Three Bullets

by Melvin Burgess

  On we went, rejoicing. We got a quarter of a mile or so before, Lo! We came across the real reason why we’d been let through.

  Another roadblock! That other one had just been to hold back the firstcomers. This was the real one. I thought it had been a horde behind that first one. I was wrong. It turns out I didn’t really know what a horde was. Behind this roadblock, that was the real horde.

  There were people as far as you could see. Every available space was heaving with them – all over the motorway roundabout, up the M60, down the road to Stockport. Thousands, tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands. It was a flood. Every single one of them was on the run from the Bloods, every single one of them was desperate to get through and none of them were going anywhere. At the back of them, more were arriving every hour, more and more and more, creating a bigger and bigger bottleneck. They all wanted food, drink, the loo. They wanted everything, and there wasn’t anything like enough of any of it.

  The FNA had orders not to let anyone in or out, but there weren’t enough of them to hold the horde back for ever. It was a disaster in the making. And meanwhile, somewhere behind them, and no one knew how far, the Bloods were on their way. For the refugees, that was going to mean either a massacre or a concentration camp, which as far as I can tell, is just a slow version of a massacre, anyway. So things were very, very edgy.

  Among the Asian hordes were the other smaller hordes. Black people, queer people, Jewish people. The Bloods didn’t hate the Jews, they just booted them out of the country and told them to go to Israel, but a lot of the Jews weren’t too keen on that either since they’d lived here since time began anyway. And there were a whole host of radicals, revolutionaries, Catholics, Baptists, Buddhists. All on the run, all desperate to get away, desperate to keep moving – and all of them stuck.

  There was only one person there who the Bloods hated, who was going the other way, as far as I could tell. That person was the very last one of them all who should have been doing that, because they encapsulated in themselves everything that the Bloods hated – race, sexuality, belief, gender, the lot.

  Me.

  There were actually a number of very normal-looking white folk trying to sneak to the south as well. Not because they actually agreed with the Bloods, practically no one sane did that, but on the grounds that the war was pretty much over down there (for now!) and you were perfectly safe so long as you were the right colour and were prepared to say whatever the Bloods wanted you to.

  But of course they were out of luck as well. The FNA had been told not to let anyone through in either direction. Including traitors. So that’s what they were doing.

  And all the time the bottleneck was getting bigger, and bigger and bigger. And everyone was getting more and more frustrated and more and more angry. And the Bloods were getting closer and closer and closer. And out of all those hundreds of thousands of people, not one of them was having any fun.

  We found ourselves a spot, put up our tarp, which Maude the Clever had packed, sat under it, tried not to eat and drink too much, and waited for something to happen. One thing I’ve learned about war, it’s the most boring thing in the world, right up to the moment when it suddenly becomes far too exciting. Know what I mean?

  But not Maude. She wiped down her army fatigues, tightened the belt around her tiny wee waist, opened a few buttons down the front and announced she was off to negotiate our passage. My guess was, that wasn’t the only passage that was going to those negotiations. Maude is such a slut! But you have to hand it to her. That’s all it took, a few opened buttons, a tight belt and bingo! Every head turned, men and women, but let’s face it, especially the men. The beardie Muslims, the young, the old. Anyone with a hormone left in them.

  I don’t blame her. If I had a bod like hers, I’d be a slut, too.

  While Maude was out slutting, I was left at home looking after the poop machine. Rowan. Yes – really! He was three and he was still pooing himself. He wouldn’t let me put a nappy on him, just ran around, pooped himself, then came running back to be cleaned up. By me. On that first day he did it three times. Three times, in one day? See, we fed him too much. Something to do with the allergies I expect. The third time, I didn’t feel like retching my way through another set of kecks, so I told him just to ignore it.

  ‘They say I smell,’ he said, looking over his shoulder towards his playmates.

  ‘Ignore them. They’re bullies,’ I said. I should know, I’ve spent most of my life being bullied. But when Maude got back in the evening, the poo had turned his bum red raw and I got no end of grief. It’s like Alien, only not with acid blood – with acid poo.

