There aren’t many of them left now. They’re evenly matched, maybe Bernie’s even got the upper hand, especially cos Primrose is a bit scared now; you can see it on his face. There’s thundering steps on the iron stairs, and two blokes try to grab her. One of them leans close to her, cos that’s scary to normal kids, to any little girl, and it’s just instinct, but she only has to put up a couple of fingers to his temple and let a jolt go across his forehead and he’s fallen to the floor, crying bloody tears. The other one grabs her round the waist – don’t they know anything? – and she gets his wrist. She’s learning it doesn’t take much to stop them touching her, and she feels pleased with herself until she looks down and sees Primrose heading out the door that leads to the back of the block.
He’s going to get away. Bernie is moaning on the floor, and Terry bleeding from the hole in his head. Terry’s gone, just like her mum, she’s sure of that, but Primrose is trying to get away. Oh no you’re not, you little shit, Roxy thinks. Oh no you’re bloody not.
She sprints down the steps, keeping low, and follows Primrose back through the building, along a corridor, through an empty open-plan office. She sees him veering left and she speeds up. If he gets to his car she’ll have lost him and he’ll come back on them hard and fast; he won’t leave any of them alive. She thinks of his men taking her mum by the throat. He ordered this. He made it come true. Her legs pump harder.
He goes down another corridor, into a room – there’s a door to the fire-exit stairs and she hears the handle go and she’s saying, Fuck fuck fuck, to herself, but when she hurls her body round the corner Primrose is still in that room. The door was locked, wasn’t it. He’s got hold of a metal bin and he’s bashing at the window to break it and she dives down just like they’d practised, slides and aims for his shin. Her one hand grasps his ankle, sweet, bare flesh and she gives it to him.
He doesn’t make a sound the first time. He topples to the ground like his knee’s given way, even while his arms are still trying to bash the window with that bin so it clangs into the wall. And as he goes down she grabs his wrist and she gives it to him again.
She can tell from the way he screams that no one’s done this to him before. It’s not the pain, it’s the surprise, the horror. She sees the line run up his arm, just like on the bloke in her mum’s house, and thinking of that, even remembering it, makes it run stronger and hotter through her. He screams like there are spiders under his skin, like they’re biting him inside his flesh.
She eases it off a bit.
‘Please,’ he says. ‘Please.’
He looks at her, makes his swimming eyes focus. ‘I know you,’ he says. ‘You’re Monke’s kid. Your mum was Christina, wasn’t she?’
He’s not supposed to say her mum’s name. He shouldn’t do that. She gets him across the throat and he screams, and then he’s saying, ‘Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.’
And then he’s gabbling, ‘I’m sorry about it, I am sorry, it was about your dad but I can help you, you can come and work for me, bright girl like you, strong girl like you, never felt anything like it. Bernie doesn’t want you around, I can tell you that. Come and work for me. Tell me what you want. I can get it for you.’
Roxy says, ‘You killed my mum.’
He goes, ‘Your dad killed three of my boys that month.’
She goes, ‘You sent your men and they killed my mum.’
And Primrose goes so quiet, so quiet and so still she thinks he’s going to start screaming again any second or he’s going to launch himself at her teeth first. Then he smiles and shrugs. He says, ‘I got nothing for you, love, if this is the way it is. But you were never supposed to see it. Newland said you weren’t going to be home.’
Someone’s coming up the stairs. She hears them. Feet, more than one pair, boots on the stairs. Could be her dad’s men, could be Primrose’s. Could be she’ll have to run or there’ll be a bullet for her any second.
‘I was home, though,’ Roxy says.
‘Please,’ says Primrose. ‘Please don’t.’
And she’s back there again, clean and clear and with the crystals exploding in her brain, back in her mum’s house. It was just what her mum said, just that. She thinks of her dad with his rings on and his knuckles coming away from a man’s mouth dripping blood. This is the only thing worth having. She puts her hand to Primrose’s temples. And she kills him.
Tunde
He gets a phone call the day after he puts the video online. It’s from CNN, they say. He thinks they’re kidding. It’s just the kind of thing his friend Charles would do, some stupid joke. He called Tunde once, pretending to be the French ambassador, kept up the snooty accent for ten minutes before he cracked.
The voice on the other end of the line says, ‘We want the rest of the video. We’re happy to pay whatever you’re asking.’
He says, ‘What?’
‘Is this Tunde? BourdillonBoy97?’
‘Yeah?’
‘It’s CNN calling. We want to buy the rest of the video you put online of the incident in the grocery store. And any others you have.’
And he thinks, The rest? The rest? And then he remembers.
‘There’s only … it’s only missing a minute or two at the end. Other people came into the shot. I didn’t think it was …’
‘We’ll blur the faces. How much are you asking?’
His face is still pillow-mashed and his head hurts. He throws out the first stupid number that comes into his head. Five thousand American dollars.
And they agree so fast that he knows he should have asked for double.
That weekend he prowls the streets and the clubs looking for footage. A fight between two women on the beach at midnight, the electricity lighting up the eager faces of their audience as the women grunt and struggle to grab each other’s faces, throats. Tunde gets chiaroscuro shots of their faces twisted with rage, half hidden in shadow. The camera makes him feel powerful; as if he’s there but not there. You do what you like, he thinks to himself, but I’m the one who’s going to turn it into something. I’ll be the one who’ll tell the story.
There’s a girl and a boy making love in a back alley. She coaxes him with a crackling hand at the small of his back. The boy turns around to see Tunde’s camera pointing at him and pauses, and the girl sends a flicker across his face and says, ‘Don’t look at him, look at me.’ When they’re getting close, the girl smiles and lights up the boy’s spine and says to Tunde, ‘Hey, you want some, too?’ That’s when he notices a second woman watching from further down the alley, and he runs as fast as he can, hearing them laughing behind him. Once he’s safely out of the way, he laughs, too. He looks at the footage on the screen. It’s sexy. He’d like someone to do that to him, maybe. Maybe.
CNN take those pieces of footage, too. They pay. He looks at the money in his account, thinks, I’m a journalist. This is all it means. I found the news and they paid me for it. His parents say, ‘When are you going back to school?’