Three Bullets

by Melvin Burgess

  She came back about midday on the second day...

  ‘I found somewhere better to stay. They have bikes,’ she said.

  It turned out to be a French charity – an unofficial one – called Help the English. It was a bunch of French bikers who’d scraped together a couple of lorries, loaded them up with food and driven over here to help out and have a bit of fun at the same time. I wasn’t keen, I like a good curry myself, I’d rather have hung out with the Sikhs, but old Rubblehead was fixed on it. So off we went. It was only about a mile up the road, to be fair.

  So these Frenchies, they’d built a brick oven by the roadside and scraped together enough wood to get it hot enough to bake bread. When we came along they were handing out warm loaves, and it smelled beyond delicious. And pots of lamb stew. They didn’t have any refrigeration, so I’m guessing they got the lamb from the same place we didn’t. It was great. Yeah, they did good food. In fact, it turned me on to French food. Stuff like confit duck – that’s duck in a tin in its own fat, for the ignorant among you. Sounds disgusting, non? It’s not. Well, it wasn’t then, but we were starving hungry. Usually they doled you out just potatoes in the fat, which was also delicious. But sometimes you got a piece of meat, too.

  They’d put up tents by the roadside and fed people as they went by.

  ‘ ’Ere you go, you poor Eeenglish peasants,’ they were shouting, doling it out, ‘Haute cuisine à la M-One. ’Ow can you reeseest?’

  They were a laugh, with their piercings and tats and leathers and big beards, although some people hated it – you could see from their faces how much they hated being poor Eeenglish peasants who had to take charity from a bunch of hairy French bikers. Maude had already made her mark, and as soon as we arrived she was chatting away to them in French. Especially this one guy, tall and skinny with his beard in a plait and a pair of huge rectangular sunnies, like TV screens, they were. I didn’t see any bikes. I reckoned if there was going to be any kind of bike around that camp, it was likely to be Maude.

  I was sooo jealous! Of Maude’s French, I mean. I’d spent half my life being jealous of Maude. She’d had better schooling than me – her parents could afford tutors and all that, plus they had holidays over there, too, whereas we never went abroad. Our kind of family never does that kind of holiday. We only did days out... But who am I kidding? I never did any work even when there was school. Anyway, she was gabbling away with them, and I was... you know that thing? Where people start gabbling away in a language you can’t understand and all you can do is stand there like an idiot and wait. That was me.

  There were a couple of women, a couple of kids and four men, all of ’em eyeing me up curiously, which I was in no mood for. But one of them caught my eye. Medium-sized guy, with short hair and a blond beard. In his late twenties. White, but with a deep tan. I don’t like ’em too pale. I turned my head to watch him watching me, and he looked away, looked down... but then his eyes came back up to meet mine. And he smiled.

  Yeah. Yeah. He just smiled and I smiled back right away, because... well, I don’t know why. We recognised each other, maybe. Which, if that was the case, would be the first time in my life I’d recognised someone recognising me and been fairly sure about it. I looked away too, but then I got my courage up and I looked at him again, and he looked back more or less at the same time and this time we gave each other the nod. And we laughed because...

  Because.

  Maude turned to look at me, as if I’d spoken out of turn. I shrugged. She turned to ogle the blond guy, looked back at me, like – really? Then she went back to gabbling in Francoiseaise to the tall skinny guy, who she clearly thought was some kind of prize catch. I was thinking, Too skinny. My guy had a nice layer of fat around his ribs. I don’t like ’em fat but I don’t like ’em thin, either – and I was just thinking it would be nice to dig my fingers in there and see how ticklish he was, when he nodded at me again and went off to get on with the cooking.

  I got fed up waiting. I’d put Rowan down and the women were making a fuss of him, showing him to the other kids there, so I parked myself down by the lorry against one of the wheels, still waiting for Maude, and as soon as I sat, I was exhausted. One of the women – chubby girl, her name was Laetitia – she came over and sent me to one of their tents to lie down and sleep.