  So that was me for the next few days – scraping poo off Rowan’s poo extruder and making sure he didn’t get kidnapped by some weird, poo-loving paedophile, who probably doesn’t exist in the first place. What fun! Although, to be fair, I did have some proper, actual fun with him. Little Rowan, like I say, had been kept at home by Mum so much of the time that he was actually still at the point where everything was an adventure. He was in a state of such innocence and actual downright ignorance about the world, even I found it kinda cute.

  ‘Look, Rowan. Spider!’

  ‘Spida.’ And he stared at it like I’d just shown him a wonderful treasure. Which, let’s face it, I had.

  ‘Butterfly.’

  ‘Burrfly.’

  ‘Bicycle! Baby! Man with a funny hat! Beetle! Fountain!’ I did that one by shaking a bottle of fizzy water I’d bought. Poor little thing. Mum was so terrified that he’d get stolen or killed, he never went out and she was too depressed to entertain him much at home.

  Maude was a lot happier with me that evening.

  ‘Maybe he’s not spoilt. Maybe he’s just bored,’ she said. Which might have been true but then I could also say that my circumstances have made me the cow I am, but it doesn’t make me any nicer, does it? Even so, I was a bit more on his side for a while and I was even reconsidering leaving him with Maude and taking him with me to Amsterdam as soon as the roadblock was down, but then he blew it utterly by waking me up early one morning and peeing all over my sleeping bag. With me in it.

  ‘Fou’tin, fou’tin! Look, Marti, fou’tin!’ he screamed. Oh, he knew what he was doing, the little pee-er. He was laughing his head off – until I smacked his bum and shoved him out of the tent. Don’t talk to me about smacking, no one ever smacked me and not being smacked didn’t do me any good, did it? Then he went wailing around the place like the world had ended. There wasn’t water to wash the sleeping bags, so I had to hang them out and sit in the pee smell under the tarp, and sleep in it at nights, while he went off to play with the crowd of kids who were hanging around the camp. Suits me. The little pee-er.

  We did have our fifteen minutes of excitement that day when mobile coverage suddenly kicked in. Most people had their mobiles turned off to save battery – you never knew when you were going to get to charge it. So it started off with just one or two phones going off, and then everyone cottoned on and whipped their phones out, and off it went all together... ringtones and text alerts that had been hanging around for days flying around all over the place, everything bleeping, dinging, bits of tunes, buzz buzz buzz. It was hilarious. And everyone’s ringing up their family and their mates and trying to shout over one another, noses stuck in their phones trying to work out who’s alive, who’s dead, who made it out, who’s still in there. Me too. I’d got myself a new phone in Manc while we were waiting for Rowan to get better. So when I saw everyone whipping out their phones and studying them dead hard and typing and making calls, I checked out mine to see what was going on.

  I had a few messages. The one from my friend Conor, who’d made it to Ireland. He has an auntie in County Clare. He was going, Come on over, Marti, it’s great, there’s cars everywhere and fresh milk and butter everyday! I was like, Dairy products? Are you kidding me? And I actually had messages from my brother in Amsterdam, which made my little heart leap for a
second – before it came crashing down like a fallen angel at my feet.

  Where you at, bruv? Hey, bruv – you still alive?

  Bruv. Boy, was he in for a shock.

  And then, Hey, Mart – I might be coming over soon, keep an eye out for me!

  I was like... Nooooooooo. I was on my phone going, No no no!

  I needed him in Amsterdam! But no answer. The trouble is, my brothers Adam and Aiyden both converted to Islam a few years ago. Dad was furious – started calling them the Ishmaels. Ishmael 1 and Ishmael 2. The whole family fell out about it. They grew beards and started calling themselves Muhammad and Ali. Dad refused to call them that, so they wouldn’t talk to him until he did. His mother, my gran, who had wisely fled to Ireland some years ago, stopped talking to him until he talked to them. It was a mess.

