One of Us Read Online Free Page A

piss.”
    “I will.”
    “You pay double.”
    “I will.”
    They stopped him, at the border. I heard the engine stop, the sound of voices. I burrowed under boxes, did not dare breathe. Then the engine started, and we moved and we did not stop.
    He let me out at a truck stop, bought me coffee.
    “I’m sorry,” he said. “About the other thing. I couldn’t have, anyway. Got a daughter your age. Beats you, does he? You should be cutting his balls off. If he had any.”
    I washed in service station sinks, I slept on hard benches and among crates of fruit, the air thick with the stink of lemons and of me, I slept leaning against boxes filled with giant televisions, all the time waiting for a rough shake into wakefulness, a hand over my mouth, worse. I paid out what little money I had left, I pretended that I did not see the way that some of them looked at me, and I kept on running. I could have stopped anywhere, I suppose. But I could speak English, I had been taught at school and my father had paid for lessons at home. “You could study abroad, London, Los Angeles, where the hospitals have money and the best of everything,” he said. So I learned about Mr Benson, who was a civil servant, and his wife Jane and their children and their dog, Max. And so here I was. The street signs were in a different language, but the men like Corgan were just the same.
    I hurried on to the other side of the road so I did not have to walk past the drunken men who were standing outside the window of the all-night garage and shouting in, laughing and pretending to fight, and then kept on walking towards home until the sky began to lighten, and at last I was back where I lived. I stood in the shower for a long time, even though it was only lukewarm. It was only ever lukewarm. There was no blood left on me, but even when I came out of the shower, I still did not feel clean. Yes, I had treated a patient, done what I had spent years training to do. But I knew what he was, and I knew what Corgan was. They were the men who came for my father, the men who killed Aleksey. Different voices, different passports, same story. And I had worked for some of these men, so that I could avoid being sent back to the others. You do what you have to do, I thought to myself. You do what you have to do.
    It still took me a very long time to get to sleep, and I still did not feel clean.
    ~
    The next day, at two, a man who I had not seen before was outside my house, leaning against a car, one arm stretched lazily out over the roof, fingers drumming. He wore sunglasses like mirrors, so that I could not see his eyes, even though the day was cloudy. I think that he thought that he looked good like this, but he was fatter than he thought he was, and his clothes showed it, and when he looked round at me his sunglasses slid down his nose.
    “You must be the doctor,” he said. “I’m Paul, your chauffeur for the day. Fuck happened to you last night then? I was hanging around for half an hour waiting for you.”
    And so it went on. I was taken to the flat, changed dressings, checked the wound, did what I was told to do. The first time I went back there, the man who had been shot was conscious. There were two other men there, not Corgan, but ones like him. They were talking to my patient in low voices and stopped when I came over to the bed.
    “So you’re the one that patched me up,” the man on the bed said, smoking a cigarette and blowing the smoke up to the ceiling. “Cheers, pet. Hurts like hell, mind, but you’ve done a canny job there.” He was still pale beneath his tan, and little crusts of matter had formed at the edges of his mouth, almost hidden by the edges of his little beard that did not go further than around his mouth.
    “It will hurt,” I said. “That’s why I asked them to get these tablets for you to take. They will make the pain less.”
    “Can I mix them with alcohol?”
    “No.”
    “Oops.” All the men laughed.
    “You’ll have to