Ball of Confusion

by Ian Black

  The standing guard follows him, leaving the others watching as Millie bows her head muttering vented anger, “I blew it again!”

  •

  Very early next morning, Millie’s sat at her desk in the practically empty open-plan office. While the early bird cleaners clean, she sits daydreaming deep in thought, and with the background vacuuming noise doesn’t hear Larry approaching, until he plonks his briefcase on her desk.

  She jumps, startled, “You gave me a heart attack!”

  He perches his buttocks on the edge of her desk and asks, “What’s new, pussycat?”

  She’s gutted, “I blew it again, Larry. I’m really pissed off.”

  He nods in agreement, “You know what? I reckon you’re too passionate about this story, about this theme. You’re letting your views bias the integrity of the piece. The Iraqi’s a terrorist… his mind’s made up already. He ain’t changing his views whatever you say… So now your eagerness to show him what you feel means that in two meetings you’ve learned zip… and you’re on a deadline!”

  She shrugs, dejected.

  He confirms, “I need that programme finished next week.”

  Millie shakes her head disappointedly. “Me stating facts just won’t cut it, I can’t do that; I need more of Hazma’s thoughts. The programme can’t finish with me lecturing him!”

  Larry offers some advice, “Listen, you’re a damn fine journalist, and you’ve dug up an interesting story. You’ve already got the start, and middle, all you need is an end, and you know how it works, if you can’t find a proper ending…” he stoops in closer and whispers, “suggest one!”

  “I won’t do that, Larry.”

  He shrugs, “If you can’t close a story with hard facts, wrap it up with a rhetorical question. Leave it in the mix, keep the viewer guessing; you’re not telling any lies.”

  Millie shakes her head, “George and Hazma deserve better than that… I’m better than that!”

  “Prove it then!” He stands to leave. “Never let your feelings impair a good ending!”

  •

  At about the same time, at breakfast, Hazma and George sit eating in the canteen as one of Pixie’s bouncers, who George nailed in the corridor, struts towards them like a farmyard cock, wearing criss-crossed Elastoplasts across the bridge of his beak. He sneers down at them and crows, “You’re both gonna get it!”

  With impudent interest, George looks up and enquires, “Get what?”

  “You know what…” he growls. “You’ll get it!”

  George retorts, “How can we get it? I gave it you! Look in the mirror, mate!”

  The brute’s furious face twitches and his narked neck muscles push his chin out. He looks right around the room, really wanting to give it to George now, but sees two nearby guards observing. They might put up with Pixie’s antics, but not those of his cronies, which this crony knows, and so retorts in the only way he can, here and now, by issuing more of the mundane same, “You’ll get it!” before strutting away.

  An old prisoner sat alongside them comments, “I hope you boys are tough… Pixie gets out later. There’s no place to hide from a madman in here!”

  •

  After breakfast, back in their cell, George sits with the hard back of his chair positioned in front of the door, to prevent anyone bursting in unannounced, while Hazma sits at the table modifying both bog-standard phones: tweaking wires protruding from the top, turning them into remote-controlled sparking machines (improvised detonation devices).

  George looks a little sad as he asks, “When are we leaving?”

  Hazma continues working intricately, and replies, “I’ve nearly finished. We can prime the fertilizer bags today,” then takes a quick timeout to glance at George and confirms, “We go tonight!”

  Surprisingly, George looks disappointed by the news, but continues watching him work, while mulling things over in his mind. He then sounds embarrassed, and stutters a little, admitting, “I don’t, know… I don’t know, if… if I want to escape.”

  Hazma freezes, and with a disbelieving expression exclaims, “What?”

  George, as ever, is honest, “What am I going to do outside? I don’t know anyone. I’ve got no family, no friends, nowhere to live. I’ve never worked…” He holds his arms out wide and states, “There’s nothing for me outside, Haz. I don’t fit in… I’ll just get into trouble again!”

