The Girl Who Wouldn’t Die (20 page)

Later, after Ella had done her shift with Tonya and Big Michelle selling dope, Special K and Miaow Miaow to the kids in the tower blocks, who were hoping for weekend respite from reality, Ella found herself sitting alone on the swings in the local park.

Danny, who had become more concerned with buying weight of anything he could get his hands on than with the childish smashing of windows for fun, was off ‘on business’. Ella had excused herself from going drinking with Tonya and Big Michelle. The novelty of sensory overload was wearing thin after eight months. She wanted to think things through in silence. Chew over her plans and take stock of where her involvement with Danny and the others was taking her.

It was a bitter night. She clutched her Puffa jacket close to her body and watched the smoke of her breath in the moonlight.

I don’t want to go back. I can’t face another row. I’m being torn apart from all sides.

She looked up at the moon’s purifying glow and felt like she wanted to tell it her secrets.

I’ve got to get out of this, moon. Give the police what they need and get out of all of it. Danny, Letitia. The lot. The Gargoyle said he would make that happen. I can do this. I can see it through. I’m strong. I got my GCSE grades. I’ve just got to keep it going a bit longer and get my A levels. I can’t fuck up. I won’t fuck up. I’m going to make this happen, moon. I swear to you. I’m getting out of here.

‘All right, Ella?’ a nasal voice said from the opposite side of the small park.

Ella’s breathing came fast and short. She peered into the shadows to see who the voice belonged to but she already knew.

‘Jez! I thought you was with Danny.’

‘Nah. I had to sort out some scamming junkie grass but I’m finished now.’

As Jez stepped out of the shadows and into the moonlight, Ella shuddered. She didn’t want to think about what sorting out a scamming junkie grass entailed. Actually, she did.

‘What did you do?’

‘Gave him a little poke in the eye with a hot iron. I thought it would make a cool popping sound but it didn’t. Wasn’t as good as I’d hoped.’

Ella’s stomach churned. She was a police informant. What would Jez do to her if he knew about the Gargoyle and their cosy little meets in his car?

‘Can I sit with you?’ Jez asked.

No! Go away, you freak
. Ella nodded. ‘Yeah. Sure.’ Smiling weakly. Showing just enough enthusiasm.

He chose the swing next to her and sat down. He pulled a packet of cigarettes out of his Puffa jacket pocket and offered her one, which she accepted. Then he produced a Zippo lighter from his jeans pocket. He clicked the lid open, flipped the wheel. The lighter became a beacon of flame in the night.

‘You always overfill it!’ she said. ‘How do you not burn yourself?’

Jez laughed. His face was illuminated as he lit his cigarette and hers. He was not unattractive but there was a cruelty and absence of conscience behind his deep-set, black eyes. Worse than Danny even. Danny gave the orders but Jez executed them with vigour and almost evangelistic joy. He was a sadist. Everybody could see it. Ella, especially.

‘I do burn myself,’ he said. ‘All the time.’

‘So why overfill it?’

‘Like you need to ask?’ He extinguished the lighter and reignited the six-inch torch of yellow fire. He waved it in front of her face.

Ella could feel the heat and leaned back on the swing.

‘It’s beautiful,’ he said. ‘And I like the pain. It gives me back control; order out of chaos.’

Without hesitation or need for a second opinion, Ella diagnosed Jez as deranged.
God, get me out of here fast.
‘I never had you down as some philosophical geez, Jez.’

‘Yeah well. Lots you don’t know about me. Lots I don’t know about you, innit?’

Ella figured, he was just like any other boy.
He liked the sound of his own voice. She would let him speak for five minutes, make her excuses and go.

‘Go on then, Jez. Tell me about how you come to be tangled up in our little gang. You got five minutes and then I gotta get back, yeah?’

Jez smiled at Ella and started to swing gently. The metallic creak and clang of the swing as it moved back and forth made Ella’s teeth jar.

‘I wasn’t always from round here,’ he said. ‘I lived round the way. Fucking Millwall territory, man!’

‘You like from some family full of skinhead nutters?’

Jez ran the flame of his lighter up and down the steel chain of the swing and then snapped the Zippo shut. ‘My mum’s side of the family are proper BNP, English Defence League and all that shit. But my dad … My granddad went mental when Mum got up the duff with me.’

‘How come?’

