by Ray Banks
A glance behind me: the police move now, forming a corridor, funnelling the march straight down the middle of the street. One of the uniforms at the end of the line is gesturing towards something out of sight. There’s an engine sound forming a throbbing bassline to the chants, so I guess it’s one of the police vans I saw earlier.
I can’t walk now. Have to pick up the pace. Sprinting towards the Beetle.
If I can get in that car, fucking break into it, maybe get it off this road, somewhere safe, I can go through it. If not, I’ve got to grab whatever the fuck I can and get out of there. Something to prove the students were behind this. The Zippo, the leaflet, something else. I already told Beeston about the car. If he’s got any sense, he’ll call the police.
But then a lack of police really isn’t the problem right now.
There’s got to be a way of saving this. And that hope is enough to keep me moving.
A stone skitters off the tarmac next to me. I react to it, swerve but keep running. My lungs already tight against the inside of my chest, I have to stop, duck behind a Volvo.
Another stone, bigger, bounces off the bonnet of the car. Whoever it is, they’re fucking aiming at me. I hazard a glance at the stone’s origin — see that the gang of Asian lads at the end of the street have started a march of their own. Moving towards me, looking to meet the ENS head on.
And me in the middle.
I hunker down, skip to the pavement side of the Volvo and duck-walk my way to the Beetle. Hoping that the mob of National Socialists will keep the gang busy.
Another object thrown, this time a brick.
Nowhere near me now, this time connecting with one of the riot shields.
The chants from the ENS grow louder. I can’t make out the words anymore, only the attitude. They’ve seen the Asian lads, the locals, and they’re spoiling for it. Like Russ and Eddie said, beered-up and looking for a little blood in their mouths. So they might as well be chanting that there ain’t no black in the Union Jack, the kind of front they’re putting on, as well as the kind of reaction they get.
Shouts from the Asian lads, running feet.
Something slams against the road. There’s a shout from the protestors. I can hear the clatter of riot shields now. Turning around, the police are trying to divert the march. It’s not happening.
These guys didn’t come here to protest anything; they came here to do some fucking damage. And these fucking busies are compounding the issue they came to shout about. So the marchers push against the police cordon. I look around and see the cop line stretch almost to breaking point. One of the coppers turns, and signals to the alley.
The roar of an engine, and one of the vans lurches out into Wilmslow Road.
I keep my head down, crouching by a car. The Beetle’s within arm’s reach, but I can’t get there without giving away my position. And as much as I’d be fine with those Asian lads in any other situation, right now I get the feeling that they’ll stomp the first white face they see.
Something’s thrown at the police line.
That something multiplies quickly.
There’s a tremendous groan from the police line. At least it sounds like that. Then a couple of the riot cops flip onto their backs. I turn to catch three coppers on the ground, trying to scrabble as the marchers stampede over their bodies. The other coppers stand as fast as they can, loose and warped links trying to bind back into a chain.
Enough is enough. This march is over. One of the brass has decided that the protest ends here. There’s the sound of a loudhailer squelching, blaring, someone with stripes on his uniform telling the English National Socialists and the Asian lads to disperse. That they should head home.
This is a disturbance of the peace.
Any further disturbance with be met with—
Too late. The floodgates are already wide open.
A fizz of a fuse, then the machine gun staccato burst of explosions. Bangers, fireworks, something like that. The rest of the police line back off, a flurry of red, white and blue sparking in a sea of busies. The assault’s come from the ENS side, the police not expecting the white lads to kick off this early.
Another fizz. More fireworks. One of the marchers, a white guy wearing a hoodie, backs off, jumps and throws them at the Asian lads. The bangers hit the deck in front of the bandana gang, explode just as they retaliate with a volley of stones, bricks, whatever they can lay their hands on.
The protestors push halfway down the road. On either side, I can see the police ready their batons, clicked and swinging.
I switch, keep low, head to the Beetle and search the ground for one of the thrown bricks. Can’t hang around here. If it’s not fucking nasty already, it’ll get here soon.
A cry from the crowd. One of the Asian lads with two coppers on him. One with the lad’s right arm, the other taking his baton to the back of the lad’s knees. Trying to buckle him, force him down.
The ENS have fragmented now, taking on the police line as well as the approaching Asian lads. I see the hoodie hit the ground under a dozen police-issue boots. One of the coppers kicks him face-up, the hoodie curling and screaming at the same time.
I grab a half-brick, pitch it through the Beetle’s side window. Glass rains down onto the passenger seat and the alarm goes off. The noise bores right through my skull, jars the pain into agony. I hold onto the side of the car, the crunch of pebbled glass under my hand, try to focus, stop my knees from giving out.
Can’t do it. The ground whips away from me in an instant, but I hang on, wait for it to whip back.
I need to get this car started. It’s the only way. Drive the fucking thing out of this riot. Have a go at hotwiring it. It’s about the only thing I can do now. Because if I don’t have a vehicle soon, I’m going to get stomped to death out here.
If this headache doesn’t kill me first.
I pull up, look through the smashed window. I can’t see the Zippo anywhere. Last time I saw it, the lighter was sitting on the dash. No reason to think it’ll have moved since then, not unless Ben’s been back. But then how did he get into the car?
