Breach by Olumide Popoola

know if we can we get them over that last boundary.
    I look into their pleading eyes. Did I ever look this way? Did I look at him with hopeful eyes?
    I told him nothing. It was my uncle’s friend, the man I came with, who told him stories: ‘Oh, this boy. His father had to send him away. You know how it is with the village warlord – he sees your son’s height, hears his new deep voice, tells you he needs your boy, he’s going to take your boy to fight.’
    I could tell that he didn’t listen to stories like those. Even when I was cowering Fearboy, I told him nothing. I stayed near him and I watched. When I messed up, he unbuckled his belt and he was right to beat me. Some of them get wired before we go out but not me. He saw that I didn’t need drugs. I sleep in the tent nearest his tent. I’m the quietest and, when someone needs beating,I beat the hardest. And when he’s sleeping, no one must wake him. To wake him, they’d have to get past me.
    One woman comes to our area with her child. She has no money but, to get a chance on a truck, she must pay and she knows what that means. He told her to come this afternoon but he’s still sleeping in his tent, so I give her my chair to sit on. It’s a kind of holiday chair, with stripes, which I find funny and he finds funny too. ‘You think this is your vacation?’ he says when I sit in it, to make the others laugh. He likes to say ‘vacation’ in English, like we’re in an American movie.
    There are always desperate women like her, on the road, in the camp, even in the forest or some damn car. If he likes them, once is not enough. He passes some of them on to us. Or he has them cook or wash our clothes. I don’t take them any more. I used to. I know none of them is a sister of mine but one bitch put that idea in my head. She asked me, ‘Do you have a sister?’ And from then on, I have none of these women. I don’t need to, like I said. Girls like me and if I have to I’ll pay.
    The woman sits in the vacation chair with her child on her lap. She lays the kid on its back on her thighs and holds its little feet in her hands. She doesn’t look at me or at any of us, only down at the kid. We’re quiet because he’s sleeping in his tent and no one must wake him, but she talks to her baby. Mother sounds, baby talk, smiling down at it. A boy, a girl, I don’t know. Its stomach is round and its shirt rides up. She rubs the brown skin ofits round belly, saying, ‘Beautiful, baby-baby.’ The kid gurgles back at her.
    He’s standing in the opening of his tent. He’s been watching me watching her with the baby. I clench my fist. I want to hit something.
    She looks up at him and he tips his head towards me, like: Give him the baby. So she stands up and nuzzles the baby’s neck before she hands it to me. Then she walks into his tent, not looking back. He’s unbuckling his belt when he pulls the tent flap closed.
    The kid’s eyes get watery but it doesn’t cry. I know how to hold it, I used to hold my sisters, but my teeth are clenched and I would like to throw it on the ground. Here’s Mouse now. He takes the baby away from me. He’s on something, Mouse is – his eyes are red – but the baby’s better off with him than with me.
    I thought Ghostman didn’t remember my story, the story my uncle’s friend told, but it turns out he did, he remembered it all this time and that’s why he started talking to me when he should have kept quiet. He told me it reminded him of his own story. But in those days, it was the Taliban. He told me about walking with his father to the market for food because it wasn’t safe for his mother on the street. He told me his father went into the stall and he waited outside, boy he was then, thirteen years old. Five of them were patrolling and they came round the corner in their beards and robes and saw him and ran at him and grabbed him. They said he was a scout, keeping watch to warn peoplewhen the patrol approached, and they took