Nowhere to Go Page 4

  "Bastard," Smith said. "Nearly killed me. My face is bleeding, look." He shoved a dark hand towards Mason. "Christ, man, it's not stopping. Splinters off the fence, I can feel them. Tell you, I'm going to come back another time, and I'm going to have him. He's a dead man. Where's the car?"

  "By the road," Mason said.

  "Aye, I know it's by the road, but where the hell is the road?"

  There was a long silence.

  "Maybe that way," Mason said in the end, waving roughly in the last direction he remembered running from. He had no idea where the car was, no idea where the road was, he just wanted to be home amongst the concrete and the brick, back where there were lights everywhere, all night, burning away the darkness.

  "What was that?" Smith said, whipping his gun up and pointing it at random places in the darkness. "Did you hear that?"

  "Countryside," Mason said, "there'll be rabbits and owls and stuff, foxes, I dunno, all sorts, the whole bloody place is alive."

  "No way was this a rabbit," Smith said. "This sounded bigger."

  They crouched, listening, and for a long moment that seemed like an hour, there was not a sound. Then the air rippled into life above them, a flapping flutter low above their heads and both men swore and nearly shot at whatever it was. Something in the carpet of leaves rustled, and Smith said, "We've got to get back to the road, this is doing my head in."

  Then a quiet voice said, "Welcome to the country, lads," and Smith fired two, three times, but Mason wasn't waiting to see what happened next, he just ran off into the woods again, gripping tight on to his own gun, thinking please let this be the way back to the road, please. When the shotgun roared again he fell, stumbling over a tree root that tried to curl its way around his ankle, and a pain grabbed his leg and squeezed. He stood up, trying to convince himself that he hadn't just twisted his ankle, and took a couple of tentative steps, but each time he put any weight on that foot, the pain came burning back in. It didn't matter though, he had to keep moving. The shotgun hadn't sounded that close, but he had lost any sense of direction amongst the trees and for all he knew he was walking towards it. He held his gun tight in a sweating hand, and tried to walk as quietly as he could through the undergrowth, talking to himself under his breath to take his mind off the pain and the fear and the darkness, repeating over and over: one step, and another step, one step, and another step, one step and another step.

  Then Mason heard the rustle of a bush behind him, and he turned and saw the dark figure begin to raise its arm but he was faster and he pulled the trigger and the sound of the shot sent everything that lived in the trees around him skittering and cawing into the night. He walked forward, still aiming at the body that lay half shrouded by the dead leaves into which it had fallen, but he knew even before he even reached it. It was dark, and he couldn't see very well, but he could see well enough. He turned and stumbled on through the dark.

  Smith was going to shoot me, Mason thought. Hell, call himself a professional, he was as scared as I was. If I hadn't shot him, he would have shot me. I'll tell Davey that the target shot Smith, he wouldn't believe I could shoot anyone anyway.

  Mason limped through some bushes, and the ground disappeared suddenly from beneath his feet. He slid down an earth bank, losing hold of his gun on the way, and then he thumped into beautiful, hard tarmac. He ignored the pain in his ankle, jarred again by the fall, and kissed the road. Then he staggered to his his feet. He couldn't see his gun, spent a couple of moments looking around for it, then realised that he must have dropped it at the top of the steep bank. He tried to scramble up, but his ankle gave way and he slid back down again. Can't do it, he thought, and no time to try.

  He took a gamble, turned left and hobbled along the road. After a minute or two he limped around a corner and saw the car, sitting in the driveway to the disused pumping station, and the anonymous family hatchback was the most beautiful thing that he had ever seen in his life.

  Mason limped to the car as fast as he could, put his hand in his coat pocket and thought for one desperate moment that he had lost the keys in the flight through the woods. Then he remembered that he had put them into his jeans so that they would be safe. He fished them out, unlocked the car door and slid himself in. He didn't know how well he would be able to drive, the car was a manual transmission and it was his left foot that he had hurt, but if he had to drive the whole way back to London in first gear he'd do it.

  Two hours, maybe a little more and he would walk into Davey's office in the back-room at the Palace, demand a large Macallan, not off the bar, the twenty-one-year-old stuff that Davey kept in his desk drawer, and he would take the first glass in one go and say Davey, I'm not doing another job like this for you, not ever. Send Con Murphy next time. Let him get shot at, barely escape with his life. Now pour me another, you owe me it.

  Mason fitted the keys into the ignition, turned them.

  Nothing happened.

  He tried again.

  Still nothing. No engine. None of the dashboard lights came on. Nothing. He looked out and saw that the bonnet was not quite back in place, as if someone had closed it without wanting to make too much noise.

  "No," Mason said. "No oh no oh no," and he opened the car door again and staggered out, but the woods were already coming alive with a startled flurry of crows as someone walked through the undergrowth, not bothering to keep quiet any more, the footsteps unhurried, all the time in the world.

