The Power

by Naomi Alderman

  ‘You keep yourself safe,’ she says.

  ‘Yeah,’ he goes. ‘I’ll stick behind you.’

  He’s younger than her. Only by a few months. That’s one of the things that’s always been so hard: Bernie knocking up both their mums at the same time.

  She grabs his shoulder and squeezes it. She calls another couple of lasses to come, too. Vivika, with one of those long, pronged conductive batons, and Danni with a mesh of metal net that she likes. They all take a little bit before they head out the door, and there’s music playing in Roxy’s head. Sometimes it’s good to go to war, just to know you can.

  They follow that little knot of girls from the pub at a bit of a distance till they walk through the park, shouting and drinking. It’s past 1 a.m. It’s a hot night; the air feels damp, like there’s a storm brewing. Roxy and her gang are dressed dark; they’re moving smoothly. The girls run towards the merry-go-round in the kids’ playground. They lie back on it, staring at the stars, passing the vodka between them.

  Roxy says, ‘Now.’

  Merry-go-round’s made of steel. They light the thing up, and one of the girls falls off, frothing and twitching. So now they’re two on four. Easy.

  ‘What’s this?’ says a girl in a dark blue bomber jacket. Ricky had pointed her photo out as the leader. ‘What the fuck is this? I don’t even know you.’ She makes a bright warning arc between her palms.

  ‘Yeah?’ says Roxy. ‘You bloody knew my brother, though. Ricky? Picked him up in a club last night? Ricky Monke?’

  ‘Oh fuck,’ says the other girl, the one wearing leathers.

  ‘Shut up,’ says the first girl. ‘We don’t know your fucking brother, all right?’

  ‘Sam,’ says the girl in leathers. ‘Fuck’s sake.’ She turns to Roxy, pleading. ‘We didn’t know he was your brother. He never said nothing.’

  Sam mutters something that sounds like ‘he bloody loved it’.

  The girl in leathers puts her hands up and takes a pace backwards. Darrell gets her square in the back of the head with the butt of the shotgun. She falls forward, teeth into the soil and scrub.

  So now they’re four against one. Closing in. Danni sifts her little mesh net in her left hand.

  Sam says, ‘He was asking for it. He begged us for it. Fucking begged us, followed us, told us what he wanted done to him. Filthy little scrote, knew just what he was looking for, couldn’t get enough of it, wanted us to hurt him, would have licked up my piss if I’d asked him, that’s your fucking brother. Looks like butter wouldn’t melt, but he’s a dirty little boy.’

  Yeah, well. Might be true, might not. Roxy’s seen some things. She still shouldn’t have touched a Monke, should she? She’ll ask Ricky’s mates about it quietly when all this is over and maybe she’ll have to tell him not to be a stupid boy; if he wants that kind of thing she can find someone safe to oblige.

  ‘Don’t you talk about my fucking brother like that!’ Darrell yells suddenly, and he’s aiming the shotgun butt for her face, but she’s too quick for him, and it’s metal that shotgun, so when she grabs it he gasps and his knees buckle.

  Sam gets one arm around Darrell. His whole body’s shuddering – it was a big jolt she gave him. His eyes are rolling back in his head. Fuck. If they hit her, they hit him.

  Fuck.

  Sam starts to back away. ‘Don’t you bloody follow me,’ she says. ‘Don’t you bloody come near me, or I’ll finish him, like I did your Ricky. I can do worse than that.’

  Darrell’s close to tears now. Roxy can tell what she’s doing to him: a constant pulse of shocks into the neck, the throat, the temples. It’s most painful at the temples.

  ‘This isn’t over,’ Roxy says quietly. ‘You can get away now, but we’ll come back for you until it’s done.’

  Sam smiles, all white teeth and blood. ‘Maybe I’ll do him now then, for fun.’

  ‘That’s not clever,’ says Roxy, ‘cos then we really would have to kill you.’

  She gives the nod to Viv, who’s circled back round during the commotion. Viv swings her baton. She gives a whack to the back of Sam’s head like a sledgehammer taking out drywall.

  Sam turns slightly, sees it coming, but she can’t put Darrell down in time to duck. The baton catches the side of her eye and there’s a burst of blood. She screams out once and falls to the floor.

