by Chloe Daykin
We run before we even see his eyes. Down the riverbank, through the water and up the other side.
H. Anderson
It’s the name on the parcel I held in the back of the DHL van, the one Omar had to deliver. Maybe we don’t need an Ekeko doll. Maybe the gods just like us.
Maya hobble-runs and yells as we slide in the mud. Steven screeches alongside.
Her boot goes in my face.
We speed out of the reed-roof houses, though the crumbling streets, into the slick concrete slabs of the city. Maya is limping, we’re both sweating. Steven keeps looking round, like, ‘Where’d all the trees go?’
We slink round the back of the slick white walls of the El Dorado Hotel and squat next to a dumpster. We put our backs against the plastic, breathing hard.
The shadow walks round the edge of the building. The bins stink in the heat. We don’t move.
Maya points round the side of the dumpster, near the door.
The guy’s feet crunch in the dust.
We scuttle round the side like land crabs and swing into the hotel, past a guy with a cigarette on his way out. He nearly burns my shoulder.
‘Sorry,’ we say and blink our eyes in the corridor dark and carry Steven into the toilet.
And lock the door.
Maya
I stick my head under the cold tap. Steven swipes the water with a paw. I come up for air and we swap over. Raul sticks his head in then switches the tap off and we lean against the sinks and breathe.
‘My dad doesn’t stay in hotels,’ I say.
‘Well, he was here on Friday.’
I put my hand over my mouth. ‘This place stinks.’
‘I know.’ Raul covers his nose. ‘I had to deliver a parcel. In a truck. And a plane. Your dad’s name was on the parcel.’
I squint at the strip light and switch it off. I feel calmer in the dark. Dark feels safe. We stand there and blink our eyes to get used to the half-light pouring in under the door like someone that’s been steamrollered.
‘My dad would never stay here.’ He wouldn’t. He’s never stayed in a big hotel in his life. His principles used to annoy everyone, especially me.
‘Well, he is.’ Raul nods. ‘Get over it.’
Steven comes out from under the toilet and jumps into the sink.
I twist my finger in my elbow and try not to breathe. ‘If he’s there, he won’t let me in. He thinks I’ve gone home anyway.’
‘He’ll recognise your voice.’
‘He won’t tell me what’s happening.’ The idea of seeing Dad when he’s involved in all this suddenly makes me feel sick. ‘If I ask at the hotel desk they might have someone waiting, watching out.’ I rub the back of my neck.
‘JVF?’
I nod. I wish I knew what to do. I wish Matias had told us the plan. ‘You’ll have to pretend to be room service.’ I look round at the cubicle. ‘I actually do need a wee. Could you turn round please.’
Raul clutches Steven by the sink. ‘What’s the difference between roast beef and pea soup?’ I say loud enough to distract from the noise.
‘Anyone can roast beef,’ I yell.
And BOOM.
Someone bangs on the door.
Raul
Maya opens the door and pushes it back on to the person’s head as they start to come in. He swears and grabs his face and we run out into the kitchen.
Everyone’s so busy nobody notices.
Maya hides Steven and squats by a cupboard.
I walk out of the kitchen carrying a bowl of aguadito de pollo. Chicken soup.
Fast.
In the corridor Maya and Steven scuttle after me, and the air-conditioning hits us like an iceberg. I walk into the lobby while they wait round the corner next to the lifts. Steven keeps pressing the buttons so they light up. Then trying to eat them.
‘Mr Anderson ordered this. I forgot the room number,’ I say.
The receptionist looks at me closely.
I look at the single line of grey hair streaking up her head. She looks at me over the top of her glasses and leans back in her chair. The phone rings. She talks.
I point at the soup. ‘It’s going cold,’ I say, and make a face.
She looks behind and mouths the number.
‘Doscientos tres.’
Two hundred and three.
And Steven bursts in round the corner.
Maya
Steven escapes. He runs. I run after Steven. Raul spills the soup and Steven starts licking it up off the floor. The woman behind the desk screams and I scoop him under my arm and put him out the front door. ‘Wait there!’ I say, and he gives me big eyes.
