The Distance

by Zoë Folbigg

  Hector cuts off. The jar isn’t there. He fumbles among the cables, a frantic hand searching in a dark and cluttered nook he can’t see. Then he looks above the cupboard, behind the television, at the back of the DVDs. He knows it was near the television, because every time he sat on the sofa sketching, or watching TV, while he tried to ignore texts from his friends, from Pilar, urging him to join them in a bar or cantina – to be the real Hector again – he would look towards the cupboard, to his chupito jar stuffed with red and green notes and imagine what he would spend that money on. A designer dress for Pilar from Mexico City? No, he had earned that money, not her. Converting the second bedroom into a studio? Pilar never showed any interest when Hector mentioned babies, so maybe turning the spare room into a place for Hector to paint would at least start that conversation. Or…

  A flight to Europe?

  ‘It’s gone, baby,’ Pilar calls out with a husky croak, sounding not the slightest bit remorseful. ‘I needed it the other night.’

  Hector leans his palms against the edge of the chipboard cupboard with the TV on top of it. His head hangs down and he looks at his bare feet on the cool tiled floor.

  ‘You spent 8,000 pesos, of money I saved, on one night out?’ he says quietly.

  Calm yourself.

  Pilar jumps out of bed and storms into the living room, wrapped tightly in the sullied sheet that trails behind her like a bridal train. She sees Hector’s bare back arching, leaning away from her. His fake Calvin Kleins rising above the waist of his brown cargo shorts.

  ‘Shut up, OK, Hector?’ she snaps. ‘My head is hurting and I don’t need this shit right now. Stop being such a whining bitch.’

  Hector turns and slumps down and sits on the terracotta tiles.

  ‘Anyway, I told Benny last night, he said he’d look after us.’

  The walls of the apartment start to sway a little. The TV cabinet Hector is leaning against bumps across the floor ever so gracefully, shunting Hector along a little, urging him to pull himself back up and get to work. The sofa facing him and the round dining table in the corner also move a few centimetres to the south; fragments of paper fall to the floor again and scraps of Pilar’s sharp eyes and bitter smile taunt him. Tectonic plates shift, the earth quakes, and Hector Herrera’s conflicted, angry heart rips into two as he wonders how the hell he’s going to get them out of this mess.

  Fourteen

  When they were boys, Benny Trujillo was Hector’s bunk buddy at the Villa Infantil De Nuestra Señora. They met when Hector was seven and Benny was nine. Benny had never known his mother, who fled town the night he was born, so Benny had spent his entire life being passed around, from aunt to grandparent to foster carer and back again, until they all had too much and he was left on the doorstep of the orphanage by an exhausted aunt.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said to Sister Miriam, the most senior of the three sisters who ran the orphanage in a town-centre villa, given to the diocese by a generous patron named Sánchez. ‘We’ve washed our hands of him. Some people are just bad eggs. His father, whoever he is or was, must have been a bad egg,’ said the woman with exasperated eyes.

  Sister Miriam was horrified by how a child could be written off. But she took in the little boy with the square head, who wore a black bow tie over an orange shirt with ruffles on it, and showed him to his bunk.

  ‘Hector has just got back from his grandfather’s,’ Sister Miriam explained as she smoothed Benny’s wiry black centre-parted hair. ‘You boys will get on like a house on fire.’

  Alejandro Herrera became an old man the day his son and his wife died in a car crash, although Hector couldn’t imagine his abuelo was ever a young man. He was already a widower and the only relative alive and able to take Victor and Lupe’s four-year-old son on. Hector had been in the back of the car when it spun off the roadside and down a ravine at Las Vigas, after a Day Of The Dead festival had turned rainy, as November days often did in the mountains. Hector’s four-year-old bones must have been more pliable and able to take the shock than his parents’. At the bottom of the ravine, his mum and dad didn’t speak, so Hector climbed onto the bench of the front seat to wake them.

  ‘Mamá!’ Hector had lumbered onto her lap, but it was hard to hug her with his brother in the way inside her tummy. ‘Mamá!’

  Hector looked at his dad but his face was distorted and red, his mouth locked wide open, and he looked a bit scary, so Hector snuggled into his mother’s distended stomach, hugged it and cried, waiting for her to wake up while another life inside her was slipping away.

