Three Bullets

by Melvin Burgess

  People often say about someone they used to be close to, that they don’t know them any more. It was never as true as it was for me and my dad. Who was he now? And – how cool would it be if my phone could give him back to me. How cool? Cooler than all the fashion labels in the world. Cooler than Amsterdam, I hear you say? Yeah, really. Even cooler than that.

  I rang my bruv in Amsterdam, too. You have to keep your options open. No answer there either. I guess he was too busy frolicking with all those virgins in Paradise. Lucky guy.

  13

  We spent a day hanging around with Rowan’s finger, but events were moving faster than we were. The Bloods were on the move, occupying towns and villages, putting up roadblocks, rooting out anyone opposed to them. The longer we left it, the harder it was going to be to get down south, let alone back up to Hull and Amsterdam, city of my dreams. I was prepared to put my life on hold to try to save my dad, but after that, I was sticking to plan A. I’d be off to Hull before you could cough. I wanted to spend my war years whooping it up in the sex capital of Europe, not languishing in a prison camp, thank you very much.

  I kept nagging to go, but kids always come first, never mind whether they deserve it or not. And then, if you argue against it, it’s like you’re some kind of monster. To make it worse, the Nottingham guys actually offered to take him off our hands! They knew a charity that would take him in.

  ‘Pretty little kid like that,’ one of them said. ‘People’d pay a lot of money for a kid like that.’

  ‘Even with half a finger missing!’ I said. No one laughed.

  ‘The important thing is,’ this bloke said, ‘it’d be safer for him. He’d have a good life. If you loved him, that’s what you’d do. If I had a baby brother,’ he said wistfully, ‘I’d do it for him. Really. It’s the best thing.’

  As far as I was concerned, it was a no-brainer. No kid to look after? Money? Safe place for said kid? What are we waiting for? But Maude was dead to our appeals.

  ‘Your own brother,’ she said to me. She was always saying that.

  ‘It’s for his own good,’ I said.

  ‘Like pinching him on his side was for his own good?’ she said. Typical. The little wretch had snitched on me!

  She had a real rant about it. How people couldn’t be trusted when money was involved. How there was no guarantee that Rowan was going to go to a good home. ‘It could be some awful place. Like, slavery. Or some pervy thing. And you,’ she said, ‘you want to risk that for your own baby brother!’ And – this is the killer – ‘And anyway, Marti, you promised Mum!’

  She was always saying that. It was true, me and Maude, we both made that promise. When Dad disappeared, Mum made us promise that if anything ever happened to her, we’d all stick together. I guess the difference between me and Maude was, that while I promised it to keep Mum happy and make her feel good (see? I’m not all bad!), she promised it like it was some kind of big oath that you were actually supposed to keep.

  Maude has this big thing, you see, about Staying Together. It’s kind of a fetish. She got it off Mum, of course – that’s why we waited so long in Manchester waiting to get killed in case my dad turned up. I happen to think it’s a lousy tactic. The best tactic is to stay alive – obvious or what?

  She made me promise again. ‘We stick together, Marti. OK? OK? I have your word, your word of honour? Promise me, Marti, won’t you?’ Etc, etc... She kept on and on, and it was obviously really important to her, so I did it, I gave her my word of honour. The poor girl had obviously failed to notice that I don’t actually have any of that particular commodity. It kept her happy. I said the words, but all the time I was thinking to myself, if it came down to it, like, me or him, well, I’d do my best to make sure he went to a good place of course. Because, you know, he deserves a good home, right? And me? Well. I deserve the money.

  Funnily enough, although Maude failed to do any significant ‘negotiations’ on that stop off, one of the guys, not the one who wanted to sell Rowan, some other guy, was desperate to sleep with her and she wasn’t having it. This guy was really mooning all over the place for her. I learned later on that she’d had a thing with him before in Manc and she had a policy of not returning to her own mess, as she put it. But this guy was making his pitch worse than it already was because he was trying to stop both of us – sorry, all three of us – going further south at all.

