by Luke Palmer
‘Oi!’ And then again, a few seconds later, ‘Oi!’
I turn around, slowly.
‘How’s the face?’ Carl’s eyes are hard. He says the words more like an accusation than a question.
‘… fine,’ I manage.
Carl is emerging from the car, uncoiling himself from the deep cup of the driver’s seat and stepping towards me. ‘Let’s have a look at you.’ His hand takes a firm grip of my chin and tilts my head backwards, his fingers probing the still-raw flesh under my cheekbone. He jerks my head the other way, looks again.
I try not to catch his eye, blinking up at the massing clouds.
‘Looks alright. Healing well. What you using on it?’
The words catch in my throat. ‘Suh… Some antiseptic stuff.’
‘Keep going with it. You’ll be fine.’ He lets go of my head, but he’s not finished yet. His hands land heavily on my shoulders. I feel his fingers curl into my shoulder blades, his thumbs hard in the gap above my collarbones. ‘Now look,’ he fixes me with his eyes.
I try to focus on something the other side of him. Alan has climbed into Carl’s seat and is toying with the radio. The volume suddenly jumps, the car vibrating with the hum of bass. Carl’s head snaps round and he gives a kind of whistle, his bottom lip behind his top teeth. Alan sheepishly turns the volume down and removes himself from the driving seat.
‘Fuckin’ child,’ Carl continues, the burr of his voice softening. ‘Look, I’m sorry about the face, right?’
He seems to expect me to nod. I do so.
‘But you watch yourself with her. With Dana. She’s got issues, y’know? Needs a hand keeping on the straight and narrow. She’s not to do what she did. She knows that. But if she’s taken a shine to you, I need your help keeping her in line. ’K?’
Again I nod. Inside my head there’s a smaller version of me thrashing his arms and legs around, livid.
‘Good man. Come over here a minute.’ He puts an arm around my shoulder and leads me to the edge of the hard standing behind the garage. There’s a low brick wall and, beyond that, the ground falls away sharply so there’s a view across the backs of houses, a few scraps of green space before the railway line rises up on its embankment. There’s a goods train on the track, waiting to go through a red light, its haphazard arrangement of containers – blue, red, yellow, green – all rusting equally at the edges.
Carl’s other hand goes to the chest pocket of his white shirt, pulls out a packet of cigarettes. He flicks his wrist and one pops out of the top. He gestures towards me with it.
‘No, thanks.’
‘Wise man.’ He puts the end in his mouth and returns the pack to his shirt pocket and rummages for matches or a lighter. I notice that the back part of his hand is blotched with white scarring that disappears up the inside of his sleeve. He sees me looking at it.
‘Battle scars,’ he says. ‘Burns.’ Unbuttoning his cuff, Carl rolls up his sleeve to reveal the blanched and hairless flesh rising in a series of angry ridges and ripples up the length of his arm. There are places where the muscles seem wasted away. There’s a kind of crater in his forearm. You can see the gap between the bones. ‘They did this to me. Afghanistan.’
I’d seen this kind of injury before. At the big funeral for Dad and the other victims, there had been survivors of previous attacks who had spoken to us afterwards.
‘It was an IED,’ Carl continues. ‘You know what that is?’
Yes, I know. Improvised Explosive Device. I nod.
‘Of course you know. It was by the roadside, hidden in a kid’s toy. Our unit were passing when it went off. A fucking kid’s toy. That’s sick, isn’t it? I was at the front, a way past it. Everything went black then I woke up under a pile of rubble a few minutes later. Some of the unit weren’t so lucky though. I got these trying to pull them clear.’ He rolls his sleeve back down, re-buttons the cuff.
The goods train jerks itself into movement, pulling slowly away and out of town.
‘When Dana told me who you were, after I’d hit you, I felt guilty. I know what you’ve been through. I’ve lost people too. To them.’
