Chapter 13
Thirteen
Thursday
ROMAN
The dual carriageway rumbles with traffic. Standard. This is the quickest way to Sanj’s—cuts about seven minutes off. It’s noisy and dusty this close to the road, but after a few minutes the footpath narrows.
He dips down below the road level, through a few sparse trees, and then all at once, the council estate looms in front of him. All the houses look identical; pebble-dashed boxes with a square of patchy ground that passes for a front garden.
He walks past what they call the park—a patch of sad-looking packed earth and grass three—kids using the broken roundabout in it like a treadmill.
Turning into Seagrave Avenue, he passes a battered Ford Fiesta with no plates and a crunched front end, sitting half on the kerb with a strip of police tape looped lazily through a wing mirror.
He walks by the first block of flats and grins when he sees a green washing-up bowl holding a load of parched geraniums strapped to a rusty iron balcony.
Sanj’s house at the end of a cul-de-sac looks smarter than most because Mrs Patel wages a quiet war on anything that can be scrubbed or tidied.
Their small front garden is neat with a freshly mown lawn and clumps of lavender planted around the edges.
A couple of dwarf conifers sit in earthenware pots outside a cleanly wiped UPVC door.
Roman lifts his head just as upstairs curtains twitch.
He doesn’t bother knocking properly, just taps, opens the door and calls, ‘It’s only me!’ like he lives here, too. And he kind of does. A radio burbles from inside and he hears one of Sanj’s younger brothers cry out in frustration against a backdrop of what sounds like gunfire.
Mrs Patel’s voice floats into the small hallway from the kitchen. ‘Sanjay’s in his room, Roman, love. Pakoras will be ready in ten minutes, I’ll bring you some up.’
‘Yes, Auntie,’ he says—that’s what she told him to call her.
He felt stupid doing so at first, but now he’s used to it.
He breathes in the comforting odours of gently fried onions and cumin and the warmth of oil.
The smell slides under his ribs and starts to soften the hard nut of resentment stuck there.
He glances into the front room on the way to the stairs and sees Sanj’s young twin brothers sitting cross-legged with their Switches, faces tilted down towards the blue light, their mouths open in concentration.
‘All right, lads?’
They issue grunts as he passes by, their eyes never leaving their screens.
Roman takes the stairs two at a time, the carpet worn dark and threadbare in the centre from over a decade of Patel family foot traffic.
Upstairs, Sanj’s door is ajar, and Roman hesitates in the doorway. This room is basically heaven.
It’s half the size of Roman’s room; a small cube of space jammed to the rafters with top-notch kit. Two towers sit like black monoliths under an outsize desk made from an old, scratched door.
In front of Sanj sit three monitors, one of them turned portrait to fit, all of them running something neon and hypnotic. Tangles of cables converge like nests of vipers and an old, dusty fan swings lazily.
With so much equipment piled on the floor there’s barely any space to put his feet, but Roman knows exactly where to step. He picks his way through and perches on the tall stool adjacent to his friend.
‘All right?’ Sanj says, without turning. Roman sees that the stubborn tuft of hair on Sanj’s crown is doing that thing where it defeats both combing and hair gel. He grins at his friend’s T-shirt, which reads in typed script: no, i will not fix your computer.
Roman scoots the stool closer, his mood already lifting a bit. Onscreen, a console scrolls and stops repeatedly, the lines of output stuttering like a heartbeat.
He feels Sanj’s eyes slide sideways.
‘What’s up? You’ve been off radar. I was getting worried about you, mate.’
Roman shrugs and stares at the monitor like he might find the answer written in the pixels if he looks hard enough.
Sanj says, ‘Houston, are you receiving?’
Roman opens his mouth, then closes it again. He doesn’t want to bring Oliver Sharpe’s dumb face here with him. He wants to get lost in the screen logs, the coding runs. He wants to scoff Mrs Patel’s pakoras until his belly aches and let them work their magic on his frozen insides.
‘Your mum texted me on Saturday afternoon,’ Sanj murmurs, tapping at the keyboard. ‘Asked if I’d seen you. She said you’d gone to the post office and disappeared off the face of the earth.’
‘What did you say?’
Sanj looks at him sharply. ‘I said I hadn’t, obvs, you dummy! But you didn’t answer any of my messages.’
Roman feels the words clamouring to get out and jamming in his throat. He takes a breath and blurts it all out in one long breath. The removals men. The crash. The glittering pile of glass on the gravel with his mum’s crushed parcel and ruined cake topper.
‘I messed up her parcel, and she had to let the client down,’ Roman says. ‘She’s still not speaking to me properly, and I don’t blame her.’
Sanj pulls a face. ‘Just give her a hug, say you’re sorry, bro. Job done. Standard mum fodder—they can’t resist.’
Roman tells him what happened and about Oliver Sharpe storming out like he’s the king of the street. The disrespect about Roman’s dad and, finally, the lads from school who witnessed it all.
He can feel the humiliation as fresh as the moment it happened, like after a slap when you can still feel the heat in your face. His throat tightens, but he doesn’t cry. ’Course he doesn’t. But there’s a point where his voice goes so thin he has to cough to thicken it up again.
Sanj’s expression shifts while he listens.
At first, Roman sees the patient version of him, when he’s trying to pay attention but itching to get back to the screens.
Then Sanj’s eyes darken and his jaw sets stubbornly, and by the time Roman has finished he totally gets it.
He’s frowning in that way that means Oliver fricking Sharpe is now his project, too.
‘You can’t let him get away with calling your dad a knobhead, mate,’ Sanj says.
‘I know, right?’
‘So, what you planning on doing about it?’
‘I’m thinking it’s got to be murder,’ Roman says, deadpan. ‘Dump his body in a vat of acid and roll it into the Trent.’
‘Excellent choice. Or we could hack his Sonos and make it play “Baby Shark” at 120 decibels at 3 a.m. every night until he crawls back to wherever he came from.’
Roman huffs out a laugh. ‘Or swap his toothpaste for Deep Heat.’
‘Or reroute every parcel due to be delivered within a five-mile radius to his address for the next year. He’ll drown under a million packs of dog-poo bags and hair nets.’
They both sit there laughing for a second, enjoying the picture until it fades and the room settles again. The fan ticks back towards them and Roman feels a brief movement of air across his face. He feels lighter now. The heat that stalled him earlier is softening.
‘Seriously, what you going to do about it?’
‘I’ve already started something. There’s a bit more groundwork to do, then I’m ready to find out exactly who Oliver Sharpe is and what he’s hiding.’