Three Bullets

by Melvin Burgess

  I ran back home to tell Maude it was time to stop digging.

  Thomas, our neighbour who’d taken us in, he had this big old house, the biggest on our road and it hadn’t been touched. Even his croquet lawn at the back was still in one piece, which was ridiculous really, because we’d all sorts of stuff going off all over Fallowfield lately. It was just him and his mum living there so he had loads of room and he was very good after the bombings. He opened up his basement for people – had a family of six living down there who’d been bombed out a few weeks before. He was very generous but he was hilarious too – he used to go down there with an air freshener and spray all over them and bellow at them in that big operatic voice of his about personal hygiene.

  ‘The waft comes up every time I open the cellar door,’ he bellowed. It wasn’t their fault, there wasn’t enough water for all those people to shower every day like he did. Also, Thomas had somehow got his hands on half a dozen sacks of chickpeas, don’t ask me where from, I don’t know. He knew so many people, he was always coming up with something. We’d all been eating nothing else for two days, so everyone was farting away like Queen Elizabeth II after a heavy week of banqueting. It was a miasma down there! You could spray all you liked and never get rid of that honk.

  But not us. Maude and I were from across the road. We were neighbours. I used to go to parties at his house when I was little with Mum and Dad and play croquet. He used to let me have a sip of fizz while they weren’t looking.

  ‘I’m not having you staying down with the riff-raff,’ he said. ‘You get the posh treatment. You’re guests.’ So we had one of the spare bedrooms on the top floor.

  He was a singing teacher – opera. There was always someone round there yodelling away in one of those big opera voices, even during all that chaos. There was one there when I arrived. A girl. Very beautiful and very surreal, that beautiful voice soaring over the rubble of our house as I came up the road. I went in the back way, past his mother Lily, sitting watching soaps he’d recorded for her years ago at high volume in the conservatory.

  ‘Marti, darling, how nice to see you, make me a cup of tea, will you?’ she warbled as I ran past. But I was in a hurry. I ran up the stairs two at a time. We had to GO!

  I burst into our room and guess what? Guess bloody what? She’d found someone under the rubble after all. There he was on the bed – our bed – with a drip going into his cute little arm and an oxygen mask over his cute little face.

  You guessed it. It was Rowan. She’d only dug out Rowan. The surviving little... survivor.

  ‘You found him?’ I said. ‘Of all the things you could have found – him? Him, Maude?’

  ‘He was under the stairwell,’ she said, which made sense because Mum was always on at us to hide in the stairwell, or in the fireplace. They were the two places most likely to stay standing. ‘I told you I heard something.’ And she grinned like an idiot. She’d effectively cut our chances of getting out the UK by several hundred thousand per cent, and she was pleased about it. Then she teared up on me, like Santa Claus finding a baby to give a rattle to.

  ‘Great,’ I said. ‘Hey, that’s really great, Maude. You must be SO pleased with yourself.’

  It was all I could do not to kick her in the teeth.

  Let me tell you about Rowan.

  He was three years old, right? The civil war was in full swing, snipers on the streets, nothing in the shops, health service dead. A war baby. Now you tell me what sort of total idiot moron woman actually goes and has a baby in the middle of this? I mean, how selfish can you get? I cannot even begin to tell you how angry it made me when I found out Mum was pregnant.

  ‘So you’re getting rid of it, right?’ I said.

  ‘Oh, no,’ she said. ‘No, no. How could I terminate a new life in the middle of all this death?’

  We had a HUGE row about it. It went on for days. I didn’t even know it was possible to have a row that big.

  Dad was away, as usual. He only appeared long enough to get Mum up the duff and then he was away again. He’s like, Oh, no, I don’t have time to help my own family, I’m far too important for that. So here’s a newborn baby and a half dead bully to look after. Really? I mean – really? We could hardly feed ourselves as it was. Mum was already in a mess. She was depressive, my mum. Definitely. Of course she wouldn’t have it. She’s like, Oh, no, nothing like that. I’m just depressed because of circumstances. Anyone would be depressed with all this going on, wouldn’t they?

