The Desert Run Page 3

  I kind of understood. Not fully, but enough.

  “So that’s why my dad’s such an arsehole.” Ben looked at me, and now he smiled.

  “But he won’t do anything. He just likes to shout a lot.”

  I found out a week later that Ben was wrong about that. He came into my room and started asking all these questions about what you had to do to apply for a student loan and all this stuff. It was obvious he wanted to talk some more, and when I asked him about it, he told me his dad had cut him off financially. Not completely, he was still paying the course fees, but he refused to pay for any living costs if Ben was going to spend his time drinking and taking drugs. So Ben had to start applying for the same loans and credit cards that the rest of us needed.

  That second summer we didn't go away again. Ben wanted to, but there was just no way I could afford it, and this time he had a better understanding of that. We stayed in Brighton though. Ben couldn't face spending the summer with his dad, and since we had to pay for the flat during the summer months, I figured I might as well live there. I had another reason too.

  By then my dad had met another woman. He worried at first I might think it was too soon after Mum, or that she was too young, but actually it was a relief, I didn’t have to worry about him being on his own and getting lonely. She had two young kids, so the house didn't feel like home by then anyway. My room had even been repurposed as a nursery, with Peppa Pig wallpaper.

  The only downside was that it meant Dad didn't have any spare cash, so I was even more reliant on the credit cards, borrowing against the next instalments of my student loan and working as many hours as I could. I still tried not to worry about it at that stage. But the debt was mounting up.

  4

  In the end I got my degree. A 2:2—a Desmond, they called it, on account of Desmond Tutu, whoever he was. It’s not a great degree, but I think realistically that was the best I could hope for while holding down full time hours at the petrol station. And it only cost me thirty-five thousand pounds.

  Ben didn’t do so well. He failed his final-year exams and had to stay in Brighton to resit the third year. I stayed too. Dad’s new woman had pretty much taken over at home by then so I had nowhere else to go.

  The two guys we’d shared the flat with did move out though, so we had to replace them. And since we were sick of the mess that boys made by then, we pretended that the landlord would only take girls. And that’s how Anna and Julia came to move in. They were both in their second year. Anna was pretty but a little chubby with black curly hair. She liked to cook and was one of those OCD people who couldn’t go to bed unless all the washing up was done, which was perfect. Julia was… Well, how to describe her? I suppose I have to as she’s crucial to the story.

  At first I didn’t see Julia as pretty exactly, more striking, with her blond hair, her figure, and her attitude which showed in the way she held herself and the way she moved. It was odd though because everyone else seemed to rate her right away. Friends down the pub would ask if our ‘fit flatmate’ was coming out with us, and be disappointed if she wasn’t. Maybe I didn’t fancy her at first because she intimidated me a bit, right from the beginning, or maybe because I knew I had no chance with a girl like her. Or even because I couldn’t quite believe she’d moved in with us. Whatever the reason, it hardly mattered at the time because she wasn’t single anyway. She was seeing a semi-professional footballer named Andy, who always thought he was going to be signed any day by a major team. Even Anna had a boyfriend. So Ben and I were reduced to hoping they would bring lots of hot single friends around. But that didn’t happen either.

  But while they moved in, my next trouble was I didn’t know how long I could afford to live there with them. My 2:2 in economics and business studies wasn’t the instant ticket to a well-paid job that the university had made it out to be. I applied for everything I could find. Hundreds of jobs. Mostly, I got ignored. Very occasionally, I’d get an email back saying they were looking for someone with more experience. But that happened so rarely it felt like something to celebrate. I’d clench my fist and think “Yes, I actually got a rejection.”

  It wasn’t just me either. I didn’t know anyone from my course who managed to get a decent job. There were a few who were working as interns for various companies, but they weren’t getting paid, they were just doing it for the experience. And I couldn’t do that, not while I was still working at the petrol station. It would mean giving up the only money I had coming in. I wouldn’t be able to pay the rent, and then I’d have nowhere to live. All I could do was work, and keep applying for jobs and juggling my debts around in the hope that something came up before I ran out of credit.

  So that was my life as a graduate. That was why I’d spent hours poring over textbooks, constructing brilliant and original arguments on macroeconomic theory. Why I’d memorised the philosophy of prominent economists throughout the ages, so I could sit in my swivel chair, watching people key in their pin code one after another, queuing up to pay their taxes to Big fucking Oil.

  5

  The start of Ben’s ‘solution’ came one night in February the year after I graduated. I got back from work after an eight-hour shift, during which I’d cleaned out the toilets three times, once because someone had thrown up in there, once because someone else had pissed all over the floor and then finally because someone had blocked it with paper and kept flushing it till it overflowed. When I got home, I pulled off my red polo shirt and threw it in the sink with washing-up liquid, then wriggled into a T-shirt and hoodie. I grabbed a couple of beers from the fridge and slumped down next to Ben on the sofa, where he was playing on his Xbox. I snapped open my beer, and a little of it spilt on some papers on the coffee table. And Ben told me off for it. Which was odd.

  “Careful, mate, that’s important.”

  “Not like you to be studying,” I replied.

