Revenger

17

At the Lion Market, Maninder Panu caught his cousin Ajay’s eye and nodded his head to one side, towards the main window of the store. Ajay picked up the hint and looked in that direction. Half a dozen teenage lads, all African by the looks of them, were standing outside on the pavement. One of them was fingering a bowl of apples. He picked an apple up, stood holding it until he was certain that he had attracted the attention of the men inside the shop, then took a large bite out of it and started chewing the fruit, exaggerating every stage of the process, smacking his lips so much he almost seemed to be blowing kisses. He was trying to wind them up, that much was blatantly obvious. He wanted a reaction. So now what?

Maninder turned his attention to Ajay. It wasn’t so many years since Ajay had been living the thug life, wearing his trousers halfway down his backside and calling everybody ‘rude boi’. He’d grown up a lot since then, but he still wasn’t the sort of man to back down from the offer of a fight. Maninder could see the temper rising in him. Any second now he’d be reaching for the baseball bat and walking out the front door, waving it in the African kids’ faces. Something told Maninder that that was exactly what they wanted him to do. This was a trap, a set-up, he was sure of it.

‘Don’t,’ he said, before Ajay had even made a move.

‘Come on, man, we can’t let them disrespect us like that. If they get away with it once, they’ll never stop.’

‘And if you start a fight you could end up in jail. They’re winding us up. They want us to react. Don’t give them that satisfaction.’ Maninder frowned. Out of the corner of his eye he’d seen something on the CCTV screen that hung beside the till. He lowered his voice and gestured with his index figure: ‘Come here, Ajay. Quick!’

The big man scurried over on surprisingly light, nimble feet and looked up at the screen. It showed the views from each of four cameras in rotation. ‘There!’ whispered Maninder as the picture shifted to the liquor cabinets. ‘Look at her!’

There was a young woman on the screen, young enough that she would need an ID to buy any booze. For a moment Ajay thought that Maninder was simply trying to distract him from the goings-on outside, because this chick was stunning, blonde hair falling over the shoulders of a short, furry jacket. Beneath it her breasts were spilling out of a corset a couple of sizes too small to contain them, her crotch was barely covered by a tiny, skintight black microskirt, and she was wearing black tights and heavy red boots. She had a black nylon knapsack in one hand.

Then he noticed what the woman was doing.

She was taking a bottle of vodka off the shelf and sticking it in her bag.

‘That’s the second one,’ hissed Maninder.

The woman wasn’t alone. She had a man with her; a boyfriend or a pimp by the looks of things. He looked a lot older than her and a lot bigger: Ajay-sized, in fact.

And it seemed to Maninder that these two, like the kids outside, were putting on a show. They wanted to be seen.

Something was going on here. But what the hell was it?

The next man on screen at the O2 was a sharp contrast to the previous one. For one thing, he was standing outdoors, on a balcony several floors up in a tower block. For another, he was black. His name was Curtley Mackenzie. ‘Thirty years ago, it wasn’t easy being black in the British Army,’ he said. ‘There were racists who’d call you a darkie, say you had no place in a white man’s regiment. But Mark Adams treated me like a man, like a Para; nothing more and nothing less. If he gave you an order, you jumped to it. But if you were in trouble, you could go to him and he would always listen, always say something to make you feel better.’

The atmosphere in the hall changed. The schoolmaster had been posh, talking about a world that was foreign to most of the crowd. But irrespective of his skin colour, Curtley Mackenzie was talking a language they could understand, and even those who’d never been anywhere near the forces felt as though this was a world that they knew.

‘When we went to the Falklands, well, everyone knows about Lieutenant Adams charging an Argentine machine gun single-handed. But what they don’t know is what he was like with the lads. He kept us going when we were cold, hungry, frightened, and so tired we felt like we couldn’t take another step. He never asked any man to do anything he wouldn’t do. I’ve been to war with Mark Adams. I’ve trusted him with my life. I’d do it again, and all.’