Focus.
A brick stots off the back of the Beetle. I turn at the noise, see the Asian lads fall back as the police push forward. I see the Met have regrouped a solid line, some of the marchers running in the opposite direction, some of them caught on the wrong side of the line. I see a couple of bandana-wearing lads putting the boot into a skinny lad. For a second his pained features flash into Eddie’s.
“Go on, you take that fuckin’ kicking, you cunt!”
Shouting cripples me. I scrabble at my suit pocket, my back hitting the Beetle as a gang of marchers barrel past me. I fumble out some more codeine, the world grown fucking small as soon as I see those pills.
Another brick bounces by my feet, hits me in the leg.
I twist, see the pills falling before I get a chance to react, my heart stopping for a split-second as they slip out of my hand.
I drop to the pavement. See a white guy in a Lonsdale shirt running towards me. Can’t see his face, my vision’s that wet.
I blink, and he’s suddenly right in my face.
“The fuck, man?” he says.
I push him back. Hard. Watch him grab onto me as he goes. Kick him once in the kneecap and see him hit the bonnet of the Beetle at an angle. He creases his face.
“The fuck?” he’s saying.
I turn, grab as many pills from the ground as I can and shove them into my mouth. They taste like talcum powder and grit. I swallow them with a parched throat, see the white guy dig into his pocket.
Thinking, fuck.
It’s going to be a gun.
This is it. Happening again.
And this time, the guy isn’t going to miss.
He’s out of range for any Asian lads to come at him. I feel my bladder go. Just a little.
The guy brings a string of fireworks from his jeans pocket. A lighter in the other hand.
“The fuck, man?”
he says. “What you on?”
“I don’t—”
He cranks the wheel on his lighter. And the fucking world’s gone so slow, I can see the shower of sparks he makes as the flint catches. Then the flame, rising up to the fuse on the fireworks.
The fizz. Again so slow, the pitch rising as I realise where he’s going to throw them.
He chucks the bangers into the car.
I see him break away from the Beetle, hurtle into the crowd, can’t place the fizz of the fuse for a second before the bangers go off.
Then I pick up my feet and run. Back to the here and now, some more of the ENS have broken through to the Asians, who seem to be mostly wounded and back-pedalling.
But not beaten. Not yet.
A smash of glass and the sound of catching flames comes from behind me. I follow the noise to the Asians — they have their own fireworks, homemade, milk bottles filled with petrol. Fending off the ENS with everything they have. If their community’s going to burn tonight, the Asian lads want to be the ones to do it.
One of the bottles smashes against the Beetle. The flames spread across the paintwork. I can already see the glow inside the car.
I’m slowing, pain in my chest. Pain in my head. Can’t keep running, but I need to. I slam into one of the Asian lads, his face covered. He twists out of the way, reaching into his pocket. I see the flash of a blade and hold up my hands. All ready to fucking cry myself to safety if need be.
It’s a sharp blade, but short. A fishing knife. But this guy’s not going to use it. Too much water in his eyes — he’s scared out of his mind. He pulls the bandana from his face. I can’t see through the gloom, my head raging, my vision shifting in and out of focus.
I catch a crystal clear image for a moment.
Tariq.
“What the fuck did I tell you, man? I told you to stay at home.”
That’s what I’m trying to say. Doesn’t come out like that. I’m slurring, my speech lost, probably about the same time I lost the rest of my bladder.
“The fuck you doing here?” he says.
This headache, the pressure’s fucking immense, feels like my skull’s about to explode.
The car.
I remember the car.
I push him out of the way, start running again. My right leg buckles out from under me. I drop to the pavement, hit my right knee hard but I don’t feel it. I fall further, try to break my fall, but my right arm refuses to take the weight. Hit the concrete with my shoulder and one of my front teeth. My vision blanks to a grey fuzz again, like I’ve had a gallon of vodka put straight behind the eyes.
Need to get out of the way.
My mouth filling up with blood.
My skull. It’s going to crack wide open.
Can’t hear much now. Can hear Tariq. He’s shouting.
He needs to move. I need to fucking move. Try to get up.
Can’t.
Try to twist onto my other side.
Can’t.
Try to shout at Tariq, cry out for help.
Comes out spluttered, the right side of my face slack and numb.
And then the Beetle explodes. A flash of orange light tearing into the sky, it almost looks beautiful. I manage to roll onto my back, see the flames cut through the night. My vision flickers into clarity for a moment and I can see all the stars.
Tariq blocks them out, looks down at me.
“I can’t move,” I say. I see the blood and spit spraying out of my mouth, but I can’t feel it land. Just as I can barely hear myself speak. “I can’t—”
“Jesus,” mouths Tariq.
And, just before I die, I remember thinking that that’s a weird thing for a Muslim to say.
42
Dead for thirteen seconds. Unlucky for some.
Unconscious for a lot longer than that. Difficult to say how long, really. Once you throw in the trauma of resurrection, the whole shebang feels like a fucking decade. And when you finally crawl out of the darkness, when all your senses work to a degree, when you know where you are, what you’re greeted with are the sterile walls of the local hospital and mask over your face.