I hear the crackle of Carl’s cigarette tip and he inhales deeply. He breathes out slowly, a thin line of smoke disappearing into the middle distance of the housing estate below us.
‘For a little while, Josh, I didn’t know what to do. Then I found something. I’m telling you this because you know how it is, don’t you? You know that anger, that heat? I can help you. Give you a way of living with it. A way to do something with it. A way to honour your dad’s memory.’
‘Excuse me, you can’t smoke here.’ It’s a woman’s voice. We both turn as she walks towards us from a door at the back of the garage. ‘This is a garage, there’s petrol here and gas cylinders in that cage over there. You can’t smoke here.’
Carl takes another deliberate and slow draw on his cigarette. The closer the woman gets to Carl, the more she seems to doubt her confidence.
‘Look, you can’t do that here. Please extinguish it, or leave. Please.’
Carl casually flicks the still burning cigarette towards the woman. It bounces off her legs as she jumps back, a small hole in the shin of her tights. She stamps on the glowing butt.
‘Excuse me…’ but her voice falters.
Carl stalks towards his car. ‘Don’t worry about me, love. It’s them you should be keeping an eye on.’
The woman’s head spins to where Carl points. A group of three kids, one of them black, about to enter the shop. She makes straight for them, ‘Just two at a time, please.’ She makes the black girl wait outside, then stands in the doorway and glares when the girl scuffs her feet on the newspaper racks.
Alan is standing behind the open back door of Carl’s car, his e-cigarette aloft. ‘Told you you should get one of these, bro. You can do it anywhere. Look,’ and he sends another cloud of vapour skywards.
‘Get in, you prick. And turn that stupid thing off. It smells like a slag’s toilet.’
The engine guns, the music blaring again.
‘See you around, Josh.’ Then Carl gestures with his hand, holding it out of the window, pointing downwards, fanning out his fingers and making a circle with his thumb and index finger. The window begins to roll up again as Alan and Vince get in the back. I glimpse someone else in the front passenger seat: long hair, school uniform, looking straight forwards.
Dana.
THIRTY
By the time I get home, there’s an email from Alan with a list of links to websites. I click on a few. They’ve all got the same words in a lot of their headlines: words like ‘invasion’ and ‘epidemic’, and more medical-sounding words like ‘spreading’ and ‘infection’.
There are more articles with words like ‘heroes’ and ‘citizens’ and ‘protection’. Like the others, they all look like a normal newspaper websites, but I’ve not heard of the names before. I click on one article called Hero Soldiers Told to Wait for Housing Behind Immigrants. The story is about a couple of soldiers who had left the army and had been placed on the bottom of the list for council housing. There were pictures of them sitting on their childhood beds at their parents’ houses. It looked ridiculous, these big, muscly, tattooed men perched on top of Spiderman duvet covers, pictures of cars on the walls. There was a quote from one of the soldiers at the top of the article: ‘it’s demeaning and dehumanising to line up at the job centre behind the kind of people who might have been shooting at you out there.’ The article goes on to describe the estimated 7000 ex-Servicemen who are thought to be homeless in Britain, and the disgrace – that word again – of the government’s policy of putting immigrants to the top of the list for things like housing and healthcare.
I get to the end of the article and realise my fist is clenched hard on the mouse. The final picture shows a smiling family – mum, dad, and four kids – standing outside a terraced house. The caption reads Helped first and furthest. Their skin isn’t white.
I click a link to an
other, similar article and have to double take. It’s from the local paper and the big, colour picture shows Carl, undressed to the waist. The scarring I’d seen earlier travels over his shoulder and engulfs almost one half of his torso. His good arm shows several military tattoos. The article explains how Carl was discharged from the army on medical grounds, despite wanting to return to the front lines. Because of his discharge, he won’t receive the benefits he would have received had he completed his term of service and he, like the men in the previous article, was back living with his mum and brother. Another picture shows Alan and Carl sitting either side of their mum, a tired-looking woman who doesn’t look that much older than Carl, in what I assume is their living room. I scan to the bottom of the article and find the following.
