Heliopolis (17 page)

Zé was preparing to leave. He got to his feet, took a phone from his inside breast pocket, and called his pilot. ‘Leaving in five minutes. Start the engines please.’

If I said nothing now, Zé would take my silence as assent. It would be a done deal. Melissa had suggested I take the place, but she couldn’t have meant it. I was back at the stove now, resuming work on the risotto, but I was preparing to say something, anything, to lodge my objection.

The helicopter started to whine into life above us. Zé drained his glass, and made for the door.

‘I’m glad you have some sense, Ludo,’ he said. ‘If she is too spoilt to take advantage of this opportunity, then I shall make it available to you, who appreciates it. She can stay here with her loser.’

She never sees her loser, I thought. And the loser can’t be trusted. She needs me to stay here and look after her, to make sure she’s OK.

‘For your information, I’m marrying my loser,’ she blurted out.

‘What are you talking about?’ Zé said, freezing at the door. ‘You can’t get married. You’re too young.’

‘I’m old enough to be pregnant.’

I stared, my hand stilled, as the rice in the bottom of the pan began to blacken and burn.

S
o the problem is . . . what? You can’t stop thinking about her? You’re addicted?’ asks Flávia.

We’re at the
lanchonete
, drinking milkshakes and eating steak and melted cheese ‘Beirut’ sandwiches. Flávia slipped her cutlery from its plastic bag as soon as the food arrived and is now cutting up her sandwich into neat morsels, which are disappearing into her one by one at top speed. I haven’t started mine. A lot has happened this morning, and I am unashamedly offloading it on to her. She looks bored.

‘Perhaps I am addicted. I don’t know. I left the country for a year once, and being away from her definitely helped.’

She swallows carefully and wipes her mouth before speaking. ‘There’s one solution for you to start with: try not seeing her. She is your sister. And she’s married.’

‘She’s not my real sister, remember?’

Flávia shrugs. ‘Whatever you say.’

The phone ringing in my office this morning was so unexpected that I momentarily felt a surge of adrenaline, imagining that I was about to catch my nuisance caller in the act—then I remembered that his cover had been blown for some time. The one voice I did not expect to hear was Melissa’s.

She got straight to the point. ‘Ernesto knows.’

‘What?’

‘OK—he doesn’t know, but he suspects.’

‘I could have told you that. I had lunch with him yesterday.’

This stalled her. ‘How come?’

‘He’s a client of mine. You should take more of an interest in his work. He changed jobs without even telling you. He works for your father now.’

‘Yes, he told me that too.’ She sighed into the phone. ‘This is all too much for me.’

‘It’s OK,’ I said. ‘He doesn’t know that it’s me who comes to stay. He’s not even sure that anyone does. You just have to reassure him.’

‘We can do better than that. I called to tell you that you’re never coming round here again.’

‘Don’t be hasty.’

‘This is the opposite of hasty. You should have stopped a long time ago. When I’m alone, at least. I think we both know it’s a little weird.’

‘You called
me
last night, remember?’

‘It doesn’t matter who called who. It’s messed up, Ludo. Ernesto mentioned a couple of other things—stuff about messages on the bathroom mirror, and someone reading his diary—so unless you want to talk about those as well, I suggest that we leave the conversation there and agree that we won’t see one another like that any more.’

‘Wait.’

‘And if you ever come over here uninvited again I’ll tell Ernesto exactly who creeps into my bed while he’s gone. Understand?’

My second attempt to say ‘Wait’ met with a dull telephonic full stop.

I charged out of my office, intending to find her and remonstrate with her in person, but ran into Oscar in the corridor. He gave me a punch on the arm that was meant to seem playful, but felt like he was trying to cause me pain.

‘I bet that gave you a shock, didn’t it?’ he said. ‘Finding out the MaxiBudget client is actually your own brother-in-law?’

‘It did. But I guess I shouldn’t have been too surprised—Zé likes to keep things in the family.’

‘It should be fun, anyway, all of us working together. How was your lunch?’

‘Very instructive.’

‘Excellent. Now, to business. Just because the client is family doesn’t mean that I don’t want an incredible piece of work from you on this. You don’t want Dennis showing you up, do you?’

‘What?’

‘He may only be here temporarily, and he may be half-foreign, but he’s good. He’s already come up with some insightful stuff. It would be embarrassing for you if we went with one of his ideas over yours, wouldn’t it?’

‘Very.’

‘So get working. That reminds me. Have you got another of your focus groups with the cleaner lined up?’

