by Paul Finch
Because you're back in the barber shop
In the cellar
In Denmark Street.
And it's late and the clubs have all shut
And you shouldn't have come back down here with Joe.
You're still naked
But you're tied to the chair and it's tipped back
On its chromium base.
Joe stands with his back to the mirror.
Behind you Tony watches, like a judge.
Starting at your feet, Joe says, "scissors all over?"
He looks up at Tony.
"I'll try not to take too much off."
LITTLE TRAVELLER
Simon Kurt Unsworth
Ghedi jittered
The scow lifted and dropped, buffeted by the arrhythmic chopping of the swell surging at them from the ocean at their backs and the container ship's hull at their fronts. Everything trembled, everything shook, the water trying to unsettle Ghedi but failing because of the steel that ran through his bones and the density of his muscle. All around the world had tautened, become bright, diamond-edged and clear, sharp; this was the most dangerous part, these next few minutes, when Ghedi and the others would be at their most vulnerable.
There was a boom from the scow in front as Korfa fired the gas-powered grappling hook; he had stolen that two or three ships back and it was one of his proudest possessions. Ghedi only had a welded mess of fishing gaffs at the end of a rope and he threw it now, watching as it arced into the sky above him, leaving black trails behind itself like shed snakeskin before it disappeared over the ship's rail. He tugged, felt the hooks drag and then find purchase, and then he was swarming up the rope, antlike and quick, fingers sure on the rope as it writhed in his grip. His gun chittered to itself on his back, little satisfied metallic clinks as it readied itself for what was coming and looked forward, excited. Hand over hand he went, feet walking the skin of the ship, silent and intense, letting his lack of fear, his ferocity and preparedness to kill go ahead of him like the scent of a lion's musk as it charged its prey.
He reached the rail without incident; no water cannon, no gunshots from the fat white men that the companies sometimes hired to protect the ships, men with shaven heads and tattoos who thought they understood violence and fear but who did not. Ghedi understood violence and fear; Ghedi was violence and fear.
Despite his gas grapple, Korfa was over the rail later than Ghedi, slow and old and weighted by a belly that was growing fat and soft; Ghedi would smile about that later, but not now. Now he crouched and peered about, as Korfa was doing a hundred feet along the deck from him. The container ship was deserted, the deck silent apart from the rapid echoes of Ghedi's own breathing, coming back at him from the sides of the containers stacked high and running down the centre of the ship like a vast, segmented spine, doubling his inhalations and exhalations so that he sounded like two men, two warriors, weapons made flesh. He scuttled forward, drawing close to the containers, wary of the occasional gaps between them but grateful of the cover they offered. Korfa, more brazen, stayed by the rail, leaning back and peering up. He had a quizzical look upon his face and as Ghedi came alongside him he said, "Up there, little traveller."
Little traveller ; how Ghedi hated that nickname, bestowed upon him simply because he was younger than Korfa and the others and because of his name's meaning. Ghedi sometimes imagined his parents hoping that his name would encourage him to see the world; little people with big ideas, lost now in the somewhen of his past. He couldn't remember their faces, nor their voices or the touch of the hands. Little traveller. Would they ever have guessed where he would travel to, he wondered? Probably not.
"What?" Glancing up. Nothing.
"Shadows, most likely," said Korfa, not looking down yet, "but maybe one of the hooyadiis wase." His voice sounded distant, thoughtful, as though he were contemplating which of the camp's whores to fuck.
Ghedi scanned along the tops of the containers. They were stacked high, four up, the edges deep in shadows, the sky beyond them the blue of forever. It wasn't unheard of for the fat white dufarr to position themselves on top of the containers when they saw the attack coming, for them to fire down or drop things. One of Ghedi's friends had been hit by a dropped stanchion on an earlier raid, bursting his head open so that his brains had spattered out and ended up looking like worms on the deck, pink and crawling. Today, though, Ghedi saw nothing.
