79.

  I had never really accomplished anything in my life. I’d never really even had goals that I could accomplish. I guess like most kids, my life was a procession of adults telling me what to do, what to care about, and what success looked like. Once I was dumped out of the education system I was just a thing that lived, breathed, ate, and worked, so I could keep living, breathing, and eating. It was more about survival than accomplishing anything.

  So this warm fuzzy feeling in my gut was a strange sensation. In fact, it felt utterly alien. I had made it back to the high rise overlooking the warehouse and watched the police swarm. I had waited to see Black John slapped in cuffs and put in the back of an ambulance and then I departed when the fire trucks began arriving. The warehouse, being decrepit and poorly maintained, had basically collapsed in on itself after the fire had weakened its structure. The drugs were gone.

  I had won.

  I strolled along the top of the yellow bricks leading back home, with my balaclava half pulled up, stinking of smoke, and a stupid grin on my face. The first golden wisps of the sun were just beginning to peak over the horizon. The police should have also apprehended Brick by now.

  On my way to the warehouse I had stopped outside Brick’s nightclub with another backpack. This one was filled with all the illicit drugs I had stolen from Brick’s dealers. I had used the Lockpicking Feather to open his car and stash them in there. Then it was just a simple case of a phone call to the police. The drugs were destroyed, Brick and Black John should be sharing a cell by now, and the Syndicate’s back was broken. Not bad for a night’s work.

  The sun had fully risen and the streets were beginning to wake up as I arrived back home. I thought I would crash in exhaustion the second I saw my bed, but I was too wired. My hands trembled slightly and my various wounds had begun to buzz angry notes of agony.

  I stripped out of my gear and strolled to the bathroom. First, I needed a shower. It was a bloody affair. My balaclava had been containing the worst of it, but my face was caked in blood. My nose, my lip, and my forehead had all bled openly under the mask and then all that blood had dried all over my face. Tenderly, I washed it all away, wincing as water stung the laceration on my forehead. I poked the wound with a finger and felt how swollen the general area was. That was going to be a nice fat hematoma courtesy of Black Jon’s battering ram head.

  Once I’d washed the blood off, it was time to get rid of the acrid smell of smoke that seemed to have stained my skin and hair, even though I had been completely covered. I scrubbed my hair and then my skin until it turned pink. I stepped out of the shower, scrawny and battered, but with a grin on my face. The grin quickly disappeared when I began dripping iodine into the cut on my forehead, which was now joined by a golf ball sized knot. I was becoming pretty adept at bathroom sink triage. I folded up a pad of gauze and sellotaped it to my forehead, before wandering back into my bedroom and sitting down with just a towel around my waist.

  As I drip dried, I looked at my bed, but I was still too full of nervous energy to sleep. Had the police caught him by now? They should have. Did they arrest the rest of the Syndicate goons? Where was Black John right now? Then my stomach groaned and I rubbed it. I couldn’t even remember the last meal I’d had. Was it those burgers the Pigeon King had given me? That was well over 24 hours ago now, wasn’t it? I knew I didn’t have anything in my kitchen, but I did have a stash of money still in a box at the back of my closet. I could go and get breakfast.

  The idea tickled me. Grandad used to take me out on Sunday mornings for a fry up at the local greasy spoon cafe. Grandad’s haunt of choice was Syd’s Cafe which had apparently been there since the early 2020s! Syd himself looked ancient enough for that to be true. My stomach growled as I thought about questionable breakfast meats fried in even more questionable lard and that made my mind up for me.

  Hastily, I started getting dressed, and that was when I saw the letter sitting on my desk addressed to Marilyn. I suddenly felt my cheeks grow hot with embarrassment. How melodramatic that had all seemed now. Like I was writing one of those dear john letters from WWII. I quickly scrunched the letter up and threw it in the trash. Before I could chicken out of it, I grabbed my WristPod and wrote Marilyn a message. Then I deleted that message and rewrote it four more times before I finally pressed send:

  ‘Hey Marilyn, you want to grab sum brekfast?”

  I had almost added an x at the end of the message, and then felt so nauseous with nerves that I hastily deleted it. I might be able to go hand to hand with Black John but I wasn’t that brave.

  I paced my room for a few minutes feeling stupid for sending the message. It was barely past 8am, would Marilyn even be awake? And if she was, why would she want to leave this early to have breakfast with me? Just as my self recriminations reached maximum velocity a message pinged up on my WristPod.

  “Yeah sure. Where?”

  “Syd’s?” I responded, far too quickly.

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  “Cool. I can be there in 20?”

  “Cool. I’ll meet you there.”

  Another stupid grin crossed my face. Today was going to be a good day.

