Trash (7 page)

I fell on my knees, and they let me.

I managed to take hold of somebody’s leg, and held it – I put my head on my hands. I was down there, kneeling, and I said, ‘I swear on my mother’s soul I did not find a
bag. I am telling the truth, sir – please don’t kill me. I cannot help you, I am speaking the truth.’

Where did I find the strength? I know that it was José Angelico’s strength.

‘I am sorry,’ I said, and I was fighting for my life, and knew it. ‘I should have told you I found money, but I should have given it to my friend also, and I didn’t so I lied to you. Please don’t kill me, please.’

‘What belt were you under?’ said the policeman.

‘Four, sir, honestly – I promise.’

‘Where’s the bill the money was wrapped in?’

‘I put it in the paper sack. I put the money in my pocket.’

‘Raphael, listen to me.’

This was the man in the suit, I think. He knelt down next to me, but my head was throbbing so badly I cannot really remember.

‘You’re the breadwinner, aren’t you, for your stinking little family?’

I nodded, but I didn’t look up. ‘Yes, sir.’

‘If anything happened to you, your family would have big, big problems. What would your auntie do?’

‘I don’t know, sir.’

‘Two little cousins – what would happen to them? Can you hear me?’

‘Yes – I don’t know, sir. I didn’t find a bag, sir, please believe me.’

‘We can drop you out of that window. Or we can take
you out the back. We can do it right now – we have a special place, you know? Perfect for little scum like you. Where no one hears anything. And we will – if we want to – break every bone in your body.’ He took me by the arm, and was squeezing it and lifting it. ‘ We will break this first. You understand that, don’t you?’

I was nodding still, and shivering, and stinking. My twisted arm was in the air, me on my knees, and I waited for the snap, the pain so great I was silent, open-mouthed, unable to make a sound, just waiting.

‘We could put you in the trash and nobody would care. Nobody would even come looking – you understand me? You’d end up in a sack.’

I nodded. I could not speak.

‘So I’m going to ask you one last time …’ He hoisted me and bent me over the window so I was staring down, and I felt someone take my ankles so all they had to do was tip me out. Again, I was looking at the ground as they balanced me. ‘Where is the bag you found?’

I tried to look up, but my arm was so bent and my back was so twisted. I tried to speak, and couldn’t, and tried again. I said, ‘On my mother’s soul, sir—’

The man shouted: ‘What? I can’t hear you!’

I was tipped out more, and I screamed for help. ‘I promise, I promise!’ I shouted. ‘I found money only. I found no bag. If I had found it … if I knew anything about it, I swear you would have it now. I would give it to you! I would – please, listen …’ I could hardly breathe but I
found the words. ‘I would take you back to my house and give it to you. But how can I, sir, when I did not find it?’

I started sobbing, because I knew that this was my last chance. I felt the hands on my ankles shift, and then – after some silence – I was lifted back into the room and dropped onto the floor.

When I looked up, I could see the men talking together in low voices. I was shaking all over, and I could not move. After more time, one of them looked over and told me to stand up.

‘You’ve shat yourself, haven’t you?’ he said.

I nodded, and I clawed my way up the wall so I was half standing.

The man shook his head. ‘You stink of it. And of garbage.’ He turned away from me. ‘We’re wasting our time,’ he said. ‘Boy, that’s all you are, that’s what all of you are. You are a piece of garbage. What are you?’

‘Sorry, sir, garbage, sir.’ I whispered it.

‘Eleven hundred pesos, wasting our time with crap. Look at you.’

I managed to meet his eyes again, waiting to be struck as he came over.

‘What is the point of you, eh?’ He turned to the other men. ‘Look at him – why do these people keep breeding? Put your hands behind your back.’

I did so, and waited to be hit.

He sighed more heavily, and I could see that he hadn’t slept for a long time – he was frightened and tired. I
prayed in my head – I could see he was weighing me, looking me over, wondering what, if anything, I was worth. Valuable or trash? To be kept here and beaten and beaten … or thrown away? What if they brought Gardo? What if they brought my aunt, and beat three different stories out of us?

