The Garbage King

by Elizabeth Laird

  But the blanket was already round his shoulders, and Mamo had picked up his bag and was walking off with it, through the gap in the cemetery wall, out into the street.

  His heart thumping painfully, Dani followed him.

  11

  Tiggist was scared all the time of offending Mrs Faridah, but she couldn’t help feeling a bit sorry for her too. Mrs Faridah was looking tired and worn. Her husband’s voice, weak but demanding, constantly called her into the sickroom. There were phone calls also from Addis Ababa, where her brother-in-law seemed to be having problems in running the shop.

  Tiggist was learning to watch Mrs Faridah closely, trying to judge her moods, working out her own strategy for staying out of trouble. She was careful now not to show too much affection to Yasmin when Mrs Faridah was around, and pushed the little girl towards her mother whenever she could.

  Salma watched her with amusement.

  ‘You worry too much,’ she said one morning, as they sat together in the courtyard, washing sheets in a tub of water. ‘Mrs Faridah would be mad to get rid of you. You’re brilliant with kids. Yasmin’s so good when she’s with you.’

  The little girl had been trying to climb on to Tiggist’s lap. Tiggist wiped her soapy hands on her skirt, and put her arms round her. Then she buried her face in the soft skin between Yasmin’s neck and her plump little shoulder, and made a funny growling noise. Yasmin squealed with delight and wriggled free. Tiggist looked round anxiously in case her mother had heard, then relaxed as she remembered that Mrs Faridah had gone out to the market.

  ‘Aren’t you scared in case she gets angry and sacks you?’ she asked Salma.

  Salma shrugged.

  ‘She can’t. Mr Hamid’s mother employs me. Anyway, I wouldn’t put up with anything from her. I’d just go home to my mother.’

  Tiggist said nothing. Salma glanced up from the stained pillowcase she’d been scrubbing and saw the desolate look in her friend’s face.

  ‘Oh sorry,’ she said. ‘My big mouth again. Here, help me with these sheets.’

  The girls wrung out the sheets, twisting them between their hands and sending showers of drips down to wet the concrete. They were draping the first one over the washing line, which ran from the old tree in the corner of the compound to a hook in the side wall of the house, when they heard someone rattling the compound’s iron gates.

  ‘I’ll go,’ said Salma.

  She ran across the concrete courtyard and opened one of the gates. Tiggist, who had bent down to pick up the second sheet, looked up curiously.

  A young man was standing there. He was greeting Salma in the usual Ethiopian way, tapping his right shoulder against her right one, then his left shoulder against her left one, then they touched right shoulders again. Now he was reaching into his pocket and bringing something out, putting it into Salma’s hands.

  Salma’s got a boyfriend! Tiggist thought incredulously. She never told me!

  The young man was too far away to see clearly, but he looked really nice. He wasn’t handsome exactly, a bit too thickset and heavy-browed for that, but even at this distance it was easy to see that there was something solid and kind about him.

  Lucky Salma, Tiggist thought enviously.

  Salma was laughing now, and pointing across to Tiggist. Embarrassed, Tiggist lifted the sheet up to hide her face and started arranging it on the washing line. After a few minutes, unable to hold her curiosity in any longer, she peeped round the side of it to see if he was still there.

  He was, and he was looking straight at her. A slow smile was spreading across his face.

  Tiggist ducked back behind the sheet again. She heard the metal gate clang shut, and Salma’s flip-flop sandals slap on the concrete as she ran back again.

  ‘You’ve been very quiet about him,’ said Tiggist teasingly. ‘You didn’t tell me you had a boyfriend.’

  Salma burst out laughing.

  ‘He’s not my boyfriend. He’s my brother! He brought me some medicine my mother’s made up for me, for my skin rash. Did you like him? Did you really? He liked you, I could tell. He kept asking me about you.’

  Tiggist felt a slow blush start somewhere in her chest and rise up towards her face.

  ‘He can’t have liked me. He hardly saw me.’

  ‘He did. Enough to say he thought you were pretty, anyway. I told him all about you.’

  ‘What? What did you tell him?’ Tiggist asked anxiously.

  Salma giggled and squeezed her friend’s arm.