  Hazma rubs his beard and ponders. George’s point is a valid one. The Iraqi has already meticulously planned his own escape, but hasn’t for one moment considered what George will do on the other side of the wall, and admits, “I hadn’t thought about that… I just thought, once we got out… we’d go our own separate ways.”

  “I don’t want to be a tramp again,” George admits. “I like beds now, and food… It’s lonely being a tramp!”

  Hazma needs only seconds to decide, “Then you’ll come with me.”

  George’s face lights up “Really?”

  “Yes,” He replies. “My people will make you welcome!”

  George relaxes back in his chair, looking relieved, and delighted.

  •

  As night falls that evening, just after lock down, Hazma stands at the sink in their cell, his face well-lathered with soap, while wet shaving in the mirror. He waggles a disposable razor in the water then continues shaving, as the muffled tones of an old American songstress filter through the adjoining wall from the next cell. She sings so sweetly, “Move over, darling…”

  George hears it too, “He’s back then.”

  Hazma continues to shave.

  George watches him glide the razor over his face, and admits, “I’ve never shaved before.”

  “Nor me,” Hazma wipes his clean-shaven face with a towel, passes the razor to his cellmate and replies, “you do now!”

  Hazma pops himself up onto tiptoes and peers out through the window, to be greeted by a glorious sunset of blended reds, oranges, yellows and blacks. But though glorious, ominous dark clouds hover over the sunset, enshrouding it. The sky is a celebration, wrapped in moody darkness. He nods gently, satisfied, and acknowledges to himself, “It is God’s will.”

  •

  In the cell next door, Pixie whines along with the song, “My head’s in a spin…” as his Elastoplasted pal panders to his recuperating master’s every whim.

  “My head is in a proper spin!” Pixie comments in camp fashion, while gently touching his sore, heavily bandaged, turban-like head. “Ouch, ouch,” he exclaims like a girl, “it throbs!” while sinking the back of his head into plumped-up pillows.

  Once comfortable, he rolls his eyeballs towards the adjoining wall and assures himself, and his devoted one, “They’re gonna get it!”

  •

  On the other side of the wall, George has finished shaving; they’ve given each other cropped haircuts too, and stand face to face staring at each other’s new appearance: clean shaven, with hastily hacked haircuts.

  With a bleeding face lacerated by shaving nicks, George comments, “You look younger!”

  Hazma rubs a hand across his own hacked head, then sets the ball rolling, “Let’s get out of here!” He instructs George, “Get your mattress and squat behind it with your back against the door.” George obeys the command. Hazma follows suit, and they both sit against the door holding mattresses out like shields in front of them.

  Slowly and precisely, Hazma instructs further, “Remember… do everything exactly how I told you, and I’ll see you in the street.”

  Wide-eyed George nods back vigorously, with a gormless excited-looking face. Hazma places a red-tipped matchstick between his teeth and lets the mattress rest upon his forehead, then punches numbers into the un-improvised iPhone and presses call. He places his hands tightly against his ears. George does the same, and with baited breath they wait.

  In the garden outside, against the wall directly outside their cell, one of the modified phones lies well-disguised, nestled discretely partly buried in dark compost inside
one of the fertilizer bags.

  The phone call from Hazma is received – lightening the luminous screen – a spark flashes between both protruding wires – the IED detonates.

  •

  George and Hazma flinch as force pressurises their skin. A deafening boom blasts their eardrums, that ring, their hearing numbed, then as the blast subsides, rubble falls from a devastated wall; falling in blocks of bricks into a mound on the floor, beneath where the window once was. Both men peer around the mattresses into a dust-filled cell. External light filters in, and cuts like laser beams through the cloud; it becomes clear… that a large hole now gapes.

  “It worked!” exclaims George, shoving his mattress away.

  “Of course it did!” Hazma replies, still biting onto the matchstick. He treads across to the new exit, drops to his haunches and peers out. Emergency lighting now floods everywhere, as loud sirens wail.

  The Iraqi punches more numbers into the iPhone, then both men watch with intrigue, and brace, as the second bomb on the perimeter wall blasts with a flash, followed by a secondary boom as the oil tank ignites.

