The Score

by HJ Golakai

  “I handed everything to them on a plate, my ideas, my creation, and they didn’t have the decency …” Gaba shook her head. “Arseholes played me for a fool. Right under my own nose, and I didn’t see it. Same as you. Had you –”

  “I don’t give a shit! I don’t! You’ve got a knife on a child!” Vee felt her vocal cords tear a little.

  “Am not a child,” Tristan sniffed from the ground.

  “You lost me and any chance you had the second you did this. I don’t want to hear some villain’s soliloquy, because you’ll get no sympathy from me. God. Tristan, come over here.” She lowered her voice to a growl. “Tristan. Behind me.”

  “No.” Gaba reached down and grabbed Tristan’s shirt again, the whites of her eyes pulsing mad with fire. She lowered the knife till it hovered inches from his neck.

  Vee took a few steps closer. “You won’t. You might be crazy, but you’re not that crazy.” She squinted at Tristan and issued a tiny nod. Xoli caught it and yanked him up, reeling her arm with brutal force this time, but Tristan was faster. He ducked, wriggled and slithered bare-chested on the concrete. Vee had but a split second to follow the blur, heart lifting as it headed for the stairs. A split second before Xoliswa held up a fistful of empty green shirt, flung it down with a roar and charged.

  Dammit. Vee braced herself. I haven’t done this shit since boarding school. And we didn’t use knives.

  She ducked instinctively, knowing the swing of the knife-arm would have all Gaba’s weight behind it. Gaba plunged into empty air, spun and stumbled, nearly losing her balance. She righted herself with fleet feet, almost slicing into Vee’s upper arm as she crouched low to uppercut her under the chin. The knife made a ‘whzzzz!’ as it went past, communicating in no uncertain terms that if it landed she was done. Vee tottered, managing to transform the punch into a jab that got Gaba in the throat. Didn’t do a world of damage but it left her gagging, eyes watering, for a few seconds, enough time to move off a little.

  A quick assessment tallied the odds against her, knife notwithstanding. Vee had the height, but the weight advantage swung the other way. Not to mention that although she didn’t cut the figure of one built for speed, Gaba was quite inspiring in her agility. Vee knew she was faster, but not by a huge margin. What would serve her was savvy, if she could create a distraction, grab something as a makeshift weapon, anything. Gaba expertly backed her across the gravel square, away from the exit. Attempting to make a run for it was a rapidly shrinking opportunity.

  “This isn’t fair,” Vee said breathlessly, still backing away. She parried to one side but Gaba stayed close, taking another swing that went wide. By now Vee could tell she was sorely out of practice; she wasn’t keeping her movements tight enough. Bank jobs sucked essential skills out of you.

  “Fair?” Xoli laughed, just as breathless. “I’ve been played, you’ve been played, and you still want fair?”

  “Played? Speak for yourself.” Vee hopped side to side, bouncing on her toes. She couldn’t see behind her, but she could feel the wall encroaching with every backward step. Closer, closer …

  “Haha, you.” Gaba’s headshake was pitying. “Still not asking the right ques–”

  Vee faked to the left this time and pretended to duck. Gaba sidled up and swung, her jab nicking near Vee’s elbow and drawing a thin line of blood up the inside of her arm. Vee jumped back and as Gaba barrelled in, she spun and landed a side kick in her stomach. The knife whizzed past her foot and sank in. As her leg came down, Vee braced herself for the exquisite pain of the blade slicing the flesh of her foot open, but in awe realised the blade was sunk into the thick treads of her sneakers. She stumbled for balance and managed to right herself. Gaba charged again, and Vee dropped to a squat and shot both fists out like armed missiles. Gaba’s face melted in surprise a split second before impact, but she was too late to slow down. As they collided, Vee gagged a little as the creepily warm softness of breast tissue enveloped her hands up to the wrists. Gaba let out a howl of anguish and staggered, smashing into Vee’s torso, nearly bringing them both down. Vee shoved her away; Gaba tottered backwards, slamming into the railing welded into the wall. The old metal fixture groaned and whined as the railing loosened and gave way, rusted screws popping out of the crumbling brickwork. Vee’s shock morphed into cold horror as both Xoli, pinwheeling her arms, and the railing fell over the side.