  Ishmael 1, AKA Muhammad, AKA Adam came over here to fight for the Birmingham Islamic Foundation a year ago. We hadn’t heard a word from him for months, which you’d think would put Ishmael 2, AKA Ali, AKA Aiyden off, but no way.

  Me, I learn to welcome martyrdom into my life, he texted me. Martyrdom. Everyone else calls it being dead. They call it martyrdom. And... I learn? I learn? He never used to talk like that before. I save a virgin for you in Paradise, bruv, he said. Well, thanks. When I pop my cherry, I want it to be with someone who knows their way around, not some stupid virgin who’s as ignorant as I am. Know what I mean? Poor Aiyden! He hasn’t seen me for so long, he has no idea about me. He’s in for a shock when he meets me, I can tell you.

  This is my life. What kind of morons live in Amsterdam, the drug and sex capital of the western world and become Islamic fundamentalists?

  My brothers. Just my luck!

  There were a few texts from other mates. Jay, Skinner, Charlene, Alexa – all of them out of it now. There was a text from Lara in Birmingham, where the Bloods had arrived a few weeks earlier. According to her, the fighting was still going on, but it was just mopping up little pockets of resistance. There were troops moving further north, which meant the push to Manchester could happen any day now – as if we didn’t already know.

  Nothing from my dad. That was six months now. I still hoped. I never stopped checking whenever I got coverage, even though I knew it was useless.

  Two more days went by, then a third. I was going crazy. Maude was still ‘negotiating’ but none of it had paid off yet. Rowan was off with his little mates every day, which was just as well as I’d run out of things he’d never seen or heard before. The parents of the other kids kept their eye on him along with their own, so I could lie under the tarp and read. And queue. There was a lot of queueing going on. The Red Cross and other charities turned up, doling out food and medicines and so on. We weren’t doing too badly, because Maude was using her contacts and her assets to get us supplies from the FNA as well, so a lot of folk had it worse off than us.

  Rowan was having the time of his life. He never even knew more than about three people in the world before that. Me, I slept, queued and read. I reread Malcolm X, and the ten commandments of the new Black Power movement. One day, brothers and sisters, one day. I reread Juno and listened to my tunes. I went on a book hunt around the camp and got a few more, including Alice in Wonderland, which I’d never read before. It is the campest book I ever read – Lewis Carroll was definitely queer. Trust me. It made me feel all kinda militant, so I took off the military-style combats that I’d changed into for the mud and so on, and dressed girlie, in my very short skirt – the pussy pelmet – and a low-cut top. I got a lot of surprised looks from people, especially the beardie Muslims, and quite a few angry ones as well.

  ‘I have children here,’ one of them hissed at me.

  ‘That beard doesn’t suit you either, and if you can look ridiculous, so can I,’ I told him. Which I was rather pleased with.

  On the third day we had some more excitement – tanks! Two tanks, Boris 62s, so British, but they had the stars and stripes stencilled on the sides. You could tell they weren’t Blood tanks at a distance because they were making their way up the M60 towards us and no one was running for their lives. The motorway was so packed with people, they were making slow progress. After a bit you could hear a loudspeaker telling everyone to clear the way – ‘Move to one side, move to one side everyone. It’s OK, we’re here to sort this out... move to one side...’ – in an American accent. And cheering, as people realised that they were on their side.

  Everyone crowded round them, which made it even harder for them to move. They were the first tanks I’d seen since they all went running south a few years ago when London was under attack.

  I know what you’re thinking. US troops in British tanks? What’s that all about?

  When the US defaulted on the dollar, they ended up having their own civil war over there, which, as you know, was won by the South this time – way, way to the right of anything they’d ever had before. And Lo! It came to pass that over here in the UK the Brotherhood of the Blood of Jesus, which was a tiddly little group of badly armed nutjobs, became funded up to the hilt overnight and started obliterating and smiting their enemies with helicopter gunships, artillery, and tanks, etc. And the rest of us were verily squashed, smited, written out, and generally done over big time.

