Omar Musa - Here Come the Dogs

Now the highlights –

Aspen White.

Like Trem says, icing on the fucken cake.

Solomon is thinking what a liability Jimmy can be. One time, early on, he capped a dope piece by WERSE from Brissie, who’s a king. Jimmy went over the top of it with this shit chromie but was all proud of himself. Toy.

A bird cries. They both look up sharply,

then it’s silent again.

Now the keyline –

light purple makes it pop right out.

The piece is finished.

They stand there, appreciating,

grinning,

breathing.

Bold — crisp — emblazoned.

Best they’ve done in ages.

Solomon looks at his watch. It’s been just over an hour.

‘Beautiful,’ whispers Jimmy. He pulls out his phone and takes a photo. The flash is blinding.

‘Dumb cunt!’ Solomon hisses.

‘What did you want me to do? Fuck,’ Jimmy whispers back with equal vehemence.

‘Ay, you can see the mountains from here,’ whispers Solomon, looking over his shoulder.

There they are, paperfolded mountains, far off. Soundless chains of lightning burning like filaments in between them.

‘Fuck. That’s dope.’

They stand up straight, stretching, looking over the lights and the blackness to the far mountains. Suddenly a voice rings out.

‘OI!’

The secca is looking up at them, white face like a coin on the floor. Only one way out. ‘Go!’ They barrel down the stairs. Jimmy is zipping up the bag with one hand, making sure the bally’s still on with the other. The secca is yelling something repeatedly but they can’t tell what it is, with the ringing of the stairs and the sound of their breath. They get to the bottom. ‘Oi, stop!’ The secca’s got something heavy in his hand but he doesn’t seem to know what to do with it, a snake more scared of them than they are of him, so he just stands there. Solomon’s still got a can in his hand, which he aims, blasting yellow paint right in the man’s eyes. The secca yells, falling and holding his face.

Another man they hadn’t seen appears from the right with a torch, running and shouting at them. Light swings through the dark and he yells, ‘I called the fucken cops, you fucken idiots.’ He tackles Solomon to the gravel and gets some good punches in before Jimmy gets there. Jimmy has got a can in his hand and he busts him in the side of the head with it. Red. The man pitches over and shivers on the ground, like he’s having a fit. Solomon rolls away and they can see the dude’s teeth in the moonlight and it’s almost like he’s smiling. They freeze for a second then the first secca comes at them again, with blood and dirt and yellow paint all over his uniform. Solomon twists his ankle as he tries to run and lets out a yelp of pain but Jimmy pulls him up and they’re running.

Jimmy half dives, half falls through the hole in the fence, the one Solomon cut, tears his shirt, then is hurtling through the grass up a slope. He can feel blood trickling down his back, or it could be sweat. Solomon is behind him, puffing, swearing.

Neither of the seccas has followed them out of the yard, but the danger hasn’t passed. They run across a big road and then hide for a moment behind a bush. They take the ballys off and they become T-shirts again. They stuff them in the bag, then the gloves, and chuck the whole lot deep into the bush. They peek out and see a cop car pull up at the intersection.

They run across the remainder of the road, leap a fence, bolting, ducking and rolling. A car screeches around and it’s coming towards them. Jimmy is sprinting now, breath rattling like a ball bearing in a can. Can’t keep this up much longer — he’s getting dizzy, stomach curdling, metallic bile rising in his throat.

Then the sound of the car heads in the opposite direction.

‘Thank fuck.’

They fall underneath a Hills Hoist in some rundown backyard, breathing hard. Sheets billow around them like the skirts of spectral dancers. ‘Fuck. That was hectic.’ says Solomon. His face is shining.

Jimmy is still breathing too heavily to answer and he begins coughing nuggets of black.

Nevertheless, it feels good.

Like brotherhood.

The smell of himself, a grin of moonlight, and the sound of an inmate who has been designated to sweep the floors outside the cells. The sweeper is the way prisoners trade goods, buy cigarettes and pass on messages, something the guards know but let go. Aleks can hear inmates on the lower floor yelling, ‘Sweeper! Sweeper!’, a murmuring in one of the other cells and the sound of someone sharpening a toothbrush.

He takes out a little wooden prison spoon. He snaps it into two pieces and begins to plane them down with a razor that has been melted into the handle of a toothbrush, making sure to get the proportions right. Below him, Gabe sings softly to himself. Aleks feels the violent urge building, but instead grips the handle hard and focuses on planing the pieces smooth. It takes a week to get them as he wants, smooth and flawless, both with overlap notches so they fit perfectly together.

Now he needs superglue, which is harder to come by than he imagined. It becomes a full-scale, clandestine operation, and eventually he gets a glob of glue in cling film from the sweeper, as a favour from a Turkish mate. The glue would’ve come from the minimum security workshop. Finally he puts the pieces together and lets the final product sit there. He wishes he could show it to his cousin Nicko, who is very religious.

He concentrates and in ten minutes is able to transport himself back to Ohrid. Every year a priest stands on the pier and throws a cross over his shoulder. Hundreds of men in the freezing water swim for it, splashing up little coronas of white foam and gasping for air. Aleks smiles and looks at his new cross, thinking that, if he drills a hole in it and uses red and black string from a towel to make a cord, it would make a fine necklace.

In the yard, he is treated with deference and shows no signs of weakness. Every now and again he spies the flash of red hair and thinks about teaching Torture Terry a lesson. But he must control himself. Concrete, bars, concrete, bars, alliances and enemies, each man within ruminating his own ruin, falls, failings and loves, his place in the animal hierarchy. Though most of them would’ve done the air jiggle a century ago, there is even a type of brotherhood among some. The road to hell is paved with good intentions, Aleks thinks.

The attack he expects never comes, but he sees every variation of violence. Unlike in Macedonia, here the prisoners are the ones to worry about, not the guards. He sees a man stomped to death, hears men raped in their cells. He sees jam packets heated into napalm in kettles and flung on the faces of paedophiles. Even the recreational boxing, where mitts are made from socks stuffed with stolen sponges, is just another outlet for tension and a way to show strength.

When he returns to the dark, silent cell, the presence beneath him almost seems big enough to devour him. There are times deep in the clockless hours when the man cries out and Aleks worries for him. Then he feels disgusted. So alien, so black.

In the morning, Aleks is about to go into the visitor’s area. He pulls his shirt, pants and underpants off, spreads his legs and stands against the wall as naked as a newborn. The security guard checks his armpits, hair, ears and mouth, then gets him to spread his legs, pull his dick up, squat and cough.

‘Nothing up there, mate? I found a mobile phone last week.’

‘Bullshit,’ says Aleks.

‘No bullshit. Saw the antenna sticking out.’

‘Old school. Motorola?’

‘Yeh. Bloke got it up there in a condom. Punched him in the side and half the bloody thing came out.’