  “Nooooo!” Vee screamed. She shot her arm out at the empty gap, even as she knew there was no way in hell she could reach. She scrabbled over to the edge on her knees and elbows. One end of the railing had detached, but the screws of the other side were holding fast. It grated and clanged as finally it stopped swinging, and by some miracle Gaba’s fingers were wrapped around it, still hanging on. Vee slid over on her stomach and stretched out her arm. Immediately, Gaba grabbed on to her, her fingers digging into Vee’s forearms. The railing gave a sickening groan under their combined weight.

  “Tristan! Monro!! Tris– uggggh aarrrggghh!” Vee screamed. It felt like her arms were being ripped out their sockets.

  “Miss Vee!” There was a pounding of footsteps as Tristan ran back onto the balcony. He surveyed the situation, his eyes huge as he raked his fingers through his hair. The railing made another ominous groan. Tristan quickly climbed onto Vee’s back, giving her more traction by nailing her to the ground and hauling her in by her jeans.

  A streak of black shot past and coalesced in the shape of Monro. Vee wanted to burst into tears, though she had no idea how a dog would help. She didn’t have to wonder for long. Monro advanced to the edge, teeth bared, eyes lit with ferocity, his large shoulders hunched in attack mode. A single bark and Gaba’s expression dissolved into one of pure terror. Between the drop and the dog she was clearly willing to take the former. Grunting in bursts, she kicked her legs, rattling the metal. Vee roared in pain, arms aching.

  “Monro!”

  The husky snarled and sniped over the railing, muscles rippling as if considering jumping on it to attack. At last he went still, tuning in to Vee’s pleas. He studied her with wise eyes, as if contemplating a decision, then crouched next to her and lowered his head. Slowly, very gently, he closed his mouth around the soft flesh of Vee’s upper arm and brought his teeth together. Vee howled, in shock more than pain. Monro was trying to get her to let go.

  A series of low but audible calls and whistles floated up from the safety of the ground. The tag team had finally located them. “Twinkie! Go look over and tell me how far down it is,” she barked. She slid nearer the edge when his weight moved off but she held on, pushing Xoli’s fingers onto the railing to shift some of the strain. “Dammit, Tristan!”

  “It’s … it’s not … not far. Not far down,” he stammered, peering over the ledge. “There’s two guys waiting under her –”

  “Tristan Heaney!”

  “She won’t die! Let her go,” he sobbed.

  With that, Vee yanked her arms back over the side, rust and gravel scraping her arms. Gaba’s fingers flailed and lost purchase on the grate.

  A flare of satisfaction erupted in Vee’s chest as she watched Gaba’s eyes widen just before she tumbled into darkness.

  Chapter Thirty-two

  Take off was virtually seamless compared to takedown, almost dream-like. Tristan scraped up the pulverised remains of her cellphone into his torn T-shirt and they raced downstairs. Vee was forced to stop a couple of times, once to yank the knife out of her sneaker before she tripped over her own feet and again to take a breather against the wall, rotating her shoulder blades and wincing. They retraced her steps the way she’d entered, closing the service entrance behind them. Neilson and staff could deal with the bewilderment of the unlocked door the next morning, as well as the busted grate on the roof if at all they ever ventured up there. She managed to scoop up the access pass, into which she tossed the knife. The Mazda was idling at the end of the lot and they saw Gaba, alive and apparently in full-blown shock, bundled and shut in its boot.

  Th
e Nots exchanged a triad of frightened looks at Monro’s presence. “The dog,” Not-Paul the driver protested simply, surprising Vee by having a perfectly normal voice, which she’d started to doubt he had.

  “He’s riding with us. Drive,” she shut him down. After they’d all squeezed in and swerved onto the road, she checked her watch, breathed and leaned back on the headrest, muttering a quick prayer of gratitude. Forty-two minutes. Guy Richie the man. Not once did an alarm or siren wail as they sped down the road.

  They dropped her off right in front of her car. Vee tucked Tristan and Monro into the back seat of the Chrysler. She crossed the road again over to the other car and leaned in through the front passenger window of the Mazda. “Remember what I said?” She looked hard into each of their faces in turn. “She stays alive, no matter what.” Not-John nodded slowly. She handed him the envelope of cash and tapped the windscreen. Without another word, the engine gunned and they cut into the night.

