by Chris Ward
She washed her face in a cracked, stained sink and headed back to the room. As she reached the door she paused, hearing voices inside. Aware of how the floorboards creaked, she inched closer and leaned her ear against it.
Jun’s voice came muffled through the wood: ‘Akane, I miss you. I can’t do this anymore.’
He was talking to himself. Jennie gave a quiet sigh. She had to find him some kind of medication or they were walking into a disaster. Crow was a ruthless killer, and Jun could barely look after himself.
Jun’s voice again: ‘Akane, please don’t leave me. Please don’t go.’
Jennie grimaced, tears welling up into her eyes. She lifted a hand to push the door open, then something happened to make her blood run cold and a trickle of cold sweat dribble down her neck.
‘I’m sorry, Jun,’ came a woman’s voice. ‘Be strong for me.’
Jennie gasped. She heard movement from inside, and then shoved at the door, but it wouldn’t budge. She slammed a hand against it as she twisted the handle, but only the top half of the door shook. The bottom was stuck hard. Her door stopper had been pressed back under it.
‘Jun!’ she shouted. ‘Let me in!’
She heard him shuffling towards the door, and a moment later it swung inward and his face appeared.
‘Oh, sorry, I thought you said to make sure no one could get in.’
Jennie pushed past him into the room, but it was empty. The window was still open as it had been when she had left, but they were two storeys off the ground. There was no way someone could climb up.
Then she saw it: on the bed, two depressions, one where Jun had been, and another shallower one beside him. Scuff marks in the bedclothes about the size of her palm made a path over to the window.
They had been made by feet or knees or hands.
Jennie ran a hand through her hair, feeling a cold sweat break out on her back.
12
Dave Balls meets some non-friends
‘Fucking assholes.’
Dave Balls stumbled, the spongy inner layer of his watermelon suit stopping him from cracking his head on the wall of the nearest building. He leaned left, correcting himself, and overdid it, staggering forward and dropping to his knees in front of a little water fountain, like a thirsty man casting a prayer.
‘Wankers.’
He reached up and used the crusty stone edge of the fountain to haul himself back upright. He reached out and cupped some of the water, splashing it over his face, too late to realise it smelled of piss. Choking, he fell back to his knees and retched onto the ground.
C … unts.’
Life wasn’t supposed to be like this. Six years ago Balls had stepped down off a Ryanair flight at Barcelona airport and taken the first deep breath of opportunity. That it had smelled of engine oil and burned tyre rubber should have been a sign.
#
Money, money, money, that’s what they said. All you had to do was show up and fistfuls of Euros would magically appear in your hands.
The month-long intensive TEFL course had nearly killed him. That he’d done a homestay with a crazy ginger-haired American who’d insisted on hitting the bars every night in search of Spanish pussy hadn’t helped. That they’d got a combined total of no ass across four weeks of hard partying pretty much summed up Balls’ experience.
In four weeks he lost five kilograms and ended up in hospital with pneumonia. The ginger cunt had laughed his ass off, then fallen asleep on the beach at daybreak one morning and woken up in the midday sun, wearing just his boxer shorts. Hearing him screaming in the shower for the next week had made Balls feel a little better.
He’d passed the course. The school had given him a sympathy pass he was sure, probably because failing the poor British bastard who’d ended up in Hospital de Barcelona would have looked bad for business in these days of blogs and endless review sites.
The ginger cunt had headed off to Prague in search of blonder pussy and a less punishing sun. Balls had found himself lodgings with an older Spanish couple and taken his first steps on a quest for world domination.
A year later he was working twelve hour days, of which at least three were stand-up commutes back and forth across the city. He got to know Barcelona’s metro very well, to the point where his new party trick was reciting the stations of each line from memory. One English class at one end of the line would be followed by another in a distant suburb, such was the saturation with which the city found itself with eager foreigners. Pay was low and lower, both as a result of the lack of demand for teachers when a click of the fingers and a muttering of the first syllable of the word “English” would bring ten of them running and the worrying lack of quality in the teaching itself. Balls had gone to a reputable college, but it was easy enough to buy a TEFL certificate online. Balls had only signed up through sheer terror at the thought of not knowing what he was doing.
The older couple he was lodging with were welcoming enough, particularly of his wallet, which would find itself opening at the most unlikely of times; after an offered load of laundry perhaps, or after finishing an unrequested meal left on his bedside desk. His landlords were shameless at fleecing him at every possible opportunity, taking with one hand while giving with the other—pushing on him their thirty-something daughter who had so far let marriage pass her by.
Of course, she was nice enough at first. They went on chaperoned dates to the cinema and to family restaurants, Balls being coerced into conducting his relationship in reverse order, having established a parasitic friendship with the girl’s parents before he even learned her name. Their eventual union was inevitable from the first day she fluttered her pretty little eyelashes in Balls’ direction. For a serial slow-dance soloist like Balls, the attention of anyone of the opposite sex was headline worthy, and for it to be from a girl far prettier than anyone he could possibly meet back home meant his fate was immediately sealed. Even the quiet announcement that her staunch Catholicism prevented him from taking a pre-purchase test drive made little difference. Stars glittered in his eyes and he was thinking about the calendar, already planning a date when he could Ryanair his family out for the lowest cost.
