Ross Armstrong - The Girls Beneath

‘You’ve got a girlfriend? Nice, good for you,’ I say, smashing into the passenger window with my baton.

‘Shit! Tom? Don’t do that. Let’s do this when we’re on the clock tomorrow, okay? We’ll do it together. We’ll stick together, I promise, but not now.’

It takes a few hits to get through. Then I clear off the loose shards and take a look inside.

It smells chartreuse. It would taste of ink and sound like an E flat. Owing to the blacked out windows it’s dark. But it’s the smell I’m interested in. He joins me, poking his head inside.

‘What would you say that smell is, Emre?’

‘Er, I don’t know. I can’t smell anything.’

Chartreuse, refined yellowing pear-like green, a colour named after a French liqueur.

‘I can’t see anything either,’ he says, interest growing. But I spy the outline of a patterned glove, that I’d say is part of a set. But the other glove, and the possible matching hat and scarf, are nowhere to be seen. Leaving the single glove there, alone, lying limply on the back seat.

Girl missing: Blacked out windows.

It’s like word association. It’s just how my brain works now. That’s not to say I’m right, but if a girl goes missing there are only so many options.

1. She’s gone of her own free will.

2. She’s walked into a trap.

3. She’s been picked up and taken somewhere against her will.

And if she’s been taken somewhere you’re going to have to do that with a degree of care. You’re going to have to pacify her, or make sure no one sees her struggle, hence the blacked out car.

Robbery:blood on broken window.

Arson:check the insurance.

GBH:check romantic history.

Missing girl:car with blacked out windows.

It’s just something I do. ‘Be open to the fact that the simplest answer is sometimes the best one.’ Even the training officer said that. In other words, clichés become clichés for a reason. They’re neither to be worshipped or ignored.

I should’ve been watching Bartu instead of wandering through these thoughts though, because when I turn to him he’s in the process of doing something uncharacteristically stupid.

‘My phone’s got a torch app, but it’s dead. Here,’ he says, flicking his Zippo alight and leaning it into the car just as something tells me that the chartreuse might be something to be concerned about.

‘No!’ I shout, grabbing him. He drops the thing and I throw both of us back as the car goes up in flames. We hit the ground, hard.

The next thing I notice is the white smell of our burnt hair.

I close my eyes, half expecting the whole thing to go up – boom! But it doesn’t. It’s not quite how you’d want it to be. But it’s still a spectacle the upholstery definitely isn’t going to survive.

‘Fuck!’ he shouts. He’d definitely be worse off if he’d leaned further in, and ended up half the man he used to be facially.

The car blazes beautifully against the night sky, as snow begins to fall. Embers rise, passing white flakes, kissing them hello and goodbye as they rise towards the abyss above.

‘Fire Alight’ starts playing on a loop in my head. It’s another lullaby I wrote in the ward; you won’t know it. My subconscious has a dark sense of humour.

Missing girl. Blacked out car that sets alight. If all this doesn’t pique Emre’s interest, then it damn well should do.

The chartreuse and blue are linked. I think the scents have shades of each other within them, now I picture them together.

‘Fuck,’ he repeats, more from anger than pain.

I face the flames. I’m resolved. It’s my time to shine.

I pick him up and dust us both down. Then I pull him back again, as something goes bang !

We fall down onto our arses. And watch the car shake. Muffled cracks and bangs rumble away in there.

Bang. Crack. Bang .

I picture the shadow of a jittery guy in a blacked out car on the day I was shot. This car, I’m guessing. I sniggered as he sped away. I’m not sniggering now.

Cars don’t explode if you shoot into the petrol tank like in the movies. It wouldn’t happen that way, trust me. Cars don’t tend to do anything that dramatic, unless they happen to be, for instance, filled with fireworks.

Boom!

The boot lifts clean off and rolls a few metres away from us. Lights pulsate from the back of the car, then are flung out onto the ground causing three-second long lakes of green and red sparks, as high-pitched whistles join the other noises and we hold our ears.

But still, it’s the fireworks not the tank that has exploded. Because petrol tanks don’t tend to explode.

Unless, for example, those fireworks spark an even bigger fire, that heats the petrol in the tank below to combustion point.

Whoomph! A noise that puts the gunpowder bangs into context. I’m closer than I want to be, as the tank explodes.

Grey smoke and debris shoot into the night air.

Then a single rocket escapes and shoots over the London skyline. It’s a hell of a show. You can’t help but just sit, watch and shake your head at the spectacle of it all.

Fire. Gunpowder. You slam some things together and the world reacts accordingly.

Me. Bartu.

Girls and boys.

Bullets. Brains.

The smooth neck of the London city sky and everything else, that glints blade-like underneath.

We watch it in wonder.

‘Fuck’ indeed.

The sky lights up. A millisecond of day in our evening time. Like sheet lightning.

Documented Telephone Conversation #1

It rings.

‘Hello?’ she says.

‘Hello.’

‘Hello. Who is this?’

‘Err…’

The silence drags.

‘Oh,’ she says.

‘Hmm,’ comes the non-committal noise across the line.

‘You hid your number,’ she says.

‘Did I?’

‘You know you did,’ she says.

‘Yeah…’

The caller starts to tap their knee nervously. The receiver of the call shifts her seating position, but she doesn’t feel the need to talk. Then she gets up and moves into another room, perhaps so she can speak more freely, it is the evening after all and she may not be alone. She settles down in her new position, wherever that may be. She hasn’t been wherever she currently is for very long. Then she breathes a sigh across the line.

‘Are you alone?’

‘How’ve you been?’ she says, not taking the bait.

‘I’ve been worse. I’ve been better.’

‘Do you need to talk?’ she says.

‘Yes, I do, I need to talk. I don’t want to, but I need to.’

‘What do you need to talk about?’ she says.

‘I just need to talk, and hearing your voice isn’t bad either. Not too bad I suppose.’

‘How’s your new job going?’

‘It’s going,’ I murmur.

I know that she senses the tension of it. Anger or the unsaid can so easily sound like flirtation but that’s not what she wants. She doesn’t want any of it. She wants to get on with her life and to not feel bad for wanting that. She feels that as it was me who called, the onus is on me to drive beginnings, otherwise it’s like someone insisting on coming to your house in the afternoon only to lie dormant on your sofa. We both feel the silences take on different forms, which is one of the miracles that everyone has felt since the advent of the telephone call and has been repeated thousands of times all over the world since. It’s a kind of telepathy. We’ve picked up where we left off.

‘So what’s happened since we last spoke? Anything big?’

‘You could say that,’ I say.

‘You sound different,’ Anita says.

‘I am,’ I say.

‘What happened?’