I think I held my breath.

At last he decided. He looked at the policeman behind me and said, ‘Get him out. We’re wasting time.’

I felt a hand on the back of my neck. I was taken out of the door. I was taken down the stairs, and a guard took me down a passage and down more steps. A few minutes later, I was on the street, and I found myself running on legs that bent like I was drunk, and wouldn’t do as I wanted. But at least I was running, crazily, down a long, empty road. At least I was free, and at least – unlike poor José Angelico – I was alive.

My legs got stronger. I knew then that I could run for ever.

It was raining and cool.

I just kept running steadily. I had no idea where I was and I didn’t care – I felt like I could run for ever. I ran through the streets, heading for any lights that I saw. I had no money at all, and I didn’t care. The world felt so big, the rain was so fresh, and I remember thinking,
Why is it raining in the dry season? How can it be so cool?
The sky was so high. Time had slowed right down, but it can’t have been more than three hours, and as I ran I realized more and more how stuck the police were, if I was the only clue they had. Again it was clear how important the things we’d found must be, and then I began to think how lucky I was and how close death had been.

The hand could have opened and dropped me. I could have been thrown away, I could be – now, right now – slowly dying on a stone floor.

I closed my eyes and ran faster with my arms stretched out.

My auntie had said, ‘Raphael found something,’ and that was the only clue they had. Just those words had led to the whole neighbour hood being searched, me being taken. Taken, but free now.

At last I slowed to a walk, and at the far end of the street I saw a landmark I knew. I didn’t know its name, but I knew it was in the city business district. The landmark was the statue of a soldier, raised up high. He had a drawn sword, ready for some charge in some war. I had passed him before, yelling something to his comrades, fighting for freedom! I walked right up to him and looked up, and I said, ‘They let me go. I did not give it up.’

I could not believe they had let me go, and the statue just carried on yelling.

There was a surge of rain and the kind of breeze I’d felt up on the dumpsite, in from the sea – a typhoon breeze, though this was not the typhoon season. I looked at the soldier and thought,
So, am I garbage?
And I laughed, because it occurred to me – there and then – that the garbage boy had just lied his way out from under the noses of those clever men. A little garbage boy had sat there shaking, saying, ‘I don’t have the bag,’ when all the time I knew exactly where it was and what had been in it. We’d caught the train and we’d found the locker. We had the letter – and OK, we did not know what it all meant yet. But the garbage boys were way
ahead of the garbage police, and I had said nothing to those men.

I walked on.

It would take two or three hours to reach Behala, and I was so happy walking – I knew which direction to take. I passed an old man and two little kids with a cart. They were night sweepers, shovelling trash. I asked the man if he had a cigarette, and he looked at me strangely. I had forgotten that my face was covered in blood.

He gave me a little bit of a cigarette, and I sat and smoked with him. The kids stood and looked at me, and I was stinking, but nobody seemed to care much. The little girl was about five, and the other – maybe a girl, maybe a boy – looked about seven. The seven-year-old got a bottle of water out of the cart, and I splashed some over my nose and mouth. Then I said goodbye and started running again.

Let me tell you something else – I think I will tell it now.

On that computer we had found out about José – the man whose bag it was. José Angelico, God rest his poor soul, was a dead man. His name had been in the news. Gardo had said, ‘What if he’s a killer?’ – but it turned out the poor man had been killed.

Guess where he had died?

He had died in a police station. The newspaper said that he had died while police were interrogating him. In the same police station as me? I wondered. In the same room?

Had they dropped him from the window on purpose? By mistake?

I was passing a little park, and I ducked into it for a moment and sat on the grass. The rain was so light and cool. I guess I was in deep shock, so I just sat for a while, and I thought more about poor José Angelico.

He had been arrested on suspicion of a major, major crime – it had made all the papers. After the computer, we had gone to the papers – one thing there’s a lot of on the dumpsite is old news papers. It didn’t take us long to find the right ones, and we sat there like three little old men, me reading it all out to Rat, who nodded and stared. The police had arrested José Angelico for robbery.