  ‘Are you sure? Are you sure?’ I kept saying.

  ‘Yes. Yes, yes,’ she kept saying, which was about the limit of her English. So I went to the tent and – pop! I was gone. Fast asleep.

  And I slept and I slept and I slept. I had no idea how tired I must have been.

  When I woke up it was quite late in the afternoon. I lay there for a while, listening. They were still talking away in French. You could hear the sound of the refugees as well – a babble of voices beyond like a river. The odd lorry moving around, people talking in English, Punjabi. There were Caribbean voices, posh voices, poor voices. All sorts. Mainly immigrants, or people whose parents or grandparents had been immigrants. So many different kinds of people, and all of them wrong. The wrong colour, the wrong voice, the wrong beliefs. All of us united, wrong together.

  Then I had a sudden pang about Rowan and I got up to go and see what was going on. But it was fine. He was playing with the other kids, two French kids. They’d decided he was a baby, and they’d wrapped him up in blankets and were feeding him out of a cup with a spoon, and milk out of a baby bottle they’d got from somewhere, which made me laugh. It must have been heaven for Rowan. He was lying very still and going, ‘Ga-ga,’ like he thought a baby did. One of the little girls kept squeezing the bottle to make the milk come out, which I thought was hilarious. I mean! He didn’t even have to suck!

  It was quite a mild day, but it had been damp and I was a bit chilly. Laetitia gave me a shawl to wear. They were all very kind. They fed me, gave me a big plate of fatty potatoes with a bit of meat in it. It was just heaven. Then I was tired so I went back to sleep, but only for a short while. When I got up again, everyone was cooking. Maude was there too and I joined in, peeling spuds.

  So they sort of adopted us. How cool was that? I might have known that whenever it looks like Maude’s on the hunt for a shag, there’s usually another agenda going on. She always was clever when it came to using her assets.

  I did about half a tonne of potatoes that day. My guy, the blond guy, Anton, he was called, was one of the cooks, him and Laetitia. They were working a little way off. After a long time he seemed to finish whatever he was at and walked round to where we were and smiled at me again. My insides melted a bit. I wondered if he’d come round just in order to smile at me. Then he went off to his tent. I saw him duck down and go in, and he cast me a little glance as he went.

  I did some more spuds. Then another woman, Marie, took the peeler out of my hand. ‘Enough,’ she said. Actually, my hands were sore, I had blisters. I wasn’t used to the work.

  ‘You go.’ She waved her hand around the camp.

  ‘Do you mind?’

  ‘No, of course.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  So I wandered off. Marie turned and said, ‘Take your time.’ Laetitia, who had come to help with the spuds, leaned over and said something quietly to her, and Marie answered and they both laughed softly.

  ‘C’est là-bas,’ said Laetitia.

  ‘C’est what?’ I said.

  ‘It’s over there,’ translated Marie, nodding to one side. ‘ ’Is tent. Over there.’ She was pointing over to where Anton had gone.

  I was—oh my gosh! Was I really that transparent? I fled, I just fled. So I had to wait ages for them to stop working so I could go and hang out around his tent.

  I wasn’t even sure he was still in the tent by then, actually. I was faffing around, looking for something to do, but there wasn’t anything to do. I was too shy, still way too shy to do anything myself. And I wasn’t sure. I mean, really – how can you ever be really sure? And I was terrified of being rejected. I was wondering if maybe I oug
ht to go and cadge a ciggie, but I don’t smoke. Or go and ask him something, but there wasn’t anything I needed to know.

  ‘Hello,’ he said. He made me jump, he came out so quietly while I was looking the other way.

  ‘Bonjour,’ says I, trying to look cool.

  We both stood there and it was just getting awkward when he said, ‘Would you like to come in for a little drink, perhaps?’ His English was very good – it sounded just like that, with not much accent at all.

  ‘I don’t drink,’ I said almost at once, without thinking, even though I do sometimes, and he nodded and looked awkward, so I said, ‘I’ll come in anyway if you like, just to be sociable.’

