Never Apologise, Never Explain - James Craig [16]
The boots took a step back. He closed his eyes, took a deep breath and waited.
The kick never came.
After a few seconds, the soldier stepped away and turned towards a yelping noise that had started up somewhere to his right. It sounded like a dog hit by a car, but Pettigrew knew that it wasn’t. Cursing and screaming, a woman he didn’t recognise was being dragged down the street by her hair. The boy soldier jumped forward and, without breaking stride, let fly with a casual half-volley, like a kid kicking a stone along the street. His right boot landed somewhere near her mouth and Pettigrew watched her face explode in a mess of crimson, like something out of a Sam Peckinpah movie. The yelping and cursing stopped, replaced by a low, frothy moan.
The soldier studied the toe of his boot and carefully began cleaning it on the back of his left calf, smearing a mixture of blood, snot and nasal cartilage across his olive-green fatigues. Satisfied with the result, he turned back to face the priest, eyes glazed. Stepping closer, he pointed at a large puddle of green paint over to Pettigrew’s right, which was spreading slowly across the scrub of the tiny front yard. The eight tins of Eden Green paint had been a birthday present from his sister. They had been stacked by the door for several months now, waiting for him to get round to painting the outside of his house, a three-room shack his friends and neighbours had helped him build two summers ago. The soldiers had clearly found them too much to resist, kicking them over as they’d jumped down from their trucks.
‘Get down!’
William Pettigrew looked at him uncomprehendingly.
‘Lie in it, fucker!’
The priest looked at the paint and hesitated.
‘Get on with it,’ the youth’s face turned pink as he struggled to find the right words, ‘motherfucker!’
Another boot caught Pettigrew in the small of the back. Forced down into the puddle, his shirt and trousers were immediately soaked in the cloying green paint. Lying still, he felt a small pulse of satisfaction that he had managed to get dressed before opening the door. To be both naked and green would have been a terrible embarrassment.
Of course, it was also a waste of good paint, but that seemed a total irrelevance now, since it wasn’t as if he would be coming back to start the decorating.
A boot tickled his ear. ‘Why didn’t you stay away, dickhead?’
It was a good question.
William Pettigrew was well known locally as a so-called ‘Red Priest’, a liberation theologian and, therefore, a troublemaker. That meant that he was always likely to be on someone’s list. When the coup began, his friends had warned him that he would be a target; that he should lie low, maybe even leave the country for a while. Pettigrew was lucky – he had that option; he had a passport and he had money. He could go back to Great Britain and leave this all behind. On several occasions, the Archdiocese and the ecclesiastical governors had made it clear to him that this was a course of action of which they would approve.
He had toyed with going to Scotland – his great-greatgrandfather had been an innkeeper in Montrose – to see for himself where the Pettigrews had first come from. But, deep down, he knew that was just a fantasy. He would never run away.
In the event, he did leave Valparaíso . . . for a little while. After a couple of nights of listening to the shooting, he had headed for a village twenty kilometres up the coast, where he spent a couple of nights on a friend’s floor. The whole thing quickly seemed melodramatic and self-indulgent – cowardly, even. By running from his fate, he had put himself in a prison of his own making. After all, Cerro Los Placeres was his home. There was nowhere else