Three Bullets

by Melvin Burgess

  My torturer didn’t beg. He nodded, as if this was what he expected or deserved or something. Or as if he was giving permission.

  BANG.

  Yes, I can be so full of hatred, but there is one thing and one thing only that stops me from ever being the truly bitter and twisted bitch I should have become. I was never the same again after I was tortured. That man changed me, he changed me more than you will ever know. But he wasn’t the first. Maude got there first. She broke her way into my heart and she’s still there. It’s where she lives. She hasn’t let me go, she never will. She’s the brave one, she’s the loving one, the stick-together one, the kind one. Not me. She’s dead now but she lives inside me and nothing anyone can ever do can take that away. We were never lovers, but even so, she is the love of my life. She was never tortured. She was never changed. She never will be changed. She will always be the same – my now and for ever Maude. My Maude. She should be alive, not me. But since she’s dead, well – I have to be alive for her.

  The other thing is – I got Rowan back! Yes, they found him for me. It took ages to locate him, during which time I was imagining all sorts of horrors – you can imagine after what happened to Malcom. For a bit, it looked as though I’d lost him for good, because the girls were heading south to try and join up with the Bloods. But being ladies of business, they’d paused to make a few bucks at an FNA camp for a while, and our fellas caught up with them there.

  When Rowan came back, I was afraid he wouldn’t recognise me after what had been done to me. And he was scared at first. He came up to me very slowly as I lay on the bed. Step by step...

  I said, ‘Rowan,’ a few times – I didn’t have my old voice, but I’d been practising. He came to stand by the bed and looked at me, just stood there, looking. I let him. He looked me all over – at my face, at my hands and feet, at my legs. He came close. He stroked my face. Then he climbed on top of me and lay there saying, ‘Marti, Marti, Marti,’ while I nodded and hugged him back hard.

  So that was us together again. Brother and sister.

  And there you are. And was I happy. The changed Marti? Changed by my torturer, changed by Maude, changed by losing everyone except little Rowan?

  We all have our demons, don’t we? Don’t imagine that mine got smaller because I loved Rowan, they didn’t, they didn’t at all. I was still the same old selfish, greedy, self-serving Marti Okoro that I ever was, still prepared to sell my grandmother for a stale crust – and your grandmother, and you, whoever you are. But Maude had somehow clawed my heart open and a little boy called Rowan crept in. That’s all. Perhaps it’s a big difference, perhaps it’s only a small one, I don’t know. All I can say is that the stale crusts I sold your grandmother for are shared between me and him these days.

  That’s it. I wonder sometimes if Rowan would be better off without me, and if I’ve done him any favours at all by us sticking together. But here we are. What’s done is done, and that’s one thing that all the hot knives, the boots and clubs in the world, or all the drugs or the boys or the girls, or wads of cash or jewels (not that I’ve ever seen any of them!) can’t ever undo.

  27

  We carried on, me and Rowan, one bullet between us, which, please the Lord, I hoped I’d never have to use, heading north-east for Hull and the ferry out of hell.

  The Bloods advance had stalled – they’d even had to retreat a bit, but maybe not for long. This was our best chance to make our escape from jolly old England. Trouble was, it was everyone else’s chance as well. The roads were fuller than ever. People were trying to get home, or find a new home or escape or whatever. Some were trying to get to Scotland – a lot of Pakistanis, for some reason. Others were trying to go west, to Liverpool and on to Ireland and beyond, to the Caribbean, perhaps. No one wanted to go to America any more, of course. An awful lot of them, same as us, were headed for Hull. If you wanted to get to Europe and on to Pakistan or anywhere in Asia, or south to Africa, Hull was where you started out. We were just two out of hundreds of thousands. And where was our place in that queue?

  But Amsterdam was still calling! Somehow I was going to get there, and I truly felt that after all I’d been through, nothing could stop me now. I’d been dreaming about it for so long that I’d started to think of it as home. Maude was dead, Mum was dead. My dad – maybe, maybe not. But for now, Rowan was all I had in the world – and we were going home.