  No, Mum. I’m not depressed and Maude’s not and Dad’s not. And you are!

  But it was no use, say what you like, it was never anything to do with her. Neither she or Maude would have been even alive if it wasn’t for me. But do I get a say? No way. I just get to play Mother while my actual mother is too busy being pregnant.

  Of course Mum being Mum, she then went on to have the worst pregnancy ever. The vomiting! She was a fountain of puke. Food was already getting short, and there she was vomming it all back up as soon as it went down. There was this time when Maude found a box full of canned peaches – a whole boxful! Peaches! They were dented but they were all good. Mum spooned them down herself every night for a week and then half an hour later – blurg! Up they’d all come.

  ‘There go those peaches again,’ said Maude. I could hardly speak, I was so angry. Every time I heard the tin opener going I wanted to run in and stab her with it. And did she learn? Did she leave the peaches for us? Of course she didn’t. She kept trying and trying until they were all gone.

  ‘But I love peaches,’ she groaned. Yeah. So did I. Thanks, Mum.

  When the vomiting stopped, the bloating began. When the bloating stopped, the high blood pressure started. If you ask me, for a woman to have a boy inside her – I mean an actual real boy, actually living inside her like some kind of alien parasite – it can’t be right. It’s poisonous, I reckon.

  ‘Well, she managed it before OK, didn’t she?’ said Maude. I didn’t even bother answering. I have to deal with that sort of thing all the time.

  Mum could have had a termination easily. There were still clinics open. It wasn’t like she was religious or anything. I told her. ‘Look around you,’ I said. ‘Bombs going off all over the place. Militias roaming the street. Racists and supremacists running around. And – you’re married to a Black man! You have Black kids!’ Well, it’s all right for her, she’s white. But me? You can lie about your religion or your politics, but you can never lie about the colour of your skin.

  Let me think. We live in an absolute racist hellhole. How can we make it even worse? Oh – I know! Let’s bring another Black person into the world in case the racists need a little extra target practice, why don’t you?

  Great. And to add insult to injury, when he was born, the little wretch was actually white, pretty nearly. I mean, how’s that? Really! An almost-white Black brother. The little toad. I could have strangled him at birth.

  I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking, There she goes. Moaning about her brother. The usual. Brothers and sisters, eh? Always moaning about each other but underneath they adore one another really.

  No. Really no. I genuinely did hate him. I know it wasn’t his fault. He didn’t ask to be brought into the world, did he? If he’d been able to see what he was coming into, he’d have said no, I expect. I certainly would’ve. Well, I’m sorry about it. I really am. But still, all that notwithstanding... yes. I did actually, genuinely hate him.

  But surely, you say, surely I was pleased to see my little baby brother had survived? Surely I was going to look after him.

  Excuse me? Can you imagine how hard it was going to be to get away from here anyway? Militias, roadblocks. Radical beardie Muslims. White supremacist Christian maniacs. Bombs. Refugees. And now I had a toddler with me. On what planet is that good news? And it’s not just any normal three-year-old we’re talking about here – it’s a precious, whining, spoilt, bad-tempered little toad of a three-year-old. To look at
him, you might think butter wouldn’t melt. Cute? Yes, cute as kittens – if you didn’t know him like I did. Believe me, this is a kid unable to think of anything except himself.

  So me and Maude had an ENORMOUS row about what to do with Rowan. I wanted to do the sensible thing, which was to hand him over to a charity, who’d find him a nice family to live with. Cutesy three-year-old, whiteish toddler, wants rescuing from hunger and despair by loving family. Come on! This is a war zone! It’s our duty to make sure he has the best chances possible.

  ‘He’s your brother,’ she said.

  ‘Yeah, that’s why I’m doing my best to find a decent home for him,’ I said. There were a dozen organisations who’d be falling over themselves to take him on... and help us out on our hazardous journey by compensating us for our noble sacrifice. Come on. I mean – COME ON!

