Baghlan Boy by Michael Crowley

Author:Michael Crowley
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The Book Guild
Published: 2020-09-11T00:00:00+00:00

Part Two

Twenty-Two

Rotterdam, April 2012

Farood hoisted himself from the sleeping bag with the determined thought of opening a window. His tongue itched with cigarette smoke and his nostrils clenched against the odour of stale, heavy-sweet alcohol. He stood, coughed, then drew the curtains that tinted with April light. A willow tree was poised across the road, its skirts puffed out as if to present a better view of itself. He had been in the Rotterdam apartment for three weeks, but he hadn’t noticed the tree before, not like this. It glowed, as if storing up light for this particular morning, projecting across the road towards him. He pulled up the window, letting birdsong enter the room. No traffic could be heard, just the quiet pattering of a ball off a pavement. Leaning out of the window into the Sunday of an unbending road with its queues of apartment blocks, with thousands of people living around him, he believed he would never be found. He walked over to the kitchen area to make some coffee, inhaling its aroma. Vinnie entered the room in his boxer shorts, revealing more of his blurred tattoos.

‘I’ll make some coffee,’ volunteered Farood.

‘Good lad.’

‘You want me to make breakfast?’

‘No need, son. We’re going out for breakfast. And we’re gonna start working.’

Vinnie spoke about starting work most days without ever saying what the work was.

‘Vinnie, why don’t we decorate this room? Brighten it up a little. What do you say?’

‘It’s not ours, is it?’

‘Will he mind. Your friend?’

‘I don’t know. But it’s not worth the trouble, is it?’

Every day for the last few weeks had been filled with TV, films, shopping, drinking, prison stories, traveller stories and the occasional bout of sean-nós singing from Vinnie. Neither Atherton nor Vinnie had attempted to persuade Farood to drink. He was left to watch their voices slow and swerve, their tempers soften and fray, their eyes widen and moisten with every swig. Some nights would culminate in Vinnie stripping to his boxers, bouncing off his toes and challenging either of them to spar with him. Farood would swing kicks against Vinnie’s forearm blocks and needle jabs. When the lightbulb broke, they sat in the darkness concurring that prison was a joke, too soft, and as such had let them down. On the ferry they had played cards riotously, inviting other passengers to join them until they were required to leave the bar area because of their choice language. It was an overnight journey and Vinnie interrogated Farood about his journey from Baghlan to England.

‘Did you know, Farood, that same route was used thousands of years ago? It was called the silk road back then.’

‘I heard that. An agent told me that, I think.’

‘They’re clever people, these agents.’

Before leaving England, the brothers stated they needed to be ‘cashed up’ for the trip. For Atherton and Vinnie, this meant ‘an armed’ on a brothel: these were cash-only establishments that tended not to ring the police. Inspecting the back pages of the mid-week Evening News they circled some south Manchester parlours before heading out on the Friday afternoon.

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