Ride or Die

by Khurrum Rahman

  In the centre console there was a box full of nuts. I made a face, but desperate times, desperate measures. I had to keep my energy up. I placed the box on my lap, and with eyes furtive, I rifled through the nuts, chucking a bunch in my mouth, noticing, too late, that there was dried fruit in there, too.

  Fucking insult to injury!

  Wanting to get rid of the taste, I reached for the bottle of water sitting in the cup holder, checked the seal was intact before breaking it open and downing it. There were still bits of nuts and fruit in my mouth, a mixture of soft and hard, all floating about in a gulp of water. I swallowed. Something had to stick, and it did. Halfway down my throat. I started to choke.

  I dug my fingernails into the dashboard and forced myself to cough, to puke, but it wouldn’t come, just a dirty dry heave. I dropped my head down in between my knees, maybe gravity would sort me out. I could see my Jordans parked neatly in the footwell. I couldn’t die, not like this, not like a fucking eejit, on some nut and dried fucking fruit choking accident, not in my socks.

  The locks flew open with a jolt scaring the shit out of me. The door flung open and the smell of nature and shit entered the car making me gag further. A hand gripped my shoulder.

  I turned my head to see Imy on his haunches looking at me, nowhere near as concerned as he should have been. ‘Breathe,’ he said, rubbing my back. ‘In through your nose, slowly, and out through your mouth, slowly.’ I did. In through my nose and out through my mouth. ‘Some water,’ he said, calmly. ‘Small sips.’ I did. Small sips. I swallowed, cleanly. ‘Okay?’ he asked.

  I nodded fast, and kept taking breaths until I could speak.

  ‘I choked on the nuts. There was dried fruit in there. Think it caught me by surprise.’

  Imy nodded. ‘Looks like you were having a panic attack.’

  ‘Where were you? I woke up and you…’ I didn’t finish the sentence as I was in danger of sounding like a sap. I noticed carrier bags by his feet. ‘Did you… did you go shopping?’

  ‘I went to get supplies. I left you a note.’

  My eyes searched the interior in an effort to prove him wrong. ‘Where?’ I spotted a white corner of paper wedged between the driver’s seat and the centre console. ‘You couldn’t find a better place to put it?’

  ‘I left it on the dash,’ Imy replied. ‘You must have knocked it.’

  ‘I think I would’ve noticed,’ I countered with conviction, knowing that I probably did knock it during my episode. ‘I can’t believe you left me by myself and went shopping,’ I said, not yet ready to let it go. ‘What if somebody came for me? What then?’ I waved the note at him. ‘Am I supposed to origami some sort of weapon out of this?’

  ‘I couldn’t risk taking you with me, not after last time. You’re well hidden here.’

  ‘How far are the shops?’ I asked.

  ‘About seven kilometres.’

  ‘English, Imy?’

  ‘About five miles.’

  I unfolded the note and read it out loud to myself.

  ‘Gone to get supplies at 2.30 p.m. Will return by 3.30 p.m.’

  Imy glanced at his watch. I glanced at his watch. 3.20 p.m. He raised his eyebrows at me as though I should be fucking impressed with his timekeeping. When I didn’t acknowledge it he only went and took a dig at my timekeeping.

  ‘What happened to your thirty-minute mental alarm?’ He smiled. ‘You’ve been asleep for almost six hours.’

  ‘Oh, I’m sorry, two attempts on my life tired me out a little. Is that… Is that alright with you?’

  Imy considered that for a moment, then said, ‘You should have slept on the plane.’

  ‘Don’t. Seriously.’

  He turned away and rooted through the carrier bags. I slipped on and laced my Jordans and stepped out onto uneven ground. Imy had placed two foil containers on the hood of the car. I walked over to inspect them and immediately the rich masala aroma attacked my senses and made my mouth water. I swallowed in anticipation and licked my lips.

  ‘I played it safe,’ Imy said. ‘One is chicken, the other, lamb. Do you have a preference?’

  ‘I’ll get on better with lamb. Unless…’

  ‘That’s fine.’ He handed me a plastic fork. ‘I’m good with chicken.’

  Imy pried off the cardboard lids to reveal yellow rice topped with a thick sauce and a generous helping of meat.