  We stuck to the big roads – I’d had enough of criss-crossing the fields and climbing gates. It was different anyway, with no Maude to help me. The boys at the camp had found us a pushchair – not for Rowan though. It carried food, tent, clothes, all our stuff. I needed the smooth roads to push it along. Sometimes Rowan rode on top of the stuff, but mostly he had to walk – there was no way I could carry him, those whores had spoiled the little swine, he was an absolute piglet. I thought he’d slow us down, but while he’d been stuffing his face, I’d been getting my kidneys liquidised with a big stick, and it was me who had to call a halt first. My feet! They hurt so much. I did toughen up a bit and by the time we got to Hull I was up to seven or eight miles a day, but even then, I was wiped out the day after.

  Not much happened apart from walking. The war had stalled behind us. The charities and NGOs were free to come in and help us, businesses were still functioning. The shops were open – some, anyway. I bought Rowan a second-hand console so he could play games. Got myself a new phone, downloaded my numbers and my tunes. Had some chats with Sebastian and some of the folk from the NEA – I’d made some friends there. Chatted to a few mates. Tried to call my dad and my brothers; no reply.

  And we walked and we walked and we walked. And in the end, we made it – yeah! Several months late, but when was I ever on time? Hull! Ferries! Escape! Amsterdam! Sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll.

  Er, excuse me? Did I say sex? Forget it. Look at the state of me. Did I say rock ’n’ roll? We had no money, I’d spent the lot. Did I say Amsterdam and escape? We joined a long, long queue of refugees waiting for some charity or other to get us out of there – hundreds of thousands of us living in shanty towns, squatting on the beaches, sleeping in the parks. Most of us were in these enormous camps that had been set up in industrial lots and old warehouses outside town. Park and Stay. No charge.

  No one likes a refugee. Getting a ticket for the ferry was hard, and that wasn’t the end of it. You needed a passport, a job waiting for you over there, a visa, papers for this, papers for that. All those things cost money. A better bet was to get yourself smuggled across the sea in a small boat – a fishing boat if you were lucky, an inflatable dinghy if you weren’t. None of them were all that cheap either.

  We spent a few weeks living in one of the camps on the edge of town. My money was at an end and it wasn’t long before things started to look a bit desperate. There was some cash around, grants and loans and stuff, mainly from the EU. You could get money to start a business if you had some skills. But what skills did I have? None. Accidentally shooting dicks off racists wasn’t on the approved list. The charities were there, thank God. They’d all been preparing to pack up and leave when they thought the Bloods were on their way, but that hadn’t happened, so here they still were, for now, anyway.

  No one knew for sure what was going on further south. There were all sorts of rumours going round about how well the rebels were doing, how much funding they had, how many arms, what kinds of arms. China was supporting them!... Er, no, hang on, no, not China, it was the EU sending in the warplanes and gunships. Or the Saudis...? Plenty of people were happy to think that the tide had turned, that the Bloods were on the run. As far as I was concerned, things could change at any time. The charities would up sticks and make a run for it, and then what? I’d just had a taste of the Bloods, or something like them. I didn’t fancy getting a second dose of that, thanks a lot.

  One thing I knew and one thing only – there was plenty of shit about and there were plenty of fans about; pretty soon, one was going to hit the other.
We needed to get out. But how? If Maude had been alive, she’d’ve kept all three of us going by teaching, or... who knows what? I never got to the end of her skills, never found the beginning of mine, either.

  Like everyone else, I kept going into Hull from the camp to try and find work in the city, but what could I do? I can’t walk properly, I can’t even talk properly any more. I have no skills. I’m as ugly as a handful of rubble. I did my best to keep a happy-looking face on the front of my head for Rowan’s sake, but I can tell you, if it hadn’t been for him, I would have ended it all. What did I have to live for? All my dreams had been taken from me. I had literally nothing going for me.

  And then came the most unlikely piece of luck I ever had in my life. It came in the form of a great, big, dirty-arsed sailor, who’d fought his way across from Liverpool to try and get a boat from Hull, and failed. He was sitting on his hairy backside outside a minging little bar on Oxbow Street.

