From the day I arrived in the city at fourteen, the three of us grew into a powerful, close-knit group, inseparable both at school and in Angel Park. We didn’t exactly shun others, but neither did we need them, and I managed to go through my entire school career without a proper friend of my own age. Then, when I still had a year to go, Melissa and Ernesto left school and enrolled at the university. It put distance between us, whether we wanted it or not. They had embarked on the next stage, Ernesto developing his anthropological interests and Melissa studying journalism, while I was left behind, and instantly rendered younger. It was only a matter of time.
I am seventeen. Loaded with shopping bags and drenched, I clatter through the door. Above the city, the sky is iron-grey with rain. Single strands of lightning flicker on the horizon, impossibly distant. A yellow bar of light under the door to Melissa’s bedroom. Loud music. Laughter. I’m unpacking the shopping when she bursts out of the room, wearing only a man’s shirt.
‘Something ridiculous is happening,’ she laughs, giving me a hug. ‘I think I’ve fallen in love with that idiot Ernesto.’
The tower rears up in gleaming silver sections, like robotic vertebrae, and is constructed in an oval shape, which means there isn’t a straight line in the place. The furniture has to be arranged in the middle of large open spaces, which gives the penthouse a permanently transient air, as if the removals men have only just left. There’s a plunge pool on every balcony, and the great black disc of a helipad sits on the roof like a crown.
Zé knew when he bought the place that there were benefits for him that Melissa would overlook in her enthusiasm for independence—the principal one being that he could drop in and check up on her whenever he wanted. Sometimes he would get his pilot to hover outside the window, so Melissa or I could wave and show him it was worth his while to land. Other times, he would swoop in unannounced. Either way, you couldn’t have failed to know he was coming: the walls would begin to vibrate, and the sound would roar above your head until the engines were cut, leaving the descending whine of slowing blades. Then he’d be at the door, suited and sweet smelling, bearing cigars, or a bottle of something. When Melissa wasn’t expecting him, I sometimes had to cover for her and Ernesto, frantically scrambling into their clothes next door.
‘Ludo,’ he would say, beaming his best business smile. ‘Ludo, Ludo, Ludo.’ He would gaze out of the window, puffing his big cheeks out, grinning, pretending to examine me in depth, though there was nothing in the eyes. He loves being in tall buildings and is always distracted by the view. ‘My boy, it’s good to see you. How are you? Studying hard?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘Good for you. Enjoying the apartment?’
‘Oh yes.’
‘Good, good. I’m happy. That’s what it’s here for. Now where is Melissa, do you suppose? She can’t still be in bed. These women and their showers, I will never understand it.’
‘She’ll be out in a minute. Can I pour you a drink while you wait?’
Those were the days. Now it is I who cower in the bed while Zé struts around outside, and Ernesto who is king of the tower. It mystifies me.
But there’s no denying it. Melissa and Ernesto were a fact not long after we moved in, and Ernesto a full-time, if covert, resident. The apartment was Ernesto’s escape route as much as ours. He and Melissa might have plotted the situation as carefully as Zé himself. Without me there as a chaperone, Zé would never have let her move out. With me along for the ride, she had a respectable brother-sister thing going on and the added benefit of someone who cooked and cleaned to earn his place. I felt in the way from the start.
The thing that gets me is that I know they’re meant to be with each other. The picture of them together, it works. Ernesto, the perfect father with the worthy job, who for all his unwavering commitment would never go to work on his kids’ birthdays; Melissa, his eye-poppingly beautiful wife, her inheritance supplementing Ernesto’s income, her figure seeming to tighten up with every child she squeezes out. In the middle of that vision, I look like I’ve come to steal their TV—or at least repair it.
During those years I became expert at being part of the background while discreetly adding to the foreground; of requiring nothing but being ready to supply anything. I cooked every meal. I cleaned shoes. I cultivated my herbs. I performed tasks that they took for granted to such an extent that I wonder whether they notice now how much worse everything tastes. I made sure their wine breathed; I chilled their beer to the perfect temperature. Quietly, I improved every meal, smoothed over every domestic transaction, and kept out of their way. And I might have been able to stand being that person, inheriting my mother’s position and retaining for the next generation, were it not for events that made me look on them both with new eyes.