  “I’m not studying.”

  I frowned and looked a bit more carefully at the papers where I’d put the beer down. It was just a load of numbers and columns.

  “What’s that, then?”

  “It’s an idea I’ve been working on.”

  I picked it up to take a better look. Alongside the numbers were a few words in Ben’s neat handwriting.

  “What idea?” I said, but he was concentrating on shooting people on his game; he’d run into a nest of Russian soldiers. I watched to let the murder and mayhem calm what was left of my mind after my shift. Explosions and blood were gently washing away all my thoughts, except maybe that I could handle a joint. Then Ben suddenly asked me, not taking his eyes from the screen.

  “How much do you owe, Jake?”

  I fought for the energy to answer. “What, overall, or just on the credit cards and overdraft?”

  “Total. How much would you need just to start from zero?”

  I blew out my cheeks. “I dunno. Thirty-five? Forty?”

  “Forty thousand pounds?”

  “Yeah. About that. Why, have you won the lottery?”

  Again, Ben didn’t answer right away. He changed the weapon he was using to a handheld rocket launcher and aimed it at a helicopter that was hovering over his position. A man was leaning out of it, firing a machine gun and screaming hysterically. Ben aimed at the tail and released the rocket, blowing the back of the helicopter off so that it started to spin around in a death spiral. We both watched as the man kept shooting, even though he was doomed, and seconds later, the screen erupted in yellows and oranges as the chopper exploded. A satisfying death.

  “You know how much I pay for a teenth?” Ben went on. In case you’re not familiar with the word, it means an eighteenth of an ounce of cannabis. The smallest amount that people normally buy.

  “About a tenner?”

  “Yeah. For resin. Sometimes fifteen if there’s not much about.”

  I waited to see where this was going, but it didn’t go anywhere.

  “So?” I said eventually.

  Ben didn’t take his eyes off t
he game. “So. If you have one ounce of resin, in theory, that’s worth about a hundred and twenty quid. Maybe a hundred and eighty. Do you remember how much we paid for an ounce in Morocco?”

  It seemed a long time ago by then, but I still remembered.

  “About twenty euros.”

  “Yeah, about that.”

  “Are you thinking of selling drugs, Ben?” I asked, beginning to smile.

  For the first time he looked at me, a little bit irritated, and he ignored the question.

  “Of course, wholesale prices are different. At least, I assume they are. They must be. Otherwise, why would anyone bother doing it?” He toggled the menu suddenly and hit pause on the game, then pointed at the paper I’d spilled my beer on.

  “I reckon, wholesale, an ounce is really worth somewhere between sixty to ninety pounds for resin.”

  He was looking right at me then, and his dark eyes had taken on a look I knew by then. A look of excitement.

  “You know that resin comes over in nine-ounce bars? Nine bars, they call them?” He looked at me until I shrugged and nodded.

  “So?”

  “They’re about the same size as... as a big chocolate bar, you know, the family-sized bars. You’re an economist. How much do you reckon they go for?”

  I couldn’t help myself. I did the maths.

  “Five hundred quid?”

  “Depends on the quality,” Ben said, and I was annoyed that he’d changed the rules of the sum just as I worked it out.

  “It can be as little as four hundred, or as much as a thousand.”

  I didn’t know what to say, so I kept quiet, but he went on.

  “And four nine bars sold together is what makes up a kilo. And what’s a kilo worth?” Ben asked but answered the question himself. “Maybe two thousand. Two and a half.”

  “Why are you telling me this?” I asked once we’d sat in silence for a while.

  “I’m just thinking that if we drove the van down to Morocco and filled it with hash, then we could clear all of our debts in one go.”

  6

  Ben reached for his beer and tapped the top of the can three times with his fingernail. Slowly, he tugged on the ring pull, and we both listened to that strange noise of sucking and breaking metal. He took a delicate sip, then turned to look at me.

  “Or more likely, we could end up in prison,” I replied. “Or murdered and buried somewhere in the desert.”

  “Why? Why would that happen?” Ben asked, suddenly animated.

  “Because...” I turned my hands palms up and shrugged. “Because that’s always what happens when someone gets into smuggling drugs. They get sucked in more and more until they get caught by the FBI, or gunned down by Columbian drug lords.”

  “You’ve watched too many films, and you’ve believed what they’ve told you.”

  I looked right at him for a moment.

  “Most of those films are true stories,” I said, and this got him. He looked frustrated and turned away.

  “Maybe, but they’re only the true stories of the minority who get caught. The ones who don’t get caught don’t get to tell their stories.” He stared at me again now, and I could see he was at least a little bit serious about this.

  “Nor do the ones who get killed,” I replied, staring right back at him.

  Ben took a sip, allowing me to think I’d won the point, then he went on.

  “No one seemed very interested in killing us when we were down there,” he said. “As I remember it, they wanted to sell us as much dope as they could.” He sniffed like this was a challenge—find an answer to that, Jake, and I couldn’t, because that much was true.

  “And we could have had the van packed to the roof with anything. And yet we drove straight through both sets of customs. Spain and Dover.”

  I couldn’t really argue with that either, although I tried to.

