She took the paper and folded it as carefully as if it was a 100–birr note.
‘Tiggist!’ Mrs Faridah shouted again.
‘I’ve got to go,’ she said, and ran into the house.
It was several days before Mamo could think about carrying out his promise to go to Dani’s house. After the black mini van had come from the municipality, and the men had wrapped Karate in a white blanket and taken him away, the boys had felt the need to stick together.
‘What’ll they do with him?’ Mamo asked Million. He was thinking of the cemetery where he and Dani had met. It wouldn’t be a bad place to go. If Karate was buried there, they could even go and visit his grave.
But Million jerked his head towards the hill behind the city.
‘There’s a graveyard over there somewhere, a long way out. They put you there if they don’t know who you are and there’s no one else to bury you.’
‘But is it a proper place? Near a church and everything?’ Mamo said. He wanted to hold on to the picture of the cemetery.
Shoes lifted his head from a bag of strong-smelling stuff that he’d been holding to his nose. Even a whiff of it made Mamo’s eyes water.
‘Been there. Church. They wrap you in a mat,’ he said jerkily.
Maybe it’s where they put Karate’s real mother, Mamo thought.
He felt a little better. It had been horrible seeing Karate disappear with strangers, like rubbish to be disposed of, but if he was in a churchyard, somewhere near his mother, he’d be all right.
Million was in an unpredictable mood after that. He and Buffalo got hold of some arak and drank themselves silly. Buffalo’s eyes stared red and angry out of a thunderous face, but the drink made him clumsy and it was easy, if you kept quiet, to stay out of his way. But Million was more dangerous. The more he drank the more his mood veered, affectionate and confiding one moment, resentful and hostile the next.
None of the group talked about Karate, but his passing had left a jagged hole, and it would be a while before it could close over.
On the third day the effects of the arak seemed to have worn off and Million and Buffalo were themselves again. Dani and Mamo, who had taken it upon themselves to forage for food during the last few turbulent days, had gone out early, before the sun had risen, and had come back with a good haul from the bins behind a new restaurant that had recently opened close by.
This was the best time of day, Mamo decided, as they sat eating together, letting the warmth of the day’s new sun chase the chill of night from their thinly clad bodies. Now, with full stomachs and the day before them, with Million and Buffalo restored to normality and the balance of the gang familiar again, life didn’t seem so bad.
Dani, waiting till the food had all gone and Million was sitting comfortably with his legs stretched out in front of him, asked the question that was in Mamo’s mind.
‘Million,’ he said, ‘is it OK if Mamo goes down to my house at Bole today? I want to know if – what’s happened to my mother.’
He was tense as he waited for the answer, and breathed out with relief when Million merely nodded.
‘I’ll go with you to show you the way, till we’re nearly there,’ he said to Mamo and jumped to his feet.
Mamo, excited by the thought of doing something different, grinned at him.
‘You could go all the way yourself, and knock on your own door,’ he said. ‘I don’t think even your ma would recognize you now.’
Dani looked down at himself, and Mamo saw that he’d made him anxious.
‘Don’t be daft,’ he said roughly. ‘It’s just that you’ve got thinner, that’s all, and your clothes don’t look new any more.’
But it was more than that, he thought, as the two of them set off along the pavement, skirting the potholes and navigating round the street sellers, who were setting out their wares on cloths on the ground. Dani moved differently now. He was less shambling, more alert, his muscles becoming taut. Though he was constantly on the lookout for danger, he no longer skulked all the time in the shadows of walls, where he had been at greater risk of giving himself away with his hangdog air.
Mamo pulled down the brim of the cap Dani had given him, which he still wore night and day. It was good going off like this, to a new part of town, though he was a little worried about Suri. The puppy was too small as yet for an expedition this long, but was becoming more difficult to carry. He’d had to leave her in Million’s care.
It was a long walk. They were soon out of the centre of town, but the road that led down to the suburb of rich people’s houses seemed endless. They stopped at a petrol station and took a drink of water from a tap at the back, keeping an eye out for the pump attendants working round at the front who would chase them away the minute they were free.