  ONE OF US

  I thought sometimes, maybe my life would not have been so different after all. Before the horror came, and my world changed forever, I had been in the last year of medical school. I would have been standing in a hospital reception at two in the morning, standing under buzzing lights, back aching, feet hurting, while Saturday night drunks sang and banged on the counter and were sick on the floor. Now I was standing at two in the morning in another country, and my back and my feet hurt, and I scraped grease from a stained griddle under harsh white lights while drunks reeled and argued on the other side of the counter. Maybe not so different. Thinking this helped, sometimes.

  Peter was the manager of the burger bar. He made me think of a bear in the zoo at home, he was hairy and he growled, and whenever he came into a room it looked smaller. Sometimes he was kind, sometimes his temper scared me. I forgave him that, though. He gave me a job, without asking for papers or identity cards, and he paid me on time, and he did not try to touch me. He looked sometimes, but he never did more than that, and that is no more than most other men that I have known, and it is much less than many others. Before Peter, I worked in a hotel, changing stained sheets and emptying ashtrays for three pounds an hour until the assistant manager came in on another one of his inspections and pushed me face down on the bed. If the guests had not returned to argue in the corridor over whose fault it was they had left their concert tickets behind, I do not know what would have happened. Or rather, I do.

  Before the hotel I washed dishes in a cheap restaurant, and before that I shivered on the streets for four nights that lasted a year. Before that was a boat, and before that, days in the back of a lorry. Even now if I smell lemons, I also smell diesel and fear. Before that was another lorry, and before that was another, and before that was the day that the police beat my brother to death and took my father away and I heard it all from the cupboard under the stairs, shivering behind an ironing board with my fist stuck in my mouth to stop my screams from coming out.

  So I scoured the grill as soon as it was not so hot that it would burn my hands, and I cleared half-chewed chips from tables. It was work, and it paid me money, and the money paid for a bed in a room with three other women and only one sink, but it was a bed, and there was a lock on the door, and after the four nights on the streets, that was enough. Alice was a Kenyan. She worked as an office cleaner, and she had a picture of a child stuck to the wall next to her bed. At night she touched it with her fingers as if she was touching the child's face, and she cried. Safeta was Kosovan, and she worked in
a laundry, washing and drying a thousand sheets that a hundred Alices stripped from beds every morning. She smelt of the laundry, and it was a clean and nice smell, but her hands were always red and she bled from around her fingernails. Sally was English but she was also a drunk. I do not know what she did in the daytime but at night she just sat on a chair in the common room of the boarding house, drinking and staring through the television into a world beyond. Sometimes she came home in the evening with bruises on her, and what looked like bite marks.

  I knew that if I lived there for long I would go mad, and end up sitting with Sally by the television, pulling at my hair or picking at scabs on my arms. But without the proper legal documentation I could not get a better job, and without a better job I could not make more money, and without money I could not live anywhere other than the hostel.

  I could not go back to my home, it was not safe for me. Even if things changed I could not go back. Would not go back. I could not live in a place with so many ghosts, and have for neighbours those who had informed, denounced, spied, or just turned their faces away and done nothing. I am making a new life in England, if I can, because it is as good as anywhere else, and I can speak the language—better now than I could three months ago. I have filled out the forms and the forms and the forms, and I have sat under strip lights in plastic chairs, holding the ticket with my number on it and waiting to be called, to be asked the same questions over and over again by men and women with sweat patches on their shirts and indifference in their voices. I hope for the right decision and the papers that will say I am now a person, but I do not trust this and I am scared that they will send me back, so I save as much as I can from the endless nights in the burger bar so that I can buy the papers that will say that I am legal. I do not want to do this, because I want to be a good citizen, and because I knew that the men who dealt in the false papers would remind me of the men at home, the men who did everything with a swagger that says that they can be so confident because anything that gets in their way will be beaten out of it.

  Daniel was not one of them, but he worked for them. He was all smiles and loves and sweethearts, and he put his hand on my arm as if he were my friend. I could still smell the taint on him like sweat. Daniel was English. Safeta had a friend who knew other Kosovans who looked after the papers for all of their own people. If you were a Kosovan, you got your papers through them, or you did not get them at all, and if anyone else in the city dealt papers to Kosovans they soon stopped. I asked her friend if they could get me what I needed, a national insurance card and the home office papers with stamps that would give me leave to remain, and he asked the others but they said no, I was not one of them and they would not trust me. They gave him a phone number though, and I rang and spoke to a man who did not give me his name, not then. I met him three days later, in the glass and plastic of the coffee bar at the railway station. He was tall and thin, and the way that his black hair fell loose over his forehead made me think of a boy that I had known in school.

  "I'm Daniel, sweetheart," he said. "Just Daniel." He sat opposite me, sipping at his coffee, asking me questions about what I wanted, what my life had been, how I had been a medical student. Then he asked me why I was not drinking any coffee.

  "I do not want one," I said.

  "Don't have the money, more like," he said. "Don't lie to me, sweetheart. I can't trust you if you lie to me."

  "OK," I said. "That is why. I have no money."

  "So if you can't afford a cup of this dishwater, how are you going to pay me?"