  Alejandro took Hector on and learned to cook, and then rotate, three meals: tamales, pozole and pollo a la Veracruzana. He’d never cooked before, his wife Maria always had. Since Maria died three years earlier, Alejandro had got by on tacos and tostadas. But as he scooped Hector up in the hospital and took him back to his ramshackle little house on Calle Bremont, he knew he would have to learn to cook, to clean, to look after an only son again, as Victor had been.

  Alejandro found looking after a preschooler back-breaking work at his age – his days in the gardens at the Museum of Anthropology were physical enough, but when Hector climbed onto his grandfather’s back to ask Abuelo all the questions he was desperate to know the answers to, his spine would curve like a question mark until he thought it might just snap. The manager of the museum, a small and sympathetic man with a neat moustache named Felipe Hernández, was understanding, and welcomed the little boy at the museum. When Hector was six and started school, Alejandro found it even harder to work around the school day; dropping Hector off, picking him up and taking him back to the grounds of the Museo to play hide-and-seek with the Olmec heads (Hector always won, those enormous stone statues were rubbish at hiding).

  Soon after Hector had started school, Alejandro paid Sister Miriam a visit at the Villa Infantil, and she was kind and welcoming. She said she, Sister Juana and Sister Virginia would find space for Hector alongside the twenty other children, whenever Alejandro needed help.

  Señor Hernández agreed for Alejandro to work at the museum, one week on, and then take the next week off so he could care for his grandson. He was accommodating; he’d felt terrible enough when Alejandro lost his wife to a heart attack, but to lose his son and daughter-in-law three years later…

  ‘Of course, Alejandro,’ Hernández said. ‘You can work double shifts one week – in the grounds until the sun goes down, and then clean the interior of the museum after closing. Then you can have the next week off. Hector needs you,’ he said with an avuncular nod. Hernández was sympathetic, but he wasn’t that sympathetic.

  On the weeks Alejandro worked at the Museo, he pulled sixteen-hour shifts across seven days, working 6 a.m. until 10 p.m., until there wasn’t a blade of grass too long, a plant unpruned, a gecko out of place or a display case smeared, and Hector would stay at the Villa Infantil De Nuestra Señora under the kind gaze of Sisters Miriam, Juana and Virginia. On the ‘off’ weeks, the weeks he had Hector staying back at his little house, Alejandro was a full-time grandparent; taking Hectorcito to school, cleaning, cooking and darning the holes in his socks and on the knees of his trousers by day; then feeding him, bathing him, helping with his homework and reading him bedtime stories at night. Hector was exhausting but lively company.

  ‘He keeps me young,’ Alejandro said quietly to Sister Miriam one day.

  There isn’t much Hector remembers from his early years at the orphanage, he can’t even remember the day he met Sister Miriam, when she gasped at how much Hector looked like Lupe Herrera, the friendliest of the girls who worked on the ground floor at Lazaro’s, and pulled him to her bosom. The two most vivid memories Hector has from his childhood are of clinging to his mother’s belly in the wreckage of the car; and the day Benny Trujillo, in his orange frilled shirt, black bow tie and thick square head, turned up at the Villa Infantil.

  All the children at the Villa Infantil were orphans or had been abandoned, but Hector and Benny were the most alike, and would
have gravitated towards each other, regardless of whether Sister Miriam gave them a little nudge at the start.

  The twenty-two children varied in age, from eighteen months to fifteen years, many of them were siblings. Hector and Benny weren’t the only seven and nine-year-old boys there, but they were the only ones without a brother or a sister, so they stuck together. They were also the most mischievous. Hector called Benny ‘Olmeca’ because his large head, with its creased forehead, thick nose and wide lips reminded him of the colossal stone heads at the Museum of Anthropology. Benny called Hector ‘Zapata’ because his agreeable face and wide, bronze eyes looked like the man in the book Sister Virginia had shown them when she was teaching the children about the Mexican Revolution. Hector played up to this – he always did want to make Benny laugh – by painting a huge moustache on his face in ink that took five days to wash off.