  ‘It’s too dangerous,’ he kept saying. I thought he was just trying to get her to hang around for his own nefarious purposes, but then the others started on about it too. The Bloods had been funding various different groups ahead of them to soften the place up, and the road to Nottingham and beyond was bad.

  ‘We’re getting all sorts of reports. It’s really bad country down there, there’s some really vicious groups going about,’ said this small blonde girl, who was also trying to stop us going. Which was annoying. Because I’d made up my mind to go, you see? For my dad? On the other hand it was making my teeth chatter with fear. Literally. I was shaking.

  ‘I can’t do it,’ I told Maude. ‘Look at me. You know what a chicken I am.’

  ‘Being brave isn’t about feeling no fear. It’s doing things in spite of it,’ she said. Which made me even more annoyed. She’s always coming out with wretched pithy sayings like that. I did my best to convince her to go on her own – I even offered to take Rowan with me.

  I mean, come on! That was a reasonable deal, wasn’t it? It was probably even sensible.

  She thought about it a bit then said, ‘Sorry. The answer’s no.’

  ‘How come?’ I was astonished. It was a good deal!

  ‘Because I don’t trust you,’ she said. ‘I think you’d sell him off to the highest bidder as soon as you saw my arse disappearing over the horizon.’

  I was incensed. It was true, of course, but I was still incensed – mainly because everyone was seeing through me so easily. It was kinda making being selfish a bit redundant, you know what I mean?

  Anyway, so that was that. I had a bad feeling about it. I had no idea whether my bad feels were just me being the usual chicken or some kind of foresight. In this case, it turned out to be both.

  14

  And it started so well when we finally set off again! So well. The FNA guys welded our tank up, so we were back on the road. I was being nice to Maude so I had on my combats – the proper ones, as she called them. It was a good day for biking, a few clouds but no rain. Plenty of sunshine. We’d been shown a really pretty, remote route. We were avoiding towns and villages. There was the odd drone flying overhead, keeping an eye on things – including us, no doubt. There was no way of telling whose they were. We had to park up a few times and hide under trees and stuff like that. It was a good day to stay out of sight. It’s always a good day to stay out of sight.

  We were enjoying ourselves. We should have known better.

  We were going slow because Rowan had started fidgeting. That was a blessing, had we but known, because suddenly Maude nutted me in the nose with the back of her head, and back we all went, all three of us – stripped off the bike, head over heels, down on the tarmac – smack bang!

  Out cold.

  I got the worst of it, with Maude on top of me, although to be fair she got the washing line they’d strung across the road right on her tits at twenty miles an hour. If we’d been going much faster she’d have ended up with four. I woke up a little later – no idea how long later but it can’t have been that long. Maude was on her feet with her hands behind her back. Rowan looked OK except he was being held by his clothes from behind. He’d gone all quiet, all big round eyes and his face went white. The guys who’d got us were high-fiving each other, except for this bloke with a lot of muscles and a big belly, who was looking down at me and frowning. I couldn’t make out much because my eyes were watering so much. My nose had been squished all over my face. Just my luck! My nose used to be quite long, but considering the rest of me it was still one of my few good features. N
ow it was short but it was all over my face.

  What I could see, though, was that the fat one had a shotgun pointed down at my face.

  ‘Bang,’ he said. Maude screamed at him. Then he put it up and laughed.

  ‘Just joking,’ he said, in some scummy southern counties accent. Then he held out a hand to get me to my feet. Which I took – there was no way I was getting up on my own. But I still couldn’t stand and I was having to grab hold of him to stop myself falling down, and he was going, ‘Get off me, get off me, get off me!’ and swatting out at me. But I really couldn’t stand up, I was all over the place, so I was still snatching at him and getting nose blood all over him. That was the first sign that these guys were a bunch of amateurs. So he called to one of his minions to hold me up instead, and this guy who came to do the job, you know what? He was Black. Which was a surprise, to say the least, because the rest of them were white and dressed in what looked like some sort of homemade Blood uniforms, with the double cross on their fronts.

  The Black guy put his arm round me to hold me upright, kind of at arm’s length, like I was some kind of pollutant.

