Age of Legends Read online

  Bruises. Surely she had some bruises from the punishment the policemen had dished out?

  There were none of those either. Her torso, her arms, her legs––no evidence whatsoever of the abuse.

  She was healed all over.

  How is that even possible?

  What should have taken weeks, even months, to recover from had mended in just a matter of hours.

  A sense of unreality washed over her, until her hunger reasserted itself, grounding her again. She was famished. If she didn’t eat soon, she was afraid she might pass out.

  Pushing thoughts of her near-miraculous recuperation to the back of her mind, she went in search of a high street. She knew this was a risky move. Surveillance cameras everywhere and facial recognition systems in operation. Her cycling top had a hood, however, which she pulled tight over her head.

  It took her half an hour of wandering, but eventually she found a late-night mini mart nestled amid a parade of charity shops and national chain stores, many of the latter now closed down. The mini mart was the kind that at one time would more than likely have been run by an Asian family, but its present proprietor was an overweight white man who looked peeved, as though being a mini mart owner was beneath his dignity. He sat at the checkout, peering through thick spectacles at a copy of The Sun, “The Paper That Supports the New Britain”.

  Only when she was through the doors of the mini mart did Ajia realise she had no money on her. The police had confiscated all her personal effects, including not just her phone but her wallet too.

  Shit.

  Ajia had shoplifted only once before, a tube of mascara from Boots when she was twelve, and she had felt awful about it for days afterward. But that had been a spur-of-the-moment thing and she’d been just a kid. The circumstances were different now. This was necessity.

  Aside from the proprietor there were two other people on the premises, both customers. One was a bleary-eyed stoner looking for something to satisfy his munchies, the other a heavily pregnant woman who was in the grip of a food craving, to judge by the jar of pickled beetroot and the tub of ice cream in her shopping basket. Ajia didn’t think either of them was going to give her much trouble. The main thing was not to draw attention to herself, which was hard because she knew she looked a mess.

  The shelves were half empty, and what stock there was, was overpriced even by independent-retailer standards. A glass-fronted refrigerator offered a selection of prepacked foods, including sandwiches and samosas. Ajia grabbed a couple of each and a bottle of water. She ambled towards the checkout, casual as anything, like someone who had every intention of paying for her purchases. The door lay just four yards away. She reckoned she could be outside and halfway down the street before the proprietor roused himself to go after her. That was assuming the man could even be bothered. He looked as though he didn’t engage in any activity more energetic than using the stairs, and even that would leave him short of breath.

  “Excuse me,” said a voice behind her.

  It was the pregnant woman.

  Ajia pretended not to have heard, but the woman was persistent.

  “Not my business,” she said, “but I couldn’t help noticing.” She indicated Ajia’s torn, bloodied clothing. “Did a boyfriend do this? Because if he did, I hope you’ve reported him. Can’t let the bastards get away with it, can we?”

  “I tripped and fell,” Ajia said.

  “That’s a lot of blood for someone who ‘tripped and fell’. Listen, love, I’m an A&E nurse. I’ve seen it all. Girls in the state you’re in and worse. We’re trained to look for signs of physical abuse. If you haven’t gone to the police yet, you should.”

  Ajia almost laughed.

  “At least think about it, would you?” said the pregnant woman.

  Having overheard the conversation, the mini mart proprietor and the stoner were now staring at Ajia, intrigued. The pregnant woman had managed to blow whatever chance she had had of doing this subtly. Her only tactic left was just to go for it.

  She said, “Thanks for the advice,” and pelted for the door with her armful of food.

  None of the three people even attempted to stop her. They just stood stock still, seemingly too astonished to react. As she burst through the door, Ajia glanced back, and they were as statue-like as before. They weren’t even looking towards her. They were staring at the spot where she had been standing a moment ago, frowns forming on their faces.

  Ajia raced off along the street, clutching her ill-gotten gains to her chest.