"We should move," said Korfa, snapping back into reality and glaring at Ghedi, as though the delay hadn't been his fault. Ghedi nodded and swung his rifle around from his back, took it by neck and stock and held it calm, and they went forward. Ghedi, still dancing along close enough to the containers to feel their breath on his back, watched as Korfa moved along the rail, continually glancing up. What had he seen, or thought he had seen? Ghedi wondered, because Ghedi could hear or see nothing.
Nothing.
That wasn't usual, was it? In all of their incursions (a word he had heard in a crackling radio broadcast by a faraway white man about what he and Korfa and the others did, and liked for its rolling, jagged sounds and the way it caressed his tongue), their time on the boats had been built of noise and fragments, of the stenches of fear and sweat and gunfire and sometimes of blood. Now, however, all was silent except for the scuff of their feet and the muttering of his gun, and the only smell was that of burning.
Ghedi stopped. It had only been a whiff, as though his nose had touched against a tendril drifting in from some vast distance, but it had been there nonetheless, there and now gone. He sniffed again, smelled nothing.
"What?" asked Korfa, turning. The man's skin was slick with sweat, and suddenly all Ghedi could smell was him, the smell of his body and the things he smoked, that they all smoked, thick, seeping out from his pores as though Korfa was more drug than man. Perhaps he was.
"Nothing," said Ghedi after another sniff.
"Then come on," said Korfa, looked up again at the top of the containers and screamed.
It made Ghedi jump, the scream, and he pulled the trigger on his rifle unthinking. The weapon, exultant, screamed the song of its soul and spat fire and Korfa's chest and belly bloomed open into flowers that had rich red petals. The man screamed again, staggering back against the rail, pushed by the weight of the rifle's touch on him, then teetered and fell forward. He rolled, flopping like a gaffed fish, ended up on his back, staring still at the top of the containers and screaming. Ghedi dropped to his knees, sorry but needing Korfa to shut up, to shut the fuck up before someone came, holding a hand over his mouth to stifle the noise of him. Gradually, Korfa quietened, and his silence was somehow worse than his noise.
"Little traveller," said Korfa after a second. He was still staring up, looking not at Ghedi who had shot him but beyond, focussing on something and scared of the something, a something that Ghedi could not see even when he turned and looked to the same place. "Little traveller," said Korfa again, his voice stinking of meat because of the blood in his mouth and the terror in his eyes, "run." He coughed once, spraying Ghedi with warmth, and then died.
Gone, Korfa was gone and in the past and no longer part of the present, and a smell of burning again just for a second and then drifting away.
There was no decision to be made; forward, the only way for Ghedi now. They had a job to do, an incursion to complete, he and his fellow sailors. He might mourn Korfa later, but now there were fat white pickings to take, a ship and its cargo and crew to place his hands around so that money could be strangled out of the even fatter, whiter insurance companies. Forward.
Ghedi dashed down the deck, all thoughts of caution gone now, running and wearing Korfa's death across his face like war paint, I am fear, I am terror, running past the shadowed gaps between the containers and beginning to scream himself, a howl of fury, a roar to show his teeth. From somewhere on the other side of the containers he heard the sound of another grapple hitting the deck and dragging, the metal yammer of it piercing, and then another, the other two boats lo
oped around and finally catching up with him and Korfa, then the duller thumps of feet and hands.
Past the end of the piled spine of containers now, approaching the ladder that led to the observation decks and helm, still no sign of movement other than his own beading sweat and leaping shadow, his other self, the darkness from his own heart allowed out, urged on before him. From the other side of the containers Erasto and Labaan appeared, also screaming lionlike, seeing Ghedi and making for the other stairway. Ghedi kept moving, rushing through sun that was like water on his skin, making the foot of the metal stairs and starting up. He lost sight of Erasto for a moment, caught a whiff of burning wood, burning flesh, saw a memory flash of a house with flames in the window, heard gunfire.
