Lasting Scars
Lenny Brando
Copyright © 2020 Lenny Brando
All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author's imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
Published by Lenny Brando Creative
Cover design Brendan Lyon
First Printing, 2020
Print ISBN 978-0-9957360-1-6
eBook ISBN 978-0-9957360-2-3
www.LennyBrando.com
For Sinead
1
Alice Madsen bit her lip and crossed her legs. She should have worn tights. Or jeans. She shook her head and swung her knees under the cover of the pavement table. From the safety of her sunglasses, Alice swivelled her eyes back to the adjacent traffic. Around ten feet from her, a blue Ford Transit stood stationary behind a red London bus, and the van driver continued to stare at her through his open window.
He looked familiar. It took several beats to place him. Samir Hassan. She dismissed a brief pang of guilt. Perhaps he had recognised her, and that was why he stared. “Samir Hassan? At du? Hvad siger du?” she asked in Danish.
His stare narrowed, and she removed her sunglasses. Something like recognition crossed his face, but his eyes were cold. He seemed to say something, but whatever he said got lost in the ambient noise. Then he raised his voice and the words carried to her in a sudden lull. “Stop med at leve dette liv.”
“Huh?” Alice squinted at him. “Hvad mener du?”
The van driver didn't respond. She watched his stare drift towards the people drinking at the nearby tables. He wiped his forehead with his hand, then his mouth curled into a hostile sneer. When he turned to Alice once more, she shivered under his gaze and she looked away. Perhaps he still bore a grudge.
A moment later, the bus pulled away with a diesel growl, and the van jumped and stalled. Alice heard the sharp grind of the ignition several times as the driver tried to start the engine. A cabbie leaned out the window of a black taxi. “Oi. Stop admiring the skirt and move it.” Samir Hassan shouted in frustration, and people at the nearby tables looked up. Someone laughed at him. Hassan howled, then the engine turned, and the van moved off.
Alice wondered whether she was mistaken. Perhaps it wasn’t Samir Hassan. She put her sunglasses back on, shrugged off the incident as irrelevant and wished Kristin would hurry. When she picked up her phone, a voice to her right interrupted her.
“Where are you from?”
Alice twisted her head towards the voice. Two twenty something guys drank at a nearby table. One grinned at her, the other looked disinterested.
For pokker, she thought. She pulled at her lower lip with her teeth as she considered how to reply. A moment passed and she sighed. “Denmark. I’m waiting on a friend.”
“Why don’t you sit with us while you wait?”
She shook her head. “No thanks.”
His smile disappeared. “We not good enough for you?”
Alice closed her eyes. “I said I’m waiting for my friend.”
“So?”
“I’m fine. Just leave me alone, okay?”
The guy’s face reddened, and she saw him clench and unclench his fists. “Up yours and all,” he said.
“Grimme røvhul,” Alice muttered.
“What did you say?” He went to stand, but the other guy stopped him and said, “Leave it, bruv. She ain't worth it.”
He sat down again, and she heard his seat clunk against the table. “Stuck up bint.”
Alice turned away and focused on her phone. It trembled in her hand as she tapped on the screen. She gripped the phone tight to steady it, then flinched at a movement in the corner of her eye. She stared out onto the street as a figure approached from her right.
Her shoulders stiffened, and she readied herself to escape to another table. When she saw the waiter place the champagne and two glasses down, she let out her breath and the hold on her mobile loosened.
After the waiter left, she sipped on champagne. She shifted in her seat, crossed and uncrossed her legs and fiddled with her phone, all to block out the conversation from the other table. But the guy raised his voice, “I’ll tell you what, Daz. Them Danish birds know how to live, eh?”
“Leave it Lewis, you muppet. Let’s go somewhere else.”
She heard a bottle slam on metal and chairs scrape on the concrete. Footsteps approached, and the guy loomed over the table. He jabbed his finger at her, and she shrank back. “You know what, Danish? You ought to show respect.”
The other guy jumped in and dragged him away. As they walked off, she saw the guy called Lewis spit onto the street. When they rounded the corner and were out of sight, she slumped back in her seat and her shoulders trembled. She concentrated on her breathing. Big breath in, big breath out. Then she lifted her champagne glass and knocked back half in one unsteady gulp. A little dribbled down her chin, and she dabbed at it with a napkin.
The waiter appeared again. “Were those guys hassling you?”
Alice shrugged. “I guess.”
“Are you all right?”
She nodded and forced a smile. “Occupational hazard.”
“Yeah?”
“For sure. Thanks. Anyway, my friend will be here soon.”
“Good for you,” he said as he cleaned the nearby table. “Don't let them get you down.”
“I’ll try.” She stretched and imagined she felt the tiny hairs on her neck settle.
For the next ten minutes she swiped on her phone. Then an angry blast of a car horn
