Three Bullets

by Melvin Burgess

  ‘You can stay, and he can stay,’ they told us, gesturing at Maude and Rowan. ‘But this one – whatever it is, it goes.’

  Wow, was I glad we’d all just sworn total fidelity to each other, because now Maude and Rowan had to get out of the lorry with me. Just saying.

  ‘What’s happening to this lot, then?’ asked Maude, eyeing up the crates of stuff they were supposed to be carrying back to their ‘mates’ in Nottingham.

  ‘None of it’s going to make any difference at all when they have that flying around,’ said one of them, nodding after the gunships.

  ‘You’re going to give it to the Bloods,’ said Maude.

  ‘We both have families,’ said the guy, as if he thought that let him off the hook. But that wasn’t a clever thing of Maudie to say, because then they started fretting that we were going to survive and tell their mates what they were doing. One of them wanted to shoot us, but the other one wasn’t having it.

  ‘It isn’t like any of the FNA are going to be in the next administration, right? That’s why we’re defecting, right?’ he said.

  So they didn’t shoot us. They just took our mobiles off us and packed the crates back in the truck.

  ‘Sorry,’ said the nice one as they climbed back in the lorry.

  Then off they went. And there we were!

  There we were in the middle of a field. A battlefield, that is.

  I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking, like, Oh, when she started out she absolutely hated Rowan and it was all about herself and now suddenly she’s all lovey dovey? And we’re supposed to believe it? So what’s going on? You’re thinking I’m making something up or leaving something out. Well, there is a story behind it and you may be surprised to hear I’ve decided to tell you what it is after all. But don’t think I’m telling you because I care in any way what you think about me. I don’t owe you anything – in fact, if anyone owes anyone anything, you do. You owe me for writing this in the first place. So don’t go getting big ideas that you’re anything special, or that because I’m telling you this story it means you now know everything. You aren’t, and it doesn’t. And you never will.

  When I said that Rowan’s possibly the most spoilt child in the known world, I was telling you the exact truth. But it wasn’t his fault – it was my mum’s. And it’s not even my mum’s fault, really. It’s all the fault of some unknown scum who did something to our family, something dreadful that I never even think about let alone talk about usually. I’m telling you like the barber who did King Midas’ hair told the secret about his ears. He was the only man who ever saw the king with no hat, and so he learned a strange secret, that no one else knew, that he must never tell on pain of death. But that secret was burning him alive from the inside. He just had to tell someone! So he dug a hole in the earth, so he could whisper the secret down there, just to get it off his chest. That’s what I’m doing and that’s all you are to me: a hole in the ground.

  After Rowan was born, my mum wouldn’t let him out of the house. Imagine that. He was two years old before he even went onto the street outside. She wouldn’t let anyone in the house, either. He didn’t play with another kid until he was two. If she’d had her way, no one would have known that he even existed. That’s how paranoid she was. In the end, me and Maude nagged her into it. There was this family up the road, the Murphys, who had a little girl about the same age, so we borrowed her and took her round to play with him. It cost us six tins of beans. It was cheap, actually. It was good of them. Everyone knew how bonkers Mum was.

  So this kid came round and Rowan couldn’t believe his eyes. The only kids he’d ever seen were on the TV from the government channels and that isn’t exactly kids’ shows. He was two, she was two and half. He stood there and stared and pointed.

  ‘Doll,’ he said.

  ‘Not doll. Girl,’ said Maude.

  ‘For you to play with,’ I said.

  We gave them both a glass of juice and a biscuit – see, we really pulled out the stops for her. She’d just got her mouth into it when Rowan let out this yell of joy, ran right up to her and tried to stick his fingers in her eyes. We were like, No, stop! He was really digging in there, the little psycho. First kid he’d ever seen, he tries to de-eye them. The girl dropped her juice on the floor, shoved him backwards, screaming her face off. He wailed, she wailed louder. Mum ran to pick up Rowan. The little girl ran to her mum, who promptly marched her out the house, both Mum and her yelling at each other. Rowan kicked up a huge fuss because his new toy had been taken away.