Labaan, not quite at the foot of the other stairs, steps behind Erasto, looked up and howled, not a lion now but a hyena faced with a lion. Erasto's rifle, an American M16 stolen from the last ship's cowering security officer, clattered down and bounced at Labaan's feet; Ghedi, despite the need to move, slowed and watched as Labaan backed away, feet tangling, and fell. He shrieked again, brought his own gun up and fired, the bullets striking sparks off the rail and risers that were bright even in the shadeless sun, crabbing backwards like a child, tears on his face. Another wave of the burning stench and then Labaan flipped himself over, a rib of meat on a grill, and scuttled back behind the edge of the containers. There was another burst of firing, the sound of frayed ricochets, and then from the stairway a crunch and a scream that rose, rose again, cut off.
Ghedi glanced over; the scows were still circling out on the chopping blue surface of the ocean, sharks waiting for their prey to weaken. How many others had come on board? Were any of them left? Should he signal, bring them in and leave?
No.
This ship was theirs, was his, by the rights of terror and strength and by the rules that they themselves had decided; it was theirs because they wanted it, because they had nothing besides that which they took themselves, not families nor homes, not anything except each other. Besides, to bring it in alone, without Korfa or the others? To make it his? He would never be Little Traveller again, never be left the scraps of the drugs or women, never be left on the edges, never be beaten or teased with match or flame, there would be no more jeering about the little lost one, the cast-off, the child he had been once and had never outgrown being.
Ghedi jittered and Ghedi ran, upwards and onwards, gun leading him, his brother during day and night. It spoke to him, urging him on, up and up because they were travellers together, no longer little, no longer weak, the roar and terror of him huge, and still there were no signs of life on this flabby western ship.
As Ghedi reached the top of the staircase he caught another scent of burning, gone as quickly as it had arrived, a memory in his nostrils that reached back through the years to a place he had vowed never to visit again. It was the past, dark to him now except in flashes of brightness at the centre of the cooking fires or the waved torches that Korfa and the others had sometimes brandished, laughing at him as he cried out or jumped back from them, weeping.
Across the flat expanse of the upper deck towards the wheelhouse, a metal cabin fronted by a huge window. The sun glared across the surface of the glass, hiding what was behind it, blinding him. Ghedi roared so that they would know he was coming, was surging towards them unstoppable and terrible, would know that no glass or metal walls would stop him. Ghedi was arrived, Ghedi the traveller was come, and he was death and fear and violence.
Closer to, and the sun's fiery reflected eye shifted, sliding along the glass to reveal the room behind. It held banks of equipment and flashing dials and lights, computer displays, a large wooden wheel that was almost certainly for display rather than for any actual purpose. At its rear, a door to the lost depths of the ship was shut, bolts clearly locking it from the inside; another door, also bolted, in the side wall led out onto the deck. A shelf on the rear wall held plastic folders in rainbow colours, and logs and books, and a table under it was covered in cups and a map held down at its corners by pencils.
And there were crew.
Four of them, all standing still, looking at him, faces blank. They fear me, know what I am, Ghedi thought, and raised his rifle, letting its mouth open, letting it show its teeth. He tapped it against the glass and gestured at the side door, moving along the front of the glass towards it, a lethal, venomous spider clinging to the window's surface and dancing towards its prey.
The crew did not move other than to follow him with their eyes.
"I will kill you!" Ghedi shouted. He shouted it first in English, then repeated it in French and German. He didn't like the way the words felt in his mouth, the English slimy, the French too smooth and the German angular, digging into his throat like hooks as he spat the phrase out. He could speak none of those languages, of course, Korfa had simply taught him the expression; Korfa, now gone. The realisation made Ghedi pause for a moment, looking at the crew. His own face would be dark to them, its covering of Korfa's blood like a mask, just as theirs were pale to him, little more than hovering white discs in the gloom of the room, their eyes depthless hollows in which glints flickered in time with the ever-changing displays on the computer screens. Ghedi gestured again at the door, and again the crew merely looked at him.
There was little point in firing at the glass; it would be bulletproof. Ghedi had learned that on an earlier incursion when one of the others, Labaan he thought, had shot at the window and the bullet had leapt back between them singing a song like an enraged hornet. It had torn through the skin of Korfa's shoulder, Ghedi suddenly remembered, making the man shriek like a child. Fat westerners, trying to keep themselves safe behind thick glass and bolted metal and still they fell at Ghedi and his companions' feet. Instead, he tapped the rifle against the glass in a regular threat, still moving around towards the wheelhouse door.
