Heliopolis (23 page)

‘You mean it?’ His voice has changed completely. ‘He’s a foot soldier. He wouldn’t fool around with you like us. He’ll kill you. He’ll quarter you and burn the pieces in a ditch so the cops have to rake through the ashes to identify you from bits of bone. He’s done it before. I’m serious, man. You don’t want us to get him.’

‘I think you’re afraid to get him. In case I’m right,’ I say. Panicking. Bleeding. ‘And he finds out you pissed on me, and hurt me. And decides to put one in your head.’

That dangerous pride of his again. ‘You’re killing yourself here—you know that? Calling someone like him to the room changes everything.’

‘So get him,’ I say, breathing hard, heart thumping. ‘And mention MaxiMarket.’

The door opens and closes, and the steps retreat again. And I suspect that this might be the last time I hear from them. Or from anybody else.

I sit lashed to the flimsy chair, trying to avoid the pungent smells and cloying sensations of vomit and urine cooling on my front, and to come to terms with the fact that I am about to die. I struggle pointlessly against the greasy, chafing electrical wire on my wrists, and try to make the chair legs buckle in the hope that this might somehow help to free me.

The vacuum in my stomach begins to shout louder, especially now I have been sick. With every move I make, I am squandering priceless energy and fuelling further pangs of hunger. Food parades before me when I close my eyes: legs of roast pork dancing in theatrical chorus lines; cobs of corn spinning like the dials of a fruit machine; collapsing kaleidoscopic polygons of chops and steaks. At first I encourage the visions, but then I stop, because they’re making things worse. I imagine I can hear my mother’s voice through the radio that booms somewhere nearby, saying, ‘Avoid your favourite foods. There will be a time when you can’t have them—and the more you eat them now, the more you will yearn for them then.’

And then, because I’m trying so hard not to think about food, all I can think of is sex. Visions of Melissa’s deep-red nipples, of those succulent nuts and berries, of my thumbs shaping the slope of her back as she sleeps, of her warm, scented skin. I find myself wondering whether in spite of the restraints I could contrive to masturbate. Then I fear that if I did I might lose vital minerals and vitamins. I used to be afraid to do it. My mother told me when I was very young that my father’s ghost would be watching if I so much as looked at myself. It was a near-perfect deterrent. Even now, as I contemplate the idea, and feel tingling constriction in my underpants, his spectre rises before me. His face is in shadow, as always, but I sense the leering expression, and his hands are reaching towards me out of the darkness, proffering dollar bills in my direction as he urges me on like a pervert in a lap-dancing club.

An insect has bitten or stung my leg in several places, and there are two or three inflamed knots in the muscle of my calf where the venom is travelling, as if my captors had cut my skin and slipped peanuts into the gaps. Reaching down behind my back, pulling hard against the tightening, cutting plastic wire, I can just reach the bites. They itch maddeningly but pierce with pain when I touch them. Contorted in the chair, I play with them idly, enjoying the extremity of the sensation, rubbing sweat into the inflamed areas and vaguely imagining that by working the venom into my system in this way, I am making some kind of roux, a poison sauce. The pain should provide enough of a distraction to banish the thought of sex, but something about the inflammation, the concentrated blood, means that it has the opposite effect.

My thoughts about Melissa expand to encompass the whole family. Why did they have to
adopt
me? To own me in that way, without even declaring it to the world? From where I am sitting now, the answer is clear. Zé took me in to use me as a decoy, to protect his darling daughter, and stop her from being taken ever again—and here I am, in her place. That insurance policy they bought has finally paid out.

‘Insurance policy,’ I say out loud, and for some reason it makes me laugh.

And still the hunger shouts. Louder and louder. The churning in my stomach becomes so acute that I imagine myself capable of an equal kind of force. So I waste more energy struggling uselessly against the electric wire.

They had better leave me here to die, or kill me themselves.

They had better do that for Melissa’s sake.

