Homesick Read Online Free Page B

celebrated them, shouted for them, beeped their horns, and yelled for them.
    The last nail comes out of the box. Bullseye has said nothing. Basit levers up the nail and the lid comes off. Thereis newspaper on the top. He sees the date on
The Times
is 1944. Bullseye holds his breath. Basit pulls the paper off. Inside there are guns. Maybe ten or twelve.
    “German,” Bullseye breathes dramatically. Basit stares. He hates the sight of them, their liquorice lustre, their power to mesmerise. He reaches for a wrapped object and tears at the newspaper: it is a bottle of Johnnie Walker, Black Label, the lead seal intact. It looks old.
    “Hurry up,” Bullseye says. And suddenly Basit is all action, leaning into the crate, unpacking each weapon and resting it on the stairs. After each gun is lifted, he tries to unjam the crate. It is only when he takes out the last gun and then the bottle that the crate can be shoved back and forth. Eventually he pulls the crate upward, away from Bullseye, and then up the steps of the cellar.
    The boys at the Jamaican club got him this job. He tried to set up a proper gambling den with Jules, his Jamaican friend. But Jules was more interested in music, and Basit won too many times. Jules had a friend who knew the bosses. They asked Basit to come to their club on the Old Kent Road, watched him shuffle, deal. Hired him on the spot. Quick fingers, Freddie the Pony said. They couldn’t call him Quick Fingers, because there was a famous croupier up Golders Green way called that, a Jew boy. Basit thought he was in, but he was never really
in
, though if an outsider called him coon or nigger, they’d get it from one or other of the bosses. He was all sorts, yes, but he was theirs, too. And they were fair to their own. He had taken Ali with him on one job, lifting job, taking goods from one lockup to another, and Freddie and some others had given him a bag of chips, told him he was a good-looking boy. One of the bosses looked at him funny, so Basit asked Rita about jobs at the hotel. No funny stuff for Ali.
    As the box comes away Bullseye starts to yell. He’s not swearing at Basit, just swearing, shaking his feet, his hands. His voice is loud, so loud that Basit, who is supposed to be the lookout, doesn’t hear the key being tried in the lock. He has a habit of shifting the catch down on Yale locks from the inside. The key is being tried, and he only realises when people start swearing outside the door.
    “Terry,” he whispers fiercely. He pushes his hand down into the boy’s face.
    “Oh, fuck, oh fuck,” Bullseye says. “What about the back door?”
    Basit runs, grabbing a chair, fumbles with the bunch of keys to lock the door, and jams the handle with the chair. He runs back to the cellar steps. Bullseye is handling the guns. He looks up at Basit, and Basit sees how young he is, how frail.
    “What d’you think?” Bullseye says, pointing a weapon at Basit.
    “Put it back. Come on, put it back and come, will you?” It will take the others five minutes to get to the back of the building; they’ll have to go round the promenade of shops and down the alleyway at the back. They can make it out the front.
    “What, leave it here?”
    “Yes. Come on.”
    “Nah, mate. We may as well stay and be killed. Bosses will have us.”
    Basit and Bullseye wrap the guns in the newspaper. They look around for something to carry them in, and there is nothing. They were told to move a box, so they came in their suits with a Ford Anglia Estate that belongs to Bullseye’s dad. Basit is now sweating, but he is also cold. He suddenly hates the boy, Terry. Hates his whining and hissurrender and his wilful waste of his life: why would he do this work in this country when he is white? He could be anything. He is inside the big, wide, gleaming world, and all he needs is education and to work hard. Basit’s hands shake. He hates the boy for his wasted opportunities, the way he hates his own banishment from the world