Three Bullets

by Melvin Burgess

  I stood there and watched him stalk away. Didn’t even bother to turn round and look at me, he was too busy poking at my phone. Well. I waited for it. The taps on the phone. The pause. The turn.

  ‘What’s the code to this?’

  I folded my arms and stuck my nose in the air. ‘Find out about my dad and I’ll tell you. Freak.’

  He looked at me in surprise, as if anyone would dare talk to him like that! Then he came at me – striding forward at me, yelling – ‘You give me that code right now!’

  But I’d had enough. I don’t know why. I guess being locked up in that truck for hours and hours didn’t help. And being scared. I’d been scared ever since I’d left Manchester – not that Manc was much less dangerous but at least it was danger I knew. Snipers and bombs, OK, but at least you knew what to expect. And those bodies, those children burned in the church, that didn’t help. And that stuff with Major Tom. And now my dad. I’d come all this way and done all this stuff, I’d come hundreds of miles out of my way just for my dad, and now he wasn’t here and I wasn’t even going to find out if he was alive or dead. And Tariq was allowed to stay and I was being sent back. And now my phone was being taken off me, the only thing I had left of my mum and dad – all because this self-important, overpriced piece of knitwear was so full of hate he couldn’t even be civil. He’d rather actually beat me up than do that.

  I suppose he thought I was going to squeak and run, but I didn’t. I made my hand into a big claw. I pulled an imaginary knife from my belt with the other hand and held it up in the air like I actually had a great big knife. I let out a great cawing war cry and I went for him like some kind of crazy valkyrie straight out of Valhalla.

  You should have seen his face! It was hilarious. He came skidding to a halt and his eyes swivelled for a moment, trying to work out whether he should run or stand up for himself. Then he went for his gun, but he was in such a hurry – I was almost on him – that he got in a tangle with his own boots and sort of tripped and had to stagger about getting his balance, and at the same time pulled the gun out of the holster but got it caught in his jacket.

  And then I was on him. The valkyrie from hell.

  Like I say, I have good upper body strength. I used to spend a lot of time sifting through the rubble in Manc, looking for stuff, or ‘looting’ as some people like to call it. Plus I was off the meds, that helped. Maybe carrying Rowan around so much of the time helped too. He was off balance and I knocked him down like a snowman and had him on the floor, whacked his hand so he dropped the gun, got myself on top of him and started squeezing the life’s breath out of his nasty transphobic throat. I could hear yelling and shouting around me, but no one came to stop me for a moment. Until Maude walked up – not in a hurry, mind – and pulled me off him.

  ‘Don’t actually kill him then,’ she said.

  I was panting. I think I nearly fainted.

  ‘He deserves it,’ I said.

  ‘I know,’ she said.

  ‘Jesus,’ croaked the guy, rolling around on his back in the dirt, clutching his injured throat. ‘Jesus. Oh my God. Jesus.’

  I took a look around. Tariq was putting his own gun away, so I guess he must have stopped the guys from coming to their boss’s rescue.

  ‘Let’s go,’ I said, and I marched back to the truck. The Twat in Black picked himself up and went back into his hut, rubbing the back of his head. His guys were smirking away, so you could guess they’d rather liked it. A twat is a twat, I guess. They started loading the truck back up with some crates from inside the building while I sat on the tailboard and did my make-up, for the want of anything better to do. Rowan woke up and started crying. I held my arms out to him, so Maude carried him to me, and he quietened down. Stuck his thumb in his mouth and looked up at me with adoring eyes while I did my mascara.

  ‘I won’t do it again,’ I told him.

  It didn’t take long. Everyone was in a hurry all of a sudden. When they were ready for us, I handed over the code and Tariq came over to say goodbye.

  ‘I told you he was a c**t,’ he said.

  ‘He called me a he,’ I said.

