Heliopolis

by James Scudamore

  I turn on my computer and make myself a coffee: tiny, strong, little more than a smear of dark flavour in the bottom of the cup. The cups are exquisite, a present for my mother brought by Zé and Rebecca from Italy. Their porcelain is so thin that the decorated dimples on the sides of each one are translucent. I knock back one coffee, then another. I take a bottle of vodka from the freezer, along with the slender crystal shot glass I keep chilled with it. When the computer is up and running, I sit bathed in its blue light, drinking shot after shot of the frozen vodka, relishing every mouthful of the numbing, syrupy liquid.

  It used to be near impossible to find out anything about a shooting from which no death resulted. No longer. Until the authorities close it down, we have a site called citybodycount.com set up to monitor shootings in the face of police misinformation. The standard official report of most violent incidents is resistance followed by death, and this site exists to provide a little more background. It is here that I find a brief note on the event that I precipitated this morning:

  At 11:23 A.M. in the Praça Áustria, an armed robber was shot following an attack on a private security guard.

  The brevity of the report, and in particular the devastatingly non-specific use of the word ‘armed,’ strengthens the urge I have been feeling all day to find the boy and somehow make amends. But given that he is almost certainly what they call a ‘marginal,’ he will be impossible to find.

  ‘Let it go,’ I say aloud, licking the last of the vodka from the bottom of my glass and pouring another shot. ‘It wasn’t your fault.’

  In fact, the person I blame is Melissa. It’s only after unsatisfactory contact with her that I behave as odiously as I did this morning—or, for that matter, this evening.

  I turn off the computer and open the sliding door to my terrace to enjoy my drink outside. I cultivate huge, leafy plants out here that almost block out the light, giving it a cavern-like feel, but they bring me as close to nature as is possible here in the city. Also, my hole-in-the-wall of an apartment is right above the pool maintenance area, so that when the traffic noise dies down, you can hear water flowing through the filtering system, and, if you ignore the smell of chlorine, almost imagine yourself to be by a river. That, and the calls of my songbird, are what I cling to.

  The bird is a refugee from the farm—a fat little monk parakeet who would not fly away when I tried to set him free. I have come to love his squawks and titters. He keeps me company on my balcony at night, when I sit in a wicker chair drinking cachaça and Coke and thinking of the farm until my head is too numb to recollect. The sad thing about songbirds is that the beauty of their cries is contingent upon longing—if mine ever found a mate then he might fall silent for good. Thankfully there’s not much chance of that happening round here.

  That said, exotic creatures are sometimes drawn to my jungle terrace. As I sit in the darkness with my vodka, something, a flying cockroach or a small bat, hits the shutters with a dull thud, picks itself up and flies away again. I hope whatever it is stays away from the swimming pool. The janitor is always picking sodden corpses out of the filter in the mornings, even though there is an electric snake that’s supposed to patrol the depths scavenging for litter. It slithers smoothly across the floor all night, vacuuming the water and emitting a cold blue light. Not long ago I woke up to hear the snake gasping and sucking, and emitting a high mechanical whine of anguish, and went downstairs to find it grappling with a bat. I tried to free the creature, but it was half-drowned and struggling madly, and there was nothing I could do to stop it being devoured by the machine.

  SPRAY PANCAKES AND SPRING CHICKENS

  The only night sound in Angel Park was the faint hiss of conditioned air. At the end of my first day I lay in bed rigidly fixing on it, unable to sleep. It wasn’t just the lack of animal noise that bothered me: for as long as I could remember I had slept in the next room from my mother, and overheard every murmur, every snore, every creaking bedspring.

  I came down in the morning to an eerily empty house. Strewn about the granite hub at the centre of the kitchen lay the litter of three breakfasts: once-bitten pieces of fruit, half-drained glasses of juice, overturned yoghurt pots. Here was my first glimpse of the family in their city clothes. Whereas breakfast on the farm was a performance that could take all morning, with Zé installed behind the newspapers at the end of the table presiding over a steadily mounting pile of fruit peel, this meal had happened fast. The scene made me think of a sci-fi apocalypse—as if the family had dropped everything to rush off at the chilling sound of some early warning siren.

