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One hundred and eight. Callum

 

 

‘What about you, Callum? What would you do with all the money in the world?’

Gordy must’ve seen from my face what I thought of the question.

‘Oh, come on. It’s just a bit a fun,’ Gordy teased.

Four months had passed since . . . since the kidnapping. I was working as a car mechanic three hundred kilometres away from home in a place called Sturham. The December afternoon was already getting dark. The heating in the garage was supposedly turned right up, but it was still chilly, and the work was mind-numbingly boring but I was glad of it. It stopped me from brooding all day, every day. And the guys I worked with weren’t bad. Gordy was a nought who’d worked as a car mechanic since he was thirteen. He was now fifty-seven and he was still a car mechanic. Nothing had changed for him. Tomorrow was going to be the same as yesterday as far as he was concerned. He was just punching time until he died. I looked at him and saw my uncles and Old Man Tony and even my dad – until Lynette had died. I looked at him and was so afraid I was seeing myself in ten, twenty, thirty years time.

Rob was a couple of years older than me. He was a talker. He was going to change the world by using the only means at his disposal, by grumbling about it. I’d only been working here for three weeks and already I’d had to hide my fists behind my back and go and sit in the toilets for a good ten minutes to stop myself from swinging for him. He drove me nuts.

‘Well? Don’t you have any dreams – or are you too good to share them with the likes of us?’ Gordy teased.

I forced myself to smile. ‘I don’t like to dwell on what I’ll never have,’ I shrugged.

‘You never know,’ Rob said, inanely.

‘So what would you do?’ Gordy urged.

‘Build a rocket and leave this planet. Live on the moon or some place else. Any place else,’ I answered.

‘If you had all the money in the world, you wouldn’t have to live on the moon. You could do whatever you liked right here,’ said Rob.

‘D’you know what they call a nought with all the money in the world?’ I asked.

Rob and Gordy shook their heads.

‘A blanker,’ I told them.

They didn’t laugh. They weren’t supposed to.

‘Things would change if we had a ton of money,’ Rob tried to tell me.

I tried – and failed – to keep the pitying look off my face. ‘It takes more than money, Rob. It takes determination and sacrifice and . . . and . . .’

Rob and Gordy were both looking at me like I’d lost my mind. I shut up.

‘Just ignore me,’ I told them ruefully.

‘We’ll have to call you the deep one,’ Gordy said. ‘Or better yet, the profound one.’

‘Don’t you dare,’ I warned him.

‘We will come to you for spiritual guidance!’ Gordy bowed low, his hands together as if in prayer. ‘Oh, profound one, share your mystical insights with us. Enlighten us . . .’

‘If you three can’t be bothered to get on with your work, there are hundreds of others out there who’d be only too happy to take your jobs,’ Snakeskin emerged from his office to holler at us.



Without a word we got back to work, waiting until Snakeskin had slammed his way back into his office before adopting our previous positions.

‘What a horse’s ass!’ Rob sniffed.

‘There’s a lot of it about,’ I said.

‘Amen to that,’ Gordy agreed.

‘What I want to know is, how does . .?’ Rob began.

‘Shush! Shush!’ I hissed at him. I moved over to the workbench to turn up the volume on the radio. Something on the news had caught my attention.

‘. . . has refused to confirm or deny that Persephone Mira Hadley, his daughter, is pregnant, and that this is the result of her ordeal a few months ago at the hands of her kidnappers. We can only speculate as to what this poor girl has been subjected to at the hands of the nought men who abducted her. Persephone herself has so far refused to speak of her two terrifying days in captivity, the memories being obviously too painful, too shocking . . .

‘Hey!’ Gordy was staring at me and I had no idea why, until I saw the radio lying on the floor, smashed to smithereens where I’d thrown it against the wall.

‘I’ve got to get out of here.’ I headed for the exit.

‘Er . . . Callum, where d’you think you’re going?’ Snakeskin called after me.

‘I’ve got to leave.’

‘Oh no you don’t.’

‘Watch me!’

‘If you go out that door, don’t bother to come back.’ I carried on walking.


Date: 2015-12-18; view: 649


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