Catherine O'Flynn - News Where You Are

Phil hisses: ‘Because it’s the wrong fucking way!’

Michael sits up properly and looks at him. He notices Phil’s face is pale and moist. ‘What’s the matter with you?’

‘We’re going to die.’

‘What?’

‘We’re going to die, Mikey. Jesus Christ, he’s going to kill us.’

Michael starts to laugh. ‘Why are you saying that?’

‘Cos that’s what’s going to happen. Have you not heard the stories? British soldiers get picked up in taxis, taken out to the desert, robbed and killed.’

Michael stops laughing. The taxi stops spinning. ‘What stories? What are you talking about?’

‘The stories — everyone’s heard them.’

He stares at Phil. ‘Why didn’t you tell me about the stories when you said we’d get a taxi?’

Phil looks down at his lap. ‘I forgot.’

Michael leans forward and says to the driver: ‘Mister, I think you’re taking us the wrong way. Can you turn round, please.’

He’s ignored.

Phil is muttering: ‘Jesus Christ, Mikey, bandits.’

Michael tries again. ‘Oi, mister. Where you going? Turn round.’

He sees the driver’s dead eyes in the mirror as they start to slow down. ‘Don’t worry, please. We are here now.’

Phil and Michael look out of the window at the blackness beyond and both see that ‘here’ is not where they want to be.

The car pulls in at the side of the road where two men stand waiting. One of them opens the car door and signals for them to get out. The three men stand around Phil and Michael. One of them holds a large knife. He speaks in English. ‘Take off clothes, please.’

Neither Phil nor Michael moves.

‘Take off clothes, please, or I cut throat.’

Michael looks into the darkness, trying to see where the two men could have come from. He sees no houses or cars nearby. He wonders how far they’ve travelled to the rendezvous. Have they walked all the way from town? He starts wondering about the man’s English. Does he only know vocabulary related to robbery? Michael wonders if the robber looks forward to these little opportunities to practise his stock phrases.

He’s shouting at them now. ‘You! Take off clothes! I ask nicely last time.’

Michael smiles. The Hollywood school of English. He’ll be coming out with some Jimmy Cagney line next. He turns to share his amusement with Phil only to see Phil standing naked apart from his baggy cotton shorts, shaking despite the heat. Michael has no idea what Phil is playing at. He has a strange feeling, as if he’s watching the scene from a distance. The man keeps shouting at him, his face now inches away from his own. Why does he keep telling him to take his clothes off? Michael can think of no earthly reason why he would do such a thing.

Phil turns his head a fraction. ‘For Christ’s sake, Mikey, do what he says. Do you want to get us killed?’

Michael looks at Phil. It seems a strange thing to say. Michael is filled with a desire to be back in his tent eating the bar of chocolate he knows he has in his tin. He realizes he’s starving. He thinks about the shepherd’s pie his mother used to make. Then he thinks about her apple crumble and custard. What would he give for that right now? Or even just a single decent cup of tea and a nice coconut ring. He’s irritated to find his thoughts interrupted by the man with the knife screaming at him: ‘Take off!’ The man reaches across and plucks at Michael’s jacket and without making any conscious decision Michael finds his fist shooting out, hitting the man full force in the face.

The impact is a shock to both of them. Michael is suddenly alert. He lunges forward and manages to grab the knife before the other two men have dropped their fags. He feels their hands on his arms, but is able to kick and hack his way out. He waves the knife and they back away. He looks around and sees that Phil has already started running towards the road. Michael starts to run after him. He checks over his shoulder, but the men have no interest in the chase. Instead they hunch down, picking over Phil’s uniform.

Michael and Phil run along the dark road, managing after half a mile to flag down a passing truck. They climb into the back and collapse exhausted on the flatbed, trying to catch their breath. It’s a while before Phil is able to speak.

‘Bloody hell, Mikey. You could have done your John Wayne bit before I dropped my pants.’

‘I didn’t get the chance. You don’t need much persuasion, do you?’

‘They had a knife, for Christ’s sake, that’s enough persuasion for me.’ He’s quiet for a moment and then adds: ‘Thanks, Mikey.’

‘What for?’

‘You saved my life.’

Michael smiles. ‘They weren’t going to kill us, you daft sod. Their hearts weren’t in it.’

Phil shakes his head. ‘You saved my life.’

Michael looks at Phil and starts laughing.

‘What’s so funny?’

Phil’s face and body are smeared with whatever animal’s shit is all over the back of the truck and clumps of feathers are sticking to him.

‘We showed the others, didn’t we? Let them travel like cattle — we’ll get back in style.’

He ordered a beer and took it to a table by the window overlooking the queues of cars nudging their way round the roundabout. As always, he was early to meet Andrea and as always she would be late. The hotel bar played its early evening selection. Frank was familiar with the track-listing now. He knew that ‘Mas Que Nada’ would be followed by the Lighthouse Family. The smooth early evening playlist. Andrea hated that kind of music; she said it made a vein throb in her face. Frank quite liked it. He tapped his foot.

The bar was charmless and yet he and Andrea always met there when in town. It was on the fourth floor of the hotel and Frank enjoyed the view. He liked that part of the city centre — an area where small scraps of the past were still visible at the margins of the newer developments, like unfashionable trainers peeping out from under a new suit. All the office blocks around had been converted into apartment complexes, their windows made larger, their surfaces lighter. Frank looked out at a building now calling itself Westside One. He remembered it as the office of an insurance company. He wondered what the people who had worked there, who had once sat at desks dreaming of escape, now thought of the dream of champagne flutes, leather sofas and wooden laminate flooring that was being sold back to them. He wondered if any of them had bought an apartment there and looked down now on the view they once hated with new eyes. He suspected not; no one seemed to be buying any more. An enormous banner hung on the outside of the building announcing that the ‘last few’ still remained two years after the first residents moved in. The banner boasted the development’s selling points, one of which was that it overlooked another more prestigious development.

In the centre of the roundabout was one of the city’s few remaining sunken mini-parks. A faded sixties mosaic of an imagined Victorian past, horse-drawn carriages and children chasing hoops with sticks, formed the backdrop to a now stagnant water feature. Empty cans lay motionless on the black surface of the water in the concrete pond. Benches waited for anyone who might enjoy a moment’s rest in the eye of the traffic’s storm. The city’s many subways were once a source of pride, decorated with public art and seating areas. Frank had seen archive footage from the sixties of the opening of a subway under one of the busiest roads in the centre. A race to cross the road was staged between two councillors. One went by surface, the other by subway — and won. The results were clear: subways were quick, safe and modern.

Frank could see now that three of the subway tunnels that led into the underpass were sealed off. New pedestrian crossings had been installed on the busy roads. The ethos of separating people from cars that Frank’s father had thought the solution was now seen as the problem. People wanted the right to roam the surface of the city and not be shuttled below or above the roads out of the sight and minds of motorists. Frank remembered covering a murder in one of the tunnels some years ago. The victim had tried to resist his mugger and ended up dead. He wondered how long it might be before all the entrances were sealed off and the sunken garden covered over. He imagined it remaining intact under a new layer of development, as empty and forlorn as it stood now, waiting for future archaeologists to unearth and invent complex mythologies about.