  “I tried to get him to attack when you guys were fighting, but he just sat behind the door and wouldn’t move. I tried to drag him –”

  “He’s my dog. He answers to me,” Vee replied flatly.

  The car was a graveyard the rest of the short drive home to Leicester Street. She took the 2nd Avenue entrance to her house, avoiding driving past Tristan’s. She parked in the garage and wordlessly got out, opening the door to let Monro out. The dog pattered into the yard and slumped into his favourite spot on the lawn.

  “Are you pissed?” Tristan asked timidly.

  “Am I pissed?” Vee barked, banging the side gate. “For true? Let’s review every warning I’ve ever given you, up against what just happened, and decide together if I should be pissed!”

  “I-I-I thought if …” Tristan backed away.

  “You don’t think!” Vee grabbed him by the shoulders. His bare skin burned her fingers. “You act. You don’t trust nobody, you don’t stop to listen, you act. And you never, ever, how many times I nah tell you this, you never give in to what anybody says, no matter what they threaten you with!”

  “I didn’t know what else to do!”

  “So you –”

  “She knew where your job was. The street and building and everything.” Tears trailed a fresh route through the smudges on his cheeks. “She described the inside of your house. She said she was gonna come back here wi–” his chest pumped up and down with laboured breaths, “wi-with her friends and kill us. I didn’t know what to do.” He swiped his eyes with a forearm and kept it up over his face. “I thought if I did what she said, she wouldn’t hurt you.”

  The knot in her throat threatened to strangle her. “You still shoulda stuck to the rules. Run away, scream, run to the first person you see. A bigger sicko than her could’ve …” She hyperventilated. “You don’t protect me. I protect me, Monro protects me. I protect you. You can’t go runnin’ wild round town actin’ grown, tryna fix messes and fight villains. I do that ’cause dah my job, and believe it or not it stinks. It’s not your job to be actin’ like my partner, like mister sidekick to Nancy Drew. You’re eleven, you’re nobody’s saviour!”

  “You’re not a saviour either!” Tristan shouted back. Sobs shook him and Vee melted, wrapping her arms around his skinny frame. The beginning of her own tears stung, but she let him have the moment and just held him, his head in her neck as she knelt on the lawn.

  When the tank was empty he pulled away, his breath coming in ragged bursts. He grabbed near his navel as if to lift his shirt to wipe his face, then remembered he didn’t have one on and used his palms. They blinked at each other for a long time, the silence of the garden enveloping them, and Vee thought if anyone happened by and saw a black woman hugging a half-naked white kid on a dark night, she’d rot in jail for three lifetimes. She smiled weakly, and Tristan smiled back, a fleeting look in his iron grey eyes like he was holding something back.

  “What?” She shrugged. “I nah vex anymore.”

  He sniffled. “Who’s Nancy Drew? Does she live on our street? Is she the coloured lady with the Rottweiler we hate?”

  Vee closed her eyes slowly. “Jesus wept,” she murmured, pulling him in for another hug.

  She forced him into her bathroom to get cleaned up. While he showered, she dressed the gash on her arm and downed a couple of Panados, then unzipped the access pass, careful not to touch Xoliswa’s knife. She stared at it a long time, not sure what to do next. Finally, she fished it out with her hand inside a Ziploc bag and turned it inside out, then stashed it in a shoebox behind a stack of old clothes at the back of her closet. A problem for another day. Tristan emerged in his jeans and sneakers, and she practically had to sit on him to blow-dry his hair. She threw one of her smallest T-shirts at him.

  “This?” he scoffed, holding it aloft like a diseased rag. “No ways. It’s for girls.”

  “Wear it for the ten steps it takes to get home. You’re not entering a beauty contest.”

  He read her face and eased it over his head, looking sour. “This is so gay. Nobody better see me.”

  “What’d I tell you ’bout using gay as an adjective?”

  He grunted. “It’s rude and defarmingary and wrong.”

  “Defamatory.” She eyed the look. It was no X-Men collector’s item like his had been, but it would do. “Stop whining. You know who your Ma named you after?”