  I arrived at Syd’s and got the best table. ‘Best Table’ was a bit of a stretch. Nothing in Syd’s could be described as the best. It was just the table with the least amount of visible grime and didn’t wobble too much. Syd’s interior looked like it hadn’t been updated since before the last Great American War. It had wood panelled walls, white plastic chairs and tables that had yellowed with age, and a layer of grime that I reckoned was older than me. Syd, like his cafe, looked like a relic from a bygone era. He was stooped with a hook nose and white stubble around his pointed chin. His pate was bald and he had wiry white hair sticking out from the side of his head at crazy angles. In today’s modern age, with over the counter hair loss and skin treatment products, it was rare to see a man so… ugly.

  I had ordered my Grandad’s favourite breakfast and slid into the fixed chair. I also ordered a couple of mugs of tea. Just as they arrived, so did Marilyn. She looked her usual fantastic self. She was dressed for work and looked tired, but all I saw was her luscious hair and those jewel-like green eyes. She smiled brightly as she saw me waving to her and came and sat down.

  “Nice hat,” Marilyn said, laughter in her voice.

  I had pulled out an old wooly hat to cover the wound on my forehead, and hopefully deflect attention from my swollen eye.

  “Oh yeah…” I laughed. “Bad hair day.” I shrugged and Marilyn giggled. “You hungry? Order whatever you want, I’m paying.”

  “You’re in a good mood today,” Marilyn said, shrugging out of her coat. “What's up? Did you win the lottery or something?”

  “I wish,” I said, rolling my eyes and sipping my tea.

  “You found a new job?” Marilyn asked.

  “Sort of,” I replied cagily.

  “What is it?” she asked eagerly.

  “Nothing,” I said. “It was just a bit of… warehouse work.” I said.

  “Oh cool,” Marilyn said. “Breaking your back picking up boxes?”

  “Yeah sort of,” I said.

  “Show me your muscles then,” Marilyn said with a wicked smile.

  I felt a blush creep across my cheeks and I was so grateful when Syd shambled over to take Marilyn’s order.

  “I can get anything?” she asked.

  “Yeah,” I replied.

  “What did you get?”

  “Full English.”

  “Then I’ll have one of those too, ta Syd.”

  Syd grunted, scratched facsimiles of letters on his pad and then shuffled away again.

  Marilyn blew on her tea and smiled at me, her eyes scanning over the various visible injuries on my face.

  “It’s really good to see you Alex,” she said after a moment. “I was starting to get worried about you, shut up in that flat alone all the time…”

  “I’m not alone,” I said quickly. “I’ve got Grandad.”

  “Oh right yeah… of course…” she said, looking away from me for a moment. “But I just meant, you know, without people your own age and stuff. It looked like you weren’t okay…”

  I could see her struggling to put together her words and even as she tried to soften the blow, they still stung. Not because of what she said, she had no idea why I was in the state I had been in, but because I had made her worry.

  “I’m fine,” I said to her, giving her my best attempt at a confident smile. “It was just… rough you know… with the fire and losing… losing…” I faltered for a second, my voice catching before I quickly pulled myself together. “Losing my job. It was tough but I’m okay, honestly.”

  “That’s the spirit,” Marilyn said. “Life’s always gonna be tough ‘round here. It’s all about how we face it, right?”

  “Right,” I said.

  “But, if you do need to talk about anything, I’m always here for you. You know that, right?”

  “Yeah… ‘course,” I muttered looking down into my mug.

  There were a million things I wanted to tell her, but how could I? If I opened the black hole of despair that my life was, she would run a mile, and I wouldn’t blame her.

  Fortunately, Syd arrived with two platter sized plates of cholesterol and meat to break the tension. He plonked them down in front of us, slapped down two filthy bottles of sauce, grunted and walked away. We tucked in greedily and the conversation flowed much more naturally, and most importantly, was less about me. It was nice. It was normal. It was the closest thing to real human interaction I’d had in a long time. We were snorting and giggling about some half remembered classroom story from primary school when a news report flashed across Syd’s ancient tele.

  I looked up and my heart thudded. There was Brick’s face, staring back at me from a mugshot photo. Syd also saw the police alert and turned the volume up.

  “In the early hours of the morning officers responded to an anonymous tip off about drugs in New Cross, South London,” a reporter’s voice read. “A man in his late 20s, known to be a notorious criminal, was pulled over and his vehicle searched. Police reportedly found hundreds of individual wraps of Class A drugs in the rear of the vehicle.”

  “Scum,” Syd growled from the counter.

  “Upon finding the drugs, the man became violent and reportedly broke out of his handcuffs and assaulted the two officers, killing one in the process, and putting the other in intensive care.”

  My stomach ran cold.

  “The man, who has been identified as Nicholas Bayley, has been designated as possibly armed and very dangerous. Members of the public are advised not to approach and to…”

  I stared at the screen horror.

  One police officer dead. The other in intensive care. He did that with his bare hands… because of me.

  “Alex… Alex… are you okay?”

  ‘No,’ I thought. ‘I’m not. None of us are.’