The Walking Dead

Faria recognized him. With his old coat, the wool hat down on his forehead and the sheaf of papers in his fist, she had seen him often enough with his little tour groups. For a moment she thought it sad that so few accompanied him — but it was only a fleeting thought because the business in hand was shopping and on her knee was the list she had been given of items to be bought. A police car pulled out behind the car and passed them, and the policewoman, who was the passenger, eyed her. She said quietly to Jamal, 'Don't worry, they're not for us. They're for druggies and drunks. The town is bad with all levels of abuse. It's the corruption…There are no guns here. The town is not protected.' A little shiver went through her but she thought Jamal hadn't seen it. She had neatly ticked off each item on the list, and now she needed only the hardware store, which never closed before ten, to buy the soldering iron. They followed the police car, and the road took them away from the guide and his party past the steps to the shopping arcade. She knew it was the target but not when it would be hit.

Without thinking — she had dedication but not professionalism — she broke a rule. She turned to the young man beside her who was so young and had smooth skin, not her scars. She asked, 'When it's done, what will you do?'

'Go home as soon as I am released to my father's shop in Dudley. After the end of the holiday, I will go to London and my college, at London University I am nineteen, I am doing first-year business studies. I was identified at the mosque in Dudley because I spoke up for the three boys from Tipton, which is close to where I live, who were barbarically imprisoned by the Americans at the concentration camp of Guantanamo, and tortured. The government did nothing to help them. The government is the lackey of the Americans. I tell you, Faria, I am disappointed I was not chosen. I would have done it, worn the belt or the waistcoat. They told me I was more valuable alive, but that is confusing to me. How can doing reconnaissance be more important than dying as a martyr? But I am obedient. I will go to London and hope that I have proved my value and will be called again…Is this the shop?'

'I apologize for asking the question. Please, forgive me. This one, yes.'

He braked and pulled the car close to the kerb.

She went with her list towards the shop's open door. Behind her, in the car, she left the youth with the pretty face, the small stunted body, the heavy spectacles and the first fluff of a moustache: she wondered if the girls at the college, white-skinned or Asian failed to notice him, if the story of the virgins in the gardens of Paradise stirred him. She could not kill it — a small, fast excitement ran in her at the thought of virgins. In the shop, Faria asked for a soldering iron and knew to what purpose it would be put.

* * *

The table had barely been cleared. Kathy had gone, charging up the stairs to her room, homework and music. The mats were still on the table, and the water glasses, but the silence of the meal was over. The envelopes were dumped in front of Jools, where the crumbs from the pudding had not been wiped away.

He stared at them. Babs had thrown them down, then retreated to the sink and was running water into the bowl.

Some of the envelopes were three months old, some had come that week. One must have come today. Babs had taken his plate off the mat, gone to the drawer where brown envelopes festered and flipped them so that the oldest were at the top.

Bills, final demands and threats.

The household finances of Jools Wright were a disaster. Bank accounts overdrawn, credit cards leaking interest charges, gas, electricity and water all unpaid. There was an abuse-laden handwritten note from the man who had repaired the chimney flashing.

No point going to the drawer where the envelopes accumulated and getting out the cheque book, his or hers, because any cheque he wrote would bounce high. Even the damned piggy bank, only for two-pound coins and the summer holiday, was empty because it had been rifled for last week's supermarket run: he had counted out a pocketful of coins while the woman had stared bleakly at him and the queue building behind him had fidgeted in irritation.

The house was the trouble. Her parents had put down the deposit for them, and the mortgage had been based on Babs going back to work when Kathy started school. But Babs didn't work any more, citing stress. The mortgage ate what he earned. He was blamed for her stress. Couldn't argue with it. Didn't argue with it. He'd not made head of department, wasn't on a high-achiever bonus, and above-inflation salary increments were a thing of the past. He looked down at the bills, shuffled and restacked them, then laid them out across the table.

'Well, I don't know what to bloody do with them, short of robbing a bank.'

'Which you'd probably cock up,' came the whiplash from behind him.