  LATER, ON A park bench, she wolfed down the food. The sandwiches were tasteless, the samosas more so. A hint of spiciness was somehow worse than no spiciness at all. Maybe there was a cap on how hot an Indian foodstuff could be these days. There were rumours that, in the wake of Drake’s election, the chefs at certain curry houses had started toning down the intensity of their vindaloos for fear of seeming unpatriotic. Or maybe the samosa was just a piece of flavour-free mass-produced crap, that was all.

  Either way, it was nothing like the ones Ajia’s mother used to make. Those samosas were gorgeous, crispy treats with just the right mix of vegetables and enough green chillies to make the lips burn deliciously. As a kid, every morning when Ajia went to school, her mother used to pack a fresh samosa in her bag, wrapped in kitchen foil. “In case you need it,” her mother would say, and even if she wasn’t peckish, Ajia would eat it regardless at some point during the day.

  Thoughts of her mother brought an extra layer of misery to the miseries Ajia was suffering. Padma Snell had been among the first wave of deportees when the Drake government came to power. Being born in the UK and a resident for forty years did not, it seemed, guarantee UK nationality any more. Padma and her parents, Ajia’s grandparents, were put on a plane and flown to Mumbai, arriving in a country Padma had never visited and her parents remembered only faintly. This, of course, was in contravention of international law and had provoked an outcry from the UN and various charities and NGOs, which had not troubled Derek Drake one bit. He had simply accused “bureaucratic busybodies” of interfering in his country’s inalienable right to do as it pleased with its population.

  What had become of her family members after their deportation, Ajia had no clear idea. The last she’d heard, they were in an internment camp and being treated as displaced persons––glorified refugees. That was four years ago, and every attempt she had made since then to communicate with them or trace their whereabouts online had come to nothing. There were no official records of them having been transferred out of the camp, but the camp itself had been dismantled. Their social media accounts stood idle. Their phone numbers had been disconnected. It was as though they had vanished into limbo.

  India was not to blame for this, at least not wholly. The subcontinent was struggling to cope with the influx of arrivals from Great Britain. Tens of thousands of individuals per year were being added to its already vast population, some coming because they were forced to, others to escape a Britain where tolerance of difference was at an all-time low. India’s infrastructure was cracking under the strain.

  Ajia herself had been allowed to remain behind solely because of her Caucasian father. If he too had been of Indian ethnicity, they would all have been deported. Sometimes, in the light of how her life had turned out after her mother was taken away, she wished they had. At least then they would all be together. And her father would not be dead.

  Grief welled within her. Old grief, deep grief, not yet healed. Ajia fought it down. Now was not the time. What was important now was survival. She was in serious shit. On the run from the police. Nobody to turn to. Nowhere she could go. The fact that her injuries, not least the bullet wound, had somehow magically vanished was some consolation. It was also extremely weird, and she supposed it should have bothered her more than it did, but just then it felt like simply an added layer of complication for her to deal with. It was almost surreal how screwed she was, and how quickly it had happened. One moment, she was merrily going along
, business as usual. The next, this clusterfuck.

  Yet somehow it seemed inevitable, too. You couldn’t do what she’d been doing––putting up images in public places lampooning Derek Drake––without at least acknowledging the possibility you might someday get into trouble for it. For months she had been making her art ever more inflammatory, ever more provocative, practically courting disaster. In today’s atmosphere, you played it safe or faced the consequences, and Ajia had made a conscious decision not to play it safe. She was angry and she wanted people to know how angry she was.

  The state, however, did not like anger. Anger posed a threat to order. The state wanted the masses complacent and docile, and it visited its own anger on anyone who did not conform to its will.

  As she cast her mind back over recent events, a thought occurred to Ajia. Why had the two policemen taken her from the station and brought her to that piece of waste ground? What had they been planning to do? She had no memory of getting there, but then presumably she had been unconscious during the journey. What she did remember, vaguely, was one of the policemen attacking her with a crowbar. She remembered, too, a sack made of black, rubberised fabric, gaping like an open cocoon.

  The sack––had that been a bodybag? Had the two cops been going to kill her and stash her in it?

  If so, then the situation was even more dire than she’d supposed. They want me dead.

