Bombproof (9 page)

That’s when he wakes up and looks down. Sees her tousled blonde hair. She crawls up the bed, straddling his chest, rocking her hips back and forth.

She eases back, squats over him, takes him inside. He can see their reflection in the mirror. Sami looks twice to make sure it’s him. Surely he must be in heaven. He’s lying on Egyptian cotton sheets in one of the most expensive hotel suites in London, being screwed by a girl he’s fantasised about for more nights than he can remember. Kate Tierney. No longer a wet dream. A reality.

Later, as they’re lying in bed, they talk about old times, about the past couple of years. She wants to know all about prison, the nitty gritty, the violence, the gangs. Kate seems to get off on all those men being in the one place. Sexually frustrated men. Unfulfilled. Violent.

Sami doesn’t need much time to recover. Kate gets on all fours and says, ‘Show me how they do it in prison.’

Prison sex normally involves a left hand and a bartered copy of Big Jugs magazine but Sami thinks her version is a lot more interesting.

They cuddle afterwards. It’s nice. They know stuff about each other. Sami remembers the details of her letters. He knows about her brothers and her father losing his job and how they always spend Christmas in Scotland with relatives. She wrote about ordinary run-of-the-mill stuff, but Sami loved reading about it. It made him feel normal or at least that one day his life could be normal.

At six the next morning he’s out of the Savoy the way he came in, smelling of sex and tasting Kate on his lips. Sami buys a coffee from a kiosk near Embankment Tube. Sits on a bench in Victoria Gardens. Makes his plans for the day. The wind comes off the river and tugs at the coats of commuters leaving the station.

Tony Murphy denied any knowledge of Nadia, but he could have been lying. Toby Streak was too frightened to be telling lies. So what does he do next?

He takes a crumpled piece of paper from his pocket and smooths it on his knee. The name and number are written in pencil. Vincent Ruiz. Sounds foreign.

Sami looks at his watch. It’s gone seven. He flips open his phone and punches the number. Gets an answering machine.

‘Hello, ah, this is Sami Macbeth. You don’t know me. I’m, ah, looking for my sister, Nadia. Ms Wallace, my probation officer, said you might be able to help me. You can call me on this number … if you’re interested.’

Sami can’t think of anything else to say. He hangs up and buys another coffee. Contemplates a doughnut. Suddenly, his mobile beeps and he glances at the screen. It’s Nadia’s number. His heart flip-flops in his chest like a landed fish. Hot coffee spills over his fingertips. He opens the handset.

Two words and an address, that’s all she sends him.

Meet me
, is the message. It’s not an explanation. Not an apology.

The address is in the East End. Sami hits redial. Waits. The number rings out. Why is she playing games with him?

14

Sami emerges from Whitechapel Underground and studies a map on the wall beside the ticket office. He played his first pub gig not far from here - in the basement of the White Hart, with a band called Raw Liver.

The venue was so small and PA so large, it was noisier than the Blitz according to the locals, who called the police and tried to have the gig stopped. That’s what young bands do - make bold statements, argued Sami. Raw Liver seemed to be saying, ‘We might not be as good as the Stones, but we’re louder.’

He walks the last half-mile to the address. The place looks like a fortress with barbed wire on the rooftops, metal shutters, broken windows and a graffiti paintjob.

Sami is feeling double uneasy. This reeks of a set-up. Why is Nadia’s mobile still turned off? He looks at the message again … tries to read between the words.

Most of the flats don’t have numbers. Some of them don’t have doors. Sami finds the right one by a process of elimination. Second floor, third one along, with a patched plywood door and ‘Fuck off’ scrawled across it.

Sami knocks. Nobody answers. He tries again and then calls through the remnants of the mailbox.

Someone is coming.

A black rasta opens the door, with beads clacking. Levi’s sit low on his hips and his tight-fitting red T-shirt has a picture of Bob Marley in full voice.

‘What’s up, mon?’ he asks.

‘I’m looking for Nadia.’

‘What took you so long? She been waiting,’ he says in a singsong voice.

‘Who are you?’

‘Puffa.’

Sami walks through the kitchen. The sink is overflowing with takeaway tins and garbage. No way Nadia is living in a place like this. There’s a chicken sticking out of the plughole. Why in fuck’s name did someone try to shove a chicken down the drain?

Next comes the lounge or maybe it’s a bedroom. The floor is littered with punctured cans, pipes, cones, tin foil, burnt spoons, needles, tourniquets, half-filled bottles of water and wedges of lemon. It’s a drug den, a crack house.