  “GO!” snaps Hazma, slapping George on the back as he clambers past him over the rubble out into the floodlit garden, and sprints towards the dust cloud mushrooming from the second explosion, adding extra mood to a dark dramatic sky.

  Hazma reaches inside his prison uniform and pulls out something he prepared earlier: a Molotov cocktail, made from a glass milk bottle filled with flammables, with a short linen fuse wedged into the top. He takes the matchstick from his teeth, strikes it on a brick and ignites the frayed cotton fuse, then as it smoulders, he clambers outside.

  While sirens wail, Hazma watches George escape through the newly formed exit, then turns his attention behind him, towards the cell next to theirs, where behind the bars Pixie’s heavily bandaged head fumes through shattered glass. His red face furiously fires expletives, and though his words disappear amongst the furore, as piercing sirens wail, lip reading gives the gist of Pixie’s message.

  The Iraqi readjusts his stance, and shocks Pixie, who flinches as Hazma jumps up and slam-dunks his missile through a gap in the bars.

  As Hazma’s feet hit the floor he doesn’t stop or look back and sprints towards the wall; reaching the gap he stoops to climb out, but then stops, just for a second, to look back… at Pixie burning; howling like a wolf from his window, slapping furiously at flaming bandages.

  For the first time in a very long time, Hazma’s face forms into a smile… a wide Molotov smile, as he steps through the gap to freedom.

  •

  Millie’s wakened from her slumber by the shrill ring of her mobile. She snatches the irritating thing, checks the caller ID and answers, “What is it, Larry?”

  He informs, “Your story just took a twist.”

  “How?”

  “Your boys just blew themselves out of jail!”

  “What?”

  “Terry’s on his way to get you… I want you at the jail rolling before the BBC get there!”

  She leaps to get dressed.

  •

  Chapter: 27

  Adrenalin Spurs

  Soon after, in an affluent London area, Doctor Ruparela relaxes at home watching his fifty-inch high-def TV in the luxurious comfort of his high-value property. Lying full length on his sumptuous couch, he holds the remote control channel-hopping, but then on reaching CNN News he stops scrolling, sits up, turns the volume up and focuses attentively on the BREAKING NEWS. Reporter Millennium Jones stands holding a microphone delivering a live outside broadcast from a street scene with the decimated prison wall behind her, along with flashing emergency vehicles and huddles of uniformed men stood around talking.

  The doctor watches with intrigue as Millie reports, “…it has now been confirmed that two prisoners have escaped.” Two head-shot close-up photographs of George and Hazma, with beards and long hair, flash briefly onto the screen as Millie continues, “The Metropolitan Police have launched a manhunt, and warn civilians that both men are potentially dangerous, and if sighted, to stay clear and report to your local police immediately… Millennium Jones, CNN, London.”

  Witnessing this news, Ruparela’s trademark toothy white grin forms in splendour across his steely, self-satisfied face.

  •

  After being on the run for several hours, steady jogging takes its toll. The only respite they’ve had so far is while ducking into bushes and alleyways to hide from passing cars, and although adrenalin spurs them on, both badly need a breather.

  The jog degenerates into a run-walk along a public footpath behind a row of large detached houses. Hazma notices in one of the long gardens a small secluded garden shed, partly disguised beneath the awning of a sprawling willow tree. He motions George to follow him and climbs over a waist-high fence. The shed has no lock; he slides the bolt across and they squeeze inside, to find it illuminated nicely by moonlight via a side window.

  It’s tight inside, but both find room on the floor to sit; squeezed between a lawn mower, children’s bicycles, wheelbarrow and other items rammed untidily into the shed.

  Hazma looks around and notices a large white plastic bag with The Red Cross printed all over it. He finds it’s full of old clothing for the charity shop. Both men rummage through, strip off their uniforms and dress themselves in civilian clothing, then flop back, and try to relax.

  “We did it!” states Hazma.

  “You did it!” George points out.

  “No…” he insists, “it was a team effort.”