‘I’m not going any further than this,’ Dani said, as they slipped out of the side of the garage on to the main road. He had found a piece of black-and-white checked cloth on the last visit to the dump, and in spite of the heat he now wrapped it round his head and shoulders. ‘There’s loads of people round here who could recognize me.’
He gave Mamo instructions. He had to turn left at the next fruit stall, go up the narrow tarmac road and right down the unmade up lane where there was a sign pointing to the Sinbad restaurant. The kiosk was a little way along, on the right, no more than a window with a counter set in the mud wall. Dani’s house was a bit beyond that, on the left. It was white, though you couldn’t see it behind the high wall, and the metal gates were painted pale green.
Mamo was eager to go, but Dani seemed suddenly reluctant and held him back.
‘Don’t give me away. Don’t say anything that’ll give me away. Promise.’
‘Of course I won’t. I promise.’
‘If you see a little girl with a nanny, it’s probably my sister.’
‘OK.’
‘She might have pink bobbles in her hair.’
‘I’ll look.’
‘No! Don’t look as if you’re interested in anyone there, or look at the house as if it was anything special.’ Dani was becoming agitated. ‘They’ll suspect something. Negussie’s always on the lookout for strangers hanging about.’
Mamo got away at last, glad to escape from Dani’s fussing. He looked round curiously. He’d never been in an area like this before. Apart from a knot of shoe-shine boys on the corner by the fruit stall, no one else seemed to be around. They stared at him as he went past and one of them called out mockingly, ‘Give us a birr and I’ll polish your shoes, barefoot boy!’
‘Give us a birr and I’ll polish your face for you,’ he shot back at them, then had to duck as a banana skin whistled past his ear.
Their laughter was good-humoured, though. He could tell they wouldn’t bother him. He walked on up the road, squaring his shoulders, trying to look confident in this unfamiliar place.
Here it was. This was the corner with the pink and blue sign that Dani had described and there, a little way further up, was the kiosk.
Mamo hesitated. He hadn’t thought out what he was going to say. How could he just walk up and ask the person behind the counter to tell him about the sick lady in the house up the road? What reason would he give?
To give himself time to think, he sauntered past the kiosk towards the long whitewashed wall and the big green gates further down the lane. That must be it. That must be Dani’s house.
One of the gates was slightly ajar. Mamo slowed down, trying to see as much as he could. His jaw fell open. The place was a palace! Broad steps edged with flowerpots led up between pillars to a glass front door, and windows stretched away on either side. There were trees and a gravel drive, and grass, and bright flowers under the windows.
I didn’t know it would be like this, Mamo thought.
He was filled with a mixture of awe and astonishment. Why on earth had Dani run away from all this? He must have been out of his mind.
An old man dressed in a khaki drill suit suddenly appeared at the open gate, startli
ng Mamo.
‘What do you want? What are you staring at?’
‘Nothing,’ stammered Mamo, stepping back. ‘I just . . .’
‘Get out of it,’ the old man shouted shrilly, banging the gate shut.
Mamo walked back slowly towards the kiosk. A kind-looking woman was standing framed in the little window, leaning over to arrange some packets of sweets on the counter. Her eyes hardened when they took in Mamo’s barefoot shabbiness, but he stopped and smiled at her ingratiatingly.
‘What?’ she barked.
‘Could you let me have a glass of water?’ Mamo said politely, and he added the beggar’s formula, ‘for the sake of Jesus.’
Her glance softened. Mamo stood respectfully away from the window as she bent down and poured out a drink from a container under the counter. She handed it to him and he drank it all down, though he was no longer thirsty, and gave the glass back to her with a murmur of thanks.
‘What are you doing round here?’ she asked. ‘I haven’t seen you before.’
A plan was beginning to form in Mamo’s head.
‘I’m looking for the church of St Raphael,’ he said. ‘It’s round here somewhere, isn’t it?’
