Niyati Keni - Esperanza Street

I too felt hypnotised by the atmosphere and stayed longer than I meant to, unwilling to return just yet to preparing the Bougainvillea for dinner.

I left my father and wandered over to the market hall where earlier I’d glimpsed Suelita clinging to the top of a ladder. She was there now, one end of a strip of bunting held up to the eaves of the hall, the other end trailing in knotted loops to the ground. I wished she hadn’t been wearing a skirt. ‘Need any help?’ I said, keeping my eyes on the length of bunting between her hands.

She let a few seconds pass before she answered. ‘Sure, if you want to grab the other end and help me untangle it.’ Her tone was cool. She slipped down to stand next to me and we worked for a while in silence. ‘How’s the baby?’ she said after a while, her voice a little warmer, her eyes flickering in the direction of the sea wall where my father worked with the other jetty boys. The way she said it made it sound almost like she thought it was my baby.

I shrugged. ‘Fine, I guess.’ I watched her coil the unknotted bunting slowly between elbow and thumb. She seemed almost relaxed as she worked. I imagined asking her if she wanted to go for a walk sometime. Or maybe for a movie, not at the proper movie house in town, which I couldn’t afford, but a video played on the TV that Caylo ran off a car battery in his front yard. If guys were trains , I thought. I waited for her to speak again but she didn’t. Her silence made me talkative. ‘You know, in America they’re going to build a telescope to launch into space. We’ll be able to see further into the universe than ever before.’

She laughed then. ‘ We? ’ she said.

I flushed, misunderstanding, and said tersely, ‘Can you imagine this place gone?’ I suppose I’d hoped to upset her, but she watched me impassively as she smoothed out the bunting, her closed smile settling back on her face.

‘All the time,’ she said.

I wasn’t surprised. ‘You think of escaping a lot?’

‘Sure. Don’t you?’

‘Don’t know where I’d go.’ She looked at me with what I suspected was pity and I said, ‘You think you’ll actually make it out of here, then?’ I was sorry straight away that I’d said it. She jerked the last length of bunting out of my hand and turned away.

‘Joseph!’ I looked in the direction of my father’s voice. Ever mindful of my responsibilities, he was pointing at his watch. I turned back to Suelita but she’d moved away and I saw, from the other side of the market hall, through the lengthening shadows, her mother approaching. I waved at Missy and moved off quickly in the direction of Esperanza Street while she was still out of earshot.

The shadows were long and deep as I walked up Esperanza Street. I was brooding over what had passed between me and Suelita, replaying everything I’d said, imagining any number of ways I might have said things differently and, preoccupied in this way, I paid little attention to what was going on around me. I was almost past the mouth of the Espiritista alley when the sound of my name being called interrupted my thoughts. I stopped, perplexed for just an instant before I heard it again. I looked back into the alley.

Rico sat on the bench outside the Bukaykay’s store. Behind him the hatch was closed, the windows dark. ‘Psst,’ he beckoned me over, his palm downwards, fingers scurrying in the air like he was scratching an invisible dog. I hadn’t seen him for a few days. It didn’t surprise me to see him on the store bench now, even though the house was empty. I so rarely saw him anywhere else that it almost seemed the bench was where he belonged. I wondered anxiously for a moment whether he’d seen me alone with Suelita and even as I did so I chastised myself; Rico could hardly claim her as his property. He’s a jerk , I thought.

I walked over to him. ‘You take your head out of your books only to put it straight in the clouds? I was calling and calling,’ he reproached me, but his tone was genial, over-familiar. I heard noises behind me and saw that the rest of the Barracudas were there too, in the shadows, one on the corner of Esperanza as if he’d been behind me the whole time.

Rico rose, slipped his arm around my shoulders and said softly, ‘Let’s walk, Joe,’ as if he didn’t want to wake anyone, though there were still people about and noise and light leaching out into the evening from behind shutters and doors.

I became conscious now of how late it was. ‘I should be back already,’ I said, ‘but I can come tomorrow.’

He laughed. ‘You act so serious all the time, Joe, but actually you’re quite funny.’ I hesitated, but he pulled me forward with him, his arm heavy across my shoulders. ‘It won’t take long,’ he said.

We walked together through the back alleys into the depths of Greenhills, until the shacks dwindled into coarse grass and litter-strewn streams and long shadowy stretches in which little could be made out. Here, there were few people about. It seemed just the sort of place for the kind of shady business I imagined Rico to be involved in. We stopped under a tree and he turned to me, his eyes meeting mine then looking away again. He laughed again, softly. Somewhere in the darkness I could hear a pig straining at its tether and underneath that, the sound of a radio or perhaps a TV. ‘Your pop,’ Rico said, ‘he’s been hard at work on this rally, eh?’

‘It affects everyone,’ I said. ‘You too.’

‘I know my place.’ If I hadn’t known him better I might have thought he sounded sad. ‘And your boy. He thinks he’s a real rock star, huh?’

Who? I thought. I heard the barkada boys move in closer.

‘Can you carry a message for us, Joe?’

‘Sure.’ I wondered at the theatricality of bringing me through the back of the shanties to this place, if all he wanted of me was that I carried a message.

Rico lowered himself slowly onto an empty oil drum that lay on its side under a tree. Someone had beaten a hollow into the top of the drum to make it into a seat. It would be a good, cool spot even at the height of day. He leaned back against the trunk. ‘Sorry, Joe,’ he said. He started to hum, a tune I didn’t recognise at first, and then, softly, to sing. I heard the words kung-fu fighting. I was surprised. His voice was good: melodic and smooth. He might have been a choirboy. The barkada boys closed in. They started to beat me, carefully, neatly, with a restraint that I didn’t understand at the time. I found myself wondering if Rico only knew the same two lines of the song, for now they seemed to repeat over and over. After what might have been seconds or minutes, the blows stopped and the boys stepped back. Rico’s face frowned down at me. ‘You’ll make sure the message gets through, won’t you, Joe?’ he said. ‘I don’t want to do this again.’ In the darkness, his eyes looked wounded. His face retreated again and the boys moved back in. I focused on a point somewhere deep inside my body, away from the surface, away from my skin, from every sensation and, after a while, through the gauze, behind the dull tumult, I became aware of thoughts arising and breaking up, distantly, like surf. Down at the jetty, under the market-hall roof, everyone was still working to prepare Esperanza for the rally. None of them even knew I was here. I’d have liked to be with them. I thought about Aunt Mary and almost immediately I pictured Dub. The rock star. I pictured a guitar, the exact model: a second-hand Stratocaster, a real beauty. A motorbike bought with his dead father’s money. Either object worth far more than a few stolen herbs. I felt a thin, sharp line of rage that brightened and dissipated. And then another thought, clear and unperturbed, about how practised Rico and his boys were, how professional. I smiled.