Khurrum Rahman - Ride or Die

‘My family,’ he cried, at my feet. ‘You took away my family.’

‘You took away mine.’

I shot him twice in the chest.

I would not let the guilt in. Saheed Kabir had a hand in this.

Sophia looked up at Easedale House, the tired-looking tower block standing tall but unremarkable amongst the surrounding identical tower blocks that filled the landscape within Brentford’s Ivy Bridge Estate. Brentford had undergone – or was in the middle of – a regeneration project; Sophia wasn’t sure which. It had been ongoing for years. Her crappy flat in her crappy tower block was a few minutes’ walk away from the flats on the waterfront with price-tags she could never dream of affording. Nine figures had been spent on the regeneration, but not a drop on the Ivy Bridge Estate. Sophia despised having to walk past the smell of the rich, so close to her shit-hole flat.

Not even entertaining the idea of the piss-stinking lift, Sophia trudged up three floors. She walked past a whiny malnourished Alsatian tied to the railing on the first floor, and nodded curtly at a neighbour slumped on the landing of the second floor, who, judging by his eyes and blank stare, looked as if he’d fallen off whatever wagon he had been on. She entered the lobby of the third floor and let herself into her apartment. She closed the door behind her and double-locked it, aware that the cheap Homebase locks wouldn’t withstand force. The door probably wouldn’t even withstand somebody leaning against it.

As per routine, Sophia picked up the iron bar on the small hallway table and gripped it firmly in both hands as she walked from room to room, checking for chancers. She entered the bedroom last, dropped the bar on the side table and shrugged off her coat, letting it fall in a puddle at her feet. An ancient desktop PC sat on a desk in the corner of the room. Sophia lifted the monitor off the computer and placed it to the side. Her heart picked up as she clicked the two catches on the side of the PC and lifted the cover. Inside, sitting on the motherboard, right beside the hard drive, was a small stack of fifty pound notes, amounting to exactly ten thousand pounds. She sighed with relief, clicked the cover back in place and sat the monitor on top of the computer. And then, as she did every night after a shift, fell backwards with her arms out onto her unmade double bed, enjoying the thrill of her body bouncing gently before coming to rest. Strands of blonde hair fell across her face. She blew them away from her eyes and stared up at the damp patch on the ceiling, lit by the two working downlights. It was not a view she would get used to.

Sophia Hunt had arrived in London, aged 22, clutching hopefully onto her Performing Arts Diploma. She’d waited patiently for the opportunity – that one successful audition that would kick-start her career and give her the chance to live life on her own terms. Meanwhile, she worked hard as a cleaner. No, that’s not right. She worked as a cleaner, but the effort was minimal, as were the wages and tips. Sophia’s mother had been a cleaner. So had her grandmother. Was it predetermined for Sophia to end up on her hands and knees, with a J-cloth and a backache, and to serve those who felt it was open season to grab, grope and fondle the fucking help?

Sophia’s father had been a social worker, before he injured himself, accidentally-on-purpose, and pissed off with his benefits. He wasn’t big on sharing-is-caring. Sophia didn’t blame him. At least he’d had some semblance of get-up-and-go when he’d got up and left.

Her mother, not able to afford childcare, dragged Sophia to her cleaning jobs, from the age of seven through to her teenage years. She couldn’t bear to watch her mother crawl around grand homes with her bad back and her bad knees, making the place gleam whilst pocketing items that wouldn’t be missed. It made Sophia sad. Sad to watch her mum. Sad that they were surrounded by money but didn’t have any.

She died of a heart attack on the job, with an apron full of silverware. Sophia promised herself that she would not end up in the same position. But she was going up against life and patterns and a history of bloody cleaners in her family.

Sophia put in her all to achieve her Performing Arts Diploma, sacrificing sleep to study lines, skipping meals to stay skinny, taking extra classes to help improve her singing and dancing. But it had become quite evident, fairly soon after she’d arrived in London, that she was just one of a million starlets who shared that same hunger.

Working as an extra on TV wasn’t as exciting as it had seemed. Hours of waiting around with all the other desperados, eating yesterday’s sandwiches, until she was called to aimlessly sit in a coffee shop or a pub whilst the A-listers blocked her view of the camera. Regardless, she gave it everything, made each role her own. Once she had to push a pram across the road and she did it method. Making sure the road was clear as any mother would, looking left, looking right, and then left again, before tentatively crossing over, only for the director to shout, ‘ Cut! Just cross the bloody road! ’

Her diploma meant nothing, on top of which she couldn’t remember where she’d put it, and these days all the networks could afford to make was reality TV. Brain-dead airheads with no qualifications or discernible talent, catering for the brain-dead viewer. Despite herself, Sophia adjusted, realising that it may be her only path to success, a platform from which she could showcase her talent to the world. She applied for the lot, and was turned down by the lot. Her only success, if you could call it that, came as she got through to the second round of The X Factor and the judges had to decide between her and some singing clown who couldn’t hold a note for toffee. After some pretty dramatic deliberating, the judges chose the singing clown who sang sad songs with a frown.

Over the years, casual employment and the odd shoplifting spree helped her keep her head above water. She started to decline TV extra work, it was beneath her, and concentrated on promoting her talents on social media. Her presence was heavily felt on every platform by her twenty-three followers, who, if she was honest, were dirty old men, ogling her. She had lived in hope that a music producer or a film director would spot her undeniable talent, but all she’d received was creepy direct messages and dick pics.

And just as she was coming to another realisation – that the cleaning, the waitressing, the odd temping job, was no longer a stop gap, but just a stop – a man had entered her life and presented her with an opportunity.

It had been five days since Sophia had found the handset on her doorstep. She wasn’t expecting it, and her first and second thoughts were that it had been wrongly delivered, and how much could she sell it for. She’d frowned when she noticed it was an old throwaway Nokia phone with physical push buttons, screen the size of a matchbox and no camera. It was worth next to nothing. She’d flipped it over and attached to the back of it was a small silver key and a white card . In neat handwriting the card read: Call me. With growing curiosity Sophia did just that.

A polite gentleman had answered. He told her his name was Samuel Carter. He sounded like a Samuel Carter, too, as though he had been brought up well, educated the expensive way, and never been referred to as Sam or Sammy. It was a particular quirk of Sophia’s that whenever she met somebody new, or spoke to them on the phone, afterwards she would take her time deciding whether their name matched their face or voice. She had done this ever since she realised that her own name was so far from the mark. When you hear Sophia, you expect grace and glamour and a few quid in the bank. You don’t expect a grubby apron and a damp ceiling and the high rise of Ivy Bridge Estate. And her surname: Hunt. Posh! As though she had come from old money, rather than a mob of cleaners and fraudsters.