For a year or so, things were pretty good. The wedding went well, and Maria, his sweet Spanish princess, got pregnant almost as soon as the chastity gates were opened, Balls using his own to good effect for the first time in his life. The baby, named Stefan, arrived in a flood of screaming and cheering and was a little joy, and Balls could almost stomach the commutes in order to get home to his son.
It was difficult to identify an exact point at which things changed, but Balls looked up from his hard-earned seat on the Blue Line to Verdaguer one day and realised he spent three quarters of his life working, with the final quarter divided more or less evenly between sleeping and arguing with his wife. It was difficult to understand how he could make her so angry in such a short space of time, being both at home and awake for roughly three hours per day. The child was taken care of, Maria’s mother turning from homely landlady into hardened mother-in-law, and despite Balls’ protests he and Maria had continued living in the family home.
By the time Stefan was three, Balls only got a chance to see his son on Sundays, when the kid would blast away with rapid fire Spanish that Balls couldn’t understand, while he manfully tried to instill a little English in the kid: colours, numbers one to ten, days of the week. Maria and her mother would then berate him for tiring the kid out, berate him for not being home enough, berate him for not working hard enough, and then berate him for some more things that he was too tired to remember.
He had been a dutiful husband, earning far more money than they needed, hoping that his wife was putting it away for their child’s future education. Most nights he came home after nine p.m., by which time Stefan was sleeping and Balls was not allowed to wake him, on pain of death. Except for Screaming Sundays, Balls never saw his son. He was no longer even sleeping in the same bed as his wife—the weight of Balls on the mattress
gave Maria a special kind of “backache” that only disgruntled wives ever suffered from—and her mother treated him as a sounding board for all things angsty. He would wake up on a Sunday, look at his father-in-law, Antonio, sitting by the window, sighing between tugs on a cigarette, and see the life to come for himself in twenty years time.
One day he just didn’t come home.
It was a week before they even bothered to call him, and that was to ask for money.
Of course, once he was no longer performing his supposed husbandly duties, Balls was required to provide even more money than before, under pain of a visit to Spanish court, which no doubt would dish out a lengthy prison sentence for the crime of wanting one’s own life back. In return he was allowed to see Stefan—provided it was at a convenient time for his family, which ended up being Wednesday every week.
Wednesday, as Maria certainly knew, was Balls’ busiest work day, and the hardest one, financially, for him to give up. Without the chain of his family around his neck, though, Balls set about being resourceful. There had to be other work out there that was better paid, and with lower commutes. Barcelona was a city of several million people. It was just a case of finding it.
The answer came, not quite out of nowhere, but on a green line train from Trinitat Nova. Balls took the only remaining seat in his carriage, next to a guy dressed like Gandalf. He’d seen the human statues on Las Ramblas before, of course, but never up close. Now, sitting so near he could smell the sweat under the make-up-clad man’s arms, he looked just like a man in a costume.
‘How well does that gig of yours pay?’ Balls asked.
Many human statues would have stayed in character, but he’d lucked out and ended up next to Merlin, who not only didn’t give a shit about staying in character beyond wearing the costume, but also spoke great English.
‘Good days and bad days,’ he said. ‘Weekends are obviously best. You have to put up with a lot of drunks but people are much freer with their wallets. Summer is good, winter not so much, but Christmas is awesome.’
It was October. Balls saw Euro symbols in his eyes.
‘How do I get into it?’ Balls asked.
Merlin pulled a business card out of his robe and handed it to Balls. Specks of silver glitter lit up a name: Peter Salvadore.
‘Call this guy,’ Merlin said. ‘What’s your costume?’
‘It’s a surprise,’ Balls said.
He got straight on the internet when he got home, looking for costumes. He needed something a step up from cheapo Halloween stuff, but he was on a limited budget.
The watermelon seemed to bounce right out at him.
He called up Peter Salvadore before it even arrived and found out how to apply for a permit. He was a little surprised when he was accepted, having no experience on the job, but guessed that his animated watermelon costume was a breath of fresh air after all the cowboys and wizards.
His first day on the job, most people laughed at him. Even some of the other statues treated him like a joke because his costume looked tacky and his signature moves were awkward and poorly choreographed. At the end of the day though, he had earned almost as much as he would have done teaching English, and all by standing in one place.
Dave Balls was a happy man.
#
‘You fucking cocksuckers.’
Balls hawked and spat a globule of spittle down towards the gutter, only to see it hit his protruding stomach and get caught in the green fluff. He tried to smear it away, but only caused it to spread out like a caterpillar crushed on a car windscreen.
The others might not have realised what was going on, but Balls was onto it. That guy down Las Ramblas the other night was just the start. Dressed up as a bat and acting like an asshole, he was just the vanguard of what was about to become really fucking difficult.