  Her only viable option, then, was to disappear. Vanish, the way her mother and grandparents had done in India, only by choice, not through bureaucratic chaos. Somehow she had to slip between the cracks and never be seen again.

  Right this moment, however, Ajia wanted only to sleep. The food sat heavy in her stomach. She was wrung out, physically and emotionally. Every part of her ached, except for the bits that were plain agony. Just a couple of hours’ kip, that was all. It would be dawn soon. A new day. She could figure out what to do with herself then.

  She curled up on the bench, making herself as comfortable as she could, one arm for a pillow. The night air was chilly, but she soon fell asleep.

  SHE AWOKE AS hands grabbed her roughly. She smelled the stink of unwashed body, unlaundered clothing, and stale alcohol. She herself did not smell great, but it was the intensity of the odours, and above all the stale alcohol, that told her the reek was someone else’s rather than her own.

  A man was growling at her. “My bench! My fucking bench! You get off!”

  Next thing Ajia knew, she was being rolled off the bench. She landed hard.

  As she lay sprawled on her side, stunned, a tremendous blow struck her from above. A stamp from a booted foot, delivered viciously. She felt something––a rib––snap. The pain was so excruciating, she couldn’t even scream; she could only gasp and whimper.

  Then she was rolled over onto her back. The same hands that had ousted her from the bench now encircled her wrists. Hot breath, reeking of booze and rotten teeth, gusted in her face.

  “Little bitch. The nerve of you. My bench. Nobody sleeps on my bench.”

  Still crippled by pain, Ajia writhed, but the man’s grip was too powerful.

  “Fucking teach you a lesson. That’s what I’m going to do. I served, you know. Army. Ten years. They taught me how to hurt people good and proper. Never forgotten it.”

  A knee pressed down on her sternum, doubling the agony from her fractured rib. The man transferred control of her wrists to just one of his hands, freeing up the other. Coarse, iron-hard fingers clutched Ajia’s face.

  “Break your jaw. I can do it. Snap it right off its hinges.”

  A cry built in the back of her throat, a guttural yell of defiance. Desperately, without really thinking about it, Ajia brought her knee up between the man’s legs.

  But the angle was wrong. The blow struck the inside of the man’s thigh, not the tenderer parts it was aimed at.

  “Missed! Nice try. Won’t let you have a second shot at that.”

  The man used his other leg to weigh down both of Ajia’s legs. He was so much heavier than her, so much stronger.

  “Now, where was I? Oh yes. The jaw.”

  The fingers dug harder into her face and began twisting. Ajia felt the joints connecting her jawbone to the rest of her skull creak. Could he really do it? Could he break her jaw just like that?

  From a few yards away, a deep, clear, cultivated voice said, “I would advise you to leave her alone, Rich.”

  The pressure on Ajia’s face eased just a fraction.

  “Smith?” the man said. “Is that you?”

  “It’s me,” said the man called Smith. His accent carried a faint West Indian lilt. “And I won’t ask again. Get off her. Now. Or you’ll have me to answer to.”

  “Oh yes?” The man whom Smith had addressed as Rich let go of Ajia and reared up. “You’re big, Smith, but you’re not so tough. Not as tough as me.”

  “How about my hammer and I decide that, Rich?”

  “You and your ruddy hammer. I’m not scared. I’ve got this.”

  Rich rummaged in a pocket. Ajia glimpsed him drawing something out. There was a click. A knife blade glinted in the dark.

  As for Smith, he did indeed have a hammer, as advertised. A carpenter’s tool, long-handled, the head square at one end and tapered at the other, and he was holding it out at the end of a lanky arm. He loomed over Rich, tall and imposing, the hammer raised. If Rich’s knife intimidated him, he didn’t show it.

  The two of them held each other’s gaze for several seconds, their weapons poised. Ajia braced herself for them to start fighting. She anticipated a short-lived flurry of violence, a decisive, perhaps fatal blow struck sooner rather than later––a stab to the gut, a clout around the head with that hammer. She was in too much pain to do anything but lie there and watch.