‘St Raphael? No. St Gabriel’s is not far. You have to go out of this lane and turn up at the end. It’s a good walk up the hill.’
‘Perhaps that was it. St Gabriel.’ Mamo nodded. ‘I thought the lady said St Raphael but I probably got it wrong.’
‘What lady?’ The woman was leaning forward. Gossip was probably everything to her, Mamo thought. It was hardly surprising, in a quiet place like this.
‘She lives near here,’ Mamo said, thrilled with his own cleverness. ‘She was in her car a while ago and she gave me some money for my sick mother. She was really kind. I could tell she was ill, though. I asked her if she was all right and she said she was going abroad for an operation, so I promised to pray for her at any church she liked. I thought she said St Raphael, but it must have been Gabriel, after all.’
The woman was clearly charmed. She heaved a sentimental sigh.
‘Ah, that would be Woizero Ruth, poor lady.’
‘Woizero Ruth! Yes, that was her name.’ Mamo was trying not to sound too eager.
‘She’s beyond the help of prayers.’ The woman was shaking her head. ‘In this life, anyway.’
‘Oh,’ said Mamo, aware for the first time of the importance of his mission. Until that moment, Dani’s mother had seemed imaginary, but she was becoming real now. ‘Has she passed away, then?’
The woman hesitated, torn between a desire to be sensational but unsure of the exact state of affairs.
‘I’m sure she has,’ she said at last. ‘There’s trouble in that house. Something’s happened. Woizero Zeni, she’s the maid, and a good friend of mine, says she’s on oath not to say a word, but the master, Ato Paulos, goes out every day looking like a thunder cloud. It’s something to do with the boy. I know that much. I haven’t seen him for a long time. Everything’s been all upset there since Woizero Ruth went off for her operation, poor lady, but something else happened yesterday. Visitors were coming and going all day, wearing mourning clothes most of them. The whole place is in an uproar. It can only mean one thing, can’t it?’
‘I suppose so,’ Mamo said. He heard a metallic clang and looked round. The pale green gates had swung open and a big black car, polished to a high sheen, was turning out of them, coming down towards him. He stepped back and watched as it went past. A man was sitting in the back behind the driver. Immaculately dressed in a dark suit, with a white shirt and black tie, he stared coldly for a moment or two into Mamo’s eyes before the car swept past him in a flurry of dust and scattering of stones.
Ato Paulos had moved through every stage of anger, from his first irritation to all-consuming fury, but as time passed and he could find no trace of Dani anywhere, he started to feel afraid.
He’d felt the normal kinds of fear often in his life. He’d been scared as a child of his own stern father, often frightened in his youth during the years of revolution and war that had gripped Ethiopia, and while he was a soldier there had been moments of sheer gut-wrenching terror, when he’d seen his men blown to pieces all around him and had expected in the next instant to die too.
This fear was different, and much worse. Ato Paulos was afraid of his wife.
He wasn’t afraid that she would die. Her operation seemed to have succeeded perfectly. But he was desperately frightened that when she found out that Dani had disappeared, she would be so angry with him that she would stop loving him.
Everyone believed, he knew, that he was the master in his house, and that Ruth was completely under his thumb, but in fact she’d always had her own way in the things that mattered, especially when it came to Dani. Ato Paulos had seen that she was spoiling him, but somehow he hadn’t been able to put things right, and when he’d tried it had always gone wrong. He’d only made Dani scared of him and driven him back to his mother.
‘You’re so hard on Dani,’ Ruth often said to him, her big eyes filling with reproachful tears.
If she came home and found that her darling son was missing, that he’d disappeared, vanished into thin air – he shut his eyes and swallowed. He couldn’t bear to think of it. If only he’d known! If only he’d realized what the little fool would do!
Yes, but what had he done? That was the problem. Where could he possibly have gone?
Discreetly at first, but more and more desperately, Ato Paulos had checked on every person he could think of, telephoning some and calling in person on others. He knew people were beginning to wonder and talk. They’d started to call him back, wanting to know if everything was all right. He’d managed so far to put them off, but weeks had gone by now, and there was still no sign of Dani.