The room is dark. There are two bodies sleeping on bean-bags and two more curled up on a mattress. Sami listens to make sure they’re breathing. You got to be careful around junkies. They get paranoid. Psychotic.

Puffa has disappeared. He was here a moment ago. Sami moves along a corridor past another filthy room. Empty. Reeking. He opens the next door with his elbow. The smell hits him first. It’s like something died weeks ago and nobody bothered giving it a decent burial.

Puffa is near the window.

The curtains open. The brightness is like an explosion.

Sami spots the baseball bat but sees it too late. He tries to duck and the bat bounces off the top of his head. Pain explodes and his brain washes from one side of his skull to the other.

The next blow almost breaks across his back. He drops to his knees in a world of hurt and tries to crawl away but the bat keeps hitting him, bouncing off his neck, his shoulders, his lower back …

Sami is doubled over and vomiting. Fingers lace in his hair and slam his head forward onto a raised knee. His bottom lip bursts against his teeth. Blood leaks into his mouth.

He doesn’t want to fight. He doesn’t want to get up. He just wants the beating to stop.

Someone drags him up. Sits him in a chair. Hits him again. Sami’s head flies off at a different angle. The room goes dark. Drops away. Disappears.

Sometime later he sees a blurred light and the air swims for a moment before things come into focus. Nadia is curled at his feet, resting her head on his lap. She’s wearing only jeans and a bra.

Sami wants to stroke her hair but his arms are tied behind his back. Bound to a chair. Blood and saliva stain his shirt.

Nadia turns her head. ‘I’m so sorry, baby,’ she whispers, stroking his cheek. Weightless and brittle, her eyes are black rimmed and cavernous.

Sami’s mouth is taped. He can’t answer.

He scans the room, looking for a way out. It has a wardrobe, a soiled mattress and two armchairs worn thin by squirming arses. A dirty brown blanket lies curled on the floor. Everything is brown - brown walls, brown carpet, brown furniture.

The door opens. Nadia stands. She smiles at Puffa, who sways into the room like he’s on a catwalk. No way this emaciated crackhead beat Sami up. He must have had help.

Nadia becomes someone different. She wraps her arms around Puffa’s neck. Squeezes her thighs around his leg.

‘Have you got something for baby?’ she purrs. ‘Baby needs her medicine.’

Puffa grins with a gob full of gold.

‘First you got to dance for me, princess. Show me how much you want it.’

Nadia hesitates. ‘Don’t make me do it now.’

‘What’s wrong?’

‘Not in front of my brother.’

Puffa shakes his head. His dreadlocks swing. ‘How bad you want to ride the dragon?’

‘Please.’

‘Come on, princess, just one dance. Show Sami how much you love the dragon.’

Nadia is about to cry. She pleads with him again.

‘First you dance,’ he says.

And she does, holding her arms above her head, rolling her hips in long slow circles. Her eyes are closed. Tears of shame glisten on her cheeks.

Puffa isn’t watching her. He’s looking at Sami. He pushes his face close.

‘Do you know what crack is, mon?’ He holds up a small yellow stone between his thumb and forefinger. ‘It’s the devil’s sputum.’

Sami can feel his face burning and his skin crawling. He wants to cry. He wants to go home. He doesn’t want to play anymore. Puffa sits cross-legged in front of Sami, so he can watch what he’s doing. Nadia is watching too, as she dances. Pale. Beautiful. Ugly.

Puffa burns a cigarette and collects the ash, putting it in a makeshift pipe fashioned from a mini whisky bottle, chewing gum, a rubber band and foil. He flattens the ash in the pipe and nestles the crack on top.

He signals Nadia. She drops to her knees like a dog begging for food or waiting for a scrap to fall from the table. She’s hooked. Taken. Spoken for.

Sami wants to yell at her. He raises his feet a few inches from the floor and stamps them down, making the chair jump.

Nadia turns. Sami pleads with his eyes.

‘I need to do this,’ she says.

Sami stamps his feet again.

Puffa laughs. ‘She doesn’t love you any more, mon. She loves the rock. She loves the rockman.’

Sami tries to launch himself out of the chair. The bindings hold him back.

‘Cool it bro, you got to chill,’ says Puffa, as he holds the pipe towards Nadia and turns the lighter upside down. A bubbling crackling sound fills the room and smoke as white as cotton wool is trapped in the glass.

