by Anna Perera
Chapter Seven
Concrete Walls
The lane is jammed with people climbing over filth and crossing themselves as they gather and mutter in singsong voices over the corpse of the dead pony. Eyeball to eyeball, they shake their heads as Aaron and Lijah wearily lug the fallen bags out of their way to unload what’s left on the cart.
As the sun beats down on the pony’s thin, bony shape, a doom-laden feeling settles over everyone watching. To lose a pony is too terrible for words. But by the time the stepbrothers fling the last bags at the walls of a nearby building, people’s interest finally peters out. There’s work to be done and they begin to wander off.
An eerie silence falls until the sound of wheels, echoing like a rickety train, starts up in the distance, getting louder as it heads toward them. Soon Shareen theatrically bursts into view, as if coming onto a stage, pushing the wheelbarrow with elbows akimbo.
“You can pay me later.” Unpredictable as ever, Shareen touches Aaron’s arm with the wheelbarrow’s smooth, metal handle.
“Thanks,” he says, and means it. “After we’ve figured out what to do with the pony, you might want to help us carry the bags home in the wheelbarrow.”
Like a princess, she looks down her nose at him. “You’ll be lucky.”
Aaron notices her glowing skin, the strands of gleaming, curly hair plastered to her neck as she swirls her eyes from him, to Lijah, then to the pony and friends in the thinning crowd. Humming with satisfaction, she hugs herself at the sight of so much unexpected drama. But sadly her center-stage moment is cut short when the Mebaj brothers” cart turns into the lane. The Mebaj family don’t swear, curse or drink. They’re the opposite of Aaron’s family.
Just before they reach the crowd, the elder brother pulls the reins and they rattle to a stop.
“What’s going on?” He can’t imagine what’s behind the sad faces walking toward them. All he can see is Lijah, Aaron, and Shareen in the distance.
“Go back,” Abe warns, appearing from a side alley. “There’s something not very nice in the way.”
The Mebaj brothers climb down to push through, curling their lips like pirates at the sight of the pony stretched out in the middle of the path. With only twelve months between them, the brothers act more like twins, and when one pulls a face, the other says what they’re both thinking: “Get the pony on the wheelbarrow!”
The idea’s too much for Aaron. It’s not going to work. Staring at the pony’s limp body, at the skin and bones swarming with flies, he can’t bear to touch it. In a temper, Lijah wrenches the barrow’s handles from Aaron and roughly guides it alongside the corpse. The animal looks ridiculously huge compared to the size of the barrow, which is less than a third of its length. It’s a stupid situation. One or two kids laugh and issue instructions about the best way forward. But there’s only one way to do this. With a superhuman effort, Lijah begins to swing the pony’s hind legs in the air.
“What are you waiting for?” he yells at Aaron.
Having no choice in the matter, Aaron bends over the horse’s chunky mouth and touches the hard skull.
“Not the head, you idiot,” Lijah screams. “Your end.” Aaron drops the head with a thump and grabs the warm body. With a quick shuffle, he reaches under the furry skin and, swallowing his feelings of revulsion, grunts as he tries to lift the pony from the ground. It’s heavier than he thought and he staggers awkwardly until Simon lends a hand by grabbing the front legs and twisting them to the sky. Swinging the corpse between them, they groan as they drop it on the creaking wheelbarrow. Most of the pony is over the sides: legs stretched out at an angle, jaw on the ground. Only by carrying the back legs in his arms, with Abe holding the head up by its ears, is Lijah able to manuever the wheelbarrow and drag the pony all the way to the yard at the edge of the village.
By the time the evening light fades and the sun goes down in Mokattam, the pony has been delivered to the butcher, the bags have been wheeled home, and the rubbish has been separated into recyclable piles. The necessary work has been completed, but one awful meeting remains. Hosi was out this afternoon at the bone-fixer’s house, having two teeth pulled because he can’t afford a trip to the dentist. Only when his anger’s been faced will Aaron and Lijah get a morsel to eat and a few hours’ peace. Hopefully, Aaron will get the chance later to run and tell Rachel why the pony hasn’t returned to the yard. She’s on his mind, and the thought that someone else might tell her what’s happened makes him feel so desperate his pulse starts racing.