  Tariq shook his head. ‘You’re a bloody piece of work, Marti, aren’t you?’ he said. He stood there looking at me and shaking his head. Then he turned away. ‘OK, let’s get this truck on the road,’ he yelled. I think he wanted to make sure we were off before the commander got his nerves back. Me and Maude crowded into the back with Rowan, they loaded up the final crates, those heavy, heavy crates, whatever it was that was in them. Outside, I heard Tariq bang the truck and yell goodbye.

  ‘Goodbye,’ we yelled. ‘Hope you find your family.’

  ‘...Fat chance,’ I muttered under my breath. The truck pulled away and we were away with it, away, away, back to Nottingham – first leg on the road to Amsterdam, city of dreams. My dreams, that is.

  And Lo! There endeth the search for my dad. Just like that.

  Just.

  Like.

  That.

  18

  Once we got going again, sitting there in the blind darkness, I started to think about my mum.

  I know what you’re thinking: you’re thinking, Wow, she’s so weird! She spends all this time going on about her dad, goes on a Great Quest to find him, fails, so she immediately starts thinking about her mum instead.

  Don’t ask me to explain – I don’t even know what’s going on in my own head. What’s more, I bet you don’t either. It’s only in books that there’s all these nice neat explanations for things. Soon as you hit real life, that’s when the messy stuff starts. So I know this is pretty random, but bear with me.

  What started me off was something Tariq had said while we were in the truck on the way there. ‘You’re always going on about the tunes your dad picked for you,’ he said. ‘But you know it was more your mum who put those tunes on there, don’t you?’

  I’d had no idea.

  ‘Your dad used to send her texts with a song on it and she’d put it on the playlist for him, with him away so often.’

  ‘No one said,’ I said. But I believed him at once because that was typical of my mum. Dad was great when he was there, but I could well believe that my mum was working hard to make sure he was with us as much as a person who wasn’t there could be, if you see what I mean. So she was doing that all the time – and she never told me. She let me think it was him all the time.

  My mum was a pretty special person before the war broke her spirit into little pieces. When I was smaller, I was much more in love with her than my dad. It was only when I got to my teens and realised that I was not just a kid but a Black kid, and I started to think how great my dad was. I wanted to get into Black things – Black music, Black food. All that. I was like, Dad, I want to eat chicken. But not that bland buttery chicken that white folks like Mum make. I want spicy chicken, because us Black folk, we like spicy chicken. And curry goat and stuff. When my mum served up roast chicken for dinner I was all, Oh, it’s so bland, what is this stuff, can’t you put some chillies in this chicken next time? But before that, I’d just loved that buttery chicken she did for us, done in the oven with roasties. She was a good cook, my mum. That was the sort of food I ate mostly, my mum’s food, because she did nearly all the cooking. Dad was away. He was only back every few weeks and then he was a crap cook anyway.

  And it was my mum who first accepted that I was a girl. She was the one who took me to a gay club when I was eleven, when I thought I might be gay, while my dad was still moaning away that it was all just a phase I was going through. She was the one who took me to buy my first dresses and my first bra. My dad got there in the end, but it was always her who led the way when it came to identity.

  I was thinking about all that stuff, but the other thing I was thinking was about a time that showed the difference between my mum and my dad. We were in the kitchen and they were arguing, well, talking really, about what the greatest achievements of humanity were. And my dad was go
ing on about Shakespeare and Karl Marx and Malcolm X and various other big fellas and their Works. You know? But Mum – it was summer, by the way, high summer, a very hot day, the kind you don’t get all that often in Manc – and she took a peach from the bowl on the kitchen table.

  It was a perfect peach. That bowl was full of perfect peaches that she’d bought a few days ago, and now they were just right – heavy, sweet, soft, so full of juice you couldn’t eat it neatly and nicely because the juice got everywhere, down your front, on your chin. It was the kind of peach that just spills juice on you. One of those peaches. And she said, ‘Well, it’s not those big guys. It’s this.’

  ‘What – a peach?’ said my dad – like, You crazy?