  And it also came to pass that quite a few of the US troops in the UK, the ones in the US bases over here, weren’t at all happy with what was going on either back home or over here. The Black ones, for example. A lot of liberal whites, too, who were kinda keen on democracy and freedom, started to fight over here against the Bloods. Others, like this crew, didn’t take sides, they just liked soldiering. They were calling themselves US Forces for Freedom. But they were actually following the good old US custom of making money out of other people’s misery. In other words, they were mercenaries.

  It turned out that some of the better-off Asians from Birmingham had paid them to protect the refugees on the road. Of course, once they realised that, everyone was clustered around the tanks, cheering, wanting to shake their hands and beg, which made their progress even slower. From when we first heard them to the point where they actually arrived at the barricade, I’d say it took them about three hours to cover maybe a mile. But when they got there, they turned the turret round so that big, big gun was pointing straight at FNA HQ and ordered them to lift the barricade.

  To cut a long story short, it didn’t make any difference. The FNA didn’t have anything that could take a tank out, but they did have thousands of the very people the UFF had been paid to protect. While the tanks were crawling at 0 mph up the motorway, the FNA spent their time chaining a few hundred of them to the HQ and various other targets. The tank could have just gone forward and crawled over the barricade but if they did that, they’d crush the hostages.

  The tank commander got down to negotiate.

  ‘Listen, my friend – we’re just the forward force. We have another four of these babies coming up behind,’ he said, patting his vehicle fondly. ‘You might as well open up for us now. Save you a whole lotta trouble later on.’

  ‘If they’re here before Christmas, they get a cracker,’ the FNA guy said, and his men cracked up laughing. There wasn’t anything moving up and down that motorway. Stalemate! We all had to just sit back down and wait, either for the other tanks to turn up, or for the tank guys to decide to roll over anyway, or for the FNA to just let ’em through. Which, when all was said and done, they were going to have to do sooner or later.

  Great. So we sat for another two days. What can I say? It rained. Food was running out. Everyone was pooing and peeing. Can you imagine it? And all the time, the crowd was growing even more monumental – maybe half a million or more, who knows, spreading all over the motorway, backing up into Stockport. It was turning into the mother of all refugee camps. The FNA were trying to herd people into holding points in the playing fields and farmland around the schools and by the river, but they were meeting a lot of resistance, because people wanted to be off as soon as t
hey could.

  And still they came. The whole place stank. We had a heavy rain shower a couple of times and... well. It was difficult to tell where the mud ended and the poo began, put it like that. We’d been on the road for five days and we’d done about two miles. Great! Flying start!

  We were in the same boat as everyone else now, running out of food. I had to go off looking for it. Rice, I wanted rice. It’s dry goods, easy to transport, it keeps, and isn’t going to make Rowan’s bottom explode. People were feeding the little idiot all sorts of unsuitable things. Nuts! Where did they get all those peanuts? He kept coming back looking like a raspberry. And the poo saga was not at an end. I know, I know! I keep going on about poo, but honestly, the thing I remember most from those days is actually poo. I pinned a cloth on his front with a list of his allergies on so he could go off playing without some well-meaning moron giving him peanuts or biscuits. It didn’t work. Either they didn’t read it or didn’t care, so I swapped it for another one, saying, If I eat nuts I die! to see how that did. It didn’t. Maybe they didn’t notice the rashes under his covering of mud.

  Anyhow, I left him with this little group of friends making mud pies – I hope they were mud pies – and headed out, and ended up not far from the barricade, with the tank still parked up next to it, the gun still pointed at the FNA HQ. They’d cleared a space round it, and the commander was sitting there on a camping chair by the tank, smoking weed and drinking a cuppa with a group of people. And among them was Maude.

  I didn’t go in and try to join them – I’m far too shy for that. They were sitting there like it was a picnic on a sunny day. The commander had a flap-eared cap on, his long legs crossed, cupping his tea in his hands and smiling at Maude. The sun was out, but it was only April, and it wasn’t exactly warm. How Maude got in with them so quick, I have no idea. They’d only been here a day, and there she was, sharing a spliff and joking away.