26

Milton walked out of the police station with Elijah behind him. He looked out into the street. It was a hot night, broiling, and even though it was coming around to four in the morning there were still people about. The atmosphere was drunken and aggressive. Men looked at them as they passed, assuming that a white man on the steps of a police station must be a detective. There was contempt in their faces, violence behind their sleepy, hooded eyes. Milton had called a taxi while he was waiting for Elijah to be processed and it was waiting for them by the kerb. He opened the rear door for Elijah and then slid in next to him. He gave the driver the address for Blissett House and settled back as they pulled into the traffic.

He looked across at the boy. He had the downy moustache and acne of a teenager, but there was a hardness in his face. His eyes were fixed straight ahead and his face was set, trying to appear impassive, but his hands betrayed him; they fluttered in his lap, picking at his nails and at swatches of dead skin.

“You know you’re in trouble, Elijah.”

He did not reply, but the fidgeting got worse.

“Let me help you.”

When he finally spoke, it was quiet and quick, as if he did not want the taxi driver to overhear him. “You ain’t police?”

“No.”

“You swear it?”

“I’m not the police. You can trust me, and I want to help. What’s the problem?”

Still he was not convinced. “Why you want to help us? What’s in it for you?”

“It’s a long story.”

“I ain’t saying nothing unless you tell me why.”

Milton thought for a moment about what to say. “I’ve done some things in my life that I’m not proud of,” he said carefully. “I’m trying to make up for them. That good enough for you?”

“What kind of things?”

“Bad things,” Milton said. “That’s enough for now. This is about you, not me.”

Elijah looked down at his lap. Eventually, the residual fear of his situation defeated his bravado, the reluctance to admit that he needed help, and the fear of what might happen to him if the others discovered that he had spoken out of turn. “Alright,” he said. “Last night. I was there. I saw what happened.”

Milton told him to explain. Elijah spoke quietly and quickly.

“Who had the gun?”

“Me. Bizness gave it to me last week, told me to keep it for him until he needed it. You need heat, right, with our rep? You get a beef, like we had with Wiley and his crew, you don’t have a blammer, you done for. Finished.”

“Who’s Wiley?”

“This rapper. He’s been dissing Bizness. He had to make an example, man. Can’t have that kind of nonsense going on, YouTube and everything. Bad for business. Bad for your rep.”

“You gave the gun to him?”

“Nah, man. I had it. He wanted me to do it myself.”

“And?”

“I didn’t know what to do. I started walking over towards where this fight had started, Bizness and Wiley were going at it, I put my hand in my bag, the gun was there, and then the next thing I know Pops has come over to me, grabbed my arm and told me to breeze. I did — went straight home.”

“Did you tell the police you had the gun?”

He looked indignant. “I didn’t tell them shit.”

That was good, Milton thought. The boy was hanging on by his fingertips, but he still had a future. “This Bizness. Who is he?”

Elijah looked at him with a moment’s incredulity before remembering that Milton was older, and naïve, and that there was no reason why he would have heard of him. “Risky Bizness. He runs things around here. He’s been in the LFB for years, since he was a younger, like me. He’s one of the real OGs.”

“One of the what?”

“Original Gangsters, man. He’s got himself involved with everything — the shotters sell the gear and pass the paper up to the Elders and the Elders pass it up to the Faces like Bizness. He makes mad Ps. He built himself a record studio out of it and now he’s got himself a record deal. He’s famous on top of everything. He’s a legend, innit?”

“What’s his real name?”

Elijah shrugged. “Dunno. I’ve never heard no-one call him anything but Bizness.”

The taxi turned into the road that led towards Blissett House. Milton told the driver to pull over. He guessed that Elijah would prefer not to be seen getting out of a cab with him and he saw, from the look of relief on his face, that he had been right.

“Alright, Elijah,” he said. “This is what I want you to do. Go home to your mother. She’s beside herself with worry. Get to bed. Don’t answer your phone, particularly if it’s Bizness or any of the other boys in the gang. You need a little space between you and them at the moment. Do you hear me?”

“Yes,” he said. “What about the police?”

“I think that will be alright. I’ve given them my number. If anything comes up they’ll call me and we can take it from there. Now then — what did you do with the gun?”

“Dropped it in the canal.”

“Do you promise?”

“Yeah,” he said. “I don’t want nothing to do with it.”

“That’s good.” He reached over and opened the door. “Go on, then. We’ll let this blow over.”

“And then?”

“I’ve got something for you I think you might enjoy. Meet me in the café in the morning. Nine o’clock. Bring your sports kit from school.”

“Nine? That’s, like, just five hours. When am I gonna get some sleep?”

“You can sleep afterwards. Nine o’ clock, Elijah. I’ve got something for you to do that you’re going to be good at.”

PART THREE

Strapped

Laughter, and then something else. A low drone. His stomach knotted. No. The plane was still a dot on the horizon but it was closing quickly. Beneath the radar. A Warthog, onion-shaped bombs hanging beneath its wings. He threw his rifle aside and scrambled down the escarpment, the loose sand sliding down with him, his boots struggling for purchase, failing, and he was tumbling down the last few metres, landing at the bottom with a heavy thump that drove the air from his lungs. He got to his knees and then to his feet, his boots skidding off the dirt and scrub as he pushed off, his arm sinking down to the wrist as he tried to keep upright. He ran towards the village. Five hundred yards, four hundred. The sound of the Warthog’s engines was louder now; it was coming in low, a thousand feet up, not rushing, the pilot taking his time. Three hundred. He ran, boots sinking up to the laces with each step, thighs pumping until they burned. He gasped in and out, his lungs so full of the scorched air that he felt like they were alight. Two hundred. He was close enough to yell out now and he did, screaming that they had to take cover, that they had to get inside. One hundred, and he was close enough to see the faces of the children outside the madrasa. The cheap plastic ball had sailed in his direction and he could see the confusion and fear in the face of the boy who had been sent to fetch it. Five years old? Surely no older. He yelled at him to get down but it was too late, it had always been too late, it would not have mattered if he had been able to get to them sooner, the decision had already been taken. The Warthog’s engines boomed. The boy turned away from him to face it. The ball rolled away on the breeze. A blinding flash of white light. The deafening crack of a terrible explosion. He was picked up and thrown back twenty feet in the direction that he had come. He was slammed down onto the ground by a bolt of hot air which dented his cheeks and stomach as if they had been made of paper. A second and third explosion seemed to bend the world of its axis, the noise blending from a roar into a continuous, high-pitched whine. He lay, staring up into the sun, while the air around him seemed to vibrate as if someone had smashed a cello with a sledgehammer. He rolled over and pushed his head up, working his arm around until he could prop himself against his elbow. A ghastly rain of pieces of flesh and blood soaked clothing fell onto him and all around him. Then bits of rubble and metal. Above, slowly unfurling, was a dark cloud of black smoke that rose and shifted until it had obscured the sun. He smelt burning flesh and the unmistakeable acrid tang of high explosive. His hearing resolved as the Warthog swooped over and away. He pushed himself up until he was on his knees. A huge crater was in the centre of the village. The launcher was gone. The madrasa was gone. The children were gone, too, or so he would have thought until his eyes tracked around to the right and he saw red splashes of colour on the ground and glistening red ribbons of flesh suspended from the bare branches of a nearby tree.