  Then Rich backed down. Like a dog capitulating to a larger, fiercer dog, he bobbed his head low and grinned servilely.

  “Yeah, well, not worth it, is it?” he said. “I mean, sun comes up in an hour. It’s just a bench.”

  “Quite,” said Smith. “I’m not sure one can even claim a park bench as one’s own. Aren’t they public property?”

  “Yeah. Yeah, yeah.” Rich put away the knife. He gathered up a heap of bulging plastic carrier bags which sat beside the bench, his worldly possessions. Grumbling under his breath, he began shuffling away.

  Smith presented himself to Ajia. At first glance, he and Rich had much in common. Both had straggling, unkempt beards and both were in need of a good bath and a change of clothing. In that respect, they were more or less your typical homeless rough-sleepers.

  Smith, however, had a straight-backed bearing, compared with Rich’s hunched posture, and he didn’t smell like a brewery. His outfit, too, was somehow more dignified––a military-surplus greatcoat and a trilby hat, where Rich favoured castoff sportswear––and his dreadlocks were the genuine article, properly palm-rolled, while Rich’s were just the result of matted, filthy hair. Rich looked shabby, and Smith also looked shabby but in a somehow classy way.

  Smiling, Smith extended a hand to Ajia.

  “Permit me,” he said.

  Ajia did not accept the proffered assistance. “I can get up on my own, thanks.”

  She proceeded to try, and, with a lot of wincing and hissing, just about managed it. She got as far as slumping onto the bench, at least. She was breathing hard, and every inhalation and exhalation hurt.

  “You made that look easy,” Smith said.

  Ajia grimaced. “Listen, thanks for helping me out with that guy. Don’t get me wrong, I appreciate it.”

  “You’re welcome, good fellow.”

  Good fellow? Who did Smith think he was? Fucking Aslan the lion?

  “But,” she said, “I’m okay now. You don’t have to hang around. I’ve got this.”

  Smith’s expression could not have been any more sceptical. “Have you now? Because to me it looks as though you haven’t got anything except what seems to be a broken rib, along with bloodstains on your cloth
ing suggestive of an older injury. In short, you aren’t in great shape.”

  “So what if I’m not?”

  “All I’m saying is you seem as though you could do with a friend,” said Smith, “and I could be that friend.”

  “‘Friend’ as in you want me to give you a gratitude blowjob or something? Because, I can tell you this, Mr Smith, that is not going to happen. Not in a million years.”

  “Just Smith.”

  “What?”

  “No ‘Mr’. Just Smith. And no fellatio is called for, or any other sexual favour. I’m willing to do you a kindness, that’s all. You’re like me, I can tell. We are cut from the same cloth. You may not realise that yet, but we are. I have found you, and I can take you to a place where there are more of us. Others who share the secret.”

  “Secret?”

  “We have become as new,” Smith said. “We have died and been reborn, and now we are transformed. Improved. Exalted.”

  This, to Ajia, sounded like Jesus talk. With an ultra-right-wing, devoutly religious prime minister in charge, it was hardly surprising that there had been a significant uptick in Christianity all across the land. Not only was church attendance on the rise, faith outreach centres were flourishing as well, and a number of homeless shelters were now offering food and beds solely to those prepared to endure an hour or two of hardcore evangelist preaching beforehand. Smith, Ajia reckoned, was a convert and had adopted the role of shepherd, rescuing lost lambs and bringing them into the fold.

  This particular lamb, however, would rather end up on the dinner table than join the flock.

  “Yeah, no,” she said, eyeing Smith’s hammer, which he had tucked into a loop of his belt. Godly or not, anyone who walked around open-carrying a hammer was not to be trusted. “Whatever it is you’re selling, I’m not in the market. Thanks again. I’m off now.”

  She rose to her feet, and immediately was overcome by pain, and accompanying that, a wave of light-headedness. She staggered and keeled over.

  Smith caught her as she fell. “Good fellow,” he said pityingly, supporting her. “Like it or not, your fate and mine are bound together. We are kin, and nothing can change that.”