The receptionist stands and yells at me. ‘Sorry!’ I yell back and run out.
Raul catches me in the corridor. ‘Two zero three,’ he says and I look at the board of keys on the wall.
Room 203.
I see the key. Top row behind the receptionist who sits back down.
I also clock a CCTV camera trained on the desk. And one on the lifts. I wonder if they enjoyed the Steven and me show.
‘The keys are too high. Plus they’ve got CCTV,’ I say.
‘So.’
‘So it’s impossible.’
Raul wipes soup off his shirt. He looks at the key rack. He looks back at me. ‘You know in my country there are two thousand nine hundred and thirty-seven species of birds and animals. Sixteen per cent of them don’t exist anywhere else in the world. Thirty-one per cent of the plants don’t exist anywhere else either. If they cut down those trees they will die. Hundreds of birds and monkeys and baby monkeys will die.’
‘All right, all right!’ I put my hands over my ears. ‘I can’t bear it.’ I scream in frustration and a ball of yellow pops out of the staircase and looks at us, then hovers over into reception.
The receptionist’s eyes bulge.
I look on in horror as it spreads itself against the wall by the lifts and sets the wallpaper on fire.
The fire alarms go off.
Raul
The receptionist runs over with an extinguisher.
Fire starts licking up the wallpaper.
‘You can’t do that!’ Maya tells the fireball off as it drifts back to us. ‘You can’t just go round doing things like that!’ she shouts at it and it shrinks to the size of a pea and disappears.
She eyeballs me. ‘You did that deliberately. You made me mad on purpose.’
‘It was an experiment,’ I smile.
We stare at the fire. The fuss everyone’s making about it. It pulls everyone in.
Steven keeps leaping at the window from outside, like a kangaroo on mountain dew. I try not to laugh.
Maya runs in and stands on the receptionist’s chair and snatches the key. We put our hands over our ears and run for the staircase. Everybody else is running down.
We run up.
We reach the floor and speed walk along the corridor.
I see the numbers. 213, 209, 205 …
We swing through a double door. And stand outside two zero three as the door at the other end of the corridor slams shut. And freeze.
Maya
The door at the other end slams shut and I see a blur that I’m sure is my dad run through it. It’s like we’re slipping into different dimensions.
We freeze.
‘You going in or what?’ Raul nudges me.
‘I want to know if he’s in first.’ I knock.
No one answers.
I slide the key in and open the door.
Inside, the room’s like a photo with the person missing. Just all background.
The door clicks shut and the noise of the fire alarm dims.
The wardrobe’s open. I see Dad’s shirts hanging there.
His watch is on the bedside table. His bed is unmade. A pencil and notepad covered in doodles lie on the bench, and a big brown briefcase sits on the bed.
Raul looks in the bathroom then comes out and checks through the drawers.
‘What are yo
u looking for?’
‘Food.’ He opens the fridge and chucks me a bottle of water.
It’s so weird being in here with Dad’s smell. And no Dad.
Raul takes all the food he can find out of the fridge and the fruit bowl and stuffs it into the rucksack. He holds up two bottles of yellow cola and grins. He kisses one and takes a drink.
I look at the briefcase and open it.
Raul
Maya looks different in here, like she’s seen a ghost. I guess she has.
It’s weird being in someone’s room when they’re not in it. Like they’ve just walked out of their life. Like he’s just walked out of hers.
I think about the way I left my dad. He’ll be on his way home right now. To face Mum. And tell her about me. She’ll kill him. I blink my eyes hard and look in the drawers.
I don’t really know what I’m looking for till I find Maya’s dad’s wallet. It’s just lying there.
Stealing is not what I do. Stealing is not what I’ve ever done. Bad stuff comes back at you. That’s the way life works.
But we’re alone. With no one. And nothing.
When I left my rucksack at Matias’s I lost my money too. We need money, right?
