by Rick Wood
And, given the temporary relief from prying eyes, the one who does not belong grins.
But only for a moment.
Not long to go now.
The second death is soon.
13
Tariq
It’s the same old story.
I am scum. Foreign trash. Pollution. Vermin. A dirty migrant. I do not belong here. I’m a leech on your society. I’m a disgusting immigrant invading your way of life. I’m this, I’m that, I’m something, I’m nothing – but whatever it is I am, I do not deserve the same rights as you do.
At least that’s what the idiot who put the brick through my pharmacy window thought.
The third brick in the space of a few months.
But everyone says the same thing. “Good job you have insurance.” “It’s just a brick.” “Don’t take it personally.”
It’s just a brick? Not personal?
Shut up, you fools.
I’m sorry for being so forthright.
But then again, I’m not.
What do you want me to tell you? A lie? An alternate reality?
If you were looking for a new story, full of original ideas and twists and turns that haven’t happened before, then I am sorry, but my segment of the story is not for you. Go read Gone Girl, or Girl on the Train, I hear those books are hugely original. Riveting, even. Will keep you turning the pages for hours. And, luckily for you, they don’t leave you having to face the reality of what hardworking people deal with day-to-day in your society.
But if you were looking for the truth, then read on. If you wish to witness the looks, the comments, the judgements that show the subtle fascism underlying this country, then you’re in for a treat. If you wanted to read about what British society seems to deem as something I just need to ‘accept’ – then you are in for the read of your life.
I don’t even understand why you hate me. Because of terrorists? Because someone committed a horrible act, and you think because I share their skin colour and religion that means I share their values? That it makes me dangerous? Well, by that logic, maybe I should judge all white British people as dangerous because of the minority that spit on me in the street and tell me to go back to my own country.
I hold the brick in my hand.
“Just a brick,” they say.
No, it’s not just a brick. It will never be just a brick.
The police come around again, but there’s no point. They say the same thing as last time, and the time before.
“We’ll file a report.”
“Let us know if you see anything suspicious.”
“Not really much we can do.”
I don’t understand that. They don’t do anything – they don’t look for prints on the brick, they don’t look at traffic cameras, they don’t even bother looking at my CCTV because they know whoever did this has their hood up and their scarf around their face.
I understand the police are underfunded and under-resourced.
I’m sure that’s why they are so reluctant to do any of the things I suggest.
Their money has to go on murders and rapes and drug busts – not on some business owner facing repeated racial attacks.
I’m sure that’s what it is.
And I am completely sure it’s nothing to do with the fact that I’m not deemed part of their society because my birth certificate does not read United Kingdom.
I don’t even watch them as their police car speeds away this time. I no longer have the hope that this will change, that they will act, that there is something they will do that will stop this.
Instead, I stand behind the counter – not the main counter, but behind the small wall where all the drugs and prescriptions are kept. I stand there surrounded by the medicines that would not be supplied to people in need if it weren’t for me owning this business. Giving it to people who’d rather I wasn’t here.
I know not everyone feels this way. In fact, I am sure of it. But it seems that everyone who walks in looks at me with a flicker in their eye, a brief moment in their first recognition of me, that identifies that I am not one of them. They probably don’t even realise it on a conscious level – but somewhere in there, in the back of their mind, a fleeting thought of recognition passes saying, “He’s a Muslim.” Or, “He’s brown.” “He’s Indian.” “He’s Bangladeshi.”
Or, as the note that was wrapped around my brick in my hand reads: Fuck of home paki.
The most offensive thing about it is that they can’t even spell off right, and they claim it’s their language.
But I do what I did the same time last month when the last message came through my window.
I contact the insurance company, who now know me by name, then just get on with it. Continue running my business like nothing happened.
Because – what else am I going to do?
I have a wife. Two glorious children that I praise Allah for every day. A business that I own and run. I have made a good home for me here.
And I like it.
And I’m going to keep it.
I fill a few more bags with a few more boxes of pills. I call out their names and they collect them. Most of them smile. Say thank you. Do so without contempt.
This place isn’t so bad.
Strange, how these strangers realise so little about what that simple thank you does for me.
Then he enters.
He’s not young, that’s for sure. His skin has wrinkled and faded in the way that it only does with years of alcohol and tobacco. Even so, his chest has more muscle than he should be afforded, and he walks with a limp that only comes from hard times. His arms are covered in tattoos, most of them faded, but among them are clear symbols of who he is. Nothing as bold as a swastika – but images that hint at where he stands. A St. George’s flag alone would not label one a racist, I understand that, but when accompanied by the Celtic Cross, SS bolts, and the words blood and honour in Bloodhound font, his political ideologies are made apparent to anyone who looks at him for more than a few seconds.
His eyes meet mine for a very brief moment, but I can feel it. His sneer. His hatred. His contempt.
