"It's that one."
"Say nothing."
Sullivan looks to Jahseh, and Jahseh to Sullivan. There's an intoxicating nostalgia to their at hand circumstance. Curb tilted and laughably helter-skelter on one any Abbey Wood roadside far too late into the night for any staple man's preference. Never for Sullivan and Jahseh, though. The crippling darkness only ever amps them further, the stagnant shadows and cones of streetlight they bow their heads to.
Jahseh is the first to break from their matrix of quiet, and then Sullivan soon after. The pair dismount the car, Sullivan circles it till his shoulder meets his brother's. Jahseh's frustration is evident, more than, but Sullivan cannot for the life of him figure out why. Nor can he compass what business either of the two have gallivanting about Abbey Wood this tragically into a Saturday night. "Am I meant to keep guessing why we're out 'ere?"
Jahseh's shrug in response is coded and half-assed, "You carrying?"
"No shit. Wagwan?"
Sullivan eyes the hand that Jahseh plows through the stubble of his chin with a bleeding impatience. His stomach coils at the déjà vu of it all, only the reliving that comes to mind is twisted with a turn for the inevitable worst. And either of the two bleaching a bathroom sink till four in the morning. It's that vacant stare that has time and time again proven the pair haven't a civilised bone between them, despite how wholeheartedly they charade about in their 9-5s and paid off vehicles.
" Just come, man."
Sullivan is anxious to follow after him, anxious as they cross the road and anxious as they hike two flights worth of stairs, anxious as they scale the landing and even more so as Jahseh anchors before a door he can bet his life savings the pair have no lawful concerns on the other side of. But he can only recline against the wall beside him and waitâthere's no talking Jahseh out of that vacancy to his stare.
"Jah..."
Jahseh pelts four tight fisted knocks against the door. After a minute of stillness ticks by uninterrupted, his knocks betide in a downpour of thumps that rattle the thing down to its hinges. Within seconds there's scuttling from within the council flat, and when the door finally opens, the odour it'd caged repels the pair an inch back.
Kamale.
And if not for his gaping plum for a left eye, Jahseh might've been quicker to acknowledge the horror on the boy's face before he pitches the door shut. Sullivan's foot is bricked in its path before Kamale is successful to do so. By the stretch of unlit hallway backdropped behind him, the floor curried by curious coloured stains and assorted garbage, Jahseh is quickly spun from impatience to a choking irritation.
"What... W-What the fuck! I gave her back the bag! I swear!"
Oh.
Sullivan's confusion puzzles seamlessly into a less distorted picture. Beside him, Jahseh can't bear much more of the kid's blackened eye, nor the smell that perfuses his every sense. He takes a gnawed lip between his teeth, scowl all the stonier, and inches another step backwards.
"Come outside, man."
Kamale shakes his head, "Y-You're gonna wake up my stepdad, j-just go away! Please, maâ"
When Jahseh kisses his teeth, Kamale quells his pleas and shuffles outside. Sullivan inhales a bout of fresher air as the door closes, it does nothing to mellow his bridled unease. At the rise and fall of Kamale's chest, his trembling hands and trembling top lip, his batting gaze between the two men at his doorâthe sense Sullivan'd thought he'd made of the situation diminishes by the second, spesh by way of his brother's deadpan glare.
"I ain't done n-nothing."
Jahseh can only fight the urge to thwack the boy upside the back of his head with the two hands he keeps fastened in the depths of his pockets. "Where've you been, Kamale?"
Kamale's eyebrows furrow by a margin.
"N-Nowhere. I swear down."
Jahseh is suddenly grateful he'd taken the task at hand upon himself, because no amount of pep talking could brace Eve for the state of Kamale, who tarries blatantly in the consequences of his stubborn refusal of her help. And he knew she couldn't stomach it because even heâwith all his blokeish nonchalance and generous threshold for goreâcan't begin to fathom the chance of some sorry excuse for a stepdad owning the fist that did that much damage to a kid's eye.
"Go see Eve tomorrow."
Kamale blinks, "Is this... Are you taking t-the mick? That's what this i-is about?"
"Don't make me have to come out 'ere to ask you again," Jahseh mutters, and with that, he's fully prepared to get back in his car and fuck off. If only the crescendo of heavy footsteps from the other side of that door had waited till he'd done so. Instead, Sullivan and Jahseh watch Kamale's timidity somehow exceed itself and take a much uglier face. Dread, a slew of curse words crisp beneath his breath as he turns towards the door and attempts to hold it shut, but it's ripped open to showcase a man no taller than five-tenâfat, sweaty and per the grunt he throats out undoubtedly looking to pick a fight.
His belly thick with beer and the lower half of his face lathered in a slobbery sheen, red eyes and sunken features, untamed stubble, peps in his hair and the tussles of his sideburns, and a smell that rivals a sewage. Jahseh looks him over with a volcanic disgust, it bubbles and brews and threatens to erupt right out of him in a torrent of violence. The man is blatantly drunk, unsteady as he grips the doorway and slurs incoherent dribble. The cold is eventual to startle him sober, as he looks between Kamale and Sullivan and Jahseh.
"Wha... What the hell..." He fights to string together a sentence, "What the fuck's this, you prick? You... What trouble you bringing to my... To my fucking door!"
"Oi," Sullivan quips. "Go lay your fucking head down."
"You what! Kama..." The man burps. "Kamale, I'll... I'll fucking smack the lot of ya's! You..." Another burp. Jahseh hadn't thought to consider running into his stepdad, but now face to face with the man, he wishes he had.
"Parker, plâ"
"You... Shut it, yeah?" Parker sneers, a warm jet of saliva sprays Kamale into a debilitating silence, and the kid lowers his gaze to the floor. "You pricks... It was you! You bought... You gave him those f... Those fucking clothes, he don't need 'em!"
"I said it was some womanâ"
Parker quietens him yet again with a fisted grip of his top as he yanks him backwards. "You... You can tell... Oi, you tell that bitch toâ"
When Jahseh had asked that he join him tonight, Sullivan's unsure whether it'd been in search of a peacemaker or an accessary, but as he watches Jahseh free his hand and then the manifold speed with which he balls it into a fist and sends it point-blank into the man's drool-stained cheek, Sullivan decides to fall into the latter. Even as one hit turns to two, and two to four, and four to an eventual eight. Till this Parker is all but a lump of flesh and wasted space on the floor.
Then Jahseh hawks a ball of spit beside him, clicks through the blaring ache in each of his knuckles and turns back to Kamale.
"Go get your shit."
Definitely not my best but I had to remind myself I started this book to get out of my habit for nitpicking and perfection, just going with the flow.
Jahseh to the rescueee! I don't even think he did too much, to be fair. Like not completely off the handles, just slightly unhinged.
He came to tell Kamale to make a good on his promise to Eve, thoughs?
And then he ended up taking Kamale with him anyway...
Thoughts and feels?
I got an influx of new readers this week so hi!
Also changed format slightly, so long idk why I do that. Anyways. See ya lataaaa guys.