  ‘Do I really have to do this?’ he asked the big guy, who was obviously the boss.

  ‘You have to do everything I tell you, how many times do I have to say it?’ the boss guy snapped.

  ‘Yes, sir! But, sir – this one’s Black.’

  Now listen. I have a lot of issues. You may have noticed. But one thing I don’t have any issues with is being Black. I like being Black. I’m happy with it. I like Black music and Black food, I like wearing Black clothes and hanging out with Black people. Being Black is cool. If I had God come up to me and offer to make me white, I’d spit in his eyes for being the racist old bigot he obviously is. So, chicken though I am, when this Black man – he was darker than me, too, let me say that – when he said that, like I smelled or something, I slapped out at him, and he let me go, so I started to fall, so then he had to grab me again. And there I was in yet another ludicrous situation, me slapping out at the man who was trying to hold me, and him trying to only touch me with his fingertips or something, then letting me go and then having to catch me again because the big guy, and all the other guys as well, were all calling out, ‘Don’t you drop her, don’t you drop her, Sebastian, or you’re in trouble!’

  The big guy, Major Tom, they were calling him, was furious. ‘What is wrong with you, Sebastian?’

  ‘But, sir, you know how they smell...’

  ‘I know how they smell because I have to smell you every day, Sebastian. Damn it, you moron, you’re blacker than her.’

  Sebastian drew himself up – he wasn’t that big, but what he had, he drew that up. ‘Sir! I have to object. I’m as white as any of you. I am a proud Caucasian, sir – and you know it.’

  All the guys, all the racists, they were clutching at their foreheads and wiping their faces with their hands in despair. It was bizarre! I swear to you, that brother actually thought he was white.

  ‘That’s one defective negro,’ one of them said.

  I was incensed, I could see Maude making movements at me to shut up, but I just couldn’t help myself.

  ‘What is wrong with you?’ I yelled at him. ‘Are you blind or mad or something? There’s only one thing makes you Black and that’s the colour of your skin, and you’re blacker than I am. Pull your head up and think straight, why don’t you?’

  ‘That’s not true,’ he hissed. He was absolutely furious. ‘Black people are ugly. I’m not ugly. Black people have horrible behaviour – they’re thugs, criminals. I’m not a criminal. I behave right. I’m polite and they’re rude...’

  I leaned forward and slapped him round the face for that one, the ignorant little blasphemer, and he stumbled back in shock. Then Major Tom elbowed me away and gave poor old Sebastian a whack of his own, a really hard clout on the side of his face that must have made his ears ring and knocked him flat to the ground. Then he laid into him with his foot.

  ‘You stupid shit, you stupid, stupid little shit, you f**k f**k f**k!’ He was going. He really lost it. Sebastian – I was thinking, that’s no Black name, I don’t believe that’s any kind of Black name – he was rolling around, trying to dodge the boot, going, ‘Sir, sir, no sir, please sir,’ like that. And when it was over, he got up, all tearful, and went to hide behind the other guys.

  ‘It’s not right, him treating me different from the other guys,’ he wept, but Major Tom bellowed ‘Shut up!’ at him so hard, he nearly popped his eyes out, and Sebastian put his head down and tried to hide his quivering lip. I was thinking he only got what he deserved, but for different reasons from why Major Tom gave him that kicking. But Maude had spotted it.

  ‘ERAC,’ she said.

  ‘We paid over five grand for this idiot and he has a new personality every fucking day!’ one of them hissed, and he lashed out at poor Sebastian, who ducked to the ground and cringed there, arms over his head, for all the world like a kicked dog.

  Maude was right. He’d been through the ERAC. They’d done him good. Rewritten him. I’d heard they were monetising the procedure. The poor guy had been sold as a slave to this bunch of losers, but the work was faulty. He’d been through the, ‘I’m a worthless Black slave bit,’ but now his own true underlying self worth was coming back. He still thought Black people were worthless, but he knew he wasn’t worthless. So the only conclusion was... he was white!

  Incredible.

  And man! Those guys were so angry, it was unreal.