  ‘Doll,’ he said. ‘Wanna play with dolly.’ Really. He thought she was a toy.

  So that was one playtime that didn’t end as you might have hoped. Psycho boy! But the real psycho wasn’t Rowan, poor little kid. Like I say, it was my mum.

  So now – this is the beef, you lousy gossip – I have another brother. Had another brother. Malcolm, after Malcolm X, my dad’s big hero. He was cute. Nice kid. Darker than Rowan, praise the Lord. We all doted on him. I doted on him. Three years older than Rowan, which would mean we lost him at age three. I would never accuse my late mother of having another baby to replace him, but... well, work it out for yourself.

  How did we lose him? – And this is a dreadful thing, maybe even more dreadful than just losing him at all. We don’t know. He disappeared. Yep – went out one day to play outside the house and we never saw him again. Now you see, that is the sort of thing that effs with your head and as you know, I don’t use the f-word lightly. It effed up my head, it effed up my mum’s head and it effed up my dad’s head. It was round about the time that all those rumours were going around about kids being stolen off the streets and brought up by the Bloods as Christian fundamentalists or something. You know how the Bloods have this thing about ‘blessed are the little children’ – so blessed that they just cannot bear them to be brought up by dirty nonbelieving Black scum like us? That.

  So now you know. That’s why my mum never let Rowan out of the house until he was two years old. That’s why she wanted us all to watch out for each other all the time. That’s why Maude was so keen on us all staying together and utterly refused to sell him to another family. That’s why I found Rowan so hard to bear, because no one, no one, no one can ever replace my little brother Malcolm. Me and Malcolm were like two flowers on the same stem. I loved him and he loved me, and if it took me a long time to get over that and start to love the replacement, well, tough. That’s how it was.

  And that’s why Mum and Dad had huge rows about him going away. And... ah, what the hell. I could go on. All I can say is, you cannot imagine what losing a sweet little member of your family like that does to everyone and you don’t want to know. That’s war, guys! Your perfect little brother gets stolen away and you don’t know if he’s dead or alive, or working as a slave, or being turned into a black-and-white supremacist, or just learning to love someone else. That’s how it is. Fancy going to live in a war zone? Welcome to it.

  20

  The first thing we did was get off the road. It was like, road = traffic = being dead. It wasn’t a major road, but it was big enough and you could be pretty sure there was going to be something nasty coming along it soon enough. Maude picked Rowan up and we took off across a field full of cows. But those cows must have been Bloods as well, because as soon as they saw us legging it away from them, they came running straight at us.

  ‘It’s just heifers, they’re just curious,’ panted Maude – as if she knew anything about cows. As far as I was concerned, they were charging. Talk about luck. I was thinking, I’m not going to escape the Bloods in order to get stampeded to death by heifers. Off I went, soaring past Maude and Rowan like a gazelle.

  ‘You said they were just curious,’ I shouted at her as I shot past. Then I got the giggles, and I had to stop to laugh, so Maude went shooting past me and the cows were still coming...

  It was hilarious. We both laughed like drains. Getting over the wire on the other side was a hoot
. Funny the things you remember. Bloods, bombs, snipers, burned-out churches, dead mums and dads. But those cows stick in my mind like they meant something. God knows what.

  We found a field without cows and sat down to decide what to do. Well, get to Hull for the ferry to Amsterdam, of course, only a lot slower than we were half an hour earlier. We had our bags – they’d let us keep those, after searching them. They’d lifted Maude’s shotgun, of course, but I had my gun stuffed down my underpants and, believe me, no one wanted to go down there. I’d tried to get some more ammo in Nottingham, but the gun was so old, no one had any. So, still two bullets left. We had a couple of small bottles of water, no food, no phones, a change of clothes or two. And that was it. Thankfully, I still had my razor with me. But no water to shave in. Nightmare! I had a chin like an electric saw.

  It was a sunny day. All the May blossom was out, it had that odd smell it has, not like you expect from a flower, but I liked it because it reminded me of when I was small and we had a hedge in the garden that had hawthorn in it. I thought it would be good to just get on and walk, but Maude was scared of spy drones.