  ‘Oh, man. Lamb Biryani,’ I said, as I bent over the makeshift table, elbows planted on the bonnet and went to town on it. I didn’t say a word. Imy didn’t. We just munched hard with a soundtrack of birds rustling through the trees and appreciative murmurs, mainly from me, until every grain of rice had been consumed. I even went one step further and scooped up any remnants of masala with my finger. ‘That hit the spot!’ I said in my review, before knocking back the bottle of water. ‘Did you get more water?’ I asked, as an afterthought.

  ‘We have plenty.’

  I leaned back against the car and looked at the dense forest in front of me and asked a long overdue question. ‘So where we at?’

  ‘The nearest town is Sharana.’

  ‘Never heard of it,’ I burped.

  Imy hesitated for a moment, before saying. ‘Come with me. I’ll show you something.’

  ‘Nah,’ I said, holding my stomach. ‘Can’t move. I’m seriously full up.’

  ‘It’s not far,’ Imy said. ‘The walk will help you digest the food.’

  Imy led as we walked through trees that all looked pretty much the same to me, but he seemed to know his way around those parts. I kept my eyes frosty for any signs of wildlife and made sure I stayed no more than an arm’s length behind Imy in case I had to use him as a shield.

  ‘Any bears around these parts?’ I asked.

  ‘Yes. Lots.’

  ‘Fuck, Imy, this ain’t the best time for you to develop a sense of humour.’

  ‘No. No bears,’ he said, reverting back to form.

  Something had happened whilst I was asleep. Imy was in a better mood, more open. Was he warming to me? I mean, I wouldn’t have been surprised. Whatever it was, I didn’t want to address it in case it spiralled him back to a non-communicative state.

  We continued to crunch on whatever was beneath our feet: twigs, branches, stingy nettles, crap like that biting at my bare ankles. In the far distance a road came into view. Imy stopped and crouched down by a tree. ‘Get down.’

  My knees clicked as I got down on my haunches with a view over his shoulder. Imy dipped into his pocket and pulled out a… I don’t know, it was too small to be a telescope. He put it to his eye. ‘What’s that?’ I asked.

  ‘Spotting scope,’ he replied, gently adjusting the dial around it.

  I nodded, knowingly. ‘Sik! Where’d you get it?’

  ‘From the trunk of the car. It’s an attachment.’

  ‘Yeah? What’s it supposed to attach to?’

  ‘A sniper rifle.’

  ‘We got a sniper rifle in the back of that crappy Honda?’ I whispered loudly in his ear.

  He moved his head away. ‘Yes, amongst other supplies.’

  Imy handed me the… Shit, I’d already forgotten what it was called. I put it to my eye. It felt proper cool. ‘What am I looking at?’ I said, as a banged-up, seemingly abandoned car with a dirty mattress strapped to the roof came into view.

  ‘We are currently on the outskirts of Sharana,’ Imy said. ‘You see that old car?’

  ‘Yeah, Toyota. I see it.’

  ‘Okay, if you follow the dirt track to the east, it meets the main road.’

  East? Never Eat Shredded Wheat. I moved my head to the right.

  ‘At the end of the main road,’ Imy continued, ‘there’s a junction about a mile down.’

  ‘Yeah, I can see. That’s a mile down? Man, this thing is powerful!’

  ‘If you take a left, a few miles down is a market.’

  ‘That’s where you’ve just come from. And to the right?’ I was so in awe of how powerful this thing was,
and trying to figure out if I could somehow swipe it and take it home with me, that it took me a moment to realise that Imy hadn’t answered.

  I removed the piece from my eye and asked the back of his head, ‘Imy, what’s to the right?’

  Softly he replied, ‘Home.’

  Ah, shit. No wonder he’d loosened up. We were close to where he grew up. I couldn’t imagine what was going through his mind. Bittersweet, I guess. A place which once held happy memories, before those memories were burnt down to the ground. I wanted to put my hand on his shoulder, or rub small circles into his back. The situation called for a sympathetic move, but I couldn’t do it because a fucking realisation was slapping me across the face.

  I bounced up from off my haunches. ‘Are we in fucking Afghanistan?’

  He wrenched me back down by my arm. ‘Get down,’ he hissed. ‘And keep your voice down.’