But there’s something else in his eyes.
Something deeper. Something that terrifies me. Something that tells me I need to be scared of this man, of what he has done, and of what he can do.
One of the young ladies who works for me serves him. Takes his prescription and passes it to me. Benazepril. Enalapril. Moexipril. All parts of a treatment for the heart, possibly following a cardiac arrest.
I look at the man.
He leans on the counter. Out of breath. Shaking his head.
I fill out his prescription and read the name out.
“Milo Clunk.”
At first his eyes close. He waits a second. As if considering whether to be aggressive, dismissive, or just darn rude.
“Milo Clunk,” I repeat, looking straight at him.
“Here,” he finally grunts.
I hand the bag to him. He snatches it away from me and staggers out, limping and clutching his chest.
As he walks out he lingers by the smashed window. He looks back at me. Then to the smashed window. Then back at me.
As if to gloat.
As if to show off.
As if to take pride in his work.
14
1 hour, 56 minutes
“Guys,” Everly says. “What if it’s not Milo?”
Milo snorts another snotty laugh.
“You think ’bout this now?” he says between sniggers. He feels for his pocket, as if reaching for a cigarette, then finds there is none there.
“We’ve made our decision,” Ashley confirms. “We have to stick with it.”
“Well, I can tell you,” Milo continues in his arrogant matter-of-fact fashion, “One of you is going to die in a few minutes. ’Cause it ain’t me.”
“You tell us this now?” Tariq says.
“Oh, look who’s piping up.”
“What is
your problem with me, man?”
“Man? What you trying to talk like?”
“Shut up!” Ashley shouts, fed up, aggravated by useless conflict. “Just – shut up! Whatever your beef is, man, just leave it. We got shit to sort out.”
Milo shrugs his shoulders nonchalantly and leans his head back. He sighs a long, exasperated sigh, as if he were breathing out a large drag of his absent cigarette, but instead breathes any worries he had left in him. There is nothing on his face that shows even a slight concern about imminent death.
“So you are swearing it, ain’t you?” Ashley asks.
“Does it matter? I could have sworn all the past hour, sworn ’til I was blue in the bloody face. You’ve made up your mind.”
Ashley looks to Tariq. To Everly. To his watch.
Three minutes.
They still have time to change their mind.
Then again, maybe that’s what Milo wants.
“What do we think, guys?” Ashley asks, terror spread over his face.
He doesn’t want to die.
The ticking clock reminds him of the inevitability.
He could be next.
“What do you mean, what do we think?” Everly replies.
“Do we want to change our mind?”
“To who? One of us?”
“I don’t know.”
“Maybe it’s you.”
“Well it ain’t.”
“Yeah, but I could tell you that, and he could tell you that, even this arsehole” – she points at Milo – “could tell you it isn’t him. We are all going to say that. But it is one of us. Isn’t it?”
“Unless it isn’t.”
“What?”
“Maybe it’s a trick. What if we all, together, decide it’s none of us? Maybe that’s the real answer.”
“No,” Tariq decides. “We must stick with our decision. Now’s not a time to falter. We have decided him, let’s stay him.”
“You just got it in for me, don’t you?” Milo says.
“As a matter of fact–”
“Fucking quit it!” Ashley repeats.
He turns around. Faces the wall. Arms on the back of his head. Breathing heavily. Head full of mess.
He can’t look at them anymore.
He looks at his watch instead, then wishes he hadn’t.
He straightens his chest. Does some breathing exercises. Stretches his body out. All things his coach had told him to do when he was feeling anxious.
Anxious?
Hah!
Anxious is a mild adjective for what he’s feeling.
His mind races with a hundred thoughts, each one worse than the one before it. He changes his mind multiple times, questioning their decision, then questioning it again.
He turns toward the others, but his eyes don’t acknowledge them. Instead, he sees his mum’s face. His proud, doting, delusional mother. She did everything for him, and where is she now? Somewhere alone.
Does she even know he’s gone?
Has he even been reported as a missing person yet?
Have they gone looking in his flat and found his needles?
He can see the headlines tomorrow. Disgraced former Olympian goes missing amid steroid controversy.
And he can see his mother’s face as she cries over his wall, not knowing what to think. But still proud. Still the solid rock she’s always been.
“Ashley,” Everly says in a panicked voice poorly disguised as calm. “What’s our decision?”
Ashley turns back to Tariq. To Everly. To Milo.
“We stick with our decision.”
He turns back to the wall. Leans his head against the rusty surface. Feels its steely toughness cement against his head.
This is the biggest fight of his life.
And he doesn’t have any needles to help him with this one.
He doesn’t need to look at his watch to know that they have one minute left.
What if this is his final minute?
What if it’s Tariq or Everly that dies next, and he’s stuck with Milo?