  ‘Fuck,’ says Darrell. He’s crying and shaking; there’s not much they can do about that. ‘If she’d seen what you were doing, she’d’ve killed me.’

  ‘You’re alive, aren’t you?’ says Roxy. She doesn’t say anything about how he shouldn’t have gone for Sam with the shotgun, and she thinks that’s fair enough.

  Roxy takes her time in marking them. Don’t want them to forget it, not ever. Ricky won’t be able to forget it. She leaves them with a spider-web of red, unfolding scars over their cheeks and mouth and nose. She takes a photo with her phone, so Ricky can see what she’s done. The scars, and the blind eye.

  Only Barbara’s awake when they get in. Darrell goes to bed, but Roxy sits at the little table in the back kitchen and Barbara flicks through the photos on the phone, nodding with a mouth like a stone.

  ‘All still alive?’ she says.

  ‘Even called 999 for them.’

  Barbara says, ‘Thank you, Roxanne. I’m grateful. You’ve done a good thing here.’

  Roxy says, ‘Yup.’

  The clock ticks.

  Barbara says, ‘I’m sorry we were unkind to you.’

  Roxy raises an eyebrow. ‘I wouldn’t say the word for it was “unkind”, Barbara.’

  Which is harsher than she meant, but there’s a lot happened when she was a kid. Those parties she couldn’t come to, and the presents she never got, and the family dinners she was never invited to, and that time that Barbara came round to the house and threw paint at the windows.

  ‘You didn’t need to do this tonight, for Ricky. I didn’t think you would.’

  ‘Some of us don’t hold grudges, all right?’

  Barbara looks like she’d slapped her in the face.

  ‘It’s all right,’ says Roxy, cos it is now, it’s been all right maybe since Terry died. She chews her lip a bit. ‘You never liked me cos of whose daughter I was. I never expected you would like me. S’all right. We stay out of each other’s way, don’t we? It’s just business.’ She stretches, her skein tautening across her chest, her muscles suddenly heavy and tired.

  Barbara looks at her, eyes slightly narrowed. ‘There’s stuff my Bern still hasn’t told you, you know. About how the business runs. Dunno why.’

  ‘He was saving it for Ricky,’ says Roxy.

  ‘Yeah,’ says Barbara, ‘I think he was. But Ricky’s not going to take it now.’

  She stands up, goes over to the kitchen cupboard. From the third shelf, she takes out the bags of flour and the boxes of biscuits and there, right at the back, she sticks her nail into an almost invisible crack and opens up a hidden cubby-hole, not wider than your hand. She pulls out three small black notebooks held together by an elastic band.

  ‘Contacts,’ she says. ‘Narcs. Bent coppers. Rotten doctors. I’ve been saying for months Bern should just give this all to you. So you could work out how to sell the Glitter yourself.’

  Roxy holds out her hand, takes the books. Feels the weight and solidity of them in her palm. All the knowledge of how the business is run in a compact block, a brick of information.

  ‘Because of what you did today,’ says Barbara, ‘for Ricky. I’ll square it with Bernie.’ And she takes her mug of tea and goes to bed.

  Roxy stays up the rest of that night back at her own place, going through the books, making notes and plans. There are contacts here go back years, connections her dad’s been developing, people he’s been blackmailing or bribing – and the latter usually leads to the former eventually. Barbara doesn’t know what she’s given her here – with the stuff in these books, she can take the Glitter across Europe, no bother. The Monkes can make more money than anyo
ne’s made since Prohibition.

  She’s smiling, and her one knee’s joggling up and down when she runs her eye along a row of names and sees something important.

  It takes her a bit to work out what it is she’s seen. Some bit of her brain got there ahead of all the rest, told her to read and re-read the list till it jumped out at her. There. A name. A bent copper, Detective Newland. Newland.

  Cos she’ll never forget that thing Primrose said when he died, will she? She’ll never forget any of what happened that day her whole life long.

  ‘Newland said you weren’t going to be home,’ Primrose had said.

  This copper, this Newland. He was part of the plan to kill her mum, and she’s never known who he was, not till now. She thought it was done a long time since, but when she sees the name and she remembers, she thinks, Fuck. Some dodgy copper selling stuff to my dad, selling stuff to Primrose. Fuck, she thinks. Some dodgy copper watching our house and saying when I wouldn’t be home.