  George enjoys that thought, and nods proudly in agreement.

  The Iraqi continues, “In all seriousness, George, I’m honoured to be your friend… You’ve been good for me… I’ve learned from you.”

  George is touched by the compliment, and admits, “That’s better than being moaned at for being thick!”

  Hazma’s pocket vibrates. He checks the iPhone; MILLIE is displayed on the screen. He shows George, who says, “Answer it then!”

  The Iraqi shakes his head, “We can’t… they may trace the call.”

  George admits, “I feel like I let her down.”

  Which annoys Hazma, “George… you’re the one who’s been let down! You’ve been trodden on all your life… Don’t worry about Millie, she’ll find something else to sensationalise. Now get some sleep, we’ve a long walk tomorrow.”

  “I’m gagging for a drink!” George announces, as he reaches behind the bikes and drags out two dusty bottles of the homeowner’s homebrew.

  He passes one to Hazma, who can just about decipher faded handwriting on the label that reads, “Cider… It’s alcohol!” The Iraqi shakes his head “Never again!”

  “Never have!” announces George, unscrewing the top and sniffing the fruity aroma.

  Hazma’s surprised, “You’ve never had alcohol… a tramp?”

  “I saw what it did to Ma…” He admits, “She became a mess.”

  “What did it smell like?”

  George looks offended, “Ma didn’t smell!”

  “Not your ma!” Hazma smiles (again!) “What does the alcohol smell like?”

  “Oh! Apples.” George takes a sip. “It tastes like apple juice,” and gulps down enough to quench his thirst, then exclaims pleasurably, “Ah, that’s better.”

  Watching George downing fluid reminds Hazma of his own parched mouth and throat, barren of moisture. Seeing how refreshed his friend looks, he ponders for a moment… then unscrews the bottle top.

  •

  Meanwhile, outside the prison there’s nothing more the CNN team can report on tonight. Terry squats, packing equipment away, while Millie hovers above him moving anxiously from foot to foot, like a cat on a hot tin roof. Sensing her mood, he understands, and reassures her, “Relax, Mill… at least you’ve got an end to your story now!”

  She doesn’t agree, “You reckon? This wasn’t what I wanted.”

  He reckons, “It’s what they wanted! They’re free now! You won’t hear of
f those boys again. The tramp will disappear into a forest somewhere and the terrorist will be whisked away to some hideout… They’ll disappear into thin air.”

  Millie’s phone vibrates, she checks the screen: voicemail, and replays the message on speaker. “Miss Jones, Agent Williams MI5. I watched your report earlier. Just a reminder, should you receive any contact from either prisoner, please notify me immediately… Thank you.”

  •

  A while later, back in the tiny garden shed, two empty bottles of homemade cider lay discarded on the floor. George and Hazma have also drunk most of the second bottles they’re holding too. Both are relaxed, in high spirits and enjoying the experience of belly laughing as Hazma describes Pixie’s expression on seeing the Molotov cocktail. “His face went white… like his bandage!” He can’t stop smiling now.

  George is very happy too, especially at finally seeing Hazma happy, and comments, “It’s good to see you smile, Haz.”

  Whose smile disappears; becoming serious he replies, “Well, I’ve never had much to smile about!” Then after a pause confirms, “Pixie was a horrible man… horrible; he’s a word I cannot say.”

  “Which word’s that then?” George is intrigued.

  “A bad word; I can’t say it.” Hazma shakes his head, “Look at me… I’m already drinking alcohol, I can’t be swearing as well… All I can say… is that I think Pixie is a word that begins with a C… and ends in a T.”

  George scratches his head, thinking hard. Then after a moment looks Hazma in the eye and blurts excitedly, “A cat?”

  Both fall about the shed laughing.

  •

  Next morning, sunrise sunshine floods in through the shed window; the glass magnifies the warmth and brightness onto Hazma’s eyelids. He slowly opens his eyes in a dazed squint; his head inside feels heavy, fuzzy; another hangover effect. He prods George on his clean shaven cheek, “Wake up!”