While checking for the now-familiar bumps of the perfume bottles hidden in his pockets, Aaron gazes down the lane. Shareen and her father are nowhere to be seen. Abe and a few of the kids kick a ball at a concrete wall while Lijah sits, half asleep, picking his nails and breathing in the smells of other people’s dinners. Abe lets the ball bounce from the wall and roll away at the sight of the thin, stooped figure coming toward him.
A shiver of expectation suddenly brings everyone alive. The gossiping stops as they watch Hosi getting closer. Mouth open, hands clasped in agony to the side of his jaw, he’s on fire, and by the look on his face, he already knows what’s happened to the pony.
“How are we going to live? How? How?” Dribbles of blood leak from Hosi’s stained teeth and gums.
Although the past hour has been spent in peace, with hardly a word between Aaron and Lijah, a return to their usual hostility breaks out the moment Hosi arrives.
“Ask Shareen if you don’t believe me. I tried to get water for the pony. Lijah should have got it, but he went off and left the pony to die of thirst,” Aaron says.
Hosi’s expression changes from fury at both of them to narrow-eyed hatred for his son. Lijah squirms at the force of his gaze. But learning the truth of the matter doesn’t mean Aaron’s off the hook and Hosi slowly turns to face him with the same venomous expression.
For the first time in Aaron’s experience, Hosi believes him and not Lijah, but it doesn’t make any difference. He clips Aaron on the side of the head. Cowering, rubbing his ear, Aaron ducks and gazes up at Hosi, shocked. His stepfather’s lips are quivering and he looks like a baby about to burst into tears. With red eyes and a puffy, swollen face, he’s shaking so hard Aaron wonders if he might collapse. If Aaron didn’t feel the same horror and fear as Hosi, he might for once have hit him back.
Aaron shoots down the stairs and runs off down the lane. There’s a lack of restraint in the way he runs; in the way his feet slap the ground before he fists the air to work off some of the fury eating away at his insides. As he races around each corner in the growing darkness, past every pile of rubbish and stinking slum, he searches for Rachel. She’s the only person in Mokattam who can ease the horror of the pony’s death. And Aaron has a present for her—an expensive present.
When Aaron reaches the yard, he’s out of breath and the smell of dung mixed with hay brings on a sneezing fit.
A storm of sneezes that threatens to drown out the growing commotion approaching from nearby. It’s a group of girls, bunched up, crowded around one another, laughing and joking. The girl in the middle is Shareen.
Oh no. Not now. With two girls hanging on her shoulders and several others whispering in her ears, Shareen isn’t trying to impress them. She’s the natural leader and the group has no choice but to follow her when she comes to a sudden stop in front of Aaron.
She’s clearly wondering if he’s a suitable victim for a pushing-around session. Shareen slowly eyes her mates while Aaron scans the group for Rachel. She’s not there. He glances over the fence at the three ponies munching hay and wonders if she’s up at the church.
“No one’s ever going to marry you, Aaron,” Shareen starts.
A giggling ripple spreads through the girls.
Constance, who has a scar on her lip and gray-green eyes, clasps her stomach in preparation for a side-splitting laugh while they move in on him.
“Not like Shareen,” a gawky girl adds.
“You’ve never kiss
ed anyone, have you, Aaron? You’re too scared, aren’t you?” Shareen says. “Oooh, never been kissed and nearly sixteen.”
“I have!” Aaron blushes, surrounded by mischievous faces as the girls shove each other to get closer still.
“My brother got married at fourteen,” the gawky girl adds.
With the fence and feeding ponies behind him, there’s nowhere for Aaron to escape to, unless he crashes through the girls’ linked arms. They know he won’t dare do that, because touching them would bring howls of complaints from everyone in the community and, of course, they’d run and tell the priest immediately. Aaron’s their unwilling hostage and if they push or touch him, that’s different because they’re just mucking about, and what would they want from him anyway? Aaron suddenly places his hands behind his back to show them he’s not intimidated in the least, but he swallows too slowly, giving them a reason to continue.
“Who did you kiss, then?” Shareen asks.
“I’m not saying.” Aaron adds a vague, sideways grin, as if recalling someone special.