‘My dad’s a Saudi.’

George looked at his black hair and black eyes. Foiled by the pale, slightly freckled skin of a Celt. She had never had him down as mixed race.

‘Bringing up an Arab’s kid in white Bermondsey, man. Imagine.’

‘Jesus,’ Ella said, nodding. ‘Must have been tough. Was your mum and dad married?’

‘’Course not. Dad was already married with a proper family near Marble Arch. Respectable councillor or some shit. Had a big electricals business too. Came round at the weekends and taught me a bit of Arabic and the Qur’an when Granddad was out at a footy match. I think the word for it is clandestine.’

Ella looked at Jez with a degree of surprise. It had not occurred to her that he had the intellectual capacity to learn English properly, let alone Arabic. She hooked her arms around the swings and looked at his bow-shaped lips, as he sucked on his cigarette. Hidden depths.

‘So why did yous move here, then? Was it to get away from—’

‘Dad’s proper family found out about Mum and me when I was about nine or ten. Went fucking ape. I’m getting earache off Granddad about blacks and Pakis and how I’m not one of ’em, so that’s okay. And I’m getting big time rejection off my dad suddenly, who don’t want to know his love child no more.’

‘Did your mum just want to start fresh?’

Jez looked at her with intense black eyes and laughed. ‘No, man! I set the fucking house on fire.’ He laughed heartily and threw his head back so he was looking right at the full moon.

A werewolf of a boy. A feral, half-human mistake made from bits of skin with an incomplete heart. Or perhaps this was just a superficial veneer of his own making, concealing the hurt beneath.

‘That was the best, yeah? I’d been messing around with fire and stuff anyway. And I get this idea when Dad’s round and him and Mum are screaming at each other and that … you gonna love this … if I set fire to the house, it’s gonna make everything all right. Dad will rescue us and show he cares and everything will get back to normal.’

‘And what happened?’

‘It worked. He ran upstairs and rescued me, just like I planned. So that means he loves me, don’t it?’

‘But you moved.’

‘Yeah, well the house burned to the ground, didn’t it? Council shifted us here.’

‘And your dad?’

‘Fire investigator worked out I started the fire, didn’t he? So Dad says I’m a fucking head case and that’s the last we seen of the bastard.’

Ella succumbed to the sudden wave of sympathy that washed over her. She reached out to pat his hand. But then, the momentary lowering of her defences betrayed her.

‘Will you go out with me?’ Jez asked. ‘We could go see a film.’

Jez obviously thought that in telling her his story, he had broken through an unspoken barrier.

‘I’m one of Danny’s girls,’ she said. At that moment, she wished more than anything that Danny was there to put a territorial arm around her. To save her from having to salvage a happy ending to this squeamish proposition from a boy who delighted in cruelty.

Jez stood and put his face right up to hers. She could feel his breath on her nose. ‘
Well, fuck you!
’ he growled, rattling the chains of her swing violently.

Terror thumped Ella in the gut so hard, she felt like she had been wounded by a sawn-off shotgun. She gripped the swing, forcing herself to stay utterly cool and unruffled on the surface. She breathed hard through her nostrils, keeping her lips tightly shut. Was he going to hit her? No.

Jez took two steps backwards and started to point and laugh at her. ‘Got you!’

At that point, Ella prayed for the big job to be on, just so it could all be over.

At ten past four, Ad stood beneath the departures board with a thumping heart. His tinnitus ears registered their protest at the abstract chatter of animated voices, the hurried clacking of heels and the tooth-jangling squeak of trainers on a hard floor. Tourists and weekend travellers lugged heavy bags to their onward destinations like reluctant old turtles carrying oversized shells. It wasn’t quite time for rush-hour mayhem but Amsterdam Central Station was busy enough to heighten Ad’s anxiety.

He felt lightheaded – a feeling only worsened by the Diet Coke that he was drinking. He kept visualising the cook’s knife in his bag that George had insisted he conceal there. If he was stopped by the police, he would have some explaining to do.

