Fortress

31

An eerie calm seemed to have settled over the town. He passed a petrol station. The pumps were covered up, the shop part gutted. There was no sign of the police this time. On the forecourt a pair of foxes battled it out over the contents of a discarded KFC box. He was irritated at having to leave London. Only one day into his new job and he had had to ask to be excused from a seminar they’d wanted him to attend at the LSE. But Pippa was full of understanding, as if he could do no wrong.

‘Of course, Sam! Family must come first. It’s a Party motto,’ she’d told him.

Not that he had let on what the family matter was: if they found out about Karza, it would be a disaster. He still didn’t quite know what to make of his important new role. He was glad of the money as well as the attention. It felt good to have a position and be listened to, though it was new to him to be trading on his background.

He rounded the corner at the bottom of his mother’s street. Part of him dreaded what Nasima would have to say, but he was looking forward to seeing her again. There was something intriguing about her — and she was the complete opposite of Helen. The brutally perfunctory way she had ditched him, the implication that he was the wrong race and religion, had stung him hard.

He heard the steps about ten metres behind. At first it felt like a good sound, that he wasn’t alone on these deserted streets. The cops had the place on lockdown so surely there was no need for alarm.

But an unmistakable clack clack said the steps were boots with metal tips. A sound that, as a kid, he had read as a warning: trouble.

‘Hey, it’s Kovacevic the Arsehole.’

His first thought was to ignore it. But that word, one he had hoped never to be called again, meant he had been recognized. And he knew from the voice who it was. The steps quickened; he felt a hand on his arm, breathed the smell of alcohol and weed. The street was deserted, with no sign of the police van that had been at the bottom of the hill. Right. He stopped and turned.

There was a look of furious indignation on Dink’s face. He was still small, but he had filled out, a mixture of workouts, steroids and making up for all the calories he’d missed out on as a kid. His pink shaven head seemed to rise out of his tattooed shoulders like a plug amid the flesh and muscle, his features crowded into the middle of his face, as if they’d been grafted on from a much smaller head. His disconcertingly full, feminine lips parted and Sam saw the straight white teeth of a man with money to burn on dentistry, and the ability to manage a drug habit, a sure sign that he had got where he wanted to be.

‘What’s in the bag, Arsehole?’

Although he was three years younger — in the same year as Karza — age had never inhibited Dink from taking on his elders. He had two others with him, half a foot taller at least, heavily muscled, their heads identically shaved. One had no eyebrows, which gave him a misleadingly babyish appearance. The other had an unusually narrow skull and slightly sloping eyes, more likely a legacy of foetal alcohol syndrome than any exotic ancestry.

‘I asked yer a question, Paki.’

Indignation rose in Sam like acid. ‘I’m not a Pakistani.’

Dink’s approach to racial profiling: anyone who wasn’t pure white like him simply shouldn’t exist. His eyes blazed. He jabbed Sam in the chest. ‘You’re all Pakis to me, you Paki fuck.’

‘Okay, whatever.’

Sam knew Dink’s story — in fact, he had thought of him when he was preparing his last lecture, ‘The Gang as Family’. A textbook example of what he’d termed ‘Son of McDad’, the product of a ‘domestic void’, the child whose father only shows up from time to time to take the kids to McDonald’s, the mother on benefits, a stream of adult males through the home treating it like it was theirs, and Mum telling him to piss off out when she had company. The child, neglected and constantly out on the streets, falls prey to the gang, who brutalize him, then test him with tasks — at first relatively trivial, such as a mugging, then increasingly violent. As they absorb him, they put him to work, teach him how to steal, how to threaten, how to be feared. He gets respect, status. It’s addictive, like the stuff they’re dealing. The gang becomes his family, their values his.

Dink had done well. The teeth said it all. As the older members were picked off — killed or maimed or sent to jail — he had risen through the ranks until he was number one. Respected, feared and rich, everything he wanted out of life.

But right now, all of Sam’s insight counted for shit.

Dink snatched his bag.

‘Please — careful.’ Sam’s voice sounded more officious than he meant it to, a habit Helen had reminded him to check. Dink pulled out his conference ID.

‘Whooo! Doctor Arsehole!’

Sam was twelve again, hurrying back to do his homework, Dink and his posse blocking the pavement, his satchel grabbed, the precious textbooks emptied onto a waiting heap of dog shit. Only this time it was his brand-new MacBook Air.

‘All my work’s in that.’

Dink smoothed his hand over the surface of the lid, then flipped it open. ‘We’ll look after it, don’t worry.’

He passed it to one of the henchmen.

‘Now fuck off where you came from, Paki. You’re trespassing.’

‘Come on, this is my street.’

Dink stepped back in mock horror. ‘“My street”, is it now? Next it’ll be “my country”.’ He looked at his henchmen, who arranged their pudgy features into expressions of dismay. He waved a tattooed hand at the smashed shops. ‘Your lot started this. Who’s gonna clear it all up?’

‘My “lot”?’

‘All you Paki Muslim cunts gotta go back where you came from. It’s over, mate. You’ve had your fun.’ He nodded at the henchmen who each grabbed one of his arms while Dink patted him down, then pulled out his wallet. It flapped open, revealing the picture of Helen.

Dink’s eyes bulged with indignation. ‘You dirty Paki fucker.’ Dink flashed the picture at his mates, shaking his head with theatrical sweeps. ‘Big mistake, Arsehole. Big mistake.’

Sam was terrified and confused. This time indignation and rage overcame his fear. ‘Fuck you!’

Dink’s features seemed to crowd even further into the middle of his face. Then he grinned and put his mouth close to Sam’s ear. ‘Anyone doing the fucking, it’s gonna be me. Pakis fucking white women should know what they got coming from Dink.’ He pressed himself closer, the smell of the various intoxicants rising from him, thrust his hands into Sam’s pockets and pulled out his mother’s keys. He dangled them from his little finger. The flat was only a few metres away. ‘Is Mummy home?’

He shook his head. That much he was grateful for.

Dink reached into his pocket, pulled out a bunch of surgical gloves and gave a pair to each of his mates. ‘Then it’ll just be us chickens.’