Ernesto was evolving from the slack-fleshed kid who joyrode the private streets of Angel Park into someone with a conscience. He’d started to work on case studies of life in the slums, and to feel ashamed of the easy wealth of his situation. And the distractions of this new social purpose caused him to do something unthinkable: to take Melissa for granted. He would stay away for days at a time without offering much in the way of explanation, and when he returned he would spend whole evenings lecturing us on what he’d seen.
‘Do you even know how it starts, in the beginning? It starts with a single cell. Seeking shelter from the elements, a man leans a piece of plywood up against a wall. Picture it. Let’s say it’s the side of a packing crate. Let’s say he’s twenty, with no education, and only a pair of blue dungarees and a pocketknife to his name. Picture him. He cowers beneath the sheet of wood for the night. Nobody moves him on. So he stays. He improves his dwelling. One wall becomes four, then a watertight roof. Someone joins him. And if you think it’s bad, what they have here in the city, you should see what they’re escaping from.’
And so on. Melissa would never have said anything explicit about it because she believed in what he was doing, but I noticed that his self-absorption and absenteeism were beginning to affect her. Then one night, when he was away, we ended up watching a film together in her bed and falling asleep there. Somehow from then on it became the understanding that if she left her bedroom door ajar I would creep in and join her there when she was half-asleep. That way, she didn’t have to face up to what she was doing, and could sigh and clamp her arm around me as I crept in beside her. I knew I was being used to provide comfort, but I saw no reason not to oblige: at this stage our relations were still strictly fraternal. This was news, of course, that did not reach my rigid body as it lay there all night unable to sleep, as tensely sprung as if the contact of Melissa’s arm were passing an electric current through it.
Like my mother, I poured emotion into food. I translated my longing into culinary semaphore, using recipes to send frantic signals to Melissa over Ernesto’s dumb head. I made daring, all-or-nothing declarations through meticulous cocktails, and pledged myself at full volume in elaborate, anguished sauces. Melissa and I would eat in silence, communing through the food, while Ernesto sat between us, shovelling away as if he were stoking a boiler, prattling about the needy and making inane, ill-considered compliments about the cooking.
I couldn’t see how anyone could overlook Melissa. However hard your shell, she found her way in; she was like a truffle secreted in a basket of eggs, its perfume effortlessly pervasive. But not, apparently, for Ernesto.
One day a few months before my twenty-first birthday, I went to the shopping mall to buy clothes and run some errands. I remember the day perfectly for two reasons, and what happened at the mall is only the lesser of the two.
They had a pink dolphin captive in a huge tank that took up the space of an entire retail unit, slotted in between surf-wear boutiques, toy shops and hair salons. I found the poor creature fascinating. It swam in constant bewildered circles, sometimes bringing its high, domed head right up against the glass, and if you got in really close you could hear it making the occasional plaintive click or wh
istle, trying in vain to make contact with its population thousands of kilometres away.
The girl’s name was Anabel. She came into focus in the glass of the tank, standing behind me, watching the dolphin.
‘I wonder what he thinks of you,’ she said.
‘What do you think he makes of all this plastic?’ I said, to the reflection. ‘People walking around with bags. All the retail.’
She held my gaze in the glass. ‘You shouldn’t assume he’s unhappy. Perhaps he doesn’t mind being here at all. Maybe he just desperately wants someone to fetch him a drink from the burger bar.’
I laughed. ‘You think so? All these years, and nobody got that all he wanted was a chocolate shake?’
‘A chocolate shake—that’s not such a bad idea,’ she said. ‘Are you going to buy me one?’
She was eighteen, and skinny, with long brown hair and dark eyes. She wore tight jeans, boots and a denim jacket over a pink T-shirt. Rather then lift the milkshake to her face, she kept her arms by her sides and bobbed down to reach the straw. I watched the top of her head every time she leant over. It looked fragile as an egg.
