[900 words]
The toddler is solar powered. He soaks up the low, spring sunrays as they skim over the garden wall and through the patio doors. He converts them into mischief and speed and noise at 100% efficiency. My fiancée is trying to cook something too complicated for a Thursday night while he threads between her legs and the stove, approaching the speed of sound.
An accident waiting to happen.
He’s shouting over Bruno Mars and Rosé playing through the tiny, tinny speaker that was relegated to the kitchen.
Overstimulated. I put on an ambient playlist. It doesn’t help. The toddler breaks the sound barrier. A sonic boom from his mother.
I scoop him up and tell her, “I’ll take him for a lap of the reservoir. He needs some fresh air. It’ll take the edge off him.”
“Go.”
“Should only take half an hour, will that… ”
“Go.”
Outside, the air smells of shit – today they were manure spreading on the adjacent farms. I’m lifting the toddler onto my shoulders and he says, “Daddy, look at the flies.” Above us, a translucent wall of little black dots, on a sky-blue canvas. We’ve only lived here a few months. I’d forgotten how alive and hungry everything is once you’re out of the city, the constant battle to keep the outside, outside.
I carry him up the single track road that leads to the small reservoir. The road runs between the shit-spreading farm and a golf course. A hundred yards up, there’s a sign that says, not suitable for motor vehicles. After this sign the road is just stones and mud.
People ignore the sign. A car passes us slowly. People drive as far up the road as they can, as close to the reservoir as they can, to take their evening walk. They drive as far as they can, reducing the length of their walk, spending as much of the walk in the car as possible.
Three young men are jostling and laughing near a car that is parked under the sign. They speak and carry themselves with that desperate nonchalance that drug dealers or new pick-up-artists have. Their car is a subtly modified, three-door, German hatchback – and there are no women about to sarge.
I used to see deals being done almost every day in the city. I could see them happening in broad daylight from my apartment window or at the bus interchange. But on a quiet, countryside lane, it seems obscene.
Our city centre apartment corridors would reek of weed for a few weeks every September in the small gap between when the new students arrived and the building management cracked down. Hong Kong grandmas grassing-up the specific apartments, zero fucks given. After that you’d only smell it on the hottest days when all the apartment windows were open. God bless the BNO-visa-wave.
We used to never be more than 50 yards away from things much worse than weed in the city centre. But the city was anonymous, this feels… closer.
Or stop jumping to conclusions. It’s just three young men enjoying the countryside, just like me and the toddler.
The car that passed us has parked near the men. Two guys get out, surfer, hippy-style guys. They exchange a few words with the three young men. I’m still too far away to hear, but as I get closer I hear someone mention prices.
I walk past their embryonic negotiations, humming with the toddler who is swaying on my shoulders. I would say something, but it is too dangerous with the kid.
What would I say if he wasn’t on my shoulders?
Maybe I should say something, what are they going to do, fight me? They’ve got about 15 years on me, but I am convinced nobody under 30 has been in a real fight. I could have them – all three of them.
And then what?
Police will probably charge me with disproportionate use of force or something. Meanwhile the dealers will firebomb my house while they’re not being arrested.
A few minutes later we’re further up the path at the small, square reservoir. The late spring sun is slicing the water into triangles of light and dark.
“The sun is so big, Daddy,” he says, covering his eyes.
“You mean bright.”
“It’s bright and big, Daddy.”
We watch the gulls fishing and a hen escorting her ducklings to the stacked slate boundary of the reservoir.
As we pass, the hen opens her mouth wide and hisses, shuffling herself between her children and us. She is barely the length of my forearm and 20 yards or more away from us, but she prepares to fight. Worrying about the consequences is not an option for her, ensuring her children are safe is all that matters.
My son laughs, he thinks the hen is playing. I tell him we mustn’t upset the mummy, she is afraid we will take her children.
“Why?”
He asks this many times, until all I can say is, “Because.”
The sun is almost behind the horizon as we walk back down the stoney road. The three sellers are still there, the buyers are not. The three are jostling like children in their designer tracksuits.
“Why are they fighting?” asks my son.
“They’re just pretending,” I say.
“Why?” he asks, many times.
Eventually I say, “Because.”
At home I find two fly-tipped, half-litre, canisters of nitrous oxide in my bushes.
It all feels very close.
END
Corporate Clarke's Fiction 