‘Yes, I know. The cows and all that. What are you doing?’
‘Salud’s going as Mary. And I’m … I’m the shepherd,’ I said, raising an eyebrow. ‘Don’t laugh.’
He smiled. ‘So who am I, then?’
‘You’ll be Joseph.’
‘Me? Ha! Imagine that – a Moroccan as the father of Jesus.’ And there we all were, cramped in a huddle at three a.m. on Christmas morning, the most bizarre nativity scene I’d ever seen, waiting to be called out for our second appearance, trying not to doze off as the heavy bass oomba oomba of the music below shook the walls and sent us into varying trance-like states.
‘Ay, it keeps smearing.’ Chelo, the blonde Mother Christmas, turned back to face the room, gold paint all over her fingers and more lines criss-crossing her breasts where she’d tried to repair the make-up.
‘Qué fuerte, tío.’
In most cases it was hard to see where the knife had gone in and the silicon inserted, but Chelo, who when not dancing half-naked was a soldier in the Spanish army, had been unlucky – ugly jagged lines disfigured her triple-D cups and she’d lost almost all sensation. ‘Guys love ’em but they don’t do much for me,’ she’d once told Salud. I wondered how anyone with such large appendages had ever got into the armed forces in the first place. Didn’t they get in the way when firing a rifle? What about crawling on the ground to avoid enemy fire? This girl would bounce three feet in the air. Perhaps they used her as a decoy.
‘Fancy a drink, Princess?’ Alberto, the dwarf Santa, was playing barman, handing out whisky and Cokes and Tía Marías from the box of booze he’d found hidden behind the metal filing cabinet. It helped pass the time between performances, as all seven of us tried to squeeze into the purple and black painted store cupboard that had been designated our changing room for the night.
‘Bastards wanted me to come as the Baby Jesus,’ Alberto explained as he filled my plastic tumbler. ‘Dressed in a nappy with a dummy in my mouth. Fuck that. Took me three hours to get here tonight. Gotta have some respect.’
‘Five minutes!’
Ramón, the head of the agency that had employed us for the night, stuck his head round the door, his conspiratorial grin temporarily masking his Neanderthal features: he was all bald head and low brow.
‘Guys! Lighten up. It’s fucking Christmas Eve. Come on. I want to see some energy this session. Dale caña. Give it some welly. And don’t drink on stage. The disco owner is already complaining.’
He looked down at me as I huddled on a piece of cardboard on the floor, trying to stop my outfit from getting stained by the peach liqueur that had been kicked over earlier on. One of the disco security guards had already threatened to beat me over the head for breaking the rules: shepherds at the nativity scene weren’t meant to knock back shots of Jack Daniels. They weren’t meant to be herding goats, either, I thought. But no-one had been able to find a sheep in time. So goats was what I had. You could allow for a certain amount of creativity when re-enacting the birth of Christ at an all-night disco on the Spanish coast. It wasn’t traditional for the son of God to be surrounded by topless women in red and white furry thongs, either. Nor, come to think of it, could I remember Christmas cards with the Virgin depicted as ‘Cyber Mary’, whatever that meant. Eventually we’d made Salud a silver dress, with an @ sign as a halo. She wore it with the usual disdain she adopted when having to do disco jobs, but when money was tight it was hard to turn down work.
‘And Zine!’ Ramón called out above the din leaking through the half-open door. ‘Stop dancing like an African tribesman. You’re supposed to be a saint. Don’t move so much. Just stand there and look holy.’
Zine sniffed and took another drag on his cigarette.
‘Cheer up, Darkie,’ said Alberto. ‘We’ll be going home in about five hours.’
‘¡Qué fuerte, tío!’
‘OK. Next session we’re in the back hall, with the Sexómanos. Don’t fuck it up. And if they try to get you involved, just go along with it. Carratalá’s already on my case.’