  When Hector was in favour, he was ‘Zapata’ and Benny would lift him on his shoulders like a war hero if he managed to meet one of Benny’s challenges; to steal something from a visitor to the orphanage, or put a cockroach in one of the children’s bunk beds, or turn pictures upside down to make Sister Miriam think she was going mad. Sometimes Hector would turn down one of Benny’s challenges because he felt too guilty at the thought of the consequence; Nuria would miss her only toy, Sister Juana would be mortified if her polvorones made people sick, and Alejandro would be so devastatingly disappointed if Hector took twenty pesos from his wallet. When Hector refused a challenge, Benny’s thick lips would curl and he would call Hector a dirty peasant and not speak to him for days. But their weakness was always each other. Olmeca and Zapata always came back to each other. They were best friends.

  As teenagers, Benny’s challenges got bolder, and Hector got a bit more carefree about meeting them, his hormones making him more cavalier. He didn’t know why he wanted to make Benny Trujillo so happy; Hector could have plenty of other friends in the orphanage, or at the school they both went to; he got along well with everyone. But he mostly felt guilty because he knew Benny probably couldn’t. People didn’t warm to Benny Trujillo’s craggy scowl or his clumsiness; girls didn’t ever ask Benny to the movies, like they did Hector.

  Hanging out one Friday evening in Parque Juárez next to the Palacio de Gobierno, Benny and Hector leaned against the back of a pop-up popcorn stand and Benny set Hector a challenge.

  ‘See that guy there with the grey suit…?’

  Hector looked at one of the officials, stepping out of the government building with an elegant woman on his arm, waiting for a car to arrive to take him and his wife for dinner.

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘Get something from him. Anything. And I’ll give you the top bunk tonight.’

  Top bunk was the best prize because then you weren’t on the bottom bunk, where you would never know if the person on the top bunk was about to swing down with a rolled-up comic book and thwack you round the head.

  The man looked irked by the inconvenience of having to wait for a car, so he and his wife walked away into the after-work melee to flag down a taxi.

  ‘Too easy.’

  Egged on by teen bravado, Hector set about his challenge while Benny sunk back into the shadows of the popcorn cart to watch. Hector weaved between the ochre arches and grey pillars of the Palacio’s façade, under the long balcony spruced up with green awnings above their heads on the grand first floor. He got closer to the dapper man with his slow walk: he must have been a minister – or even the governor himself… Hector didn’t care who he was, he just had to meet Benny’s challenge, so he tailed the couple for a few metres, his eyes darting left and right frantically, while he thought about his tactics.

  He could get anything from the man: a button from his suit or his cigarette butt from the floor, but he knew he’d get extra kudos if it was something useful, something valuable. Benny liked Hector even more when he came back from a challenge with something they could spend or sell, because Benny always had a knack of turning something small into something bigger, such was his hatred for being poor.

  As Hector weaved through the throng, he felt a metallic taste in his mouth and saw a gift before his very eyes: the elegant woman, wearing a woollen skirt suit with a chunky pearl necklace that matched the bracelet on her wrist, had her handbag wide open. Her bulging purse was bursting out of it.

  Too easy.

  In the rush-hour noise, as the bell chimed on the cathedral opposite, and drivers of the green and white Beetles tooted their horns with impatient passengers in the back, Hector removed his thin bomber jacket, slung it over his arm, and bent down to undo a lace on his red Converse boot.

  ‘Ufff!’ he feigned, as he stumbled over, falling and rolling at the lady’s shiny beige stilettos to cause a distraction.

  The man in the grey suit stopped suddenly but didn’t say anything, he just looked irritated. The woman, with her soft caramel-blonde hair, bent down, knees together, with an anxious, maternal look in her eyes.

  ‘Are you OK?’ she asked, crouching and placing her hand on the knee of the skinny boy.

  Hector feigned embarrassment and looked at his red boot, and shrugged. He’d never taken it this far before. It was now or never.

  ‘Yes, yes, sorry, I must have tripped on my laces,’ Hector winced in pretend pain. ‘All OK now though,’ he said, as he lifted the woman’s bulky purse out from the bag under his bomber jacket. He dusted himself down with his free hand and the elegant woman took him by the arm. He had to stand up without using his concealed hand, but managed to, holding tightly to the purse under his jacket.

