Coffee and Sugar

by C. Sean McGee

CHAPTER FIVE

  “Hi, my name is Joao,” he said, extending his hand to the driver.

  Charity pushed him along gently while behind them, The Bishop stepped up onto the bus carrying in his arms the ceramic statue of Jesus, his knobbly knees wobbling under the awkward shift of weight matched against the volume of alcohol in his blood.

  The driver didn’t acknowledge Joao. He just looked briefly at the sidewalk being emptied, sneered lightly and then pulled on a handle to close the doors and redirected his focus to the bustling street where cars dodged and zoomed past.

  And seemingly everywhere Joao looked, hundreds of motorbikes zipped around, weaving in and out of traffic, onto the sidewalks and almost knocking over people and denting cars wherever they went and they never stopped coming, like an endless swarm of mosquitos, buzzing about and infecting the air with their imprudence.

  “Hi, my name is Joao,” he said, extending his hand to shake that of the man sitting at a turnstile in the centre of the bus.

  “You’re supposed to pay him,” said Charity, whispering in his ear. “I’ve got this,” she said, “three, please.”

  “It’s four,” said the man.

  “There’s three of us,” said Charity arguing.

  “I count four. You, your boyfriend here, the old drunk and Jesus. That makes four. That’ll be eight bucks” exclaimed the man at the turnstile.

  “It’s not really Jesus sir, it’s a ceramic..”

  “He knows,” said Charity lightly shushing Joao.

  “It’s taking space. If you don’t want to pay you can get off. Eight bucks. Or maybe we can arrange something else” said the man.

  “Go fuck yourself” she muttered under her breath, handing over the money to the sour looking man sitting sideways on his seat and leaning his left arm out the window behind him.

  “Temper, temper little sweetie, you fill that mouth up with bad words you’ll have no room for desert,” said the man in the chair, squeezing against his crotch with his right hand while his left hung coolly out the window.

  Nobody on the bus seemed to bother or offer anything more than a subtle glance in their direction. Joao walked through the centre of the aisle excitedly. He had never been in a bus before and the ones he had seen on were nothing like this boat on wheels. Charity walked close behind with her hands pressed on his back, easing him towards the rear seats.

  The Bishop followed close behind giving one and all the evil eye, painting doubt and suspicion upon the skin of everyone he encountered. Eventually, he lowered himself onto an empty bank and stretched out his legs, lowering his head into his chest and drifting into a deep slumber, drooling lightly from the right side of his mouth as his head tilted and locked over his fat belly.

  “This is the address?” she said pointing to a piece of crumpled paper in her hand. “Ok, well you’ll be getting off four stops after me. Remember that. It’s not the best neighborhood ok, so just don’t go talking to anybody. People will take advantage of you” she said.

  “Thanks. You look like the girl from television” he said.

  “Which one?” she asked.

  “From ‘The Carriage of my Heart’,” he said.

  “The pretty one or the ugly one,” she asked playfully.

  “The pretty one” Joao said, feeling a wave of warmth wash over him as his face instantly turned red and he wished he could have undone his words.

  “My real name is Avé Maria, but I hate that name. My mother is crazy religious. So I call myself Charity. I like it, what do you think?” she asked.

  Joao; sitting right beside the girl he had just met, was electric at the sensation of his body touching hers and was stuttering; even in his own mind, the words that he wanted to say. That was until the girl took his hand in hers and squeezed it tight, looking right over him; out of the window, as if it weren’t strange or even a big thing.

  Joao, on the other hand, was willing himself not to sweat, imagining an invisible fan blowing in the infinitesimal gap between his skin and hers, cooling his hands as he watched the tiny white hairs on the nape of her neck; just below her ear, dance to and fro as the warm evening air blew in from an open window behind them.

  He hadn’t the courage to look with her, just in case she would kiss him. What would he do then? He had never kissed a girl before, not unless he could count his sisters and his mother, but neither of them was nearly as girly as this girl.

  They were more like men.

  With women’s parts.

  Joao’s heart was beating like an African drum, pounding inside his chest and he was sure that Charity could hear every beat and he thought to himself that she knew he was nervous and that he had never kissed a girl and “Oh god, what if she wants to have sex?”

  It was all becoming too much.

