Watch Me Disappear by Ross Armstrong

Author:Ross Armstrong
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: MIRA Books
Published: 2022-11-07T15:46:38+00:00

* * *

The next day I’m frustrated to find that Levine has charged us with another gift we certainly can’t return. You can elaborate and exaggerate things from your shift when you’ve done very little, but there’s no lying when it comes to things you have to do.

However, I was just considering that perhaps it’d be good to have some time away from thoughts of the girls, to let my mind decompress, when I felt a hand on my back.

“Oi! What you two doing around my neck again?”

It was Turan, and maybe he was joking, maybe he wasn’t. He seemed to be protective of his little fiefdom.

“Kids smashed up a shop this time. Pissed in the till. All sorts.

Another blessing from Levine,” Bartu said.

“Fuckers. Told you. As you were,” Turan says, and he would’ve ended the conversation right there if I hadn’t had other ideas. “Hey, Turan. Who’s that guy, err...” I say, clicking my fingers, “...came into the chicken shop? We see him about a lot.”

“With that conclusive description? No idea, mate,” he says. He does have a lot of faces in his life, I guess.

“Yeah, but...skinny guy? In sunglasses? Maybe I’ll ask a—”

“Oh yeah, I know the one. Poor bastard. His dad went down for fiddling with him. Jarwar put the fucker away. He had to tell her some gruesome shit,” he says with some steel. “Few years ago, I think she said. Can’t remember his name. Why d’you ask?”

“Absolutely no reason,” I say.

“All right then. Best of British,” he shouts, as he crosses the road. “You get home all right last night, Tom?”

While I’m slightly surprised and maybe even flattered to hear him use my name with a warm inflection, that’s more than balanced out by the negative of how aware everyone seems to be of my movements. I shut this down, though. Keep some authority in my stoicism and save some suspicion for later.

“It’s only rain,” I say.

Turan merely nods and waves from over the road, unsure how amusing to find this plain speaking. Then he heads down a side road as we make toward the latest landmark that’s taken a beating from the local residents.

I want to ask Bartu how Turan had been told about the less-than-scintillating story of me walking home in the rain. But instead I focus on thinking about why I can’t exactly see anyone charging around pouring all their effort into bringing these girls home.

“Is this it down here?” I say.

“Yeah, this is it here,” he says, our tired mouths chuntering out adequate conversation.

We find the place has been more ravaged and fucked up than anything I’ve seen before. After struggling with the till, they decided to repurpose it as a Portaloo, then set about smashing out all the lights, with a baseball bat, presumably. What seems to place an age on the culprits is the amount of gelatin-based sweets and crisps that have been taken, and the feeling that anyone over the age of sixteen who might have done this seriously needs some better friends.

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