“I know who it was!”
Everyone turns to Malia as she wipes her nose with the sleeve of her galabeya.
“Go on, then, Malia … Tell us,” another girl begs. “It was Rachel.”
Shareen nods.
“NO!” Aaron’s horrified by the mention of her name. “Found out. Found out,” they chant.
“Bet you gave her a Coca-Cola to get her to kiss you.” Shareen widens her eyes. It’s the ultimate trick to goad him into losing his temper, but Aaron knows her too well. She’s worse in a pack and, when he refuses to take the bait, she changes tack, secretly disappointed.
“Let’s go and ask Rachel.”
“How stupid,” Aaron fumes. “Go on, then.”
“We will,” Shareen says, laughing for the first time. “Yeah, well … ’bye.” Aaron tries hard to come up with something else he can say to stop her from embarrassing Rachel. But the truth is written all over his crumpled, anxious face.
It takes two seconds for Shareen to say what everyone’s thinking.
“Aaron loves Rachel,” she announces, with an edge of irritation in her voice.
His feelings for Rachel have been hinted at before and now they’re out in the open there’s little Aaron can do but die a small death and hope for a quick, painless escape, which is sadly thwarted by the sound of their hilarious giggling. Now they think he’s pathetic and in love, the rumours will spread like wildfire through Mokattam and he’ll never be able to give Rachel the bottles of perfume or look her in the eye again. Shareen was put here to drive him crazy and Aaron vows never to forgive her for this. Then another idea twinkles to life from the flicker of irritation that crossed Shareen’s face earlier.
“Let’s face it …” Aaron picks his ego back up. “Rachel’s the prettiest girl in Mokattam. All the boys are a bit in love with her. Not just me. The other day Jacob said Rachel’s beautiful on the inside too.”
Outright fury flashes across Shareen’s face faster than a guided missile.
“Well, no one’s asked Rachel to marry her, have they?” She stoops to pick up a stone, examining it for a moment before suddenly flinging it at her target: the feed bin. The stone pings loudly. “Unlike … me,” she adds firmly.
“Who’d marry Rachel?” Constance grabs a smaller stone, aims for the feed bin and misses. “Well, maybe Sami would!”
Everyone laughs. No one likes Sami from the secondhand electrical shop because he says unkind things about people. Aaron has even seen him refusing to help his own mother carry home a huge bag of flour: “It’s not that heavy,” Sami had said.
“She would never marry him,” Aaron says, then sighs. But no one is listening to him now. They’re too busy competing to hit the target—scaring the ponies into stumbling backward from the pinging noises, ears pricked for further signs of danger. Now that the girls are pretending to have lost interest in Aaron, he grabs the chance to slip past them and creep away.
A shiver of relief runs through him as he reaches the pale, wide, dusty walkway leading to the church, and just when he begins to feel safe again, he spots his best friend. Jacob, the kid with the curliest hair and most clownlike face in Mokattam, is racing toward him with his head in his hands, muttering to himself.
“What happened?” Aaron grabs him by the shoulders. Jacob’s in shock, trembling, stuttering wildly. Immediately, Aaron spots the problem before Jacob opens his mouth to answer. Sticking out slightly from his arm, directly beside the edge of his elbow bone, is the point of an old-fashioned needle. Without thinking, using two fingers, Aaron tries to tweak the brittle tip from Jacob’s smooth flesh.
“OW! You’re not supposed to touch it.” Jacob flinches as if he’s been bitten by a snake. The curve of his arm is covered in scratches and red marks. “I was going to look for someone with tweezers to pull it out,” he says. “Those needles were covered in blood. AIDS, hepat … ize, the lot. I’m going to die and so are you now.”
“Nothing gets through this skin.” Splaying his ridged fingers high in the air, Aaron almost blocks out the sunlight from Jacob’s eyes, his hands are so big.
“I fell on loads of used needles,” Jacob explains. “They’re not supposed to put syringes in the bags. They should burn the used stuff, but they don’t anymore. I’m dead, aren’t I?” His clownlike face droops and his lower lip sticks out as if he’s about to cry.