  ‘I told him you were really bold and naughty and liked going out with men, and that you’d got dozens of boyfriends and would do anything for a laugh.’

  ‘Salma, you didn’t!’ said Tiggist, appalled.

  ‘Of course I didn’t. I told him you were very sweet and loved kids and had a kind heart and that you were very shy,’ Salma said. ‘Yes, and that you’re my best friend.’

  The blush had spread right through Tiggist now.

  ‘Oh,’ she said.

  She was dying to ask Salma more questions but she didn’t dare. Luckily, Salma didn’t need any encouragement.

  ‘His name’s Yacob,’ she said. ‘He’s much older than me. He finished tenth grade at school. He’s not like my other brother, who just went off to Addis and never came back. Yacob’s the slow, steady kind. We always tease him about it at home. But he’s been great since my father died. He’s looked after Mum and my little sisters. Done all kinds of jobs to pay their school fees. He even got me this job with Mr Hamid. Now he works in that electrical shop, the one up near the church. You know it, don’t you? He’s been learning everything he can, how to do repairs and stuff. He’s saving up so he can open his own place one day. That’s what he wants. A little shop of his own where people can bring their radios and TVs and he’ll fix them. He’d have new stock too, once he could afford it. He keeps talking about it.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Tiggist again. A lovely vision had risen before her eyes, of a little shop window with electrical goods in brightly coloured boxes nicely displayed, radios and fans, irons and cassette players, with maybe some fairy lights winking round the edges to set it all off, like in a shop she’d often passed in Addis Ababa.

  There was something she badly wanted to ask, but she had to screw up her courage to bring out the words.

  ‘I expect he’s got a girlfriend, then,’ she said at last. ‘What’s she like?’

  ‘Yacob? A girlfriend?’ snorted Salma. ‘Of course he hasn’t. I told you. He’s really slow. Especially about that kind of thing. Really shy. Up to now, anyway.’ She gave Tiggist’s arm another delighted squeeze. ‘He’ll fall for you, though, I bet he will. Hey, this is going to be fun.’

  Walking along the road, his head wrapped up in Mamo’s blanket, Dani felt strangely distant, as if he was watching a film of himself playing some weird character. It was scary, but a relief, to have left the cemetery. He’d been in there less than twenty-four hours, but it had seemed like years. He was back in the real world now. It wasn’t the usual world at all. With Mamo’s blanket disguising him, he felt like a different person, as if he’d left his old self with the dead people back there, and had been born into a new life as someone else.

  He’d had a vague picture in his mind of where Mamo must be taking him, and of the gang he was supposed to be joining. He was prepared for it to be a poor place, some kind of shack perhaps, a little bar, or a roadside shelter. Mamo said the gang members were only boys, but he bet they’d be really tough-looking guys, who would expect him to be tough too, to undergo some ritual, or to fight them, like they would on TV.

  He was building the gang up in his mind to be so huge and fearsome that when at last Mamo stopped walking, and Dani looked up, he assumed Mamo had simply paused for a minute, and he waited for him to walk on.

  But Mamo gestured towards some boys squatting by the roadside.

  ‘I’ve brought him, Million,’ he said. ‘This is Girma.’

  Dani, who had forgotten the false name he’d given Mamo,
looked round, expecting to see someone behind him. Then he suddenly remembered, and turned back to look at the gang.

  He couldn’t help recoiling in distaste, and stepped back, almost toppling off the kerbstone into the road. This ragged little group, this pathetic collection of waifs, whose disintegrating rags barely covered their bodies, surely this couldn’t be it, the gang Mamo was so keen to join, the group he actually expected Dani to join too?

  Dani took a firmer grip on the handle of his bag and waited for someone to say something.

  The boys were slowly standing up, one by one, and were staring silently at him. Only one, the sharp-eyed, lean-faced boy, who Mamo had called Million, hadn’t moved. He was lounging back against the wall, staring with calculating eyes at Dani.

  ‘You Mamo’s friend?’ he rapped out suddenly.

  Dani had never been spoken to in such a way by a person like Million. Such people had always approached him obsequiously, palms held out for money. He was afraid, but felt too proud to show it, and lifting his chin he looked down his nose, trying to look haughty, the way his father did.

