His brother Paul watched all this from a place secreted in a nearby doorway and although he had some feelings of understandable remorse he also started to think that he was so cool and carefree and how good it was that he did not have a shop and a family and a house and all that materialistic stuff to mark him out as different and get him dragged out and killed like that his poor unfortunate and incinerated sibling. Later he just cried.

Paul’s mix of weeping and borderline self-righteous was not the end of it though – he had his own problems, like no food and no shelter. When he was walking through the city in a exhausted and bewildered fashion looking for somewhere safe to sleep he was approached by a group of insurgents who also believed in a different set of beliefs than the ones that invading army thought were probably the best. These guys were rough and definitely tough, they had Kalashnikovs – real ones, not knock-offs – and they had body armour to wear under their Kaftans or whatever. They took exception to something about Paul – it was not his haircut or the way he walked, more like something indefinable, a kind of atmosphere, who knows. They hassled Paul into an alleyway and forced him down on the ground with his legs spread and his arms splayed. Lain there he had this whole memory of that Summer where he just wasted it all away, watching Idle Time on TV and smoking Drugs or Angel Dust and at the same time (as he continued to lie there) he thought about his hardship in the subsequent Winter and how his now-dead brother would not help him and then, after a time, before he really finished his thinking even, they (the insurgents) killed him as he lay there with his face held down into the concrete or pressed into the dirt. Three shots to the back of the head – they called it Execution Style but it was more a fashion of the time, a fad, a craze, something they saw in a movie somewhere or on a pirate DVD – and then they (the insurgents) got up, got back in their 4x4 – a Mercedes – and rolled off on Patrol.

The Chapter

The Chapter