  ‘Are you sure you’re OK, young man?’ asked the woman again. Hector could see his reprehensible reflection in a chunky pearl.

  He nodded. He just wanted to get away.

  ‘Thank you,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry.’

  And with that he walked back in the direction of the park while the woman gave her husband a look, pleading with him to show a little compassion.

  ‘Silly fool,’ he gruffed. ‘Kids can’t even tie their own shoelaces nowadays.’

  Hector skipped back to the park so the orphan brothers could split their haul. It was his biggest yet, and he was sure Benny would be proud of him.

  Benny’s eyes lit up as they counted the money.

  ‘Wow, that’s 1,879 pesos. Nine hundred each. I get the 79 extra ’cause I set the challenge.’

  Hector didn’t argue. He was feeling pleased with himself, until Benny punched him on the arm.

  ‘But you failed the challenge you hijo de puta peasant.’

  ‘Huh?’

  ‘I said get something from the man. Not the lady. I keep top bunk tonight. And you’re a fuckin’ idiot.’

  ‘Idiot?! We have nearly a thousand pesos each!’

  Hector had never seen a thousand pesos in his entire life.

  ‘Yeah, but when that lady notices her purse has gone, she’s gonna know it was the orphan peasant who fell over and took it out of her bag isn’t she?! And she’s gonna see you again one day. Pretty soon, because you live here and you hang out here. Congratulations, Hector, you just did a big shit on your own feet.’

  Hector felt angry. His left hand made a fist.

  And as he lay on the bottom bunk that night, taking the intermittent hits when Benny swung down with a rolled-up copy of Karmatrón Y Los Transformables, he vowed never to honour another of Benny’s challenges. At dinner he hadn’t been able to look at Sister Miriam and in bed he couldn’t get out of his head the face of the woman, a concerned and maternal gaze because she thought Hector might have hurt himself. She had children, he had seen the photo of them in her wallet – two teenage boys – and they would be feeling sad for their mother tonight.

  Determination washed over Hector as he lay and took another hit from Benny.

  Game over.

  Fifteen

  June 2018, Suffolk, England

  Looking along the row under the darkened big top, Kate feels a swell of pride, even if Chloe is scrolling th
rough her phone.

  What’s she looking at now? These tickets weren’t cheap.

  But there they sit, three little eggs all in a row, increasing in size. Youngest first, Jack, leans into Kate’s arm as he waits for the clown to come back, because Jack thinks the clown on the unicycle is the funniest. Izzy is next to her brother, trying not to show that she’s impressed by the aerialist pulling her body up between two swathes of white fabric, but Kate can tell she is. Beyond Izzy, Chloe looks at her new phone, the one she got in anticipation of going to secondary school in September, like all her friends did for their eleventh birthdays. She’s not impressed by the acrobatics in the air. She wants to see what Perrie from Little Mix is doing on Instagram.

  Kate pulls Jack to her bosom. Her heart is proud but sad, the vacant seat to her left goading her. The one she decided to pile all the coats on, given George said he had to work today. Zippy Von Braun’s Big Top always comes to Claresham during half-term, and the Wheelers have been coming since Chloe was four. But last night, after they’d had a Chinese from the takeaway in the village, George said he had to go back into London tomorrow. On a Saturday. To tie up some sustainable or responsible investment deal or something, which didn’t sound all that responsible, given Kate had been looking forward to this for months. The pile of coats looms in Kate’s peripheral vision.

  She gazes in awe at the aerialist. Her strong arms and muscular thighs, entwined in cloth as she climbs, rising through the air, while doing the splits upside down from a daring height. Kate looks at the acrobat’s stomach, the naked space between her lilac satin crop top and matching big pants, as she uses every sinew of her core. Working hard, relying on her own strength to lift herself higher up towards the roof of the circus tent. Kate marvels at another woman’s body. At her own inadequacies. At the acrobat’s red lipstick in a shade she dare not try.

  I wish I were her.

  As twists of white cloth unravel, a flash of lilac and a whirl of red falls in a blur, violently towards the floor. Stopping with an abrupt and expert tug of two muscular arms.