Page 46 of The Square

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN - ALEC

I feel like fokkenBruce Willis in that Christmas movie he made a long time ago. The one where he’s trapped in that building and ain’t got no shoes on. I should have thought through what was going to happen next. I should have considered my plan of escape. I should have at least put on shoes. But, oh, well, I suppose I’m in it now.

I laugh to myself a tiny bit as I peer around a corner to make sure that there’s no one standing in the hallway. Because this is exactly the kind of thing Christine would do. Go off on some undercooked plan of action. Just plunge headlong into a dire circumstance with no particularly strategic course of remedy.

I blame myself. I taught her to be that way, I think. Although she always had it in her. That trip to the Tower of London. Her obsession with charging in and stealing the Crown Jewels. It’s proper insane. Nobody muses over that kind of thing. Or, if they do, they don’t ever intend to act on it. Christine did. I really believe that if neither Danny nor I were there to put the kibosh on it, she might have ended up enjoying the rest of her life trapped behind the walls of Bronzefield Prison. So I chuckle, thinking about how I’m being moved by the spirit of Christine Keene.

Still and all… I wish I had on shoes. Or at least clothes. I’m like that oke Holden Caulfield in the book Catcher in the Rye. The little mental fokker who gets beaten on in his night clothes while trying to have sex with a prostitute. The difference, of course, being that I ain’t mental and I don’t have the pleasure of being with a gentoo. I’m quite sane and am escaping an unknowable situation with the intention of discovering if the only two people in the world that I feel true love for are alive and together and at all willing to allow me back into their lives.

No. I ain’t mental at all.

Ach, man. Ek gee nie ‘n fok nie. Ek loop.

I don’t see anyone lurking about, so I begin working my way down the corridor. It’s actually probably quite all right that I have no shoes now that I think on it. Quiet. The pitter patter of my steps is well muted. Which is useful in this moment, as it allows me to hear the sound of heavily booted feet coming from around the next corner in the direction I’m headed. Shit.

I turn and head back the way from which I just came. Which seems like a goddamn waste of a lot of energy, but I really do want to have to use this weapon only as a last resort. Because very few things in the world call chaos upon you like the sound of automatic rifle fire. If conflict is unavoidable, then one must do what one must. But in my current state, I’d say the odds are not in my favor.

I dart around the corner leading back to my bedroom-cum-holding cell. And just as I do, I hear, “Oi! Liam. Whatsit, bru?”

Shit.

I make it back into the room before the approaching oke spies me, I think, because the pace of his steps doesn’t accelerate and the ease in his voice remains the same when he says, “Liam? That you, man? What’s happening, bru? Everything hundreds? You need something?”

I have to assume that they (whoever “they” are) all have their own posts. In the small bit of meandering I’ve been able to do, I’ve tended to see the same faces in the same places over and over. Very much exactly like sentries on prescribed posts, guarding a fortress. And for the flashiest of flashes, I again wonder… why the fok am I here and how?

But I’ve got no time to indulge the notions, because as I dart back inside my sleeping quarters, I see the laaitie Liam, still on the floor where I left him. Snoring. Actually snoring. Like a goddamn cartoon character. I knocked him out and now he’s making more noise than he was when he was conscious.

Jesus Christ, man. This has got to be the most cocked-up escape attempt in history.

I close the door behind me and run to where young Liam is sawing logs, as they say, on the ground. Just as I reach him, a knock on the door…

“Liam? You in there, man?”

I don’t respond. Just stare at the closed door, as if by willing the oke to go away, he will.

“Liam?”

He doesn’t.

“Mr. van den Berg?”

I start to respond, when suddenly I have what is quite possibly the stupidest idea of my life. I don’t fancy myself a particularly stupid oke, so it’s not as if I have a vast barrel of stupid ideas from which to choose. But even if I were a right ninny and had a bottomless pit of dumb from which to pull, this might be way, way down there below all the other dumb ones as the inanest.

“Mr. van den Berg, sir? May I come in?”

It’s an odd feeling to be held prisoner but still very clearly be regarded as the boss.

I kneel down, sliding the rifle under the bed, and grab Liam up under the arms. I hoist him to his feet, discovering that he is sturdier than he looks. My ribs virtually moan in protest. But I manage to drag him to the side of the bed where I drop him and force his crumpled body underneath as well.

And then life starts happening in slow motion.

I can see the door handle starting to turn. I return my gaze back down toward the snoring Liam. His arm and booted foot protruding out from the side of the bed frame.

The door handle spins all the way round and the door begins to crack open.

I kneel down and force Liam’s appendages underneath and out of sight.

My ribs strain and I moan.