  A quick search on the internet is all it takes. Detective Newland lives in Spain now. Retired policeman. Little town. Doesn’t think anyone’s going to come looking for him, obviously.

  She never meant to tell Darrell about it. It was only that he came himself to thank her for what she’d done for Ricky, and for saving his own life.

  He said, ‘We know which way this is going. Ricky’s out of the picture now. If there’s anything I can do to help you, Rox. Just tell me what I can do.’

  Maybe he’s started to have the same thoughts she has, about how you just have to accept this change that’s struck us all, roll with it, find your place in it.

  So she told Darrell what she was going to Spain for. He said, ‘I’m coming, too.’

  She sees what he’s asking her for. Ricky’s not coming back to the life, not for years, maybe not ever, and not how he was. They’re running out of family. He wants to be family to her.

  The place isn’t difficult to find. GPS and a rental car, and they’re there in less than an hour from Seville airport. There’s no need to be clever about it. They watch through binoculars for a couple of days; long enough to know that he lives alone. They stay in a hotel nearby, but not too nearby. Thirty miles’ drive. You wouldn’t go looking there if you were local police, not if you were doing a routine just-in-case inquiry. He’s nice with it, Darrell. Businesslike, but funny. Lets her make the decisions, but he’s got a few good ideas of his own. She thinks, Yeah. If Ricky’s out of the game, yeah. This could work. She could take him to the factory next time she goes out.

  On the third day, in the pre-dawn light, they chuck a rope up one of the fence poles, climb over and wait in the bushes till he comes out. He’s in shorts and a ragged T-shirt. He’s got a sandwich – this time in the morning, a sausage sandwich – and he’s looking at his phone.

  She’d been expecting something, some kind of terror to strike her; she’d thought she might wee herself or have a rush of bloody rage or start crying. But when she looks into his face all she feels is interest. A completed circle: two bits of string tied together. The man who helped get her mum killed. The last little bit of stuff to mop up from the side of the plate.

  She steps out of the bushes in front of him. ‘Newland,’ she says. ‘Your name is Newland.’

  He looks at her, open-mouthed. He’s still holding his sausage sandwich. There’s a second before the fear kicks in, and in that second Darrell charges from the bushes, clonks him on the head and pushes him into the swimming pool.

  When he comes round, the sun is high in the sky, and he’s floating face up. He thrashes around, brings himself to standing in the middle of the pool, coughing and rubbing his eyes.

  Roxy’s sitting at the edge, fingers splashing. ‘Electricity travels a long way in water,’ she says. ‘It’s fast.’

  Newland stands stock still at that.

  She tips her head first to one side, then the other, stretching out the muscles. Her skein’s full.

  Newland starts to say something. Maybe it’s ‘I don’t …’ or ‘Who are …’, but she sends a little thrill through the water, enough to prickle him over his whole wet body.

  She says, ‘This is going to be boring if you start denying everything, Detective Newland.’

  ‘Fuck,’ he says. ‘I don’t even know who you are. If this is about Lisa, she got her fucking money, all right. She got it two years ago, every penny, and I’m out now.’

  Roxy sends another shock through the water. ‘Think again,’ she says. ‘Look at my face. Don’t I remind you of anyone? Aren’t I someone’s daughter?’

  He knows it then, all at once. She can see it in his face. ‘Fuck,’ he says, ‘this is about Christina.’

  ‘Yeah,’ she says.

  ‘Please,’ he says, and she sends him a hard jolt, so much that his teeth start chattering and his body goes rigid and he shits himself right into the water, a brown-yellow cloud of particles jetting out like it’s shot from a hose.

  ‘Rox,’ says Darrell softly. He’s sitting behind her, on one of the sun-loungers, his hand on the butt of the rifle.

  She stops it. Newland collapses, sobbing, into the water.

  ‘Don’t say “please”,’ she says. ‘That’s what my mum said.’

  He rubs his forearms, trying to get some life back into them.

  ‘There’s no way out of this for you, Newland. You told Primrose where to find my mum. You got her killed, and I’m going to kill you.’

  Newland tries to make a break for the edge of the pool. She shocks him again. His knees collapse under him and he falls forward, and then he’s just lying there, face down in the water.