Six million dollars.

We sat back and tried to imagine what even a thousand dollars looks like. Gardo tried to translate it into pesos and got a headache so bad he had to lie down. We were laughing, trying to imagine how you walk with all those million dollars in your pocket, and then we stopped laughing.

José Angelico had died in a police station, they said, and that’s why I stuck to the lie, even as they held me out of that window – for the sake of José Angelico and his serious-faced little girl. I also think José was with me, because I know the dead come back.

The crime he was accused of was robbing a government man – the vice-president – of six million dollars, and maybe he’d done it and the money was waiting somewhere. He must have put that bag in the trash before they
got him – I think perhaps they made him confess to it, and that’s when they came looking.

One newspaper told us a little bit about him. It said that he had been an orphan, but had been adopted by a man called Dante Jerome Olondriz, son of Gabriel Olondriz. That was the name on the letter we’d found – Gabriel Olondriz, the man in Colva Prison. José Angelico, it said, had worked as a houseboy for the vice-president for eighteen years. It said that José Angelico had an eight-year-old daughter and no other family. That was why he was writing to Gabriel Olondriz.

I sat shaking in the rain, and I knew for sure now that we would have to go to Colva Prison and deliver the letter.

My name is Grace and you will hear only one thing from me.

Father Juilliard has asked me to say what kind of a man José Angelico was, as I worked closely with him. I am a maid to Senator Zapanta – the vice-president who was robbed. I have been his maid for four years, so I knew the senior houseboy well. I can say that José was kind, gentle, trustworthy and honest. He had a very quiet voice. He didn’t smoke. He took a little brandy at the weekend, but not so much. His wife had died before I knew him, and he was paying for his daughter to go to school. Her name was Pia Dante, but she could not live with her father. José was live-in staff, and the senator’s house is a long way from schools. He boarded her with a family near to her school, and they saw each other once a week. He had also had a son, but the little boy had died very young.

I don’t know what else to say.

I was very, very upset when I heard about it, and like everyone, I said it was impossible. José Angelico was the most trustworthy man, and he did not seem brave. As soon as I could – after he had been taken – I went to find his daughter. But when I found the house, I was told she had gone. I asked where, I asked when, and I honestly tried to find a way of looking for her – but the family that had boarded her were not helpful. I don’t know what happened to the little girl. There are many boys and girls on the streets, as everybody knows.

José Angelico was a good man, whatever he did – and I won’t forget him.

I’m Olivia Weston, and I was what they call a ‘temporary house-mother’ at Behala’s Mission School. I also have one part of the story. The boys and Father Juilliard have asked that I write it down carefully, so that is what I will do.

I’m twenty-two, and I was taking time after university to see some of the world. I came to the city intending to stay in it for a few days, get over my jet-lag, and then fly on to meet up with friends for a month or so of swimming and surfing.

I visited the Behala dumpsite, though, and my plans changed.

I did go swimming and surfing – I did have a holiday. But I found lying on the beach was good for a week, and then I started to feel restless and useless. Behala had hit me hard, and I couldn’t get it out of my mind. I’d gone there to deliver some sponsorship money for my parents, who had
a friend who’d worked there. My father works in the Foreign Office, and had paid my airfare (and a bit more) in the hope I’d get something educational out of the trip. Sure enough, before I knew it, Father Juilliard had suggested I teach reading and writing to the little ones. Then I got involved in a water-sanitation project they have going. Then I was doing very basic first aid, because the kids are always getting scratched or bitten, and things go septic fast – and then I got the title ‘temporary house-mother’ – which means you agree to do daytime shifts helping out wherever you can.

I fell in love.

I fell in love with the eyes looking at me, and the smiles. I think charity work is the most seductive thing in the world, and I’d never done it before. For the first time in your life you’re surrounded by people who tell you you’re making a difference. The Behala children are beautiful, and to see them on the rubbish tips all day can break your heart. If you come to this country, do the tourist things. But come to Behala too and see the mountains of trash, and the children who pick over them. It is a thing to change your life.