Balls spent what little money he had left after child support drinking away his weekend nights in the bars up in the Spanish Quarter, where he’d picked up enough of the language to be accepted among the drinking circles of off-duty manual labourers and factory workers who populated the place, drinking beer and complaining that their great city was, for whatever reason, getting less great by the day.
And the word among the bars was that weirdoes were popping up all over the place to scare the shit out of tourists.
#
‘People are talking cod if they’re saying they ain’t seen them,’ said Paolo, one of Balls’ regular drinking partners, as they sat at a corner table on the veranda of a little bar called Estatacion, on the Saturday night before all the stuff with the bat guy had kicked off. ‘They’re everywhere, like skin blotches.’
‘Hives,’ Balls corrected. Acting as a casual English teacher for Paolo’s interesting attempts to grasp the language saved him a lot of money on drinks.
‘Yeah, those. Spiders and snakes and other nasty motherfuckers. We kicked all that shit out during the revolution and we don’t need it back now.’
Balls just gave a shrug. Paolo, a self-employed carpenter, pulled a dramatic hand across his mouth and belched.
‘You think it’s just some trick?’
‘Prank.’
‘Yeah, that. Madrid is behind this, those motherfuckers. Talk’s started about another Catalan referendum and those lazy good-for-nothing sons of bitches are trying to undermine our economy.’ He slammed a fist down on the table, making the quarter of beer left in his mug slosh around. ‘Take out Catalonia and what’s left for Spain? A bunch of lazy orange pickers and some whores selling themselves to pasty-skinned British tourists on the beaches of Malaga. You know what that is?’
‘Um, what?’
‘I don’t know. But it ain’t no economy.’
‘No?’
‘Barcelona’s where the power is. The industrialized north. Now with this little infiltration they’re trying to undermine us.’
Balls leaned forward in his chair, but kept just out of range of the spray of spittle that burst out of Paolo’s mouth with each sentence. ‘How, exactly?’
‘First they piss people off. People start staying in, or going elsewhere. They stop showing up at the cafés and bars, stop going out to restaurants. Then those motherfuckers start showing up outside museums and galleries and admissions start going down. Pretty soon word gets out on the internet that Barcelona is no longer tourist-friendly. They start heading south instead. No tourists means no jobs in the service industry, less villas getting built or repaired and honest men like myself can no longer find work. Catalonia goes bankrupt, starts asking Madrid for money. Hello oppressors, goodbye referendum and freedom.’
Paolo belched again.
‘You really think it’ll happen?’
‘Listen, Balls.’ Paolo leaned in close until Balls could smell the sweat in his moustache. ‘We let these bastards in, and before we know it they’ve got us in a stranglehold.’ He leaned backwards in his chair and waved his beer mug in the air. ‘We need to drink to revolution!’ he shouted. ‘Barmaid! Barmaid! Two more!’
#
It had taken the firsthand experience of the bat guy to sway Dave Balls’ opinion, but now he was firmly on Paolo’s side. The bat guy and the others that had been seen around were out first and foremost to damage the livelihoods of the other street performers, after which whatever happened wouldn’t matter to Balls because he would likely have starved to death.
He had done what Paolo would have probably done in the circumstances and got steaming drunk, hoping that a few glasses of the good stuff would make the answers clear.
All it had done was make him angry.
He stumbled again, and this time he felt some hands reaching out to hold him up.
I’m saved, Balls thought.
Then a fist slammed into his face.
It didn’t really hurt, but it had enough power to knock him over backwards. He bounced on the cobblestones and half rolled over, only to find a swinging foot conveniently available to realign him. He looked up through fuzzy vision at the lit up tower
of a church poking high up into the sky above him. A little nearer, and far more menacing, were the faces of five young men with hair cropped almost to their scalps.
‘Caught one,’ a guy in the middle said, but it was difficult for Balls to work out just who had spoken. ‘Anyone up for some melon juice?’
‘Not me!’ Balls shouted, which seemed to incense them further. The air became a hail of blurring objects, skin-coloured squares attached to brightly coloured shirts and t-shirts bought at the market stalls on Las Ramblas. After the first couple of punches they no longer seemed to hurt, and Balls would have probably closed his eyes anyway if they hadn’t immediately begun to swell shut.
It was over in a few seconds, and the oppressive heat of his attackers cleared to let in the cool night air. Balls heard the shuffling of feet and the unzipping of jeans and then it began to rain on him from several directions—a warm, badly smelling rain.
Balls vomited. Footsteps echoed as the gang made their getaway. He tried to speak, but his mouth was full of blood, so he contented himself by rolling onto his side and resting his head against the cold cobblestones, now slick with someone else’s piss.
He knew he wasn’t dead and expected that the damage was superficial, with the cushioning of his costume protecting him from the heaviest blows.
As he listened to distant laughter and running footsteps, he couldn’t help but feel that he’d just been involved in the first skirmish of what might end up to be a surprisingly bloody war.
13
Nozomi makes a friend and loses a friend
Her master actually patted her on the head. His fingers felt sharp and hard like sea shells and Nozomi felt a knot of revulsion growing inside her.