  ‘A peach,’ said my mum. ‘This wasn’t invented by some big old famous guy with a big brain. It was invented by loads of little guys. When the first wild peach was found, it was nothing like this. It was a small, sour little thing, so you wouldn’t bother with it. But the little guys, they saw what it could be, so they grew it and tended and bred it year after year after year, generation after generation after generation, until today, every one of us can have one of these gorgeous juicy beauties in our hand. Isn’t that amazing? That’s the genius of people. So that’s what I think is the highest achievement of humanity – the humble peach.’

  That was my mum all over. She was a very loving person before she went doolally. She loved me, and she loved Rowan and she loved Mal, who you don’t even know about and probably never will, because that’s something I never talk about. She loved us all.

  And it was just at that point – perfect timing – that Maude cut in from her place next to me in that dark, dark truck, on that dark, dark journey, and she said...

  ‘Marti, I was so, so proud of you today. The way you tackled that bully – that was fantastic. You were so brave! You’re always going on about how weak you are and what a chicken you are, and look, it’s not true – you’re as brave as a barrel full of lions.’

  ‘Yeah, well, he took my phone,’ I said.

  ‘And the way you look after Rowan,’ she said. ‘You always hold him so well and you’re so considerate and loving to him. Marti, I want you to know how sick I am of hearing you knock yourself like you do, calling yourself selfish and all that, because it’s not true.’

  ‘It is so true,’ I said.

  ‘No, it’s not and you know it. You’re a good person, so just stop acting like a bad one and start behaving like who you really are, will you? Oh – and one more thing. I love you, Marti. OK.’

  That was her piece, and she shut up then and sat there quiet in the darkness as we crawled along the road, at about 0.005 mph, because everyone else was going the same place we were going – away.

  That truck rumbled along the road, and we lay hidden inside, blind as a litter of baby rabbits underground, holding our breaths as we went through the roadblocks, keeping our thoughts to ourselves.

  My heart was full of all sorts of things that day. About my mum, and about my silly fantasy that she wasn’t really buried under the rubble, but had slipped out in the middle of the night to visit someone and that she was there looking for us in Manchester still; and I was thinking that maybe my quest to find my dad was a silly dream as well, something that could never happen, now that he’d been rewritten by the Bloods. I was thinking about how my mum always covered up for his a**e when he was away, so we felt loved by him, and how he loved me anyway, even though I’m trans and he found that so hard, and how they both did their best to make us feel loved, despite hell and the war and everything. But they were both gone now and all I had left in the world was Maude and Rowan. And then I remembered with a dreadful shock how I’d been planning to slip away and desert them and go and save myself to live a dirty life of sex and drugs in Amsterdam, when I didn’t like drugs all that much anyway and I’d never even had sex once, so how did I know if I even liked that, either? But I’d been prepared to dump them both anyway, such was the horrid lowness of my soul, as if they meant nothing to me. Yes, I’d been willing to break their hearts, but what I hadn’t realised was that I would have broken my own heart too, if I’d done what I’d planned to.

  Because... I don’t know. Because we were together. Because we were family. Because we only had each other, right? I mean, look at me. What am I to the world I live in? To the world, I’m nothing. I’m not Black, I’m not white, I’m not a boy, I’m not a girl, I’m not straight, I’m not gay. I’m nothing, I’m no one to them. But my family loved me and accepted me for who I really am – my mum and my dad both. And Maude did too. She loved me, she’d do anything for me. She’d paid me back a thousand times for me helping her when she was bombed out. And Rowan... well. Maybe, really, the truth is, I’d do anything for him too.

  What if it’s really all about other people after all? Not yourself, like I always thought. Not about me. About the people you love and the people who love you?

  It’s a funny thing, because that was about my darkest hour. My mum was dead, my dad was as good as dead. Even though I hadn’t seen their bodies, I knew it was true. I turned on my phone, the one I bought in Manchester, so I could see Rowan sleeping at our feet on a couple of blankets. And...

  ‘What you doing?’ said Maude.

  I shook my head. I thought about how she was going to leave me and Rowan so she could go and fight and die for this benighted land. Surely she’d die, and my heart broke. I bent down and I picked Rowan up in my arms – Maude was complaining that I was going to wake him up but I didn’t take any notice – and I cuddled him up to my face.