I thrash about, wrestling these indelicate thoughts. I want to cry out, but fear it might attract the wrong kind of attention. So I try biting the sackcloth and edging it up my face to get back my eyes. But the blindfold is too tight, and gravity is against me. I need a free hand to wrench away this rank cloth from my face. The anticipation of that moment of freedom gives me the impetus to suppress any fears of harming myself and I start rocking the chair from side to side until one plastic leg buckles and I fall sideways. With no sight and no arms to stop it happening, I crack my shoulder hard against the ground. I curl on the floor in the shape of my chair-prison, lashed in a right angle; a shape convulsing with belts of hot pain.

Coming to terms with the floor takes time. There are new smells (that mango is still lying around somewhere, along with whatever they replaced it with), and new sensations to contend with. The shoulder pain cools after much cursing, and some crying, but the dull throb in my jaw persists. Movement of that arm must be kept to a minimum, but I have to get the restraints off somehow. I kick around the floor in a circle, pulling at the wire in every direction, and gasping when the shoulder is touched, but with no success. Eventually I force myself to relax and close my eyes, and I lie with one cheek to the floor, trying to calm down.

Bang.

What sounded like a pistol shot brings me round with a start. Somehow, I fell asleep. I try to return to consciousness slowly, willing my pounding heart to slow down. The shot sounded close, but I hear nothing else.

I stare into the darkness and my mind wanders. It lingers on those two words, spoken by Milton.

Photographic evidence
.

That photograph of me, newborn, with my mother and Rebecca is part of the furniture I grew up with. The mythology of Rebecca’s visit to Heliópolis is so hard-wired into me that I have never thought to question it. But now, lying on the floor, lashed to a chair with electrical wire, the picture appears before my eyes. I look at it properly for once, in my head—at the black and white smile that I have understood to be the defining moment in my life for as long as I can remember. And suddenly I know that I have to get out of here somehow. Because I recognise the background to the picture. I know the room where it was taken.

And it is not in a favela.

I begin to calculate how to get to my feet, so I can circle the room with the chair still attached and try to find a way out. But just as I start to move I hear a sound from the opposing corner of my prison; a scratching, shuffling sound, too loud for an insect, too soft for anything bigger than a rat. If I can get it to come over here, perhaps coat some of the wires in blood to get it to gnaw through them, I could get out, I could get this bag off my head and scratch my scalp and scream and see and plunge my head into clean water. But how do you entice a rat to cross a stinking floor and gnaw wire from your wrists when ripe mango and rotten mango substitute and God knows what else already litter the place? The wire will not appeal, but my flesh might. I begin rubbing my wrists against the grit of the floor, to try and break the skin, to get some smell going for the rat to follow.

‘Come on, boy,’ I say, still cartwheeling in the dirt. ‘Get over here. Who wants mango when you could have wrist flesh? I’ll let you chew on my skin like sun-dried beef. Come on, rat. Eat me, rat.’

‘Are you talking to me?’ says a voice. The girl. The sound was no animal, but her quietly opening the door. ‘Because I don’t like being called rat.’

At the sound of the voice I sob, and relief buckles my body. ‘Help me.’

‘My God. What have they done to you? I could tell it was something bad by how much they were laughing. You
stink
.’

I hear her crossing the room.

‘Get this thing off my head. Get it off now or I might go mad.’

‘Stay still.’

I feel her hands grabbing the sack where it bunches tight, at my ears. A wave of her scent—a clean, feminine smell. The hands grasp, and pull upwards, and my head is stripped clear, and the world returns. Light streams into my eyes. Morning light. Have I been here all night? My mouth snatches at cool air. I grind my hair into the grit of the floor, imagining lice, insects, maggots, wanting to mince them all, to lather my scalp with gravel.

‘OK, OK,’ she says, cutting off my scream of relief. ‘You’re OK now.’

‘What time is it?’

‘Nearly eight.’

I look around at my cell, which is not nearly as squalid as I imagined, with its red floor, its clean, concrete walls, its small glassless window. I catch sight of the piece of mango on the floor, and stop looking around. I don’t want to know what the second object was.

‘Can you get up?’ she says, and I look at her face for the first time.

‘Don’t cry,’ I say. ‘I’m not that badly hurt.’

She slaps me, sending a shot of agony through my jaw. ‘I’m not crying for you, you idiot. Some
traficante
pistol-whipped my brother. He came back a couple of hours ago with a massive cut and bruise under his eye. And on top of that Flávia went crazy at him for hanging out with those people. Like he needs that after what he’s been through.’

