To Die For (22 page)

‘When I was a child in Nigeria,’ she was saying, ‘we had a goat.’

You’re still a child, I thought. She was quiet again. I waited.

‘A kid is a type of small goat,’ she told me.

She watched me, waiting for something. I said, ‘Mmm.’

Just let her talk. Let her get to things in her own time. She smiled.

‘That goat was funny. It would eat everything.’

She stopped there for a moment, maybe remembering the goat. I didn’t think so, though, not with the far-off look that had crept into her face, the same kind of look that would cross Brenda’s face sometimes.

‘Goats do that,’ I said, just for something to say.

She was a lot like Brenda: the fearfulness, the emptiness. And the same kind of strength, the same will to carry on and not let the lousy fucking world sink into her. Christ, she’d floored me, hadn’t she? That was guts.

‘When I was born, I was called Ebele. The father at our school told us that it means Kindness.’ She said ‘father’ as ‘fadder’. She pronounced each word carefully, like she was addressing the Queen. ‘My sister calls me Kid.’

It was the most she’d spoken since I’d known her. I wanted her to continue. I wanted her to tell me what happened at Dalston. I wanted to know who had the money. I wanted to find them and kill them.

But she’d stopped talking. It was as if she were explaining to me something that she thought I wanted to know. There was a silence between us, a strange silence. It had risen from the ground and filled the room, as if the two of us were caught in it and the rest of the world was outside. She wanted something from me, but I didn’t know what it could be. I didn’t know what I could have to offer.

‘How old are you?’ she said.

I had to think about that a moment.

‘Forty-seven.’

She nodded and her face showed concentration. She was taking it in like it was all vital information.

‘Where were you born?’

‘Tottenham.’

‘Did you have brothers and sisters? I had two brothers and a sister.’

She waited for me to answer.

‘I had a brother and sister,’ I said. ‘Both younger.’

‘Do you love them?’

‘I don’t see them. I don’t know where they are.’

There was something going on here and I didn’t understand it. She was digging into me, trying to get somewhere, trying to get something from me. I didn’t know what it was, or why she’d want to know. I could hear Browne snoring. We both listened to him for a while. She held the mug with both hands.

‘We lived in a small village,’ she said. ‘I liked it. Did you ever see a small village? Did you ever see one when you were young?’

‘No.’

‘I liked it. Then my father became ill. We moved to Lagos. That is the biggest town of Nigeria. I did not like it.’

She shook her head, as if disagreeing with herself. She carried on for a bit, talking about Lagos and why she didn’t like it: the smells, the crowds, the nasty people, as she called them. I tried to remember something from my own childhood, something I could tell her. Nothing came to me. It wasn’t that my memory was bad, it was just that there was nothing there for me but empty spaces and concrete.

So I listened to her talking about how her brothers liked football and how her mother was good at cooking and I wondered if she’d have these memories when she was my age.

‘Why are you here?’ I said to her. ‘In England.’

She looked down at her hands. There it was again, the closing up. I was no good at this sort of thing, blundering about. Every time I tried to get some information, she backed away.

‘Do you miss it?’ I said. ‘Nigeria.’

She thought about that and her forehead creased.

‘I miss the sky. There is a very big sky and it is blue. In London there is no sky.’

In London, she’d said. Not England, not Britain. I wondered if she’d even been outside of the city.

‘I do not like London,’ she said. ‘But I do not know Tottenham.’

‘There’s no sky in Tottenham.’

I waited for her to say something else, but she didn’t utter a word. She was staring at me now, waiting for something in that way she had, mouth open, eyes wide. Her braided hair was down around her face. Her small hands played with the mug.

My thoughts were muddy and wouldn’t clear. The girl was the key, somehow. The things she said, the way she said them, the things she didn’t say.

I was limp with fatigue and I felt useless. I was useless. The girl had made me so. I needed answers from her, but I didn’t know how to get them. I couldn’t use force. How could I? One touch from me and she’d break. I couldn’t shout at her. The moment I raised my voice, or darkened my tone, she’d shrink back into herself. I couldn’t threaten her. What did I have to threaten her with? And if I’d tried any of those things, Browne wouldn’t stand for it; he’d be on the phone to the law in seconds. He was one of those who had ethics. And what could I do to Browne? He’d ignore a threat, and I couldn’t kill him. I couldn’t kill everyone, could I?