  "That is why I do not drink the coffee. It is why I do not buy newspapers, or cans of cola, or anything except for rent and food. So I can save the money, so I can get what I need."

  He laughed a lot and bought me a cup of coffee and told me that he liked my spirit. He asked me lots of questions about my country, what I had done while I was there, what I did now, and he bought me another cup of coffee even though I said no, and then he named a price that I could not afford.

  "I do not have that much," I said. "Not nearly that much."

  He shrugged, flicked his hair away from his forehead. "That's a problem then. Because that's the price. I'll throw the coffees in for free. You have the number, phone me when you have the money. Simple as that."

  "It will take me a long time," I said. "When I pay for food and rent, there is not much left to save."

  "Girls manage," he said, "they find ways." He gave me a long look over his smile which made me feel like I wanted to wash. I went back to work, and ate food that others had thrown away so that I could save more, and I slept, and I did not do much else.

  A month later I was working the evening shift again, pushing a mop around the floor in front of the counter and trying to replace the smell of vomit with the smell of bleach. The door opened and I felt cold air and then somebody standing near me, so I concentrated on mopping in circles around my feet, not wanting to look up, to have to see the leer or to allow the chance for a conversation to start. I tried to be just a piece of furniture. Since I had left my country, I had much practice at this.

  "Forgot which place you said you worked in, didn't I," a voice said. "Fifth one I've been in." It was Daniel. He grinned at my surprise like a child who had just performed a magic trick. I did not know what to say so I did not say anything.

  "So, this is your office," he said. Peter came out from the kitchen and frowned at the sight of someone standing talking and not buying, but he dropped the cardboard box of plastic cups behind the counter and went away again. Alan leaned on the till, nodding his head to a beat which wasn't that which was coming from the buzzy loudspeakers, caring about nothing other than the sweep of the hand on the cheap white electric clock on the wall.

  "What do you want?" I said. "Why have you come looking for me? I do not have the money yet."

  "Got some good news for you on the money side of things, sweetheart," Daniel said. "Come with me now, no messing around, it has to be now, and do one little job, and everything's yours, for nothing. The best. Real national insurance card, birth certificate, and best of all a British passport. Real one, not a knock-off. Make you one of us."

  "A job?" I said. "What job? I am already working in a job."

  "Is that what you call this?" he said, looking around. "Must have been desperate, where you came from."

  "It was."

  "Yeah, anyway." He flicked hair from out of his eyes. "Some blokes I know, they need your services for the night. But we have to go now, or not at all."

  I shook my head, backed away, holding the mop handle out as if it would protect me.

  "Didn't put that well, did I?" He laughed but he was nervous, I could see it in the way that he shifted from foot to foot, and looked up at the clock more often than Alan did. "It's not what you think, sweetheart, I'm not a pimp. It's your medical skills, not your body, they're after. But you have approximately, oh, no seconds at all to make up your mind. I mean it, there's a car outside, you come now, do this little job, you get the papers, the works, make you more legal than the queen."

  "What do you mean, medical skills? I was only a student, I—"

  "Two minutes," he said. "Up to you." The door banged behind him, and he was gone into the night. I stood for a moment, watching the floor dry to a dull smear. Then I walked out into the kitchen and told Peter that I was sick, I had to go home.

  "Sick? What the hell do you mean sick?"

  "I mean vomiting. I think I have a stomach illness. There is diarrhoea too, I think, I need to go very bad."

  "Jesus, I don't want to hear about that. Don't want to catch it either. You're lucky it's a Tuesday. If this had been the weekend you'd have just had to put a cork in it. Go on then, before you give it to me. I'll dock your wages though Anna, if you're not here you're not earning."

  Daniel was waiting in a dark blue car, talking on a mobile phone. When I came near he finished the call, and opened the passenger door.

  "Good girl, darling. You've just saved my life. Told 'em y
ou were coming, had faith in you."

  I got in, and he drove away fast. I asked where we were going. He didn't say anything, didn't even turn to look at me. I did not see the point in asking any more questions, because I knew that they would not be answered. We drove through the blank night face of the city until we reached a quiet street of old houses. They had once been grand, I think, but now next to the front door of each was a rash of bell pushes that showed how the houses had been divided and divided and divided, and the sagging curtains at the windows looked as if they would remain drawn all day.

  "Here we are," said Daniel, and I could hear the tension in his voice.

  "Here we are for what?" I said, but I knew that it was too late to ask the question. Whatever I was here to do, I would have to do. I felt sick.

  Daniel did not answer, he just got out of the car, then walked around to my door and waited for me to get out.

  "This one," he said, and we walked up the path to one of the houses. Daniel opened the front door and I followed him in. The hallway was dim, lit by a single dusty bulb that hung without a shade. A table inside the door was a mess of free newspapers and junk mail. Above the table was a pay phone, and someone had patterned a halo of cigarette burns on the wall around it. Daniel walked up the stairs, and I followed him. I could smell burnt food, and cigarette smoke, and sweat. We stopped on the first floor, and Daniel paused in front of a wooden door that was all pits and splinters.