Revenger

23

It happened so fast. One second the couple inside the shop were just another couple of lowlife shoplifters and the lads outside were simply cocky, piss-taking teenagers, and the next the man Maninder Panu had taken for a pimp had a bottle in his hand. It hadn’t come from the Lion Market shelves. It had a rag stuffed into its neck.

The pimp was putting a match to the rag and now Ajay was grabbing the baseball bat, vaulting over the counter and charging at the man, bellowing in rage. The girl started screaming, but the pimp stayed quite calm and waited until Ajay was within two or three metres of him before he gently lobbed the bottle in his direction.

Ajay hurled himself to one side and his life was saved by a stroke of pure chance. There was a gap in the line of shelves at that point, and he didn’t hit anything more substantial than a free-standing promotional display for Haribo sweets, which gave way under the impact of his seventeen-stone bulk. He hit the ground, rolling away from the impact of the bottle as it exploded in a shower of jagged glass shrapnel and sent a mist of flame rolling across the supermarket floor.

Ignoring the fire licking at the shelves, Ajay picked himself up and chased after the couple, waving the baseball bat in their direction. They were heading for the exit, the pimp in the lead, leaving the girl to fend for herself. Ajay couldn’t bring himself to hit her with the bat, but he used the end of it to give her a sharp shove between the shoulder blades which sent her stumbling forward into the pimp.

They were right by the door. A brick smashed through the window from outside, landing between him and the girl. Just before she followed the pimp outside, she turned round, looked straight at him, her face twisted and ugly with poisonous fury, and shrieked a high-pitched blast of furious invective, and he caught the words, ‘Muslim scumbags!’

Now Ajay was shouting, but not at her, at Maninder: ‘Close the shutters… and hit the fucking fire alarm!’

Maninder’s warrior spirit had deserted him, if it had ever existed at all. He had been paralysed by what he’d seen happening in front of his eyes. Not just the couple inside the shop: the African kids outside had somehow got hold of bricks and small, rough lumps of concrete and were throwing them at the front window. The glass was supposed to be specially strengthened but some of the missiles were getting through, others cracking the surface, and any second now the whole thing was going to give way.

Maninder heard Ajay scream at him again, ‘Fuck’s sake, Maninder man… Shutters! Alarm!’

But there wasn’t any need to break the glass on the alarm because there was smoke rising from one of the shelves, a detector picked it up and suddenly a siren was howling and a blue light was flashing on the outside wall, casting an eerie light on the gaggle of young rioters on the pavement.

Maninder could see them gathering round the table that had held the one-pound fruit and veg bowls. They were sweeping the bowls on to the ground, and for a second he couldn’t help himself thinking about the cost of all that ruined produce. As if that mattered now. Out on the street he could see a crowd of people running to and fro, attacking other businesses just like his. The whole world was falling apart. There was nowhere to run to. He was panicking, his mind was scrambled, and he could not remember what Ajay had told him to do — Ajay, who was taking control now, even though he was the younger cousin.

Ajay appeared out of the smoke and glared at Maninder. Without saying a word, he leaned across the counter and pushed the button that controlled the shopfront security shutters.

‘Pass me the fire extinguisher,’ Ajay said. ‘If you think you can manage that.’

The shutters began rattling down over the cracked and broken glass. But then Maninder, whose eyes were still fixed on the people outside, realized what they were doing. They’d lifted the table, turned it round and were smashing it against the window like a battering ram: once… twice…

Ajay aimed the fire extinguisher at the flickering flames on the supermarket floor. The shutters were coming down but they seemed to be taking an age.

Three times… four…

Maninder cursed himself for his foolhardy optimism. Most mini-supermarkets like his had shelves running along their outside wall — even if it was windowed. Their owners wanted to use every square millimetre of space to sell more goods. But Maninder had said no, it was better to let customers walking down the road look in and see all the wonderful things they had on offer. He had won the argument, but now he wished that he hadn’t. He felt horribly exposed by the huge pane of glass that covered almost the entire frontage of the store, and he longed for a long, tall, heavy line of shelves to act as a wall against the evil of the outside world.

Five… six…

The flames were out. The shutters were almost down to the level of the table. If they could cover the window before the table broke through it…

But that wasn’t going to happen. The table broke through, the entire window shattered and the table was left half in and half out of the shop just as the shutters reached it, hit the table top and came to a grinding halt.

Seconds later there were rioters scrambling under the stranded shutters and Ajay was lashing out at them and shouting at him to get the gun.

Maninder knew what he had to do. That gun was their only hope. But somehow he couldn’t reach for it. He was paralysed. And meanwhile more and more rioters were coming through the window. Ajay was being driven back.

Only then did it occur to Maninder that there was one obvious thing he should have done the minute he saw the two shoplifters acting suspiciously: call the police. He dialled 999… and all he got was a pre-recorded message saying that the line was experiencing an exceptionally heavy volume of calls. He was offered a menu of options for leaving messages. Or he could dial 0 and wait for an operator. But the phone seemed to ring for ever without a response.

No one was going to answer.

The police weren’t going to come.

All the other members of the Netherton Street Self-Help Association were too busy dealing with their own problems to worry about his.

And the Lion Market would soon be overrun.