She’d poleaxed me once with a .32 slug and now she was gutting me with her silence. And I, who had never hit the canvas, never; I, who had ripped through banks and security depots and armoured cars; I, who had fought a section of Argentine regulars to a standstill; I, who had ripped and destroyed and smashed anyone who got in my way, was being defeated now by this child. I was being felled by this clump of twigs, this shrub growing at my rotting feet.

I could hear Browne snoring still in the next room. That was how he preferred to go through life, unconscious of it all for as much as possible. It was an easy way out, a cowardly way, but that wasn’t his fault – life had made a coward of him. Or so it often seemed. In fact, he still had things that he found worth fighting for. He was a Christian, or had been, or whatever. It was all that Scottish upbringing, rigid Protestant stuff and salt on his porridge. Sometimes he’d get moral and feel a need to do something good. Life had kicked him in the bollocks so many times he’d decided to hide from it in a bottle, but every now and then he’d emerge and go back for another kicking. He still had causes. I was one of them. The girl was another.

Life had hurt her, too, anyone could see that. But she wasn’t going under. She had guts. Why? Was there a cause there too? Was she fighting for something? Or was she just fighting for the sake of it?

I had to get inside her mind. I had to root out whatever was hidden there, but how the hell did I do that? I’d never had to communicate with children. I didn’t know how to do it.

She was smiling at Browne’s snoring.

‘I think that he is a good man,’ she said.

‘Who?’

‘Your friend, Doctor James. I think that he is a good man.’

Doctor James. She was talking about Browne. I’d never known his first name.

‘He’s all right.’

‘Why is he sad?’

‘Sad? I dunno.’

She looked at me with those wide, starving eyes. I thought that if I didn’t feed her something she’d close up on me. She wanted to talk, but not about herself. Maybe she was being subtle. Maybe everything she said was about her and I couldn’t see it.

‘He’s had bad luck,’ I said. ‘Browne has. James, I mean.’

‘Bad juju?’

‘Huh?’

‘Did he do something bad? Something wrong?’

‘Browne? Nah, he just has bad luck is all. He’s one of those people.’

‘What bad luck?’

‘He got fucked over, set up.’

She frowned and her forehead creased and she looked like a toddler trying to work out how to put that square brick into that fucking round hole.

‘He got charged with a crime,’ I said. ‘Nicked. Arrested by the police.’

‘A doctor?’ she said, amazed that such a thing could happen.

‘Yeah, he was a doctor then.’

‘Was he a good doctor? I think that he was.’

‘He was all right. Did well, small-time but okay.’

‘What crime?’

‘Rape,’ I said. ‘You know what that is?’

She nodded her head.

‘He didn’t do it,’ she said.

It wasn’t a question. She knew he couldn’t have done it, just as I knew it. Some people you wonder about. Some you know. Browne couldn’t have hurt anyone if his life depended on it. That was one thing we shared, me and the girl. We both knew Browne. We both knew innocence. Maybe because we both knew the flip side too well.

‘No,’ I said. ‘He didn’t do it. Some bird... some woman, a patient of his, told the law he’d tried it on.’

‘The police?’

‘Yeah.’

‘But... but didn’t he tell them the truth?’

‘Sure. But the woman had bruises and... well, she had some damage to her.’

‘Yes,’ she said, and I knew she understood what I was talking about. ‘But they should believe a doctor.’

‘Yeah, well, in this country, a pretty young woman in tears, and evidence of boozing, go a long way.’

‘But he should have told them that she was lying.’

‘He did. It sounded like desperation. In the end, he was found not guilty anyway.’

‘The police said he didn’t do it?’

‘No. The law thought he did it; they always think people did it – looks bad if they nick innocent people. The jury couldn’t reach a majority verdict – they couldn’t decide – so he got off. But it was a muddy affair and mud sticks.’

‘Mud?’

‘Mud, yeah. Bad reputation. Like I’ve got.’

‘What happened to James? After?’

‘His practice went belly-up; he boozed. His wife left him and took half his money and both his balls. From then on, pretty much the only work he got was as a medical official at the fights, which is how I know him.’