  ‘You crossed the border. You didn’t think about running it past me? The fuck, Imy, you can’t treat me like a fucking passenger.’

  ‘You were asleep.’

  ‘Yeah, asleep. I wasn’t in a fucking coma!’

  Imy stood up. ‘Back to the car. We’ll talk there!’

  ‘No, I want to talk now!’ I said, not giving it up that easily, but he was on the move, stomping away quickly. I followed close behind in fear of getting lost in the fucking woods. My mouth going off without permission from my brain. ‘I still had business in Pakistan. I know people there. You can’t just fucking drag me on a trip down memory lane on a whim.’

  My foot bumped into his heel. I looked up to see that Imy had stopped. That he’d turned around. I instinctively took a step back and he took one forward, I could see clearly the outline of his jaw. His face snarling in mine.

  I should’ve been sensitive to the situation, considering what this place meant to him, but fuck, my point was valid. Crossing the border without my consent and without discussing it with me was a first-class dick move. Maybe he was pissed off. Well, I was, too.

  I stopped cowering, straightened up and stood my fucking ground.

  He spent a moment destroying me with his gaze. I waited for a verbal, physical or emotional attack. It didn’t come. Behind his anger he knew I was bang to rights.

  I kept my mouth firmly shut on the way back to the car and I kept my distance.

  The Honda sat in the same place where we had left it. I leaned against the door. Imy slowly circled the car.

  ‘What’re you doing?’ I said, but I didn’t think he was in any mood to chat to me just yet. I watched him carefully, his eyes focused on the ground. I think he was looking to see if any of the growth had been trodden on whilst we had stepped away. I would never have thought of that. He went one step further by getting down on his hands and knees and looking under the car, for a tracker, I assume, or explosives.

  Once again I silently questioned my motive for being there, and once again I justified them.

  Imy opened the driver’s side door and sat inside and stared longingly out of the windscreen. I jumped in next to him. ‘So what now?’

  ‘We wait until the cover of night before we move,’ he said, all mysteriously.

  ‘Where exactly?’ I asked, leaving no room for him to spring any more surprises.

  ‘There are five Ghurfat-al-Mudarris safe houses all located close to the border. One of the safe houses is located close to a weapons storage facility. If Bin Jabbar is being protected by Al-Muhaymin, then he’s being kept in one of those. If I had to take a guess—’

  ‘It would be the one near the weapons facility,’ I filled in. ‘So they’re armed in case someone comes knocking.’

  Imy nodded. ‘That’s right.’

  I nodded right along. I knew there was more to it, but I didn’t want to voice it just yet.

  I checked the time on my phone. I figured we had an hour or so to kill before darkness, and I knew exactly how to kill it.

  From the thigh pocket of my cargo shorts I pulled out a pouch of rolling tobacco. I lifted the flap and tucked inside the opening was a Bic lighter, rolling paper and a small bag of weed.

  He gave me a curious look, before sussing it out.

  ‘Aslam,’ he said.

  ‘I had a nosey around his glove compartment,’ I said. ‘Found his stash. Thought I’d pocket it. Serves him right for trying to kill me!’ I shrugged and held up the small bag of skunk. ‘What you saying? Wanna blaze?’

  Chapter 58

  Imy

  I think it was being so close to home. I felt the temptation to just dwell in my surroundings and reach out to those sweet memories before it was all taken away in the blink of a child’s eye.

  Jay toffee twisted the top of the joint and handed it to me. ‘Normally, it’s wrapper’s privilege to spark up,’ he said, ‘but, on this occasion, this being your home town and all, I’ma let you go ahead.’

  It came from guilt, I know, but it needn’t have. Being so close to home, I had overreacted, expected Jay to understand. Why? Who was he to me, to my past?

  I took the joint and nodded my appreciation at the tight wrap before biting off the end and spitting it out of the window. I placed it between my lips and Jay flicked the lighter and sparked it.

  ‘Good?’ he asked, as I held it deep in my lungs.

  ‘Yes,’ I coughed out a broken cloud. ‘Good. Strong.’

  Jay switched the car stereo on and fiddled around with the functions. ‘Bluetooth!’ He shook his head in disbelief. ‘This car is constantly surprising me.’