We sat overlooking the ice rink on the ground floor of the shopping mall, and as we drank our chocolate malts she asked me if I skated. I told her I never had, and she was shocked.
‘There’s something called an Ice Party happening tonight,’ she said. ‘They put disco lighting on the ice and play music. Do you want to come?’
I smiled. ‘Isn’t that meant to be for kids?’
‘You think you’re grown-up, and you’ve never even ice-skated?’
‘OK,’ I said. ‘I’ll come. Where shall I meet you?’
‘I’ll be on the ice, pirouetting gracefully in the middle,’ she said. ‘I’ll be very conspicuous.’
I got home to find Melissa at the window. The forlorn princess, locked in her tower, gazing down at her kingdom of lights. I put down my shopping, and was about to ask her whether she’d heard of an Ice Party, and what she thought I should wear for it. Then I noticed that she had drunk one bottle of wine and opened another.
‘What’s wrong?’ I said.
‘Nothing,’ she replied, without turning round.
‘Tell me.’
‘I don’t know. I suppose it’s something pathetic to do with feeling lonely. Forget it.’
‘Where’s Ernesto?’
‘Working. It’s not his fault.’ She took a gulp of wine, and turned round so I could see the dark mascara deltas that held her face like fingers.
‘What’s really the matter?’ I poured her more wine, and a glass for myself.
‘I don’t know. I was thinking today about when I was kidnapped. For the first time in years. Strange.’
A cloud of red and blue light shot down the avenue below us: two police cars in pursuit.
‘I wasn’t around to protect you back then. But now I am,’ I said, looking down at her hands, and noticing the telltale rawness that came from when she had been obsessively washing them. ‘I used to hate myself for not being there to stop them taking you.’
‘You did protect me. You gave me a way out.’
I stared at her. ‘Me?’
‘You don’t remember? That performance you used to do? Your way of getting out of it when we were in a fight? The rolling eyes, the chattering teeth? It was you who gave me the idea.’ She smiled. ‘You tried it once again, much later on, when that creepy guy Oscar tried to chase you round the garden, remember?’
I remembered. Silvio’s stupid childhood routine. ‘That’s what you were doing when they threw you from the car? That was where the fit came from?’
‘It just came to me. You used to do it to get people to let you go, so I thought it would work for me. And it did. You see? Even though you weren’t there, you were the one who saved me.’
‘That makes me want to save you all over again.’ I embraced her. ‘What can I do to make you feel better?’
She sniffed, pulled back and wiped her eyes. ‘How about something to eat?’
There was some calf’s liver I’d bought on a whim. I got out my mother’s old, heavy frying pan and poured in a good slug of green olive oil. When it was shimmering and the warm smell had filled the air, I took a slice of the liver and draped it across the base of the pan, watching it crawl and shrink in the hot oil. I waited for it to char a little and then turned it over with a fork. I seasoned it, then lifted it from the pan and held the fork to Melissa’s lips. She took the morsel and chewed it, then she took a mouthful of wine, then she kissed me hard on the mouth, savoury and wet.
We worked our way through the liver, frying individual pieces and eating them straight from the pan, washed down with wine, and the locking of slippery lips. Oil, blood, saliva and wine were muddled together in my mouth. I wanted to press my fingertip on the metal of the pan to mark the moment, make it permanent. I thought of watching it sizzle as the hot oil erased my fingerprint and coloured the skin. What would it smell like? The burnt hair smell of a car wreck? Charred and succulent, like steak? Sweet and sickly, like plum sauce?
‘Bed,’ she said.
I am twenty. The moment has arrived. Those tanned, slender legs are around me at last.
It is not how I imagined. She should be helpless and moaning, soaking an ellipse into the mattress, not staring rigidly over my shoulder, looking as if she were trying to banish this experience from her head, prevent it at all costs from lodging in her memory.