  ‘If you say you’re a white man one more time, I’m gonna shoot you in the balls,’ the big guy hissed, waving his shotgun at him, so all the other guys ducked and ran out the way. Poor Sebastian looked crushed. What was going on in that man’s poor head, God only knows. But he made me think about my dad, and I thought, It shows Tariq is right. The rewriting software is crap. Which means, maybe... maybe...

  ‘What we going to do with ’em, Major Tom?’ the one holding Maude asked. He gave Maude a little shake as he said it and eyed her up like a hungry man looking at a bucket of fried chicken.

  ‘Well, we all know what we’re doing with her,’ said Major Tom, and they all laughed. ‘Congratulations, Miss. This is the happiest day of your life. Times five.’

  Five was how many of them there were, did I mention that? Not counting the Black man.

  Maude had gone as grey as a plate of porridge. I don’t blame her. None of these guys looked anything like the happiest day of your life.

  I felt something trickle down my neck. I put my hand there: blood, where my nose was bust. ‘Damn it,’ I said, ill-advisedly.

  Major Tom turned to look at me. ‘And what the f**k is this?’ he said.

  I got a decent look at him this time, I’d been too concussed before that. Big man with a belly on him, bright blue eyes, narrowed. Very cold-looking, had his teeth bared – he’d been made that angry by poor Sebastian. He was wearing a kind of square cap with a peak, a military-style thing, and a uniform that looked a bit like the Bloods’, but not quite. Big military boots, combats. He had WA on his hat and on a badge on his breast pocket.

  ‘White Army,’ he said, pointing to it.

  I looked over at Sebastian – I hate to call him that, it obviously wasn’t his real name. He looked back at me, jaw slightly down, eyes half closed.

  ‘Sebastian, is that your real name?’ I said quietly. ‘Hey, man – tell me, what was your favourite food your mother used to cook for you?’

  I know you must be wondering why I said that. Well, it was something my dad told me once, about how the deeper a memory is, the harder it is to write over it, and more likely it is to surface.

  ‘Things from childhood,’ he’d said. ‘Early things that happened often. And smells. For some reason, the memory of smells goes really deep.’

  It was just a chance, I was trying it on, really. Maybe he knew what I was trying to do because Major Tom stepped forward and slapped me round the face – a real
ly hard slap, like the one he’d given Sebastian. I went down again. Maybe the guys at the ERAC had told him something about that, too.

  ‘Enough of that,’ he said. ‘I’ll do the questions and the one I’m asking you, sunshine, is, what the f**k are you?’

  There was a noise behind him. The others had got fed up waiting for him and they were getting on with marrying off Maude. One of them was standing in front of her with a bible, another one by her side. The other one came and whacked her on the back of her knees so her legs gave way and she fell down on her knees on the road.

  ‘That’s how I like my brides,’ he said, and they all laughed.

  ‘She marries me first,’ bellowed Major Tom.

  The groom-to-be rolled his eyes and flapped his hands.

  ‘Commander’s rights,’ added Major Tom. ‘But first I want to work out what we have here.’ He gestured at me with the gun: Get up.

  I got up.

  ‘Tops off for the boys,’ he said.

  I was so shocked, I stared at him.

  ‘Tops off,’ he repeated, waving his gun at both me and Maude in case there was any mistake. So Maude did, so I did, too. It was the first time I’d actually had ’em out on show. I was quite proud of them in some ways, although obviously they didn’t match up to Maude’s, which were genuinely magnificent. Still, they were a lot better than what I had a year or two ago, which was none at all. I peeled off the T-shirt and gave ’em a little jiggle. Don’t ask me why. I guess I wasn’t all that used to them and didn’t quite know what to do. Jiggling seemed as good as anything else. Sometimes you have to try and look as if you’re not shitting yourself to death, which is what I was actually doing at that very moment.

  The lads all made retching sounds.

  ‘Pants down, ladies. If that’s what you really are.’

  I closed my eyes, but only for a moment. I could feel, rather than see, Maude looking at me. The ‘groom’ dragged her to her feet and nodded at her combat bottoms, which she started to unbuckle slowly.