  ‘Ten,’ he slurred as I walked past.

  ‘Ten what?’ I said.

  ‘Ten pouns,’ he said.

  I was looking round, wondering what he was on about and if he was talking to me.

  ‘What for?’

  ‘A shag. Or a blow job,’ he told me, and he gave me a lopsided grin.

  I was deeply offended – not because he was offering to pay me for sex, but because it was obviously a joke. Who was going to pay to sleep with me? Look at me! Hairy, broken and ugly. I was always pretty ugly to start with, but now I was the Queen of Ugly. My nose was broken, my jaw twisted sideways, I had feet like crabs. I’d lost half my teeth, my face was smashed. I hadn’t seen a med for months. I’d grown scrawny boy muscles in odd places, all twisted by my limp. My tits had grown sideways and floppy. The only identity I had left was my blue dress and my make-up, and even though it was dangerous walking around dressed like that, it was all I had so I did it anyway.

  I ignored him and walked on, shaking my head.

  ‘OK, fifteen,’ he said. ‘It’s all I have. Honest.’

  I turned back to look. He actually sounded serious. Could it really be...?

  ‘Twenty,’ I told him. And he grumbled and said he could have got a proper woman for that – which really was offensive! – but this was business. So I did it. He had a little shanty tucked away, more of a dog kennel, really. I had to wipe him down from head to foot with a wet rag before we got down to it, and he lay on his bed, grinning up at me because I was going to be the first sex he’d had for a month. Twenty pounds! I mean, it’s nothing, but I went home feeling rich, and Rowan and I ate proper food that night. A few days later I went back to see him – John his name was – to see if he wanted a repeat performance. He did, but he had no money left – just a fiver, enough for a meal and not much else.

  ‘Food before sex,’ he said, regretfully. But he did offer to put me in touch with some friends. So we shared that five-pound meal and I stayed the night in the kennel, and he was as good as his word. He was a nice guy, John, just such an alky.

  People look down on sex workers. It’s a job, same as other jobs. And you know what? It seemed like a natural progression. The final item on the list of undesirable things that was Marti Okoro. What a transformation, eh? All the way from iron virgin to hooker in the space of a few months.

  I was the cheapest girl on the street, but it paid the bills. I wore the boots, found myself a new dress, wore my hair long, smeared on some lippy across my gob, and finished it off with too much blusher. I’d been doing my best to find meds at every stop along the way but there was nothing. Maybe it was too late for that anyhow. Regardless, I made a living for me and for Rowan.

  I nearly got into trouble for it. After I started hanging around the dank streets in the poor quarters, a couple of working women came along.

  ‘You’re working our patch,’ one of them said – very aggressive.

  Which was true. But when they saw how I was close up, they decided I was catering for a very particular clientele and let me alone. And Lo! It came to pass that Marti Okoro found herself work, which is no shame on anyone. I got beat up from time to time, but then that was always something I had to put up with. We ate... we kept warm... we wore clothes... and I even managed to put a little bit away every day.

  And finally the day came when the Lord smiled down on poor Marti and all the many sins she had committed for to keep her little brother Rowan innocent, in the form of a big fat old white man with a taste for the unusual...

  He gave me a hard time, that guy – wanted a lot for his twenty pounds. I got punched, I got choked, I got kicked. I was on my knees on the hard floor for ages, but when we’d done, he fell asleep in a drunken stupor on the bed and started snoring like a pig with a bad cold. Which gave me the chance to riffle through his pockets for his wallet. And I found his wallet. And Lo! It was fat, fat, fat.

  I sat there a while, wondering what to do. Was I tempted? What do you think? Was I scared? You bet. There were a lot of people milling around Hull at that time, but even so, if anyone put out the word that they wanted to find the hairy trans hooker with a broken face, broken teeth and crooked feet, they weren’t going to have to look hard. I admit it, right here, that this wasn’t the first punter whose pockets I’d been through. Nice guys as well as nasty, there’s no honour among thieves, you must know that by now. But so far I hadn’t taken one single penny – not out of the strictness of my moral code, in case you’ve managed to read this far without learning a thing about me. No. It was the fear of retribution and ruining my business model.