She regrets this already, but she’s letting me persevere. Her mind is—God knows where. Perhaps she can’t avoid the kidnap. Perhaps she is desperately trying to take her mind off this aberrant behaviour. Or perhaps she’s nowhere I think she might be. Perhaps she is only thinking how good it was that she went for the most expensive spray-on tan today, so it won’t rub off on the sheets.
Which one of us will acknowledge the failure first? Who will pull away? It is obvious that this will never work.
To the best of my knowledge, Melissa’s sexual experiences before Ernesto came along were a couple of fumbles with Angel Park boys and an affair with her tennis coach—who by virtue of hailing from a gated community near the city centre, with no private army to defend it, was the closest Melissa got to rough trade.
Not that I knew this at the time. I thought her a sexual Olympian. I’d heard her at parties: her bravado, her vocal swagger. She liked nothing better than to be overheard saying something scandalously sexual. ‘A man has to have come at least twice before he’s of any real use.’ ‘I know everyone says that size doesn’t matter, but once you’ve had a big one, you can’t go back.’ Such utterances were of course no different from, or more genuine than, her manufactured persona at dinner with Ernesto’s parents, or any of the other personalities she submitted for the consideration of those around her—but they had given her, for me at least, the aura of an expert.
And as for me, being in bed with Melissa was the first time I had got that close to anyone, let alone someone as dauntingly perfect as her. By the time I saw her naked for the second time in my life, twelve years had passed, and the terrain had changed considerably. I had expected things to be different, of course, but not like this. The pornography I had seen had prepared me to be polite in the face of every permutation of the untamed black bush, but this was something different, something refined and defended, and all the more intimidating for being blonde. When she lifted herself casually off the bed to peel off her jeans I was stalled by what I saw—the stark, white Y at her trunk, the tan-line crisply delineated from the milky coffee of her thighs and topped off with the thin, vertical moustache into which her pubic hair had been cropped. The whole package was so groomed that it looked as if it should be twitching above a martini, not hiding down here, coconut-scented, haughtily inviting me to handle it if I was qualified.
Afterwards, when it had been silently acknowledged that this was a one-off, a write-off, she thanked me for the food, and the comfort, and went to sleep.
I sometimes thought of Anabel
when I went back to the shopping mall and saw the deranged dolphin in its murky tank. I wondered how long she had waited, and whether she went skating regardless, pirouetting with abandon, looking out for me amid the flashing disco lights.
The next day I stormed off to the lunchtime special at a Por Kilo restaurant on the Marginal, where they weigh your plate after every sally to the buffet and charge you accordingly. I went in hard, not wasting time at the salad bar other than to pick up a couple of spoonfuls of quail’s eggs, some palm hearts, and two dollops of crabsticks in Marie Rose sauce. For hours I sat there, with the concentration of a gaucho at his chá mate, mechanically devouring steaks, sausages, chicken, pizza, beans, rice, sushi, pasta, trying to work out what had gone wrong the night before. The next day, as I pulverised myself in the university gymnasium, still trying to understand, I felt no better.
Helplessly, I graduated to full obsession. I lay awake thinking of her chest rising and falling in the next room, of the pulse in her neck, the blonde hairs on her thighs. I craved the hot grip of her cunt. I checked the drawer where they kept their contraceptives, and started to sift through the bathroom bin for evidence that she was menstruating so that I could know for sure when he wasn’t going to have her. I became a filthy bathroom scavenger, grubbing for clues as to the health of their sex life.
And thus began our habit of kissing to pass the time. The attempt at sex was not repeated, and never spoken of, but the adolescent petting and the bed sharing went on—when she wanted it. The one time I presumed to lean in myself, I was rebuffed, and called a ‘freak.’ I was a passenger, a blow-up doll, a practice model. While watching TV, chopping vegetables—though generally after she’d had plenty to drink and Ernesto had pissed her off somehow—it might happen. Thus we grew into each other, like twisted trees planted too close together. To separate us, one would have to be hacked to pieces. And only the finer specimen would be salvaged.
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