Klaus appeared at precisely the right time. He carried a large, leather-trimmed weekend bag and a long rectangular hard case that looked like it might contain a snooker cue. He wore stone-coloured chinos. Beneath an unbuttoned brown overcoat, which had the expensive sheen of cashmere and pin-stitching on the edges of the collar, Klaus wore a crisp white shirt with a pale blue silk tie and a navy wool blazer with brass buttons. Only his brown moccasins looked a little well-worn, but Ad could see they were leather-soled and probably hand-lasted, judging by the rest of his attire. Klaus looked like a count’s son. His face was flushed pink. This gave his very blond hair the appearance of being slightly green-tinged.

‘Hello, Ad. We’re on time.’ Klaus clasped Ad’s hand into a formal handshake which revealed a Longines watch and the cufflinks of an older man.

‘What’s in the case?’ Ad asked.

‘My sword,’ Klaus said.

Ad dropped the bottle of Coke on the floor as his trembling fingers refused to play ball. The contents exploded into coffee-coloured foam and covered the toes of Ad’s best shoes. He followed Klaus to the platform, already feeling at a disadvantage.

‘So, was Joachim your best friend then?’ he asked Klaus once the train had pulled away from Amsterdam. It started to rock and roll through the ugly grey outskirts of Amstel, picking up speed as it shot out into the flat green quilt of the surrounding countryside.

Klaus rubbed his scarred cheek. His blue eyes wandered to the scenery, as though he were consulting the fields and wind turbines for a response. ‘No. But we were bound together by our experiences here and because we are, I mean,
were
both members of the same duelling fraternity.’ Klaus turned to focus on Ad. He put his hands behind his head and looked down his straight nose at him. ‘What happened with you and the English girl?’

Underneath the table, Ad gripped his knees. ‘We were never really that friendly. She hung out with me for the first term and I enjoyed practising my English sometimes. Then we had a big argument. I think she was jealous of my girlfriend, so we’re not speaking now. We don’t really see eye to eye.’

Klaus yawned, showing a mouth full of strong-looking teeth. ‘They are culturally too different from us. And I’m not surprised she was jealous of your girlfriend. Astrid is a rare beauty.’

Although he knew that eulogising about the blonde-haired, blue-eyed Astrid might curry favour with Klaus, Ad was keen to divert the conversation away from her now. He felt as if using her as leverage to find out more about this potentially dangerous man was an abuse of her trust in him. It was bad enough that he was falling out of—

What would George do? She would turn the tables on Klaus.

‘Do
you
have anyone special?’

Klaus laughed. ‘I’m too busy at the moment. I’m committed to a political cause, actually. And to my studies.’

‘What kind of cause?’

‘I’m involved in the National Democratic Party of Germany.’

Ad already knew what kind of party the NDP was but prompted Klaus to explain it to him anyway. He kept the demeanour of someone politely interested.

‘It’s an alternative to the CDU,’ Klaus said, ‘with … er … an emphasis on preserving Germany’s traditions and a German’s right to first dibs on employment.’

‘Preserving traditions?’

‘More cultural identity really.’

‘Whose cultural identity?’ Ad could feel himself interrogating Klaus. He didn’t want to put him on edge. He wanted to tease information out of him.

Klaus smiled an easy smile. ‘Why, true Germans of course,’ he said. Then his expression became serious and he lowered his voice. ‘And I’m telling you this because I’ve met your girlfriend and I think I understand you a bit better now.’ He winked at Ad.

Ad squashed the urge to bark with laughter.
This guy is an upper-class simpleton. He’s made sweeping assumptions from a five-minute encounter with a blonde girl.
‘Is this a family thing then? Your political leanings, I mean.’

Chuckling and another glance out of the window. ‘You must be joking. My father’s a major backer of the CDU. I got interested in the NDP just to piss him off! I’m the prodigal son.’

Klaus hoisted his weekend bag from the seat next to him onto the table and pulled out a packet of crisps. He offered one to Ad, who accepted and silently berated himself for breaking bread with a fascist. He had to remind himself that George had sanctioned this weekend. Then, feeling like he didn’t want to be obligated to Klaus for anything, Ad took out from an Albert Heijn bag the pile of ham sandwiches he had made at home for the journey and carefully wrapped in foil. He reluctantly offered one to Klaus, which Klaus accepted with a facial expression that betrayed he would have preferred something more expensive and sealed in plastic. Ad was convinced that Klaus probably didn’t even know what a savings coupon looked like.

‘Are all your friends involved in this nationalist politics thing?’

‘No, not in the slightest. Well, one or two are. We’re not exactly popular.’