  ‘Good morning, Senhor,’ said the maid who was not my mother. ‘Would you like some breakfast before your shooting lesson?’

  ‘I can get it myself.’

  ‘I insist, young man. How about a pancake?’ She held up two aerosols: one of oil and the other of pancake mixture.

  ‘I could manage one of those,’ said a voice from the door.

  Ernesto the man is very different from the boy who let himself into the house that morning and saved me from a batch of aerosol pancakes. Now, he sees his privilege as a platform from which he can change things for others. Then, he was awkward and uncomfortable, and made sporadic attempts at mimicking the brashness he observed in the delinquent kids he had grown up with. I didn’t even know he existed until I moved to Angel Park. But here he was, as important a part of Melissa’s life during the week as I was at weekends.

  When I asked her later on why she hadn’t mentioned him before, she said, ‘Ernesto? He’s the weekday you—didn’t you know that?’

  The expression was deliberately provocative. With his blond fringe and his big, milk-fed frame, he couldn’t have looked less like me. His plump cheeks had the effect of shrinking his other features, and although contact lenses have corrected it now, when I first met him he had a squint that afflicted him at random, causing his eyes to sink back into his face like currants into a loaf. But he was tenacious. If he sensed injustice anywhere, he would divert every pound of brawn into overturning it, from (in those days) a playground bully to (these days) the uncompromising might of favela drug gangs. At sixteen, he had the potential, but not the purpose, and this could come across as arrogance—the hauteur of a tournament bull misplaced inside the frame of a blinking calf. As he sat in the kitchen that morning eating the pancakes I hadn’t wanted, I felt I had the measure of him already.

  ‘Where’s Melissa today?’ he asked me.

  ‘I think she went shopping with her mother,’ I said, not knowing at all, but hoping to imply that I had already become an integrated part of the family.

  He sniffed. ‘So . . . you live here now?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You’re sort of . . . Melissa’s brother now, right?’

  ‘I suppose so.’

  This seemed to please him. Brother. Nothing more. ‘OK, we’d better follow the Minister’s orders and teach you how to handle a gun, so you can defend your new sister.’

  He must have been aware of the zigzag trajectory of my past, but he didn’t mention it. Meanwhile, I was concentrating less on his questions and more on how much accumulated cash was hanging off his shoulders—designer T-shirt, Italian jeans, new trainers that were at least a size too big to run in. It was when we got outside and I saw his car that I came closer to realising the kind of wealth we were dealing with.

  ‘It’s a Pontiac Firebird,’ he said sheepishly. ‘It’s going to be mine, but I’m not legally allowed to drive it yet, so for the moment I can only use it here in the compound.’

  ‘It’s great.’

  ‘It’s OK,’ Ernesto replied. ‘It’s nothing special.’ His discomfort puzzled me. I was supposed to be the one who was new to the place, not him. Now, I understand that he was probably embarrassed; that he had heard where I came from and thought I was fresh off the streets. At the time I just thought he was weak—though I was grateful for the possibility of a male friend my own age.

  We pulled out on to one of Angel P
ark’s clean, white roads at a safe pace.

  ‘Where are we going?’ I asked.

  He looked in the rearview mirror through huge Aviators that made his face look even more fat and puppyish. ‘Shooting range.’

  Trying hard to let Angel Park surprise me as little as possible, I tried to picture our destination, anticipating a leafy gravel driveway, a brass plaque with The Angel Park Gun Club on it, prim folk wearing white suits in a panelled dining room. Instead, Ernesto drove us to a building site.