‘I can organise one.’

‘I told Dennis you’d run his concepts past a real slum-dwelling lady. Just stop by his office and pick up some copies of his work next time you’re seeing her, will you? See what she makes of them.’

‘No problem.’

‘See you at the meeting.’ He was already halfway across the office floor, his retreating form framed by an enormous red, womb-like oval on the wall, so that he resembled a cartoon character walking off into the sunset at the end of the feature.

I went to find Dennis, who took me aside and told me he was worried he might have caught something from the prostitute.

I was in no mood to console him. ‘You didn’t take precautions? Even with that bulging bag of prophylactics? Perhaps you should get yourself tested. Go see the company doctor.’

‘Thanks,’ he said, looking only momentarily confused by how well I knew the contents of his wash bag. ‘Let me know what you think.’

I left his concepts in my office. Deflated, trying to overlook the fact that no matter how bad they were, I had come up with nothing, I headed upstairs to the bathroom that used to be Flávia’s kitchen for a think. Which is where she found me.

On finding out that her shift was ending, I dragged her out immediately with the promise of sandwiches and milkshakes. She protested that she had shopping to do first, so I herded her at top speed around the small local supermarket until she had collected the groceries she wanted. This morning’s events were weighing on my mind so much that it was only when I saw Flávia counting out her coins at the checkout that I thought I should probably have offered to buy her shopping. Now we are back at the
lanchonete
I can make up for that.

She has finished her sandwich and is distractedly rubbing a red-string bracelet up and down her wrist. It catches and tangles but she smoothes it back. She is trying but failing to look interested. I guess she thinks that her listening to my moaning is the price I’m asking for the parade of shakes and snacks I am bankrolling on her behalf.

‘Anyway,’ I go on. ‘Not seeing Melissa is out of the question. She’s my
sister
. We spend family weekends together.’

Flávia sighs. She hasn’t got time for my soap operas, but her compassion functions all the same, and makes her want to help me in spite of the fact that mostly she despises me.

‘So what are you going to do?’ she says.

‘I don’t know. Judging by this morning’s conversation things might be out of my hands.’

The end of her straw gurgles and hisses as it seeks around in the base of the glass, craving more sugary, milky fuel.

‘What you think I should do?’ I ask.

She laughs. ‘Dear Lord! How do I know what you should do? Aren’t you rich enough to afford a real shrink?’

‘I care what you think.’

‘Why do you care what I think? I’m just the woman who cleans the toilets.’

‘You’re the only real person in my life.’

‘Why? Is this a fairy tale? Are you so poisoned by the people in your life that you can only have a real conversation with a poor old toilet scraper like me?’

‘I’m not saying that. I’m saying that somehow I have lost sight of myself.’

‘What?’

‘I don’t know how to express it. My opportunities have blinded me.’

She curses, and spits, and stands up, assembling herself in sections. She might not make it—bits totter and teeter—but she pulls herself together.

‘I think you should stop buying me milkshakes. Right now, I want to punch you in the mouth, and I don’t think that’s going to change any time soon.’

‘What’s wrong with asking you—’

‘You’re a brat! I’m sick of your whining. Some of us have real things to worry about. Like sons recovering from gunshot wounds.’

‘How is he?’

‘Go to hell.’

The valediction is emphatic, but her departure is not. It takes her a full minute of muttering to collect up her shopping and shuffle to the door. After she’s finally gone, I sit toying with the greaseproof paper my sandwich came in. Then I throw a wad of damp money down on to the bar, and rush after her.

I am fourteen. Yesterday I ate my first club sandwich. Today it’s Rebecca’s turn to have me for the day, to keep me occupied before school starts. We’re welcomed at the door of a small, clean building not far from an immense out-of-town favela, which Rebecca has explained to me is one of the orphanages she oversees. As the lady at the door shows us in we are swamped by a tide of children, a tsunami of uncomplicated love. Rebecca steps to one side, but I am caught. They climb my legs, and clamber on my shoulders, and hang from my neck. Rebecca addresses each child by name, and introduces me. As one boy goes politely to shake my hand she sees me flinch at the sight of the outbreak of pink warts that stands out from the dark skin of his hand.

‘Shake it, now,’ she mutters, deadly serious. ‘This could have been you.’

‘I don’t want to talk to you.’ Flávia is motoring along the pavement at what is probably approaching her top speed.

‘I didn’t mean to offend you,’ I say, orbiting her like a satellite.