  “Aggghhhh …”

  “Hush up. Tristan Ludlow, Legends of the Fall. One of the finest roles ever played by one of the sexiest, most talented men that ever acted. You think Brad Pitt would stand around yapping about wardrobe or he’d step up like a hero?”

  “Brad Pitt is old. And he’s probably a moffie too,” Tristan muttered.

  Vee put a hand on her hip and pointed. He trudged downstairs in the direction of her finger.

  “Thank you so much. So, so much,” Kara Heaney murmured, pressing Vee’s hand between hers. The woman’s eyes even misted a little with gratitude.

  Vee felt like a fraud. She looked down and away, at the front yard. It looked clean enough, though there were too many odds and ends littered about; unused bricks likely fallen off a wall somewhere, empty paint cans, a battered wooden crate and the skeleton of a bicycle. Perhaps someone had tried to de-clutter a garage and lost heart. Several stones were lifting or missing off the cobbled walk. The lawn was broken up into islands of dying grass, like patches of disgruntled, yellowing pubes. This ruffian needs to stay home more and help his mother, she mused sadly. Gardening – added to the list of valuable skills for young miscreants. “Ah, well. What’re neighbours for?”

  Kara nodded, blinking back the mist. “I’m not much of a neighbour then, am I?”

  Vee shook her head emphatically. “I’m sure you’ve got so much on your plate. And it’s never easy after … It’s not easy. Especially with boys. It takes time.”

  “I should talk to him.” Kara jerked a thumb behind her at the front door, through which Tristan had instantly ducked when they arrived.

  “No!” Vee jumped a little at the bark of her voice in the quiet of the street. “Nah, let him sleep. He’ll talk about it when he’s ready. His wrist will be sore. He stood up for himself when those kids tried to take his phone. He fought bravely.”

  “I can imagine.” Kara cast a glance back at the house, as if imagining her warrior child within. “He’s a fighter. Like his dad was.”

  Vee trudged back home. A hot upwelling of tears pushed up her throat as she latched the gate behind her. She sank onto the first step of the veranda, pulled her knees up to her face and broke down. Monro trotted over, nudging her and whimpering. She wrapped her arms around his neck and sobbed.

  Softly, Softly

  So … That Happened

  Chapter Thirty-three

  Vee kept her eyes shut as one of the field reporters nattered in her ear. “Are you sure? It’s so sudden … day before yesterday …” She pinched the bridge of her nose. A two-day headache was setting up permanent digs between her eyes.

  “I k
now, right? I’m like whaaat, so since it’s your story I can imagine you’re like whaaaaaat,” he twittered. “I thought maybe you hadn’t heard yet so I’d call it in. I’m out here already so I’ll pass by the family home and get all the information I can. You coming out?”

  “Yeah, why not,” she replied dully. She’d covered her fair share of township stories, the good, bad and gruesome, and had a fair grasp on handling the delicate dynamics. This time, though, this time she was far too close for her own unflappable comfort. There’d be a sizeable crowd outside the Gaba home, shocked friends and neighbours gathered to wail and mourn with the family. The thought of tackling the situation alone, without Chlöe … it was too depressing. Bishop had been off work since Tuesday, apparently down with a bug of some kind. Vee closed her eyes again and kept them closed for a spell. She reached for her contacts list and dialled another number. It went unanswered seven times before picking up.

  “Who be this?” Uzo shouted.

  “Me. Voinjama.”

  “Oh. Mtschew. But you sef, why you dey use unknown number for call me? Normal normal, I wouldn’t answer …”

  “What happened, Uzo? With the girl. After I left.”

  “Ah, you dey form oga, I go give you report abi?”

  “Smh. I’m not saying I’m your boss o. I just want you to tell me what happened.”

  “Next time, you go chill make you see how we dey do things. Maybe if I like your style I can hire you to run with my boys.”

  “Uzochi.”

  He sighed into her ear. “See, you like thinkin’ too much after everything finish.” No worry, I do whetin you say make I do. I no be like all these small-small area boys. I dey like talk, simple. You say make I follow her talk, so na whetin we do be that.”

  “Uzo …”

  “Look. You tell me say one day you go need my help. You sef help me that time years ago and I no forget. The day done come, so whetin be the problem?”