  ‘We promised your mum,’ said Maude, and she looked away as if that was the end of the conversation. As if promises were real. As if they were made out of steel and concrete. Like if you dropped one on your foot, you’d break your toe.

  I was furious.

  ‘You go with him, you go on your own,’ I said.

  ‘He’s your brother,’ she said again, cool as you like. It was one of the things I hated about Maude – she was always so cool.

  ‘A brother?’ I said. ‘What does that even mean? Why should I be responsible for him just because we have the same parents? I told Mum not to have him, but she did anyway. He’s not my fault and if something’s not your fault, it’s not your responsibility.’

  ‘He’s a person, not an argument.’

  ‘I don’t care.’

  ‘Yes, you do.’

  ‘I do not, Maude. I really do not. You know how much I hate him.’

  ‘No, you don’t.’

  ‘Yes I do. I really, really, really do,’ I said through clenched teeth.

  She scowled, and farted. We might be guests, but we were still on the chickpea diet. ‘Whatever. I promised Mum that if anything happened to her, I’d look after you and Rowan. End of.’

  See? I even had to share my own mother with her. What a cow!

  We argued and argued, I talked sense, she talked cojones. I talked practicalities, she talked pie in the sky. But it was no use. Rubblehead just had to have her own way. And the annoying thing was, I still had more chance of getting out with her than I did on my own, even with the whiny one coming along. This was going to be an extremely dangerous trip. Maude had trained with the FNA. She’d been on courses. She can shoot a gun, she knows first aid, she can drive. She’s pretty. She’s white. She has contacts and perfect tits.

  Sickening though it was, I had no choice but to give up on it.

  5

  The plan was to get to Hull. Maude had promised my mum she’d look after me, so she was coming that far, then she was going to come back and face certain death in the Fight for Freedom, while I jumped on a ferry to free Amsterdam, city of my dreams, to get laid, drunk and stoned, not necessarily in that order.

  But first, we had to get out of Manchester.

  The route out of town was dictated by local politics. Manchester was never really like just one place, but it was seriously in bits and pieces these days. Some parts were still torn about with fighting; it wasn’t safe to walk down the street. Other parts weren’t too bad. Our bit had had some very heavy fighting in the past, but since the FNA got control, it was OK. They’d chased the opposition away, got rid of the snipers, started getting better supplies into the shops. Phone and wi-fi was still hopeless, though, because they didn’t control the air and as soon as they put a mast up or got the power back on, it got bombed flat.

  But still – you could move about. If it wasn’t for the empty shops, the rubble, the craters in the roads and the bullet holes in the buildings from a couple of years ago when the racists had tried to come in, you could almost think things were normal. Ha, ha, ha.

  Going east through the city was the most direct, but also the most dangerous. That part of town was splintered into God-knows-how-many militias. Christian militia, Muslim militia, fascist militia, commie militia, each one controlling their own little patch of streets and estates. Snipers everywhere. Kidnapping. Forget it.

  North Manc was even worse, if anything, because that was pretty much run by a bunch of right-wing racists – not the Bloods. Not yet. We Northerners have our own scumbags to deal with, and the bunch who’d managed to take control of north Manchester were the BNLF – the British National Liberation Front. Good old fashioned UK racists. My favourite kind. They didn’t care about God, but what they did have in common with the Bloods was they hated brownskins.

  North was out, east was out. West was the wrong direction. We had to go south, which was run by the FNA, which was supported by the Rusholme Muslim Council. Down to Stockport, then we’d circle round underneath Manchester, across the Peaks towards Barnsley and Doncaster, that way. Long way, but best way. Now that Birmingham had fallen, the Bloods were advancing fast up the west side of the country, but they were much slower on the east.

  A lot of those towns on our route were in the hands of the FNA, more or less. As was Maude. Contacts, see? She had her uses. We had to move fast, that’s all, because in a situation like this, things were changing from day to day. You could never tell. All you knew was, something was going to go wrong. You didn’t know what it was, and how exactly it was going to make a mess of your life. You just knew it was going to happen.