  His mind was racing and his hand was losing its cool, like a dam with a broken wall, bursting into a vigorous sweat and from there, his knees started to tremble and her face was sitting so close to his that he could see his own breath bristle the loose hairs just beside her ear and he wondered then if his breath was stinking so he took no chances and held onto it, releasing every now and then from the corner of his mouth and all the while playing cool and unfazed by the beautiful girl, holding his hand and leaning across him.

  “Kiss her,” he thought, braving himself to act on his desire.

  As he leaned forwards, the girl pressed a red button just above Joao’s head by the window and she jumped up from where she stood, running towards the door. Joao was startled, jumping back in his seat and then sunken by his exploding heart as the girl stood waiting to exit the stopping bus.

  “I like you” he shouted like a startled dog. “I mean, I like your name.”

  Everyone turned and looked and Joao buried himself into his hands, embarrassed at the intrusive glare of everyone about him. Charity smiled and as the bus stopped and the doors swung open, she quickly ran over to where he sat and kissed him lightly on the cheek.

  “I like you too,” she said.

  And then she was off again running to the door before the driver changed his mind and closed it on her.

  As the doors shut, Joao pressed his face against the glass and felt part of his existence turn to sand and slip away from his weakened grasp. It felt horrible and wonderful in the same breath.

  Outside the window; standing on the edge of the curb, Charity stood smiling at him and holding up her hand, waving four fingers, reminding him of the number of stops until he had to get off. Joao pressed his hand against the glass and felt every part of his self ignite. His heart felt as if it burst right out his chest and his hands and legs broke into an adrenaline laced shake, trembling frenziedly, so much that the old lady across from him thought for a moment that he was having some kind of attack.

  “Are you ok?” asked the old lady.

  “I’m fine,” said Joao.

  “Your girlfriend is pretty,” said the old lady.

  “Yeah,” said Joao smiling stupidly.

  “I have a girlfriend. She kissed me” he said in his mind, bewildered by the experience, feeling like a baby being born; stretching its arms for the first time and taking its first breath, feeling parts of himself expanding and retracting and twisting and turning, sensations he never knew that he could feel before and he sat with a silly grin slapped upon his face, looking at his open palm; the one the girl hand been holding and he tried to remember the feeling of her hand clasping his.

  He counted every stop in his mind and imagined Charity standing on the edge of every curb, looking straight into his eyes, each time holding one less finger up on her hand and his excitement built as if she were counting down to the next time they would kiss.

  Joao looked around the bus and for the first time, he opened his eyes to the people piling in through the turnstiles and crowding around the steps near the exits and those cursing at old women who dared to question their priority seating.

  The bus was alive.

  There was so much colour and veracit
y.

  Nobody was hiding who they were or what they believed or what they wanted to say. Their honesty bridged on the tips of their tongues, on the furrow of their brow and for one, tattooed onto the centre of his forehead, a picture of a small pile of poo with little lines running off the top to show that it smelt.

  There was an old man sitting to his front; looking straight at him, except the old man wasn’t looking at him as much as he was looking through him. His eyes were glazed and distant and it seemed as if he were reading something profound, engraved on the seat where Joao sat. The old man stared straight through his belly at the words no doubt scribed behind his back.

  In his hands, the old man had a large white plastic bag that had a symbol of a record on it. The bag was quite large and it wasn’t full. Whatever he kept inside was piled just down by the bottom. So large was the bag that the old man had to lean his gangly frame over and reach far and long to get his hand near the treasures that he kept and as he did, his eyes never shifted from their fixed address; peering straight through Joao’s chest.

  Eventually, the old man pulled out a single cassette.

  Joao may have been raised on a farm but he still knew of modern technology and he was stupefied by the strangeness of seeing the old man cradling the small piece of plastic and using his long fingernails to wind the tape backwards until it pulled tight and his finger nails could twist no more. Joao had never seen a cassette before, thinking for a second that maybe this was something new, so he watched on in astounding wonder as the old man pulled from the bag; one by one, a new cassette and held each one in his hands so delicately as if they were made of dust and a single breath alone would have them sift apart and scatter about in the air and far from his aging heart.

  One by one, he took them from the depths of his bag and he wound them tight with his long yellow fingernail and then after reading the folded paper inside the cassette’s container, he neatly put the cassette and paper back together and gently placed it back in the pile, taking one more.