Surely, he said to himself again and again, he must be staying with someone. He can’t be out there on the streets. He wouldn’t last five minutes. He’d have come home if things were that bad. But the thought wouldn’t go away.
Ato Paulos felt as if he was living in a nightmare.
15
Dani stood quite still when Mamo told him, as gently as he could, that people were making funeral visits to the house. He felt stunned.
After a moment or two he turned round and began to walk quickly away. Mamo ran to catch up with him.
‘But it mightn’t have been her, your ma,’ he said. ‘That woman didn’t really know. It could have been anyone.’
Dani didn’t answer. He didn’t want Mamo’s opinion. He was sure that what he’d feared all along, what he’d known in his heart of hearts, was true. Mamma was dead. There was no hope for him at all now, no one there at home for him. He could never go back. He was doomed to live on the streets for the rest of his life.
‘Listen,’ Mamo panted, struggling to keep up with him. ‘I’ll go back again. I’ll ask someone else. You can’t be sure.’
Dani turned on him.
‘I just want to be on my own,’ he said. ‘I’ll see you later,’ and he hunched his shoulders and veered off across the mass of crawling traffic to the other side of the road, leaving Mamo on the pavement, standing helplessly and watching him go.
Dani didn’t look back. He was hardly aware of the road, the slow-moving cars, or the people walking past him. He wanted to find a place where he could be alone, a crack in a wall or a hole in the ground where he could hide, shut out the world and block his thoughts out too.
He found a place quite soon. It was a shady corner under a tree, just outside the wall of the church. He sat there, hardly moving, his arms round his knees, for hours.
It was late afternoon when he got back to the pitch. Mamo had told the others what had happened. They were sympathetic, clicked their tongues, shook their heads and offered him pieces of fruit they’d salvaged from behind the store, but they didn’t really understand, and soon moved on to other topics. None of them had known what it was like to have a devoted, adoring mother, or if they had, they’d lost he
r so long ago the memory of her had gone.
Mamo sat close to him that evening, as they settled back down on their pitch after an expedition to a charity clinic to get some medicine for a sore on Shoes’ face. Dani was still numb, unable to take in the disaster that had overtaken him. He was hardly aware of anything around him.
‘Look,’ Mamo said, touching his arm. ‘Why don’t you go and see your pa? Just try. He’s probably all sad and he’ll be really nice to you. You’re his son, aren’t you? Well then.’
A scene immediately began to unroll like a film in front of Dani’s eyes – the pale green metal gates swinging open, the beautiful house floating serenely in front of him, Meseret running away from Zeni to fling her arms round his knees, his father coming out of the front door and walking down the steps towards him.
I could, he thought. Why don’t I? I will!
But then behind his father, in the still unfurling scene, he saw another figure. Feisal was standing behind his father’s shoulder. Whatever else had happened, Feisal would still be there, waiting to carry him off to Jigjiga. And now he could see more clearly the expression on his father’s face. It was a snarl of rage, his eyes blazing, his mouth contorted with fury. Anything would be better than facing his anger. Anything. Even this.
The vision had disappeared now.
So what if I’m his son? he thought bitterly. What does he care about that? I’m nobody to him. He despises me.
The sun had set a while ago and the chill of night was taking hold. Dani was shivering with cold now, as well as misery.
‘Here, hold Suri for a moment,’ Mamo said, dumping the puppy into Dani’s arms. ‘I’m going to get a drink of water.’
The puppy whined and licked Dani’s hand. Absently, Dani stroked the rough yellow fur. He’d try to stop thinking about it all, for tonight, anyway. Maybe he was just living through a nightmare that would go away. Perhaps it would all look different in the morning.
During the next few days, Dani, sunk in gloom though he was, couldn’t help noticing that something had changed in the gang. Everyone had been considerate at first, not pestering him with questions, even giving him more than his share of food, but their tolerance was beginning to wear thin.
The Garbage King Page 20