"I will kill you!" he called again, gagging on the words now, and still the crew did not move. Did they really think they were safe, he wondered, that he could not get through the door?
His own face shone on the surface of the glass, ghosting across it, covering the closest crewmember's face for a moment so that the man appeared to be wearing a mask, his face becoming a satire of Ghedi's own, distorted and ugly, and then something behind Ghedi moved in the reflections, something orange and black.
He whipped about, fast, rifle an extension of his arm, ready to deal with any fat eey creeping up behind him-but the deck was empty. He looked about, squinting into the sun. It had been there, hadn't it? Hadn't it? Something behind him, shifting and changing but still somehow peering at him, sweating sadness.
Sadness? Why had he thought that? But yes, sad, it had been sad as it looked at him, something at its centre that was without eyes but that looked at him nonetheless. And it smelled, that burning stench, of wood and material crackling and hair shrivelling, of fat roasting. What trickery was this? The crew, he thought, operating a film projector or some other device to fool or frighten him. Well, they would soon know that Ghedi was fearless, would not be stopped.
He span back about, jabbed his rifle against the glass once more and shouted "Open up!" They wouldn't understand, he wasn't speaking English or French or German but his own tongue, the language of his father, but his meaning was clear. Angling the rifle so that it pointed away, he fired, the shot careening across the glass with a sound like a dry bone breaking and leaving a silvered streak that trailed from fat to thin like a snake. A wisp of smoke rose from it like a kiss and then was gone.
The crew didn't react.
The man nearest the glass, his face still little more than a pale distortion in the gloom, carried on staring at Ghedi. Ghedi raised the rifle and pointed it directly at the man and fired. The shot impacted against the glass, cracking through its upper layer before being stopped, spreading and leaving an uneven grey mass trapped in the pane, as though the window had grown some distorted eye that stared at Ghedi. Still the man did not react, did not move or ju
mp, did not blink.
Ghedi peered at the man, who simply stared back. After a moment the man opened his mouth and spoke, the words clear despite the layer of glass between them. "Little Traveller," he said, "run."
Something was burning.
It wasn't a whiff or a hint as before, but the thick, sour stench of encroaching flame. At first, he thought it was the spore of his rifle and then it rose up from behind Ghedi in reflection, an entire house aflame, windows ringed in fire, door buckling in the heat. He could see it, despite the impossibility of it, feel it, feel the hair on the back of his neck singe and the prickle of heat across his skin, smelled it and then he was running and the crew merely stared as Ghedi fled from the house that couldn't be there.
Down the steps and away from the wheelhouse he went, the steps that Labaan and Erasto had been at the bottom of when whatever happened to them had occurred. He ran, thoughtless, rifle screaming at him in fury, sweat covering him like oil, away from the house and the flame and the smell and the thing behind the house's window. Ten steps down, twelve, twenty, how many? Something grated behind him, wood grinding across metal, and then his shadow was ringed ahead of him by an orange halo that flickered and jumped and he ran faster, the little traveller running, thirty steps, forty, taking four and five at a time and then there was Erasto.
He was sitting with his back against the stairwell wall, legs stuck out in front of him like the limbs of the stickmen that Ghedi's father used to make him when he was a small boy. Erasto, normally the darkest of them, had paled to something the consistency of goat's milk, and his skin was covered in ragged tears and punctures that were scored across his chest and abdomen. He jerked, twisting, not alive but moving nonetheless, moving in a way that reminded Ghedi of the victim of the crocodile attack that Erasto had described witnessing as a child and which had scared him so much that he would never enter the waters of river or sea. Blood sprayed from the holes in the man's skin, staining Erasto's T-shirt, darker than the ancient sweat rings that clustered around his armpits. Ghedi leapt over him, landing steps down, catching a glimpse as he passed over of something covering Erasto like a second skin, something green and grey and thrashing, ridged back hunched and eyes like glass peering up at him.