  As his fingers cradled each of his treasures, his eyes stayed locked on Joao’s chest while his gummed mouth gnawed away, his jaw spinning like a washing machine, round and round. And every now and then, one of his dentures would slip from its setting and pop out of his mouth and he would suck it back in without shifting his eyes and without interrupting his cradling hands.

  After counting three stops, Joao pressed the red button and sounded an alarm and a sense of completion and action became him. The bus pulled to a heavy stop sending him careening over himself, landing in a crumpled heap by his father’s feet. The Bishop kicked and wriggled away in his drunken stupor, opening one eye involuntarily; only at the behest of the constant tugging from his son.

  The two men exited the bus and stood in complete darkness as the two red taillights quickly vanished from sight. Joao was feeling a little nervous, remembering what Charity had said which was to be wary of other people.

  He kept his father close, holding him up with his left arm while he dragged the ceramic Jesus about with is right navigating through the darkness over uprooted trees and broken cement, dodging smashed bottles and weaving around burned out vehicles whose shells lay strewn about, forcing the pair to move from the sidewalk to the road and then back again.

  The night was getting cold, nothing like the day that had passed. Joao was dressed in just a fine t-shirt and his bones were starting to chill from the inside out. He thought of the girl; Charity, and he could imagine only sweetness, seeing her affectionate smile and her warm eyes paint across his perspective.

  Joao had never imagined that a girl as beautiful as she would ever speak to him, let alone hold his hand or kiss his cheek. He wondered if this was what love was, the carriage of his own heart being saddled and carried far from its mooring, whisked away by the kiss of a beautiful stranger.

  The two men passed a deal of abhorrence as they worked their way through the quickly thinning streets, winding upwards along the emaciated and strangled face of a mountain where houses stuck outwards in seemingly absurd angles, defying every common rule of gravity and engineering; erected like concrete pimples on the face of the earth.

  The further they went along the thinning and winding road, the darker and more impending everything seemed to feel. The characters they passed each meter seemed to have been written from the strangest book as if all the dregs of society that could not work their way down the stream of usefulness, gathered here and made the crack in the pavement that divided degradation and degeneracy their humble, intrepid abode.

  As he dragged his father and the ceramic Jesus, Joao was whistled by men dressed as women and women dressed as men. They came from the recess of where one would least expect, pouncing on his surprise and wrestling with his breath.

  He remembered the girl and paid the men or women no mind, instead focusing only on putting one leg in front of the other until finally; they reached near the summit and were greeted by a group of men carrying an array of weapons and knives.

  “You don’t go any further. Who are you and what are you doing so high on the hill?” asked one of the boys pointing a gun right into Joao’s face.

  Joao had had this since he was a child, having his brothers point rifles at him all the time and threatening to shoot him like a scavenging dog, so having the muzzle pointed at his nose didn’t take him any further than his family ever had.

  “We just moved here, we’re lost. Look, this is our church, do you know it?” he said pointing to the address scribbled on a piece of toilet paper.

  The armed men whispered to one another in their conspiring circle, looking up from within their ranks every few seconds to peer at the two men lumbering around in the dark with a giant ceramic statue.

  Eventually, The Alpha broke from the group and with his armed thugs behind him, stood eye to eye with Joao; his hands tucked under his armpits and his elbow lifted high into the air, showing his authority.

  “We run this hill; this whole community. You pay a tax to stay here. Every month. A hundred bucks. You don’t pay and we’ll shoot someone you care about and if you’re late again and I’ll personally wrap you in old tyres and set you on fire. Understand?” said The Alpha sternly; lifting his hands further into his armpits as he ascertained his command and threat while, behind him, his gang of armed men wore their meanest faces and gripped high powered assault rifles.

  “Nice to meet you, I’m Joao,” he said dementedly, extending his arm to the gang of men and letting his drunken father fall to the ground.

  The armed men looked at him like a moth with one wing as he hobbled about trying to pick up his father and they ushered him on.

  Their church was in a collection of houses that nested on the top of the hill. They had to climb a lot of awkward steps and brave a few near falls before they arrived at a heavy metal gate that was shut with a long chain and heavy padlock.

  Joao reached around and took from The Bishop’s neck, a key that was attached to a silver chain. He leaned down; steadying the statue and his drunken father cautiously against the wall, then unlocked the door to a small filthy space that was overrun with giant rats, cockroaches and had a permanent fervor of urine and feces with the putrid, musky smell of sex; a humid blend of semen and sweat.

  They were home.