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Mamo and I . . .’

  ‘What’s your name?’

  ‘Girma,’ said Dani, grateful to Mamo for reminding him.

  ‘Your real name?’

  Dani looked sideways at Mamo, who dropped his eyes. He didn’t know what to say.

  ‘Never mind,’ said Million, leaning forward. ‘What are you doing here, on the street, a rich kid like you?’

  Mamo had put Suri down on the ground. The little dog was snuffling round his bare feet, whining. Getachew pulled a crust of bread from inside his shamma and held it under Suri’s nose, laughing as the puppy snapped at it.

  The diversion gave Dani a moment of relief to catch his thoughts.

  ‘I had to leave home,’ he said, ‘for personal reasons.’

  He was afraid that Million would press him, but he only nodded.

  ‘Police after you?’

  ‘I don’t know. Maybe. I expect so,’ said Dani. The idea made him feel momentarily important. No one would send the police out to hunt for any of these kids. But then he remembered his fear. The police meant Father, and Father meant Feisal.

  Maybe I could persuade them to take me to their base and hide me there for a bit, he thought. Just till Mamma comes home.

  ‘Look,’ he said, his nervousness making him sound arrogant, which he didn’t feel at all. ‘All I want is a place to hide out for a while, just till my mother gets home from England.’

  ‘From where?’ said Getachew.

  ‘What’s England?’ said little Karate.

  ‘If we had a place to hide out,’ Buffalo said, hunching a surly shoulder, ‘we’d be using it ourselves.’ Mamo, who was looking from Dani to Million and back again, could see that things were going wrong. He was embarrassed. What would Million and the others think of him for dragging along this rich kid, with his soft hands and fat legs, who was showing no respect to anyone? He wanted to butt in and tell Dani to go off and find some other people to take him on, but he held back. Dani had offered him his yellow shirt. They’d lived through the night in the cemetery together. Dani had given him Suri.

  ‘Like Buffalo said,’ said Million, who hadn’t taken his eyes off Dani. ‘We don’t have a hiding place. We live here.’

  Dani looked past him, taking in the fence against which Million was sitting, and the door set into it.

  ‘I mean here, right here,’ Million said, while the others laughed. He pointed to the patch of bare ground in front of him. ‘If you don’t like it, you can go somewhere else.’

  Dani’s knees suddenly felt weak. He put his bag down and sat on it. The blanket was making his head feel hot and he shook it off. Mamo stepped forward to retrieve it, holding back Suri, who was trying to worry it with her little sharp teeth. The others squatted down again one by one, except for Buffalo, who leaned against the wall with his arms crossed, staring down at Dani.

  ‘But where do you sleep?’ Dani said, still clinging to the idea that they had a base, a shelter of some kind, a hidden source of support, that they weren’t telling him about.

  ‘Million tells us where to sleep,’ said Karate, who had shuffled close to Dani and was now right beside him. ‘He decides. It’s here, usually. He lets me sleep right next to him.’

  Dani looked down at him. The little boy smiled back, and Dani noticed that his top two milk teeth had come out and the new ones were growing through.

  ‘Oh,’ he said. He was trying to imagine himself sleeping out in a place like this, just lying down on the side of the street, rolling in the dirt with these ragged boys, but his mind shied away from the thought.

  Behind them, ignored by the boys, the traffic that had been cruising down the street was slowing to a standstill, blocked by an overloaded truck further along, whose axle had broken.

  ‘Dani! Is that you? Dani!’

  Dani felt as if his heart had stopped. He almost whipped his head round but stopped himself just in time. He knew that voice. It belonged to Mikhail, a cousin of his father, a gossipy, breathless, irritating meddler of a man, whom Ato Paulos loathed. Dani shut his eyes briefly, then looked pleadingly at Million.

  Million stood up lazily and sauntered towards the car. Buffalo detached himself from the wall and followed him. Getachew and Shoes went after them, their hands held out. Little Karate darted between them, pushing his way through to the window of the car, the bottom of which was on a level with his chin. Mikhail was leaning out of it.