Readers will remember Carl from a story we ran a year ago. Carl’s unit was attacked in Afghanistan by a roadside IED. Three men were killed in the explosion and two further victims were kidnapped and subsequently executed by so called Islamic State. Carl, the unit’s technical reconnaissance officer, survived only because he was partially covered by rubble and probably considered dead. He received a medal for bravery, pulling the bodies of his comrades from the centre of the blast.
I read this paragraph several times before moving on.
Another website has a huge banner across the top in childlike handwriting, saying ‘Hey, It’s Just an Opinion!’ Below this are loads of memes, cartoons of frogs and short videos. I don’t really get most of them, except the ones of a man with a bomb in the top of his turban. There was a video that went viral a year or so ago, just a looped clip of the guy who presents a TV show making a weird noise. It got funnier the more you watched it. Maybe these videos are like that. I click on a few things and come to a really retro arcade-style game where the turbaned man is running around a network of caves, and you – as an American GI – have to catch him before he collects all of the gold coins. I play this for a while before Mum comes home. The anger slowly subsides.
I sidle into the kitchen as she’s putting dinner in the microwave. Mum never cooks on a Monday evening – it’s enough just facing a new week, she always says. I don’t mind much. There’s something about microwave food that’s reassuringly safe.
‘Mum…?’ I start.
She’s leaning on the sideboard, her shoulders heavy. She doesn’t look up or respond, and I get the impression she hasn’t heard me come in or speak.
‘Tea?’ I ask, a little louder, picking up the kettle.
She nods, slowly.
I move past her to the sink, catch the scent of cigarettes. Maybe it’s Carl’s smoke on me.
‘Good day?’ I ask over the loudness of the tap.
Mum lifts herself a little, puts her hands on her cheeks and hold them there as if she’s trying to put herself back together before she turns around. It’s at this point that I worry she’s been crying. Perhaps I shouldn’t have come downstairs.
Her eyes are a little red when she turns around a second or two later, but there are no tears, which is good. ‘No, not really. You?’
‘Not that bad. Why? What happened?’
‘Nothing to worry about. Just a new person starting at work who they want me to train.’
‘Oh.’
‘It’s fine, really.’ Mum shakes her hands in front of her, the way she does when she’s trying to flick away all the bad thoughts. ‘It’ll be good in the long run as I can give her things to do to ease my work-load, but it was exhausting, being with her all day today. Just….’ She tails off, the exhaustion clear in her voice.
‘Was she not very nice?’
‘No. The opposite. She was lovely.’ Mum’s voice is flat. She’s staring at the floor.
The kettle starts to make its almost-boiling noise, I click it off before it starts to roar and get one of Mum’s latest fruit infusions from her jar, put it in the mug (looping the bag label’s string through the handle, like Dad taught me) and pour on the water, then put the kettle back on to boil for my English Breakfast.
As I clink and potter around with teaspoons, soggy teabags and milk, Mum stands leaning against the sideboard, her eyes open but registering nothing. There’s a background hum from the microwave, its orange light behind Mum’s head like a strange halo.
‘There you go, Mum.’ I place her mug next to her, far enough away from her elbow that, if she jerks, she won’t knock it over.
‘What? Oh, thanks love.’ She did jerk, as I thought. The mug remains safe.
But when the microwave pings, Mum spins too fast and her hand knocks the mug off the sideboard onto the floor where it explodes in a bomb of steam and china. I go straight for the kitchen towel as she jumps out of the spray, wincing as it splashes her legs. I throw sheet after sheet of kitchen towel on the floor and Mum dabs them around with the end of her shoes until we’ve created something like a dam around the worst of the spill. Then I get the dustpan and brush from under the sink and gather up the tiny fingernails of white china that are all over the floor, empty them inside the dam, then use the small, purple brush to slowly make the dam smaller, mopping up the water and gathering the broken crockery together before emptying it all from the dustpan into an empty cereal box that was waiting on the side to be recycled. The whole thing happens in silence and takes less than a minute.