I open the wallet and shove the cash in the rucksack and pile food on top fast so Maya doesn’t notice. I put the wallet back in the drawer.
She opens the briefcase that’s lying on the bed. I lean over her shoulder to see what’s in it but don’t get to because the door bursts open and someone grabs Maya over their shoulder and runs off down the corridor.
Maya
When he lifts me up I don’t waste time screaming. I ball my fists and summon up all my fire and let it out. A fireball bounces out of the air and up to the roof, blazing a trail as it skims the walls. It’s out of control. A raw spirit that burns him on the elbow, the knee. Jabbing in and out. The man holds me high in the air and yells, ‘No burning, no burning!’ He doesn’t let go.
It isn’t Charles. It’s someone else.
I think someone might notice. Someone might help. But in the chaos of the fire alarm no one’s here and no one does.
I see Raul running down the corridor after us, clinging on to both rucksacks, Dad’s door left open.
The fireball weaves up and around us like a sparkler. The man runs down the stairs and out into the heat, yelling stuff I don’t know in Spanish, and tips me into the back of a three-wheeler mototaxi.
‘Stay!’ He points at me like a dog and turns to yell something at Raul. The ball loses control of itself in the wind.
Steven comes screaming across the car park and throws himself in through the open window. The fireball jumps into the back with us. I hold Steven close and he snuffles his nose into my hand and the ball bursts like a bubble and disappears.
Raul says something in Spanish and jumps in with the bags and the guy starts the engine, which sounds like a can of flies in a sardine tin.
Raul
We bump off down the street, held in by walls as thin as plastic lunch boxes and big empty gaps where windows should be.
‘We should jump.’ Maya gets up clutching Steven and puts one foot on the window edge.
I pull her back.
The mototaxi swerves round a corner and our heads hit the seat in front. Hot air blows in as we pull ourselves back up on to the seat, and blast past three guys leaning against a green garage and rusty pickups with families sharing jugs of juice in the back.
‘It’s OK,’ I say, and we skid across the seat round another corner.
‘Yeah, right.’ Maya stops herself from falling out the window with her elbow.
I yell, ‘Watch the road, watch the road!’ We miss two women with flowers on their backs and a whole family on a red motorbike.
‘No really, it’s OK,’ I tell her, and we screech to a halt. We’re in Belen, on the edge of the town at the start of the water, the floating town in the city. The engine stops.
‘Maya, meet Carlos,’ I say. ‘Uncle of Matias.’
Maya
What? ‘You could’ve said.’ I look at Raul.
‘I tried to say.’
‘When?’
Uncle Carlos opens the door as we stare at each other.
‘Carlos,’ he says.
‘Maya,’ I say and shake his hand.
I watch Raul and Carlos hug and say stuff I don’t understand.
‘And this is Steven,’ I say. The agouti is now clinging to me like a baby lemur.
We get out and follow him on to a jetty with a boat like a canoe made of reeds wrapped round plastic bottles and get it in.
‘Sorry,’ Raul says and scratches his ear.
Carlos smiles and winks at me.
‘He could’ve just said,’ I whisper. ‘He didn’t need to grab me.’
‘Everyone knows who he is here. They know he works for the EIA.’
I picture all the little boats floating out of here stacked. Ferrying out the forest like worker ants. ‘He isn’t that popular, right?’
‘He’s had death threats. He didn’t want to draw attention to us in town.’ Raul scratches his neck. ‘He says we were always meant to meet him. Matias just never told us. Yet.’
I think of the fire in the forest. Of Matias on the other side of it.
I guess the time for telling us got cut short.
We slide down the river and look out at the families who live in the wooden reed-roof shacks raised out of the water on stilts. Two kids play swinging off a metal bar that sticks out of the water like a goalpost with no net and one of them falls off.
They both shriek-laugh and the other one drops in too.
It feels like floating past a sea of eyes. Everyone stares at us.
Carlos stands on the back and pushes us along with a pole paddle. The boat glides and the sunlight dances everywhere. We pass two women in felt skirts, with purple woollen tights and pom-poms in their hair descaling fish with knives.