‘Leave me. Get out of my life. Why do I waste my time listening to this playboy?’

I drop away and follow her from a distance. Her staccato, angry stomp eventually settles into a graceful lope that must be her long distance pace, her cruising speed. She’s still exclaiming loudly, taking her outrage and indignation round the block, scolding herself for the time she has squandered on me and my problems.

We double back past the office, and she carries on walking, towards the favela. I follow. I don’t notice the frontier—there isn’t one—but I can tell when we’re on the other side. All the buildings we pass are both ‘unofficial’ and precarious, or else reclaimed, and on their second or third use. Kids kick a bald football around a rubbish-fretted clay pitch. Radios blast loud funk and hip-hop from holes in the honeycomb. One boy in a yellow T-shirt flies a small, multicoloured kite that zips and veers over the players. I know that kites are used as warning signals, to let
traficantes
know when the police are coming, and I wonder whether this boy is merely playing, or earning a wage. At one end of the pitch, three men in coloured vests stand around a rusty car chassis holding tools and arguing, looking like they’re trying to reassemble the vehicle from scratch. Only a street or two from the office, this is a different world, where the sterility of progress is held off by something that is all the more vital for being so precarious.

The main body of the community is fringed by fragile wooden homes, the defences these afford broken up by narrow alleys. Ancient political posters and advertisements peel on every flat surface—I notice what could be Zé’s faded, peeling eye, bleaching to monochrome, one step from oblivion. Faces look out from behind the hoardings: those who have set up home under the shelter of advertising. I recognise the remains of one poster as an idea of mine from a year ago, a brand of sports shoe whose slogan is “Deserve the Best.” A skeletal horse is tethered to one end. The squat behind of a rusty Volkswagen Fusca protrudes from the other.

We pass a butcher’s—a small shack with two or three large hunks of dripping meat hanging from hooks outside, and live goats and chickens up on the roof. It is unlikely the animals will see ground level alive again. Meanwhile Flávia ploughs on, as if daring me to get closer. I keep my distance, on the opposite side of the road, on the crunchy concrete of a half-finished pavement. I’m looking around me at a dilapidated apartment block, at the football pitch’s broken streetlights, at tyre shops whose owners loiter in overalls at the front of their shacks amid piles of chrome and rubber. When I glance back, she has disappeared. I have no choice but to turn down what I assume to be the alley she took.

The heat is gone immediately, replaced by a cool, shadowy atmosphere—the smell of damp brick dust with a sweet under-note of decaying rubbish and the sour tang of human waste. The steps before me are incredibly steep, as if they were built for a taller race of people. In fact they are just pragmatic. Taking the shallow, leisurely route isn’t an option here: space is at too much of a premium.

And then the concentration of it starts in earnest: the crawling, hotching humanity of it. Improvised half-doors salvaged from building sites are set into low walls, whose concrete is broken up by decorative mosaics of smashed floor tiles and bottle glass. Reclaimed staircases crammed into new contexts lead to cubbyhole houses filled with people, packed in together like larvae in seedpods. I’m standing there wide-eyed, staring up at the improbably narrow thoroughfares, at the thick canopy of wires and pipes that shades them, and taking in the smells of food bubbling on stoves, of bleach, of rotting vegetables, when I hear her voice, close to me.

‘You shouldn’t be here. You’ll run into trouble.’

‘Just let me talk to you,’ I say, seeing her round face floating at a corner.

‘Not in the street. Come to my house.’

She sighs as she climbs the steps. I go to carry her plastic bag for her but she snatches it out of my grasp, saying nothing. I walk tentatively behind her, trying to take everything in, working out how it measures up to my expectations. The surreal quality of the knowledge that I come from somewhere like this, even somewhere worse than this, is overwhelming. It is as alien a place as any I have ever been in, yet somehow it is not discomfiting. There’s something in the human proximity that is intimate, almost soothing. I wouldn’t be so crass as to suggest it’s like a homecoming, but for the first time it doesn’t feel humiliating that this is the world that people like Oscar use to define me by.

I bathe in the friendly normality of it, pleasantly surprised by the fact that I am not caught in a vicious gunfight, by the familiar shouts that greet Flávia as we progress up the alley, by the sight of house-proud ladies sweeping the streets and watering the potted plants that flank their almost-doorways. I feel ashamed of these thoughts almost as I have them, and then spare an angry thought for Melissa, who would probably be terrified of this place, yet wouldn’t notice if you upgraded her sofas in the night.

‘Is your son here?’ I ask, sensing we might be close.