Jesus, now I’m deciding who I want to die least…
His eyes flutter to Maya’s dead body.
The sight stings him with the pertinent realisation of impossible truth, of certain, inescapable avoidance. The appearance of what happens once the hour is up.
It’s a harsh reality, but being in such close proximity to death is something a human can adjust to far more easily than one could imagine. Nearly two hours stuck alone with a corpse and they no longer notice it, like it’s furniture, or paint drying on a wall – once applied, it is permanently there but never acknowledged.
But your own death – you will deny its possibility until there’s no breath left to deny. This isn’t like in a boxing ring. It is barely a game. In the ring it’s a fair fight. In the past two hours alone, he’d taken more shots below the belt than a referee would allow.
A quiet beeping begins, faintly in the background.
The first thing Ashley does is check his head. Then his torso. Then his legs. Then every part of his body. Searching to see if it is him that is beeping, even though he’s searched himself multiple times and found nothing on him.
He turns around to find that Tariq and Everly have done the same thing.
All eyes turn to Milo.
A small spot of flashing red light reflects in the wall behind the base of his skull.
They were wrong.
It wasn’t him.
Which means it was one of them.
Ashley knows it isn’t him.
But so does Everly. So does Tariq.
They all know.
But it has to be someone.
It has to be one of them.
Someone has to be lying.
Unless it’s a trick.
Unless one of the other two want me to think it’s a trick.
He looks at Maya. Maybe she’s faking it. In a horror movie it would definitely be Maya. The typical, predictable twist; she suddenly stands up and reveals herself.
But they felt her pulse. Her body was rigid. She was dead. And Milo is about to join her.
Three left.
Ashley does not want to face the truth, but he knows he must – it is one of them.
Milo uses the wall to steady himself as he stands. The others back off, but he raises a hand and waves it as if to say they needn’t fear, he has no intention of forcing his death upon anyone else.
Milo looks to the terrified faces of the others. Terrified, yes, but he has no doubt they were all secretly doing leaps for joy that they get to live at least another hour.
“Well,” Milo declares, “ain’t this ironic?”
The ticking ends and the base of his skull explodes. A large lump of flesh splatters the wall behind him, followed by pieces of scalp, brain, and skin, smacking against the wall, leaving a bloody trail as they drip downwards.
Tariq wretches as Milo’s headless body flops to the ground.
Everly turns and covers her face, weeping without control.
Ashley stares at the open neck, twisted and contorted, and inside out in so many ways.
He pricks with morbid fascination.
Then he realises it’s real.
He grows horrified – not because of the sight, as unappealing as it is, but because of what this now means.
He’d already realised it, but now its unmistakeable clarity punches him in the gut with a sickening strike.
It isn’t Milo.
15
Milo
I wish it was me.
I’m not talking about the one who doesn’t belong – I couldn’t give less of a shit who doesn’t belong, or who dies in that room of sodding losers.
I’m talking about the smashed window in the pharmacy.
I wish that it was me who had done it. I’d have loved to have seen the look on his scrawny little face when he discovered the window and the perfectly articulated note that came with it.
The look of disgust, of p
ure distasteful horror, as the extent of the offense he has taken slowly settles on his face. While it changes in slow motion.
I’d have loved to have put the last remaining strength I have in my right arm into a heave, a rugged throw, bursting the brick along the wind, listening to the satisfied smash of the glass breaking into a thousand individual pieces.
But it wasn’t me.
Honest.
Why would I lie? I’d love to take credit for it. After all, this is just between you and me; Tariq ain’t going to know.
But it wasn’t me.
It didn’t do it to the snivelling little ratbag.
My arm would probably fire out the socket if I attempted to throw a brick like that. It can barely manage to keep my cup of tea steady. It ain’t what it was. Years of lifting heavy weapons have given me muscles of a weakling, meaning my shoulder stings like a bitch any time I try to lift anything. They’d laugh me out of the army now.
Yet, even as much as I would love to have been the one parading their patriotic beliefs in front of his business, as much as I would love to have seen the anger spread across that little Asian fucker’s face, I…
I just…
I don’t know, anymore.
What am I supposed to say?
Am I supposed to lie to myself?
To you?
Fuck that.
If I could have done it, I would have done it. But I don’t think I could have.
And not just because of my lack of upper arm strength.
Although that creates a huge difficulty, yes – but just imagine, for a moment, that I do have use of my arm and I could do it.
Well, then…
I couldn’t.
A week ago, yes. Give me the full use of this deteriorating body and I would be there with a whole pile of bricks, ready to launch a full-on assault.
Not now.
Not after one of them…
Saved.
Me.
I can’t say it.
I can’t even say it.
The racist is gone. Does anyone care?
It’s time to paint him in a suit and talk about how great he was when he was alive, like you always do in your funeral of lies.