She leaned forward, her eyebrows raised.

‘You believed him, yes?’ she said, and I could see that it mattered to her that I did.

‘Yeah. Lot of us did. The bird’s boyfriend was known to some of us. He was a slimy little cunt.’ Her hand went to her mouth. ‘Sorry. Anyway, we mostly thought this other bloke had done the raping, or him and the bird had hatched a way of getting money from Browne when they sued him. The boyfriend came to the fights once. He was pissed and maybe he was angry at not getting any dosh after the verdict. One of the other fighters decked him. He was laid out on the floor, a stretcher job. The only man who went to help him was Browne. You understand what I’m telling you?’

‘Yes. There are good people.’

‘Some, maybe.’

‘And bad people.’

‘Yeah. Fucking plenty of them.’

‘Yes.’

‘You sound like you know some,’ I said, expecting her to clam up or run away or whatever it was she did to hide from the truth. Instead, she looked up at me and said:

‘Why are you sad?’

‘What?’

‘You look sad.’

I didn’t know what that meant. How could I look sad?

‘Do I?’ I heard myself say.

I was tired. My arm hurt. My head was muzzy. I was thinking that I should go and sleep. I didn’t move.

‘James said that you were a boxer.’

‘Yeah.’

‘I think you were a good boxer,’ she said.

Her body moved back and forth in small jerks and I realized she was kicking her legs under the table. For some reason it reminded me how young she was.

‘You think so, eh? Why? Why would you think anything of me?’

She shrugged.

‘Did you have a nickname?’ she said. ‘Boxers have nicknames.’

I hesitated. I don’t know why I did that. Then I lied. I don’t know why I did that either. I said, ‘No. I didn’t have a nickname.’

‘What... what did you do before you were a boxer?’

‘Do? I dunno. Not much. I was in the army.’

‘You had friends, yes? I had friends. I had one friend who was called Samuel.’

Then she stopped. She kicked her legs and turned the mug around and looked at the table. I think she was waiting for me to speak, to ask her about this Samuel. I couldn’t think of anything to say. What did she want of me anyway? I couldn’t get a handle on her, couldn’t figure this all out. After a while, I said, ‘What did he do, this Samuel?’

She smiled.

‘He went to my church. He was a year older than me.’

‘Uh-huh. Church, eh?’

‘Yes. He was good at singing. Did you have friends when you were young? When you grew up, were you happy?’

She’d stopped kicking now, stopped turning the mug about, stopped everything. She looked at me with those large eyes, her eyebrows raised. She’d stopped everything except that look.

Did I have friends? Was I happy?

I used to listen to others sometimes when they spoke about growing up, when men from my platoon would sit in a crowded, noisy, warm pub and make cracks about the drunken pranks they’d played or the bird next door; or, when lying on my bed in the building site Portakabin, damp and musty-smelling, thick with smoke and cement dust, men from Leeds or Glasgow or Liverpool would talk about football matches they’d been to or scrapes with the law or some film they’d seen at a local fleapit.

I found myself telling the girl all this. I couldn’t think of anything to tell her of my own life, of my growing up, so I had to tell her what I’d heard of others’ lives. When I finished telling her, she nodded.

‘I have heard of Liverpool,’ she said. ‘They have a football team. My brother had a shirt that said Flower on the back.’

‘Fowler,’ I said. ‘He played for Liverpool.’

‘Fowler. Yes. My brother played football. He was very good.’

I said, ‘Uh-huh.’

‘I do not know Leegs and...’

‘Leeds and Glasow. They’re cities in England and Scotland.’

‘Scotland?’ she said, a light coming into her face. ‘Did they dance, your friends from Scotland?’

‘No.’

The light in her face dulled, so I said, ‘They might’ve done. I never saw them.’

‘I think that they did,’ she said. ‘They might know James. They might dance with him.’

Then she was back to kicking her legs, only there was an odd rhythm to the kicks and I realized she was dancing, trying to imitate Browne’s Scottish jig.

‘Did you have friends when you were a boy?’ she said, when she’d danced enough.

‘I was never a boy,’ I said.

That was a joke. She didn’t smile. I think she thought I was telling her the truth, that I’d been made like this, old and battered, stitched together from used parts.