'cause dirt on you is dirt on me, and we both know our hands ain't clean
Calan does not see Carlo get lifted off the sand, which is mostly Carlo’s fault for being hidden by the crowd while Calan is doing the difficult and important work of being poisoned. (Which he is doing brilliantly). The orange peels have turned his mouth into a wet, sour disaster, and every time he tries to swallow, his throat makes an ugly little sound that is only half pretend. His eyes water. His stomach pinches. His cheeks puff once before he clamps both hands over his middle and bends sharply forward, earning a chorus of alarmed noises from the people closest to him.
"I said it’s rotten," Calan insists, voice warbling with heroic misery as he points one shaky finger at the vendor. "The hel meat’s rotten. I ate it and now my insides are doing something wrong." A woman with sun-pink shoulders crouches near him with her hands hovering uselessly, while another tries to guide him away from the crush of feet and questions. Calan lets himself be fussed over for exactly two seconds before turning his watery stare back toward the vendor’s stall, where customers are now looking down at their wraps with the kind of suspicion that made a plan worth chewing orange peels for.
"Noooo, don’t eat that," he wails at a man halfway through unwrapping his lunch. That gets more heads turning. Better still, it gets someone to ask the vendor what colour the meat was supposed to be, and then someone else to demand whether the wraps had been sitting in the sun all morning. Calan presses the back of his wrist to his forehead as if checking for fever, then staggers sideways into the gentle catch of one of the mother-hen types who has decided, with no evidence at all, that he is both dying and personally her responsibility.
He makes another horrible gagging noise, this one almost entirely real, and squints through the blur of his own watery eyes toward the growing ring of bodies, wondering what sorts of treasures Carlo was probably making away with.
"I said it’s rotten," Calan insists, voice warbling with heroic misery as he points one shaky finger at the vendor. "The hel meat’s rotten. I ate it and now my insides are doing something wrong." A woman with sun-pink shoulders crouches near him with her hands hovering uselessly, while another tries to guide him away from the crush of feet and questions. Calan lets himself be fussed over for exactly two seconds before turning his watery stare back toward the vendor’s stall, where customers are now looking down at their wraps with the kind of suspicion that made a plan worth chewing orange peels for.
"Noooo, don’t eat that," he wails at a man halfway through unwrapping his lunch. That gets more heads turning. Better still, it gets someone to ask the vendor what colour the meat was supposed to be, and then someone else to demand whether the wraps had been sitting in the sun all morning. Calan presses the back of his wrist to his forehead as if checking for fever, then staggers sideways into the gentle catch of one of the mother-hen types who has decided, with no evidence at all, that he is both dying and personally her responsibility.
He makes another horrible gagging noise, this one almost entirely real, and squints through the blur of his own watery eyes toward the growing ring of bodies, wondering what sorts of treasures Carlo was probably making away with.
if it all goes wrong and we end up on the news, if you go down I'm goin' down too