  The outer reaches of the community, by which I mean the parts furthest from the city, were backwaters at the time—tracts of land owned by the developers whose potential had yet to be fully realised. They were thinking of the future—a future that has now arrived, along with thousands of vitamin-enriched, gym-toned residents—and they didn’t want mere geography to inhibit their potential for success. There were therefore large areas of Angel Park that were little more than wasteland, the terrain where the mansions and luxury blocks of the future would be built. We were still within the jurisdiction of Angel Park Security, but as discreetly positioned as it was possible to be inside the perimeter fence. There were several half-finished houses here—their lampposts yet to be wired in, their metal girders reaching imploringly to the skies for more concrete—and it was outside one of these that Ernesto now brought the car to a lurching, gear-grinding halt.

  Lots of space here,’ he said. ‘We won’t be disturbed. And I can’t reverse park so it’s good that we can drive straight out again.’

  He turned off the engine and leaned over me to the glove box.

  ‘Here she is,’ he said, reaching inside and taking out a heavy object wrapped in an oily cloth. ‘The Glock 17, chosen weapon of many a street hoodlum and gangster. And also of my father.’ He pulled back one corner of the rag to reveal the gun. ‘Let’s go inside and heat this baby up. Bring that box of bullets.’ He cast furtive glances in each direction over his sunglasses as we got out of the car.

  We climbed a low fence and entered the half-built shell of what was destined to be a very big house, with a grand entrance hall and a sweeping spiral staircase. Our voices echoed round the empty rooms. Work had been interrupted on the building, but it still smelt of brick dust and plaster. Ernesto led me through the ground floor to a long, unpainted concrete corridor. Noticing empty shells on the floor, I realised this wasn’t the first time he had come here for shooting practice.

  He opened a bag he had brought from the car and produced a stack of gossip magazines. ‘Now,’ he said, ‘who shall we shoot at today?’

  Thus my first morning in the city was spent in the lobby of an unfinished mansion, being taught how to fire a handgun at the cut-out heads and bodies of politicians and celebrities. We shot at footballers, TV presenters, soap stars, Hollywood actors. Nobody was excused. We even found a picture of Zé, with half of Rebecca’s face just peeping out behind the embrace taking place in the foreground between her husband and Pelé. After some discussion about whether or not it would be disrespectful, we pinned him up and gunned him down with the rest.

  The gun scared me. It was cold and heavy when Ernesto slapped it into my hand, and I felt I barely had the strength to hold it straight.

  Ernesto steadied my wavering hands. ‘No, take aim more carefully. It’s not like you’ve seen in films. They have a kick to them. Mel Gibson may be able to shoot three drug dealers without a second thought while rolling around on the floor, but nobody in real life has that kind of coordination, so you have to hold it with both hands and take proper aim.’

  My first bullet ricocheted off the ceiling, and the noise made my heart lurch, but then I told myself that this was no different from using my slingshot on the farm, or from firing Silvio’s rifle at birds. The city was intimidating me.

  My next three shots took out one glossy cover photo apiece.

  ‘Nice work!’ Ernesto shouted. ‘Sure you haven’t done this before?’

  ‘Melissa and I shoot stuff together all the time,’ I said. ‘I just haven’t used one of these before.’

  The mention of Melissa annoyed him. ‘Perhaps you’ll be safe enough after all. Here, give it to me. I’ll show you how we do it in the city.’

  As I passed him the gun, the door behind us was kicked open by an armed guard.

  ‘Don’t shoot,’ I managed to shout.

  ‘Gun down!’ screamed the guard. He was no older than twenty-three, with a peach-fuzz moustache, and in spite of his forbidding black uniform, his pistol shook in his hand. He had probably heard our shots from outside, and been preparing himself for a brush with death.

  Ernesto screamed at him. ‘What are you doing coming in here with your gun drawn? You might have killed us.’

  ‘Are you a resident?’

  ‘Of course I’m a resident. So is my friend.’

  ‘He doesn’t look like a resident.’

  ‘What the fuck do you mean by that?’

  ‘Don’t be cocky, kid. Who is he?’

  ‘This is the adopted son of Zé Fisher Carnicelli, so you better show him some respect.’

  ‘I don’t care who you are. You can’t shoot guns in here. You can’t shoot guns anywhere. How old are you? How old is he?’