We headed down the stairs again for the second set, me carrying a kid under each arm, totally oblivious to the roar of decadent life around them. Something about stepping out from the haze of hashish smoke and muffled music into the explosion of noise that was the disco itself had the effect of waking us up – time to be back on stage and perform. Hardly the West End, but there was still a certain tingle of nerves. One of the goats, I noticed with alarm, had taken an unhealthy interest in my shepherd’s costume and was nibbling at the corner of the old sheet I’d used as a robe. I shook its head away as we mounted the stage.
In front of us, on a T section of the platform that extended out among the audience, the Sexómanos were already well into their act. Four topless girls were doing some kind of sex show that involved pulling guys out from the crowd, sitting them down on chairs and then ‘performing’ – deep throat kissing, stripping, lap dancing, and in some cases engaging in genital contact. Salud had told me about them before with a sneer, but this was the first time I’d actually seen them. Sometimes they got so into their work they dragged people off stage for a proper screw in some back room. Not just girls, either. It would be the boys’ turn to do the same with girls from the audience in a few minutes’ time.
The ‘nativity scene’ placed itself behind the sex show as best it could. Zine and Salud stood in the centre, Salud holding a plastic Baby Jesus, while Zine looked on paternally, falling into his role as Christian saint, even blessing the onlookers from time to time with papal gestures of the hand. At the same time the muscle man started doing high kicks and the two topless Mother Christmases danced suggestively at the sides – a difficult task given the hard-core action occurring in front of them: who could be bothered with abnormally large breasts when the Sexómano girls were caressing shaving foam onto the testicles of one of the punters? Alberto, meanwhile, had got into things with more gusto, and was having his Santa outfit ripped off him by one of the performers looking for something more interesting than the usual limp, fumbling response she got from the nerds in the crowd. Live sex with a dwarf ? I could see how you quickly got jaded with this kind of thing, and I looked down protectively at the goats. They didn’t seem too worried, chewing instead on the stick of cane I’d picked up as a makeshift staff. Above us, in a cage hanging from the ceiling, a naked dancer was sliding up and down a pole without using either hands or feet. How did she do that?
‘¡Tu puta madre!’ Above the noise came an angry shout. I turned to look and saw Alberto holding a hand to his bleeding nose, swearing at the muscle man, who had now stopped his kicking and was looking concerned and guiltily down at the dwarf. From Salud’s gesture with her leg I worked out what had happened: Alberto had been hit in the face by the muscle man’s foot. He staggered over towards me at the side of the stage while the rest of them carried on. Pulling him over, I untied the piece of cloth I was using as a belt and handed it to him to wipe his face clean. The bleeding wasn’t heavy, but he was shocked.
‘Here,’ I said, pulling out a miniature whisky bottle I’d picked up in the dressing room. ‘Have a slug of this.’
‘Prick wasn’t looking where he was kicking,’ he said, taking a drink. ‘I was just getting it together with that girl as well.’
I wiped away some more drops of blood. ‘Don’t think he’s done any damage,’ I said. ‘Might swell a bit.’
‘Nah. I’ll be fine,’ he said, finishing the whisky. ‘Cheers for that.’
‘Oi!’ There was a crash on the floor between us and we both jumped away. A security guard with a baseball bat in his hands glared at us, biceps bursting out of his overstretched T-shirt. The goats started bleating. ‘No fucking drinking.’
Back in the dressing room, we were all silent for a while, a combination of tiredness and a sense of having been sullied by sharing the stage with the sex show. Even the muscle man didn’t speak, still ashamed for having kicked Alberto in the face. Alberto just sat and rolled another joi
nt on the floor, pretending nothing had happened. Salud looked over to me with an expression of desperation – I was crouching down by the goats, cleaning up little balls of shit they’d been depositing since we’d got back. I was sure the guard had frightened the hell out of them. The atmosphere seemed abnormally aggressive.
‘This place is amazing,’ said Zine, a sleepy look on his face as he leaned heavily against the wall. I could tell he didn’t want to sit down in case he fell asleep.
‘I think your moro is freaked out by it all,’ said Chelo above the throbbing music.
‘No wonder Bin Laden wants to destroy the decadent West,’ I said with a grin. Zine looked down and laughed, then closed his eyes.