  There was only one theft I could ever make, and that was the big one. The fat one. The one that would give me and Rowan enough money to get on the boat and away, away, away to Amsterdam, city of sex, drugs, safety, food, housing and education.

  How much did I need for that? I needed a thousand pounds. Five hundred a head. More than I could earn in a month of Sundays. And how much did Mr Slapsie have in his wallet? Three hundred US dollars.

  There was a time when dollars were almost as cheap as toilet paper, but it’d been a long, long time since you could get a pound for under two of them. I wasn’t sure of the amount I had in my hands as I sat there on the edge of the bed, but I was fairly sure that I was still a good few pounds down on the price for two places in Simon the boatie’s dinghy, which was the cheapest way that I knew of to get across the water (if you were lucky).

  Simon’s prices were rock bottom because of the dinghy, but the fact was, he was still in business after ten trips, despite high seas and a small flotilla of EU cruisers attempting to intercept him getting across. So he had to be doing something right. But – he was rock solid on his price. Five hundred a head. That’s what you paid – in full, no bargaining, cash up front before you got on the boat.

  But this was dollars. People preferred dollars to pounds, because the pound was up and down like my mood swings, whereas the dollar was fast rising up the desirable currency lists once again. Maybe, just maybe, it would be possible to bargain with him with the dollars, plus the bit I had saved back in my tent, buried two feet down under my bedding in the wet Hull clay.

  Tricky call. So what did I do? Hey – you must know me by now. Take a guess.

  So here we are. Here we are, on the water’s edge, in a big fat inflatable on a sea that is as still and as smooth as I’ve ever seen. The big round old moon spilling silver all around us. What could possibly go wrong? Simon the boatie is as sober as I can remember seeing him. We all know that his wife ran off with their child a few months ago and that he’s well known for his frequent drunken claims in the dockside bars that he has nothing left to live for. He has been known to put to sea in a storm, more or less.

  Yes, the gods of weather and chance are smiling on us tonight. True, the dinghy is a little overcrowded, but what do you expect? This is business.

  ‘You said there’d only be twelve people onboard,’ complains a young man, who ought to know better. Next to him, the love of his life hugs her baby and l
ooks anxiously at Simon the boatie.

  ‘You pays your money, you takes your chance,’ Simon says. ‘Anyone want out, get out now, while we’re still on the beach. No refunds.’

  The faces of the young couple look so, so white in the pale moonlight. The man looks anxiously at big John, who accompanies Simon on these trips. John extends a generous hand to the beach.

  Pause. The young couple look at each other and shake their heads. They’re staying. Who can blame them? Setting off from an uncertain land on an uncertain sea towards an uncertain welcome. But one thing when you’re a refugee: you get used to being on the move.

  John gets out, pushes the dinghy off the pebbles and... we’re off! We’re away. Off to Amsterdam, land of... well. You must know by now.

  Do you want to know a secret? One of the dark and nasty things I’ve done that has been glossed over in this record, if not baldly lied about? I expect you do, but whether you do or not, I’m going to give it to you anyway, just to show you that whatever else, I’m still the old Marti, here in my heart. Just because my heart now beats for Rowan as well as myself, doesn’t make me any nicer or more likeable.

  You know that nasty piece of work whose dollars had paid for our passage on the dinghy? The fat old white man, who was even now wandering the streets of Hull without a penny to his name, wondering where that ugly but obliging hooker disappeared with all his money? Yeah, well, he wasn’t nasty at all. He was actually a rather nice old gentleman. All he wanted was for me to lie down with him and stroke his face and murmur sweet nothings in his ear before we had perfectly ordinary sex. But I stole his money anyway, because that’s the kind of girl I am – the kind of girl who will do anything, anything at all, no matter how scummy or nasty, to look after me and mine. I’m just the same as I always was. It’s just, like I say, that my heart now beats for two, not one.

  Why am I telling you this? Maybe because it’s the last thing I’m going to tell you, ever, and although I don’t want you to know everything about me, or even a lot about me, at the same time I don’t want you to leave with any illusions.