CLICK. I take their photo with my brain.
Raul dips his fingers in the water.
A family boat goes past laughing. Two of the boys start fighting about whose frog is the biggest and the dad chucks them both in the water.
SPLASH.
I look at the reflection of my face wobbling in the ripples.
We pull up to a house that’s standing proud out of the water, long and thin with squares cut out for windows and a ladder up. Carlos says something to Raul and pulls the canoe in against wooden floating boards that connect the houses together like a pavement.
‘He says we’ll be safe here while we wait for instructions,’ Raul says.
We step out and climb up the ladder into the house where we meet two women with long black hair plaited down their backs. They smile at us and give us steaming-hot bowls of quinoa soup.
We sit down at the table and the whole room rises from cushions spread across the floor, and we are surrounded by intrigue and eyes and smiles, like a people forest.
Steven jumps down and sniffs their feet.
‘Meet Matias’s mum,’ Raul says. ‘And all his family.’
Raul
Carlos disappears back down the ladder.
Matias’s mum hugs me, and his aunt strokes my hair and tells jokes about my moustache and general manhood and makes everyone laugh. His sisters shriek and clap their hands.
I go red and eat the soup and don’t translate for Maya. I eyeball her to eat too or Matias’s mum will never speak to us again.
We eat and his mum smiles and does impressions of Matias. His serious face. His big frown. His stubborn folded elbows.
Everyone kills themselves laughing and I translate for Maya, who probably doesn’t need it – the impressions are that good. The mamis rock on their heels and howl.
Everyone calls older women mamis here. It’s kinda friendly and polite. Older guys are papis. It’s kinda nice. It makes it feel like everyone’s your family.
We finish the soup and everyone gets back to work, pulling mud out of alpaca wool and
weaving it into clothes and cushion covers for the market and the tourists. The floating boats of well-meaning people with money.
Matias’s mum moves us over by the window. We sit on the beds made of embroidered cloth and reed, spread across the back of the room. The sunlight starts to fade and the talk and laughter and chink and chirrup of outside drifts into the darkness.
The reeds the beds are stuffed with are sweet and stabby.
One of Matias’s sisters points at us and smiles. The others laugh and make noises. Steven tries to put his paw in and out of the spinning wheel.
Matias’s mum spreads her skirt and sits down with us.
She smiles at Maya. Maya smiles back.
‘Matias likes to be boss, doesn’t he?’ she says, and I smile and translate and think about how when we were kids he made us bring all the ingredients for potions and remedies he’d created to his house. We all used to line up with our leaves and plants ready for inspection and he’d tick our findings off his list if they were good enough. Or chuck them if they weren’t.
‘Yeah,’ I say. ‘He does.’
His mum laughs and speaks again.
‘She wants to tell you about the work Carlos does here,’ I translate, and Maya nods.
Matias’s mum talks fast and stares at Maya like she understands it. Which she doesn’t.
‘Carlos protects the forest,’ she says, and thumps her fist on her heart. ‘Many people here hate us, but they have not lived in the trees and the spirits. They don’t know what we know. They want things.’ She rubs her fingers together. ‘Money. Food for their children. Clothes. I try to tell them, don’t sell your soul so cheap, but they don’t listen.
‘I don’t stop. I don’t care. I keep trying. And make my clothes.’ She points at everyone working around the hut. The spinning wheel clicks round.
‘Carlos works with the police.’ She pulls a face. ‘It is necessary. And with OSINFOR – Organismo de Supervisión de los Recursos Forestales y de Fauna Silvestre – they tell the ships to show their papers, to show where the trees come from. But their papers are false. From non-endangered forest, from lakes even. Carlos has to prove it. If he wins, they have to unload the ships and people lose money. They think if this keeps on, the boats won’t come here any more. They’ll go somewhere else and people will lose work.’ She looks up and lowers her shoulders. ‘Carlos risks his life. I don’t like to live with it. But I live with what I have to, to keep hope.