  ‘They can be up there out of sight, you can’t tell. They’ll be taking pics of us.’

  I was like – ‘Are they really going to bother taking pics of us?’

  ‘They do it automatically. Anything that moves.’

  So we had this debate about whether it was better to go by day, when we might be spotted, or night, when we wouldn’t be able to see a thing around us. Maude wanted to go at night – but have you seen how dark it gets in the countryside at night? You cannot see a thing.

  ‘You’re being paranoid,’ I told her. ‘They have cities to conquer. Why would they even care about three kids?’ I mean, Jesus, there must have been literally millions of people on the move up and down the country. Anyway, she saw sense in the end – she had to, actually. We couldn’t have walked two steps without falling over a cowpat in that light.

  So off we went. We didn’t have phones so we had no compass, no maps. We’d been driven there locked up in a truck so we had no real idea where we were, except that we were lost. Maude did one of her clever FNA things, which was to navigate by the sun, but neither of us were really all that sure whether it was working or not.

  It was a nightmare! We weren’t even on a footpath to start with, so we had to keep crossing barbed wire fences and hedges every fifty or a hundred metres. Farmhouses kept cropping up and we had to work our way round them because we had no idea if the people inside were going to be friendly or not. There were the drones, which Maude kept wanting to hide from – you couldn’t always see them, but you could hear them a lot of the time, buzzing about up on high. Helicopters and planes kept appearing out of the sky and we always dived for cover quick then, because face it, all it took was one gung ho racist pilot with a few spare bullets to try a bit of target practice on us and that would be that. Not that there was always cover. A couple of times we got caught out in the open and just had to trudge on, heads down while someone circled overhead, getting a look at us, and us wondering if they were going to come down and strafe us. We always made a point of waving at them. Maybe it worked. We never got shot at, anyway.

  And food! I mean, no food. Not having any. When you think that the countryside is supposed to grow food! I mean, where is it all? I swear I never saw so much as a sandwich the whole time. Not one bite. No cabbages or apples or even turnips. Peas and beans and things – they must grow them somewhere, right? But not where we were.

  And so we got hungrier and hungrier and hungrier. We tried eating grass, can you believe that? Like cows. You know that thing when you pull a grass head and it slides out of its stem and there’s a sweet soft bit at the end? Well, that’s how hungry we got. We’d find a good patch and pick away at it like a bunch of monkeys, but we never got anything like enough to fill us up. We got so hungry, Maude wanted us to kill a lamb to eat. There were plenty of lambs about, that’s for sure. To be honest, in the right time and the right place, I’d be a veggie myself. I was for a long time, but all that fell to bits the time I found a cellar in Levenshulme with forty-three Fray Bentos tinned pies in it. Even so – lambkins! So cute.

  ‘It’d be like eating Rowan,’ I said doubtfully.

  ‘No it wouldn’t, you’re not related to any of them,’ said Maude.

  Normally I’m such a softie when it comes to baby animals, but right then, when I saw those woolly little babies skipping about the pasture with their mums, I didn’t see cute baby lambsies at all. I saw chops and leg of lamb, all hot and wet and dripping with red, nutritious blood. Maude really got into the idea, but we couldn’t catch any. She was nagging me to shoot one, but I wanted to hang on to my two bullets and I wouldn’t do it, even for chops.

  We were on a track. We’d got so fed up going over fences and avoiding paths and tracks and stuff, we just did it. And we came to a farm. Farms mean people. People means food. You know?

  It wasn’t just the food though. Rowan’s bottom was being really weird – again. What I mean is, he hadn’t eaten anything either, but even so he was pooping all the time. That’s weird, isn’t it? At least three times a day he needed to go and every time he did, Maude and I went to take a look to check it out. I mean, where was it all coming from? It was like he had a secret fudge factory up there. Without going into details, there wasn’t much substance to it, but still. It hadn’t exactly been possible to follow Mum’s strict regime of gluten-free bread and hypoallergenic quinoa over the past few weeks. It didn’t seem to be killing him, though; it was just rashes and poo.