  ‘I’m sixteen and he’s fourteen, not that it’s any concern of yours. Zé Generoso has asked me to teach this boy how to shoot so that he can defend himself when people like you let him down, and there are villains inside his house trying to kill him. You want to take issue with the Minister about it?’

  ‘You shouldn’t be firing guns,’ said the guard, holstering his pistol. ‘Give me your rounds and go home.’

  Ernesto fumed as the guard drove off. ‘Let’s take a shot at his tyres.’

  ‘He’s taken your bullets.’

  He kicked the wheel of his car. ‘I hate people like him. Little dictators. Put a uniform on them and a gun in their hand and suddenly they’re the king of the universe.’

  He shut the boot of the Firebird on his collection of guns.

  ‘It doesn’t matter,’ I said. ‘At least I know now how to take out Madonna with a couple of shots to the head.’

  ‘We’ll talk to my father about it this evening. He’s on all the residents’ committees. We’ll get that guy cautioned at the very least for speaking to us like that.’

  ‘We?’

  ‘Has nobody told you? My parents have invited you and Melissa over tonight for a welcome dinner.’

  I am fourteen, and not long in Angel Park. It’s dark, and a serious thunderstorm is in progress. I’ve been over at Ernesto’s, and when I return to the house the mastiffs are out. I have not yet learnt their attack calls. They come at me across the drowned lawn, gnashing, slobbering strobe dogs in stop frame animation, the shutter speed dictated by the lightning. Slipping in the red mud, I make it to the gatehouse, where a guard steps in front of me and shouts over the thunder the words that make them stand down.

  Is everyone in the city like this—advancing on me in the dark, their true nature only revealed when the lightning flashes?

  ‘This place is weird,’ I said to Melissa that morning, when Ernesto dropped me home after our shooting trip. We were sitting in the kitchen eating sandwiches, and the combination of eating and complaining was making me feel better. ‘How could Ernesto speak to that guy like that? I thought he was going to blow our heads off.’

  ‘He might have done, if you hadn’t been residents,’ laughed Melissa. ‘It’s happened before. People sneaking into unfinished houses, looking for somewhere to sleep. Things turn ugly . . . ’

  ‘But Ernesto spoke to him like he was a baby.’

  ‘That’s because Ernesto could get him fired. They aren’t like the police. They work for us.’

  ‘I would never speak to someone like that. Especially someone with a gun pointed at me.’

  ‘You want weird? Wait until you see Ernesto’s house.’

  Although Melissa and her family were very rich, they were rich people I knew well, and for whom
I had worked. Because I knew all their quirks and tics, I no longer defined them by their wealth. Plus, even if he was extravagant in some areas (helicopters, food), Zé prided himself on not being too pretentious. He was moderated by the influence of Rebecca—whose outsider’s sense of outrage at the inequality around her made it impossible for her to surrender completely to their life of affluence. At my welcome dinner that night I saw properly complacent wealth, and its expression in the gleaming baroque horror of Ernesto’s family home.

  It was one of a sub-cluster of houses in Angel Park built to resemble miniaturised versions of European-style palaces: Germanic, English, Venetian and so on. Ernesto and his family lived in the one that was meant to look like a French château. As Melissa led me to their colossal hardwood front door that evening, I realised that the description of Angel Park as ‘weird’ did not by any means do it justice.

  Melissa pulled on the enormous brass bell. ‘Be prepared for the fact that they won’t understand where you have come from at all. But remember: none of it is real.’ Just before the door was opened, she kissed me on the cheek.

  Five of us sat round the table: Ernesto’s father, Gaspar; his mother, Olinda; Melissa; Ernesto; me. Although the evening was supposedly my welcome dinner, it took the form of a performance between Ernesto’s parents. Gaspar sat at one end of the table asking me questions and telling me the answers, while Olinda reacted at the other end to her husband, alternately charmed and scandalised by his behaviour. I guessed the performance was for my benefit. In fact, as I learned later, they performed for each other on a nightly basis.