Trash - Andy Mulligan [44]
Anyway, to return to the story. After a week of this and getting nowhere, I decided to make my move, and get the twenty for Marco. I’d been turning it over in my head, not sharing it – but the more I thought about it, the more it seemed the only way.
I told Raphael and Gardo I was going back to Behala dumpsite, ‘just to fetch something’, and I thought they weren’t going to let me. They said I was crazy and it was way too dangerous. They told me if anyone saw me I could be grabbed and handed over – there was bound to be a reward offered now for any one of us.
They couldn’t imagine what it was I wanted to get, of course, and I didn’t want to tell them for fear of bad luck. I’m just so used to keeping what I do private, I could not share what I was going to do – nor the fact I had to do it before the end of the month, which was coming up fast. All Souls’ Night on its way – that’s the Day of the Dead. I had to get it done before that.
I just said, ‘I’m going,’ again and again. Midnight came, and I slipped out through the roof while the boys were sleeping.
I did say, I think, when you look like the devil’s child you can’t even ride a bus?
You can hold out your money, but you still get swatted off like a fly – that time I rode with Raphael was luck, and the fact that he has a nice smile and I hid behind him. So I walked some of the way, and jumped trucks some of the way. My luck held, and got better: I found a garbage truck by the city zoo, and guess where it was going? It was going to Behala, so I got inside it. Closer to my old home, I had to be on the lookout. Other kids might jump up too, and if I was seen, the boys were right – I had no family, so I might have been sold like a dog.
We got inside the gates all right. There was a police car parked up, doors open, and that gave me a turn. But the police were just chatting to the guards, all scratching their arses, and the dogs didn’t notice anything.
The truck took me past the Mission School, slowing down like it was my personal taxi. I was out fast, dropping and rolling, and I dived in under the building. The school is a big set of metal boxes, all bolted up together. The lower ones stand on legs, so there’s a little bit of space beneath. I curled up here and waited for my heart to slow down. Nobody was out, it seemed, so I uncurled and moved to the back.
There’s a guard at the front, but he dozes away, because who’s going to break in? Who’s going to steal storybooks? It would be robbing from your own people, which is why I felt so low. I was about to thieve not just from the Behala people, where I’d lived, but from Father Juilliard, who had been about the closest thing to a father I’d had so far, never knowing my real father. He was a bit slow and a bit too trusting, of course – everyone knew that. But he was a good old boy and I loved him.
I started to climb the corner.
The windows downstairs all had shutters, which were locked up at night. The upstairs windows had bars and no shutters, and I’d always made sure of an entry point. The truth was that just now and then it was nice to sleep in a big room, but I didn’t make a habit of it. The other bit of truth is that I was in the bad, very bad habit of lifting money from the school safe – I did it once a month, just a little. So there were two bars I’d managed to bend so nobody would notice but my head would fit through. I was through now like a shadow, and down on the old man’s bit of carpet.
How did I steal from the safe?
OK. The safe is on a