  So. Farmhouse. Food, medicine cabinet. See? It felt like that farmhouse was the answer to all our prayers, and even I was wondering if it wasn’t time to utilise the gun. Maude was all for it, of course, but I wasn’t sure. Farmers have guns, too, don’t they? To shoot rabbits and foxes and stuff, right? So how sensible was it going in there armed with an old revolver and two whole bullets?

  As usual, she took no notice of me. She was busy putting her training into action.

  ‘If we do it, we do it properly. We sit here and we watch – hours, if we have to. We take our time. We check out who goes in and out, find out how many people are in there so we don’t get taken by surprise. We check out the doors and windows. See where the escape routes are. We cut the telephone lines, of course...’

  Off she went. Oh, she had it all sorted out. Who knows, it might have worked too. But... Someone came along the track on a tractor – one of those big blue things with wheels as tall as a shed, you know? We dug into the hedge and held our breaths as it went growling along the track and turned into the farmyard. We heard the engine go off, waited a bit longer, then got back to arguing about whether or not to raid the place. And the next thing, the farmer, the same one who drove the tractor, appeared behind us. It was a woman and she had a gun. A shotgun: two barrels. That was one each for me and Maude. And she was pointing it at us.

  ‘Hands up.’

  We hands upped.

  ‘We’re just travelling,’ said Maude. ‘Refugees.’

  ‘And the little one. Hands up.’ She wagged the gun over at Rowan, who was staring at her with his eyes wide and his mouth hanging open.

  ‘Are you kidding me?’ I said.

  ‘Terrorists,’ she said. And with that word, I knew we were in trouble. In her eyes, we were capable of anything, and if we were capable of anything, so was she.

  ‘Is she goin’ to shoot us?’ Rowan asked. ‘Will it hurt?’

  ‘She’s not going to shoot us, Rowan,’ Maude said.

  ‘He’s not armed,’ I told her.

  ‘He could be wearing an explosive device,’ she said. She wagged her gun at him again. ‘Hands up,’ she said again.

  ‘He’s too young,’ said Maude, and she bent down and picked him up. The woman was holding on to that gun like it was a safety valve. She was shaking slightly. She was staring at me like I was some kind of a nightmare she was having. I don’t
blame her. I felt like a nightmare I was having. I was wearing my face. I had started to grow a beard. The situation was not good.

  ‘We’re not going to do anything,’ Maude told her. ‘We’re just going cross country because we want to avoid the war.’

  ‘We’re not terrorists,’ I said.

  She stared at us like we were talking gibberish, then shook her head. She stood to one side and waved the gun at us: walk. So we walked – Maude in front with Rowan in her arms, me behind and then the woman, the farmer’s wife, I was calling her, which was sexist of me because if you’re wearing the wellies, you’re the farmer, right? And if you’re holding the gun you’re anything you want to be. I nodded at it as I went past.

  ‘You need to calm down, love,’ I told her.

  I don’t know how I got the nerve, really. Just a few weeks ago I’d have been standing there pooing my pants, unable to utter a word. Now – well, I was still pooing my pants but somewhere along the road I was now unable to keep my mouth shut. And I was dangerous, too. If I could have got that gun off her, I’d have very happily blown a hole in her chest big enough for you to put her on your head and wear her like a hat.

  I was thinking about my bag. She hadn’t searched us. Some of us, you know, we have guns of our own.

  She marched us down to the farm, across the yard, the gun still quivering away, and up to the door of the farmhouse.

  ‘Open.’

  Maude hefted Rowan up on her hip, opened the door and we all trooped in to the kitchen. It wasn’t that big, a long narrow room. There was a sofa up against one wall, a big old table in the middle with six chairs around it, and at the other end a little fitted kitchen – a sink, a fridge, a little white cooker and one of those big cooker things, an Aga. There was a rail on it with tea towels hanging up to dry. Standing in front of the Aga was a man in his dressing gown, older than her, grey, but not ancient. As we came in, he turned round to look at us, then he put his hands slowly behind him and leaned back against the bar on the Aga.