  “They might have had dogs that could smell it.”

  “But that’s not a problem. You pack it in coffee. Just like in the films,” Ben replied, getting animated again. “And anyway, did you see any dogs?” He knew I didn’t because we talked about it on the way back that summer.

  “But what would you do with it when you got it here?” I asked instead. “Are you going to start dealing from the flat? That’s where the risk is.”

  “No.”

  “What, then? Put it on eBay? Send me off to sell it outside the nearest school?”

  He ignored this.

  “No, what we do is move it wholesale. And not here either. We let someone else worry about splitting it up and selling it on.”

  Ben was now stroking his chin like he was some kind of criminal mastermind, and I’d had enough. I took a big swig of my beer and was about to tell him about the day I’d had, and use that as justification that it was my turn on the game, but at that moment, the lights went off, and the TV set died.

  “Shit, that was a new high score.” I could hear Ben’s voice in the dark.

  “Didn’t you charge the key?” I said. I was really pissed off then because it was definitely Ben’s turn to top up the electric key. We’d had a bit of trouble keeping up to date with the electricity bill by then, and they’d put us on a meter, so we had to pay in advance via a card, which we topped up at the shop round the corner. And it always ran out just when you didn’t want it to. Although I’m not sure I can think of a convenient time for all the lights and the fridge to turn off.

  “It’s not my turn, is it?” Ben said, and even in the gloom, I could see on his face he was trying it on. Our eyes had already adjusted to the sudden lack of illumination. There was a bit of light coming in from the street, and I didn’t trust myself to answer him. He changed tack.

  “I’m sorry, mate. I would have gone,” he said a moment later. “Just I haven’t got any cash. Can I borrow a bit till the end of the week?”

  I reached for my wallet and pulled out a twenty. It was the last note I had, and I didn’t get paid until the next Friday. On the plus side, at least it was Ben who would have to go out into the cold. And it was definitely my turn to shoot Russian soldiers.

  7

  Unless you're an accountant, or maybe one of those people with an “I heart spreadsheets” mug that you keep on your desk at work, you’re not going to be that interested in my finances. But if you know the basics, it’ll help you understand why Ben’s idea caught in my mind.

  By then I owed thirty-four thousand pounds in student loans. I had three grand on one credit card, and another with two grand on it. I was constantly sinking right down to the limit of my thousand-pound overdraft. I also owed my dad about five grand, but neither of us really believed that was going to be paid back.

  I was working full time by then. Although my contract didn't guarantee any hours, my boss liked me and I generally worked between thirty-five and forty hours a week. It was boring as hell, but it brought in about two hundred quid, after deductions. That was nearly enough to cover rent, bus fares, food, a little bit of money for beer, and most of the interest on my credit cards. Most of it.

  So even though Ben’s plan was ridiculous, it was tempting. Not tempting to actually do it—just tempting to think about. It was like those daydreams you have about winning the lottery. How you’d spend the money. That was all I was doing at that stage. Dreaming about what it would be like to wipe away all my financial worries at a stroke.

  And actually, it was a simple enough plan. Ben still had his camper van. It was on its last legs, but it still ran. So maybe we could drive it down to Morocco, just like we had that other summer. Maybe we could find someone to sell us some dope, and maybe we could drive it all the way back, straight through the two sets of border checks, and sell the lot in one big deal?

  Ben’s figures had a fair few assumptions in them, but fundamentally, they held up. We made a spreadsheet in Excel. We scaled up what Ben typically paid for his teenths. We allowed twenty percent for whoever sold the dope to us, and another twenty percent to whoever we sold it on to.
For the sake of the figures we ignored the possibility that they might shoot us rather than accept our commission rate. And based on that, we figured a kilo of Moroccan hashish would wholesale for a bit over a thousand pounds. That meant all we’d need to be debt free was about a hundred kilos. It was a nice round figure so it stuck.

  But daydreaming wasn't going to get me out of my hole. So I went on filling in application form after application form, and I assumed Ben was getting on with his resits. Maybe I’d have noticed otherwise if I hadn’t got distracted. But I'm pretty sure what happened next would have distracted anyone.

  8

  My friends still asked about Julia all the time, and by then I'd realised that she was hot. But she still made me nervous, and with her having a boyfriend and everything, I tended to avoid her. I certainly wasn't expecting anything to happen between us. And I absolutely wasn't expecting what did happen to take place. I guess I was kind of innocent in those days.

  It happened one evening, I was alone in the flat, waiting for a frozen pizza to cook and watching TV. A rare night off and this was what my life had come to. Oh, and I was cutting my toenails. I had the clippings from one foot balanced on the arm of the sofa, and I was leaning forward, halfway through the other foot, when I heard her calling softly from the doorway.

  “Hi, Jake, what you up to?”

  I froze. First in surprise, since I thought everyone was out, and then because of what I was doing—I don't know where you're supposed to cut your toenails but it's probably not on the sofa, not where everyone eats. Then finally because it was Julia, and that always got me on edge. So I tried to make out I was just sitting like that, leaning forward and holding onto my feet.

  “Nothing, just watching telly,” I said.