Inside Straight (26 page)

He looked across at me. He grinned and waggled his eyebrows. "Fun, eh?"

I smiled and told him it was, but I was scared. I didn't know what he was going to do. He knew who'd been nicking his papers. Great. But how far was he going to take this? He'd already used a word I'd never heard him use before, so what else did he have in mind?

We followed the Cavalier for a while. I didn't think that they knew we were behind them. If they did, they didn't care. And in hindsight, I didn't know why they should've cared. What was the worst that could happen? There were clearly two of them against two of us, and I wasn't going to do any fighting, was I?

A bit further and my dad started nodding. "I knew it. I knew it as soon as I fuckin' saw them."

He swore. My dad never swore. I couldn't understand it.

It was a corner shop. The word SINGH above the door. I'd heard him talking to my mum about them before. They weren't members of the Federation, which meant they were outcasts, as good as pirates. I watched my dad watching them. He was still nodding. I didn't know what he was going to do, but I saw him wanting to do something. His hands were tight to the wheel, the knuckles pale. He was blinking a lot. He told me a story once about how one of his Federation mates who lived above his shop heard someone breaking into his place one night. He went down with the axe he kept under his bed and broke the guy's head open. He put the burglar in hospital and the police let him off with a warning. Told him he shouldn't be keeping an axe under his bed – one day he'd split the wrong skull. The guy agreed and swapped out the axe for a length of chain. When my dad told that story, there was always this wistful look on his face, like he wished it'd been him, but my mum wouldn't let him keep weapons in the bedroom.

"Okay, alright." He seemed to be steeling himself. "Okay."

"Dad?"

"Not now." He undid his seatbelt. "Just stay here, alright?"

I nodded. I didn't want him to go. I didn't want whoever it was in there, Mr Singh, I didn't want him hurt because he was stupid enough to steal our papers. I wanted to say something to make my dad stay in the car, but it was already too late. He was up and out before I could even finish the thought. I watched him stride over to the corner shop. The front door stood ajar, even though the shop wasn't open for business.

He went in. I watched the doorway.

I heard someone talking inside the shop. Then the talking turned to shouting, and nobody was shouting louder than the Asian bloke, except I couldn't make out what he was saying. I heard my dad's voice in there somewhere, but he was the one being shouted at, and he had a weird tone in his voice, like he was apologising, and suddenly I felt sick.

Dad burst out of the shop shortly afterwards. He was followed by a large Asian bloke in one of those Asian dresses. He had a white beard, but no moustache and he wore glasses that made his eyes seem massive, even at a distance. My dad hurried back to the car while this bloke screamed at him from the doorway.

My dad got into the car. He was breathing heavily. He looked at me and forced a smile. I wanted to ask what had happened, but he wasn't going to give me the truth so I kept quiet.

"Nothing to worry about." His voice was low, and it sounded as if he was talking to himself more than me. "We can still sort this out, don't you worry."

He started the engine, put the car into gear. Outside the Asian bloke was still shouting at him. He was using words I'd hear again later in life, words like
bhenchod
and
mahchod
, curses that were far more personal than the English language could manage. And if my dad didn't know what they meant exactly, he knew the disdain and hatred that peppered their pronunciation.

"You see, Graham, they're not a civilised people. That's the problem. You go in there with something to say, they'll shout you down. It's just the way they are." He moved a finger at me. "You listen to me, remember that. Way they're breeding, you'll probably have to deal with that lot in the future. Don't let their emotion put you off. They'll try and scare you to get what they want. They're just like animals."

And with that, he reversed at speed, just as Mr Singh threatened to step towards us. Dad turned the car round and pointed it back the way we'd come, and set to driving in that direction with a fierce determination on his face, albeit one with intermittent glances in the rear view to see if we were being followed.

"There are ways and means." His voice seemed more natural now. "Ways and means of dealing with everything. You don't catch a butterfly with a sledgehammer, do you?" We stopped at a junction. He checked for traffic and kept talking. "No, you don't. You go with a net. And it's the same with people. You'll know this already. There's no talking to some people. There's no respecting some people, either. I hate to say it – I mean, I like to think I can find the best in most people, and look at that rather than what they're showing me – but there are some people, Graham, that you just can't talk to. And those people are the ones you need to deal with in a different manner."

The lights changed. He held up a hand to let someone cross in front of him, then revved the engine as he barrelled into their wake.

"I mean, you might be wondering why I didn't just go in there and batter him. Are you?"

I opened my mouth, but I shook my head. I didn't know what to say. I had been wondering that, but I didn't want to ask it.

"Like one of those heroes, right? Go in there and show him who's boss. I know people who would've done that, but that's not me, Graham. I'm not going to go to prison for some thieving Paki bastard, and I would've gone to prison if I'd gone in there and been ... violent." He shook his head, moved his mouth. "No, I know people who would've done that and it just doesn't work. Like Terry, you know Terry? I mentioned him. He's the one keeps the axe under his bed."

I nodded.

"Well, he was lucky to get away with what he did. I mean, we laugh about it now, but there was a minute there when we thought Terry was going to prison for what he did to that burglar." He shook his head, his eyes wide, and he laughed. "I know, crazy, isn't it? Amazing. But that's the world we live in. And you have to abide by the laws of the land, Graham, no matter how stupid and unfair they happen to be."

I swallowed. I looked at my milk. I'd been holding it in both hands the entire time. It was warm. Bits of chocolate floated in the bottom.

"You have to do it. It's the way of things." He appeared to be looking for something now. "So it's not the right thing to do, going in there with your fists swinging, no matter how much you might want to do it." He smiled. "Here we are."