When I get back in from putting the cereal box – still steaming – straight in the outside bin, Mum is sitting at the table.
‘Another tea?’
‘Thanks love.’ She offers a weak smile. She looks at the trail of footprints my wet socks have brought in from outside. ‘Oh goodness Josh, your feet! Did you hurt yourself?’
‘No Mum, I’m OK.’
‘That was so stupid of me. I can’t even look after myself this evening and now you’re ripping your feet to shreds because of me.’
‘Mum, I’m fine. Don’t worry.’
‘It’s ridiculous Josh, how incapable your mother is. I’m sorry. I really am.’
‘Forget about it Mum. I’ll make you another cup.’
As we talk, I take two plates from the cupboard and empty the contents of the microwave containers onto them. Chicken jalfrezi. The kettle is still hot enough for Mum’s tea, and I bring it to the table with her plate, then go back for my plate and the cutlery.
‘And this thing at work,’ Mum continues. ‘This woman. She was lovely. Pleasant as could be. Polite, smiling, really friendly, asking about you and school. She’s got a son your age who’s just started there. Ahmed, he’s called. Do you know him?’
I go tense. ‘I think so, yeah. Seen him around.’
‘She’s into yoga, and cooking, and walking. We really have so much in common. And she’s just so keen you know? So eager to do well. She reminds me of … well, of me about five years ago when I started there. And what she must have been through… But I just couldn’t give her anything back. I was completely numb today, like most Mondays. And I know she’ll take some of my stuff, which will make things easier. But I couldn’t shift this idea…’
‘What idea?’
‘This notion, that…’
‘That what, Mum?’
Mum pauses for a moment, her fork halfway to her mouth. ‘That she could easily replace me. That she’ll take all my work and be so much more capable than me that the firm can finally offload me. Which they’ve wanted to do for ages. Ever since…’
For a while, we eat in silence.
‘Mum?’
‘Hmmm?’
‘If they got rid of you, we could sue them, right? For discrimination?’
‘It wouldn’t be discrimination, Josh. And it’s not going to happen. It’s just me being daft.’
‘But it does happen, you know.’
‘What are you talking about, Josh?’
‘… well, people are losing out to them all over the place at the moment. Jobs, housing, healthcare. People who are from here, people who deserve better are being put to the back of the queue and told to shut up while they, people who don’t be
long here, people who don’t deserve it, all go first.’
Mum puts her fork down. ‘Josh, you’re confusing me. What are you talking about? Them? I’ve had a long day and feel wretched, so less cryptic would be good, please.’
‘Immigrants. This woman, Ahmed’s mum, she—’
‘So you do know Ahmed?’
‘Yeah, a bit, but his mum’s taking your job, and they’ve taken a house on the estate near Jamie’s that probably should have been given to someone else as well. And they’re taking over, slowly, getting their foot in the door so they can turn this into the country they want, and then none of it will be ours anymore.’ Even as I speak them, the words don’t sound entirely like my own. This is anger talking, the white heat creeping out. ‘So what I’m saying is, it’s discrimination if they start taking from us and giving to them. It’s racist. We should do something about it, right? After what happened to Dad, it should be us who …’
Mum’s fork clatters against the edge of her plate. I stop. Mum looks at me for a long time. A very long time. And I can see tears are starting to rise up in the corners of her eyes. Again, I want very much to be back upstairs in the safety of my room.
But all she says, very quietly, is ‘Don’t you ever use your dad’s…’ Then she tails off.
We sit in silence for what feels like ages. Then she stands up and leaves.
I hear her bedroom door close upstairs and stare at the wisps of steam rising slowly from her second undrunk mug of tea.