  And he smiled and I smiled, and I went into his tent, you know? And I thought to myself, Can it be that I’m actually growing some instincts, because I swear, I never had any instincts for anything before that. I never knew what people were doing unless they told me straight out, I never knew what things meant, or how to behave or anything. But I knew what he wanted that night, and I knew I wanted it too. So I went into his tent, and Lo!

  Lo. It came to pass.

  I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking you want to know how it happened and maybe who said what and who did what and how and to who. Well, dream on. Because listen, honey – you are nowhere near that special. Nowhere near.

  Later, Maude poked her head in the tent.

  ‘OK?’ she said.

  ‘OK,’ I said. She was giving him the eyeball. He had a ciggie halfway to his lips.

  ‘OK?’ he said.

  ‘She’s my sister,’ said Maude. And she gave him a look, a good hard look. Then she went.

  ‘Wow,’ he said.

  ‘Sorry,’ I said.

  ‘Your sister, not your mother?’ he said, because she was so obviously checking up.

  ‘She was just making sure.’

  ‘Why?’

  Well, I knew. It was my first time, you see? My first lover. I know, I know! I’m a late developer. I didn’t tell him that, though. He was lucky enough as it was, as far as I was concerned.

  Later, when I was getting dressed, he was laying there watching me, and he said, ‘You are very brave and you are very lucky.’ Out the blue, just like that.

  ‘Why?’ I said.

  ‘The way you dress.’

  I looked down. I’d fetched my bag into his tent and put on that blue dress I told you about. Somehow it had really grown on me.

  ‘What’s wrong with it?’

  ‘Nothing’s wrong. It’s very brave, that’s all. Anyone else in this place, at this time, they’d go in disguise.’

  ‘This is a disguise, you should see what I wear when I’m at home,’ I said, which made him laugh.

  ‘You could dress like a boy, it would be easier,’ he said.

  I shrugged, but it hurt. Yeah, I could. More than ever really, since I’d lost my meds and all the old evils were creeping up on me. My face was as hairy as a witch going through the menopause. Even though I was shaving every day. My tits were turning into moobs. But I’d tried that disguise stuff and it never did me any good that I could see.

  The way I felt then, I was holding my breath until I got my hands on some meds, found a decent hairdresser and got some identity back. That was the feeling.

  ‘It wouldn’t be me, then, would it?’ I said. I was crouched down looking in a little mirror I keep in my handbag to sort out my hair, which was a mess. ‘What do you mean about lucky, though?’ I asked. ‘No way on this Earth am I ever lucky.’

  ‘Your friend lets you dress like that,’ he said.

  ‘What’s it got to do with her?’

  ‘It draws attention to her too, of course.’ He frowned. ‘You don’t know that? Then you must be an idiot, Marti,’ he said.

  He was right about that, anyway, because I am an idiot. I was actually surprised – can you believe that? Even though she’d been on at me about it all the time, and Tariq too, even though we’d had all those rows about it, somehow I still didn’t get it. All the time I just thought about how they were being inconsiderate about my identity. Funny, eh? How you can be told something over and over and still not know it.

  I told you I was a selfish cow.

  I went out and found Maude and I gave her a big hug and a kiss, but I didn’t tell her why. But I made up my mind that while I was here, with the Frenchies, I was going to be myself for Anton, but that when we went on the road again, I’d do like Anton said and go disguised as a man. But gladly this time. It was something I could never do for myself, but I could do it for Maude and Rowan, I guess.

  I spent almost the whole of the next three days in that tent with Anton and I’d have spent more if we hadn’t had to move on. Sometimes I think I could even have loved him, but I don’t know. I’ll always remember him, though, and not just for the sex. The sex was good, you know, but after a time the sex fades in your memory. But that little conversation I had with him never left me because I knew that he was right. I was brave, if I had to be. If it was for the right thing. Of course there were plenty of other things where I was still the biggest chickenshit that ever walked the Earth.