It’s a nasty moment. Plenty of kids in the hospital-waste clearing area of Mokattam have died of fatal diseases. Everyone feels sorry for them. These families are so far down the pecking order that hardly anyone questions the details of the horrible work they do, or asks why so many suffer illnesses that could easily be avoided if the hospitals disposed of the clinical waste in the proper way. Medical-wasting is a job that gives Aaron nightmares. His hands go clammy just imagining the constant fear that Jacob and his family live with.
“No. No, Jacob …” Aaron starts, but then forgets what he was going to say. He’s unable to take in the full horror of Jacob’s pleading eyes because there she is—Rachel—coming down the wide path, dressed in a blue galabeya, calmly frowning, as if trying to remember something important. His eyes are fixed on the vision that’s almost upon them. The last thing he wants to happen is for Rachel to run into Shareen and her mates.
It’s not until Rachel waves at them that Aaron regains some control of his wandering mind. “See, Jacob, someone … who was it? Well, anyway, someone told me that most of those syringes are, are … yeah, they’re used to stir the … the … red wine they give to the rich patients—whenever they run out of, er … spoons. Not all syringes are dangerous.”
“Eh?” Jacob’s more flustered by this mad explanation than he was by imagining an early death.
“Honestly, I wouldn’t worry if I were you.” Aaron slaps him on the back. “Hi, Rachel. Where you going?”
“To the church to say a prayer for your pony.” Rachel gazes past Aaron in that self-contained way that scares him. Does she blame him? “He was my favorite—your pony.”
Aaron follows her gaze.
“Why do you want to pray for his pony?” Jacob’s baffled. “It’s not sick, is it? Aaron? Is it?”
The dusty path seems to shrink and the distant towering hills push down on Aaron like a huge giant as he nods and watches the alarm creeping over Jacob’s face.
“Yeah. The pony died.”
“That’s a disaster,” Jacob says. “You’ve had it now.” “I know,” Aaron says.
Jacob shakes his head. “I’m going to find someone to help me.”
“Want me to come with you?”
Aaron is only asking to be friendly. He doesn’t want to go. Doesn’t want to leave Rachel here either. Go on your own. On your own, he silently prays.
“It’s OK.” Jacob grins. “Looks like you want to talk to her.” He makes a swift exit in the direction of the old part of the village.
“Do you want me to pray for the pony?” Rachel asks
.
Aaron sighs. “What’s the point? It’s not going to bring the pony back, is it?”
Suddenly lights twinkle from the interior of the church, as if to say you’re wrong, and he shivers.
“But praying will help it get to heaven,” Rachel says, and smiles.
“How do you know that?” Aaron mutters.
“Everyone knows.”
“Well, I don’t. Here, you might as well have this.”
Aaron fishes a perfume bottle from his pocket and thrusts it at her. His fantasies about how he was going to present it to her disappear in an instant.
The dark liquid slides around the rose-colored glass as she widens her eyes. “Where did you get this?” she asks, staring at the bottle but not taking it.
She isn’t impressed. She’s never impressed by anything he says or does. He might as well not have bothered.
“I found it on the street. Do you want it or not?”
Aaron’s trying to act unsurprised by her cool reaction, but the force of his heart thumping against his chest gives him away. He starts to tremble unnaturally. Even his hand’s quivering.
“Well?”
In silence they look into each other’s eyes and the power there reels them together somehow. Linking something deep and unseen. When their eyes fall away, the sense of loss makes them instinctively glance back, but now, slightly afraid, their eyes slide over each other, as if neither of them dares spark that powerful feeling again.
Without a word, Rachel turns on her heel and walks hurriedly toward the church, leaving Aaron standing in the lengthening shadows of the low perimeter wall with sensations he can’t account for.
Did she feel what I just felt? Why didn’t she take the perfume? I didn’t get the chance to explain. Why did she walk off without saying anything? I was being nice, wasn’t I?
Time, space, gravity, the stars above, girls, Mokattam, the dead pony—it feels as if none of them really exist. Placing the perfume bottle back in his pocket, Aaron heads down the wide walkway, past the bright, open cavern of the church, which is empty, apart from three old women sweeping and cleaning the altar. Rachel isn’t there. She’s not praying for the pony.
