(no subject)
I slept until eleven this morning, so the fact that it is now 12:15 the next morning DOES NOT FAZE ME. NOTICEABLY. I AM NOT FAZED. And neither is James, who I'll get round to in a bit.
First off, I only just realized, that I've made my knitting kind of synonomous to the mo and the novel. So I've got to write the novel AND grow the mo AND finish knitting my blankie.
Yes, I knit, yes, it's a blankie. I'll post a picture of me wrapped up in it all cosy and comfortable when I finish. AND YOU'LL ALL BE VERY VERY JEALOUS.
And here's James. I'm still behind, but not as far as before, as I now have 15,244 words, according to the NaNoWriMo word count validator thingamajig.
“And even confronted by that, you don’t swear unless I do first. ‘What the hell’s that?’ That putrid thing is a gingko, one of the smelliest things in the world, except a corpse flower. The thing about gingko is that it’s organic. And it smells like puke.”
“I know that last bit,” I say, looking at him. I pull the top of my shirt up over my nose. My armpits smell better than that. He snorts.
“This is how we’re getting our weed back home.” He opens the bag and shows me one, but I look away. Let him pack them himself, I’m not touching them. I kick the suitcases over to him.
“See, they’ve got dogs at the airport, and they’re definitely gonna smell this amount of weed. But what they’re trained to do is smell anything organic, and they’ll smell this horrible thing. But it smells really, really bad.”
“No shit.”
“There, I knew you had it in you. Anyway, what we do, we carry it in a bag, and you’re gonna puke in the bag, and clutch it, and look real white. Our story is you’re sick as hell, ate something bad about three hours before we get to the airport but we can’t afford to cancel now. You puked on the suitcase earlier, and we got it off, but it’ll still smell.” He smears some gingko on the suitcases. “And that should take care of them.” He sounds so confident.
The next day, we arrive at the airport smelling like puke. I’ve got makeup on my face to make it whiter, and I’m holding a bag full of gingko and puke. It smells so bad. I actually vomited in the bag, by eating too much and then sticking my finger down my throat. It worked.
Almost as soon as we get to the airport we hear the barking of a dog, and a man comes over with it on a leash.
“Excuse me, sir, but our dog has detected contraband in your luggage.” He wrinkles his nose up. “What’s that? Has your son thrown up, sir?”
“He’s not my son, he’s not my brother. And yes, he has. I’m very sorry, but I think that’s what your dog has smelt. That’s what they’re trained to do, right? Anything organic? He’s vegan. Doesn’t eat anything that’s not organic. Got a bit on the bags as well. We hosed them down, but they still smell a bit. Sorry for wasting your time, sir.” The official looks a little confused.
“Well, normally they’re pretty good at just smelling the illegal stuff, but you’re right, it’s pretty much anything organic. And… well, buster’s not been on the job long, I suppose that might be it. I should really search your bags, though.” He doesn’t look happy about it. I’m terrified, but Joan only looks stressed.
“I’m sorry, sir, but our flight’s very shortly and we need to get ready to go. We would’ve put it off until later, but we couldn’t afford that, and we’re kind of late, due to stops to… well…” he waves his hand at the bag, which I hold a little tighter. “I swear, sir, there’s nothing illegal in these bags.” Like hell.
“Alright, I’ll let you go.” He turns to go away and I breathe again.
“Excuse me, sir,” What? What? What is Joan calling him back for? “Could you give us a note or something? To avoid any more misunderstandings like this?”
“Certainly.” He pulls out a pad and scribbles on it, then tears off a page and hands it to Joan, then drags the still barking dog away. Joan shows me the note. The bearer has been searched and bears no contraband. The smell is of vomit. Jonah Jephraim. There’s no date.
“We now have an in for this airport forever, so long as our mate Jonah is on duty.” Joan ties our two bags together and pins the note onto them before chucking them on the baggage carousel. The rest of our check-in is normal, and the flight home. The note gets us through when we get home, as well.
The gang is waiting. Job walks up to us and shakes Joan’s hand.
“Let’s talk business in the car. Well done getting back.” He leads us to about three vans. One’s white, one’s blue and one’s red, so they won’t look suspicious. Job, Joan, Julius, two other gang members I don’t know and me all get in one with our suitcases.
“You got it? Three hundred thousand Canadian worth?” Joan grins.
“I did better. Five hundred thousand Canadian worth.” He hands back the gun. “I used three bullets on a dealer and his thugs who we were about to buy two hundred worth off right before they tried to kill us. I figured the emotional and mental trauma was worth two hundred thousand. Seeing three people die and all that.”
“That makes your commission five hundred thousand, for five million pounds. Well done, Joan. Would you like us to invest it for you?”
“Two hundred and fifty of it. The rest is James’. He gets to decide how to invest his” He turns to me. I look right at Job.
“How would you invest it?”
“We have a lot of accounts. Swiss accounts, Cayman accounts, under about a hundred names. We’d make a few new ones for you, and instruct the bankers to put it on the greatest possible interest. If you leave it for ten years or so you’ll have a million dollars.”
I nod. A million dollars is too big a number for me to even gape, but I’d gaped at a hundred and fifty thousand, and I know a million’s almost seven times as much. It’s a hundred thousand times as much as the ten dollars I’d been so happy with, which is also beyond my comprehension.
They drop me and Joan off at our house. Dad’s out, and we don’t really want to be there when he gets home, so we go walking. And buzzing. We end up sitting on bridge Kanulu, quiet. We sit there for ages watching people walk past and bikes and cars, all going to the new mall, which was moved about three hundred yards down the road right after that night here, three years ago. Joan’s thinking about that night too, because he’s the one who talks first.
“Were you here that night?” I nod, preferring not to say anything. I like being quiet.
“I thought you were, you were a little quiet the next morning. And your bike wasn’t in the front yard when I left.”
“That’s smart.”
“I have to have observational skills, being in a gang. I’m not an enforcer, but I still have to fight occasionally.”
“I know.” He looks a little ad when I say that.
“I’m sorry, James. You didn’t have to see that. I’ve killed four people in front of you now.”
“Is that all you’ve killed?”
He doesn’t answer. We sit there until the sun starts going down ans the water turns orange under Bridge Kanulu.
* * *
When I was nine I went with my brother to Canada, on a job for the gang. I was there when he killed three people, and was instrumental in one of the deaths. It was the second time I’d seen him kill, but I knew he’d killed many more than just those four. They died for the good of the gang. When we returned, we invested five hundred thousand dollars with the gang. A decade later I asked them to take the money from investments and place it in a savings account. The gang gave me one million, fifty-four thousand and twenty-eight thousand dollars from the first job. I now have almost six million dollars, and I’ve bought three houses.
I was nine when I started becoming more affiliated with the gang. I’d seen four deaths, and wasn’t fazed as much as I should have been. But the next one fazed me. When I was twelve.