Thicker Than Water

I handed off to Imelda’s people down in Elephant and Castle. There were two of them: handsome black men of few words who were ten years my junior and could have folded me backwards until I broke if the notion had come into their heads. I gave the van’s keys to the taller of the two, who wore a beanie and bands in rasta colours and had a braided beard that impugned the manhood of any man he met. He waved the keys at me like a schoolteacher waving a pointer.

‘Imelda wanted me to say this to you,’ he rumbled. ‘And she wanted me to say it slow, one word at a time.

’ He tapped the keys against my chest five times, once for each word. ‘Don’t - make - me - regret - this.’

Being on his turf and his time, I took the insult with as much good grace as I could muster. ‘You ever get any snarl-ups south of the river?’ I asked.

He gave me a suspicious scowl. ‘What?’

‘The beads,’ I clarified, pointing to his beard. ‘Do they get in the way when you muff-dive?’

His eyes widened and his mouth set in a tight line. ‘Man, you’re asking for some real—’

I nodded, making the wrap-it-up gesture used by studio floor managers.

‘Tell Imelda I’m grateful,’ I said. ‘And tell her I’ll sort this out soon. She’s got my word on that.’

South Circular. Kew Bridge. North Circular. In Pen’s car now, which at least didn’t handle like a barge, but I was at the end of my rope, physically. Tiredness kills. Ask anyone. The only thing that kept me awake was surfing the news channels to find out if I was a wanted man.

Pen was waiting in the kitchen with all the lights on.

She wanted a debriefing, which was extensive and occasionally hysterical, shading eventually into alcoholic.

When I rolled into bed at last, drunk with fatigue and spent adrenalin and a great deal of actual alcohol, I fell into sleep like a man stepping off the edge of a cliff. On the way down, I thought with a slightly numbed wonder about all the shit that was going to hit all the many and various fans when the morn’m when thing came.

And decided to sleep until noon.

"

"But we got through the next day without the sky falling, and then the day after that. There was nothing about Rafi in the papers or on the TV news: there weren’t even any good rumours flying on the conspiracy websites, and nobody came to the door to ask me where I’d been on the night of the third. Gradually, Pen and I relaxed from our bunker mentality.

I called Imelda, who said that she’d got Rafi settled in pretty well at her place.