Nadia inhales. Her cheeks puff out. Her eyes shut. Her head lolls back. She tries to hold the smoke in her mouth and then swallow it bit by bit, holding it in her lungs for a minute or more until it seems as though she might pass out if she doesn’t exhale.

Nadia looks at Sami and smiles. It’s not her normal, beautiful, radiant smile. It’s a chemical reaction. Opiate-induced. Her pupils are dilated. Her hands are twitching. She’s blissful. Ecstatic. She’s gone now. In another place.

Puffa chuckles. ‘Don’t she just love the dragon.’

Sami’s head is spinning. The pain makes it hard to frame questions, let alone answers. He can see the pulse beating in Nadia’s neck and the flaring of her nostrils.

She’s started to come down. It’s not like falling off a cliff. It’s like the walls of paradise are nothing but stucco façades and behind them lie ugliness, anxiety, despair …

‘The devil does it every time,’ says Puffa. ‘He tricks you. Makes you believe you’re in heaven, but when you’ve signed up, when you’ve taken the pledge, when you’ve hocked your soul, he shows you the gates of hell and says, “Don’t believe the brochures, mon”.’

Nadia is clawing at the skin on her forearms and whimpering like a frightened child in the biggest, darkest haunted house imaginable.

Sami looks at Puffa. Pleads with his eyes. He has to give her something. Make her better.

Puffa takes a tablet from his pocket. ‘It’s Valium,’ he explains. ‘It will help her come down.’

Puffa peels the wrapper off a chocolate bar and takes a bite. His eyes have a liquid sheen as he looks at Nadia proudly, as though his work here is done.

After ten minutes, she’s calm.

‘I need another pipe,’ she says.

‘Ain’t got no more rock.’

‘But I need some, baby.’

‘Maybe I dropped some on the floor.’

Nadia doesn’t hesitate. She’s on all fours, looking for crumbs of crack on the stained rug or between the floorboards, trying to force the wooden planks apart with her fingernails. She’s not Sami’s sister any more. Not the one he remembers. She’s a ghost. She’s a crack whore.

The air pressure changes slightly. A door has opened and someone is standing behind Sami. Puffa isn’t smiling any more. He opens his mouth to say something, but no words come out because a fist is squeezing his throat trying to narrow his neck size.

Puffa is scrabbling on his toes, but he can’t get traction. Whoever has hold of his throat is ‘walking’ him outside. Meanwhile, Nadia has stopped looking for crack and is curled up in the corner, rocking gently, trying to make herself small.

Sami calls out but the gag muffles his voice. He wants Nadia to untie him. They can get away. He bounces on the chair and almost topples backwards.

Someone moves behind him and a voice whispers, pronouncing every syllable in a Scottish accent.

‘You’re taking a wee trip, Mr Macbeth. It’s not the same sort of trip as your sister. Don’t resist and you won’t get hurt.’

Sami catches a whiff of the cologne and remembers smelling it before at Tony Murphy’s restaurant. Dessie Fraser was wearing aftershave. Maybe he was the one who bounced the bat off Sami’s head.

Oddly enough Sami feels relieved. Safer. Drugsters like Puffa see monsters in their Rice Krispies. At least Dessie is a professional. If he’d wanted to kill Sami he’d be dead already, despatched, gonski.

Sami takes a journey in a car boot. The darkness is oddly reassuring. He can feel the sides of the boot and smell the nylon carpet and spare wheel.

Nadia would have hated a ride like this. She would have panicked at the darkness and the enclosed space.

Even after thirteen years she still has nightmares. She hates wet nights. Swollen rivers. Drunk drivers. Narrow bridges. Nadia was in the front seat of the car. Sami in the back - just turned fifteen. Their father had been drinking at a casino in Brighton and had left them sleeping in the car. He woke them at 2.00 a.m., drunk, but determined to drive back to a cottage they were renting for the holidays.

The car demolished a crash barrier on the approach to a bridge, landing upside down in the water. The windows were open. It sank within seconds.

Douglas Macbeth was pinned by one leg behind the steering wheel, but he twisted his body so he could hold Nadia, pushing her face into the shrinking bubble of air. Sami tried to open the rear doors, but they were locked. Finally, he pulled one open. Grabbed Nadia. Scissored his legs to the surface.

They fought the current as it dragged them away, unable to go back. Swallowing water. Spluttering. Sucking air.