  I took another pull, the effects instant as I slouched down a little in my seat. Jay was busy connecting his phone to the car stereo. ‘Some music?’

  I nodded. The joint switched hands. Someone rapping softly about needing love filled the car.

  ‘LL Cool J,’ Jay said.

  ‘I don’t know who or what that is?’

  ‘It’s a tune, is what it is.’ Jay turned up the volume, slid down in his seat and drowned in the music.

  I let him get on with it as I tried to compartmentalise why I was there and what the place meant to me. I was home. Or as close to home as I thought I could manage. Those secluded woods remained acutely familiar to me. A place where my friends and I, at the age of eight and nine, would steal our fathers’ tobacco and rolling leaves and escape into these very woods until we were sick from chewing sweet paan. We’d return home red-tongued and guilty, expecting punishment in the form of the back end of a slipper. It never happened. Our parents knew what we were getting up to, and with the increasing fear of Taliban presence in our small village, they were happy to turn a blind eye to us escaping to the relative safety of the forest. What our parents didn’t fathom was that it would be Ghurfat-al-Mudarris, and not the Taliban, that would turn their children into orphans.

  ‘Give me that joint.’

  Jay handed it over. I took a long drag and held it in until my lungs felt like they were going to burst. I let it out in a neat plume through my nose. Aslam’s gear kicked in quicker than anything I’d smoked in Hounslow, the flow was smoother and the high was intense, adding to the already surreal situation – and if it wasn’t surreal enough, I was sharing a joint with someone who I’d once tried to assassinate.

  I glanced across at him, his eyes still closed, his head moving gently through a heavy cloud of smoke as he mouthed the lyrics. I noticed the phone display in his hand, the song was called ‘I Need Love’ and the playlist was titled Sophia’s Mix Tape. The song faded out and another song, along the same lines of young love, started. ‘All I Need’ by somebody called Method Man. A small smile played on his face.

  ‘You’ve got someone?’

  Jay turned to me. The high had hit, judging by the red in the whites of his eyes. ‘Nah,’ he said, but his smile said otherwise. ‘Not really.’

  ‘What’s her name?’

  ‘Sophia,’ Jay replied, unable to stop his smile from blooming.

  It made me sad for him. Sad that the path he was set on could only lead to loss. I couldn’t tel
l him that, though. If somebody had told me, when I’d first met Stephanie, there’s no way I would have listened to reason. You live in hope, no matter how little.

  I didn’t say anything more, wishing that I hadn’t brought it up. Jay still carried a lazy smile on his face, and I knew that wouldn’t be the end of it. He sat up in his seat and turned to face me.

  ‘We ain’t, like, together together! But… I think there’s something there. Something! I can feel it. The way she looks at me, trust me, I’ve clocked it and she knows I’ve clocked it. My Jay-dar is on and popping, you know what I’m saying?’

  I knew that Jay was peaking when he winked at me before jabbering on.

  ‘Let me tell you, she is trouble, I swear, proper trouble. Capital T! Actually, no, the whole word in caps lock! Like large flashing font lit up Vegas-style! I don’t mind, though. Like for like, yeah?’ Jay’s smile froze and then quickly disappeared, replaced by mild panic. ‘Oh, shit, oh fuck, oh man! I’m sorry.’

  ‘Don’t be.’ I didn’t have to ask. I knew exactly what he was sorry for.

  ‘So fucking insensitive!’ he mumbled. ‘Why didn’t you just tell me to shut the fuck up?’

  ‘It’s fine.’

  Too late, the guilt had kicked in and the high carried it on a wave. He fiddled with his phone and quickly put an end to the song, concluding wrongly that listening to a bullshit love song would be too painful for me. I opened my mouth to tell him otherwise, but he was clumsily jabbing at his phone, exiting out of Sophia’s Mix Tape playlist, and searching frantically for something more suitable to fill the silence that now sat awkwardly between us.

  ‘There!’ he said, as he put on something harder, full of profanities and violence. ‘That’s better.’

  I handed him back the joint. ‘Finish it.’ He took it off me and spent the next few minutes smoking it silently down to the butt. He flicked it out of the window and turned to me with red eyes and his mouth open. I was already dreading what he was going to say next.