‘Are you serious?’

‘You must have some pretty important friends,’ she says, with contempt. ‘Milton told me you were here, and that I should let you go straight away.’

‘Why didn’t he come himself?’

‘Does it surprise you to hear that he doesn’t want to see you?’

‘Does Flávia know I’m here?’

‘She doesn’t know anything. And you’re not to tell her. That boy has had enough trouble without her beating him up over you as well. Sweet Mary, the smell of you.’

I look into her face, the black pools of her eyes, and smile, swaying, the pain in my shattered shoulder and my jaw, the bites on my leg—all forgotten.

‘Not in a million years,’ she says. ‘And certainly not today. Get out of here.’

Stumbling, I follow her through the twisting maze of alleys, breathing sweet morning air, blinking in the light, and feeling the sun on my face. She says nothing, and drops back behind me. When I turn to thank her at the outskirts of the favela, she has gone.

I stagger, reborn, on to the street.

I am twenty-seven. For once I am early for work. Hugging my arms around my battered body, I walk past the clay football pitch, staring dully at the rubbish heap behind the ramshackle goal posts.

On a wall, pasted over innumerable faded old images, is a poster advertising a party tonight to celebrate the launch of MaxiBudget—to take place at the Beehive, round the corner.

My shoulder is bleeding, my chest hurts with every breath I take, I have lost a shoe, and I am covered in urine and vomit.

I feel OK.

I should go home, but the office is closer. Never have I been so glad to see the restored block, the security gates that encircle it, or the avocado tree behind the gates, its branches sprawling like splayed tentacles over the road. I feel automatically in my pocket for my entry pass.

‘May I help you, Senhor?’ The guard’s voice is metallic through the microphone that enables him to remain safely behind bulletproof glass. Unless you’re a cleaner, arriving on foot is suspicious. The guards let me into the car park every day, but they don’t know me—they only know my car.

‘Good morning, er . . . who is this? I can’t see you.’

‘Can I help you?’ the voice repeats. ‘The party isn’t until tonight. Come back later. Good day.’

‘I work here. But as you can see, I’ve had an accident. I have been mugged, and held hostage. My name is Ludo dos Santos—you can check it on the register.’

A small aperture in the window shoots open, enough for me to see the guard’s face. He’s someone I haven’t seen before, possibly a new employee. Though I’m not sure I’d even recognise one of the regulars—I drive past and wave at the glass each morning without seeing the person behind it.

‘If you haven’t got a pass I can’t let you through.’

‘I know how I look, but I’m an employee of this company.’

‘I am paid to let people in when they have a security pass. And not to let them in when they do not. If I may say so, you don’t even look fit to clean the building. And you stink,’ he adds, helpfully.

‘If you call my boss, Oscar Cascavel, he’ll tell you that I work here.’

‘I’m not calling anyone.’

‘Please! I have been kidnapped.’

‘Come on, Senhor, you’re going to have to do better than that. I’ve been a doorman for years. There’s no story you can tell me that I haven’t heard before.’

‘Just let me in.’

‘No way. Now you need to leave before I get my gun out, OK?’

‘You’re going to get your gun out?’

‘If I have to.’

‘You’re going to get your gun out.’

‘There. What did I tell you?’

I’m staring down the barrel of an automatic pistol, which is poking through a tiny aperture in the security glass.

‘Please leave now,’ he says. ‘I don’t want to have to shoot you.’

I stumble through the morning air, noting the song of starlings and the bright green flash of a parakeet above my head, until I somehow manage to blag a pay phone token from a person in the street. Huddling under the shelter of the phone’s giant ear, I dial Oscar’s office number.

‘Ludo dos Santos. This is early in the morning for you. You haven’t been to bed, have you? Where the hell have you been? Getting fucked up again?’

‘I was kidnapped. In the favela. They tied me up.’

He laughs. ‘That’s the best one yet. Now get in here, you can explain it to me later. We’ve got lots on. The party is happening tonight, and your family are all coming.’

‘You’ll have to send someone down to let me in. The guard wouldn’t because I lost my pass.’