‘Cops hate me, man,’ Sarang says, ‘That last incident.’
I’m remembering it. He’d just opened his new bar next to the massage parlour his partner owns. He was down the strip before to celebrate the lease signing and got a little bit rowdy with the drink. The bald-headed English fatties were vocalising abuse over their nth beers because he’s an American. Always have a go at the septics, right? Especially the ones of mixed race: Sarang’s half-Korean, and takes umbridge at a remark and the bizzies are in the mix soon as. He spends a night’s sojourn on a slippery concrete floor.
We’re discussing this issue over his whisky and my beer, clinking ice. His daughter Pear aged four approaches, says, ‘Daddy, I want to go to seven.’
He adds: ‘They’re just waiting to close me down, man. I set one foot behind that bar? they’ll do it.’
‘Aye.’
‘Daddy.’
‘What, sweetie?’
‘I want to go to seven.’ Sarang is adamant in the negative. ‘Pear, look it’s pouring down.’
It is. Stair rods. The rat-a-tat report of the drops is deafening. This is the tropics. Rainfall is biblical when it wants to be. Pear walks round the table and approaches me. ‘Uncle Tim I want to go to seven with you.’ How exactly do you refuse a four-year-old girl so straightforward in her requirement? Except it isn’t and this would be Pear’s – I confer with Daddy – fifth trip to the seven that day. Besides, seven is a potential minefield of plastic-wrapped treat demands. I say no, and she twists the fabric of my T-shirt in defiance and walks over to the massage.
‘It’s only Kit behind the bar.’ Sarang says, ‘No bullshit. Absolutely. One hundred per cent.’
The door to the massage opens and Mum comes out. Pear is on to her like a lazer beam. Sarang looks at me and smiles and shakes his head. We drink. The rain suddenly fades to a drizzle. Mother and child cross the road to the seven. Me and Sarang laugh and drink. Shy bairns get nowt, I think, and the littlun knows how to get what she wants.
‘See that,’ Sarang says, pointing to the police cruiser slowly approaching the shop. I notice no circling lights because usually they’re lit. But then the cunts don’t come by this early, and Sarang’s place isn’t even on the strip. ‘You’ll see,’ he says, ‘they’ll hook that car round and come straight back.’ Which they did. Five minutes later the women return from the seven.
I say, ‘What you get, Pear?’
I help her peel the plastic off the top of the stick candy. It’s a green skull with what looks like white brain matter mushrooming out of the top. When she thrusts it at me I decline a taste. She walks round the table, passing her mother getting seated. She says, ‘Daddy, you want to try?’
‘Of course,’ my buddy says, ‘Always Daddy check first.’ He took a taste and looked at the shape of it. ‘But wait Pear, is that brains? Out of a skull?’ He screwed up his face in mock disgust. Pear pinches her lips.
We exchange laughs over the cuteness of her way. She puts the stick candy in her mouth and then suddenly pulls it out.
She says: ‘I don’t want,’ swinging her arm back with the stick between her little thumb and forefinger.
I look into the street. The patrol car is drawing by.
‘No Pear!’ her daddy says.
But Pear flings the skull and brains into the night anyway, and I watch the stick candy spin in an arc under the lights strung across the front of the shop and shatter against the side window of the patrol car, and the patrol car halts.
Pear wraps her hands round her mouth.
Sarang looks at me and puts down his glass.
