Trash - Andy Mulligan [21]
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.
3
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