Free Breach by Olumide Popoola Page A

their phones.
    Here comes his flute teacher, a bowl in each hand – soup for herself and soup for Muhib.
    ‘I want to ask you something,’ Muhib says.
    ‘Of course, man.’
    ‘You will go home soon, to Berlin, right?’
    She shrugs. ‘Sometime I will.’
    ‘Yes, you will go,’ Muhib says. ‘All the volunteers go. And you leave us here in the Jungle, thinking about you, missing you. It’s painful,’ he says, ‘so, please, don’t love us so much.’

Ghosts
    He lets it be known that he leaves the camp when the trucks don’t run, like at Christmas and New Year, goes to City X and gambles there, drinks and spends and screws. He holes up, they say, with some cousin or brother who lives in City X, in one of those neighbourhoods where the police don’t go.
    So I follow him. Why not? The first thing he taught me was invisibility. To disappear in the woods, to disappear in crowds. He doesn’t even smell me. My hood up, I walk at least ten steps behind him along the streets of City X. Ghostman we call him, but he’s never invisible to me. I let him get way ahead of me, but I can still see the roll of flesh along the back of his neck. I can pick out his feet in a crowd, and the way he steps, a little knock-kneed. Yes, he’s weakening.
    A man’s greatest strength is the very same thing as his greatest weakness. So they say.
    Not me, though. I say, No weakness. Period.
    Gambling. Is this his weakness? He told us that he throws away thousands in a single casino night. Andthe others say that that’s his weakness and his strength too, because what we do is a lot like gambling. Taking chances, they like to say, slapping the face of danger. Everything to lose, fortunes at stake. They talk like it’s some adventure, like they don’t spend hours lying on wet leaves in the dark. Like they don’t shit themselves when we hear police dogs.
    These boys, they talk too much. I don’t talk.
    And he doesn’t talk.
    Well. He didn’t talk before, but now he’s beginning to talk. That’s weakness number one. Not the gambling, but talking.
    Second weakness, I’m suspecting, is a woman. Not one of the women who have no money to pay him, and not one of the hookers in City X. These women are not weaknesses – he charges them, he forces them or he pays them. No, I’m thinking there’s a woman who lives in City X who makes him weak.
    He doesn’t see me in the casino. No one sees me in the casino, not really. Girls maybe. Girls laying their soft gaze on me. I can get girls who don’t owe me. I can get girls without beating them or threatening them. While he’s settled in, drinking and gambling, I go with one of those girls, not for long, just outside in the alley. She isn’t happy about that, about stepping into the alley, but I don’t force her. She gives me soft eyes and holds my hand and follows me out.
    When I walk back inside, his face is red, he’s unsteady on his stool, throwing notes onto the table. I don’t countany of that as weakness. Talking to me back in the camp in Calais, that’s weakness.
    The carpet in this place, it sucks up sound. I can hear no footstep. The ring of the slot machines by the door, of course, and voices, but not words. The speakers pour music like syrup. It’s sticky in here. And warm. The opposite of the camp, I guess. But people are the same wherever. Greedy or lost or both.
    The whisky I order arrives in a square-sided glass and gleams like pale gold when I hold it up to the light. Mouse would love that, anything like gold, like money, he loves. Mouse, the guy I call Mouse (no one else calls him that but me and I don’t say it aloud), he counts money all the time, counting in his head when he can’t be counting in his hand or on his phone, checking his bank balances. That’s all he spends his money on, data bundles for his phone so he can check the piles mounting up in this account and that account. What does he think he’s saving for? There’s no later, Mouse, there’s no villa by