  ‘No mother, no father,’ Karate murmured with an air of practised misery. ‘Very hungry. Give me one birr.’

  They were blocking the man’s view. He tried to look past them, but could no longer see the boy he thought he’d recognized. He pulled back from their outstretched hands and quickly shut the car window, put the car into gear and drove on.

  ‘That’s your real name then, is it? Dani?’ Million said, coming back and standing over him.

  Dani nodded miserably.

  ‘Thanks for hiding me,’ he said. ‘Has he gone?’

  ‘Yes. Who was it?’

  The others, except for Buffalo, crowded round, eager to hear something interesting.

  ‘My father’s cousin.’

  ‘Your father’s cousin?’ Million’s voice was mocking. ‘A guy as rich as that? Why don’t you go to him, then? Ask him to take you in?’ Suspicion was darkening his face. ‘You haven’t stolen anything, have you? You’re not a thief, are you? If you are, you’re out of it. We don’t go around with thieves.’

  Dani looked up, his face hot.

  ‘No! Of course I’m not a thief! I told you. I can’t go home because – it’s personal.’

  To his surprise, Million accepted this. He returned to his stone and leaned back against the wall.

  ‘Well then,’ he said. ‘What is it you want from us?’

  Dani shook his head. He didn’t know. He wished he was back in the cemetery, just him and Mamo and the gruff old caretaker.

  ‘Want us to hide and protect you, is that it? Like we did just now? You want us to get you food? We only just manage to eat ourselves.’

  The mention of food made Dani’s stomach lurch with hunger. It was what he wanted! To be protected and fed! To be looked after! The thought of eating what these boys probably ate, of sharing food that they had touched with their dirty fingers, made him wince, and the idea of lying down to sleep among them, with all the fleas and lice they probably had in their clothes, made his skin creep, but his need pushed everything else out of his mind.

  ‘What do you want?’ Million was saying again.

  ‘Just to be with you, I suppose,’ mumbled Dani.

  ‘Like you said, food and protection, and being together, like I was with Mamo.’

  The others were close in now, listening intently.

  ‘In this gang,’ Million said delicately, ‘we share everything we have. What belongs to one belongs to all.’

  ‘I know,’ Dani said
unhappily. ‘Mamo said.’

  He reached into his pocket and pulled out his small wad of notes. A few coins were left. He almost decided to hold these back, but fear of being found out and his own sense of honour made him fish them out too. He handed all the money to Million, who counted it carefully and put it into his pocket.

  ‘Five birr for Karate’s cough medicine,’ he pronounced. ‘Getachew, you take him to the clinic tomorrow.’

  Mamo was watching Dani anxiously, afraid that, even though he’d handed over his money, he’d hold back the rest of his stuff. Dani looked as if he’d forgotten all about his bag. Giving up his money seemed to have thrown him into total dejection. He sat slumped, staring at the ground.

  Karate broke the silence.

  ‘What’s in your bag, Dani?’ he said sunnily. ‘Have you got any trainers for Shoes?’

  The others all laughed. Dani joined in awkwardly, then got off his bag and crouched clumsily beside it. Unlike the others, he was unused to squatting, and his chunky calves made it uncomfortable. He opened the zip slowly, trying to remember what he’d packed, hoping he hadn’t put in anything too precious.

  Before he’d had time to take anything out, Buffalo leaned forward, pulled the bag away from him and shoved it towards Million.

  ‘He gets to open it,’ he said shortly to Dani. Dani smiled uneasily.

  ‘There’s a yellow shirt in there that I gave to Mamo,’ he said. ‘It’s his.’

  To his surprise, Million zipped the bag up again and stood up.

  ‘Not here,’ he said. ‘Too public. We’ll go down the lanes.’

  Dani followed the others into the opening of a rough stony track that led down the hill away from the tarmac, into a maze of rough back lanes and small, one-roomed mud houses. He was too preoccupied to notice where they were going, and saw too late that he was lost. The realization made him feel even more helpless and dependent.

  Million stopped when they came to an open space where two tracks met. A tree here offered some privacy. They crouched down and he opened the bag. Everyone crowded round eagerly as Million began to pull out one thing after another.