Makes you wonder why you bothered breathing again. Especially with that toxic smell of rubber in your nostrils and a raw throat.
Let the eyes focus in their own time: the coughers, bleeders, sniffers and moaners are everywhere. Might not be the same people, but they’re familiar enough.
Surrounded by the dead and the dying, or at least playing the part with conviction. What’s worse: I fit right in. I swallow painfully.
So what did me in?
It’s not long before a doctor comes round to tell me in great bloody detail. I don’t catch his surname, but he seems well versed in my medical history, so I leave it. And the answer to the question is, take your fucking pick.
Normally, the doctor tells me, it’s easy enough to spot what actually kills a man. You can spot a knife wound, a bullet in the head (or what’s left of it), the rictus of a massive coronary. It’s also relatively easy to determine whether the dead man stays dead.
Hell, most of them do.
But my problem was my “pluralistic’ injuries.
He reels it off with me, a sad old song growing lyrics every day, it seems. My bad back, that was a given. Jarring of the spine caused by a collision with a budget car. The ear — as well as the partial deafness caused by the close proximity of a gunshot — had the lobe blown off in a Californian desert. As the doctor points out, the ear looks worse than it is, but add it to my current complaints and I’m definitely out of the running to becoming Britain’s Next Top Model.
Then there are the drugs. What the doctor calls my “increasingly damaging attachment to Class B narcotics”. In my case, codeine and its derivatives.
According to the white coat, here’s where I start being interesting.
Codeine in the bloodstream.
Doctor says that like I’m supposed to start blushing or something. Like I wasn’t supposed to be taking it. If it’s bad, I put it down to a dodgy batch from Greg. Otherwise, I don’t see the problem.
Concussion. That’s the next big word the doctor chucks at me. But I know what that one means. That’s a serious problem, and the way the doctor tells it, I’ve had not one, but many potentially concussive blows to the skull.
Lucky me.
“Sounds … painful,” I say.
“It would be. Very painful. Which brings us back to the codeine.”
Right. Always back to that.
I get a lot of pain, I up my dosage. I up my dosage, I end up taking too many. An overdose, if you will.
Fine. I can handle that.
Except I can’t. Obviously.
I try to ask him about the fucking stroke, but my sentences struggle out. Halfway through a word, I’ll forget the sound, the meaning. Not all the time, but enough that I’m pissed off and scared in equal measure.
He sees it. Tells me it’s dysphasia. Then waves his hand at me, tells me a little speech therapy’ll do me the world of good. That all I need to do right now is think hard about what I’m going to say before I say it.
“What about …?” I struggle.
What about me dying?
I draw a thumb across my throat, make a wet sound.
“Well,” says the doctor, smiling, “that was an extreme reaction.”
I frown with both sides of my face. Only half of the frown is voluntary.
You ask me, he doesn’t know why I died. Plus, he doesn’t know how I managed to claw myself back into the land of the living.
The doctor leaves. I watch him go.
In the meantime, I have more pills. They keep me from moving, but smother that sensitivity to light and sound that he said was a direct hangover from the stroke.
Or the concussion. I lost track of what he was saying.
But I’m better. I feel better. Probably the new pills.
Plus the knowledge that I’d end up in hospital on a long-term pass at some point. Could
have been physical or mental, but either way it was inevitable. I mean, I can’t say I’m uncomfortable. I can’t feel much of anything save the odd dizzy spell, a touch of creeping cold nausea and a flash-bomb migraine every other day. Otherwise, this ward’s acted as a sedative.
It’s just that realization, I suppose — that we all end up fucked, one way or the other.
“Callum,” says Frank.
Still that problem with my attention span. I keep finding too many things that demand to be stared at.
Turn my head to see Frank shoving green grapes into his mouth. He’s already got a bunch in there, makes him look like the fucking Godfather. I don’t remember him coming in, but he’s sitting right by my bed, so I must’ve given him permission.
I nod at him. “Y’alright?”
“I asked you a question,” he says.
“Uh-huh.” I look at the bottle of Lucozade on the bedside table and wonder where it came from. Then I get to thinking about how Lucozade bottles used to come with that yellow-orange plastic on them and how you don’t see packaging like that anymore, like the little cardboard trays you used to get in Bountys.
“Callum.”
There’s a newspaper sitting next to the pop. It looks unread.
I move my chin, like: What’d you say again?
“I asked you, did you see anything when you died?”
Right. Now I remember. Because Frank’s impressed. He’s never known anyone who died before. No one who made it back, anyway. Like that crazy old guy that bugged me for the first couple of days after I woke up, Frank’s been wanting to know what it’s like on The Other Side.
“Yeah.” I shake my head. “Long tunnel. Floating. Violins. A choir.”
Look at Frank. He’s rapt. Nodding.
“Bright light … at the end.” I point at myself, then pull a Superman pose. “Floating towards it. And then … I saw my dad. All dressed … in gold. Like Liberace.”
“Cal, your dad’s not dead.”
“My granddad, then.”
Frank pauses, a grape halfway to his open mouth, and his eyes narrow. “You’re feeling better, aren’t you?”
“Makes you say that?”