  ‘Fuck’s sake,’ says Roxy.

  Darrell gets the hook and pulls him to the edge, and they haul him up.

  When Newland opens his eyes again, Roxy’s sitting on his chest.

  ‘You’re going to die here now, Newland,’ says Darrell, very calmly. ‘This is it, mate. This is all the life you got. This is your last day, and there’s nothing you can tell us that’ll make it different, all right? But if we make it look like an accident, your life insurance will still pay out. To your mum, yeah? And your brother? We can do that for you, make it look like an accident. Not a suicide. All right?’

  Newland coughs up a lungful of murky water.

  ‘You got my mum killed, Newland,’ says Roxy. ‘That’s strike one. And you’ve made me sit in your shitty water. That’s strike two. If we get to strike three, there will be pain you just can’t believe. I only want to know one thing from you.’

  He’s listening to her now.

  ‘What did Primrose give you, Newland, to tip him off about my mum? What would have made you bring the Monkes down on you? What seemed worth that to you, Newland?’

  He blinks at them, first at her, then at Darrell, like they’re having a laugh with him.

  She holds his face in her hand and sends a pickaxe of pain along the jaw.

  He screams.

  ‘Just tell me, Newland,’ she says.

  He’s panting. ‘You know, don’t you?’ he says. ‘You’re kidding me.’

  She brings her hand close to his face.

  ‘No!’ he says. ‘No! No, you know what happened, you fucking bitch, it was your dad. It was never Primrose who paid me, it was Bernie – Bernie Monke told me to do it. I only ever worked for Bernie, only ever did jobs for Bernie; it was Bernie who told me that I should pretend to sell Primrose information, tell him when to find your mum alone. You was never supposed to see it. Bernie wanted your mum dead and I don’t ask questions. I helped him out. It was fucking Bernie. Your dad. Bernie.’

  He keeps on muttering the name, like it’s the secret that will make her set him free.

  They don’t get much more from him. He knew Roxy’s mum was Bernie’s woman; yeah, of course he did. They told him that she’d cheated on Bernie, and that was enough to get her killed – well, it would be.

  When they’re finished, they tip him back in the pool, and she lights it up, just the once.
It’ll look like he had a heart attack, fell in, shat himself and drowned. So they kept their promise. They change their clothes and take the rental car back to the airport. They haven’t even left a hole in the fence.

  On the plane, Roxy says, ‘What now?’

  And Darrell says, ‘What do you want, Rox?’

  She sits there for a bit, feeling the power in her, crystalline and complete. It felt like something, killing Newland. To see him go rigid and then stop.

  She thinks about what Eve’s said to her, that she knew Roxy was coming. That she’s seen her destiny. That she’s the one who’s going to bring in the new world. That the power will be in her hands to change everything.

  She feels the power in her fingertips, as if she could punch a hole right through the world.

  ‘I want justice,’ she says. ‘And then I want everything. You wanna stand with me? Or you wanna stand against me?’

  Bernie’s in his office, looking through his books, when they get there. He looks old to her. He hasn’t shaved properly; there’s tufts sticking out of his neck and his chin. There’s a smell on him these days, too; smells like hard cheese. She never thought before that he’s old. They’re his youngest ones. Ricky’s thirty-five.

  He knew they were coming. Barbara must have told him she’d given Roxy the notebooks. He smiles when they walk in the door. Darrell’s behind her, holding a loaded gun.

  ‘You’ve got to understand, Rox,’ says Bernie. ‘I loved your mum. She never loved me – I don’t think so. She was just using me for what she could get.’

  ‘That why you killed her?’

  He inhales through his nose, like it surprises him to hear it, even so. ‘I’m not going to beg,’ he says. He’s looking at Roxy’s hands, at her fingers. ‘I know how this goes, and I’ll take it, but you’ve got to understand, it wasn’t personal, it was business.’

  ‘It was family, Dad,’ says Darrell, very softly. ‘Family’s always personal.’

  ‘That’s the truth,’ he says. ‘But she got Al and Big Mick caught,’ he says. ‘The Romanians paid her, and she told where they’d be. I cried when they told me it was her, love. I did. But I couldn’t let it stand, could I? There’s no one … you’ve got to understand, there’s no one I could have let do that to me.’