  But it was good to know that about myself, and Anton – if you’re out there – thank you so much for telling me so.

  22

  Three days, three lovely days. When I look back at that time in my life, which has had so much that’s terrible in it, that little bit of time with Anton and the Frenchies was like a bubble of pleasure.

  What’s more, there was good news on the war front. Some serious resistance was going on in the south. There was fighting in north London, around Watford, all the way out to Hemel Hempstead, round that way. And in the east, around Huntingdon, where the ERAC was. The Twat in Black might have been a twat but that didn’t seem to stop him kicking some ass. Apparently the EU and some of the Middle Eastern states had started providing some proper assistance, including warplanes, heavy artillery and so on.

  So the Bloods weren’t getting it all their own way for a change. You couldn’t exactly say they were in retreat, but they had pulled back from the northern front. Retrenching. Nottingham was still under their control but they weren’t likely to be pushing further north any time soon. Finally! We had a break.

  Funny thing, I barely even thought about it at the time. It was just all part of the golden glow. All I was worried about was when I was going to get some time with Anton again. Rowan was busy playing, sleeping and eating, which is about as good as it gets for a three-year-old. Maude was with Philippe, her skinny bloke, the boss man of the outfit, which must have suited her to the ground judging by the big fat grin she had plastered across her face the whole time.

  One disappointing thing: no news from the ERAC itself. Of course no one really knew much about it, it wasn’t public knowledge by any means. People had other things to worry about, but I was dying to find out if that software had worked or not. If it had, then the fact that there was some proper resistance going on round there was good, and... my dad. I mean, I’m not an optimistic person, as you’ll have gathered by now. But still...

  I asked and asked anyone who’d come from round there, and at all the tents and so on, but no one knew a thing. Most of them hadn’t even heard of it.

  What can you do? Just survive and enjoy the days when you can. And I could. So I did.

  So. I woke up in the middle of the night and there was Maude with a hand on the side of my face. Soon as I opened my eyes, she lifted a finger to her lips.

  I got up on one elbow. Anton was fast asleep next to me. Rowan had slipped through the front of the tent and was standing behind her, his cut-off finger in his mouth. He took it out and put it to his lips like her and said ‘Shush!’ in a too-loud whisper. Maude turned to glare at him, then crawled out backwards.

  I got up, quiet as I could, and slipped out after her.

  ‘What’s going on?’ I whispered.

  ‘Time to go,’ she said. Before I c
ould ask why, she shook her head and motioned me to follow her. I tried to get to my rucksack, but she stopped me, so I just grabbed the handbag and a handful of clothes. No questions. Then off we went, weaving our way in between the Frenchies’ tents until we got to the two lorries the guys used, parked up right in the middle of the camp. Maude whipped out a set of keys, shushed me again, and opened up the back of one... quietly, quickly.

  ‘Maude? Why are you opening up their lorry? What’s going on?’ I whispered. But she shushed me so fiercely, I shushed. She put down the tail flap – she even made me help her, the bitch, because if they caught us fiddling with their stuff, we were dog meat. Even with Anton on my side, we were dog meat. I had no idea what we were going to find. I’d only ever seen inside the other lorry, which was the one they kept the food in.

  But I guess it was predictable. Bikes. Four big, fine motorbikes. Right at the front was a dirty great shiny chopper, with the front wheel half a mile in front on its long spokes and an engine as big as the moon. It was a moonlit night, and I tell you, it looked like an angel sitting up there, shining sweetly and softly in the silver light.

  I was like, WTF? I mean, Maude always loved a bike, but...

  Then she got out her knife and started slicing tyres.

  ‘What are you doing, Maude?’ I hissed, clutching hold of her and trying to be quiet. We were surrounded by bikers! I mean! ‘These people are our friends. God’s sake!’ I was beside myself! But she shook me off and got on the chopper – the only one whose tyres she hadn’t slashed – hoisted Rowan up behind her, and nodded for me to get up behind him.

  I stood there. I was shaking, I think.