‘¡Qué fuerte, tío!’
Lucía called Zine on Salud’s mobile phone just before we went out for our final set. It was six in the morning and she was just going to bed. We wouldn’t be back in the city for another couple of hours at least. Zine spoke to her while the rest of us got ready for the last appearance. Half drunk and clumsy with tiredness, we looked even more of a sight than before: Chelo had given up on creating a uniform layer of paint over her breasts, which now looked like slightly grubby balloons at the end of a children’s birthday party, while Alberto had stripped down to his vest and underpants, the only reminder of who he was supposed to be the pointed Santa hat with its white bobble on his head.
‘I’d take this off as well if I could get away with it,’ he said. ‘I get hotter the later it gets. Here, Princess, have a toke on this.’ And he passed the evening’s last joint over to Chelo’s red-headed colleague. Apart from a pinkness in the skin, you would hardly have known he’d been kicked in the face earlier on.
I decided to leave the goats tied up on an outside balcony near the dressing room this time. They were happy enough there. At this hour in the morning no-one would care anyway. It was the dreg end of the night, everyone looking their worst, and civility at its lowest ebb. We’d go down, mix with the people, dance on one of the podiums for a few minutes, then finish as quickly as we could get away with. The most painful bit would come later, when we’d have to wait around for an hour or more to get paid.
Zine passed the phone to me to put away in Salud’s bag as we began trudging out the door to head downstairs once again. He seemed moved in some way. ‘Lucía,’ he said, and smiled.
I put my arm round his shoulders. ‘It’s time to go.’
Down in the disco, the smell of tobacco and alcohol from spilled drinks mixed with the sweat of over a thousand people jiggling to a monotone rhythm. Make-up on girls’ faces was beginning to fade or smear, while the boys’ sparkling fashion shirts wilted with the dampness rising from their skin. We pushed our way forward through the crowd, Zine just behind me coming last. From the corner of my eye I could see he was holding his staff more like an outstretched lance.
‘Hey! San José!’ a group of boys by the bar called out. I laughed. Throughout the night he’d been attracting more attention than even the topless Mother Christmases.
There was a shout and I felt a body shunted hard against me from behind.
‘¡Cuidado! Watch out!’
I turned to see what was going on: one of the drunken boys was now looking at us as though wanting a fight, but Zine just gazed at me blankly and walked on, forcing me to continue.
‘What happened?’
He said nothing and pushed me forward.
We danced as best we could on the cramped podium. Zine fell back on his cave-man routine, while Alberto waltzed with Chelo, his head bobbing up and down at the level of her belly button. The muscle man had forgotten his shame of earlier and had resorted to his high kicks – the only move in his repertoire – but he aimed them out over the heads of the crowd this time. Salud danced as gracefully as ever under her silver cyber-halo, a serene smile masking an intense desire to get the hell out of there. We were supposed to be at her parents’ house for Christmas lunch soon; we’d be lucky if we got time for a shower and a couple of hours’ sleep beforehand.
As we danced, I caught sight of two of the bouncers with their baseball bats checking out the entrance on the far side of the hall. In the dim light I thought I could make out broken glass on the floor. People were drifting in and out, cold blasts of winter morning sea air wafted in like welcome slaps in the face. The guards were leaning over one man, who was clearly very frightened, pinning him with their sneers and shaven heads against the doorway.
‘I hate this place,’ Salud said in my ear as I made to dance with her. I was bored now and tired. It wouldn’t be long.
After a signal from Ramón we all stopped and walked off the podium in a line. No-one seemed to notice we were no longer there – the eye-candy for drugged, pissed party-goers simply vanishing as though we’d never appeared in the first place. Why did people pay us to do this?
As we headed back to get changed, Zine fell behind. I was tired, otherwise I would have gone back and dragged him along with us, but it was already too late.
I reached the stairs back up to the dressing room before I realized what was going on. A girl screamed and when I looked round I noticed that Zine was no longer behind me. Down at the bar the crowd was concentrating on a single space, surging forward towards it. From the left the two bouncers came running through, throwing people out of their way as the moment they’d been waiting for all night finally came: a fight.