  ‘I won’t ever leave you, Rowan, I promise, I promise I never will,’ I said. I was leaking tears all over him. I don’t know why I was so heartbroken or why I should be so overwhelmed with love in my very darkest hour. I guess it just creeps up on you, love. That’s what it felt like, anyway. You don’t fall, you’re just quietly overwhelmed. Maybe that’s what it’s like just to be human, I don’t know. But that’s how it was for me that day, because I was so filled with love for both of them.

  Maude had gone very still watching me, so I stretched out my other arm to take her in, and there we were, our three faces pressed up close together, wet with tears.

  ‘I love you, Maude,’ I said. ‘I’m never going to leave you either.’

  ‘I love you too, baby,’ she said. Little Rowan, who was still half asleep, he put his arms up around us too, bless him.

  ‘Never go ’way, Marti,’ he said, all sleepy. ‘Never go ’way.’

  And suddenly, suddenly, there was so much love in the back of that truck. So much love – I never felt it before. Maybe it was there all the time, I was just too stupid to see it.

  ‘What happened to you, sweetie?’ said Maude.

  ‘I think I must’ve grown a heart,’ I said.

  ‘Ah, Marti, you always had one.’

  ‘Did I?’

  ‘Always!’

  ‘Shit,’ I said. ‘So I’m in for a lifetime of pain.’

  ‘Nah,’ she said. ‘You let love in.’ And bless her, that was also true.

  It was strange. There I was, the ugliest I’ve ever been. There was hair growing out of every orifice on my body, I swear. I was growing muscles in places no girl should ever have them, my boobs were changing shape and I swear my bits were actually growing. But I was full of love. I never felt worse or better in my life.

  And after that we had a big row because although I’d sworn to stick together, Maude was only staying with us till Amsterdam and then she was going back to fight. So who was deserting who? I mean...!

  Which she didn’t see at all, but it made her really angry.

  ‘I’ve always been coming back to fight for freedom,’ she hissed.

  ‘I was always going to be a runaway bitch. Now it’s your turn to put yourself second.’

  ‘Second? Putting my life on the line is putting myself second? You manipulative cow, Marti. You haven’t changed at all, really...’

>   And so on.

  We didn’t dare shout at each other because we had no idea what was outside. I’d turned the torch off so we had to have a whisper row in the pitch black. But in the end, guess what? I won. I won for the first time ever! Maude agreed to stay with us in the Netherlands.

  ‘But not for ever,’ she said. ‘We’re not bloody married. Just until you get settled.’

  I was so happy, I grinned all over my ugly face. ‘I probably just saved your life,’ I told her. And Lo! We rode on, rejoicing. And then, maybe about an hour later, there was a bloody great bang that sent the truck swerving all over the road. Then another, farther away, and somewhere in the distance, strafing.

  The assault had begun. The big Blood push. Would you believe it?

  19

  We drove on a while, but there were more explosions. Then a bevy of helicopters went over – the big ones, the gunships, bashing the air over our heads. Then fighter jets, flying low. Christ. The big stuff.

  We were sat inside our little boxroom, surrounded by crates containing God only knows what, with no idea what was going on. If a shell hit our truck, it was going to be like hell going up. At least it’d be quick.

  At some point the truck, which had been on a big road by the feel of it, turned off onto something smaller – trying to get away from the assault, I suppose. Then it stopped with a jerk. We heard the door slam at the front. Footsteps outside. Voices. The back door opens and we can hear the two drivers unpacking the crates. They lift them out one by one until they get to us, sitting there, blinking in the light at them.

  And a gun pointed at us. The guy holding it waved it at me. ‘Out you get.’

  The two of them had decided, right there and then, that they had no chance against the kind of firepower the Bloods were sending over. So they were going to defect. Obviously! And if you’re going to defect to a bunch of white Christian supremacists, you better not have a weird black person sitting in the back of your lorry – i.e. me.