He pulled the Mazda over to the side of the road. I didn't know where we were. He turned in his seat. I noticed he wasn't wearing his seatbelt. That wasn't like him. He must've been in a hurry. Which meant he must've been afraid.

"You wait here." He looked out the back window. "You remember what their car looks like. If you see it, hit the horn."

I looked out of the back window too. I was scared. I didn't know why they'd be coming after us, but if my dad thought so, then they probably were.

"I won't be long."

He got out of the car and walked across the street to a phone box. I saw him go in, pull the door shut behind him, fumble for some change and then dial a number.

I looked behind me, waiting for the red Cavalier. There were no other cars on the street. If it turned up, I'd see it coming. I looked at the horn, then back at the window.

When Dad came back to the car, he was much more relaxed. He slammed the door and jarred my gaze away from the back window. "See anything?"

"No."

"Good." He put on his seatbelt and started the engine. "We're all finished."

And he drove us back to his shop, where we waited for the police to arrive. He'd grassed up Mr Singh and his friend, called it in while I was watching for the Cavalier. And while he was standing there spieling it out again for the uniform who took it down with no attempt to hide the boredom from his face, I saw my dad as the kind of man I promised myself I would never become. Because I wished he'd gone into that shop and slapped Mr Singh around. I wished he'd gone in there and left blood on the walls. Anything would be better than what I saw then, a mewling idiot grassing up a petty thief because he didn't have the nerve to take care of it himself.

I wouldn't be like him. I would fight my own battles. The police weren't his friend. The police didn't care. They had bigger fish to fry, and underhanded ways of going about it.

You had to be a man. You had to stand up for yourself.

I got up from my chair, where I'd been sitting since Kennedy left, and I looked around my flat, looking at exactly what he'd been examining not that long before. He'd surveyed this place and seen a child, a man stuck in adolescence, collecting toys and games and DVDs, a man with movie posters on his walls and Star Wars sheets on his bed. I looked around and I saw what he saw, and I realised that Jacqui Prince would never have come back with me, or stayed with me, or any of that, because I saw this place as the creepy little grief hole that it had always been.

I needed to change.

I went over to my shelf of action figures and sent every one of them to the floor. I pulled over the bookcase housing the DVDs – action and horror and sci-fi from my youth, and movies made in the last couple of years that played on and amplified that nostalgia. I kicked the DVR over, where I'd recorded hundreds of hours of
Doctor Who
and
Battlestar
and
Lost
and other shows that demanded I become invested in them or else miss out on interacting online with other people as desperately sad and grasping as me. I turned it all upside down, smashed what I could, screamed and yelled until I was exhausted. Then I sat on the end of the coffee table, staring down at a smashed sonic screwdriver.

What had I done with my life?

The answer came back quick enough:

Absolutely nothing.

I met Detective Inspector Kennedy at a Welcome Break between Junctions J25-26 on the M62. It was the kind of place where the car parks were packed with semi-articulated lorries driven by barely articulate men, and where long-haul hookers ended up with their brains hammered in. In short, it was the kind of place I usually kept away from, which made it a perfect rendezvous from Kennedy's point of view.

When I arrived, he was already there. He took me through to a carvery-style cafeteria, where the meat looked as if it had died of natural causes and the vegetables had wilted into one brown mess under the heat lamps. I bought a Club biscuit and a cup of hot chocolate that tasted like someone had dropped dog chocolate into coal ash and stirred some skimmed milk into it. Kennedy had a fried egg sandwich. The smell was enough to buckle my lips and the look of the thing made me keep my eyes on the few other customers in the place, all of whom appeared to share Kennedy's tastes.

We found a table in the corner, well away from the windows. I could keep an eye on the door. Kennedy didn't seem that bothered. "So then, you've had a think about what I told you?"

The plan was to get the money. On that front, Kennedy and I were in complete agreement. They needed the money as evidence and I needed it to make my getaway, but the trouble was that while Kennedy was keen on me picking up my cut, he was equally keen that I shouldn't see penny one. Without the money, they had hearsay. With the money and a captive witness, they had Pollard.

"Yes."

"And?"

"I'll do it. I mean, I'll
try
to do whatever you want me to. But he's not going to give me the money, is he? He already told me as much."

"That's where you need to get creative, Graham."

"I've been creative."

"You've tried to save your own hide, yes. But now you need to turn that creativity to a better end, know what I mean?"

"No, quite frankly, I don't. I don't see why I have to do any of this."

"Because otherwise, kid, you'll go to prison."

"For what?"

"For your part in a six-figure casino robbery."

"
Low
six figures."

"But six nonetheless."

"And what would that get me?"

Kennedy bit into the egg sandwich. Yolk leaked out of either side. He chewed a few times then shrugged. "What do you care? Prison's prison, Graham."

"I can do prison."

He laughed, spraying me with egg and saliva. I covered my hot chocolate and grabbed a paper napkin and started cleaning.

"I'm sorry, Graham. I really am. Jesus."

"It's alright." It wasn't.

He pointed at me. "You've still got a sense of humour, I'm glad to see that. You're going to need it, kid. I'll tell you—"

"Don't."

"What's that?"

"Don't call me kid, alright?" I balled the napkin in one fist. "I'm thirty-two."

"Yeah. Well. Whatever." The smile disappeared as he wiped his mouth. "You need to beg the man for your cut."

"I've done that already. I've called him, I even went round his house. You saw yourself how well that worked out."

"Maybe you can go to the toilet before you brace him this time."