I knew that Zine was involved, and that he would be hurt. I ran down and tried to push my way past. In the crush it was impossible to get through: girls were squeezing their way out in fright while boys leant further in to see what was happening. Before I could make any headway I had been tossed to one side by the heaving mass of flesh. There was no way in. I heard Zine shouting as the bouncers reached the middle of the fray, pulling him and his assailant away towards the door and the car park outside, baseball bats high above their heads.
‘He’s with us,’ I shouted desperately, jumping up above a sea of closely cropped heads to make myself heard. ‘Leave him alone. He’s with the performance.’
There was a metallic clang as the door closed behind them. The stuffy air once again, the incessant beat, girls drinking beer from small bottles. The crowd began to disperse: the show was over.
THE BABY
When we asked for Lucía at the hospital reception, an elderly lady wearing a dark-blue cardigan and a silver chain with a cross around her neck came up to talk to us.
‘It’s terrible,’ she whispered, her eyes glistening under the lifeless neon striplights. ‘I’m Lucía’s aunt. Her mother’s with her now.’
She kissed us on the cheeks, stretching up to reach us and feel human warmth, as though desperate for air.
‘They’re keeping her in intensive care for another day. We thought she might have moved to another ward this afternoon, but they need to keep her under observation. She’s very weak. We almost lost her last night.’
Through the open doors came the sound of explosions as the city celebrated the Fallas spring festival – the beginning of new life: cars rolling towards the centre to see the midnight firework spectacle by the river; a hornblast; bats screeching as they hunted for breakfast.
Several floors above us, Lucía was circling in and out of deathly sleep, while in a flat in Casablanca Zine was sitting by a phone, waiting for news.
It had taken them less than two days to send him back to Morocco, despite the Christmas holidays: a day in a cell, a ride in a police van to Madrid, then a flight back home.
‘They treated me fine,’ he’d told me over the phone when he got there. ‘As I said they would. I even got an in-flight meal.’
It had been the first news we’d had of him. Forcing my way out of the disco, I’d arrived just as the police were driving him away, his face like wax behind the glass of the squad-car window. A couple of local policemen standing on dawn duty at the disco gates had got involved when they saw the bouncers dragging him out from inside, looking as though they were about to beat the hell ou
t of him. They’d stopped his head being broken, but in doing so discovered another illegal immigrant who would now be successfully removed from the country. Just in time to add him to that year’s statistics.
No-one would give us any information on what had happened to him, though, and it came as a relief when he called. At least we knew he was safe, even if he had been sent back to the ‘other side’.
Lucía had cried for over a week.
Since then, over the past months he’d been living with his uncle again, old wounds between them healing, it seemed. We talked on the phone every few weeks. After the initial shock, the plan had been for Lucía to have the child in Spain then head down to Morocco to get married, Zine having finally ceded this was the best plan. They would then return to Valencia with him and the baby when the paperwork was sorted.
I knew Lucía had rung him just before entering hospital. But for twenty-four hours no-one had spoken to him. He knew nothing about all of this: someone would have to call.
Lucía’s aunt grasped both our hands with a smile sadder than any expression I’d ever seen.
‘And the baby?’ Salud asked.
She shook her head.
A strangling sensation rose in my throat and I willed myself not to let the tears fall. They’d told us on the phone things had gone wrong, but we’d thought there was still some hope.
We sat down on the hard plastic brown chairs in the entrance hall. On the seat next to me someone had left the morning’s paper: the same story that had dominated over the past months: the attack on Iraq was imminent now and would come any day.
Children in pain were crying in corners, tired parents and worried relatives slumped across one another trying to catch some sleep. Others shuffled along in slippers across the shiny floor, sipping at tiny plastic cups of hot strong coffee, eyelids half closed as they prepared for another night waiting for news. Everyone here was on the edge: only the occasional nurse starting a shift seemed anything less than close to breakdown.
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