  Mum didn’t die a moment too soon. With a bit of luck, this time next week I could be sitting in a cafe in Amsterdam, stoned out of my head, being chatted up by a tall, lean Dutchman. They’re descended from mammoth hunters, the tall ones. Did you know that?

  Imagine...

  I spent my time waiting for Rowan to get better, gathering supplies and repacking my backpack. I decided to add a few outfits to get me through – and before you think I was being ridiculously girlie, let me dissuade you of your prejudicial stereotyping. I won’t argue that I had a few skirts and dresses and various items of summer wear in there, but it was far more than that.

  Maude was on at me to go disguised as a boy to avoid attracting attention.

  ‘Incognito, Marti,’ she said, looking me up and down.

  ‘I’m not wearing anything showy,’ I pointed out.

  ‘You don’t need to,’ she said. That was just plain rude. Rude – but true. I’d already decided on my refugee outfit. It was plain, but very stylish. Combats. Tailored waist, button-down epaulets, trousers narrowing down to the ankle, all topped off with a matching cap. Maude hadn’t seen that yet.

  Maude always said how lucky I am that I can look like a boy, because most girls can’t. Thanks. Always looks on the bright side, our Maudie. If she tried it, she’d only look even sexier than she already does. You can’t hide a shape like that. If Maude ever got caught by the Bloods or some of the other little groups, she’d get raped. It’s what they do.

  Me, I’ve always looked like a boy, even though I most emphatically am not. Lucky, huh?

  We had other stuff to get before we left, now that Rowan was part of the plan. Maude got hold of one of those three-wheeled pushchairs. Kind of off-road pushchairs. I always thought they looked stupid back in the pre-bomb days, the days of proper pavements and smooth surfaces, but it was going to be useful now because in Manchester at that time, even the roads were off-road. Bombs apart, no one had been on pothole duty for an age. I found us a couple of baby carriers, which were probably going to be even more useful. But it was food that was the main thing.

  Rowan has these allergies. Yeah – I know. Allergies in a war zone. Doesn’t it make you want to eat your own teeth? We had to get oats and special biscuits and stuff, because of nuts. We even managed to get our hands on some gluten-free bread for the little fusspot. Gluten-free bread! We bought that – we actually spent money on gluten-free bread. Even now, when I think that we had to spend all that money on gluten-free bread for the precious,
it makes me seethe. There’s more, but I can’t talk about it. It winds me up too much to even think about it.

  Maude had her own stuff for ‘the mission’. The FNA had this kit they gave to people if they were trying to get out – bibles and prayer books if we wandered into regime territory, so we could pretend to be soaked in the Blood of Christ.

  ‘We may bump into Bloods. We’ll need to show them we’re on their side,’ she said.

  ‘Showing them bibles isn’t going to convince them,’ I said. Because the Bloods, they’re like, Catholics? Stone ’em to death. Prods? Heretics, cut out their tongues. Really, they get up to that sort of thing. I’d seen it on my phone. It’s not enough to be a Christian, you have to be the right sort of Christian, or you’re more or less as bad as Hitler. There are no degrees of badness for people like that. You’re either Blood or else you’re the spawn of Satan.

  Maudie had a whole load of FNA bumf. Pamphlets outlining how to talk your way past the Bloods. There was a lot to learn. For instance, if one of them asked you, ‘Are you one with the Blood of Jesus?’, you didn’t say, ‘Yes.’ You said, ‘The Blood of Jesus is in all of us, brother.’ Stuff like that. If you got it wrong – heretic! Gang rape her now! Yes, they do that. They get round it by making you marry each one in turn, then divorcing you for adultery in time for the next one. You know, I’m not a Christian myself, but you get the feeling that these guys were kind of missing the spirit of the thing.

  And weapons. Yeah, she had a gun. One of those pistols where you shove a cartridge up the handle and get ten or twelve shots. Very cool. She got it from the FNA and she’d actually used it in action defending our patch against some nasties from the east. I was surprised they were letting her keep it now that she was leaving. But the thing you really need to know about Maude, she has this secret weapon that gains her favours certain other members of our sex don’t have – her vagina.