The next instalment of Esha Ex, a novel-length work of new fiction, updated daily. For more details click here.
I pushed up the flap a few inches and slid out onto a driveway bordered with bright, cropped grass. The air was full of birdsong. There was another truck behind us and a line of vehicles in front. Workers were opening up the trucks while others unloaded and unpacked.
I pushed up the flap a few inches and slid out onto a driveway bordered with bright, cropped grass. The air was full of birdsong. There was another truck behind us and a line of vehicles in front. Workers were opening up the trucks while others unloaded and unpacked.
I ran along the side, joined the back of the mob of villa workers, watched ‘my’ truck being opened and went forward to volunteer myself to unpack it. One of the men in charge clicked his tongue at me and I stood to attention. He took a piece of paper out of his pocket and jabbed his finger at it.
“See here. This is a list of everything in that truck.”
Junction 14, corner of Nine Square and Kingfisher Island Bypass amber light not currently functioning, use personal judgement, I read.
“Every item accounted for. How it is in there is exactly how it goes to the Family. No diddling about in the middle.”
“Yessir. Of course sir.”
I climbed back into the truck, took the first bolt within reach and balanced it on my shoulder. It was heavy and I got some odd looks from the others. I went to the main gates and got some more odd looks. One of the workers signalled to me, pointing along the wall of the villa. Cursing myself for making such an obvious mistake I turned on my heel and walked the long way around, to the workers’ entrance.
The back of the villa opened up to a bustling goods yard where everything was being unpacked and organised. A young man showed me where I should stack the plastic-covered rolls to be sorted.
“Why are you holding it like that? Isn’t it awkward?” he asked.
I looked around: everyone else was carrying things on their heads, huge baskets flapping with herbs, a cane cage of chickens, even a carved wooden table. We worked together, fast and in silence, and I quickly learned how to stack two or three flattish bolts on my head. The young man thought I was from the truck company. The truck drivers thought I was from the villa.
“I’m Nikko,” said the young man.
“Esha.”
I was taking out the last bolt when there was a nerve-shearing human scream from somewhere near the front. Me and Nikko raced to see what was going on. So did everyone else.
“Through here!” Nikko called, showing me a servants’ passageway that cut through the heart of the compound. As we ran through it he tucked a key, on a leather thong, down under his shirt.
At the front of the villa was a lawn edged with flowers and shrubs. The lawn had been pegged out as a boar-run, posts hammered at intervals into the ground, ropes slung between them. In the middle of the run was a boar with a man speared on its tusk, screaming, with blood oozing from him in long, glutinous strips. The boar tossed its head and dislodged the man, who fell onto the ground with a dense, squashy sound, bleeding freely. The boar plodded grumpily off and stared at the wall. Some workers pulled a couple of stakes away from the sides and penned the animal in.
I ducked under the rope, ran to the injured man, unfurled the bolt I was carrying – eliciting cries of warning and dismay from the other workers – tore off a strip, wadded it up and pressed it to his stomach. The man was thrashing his head and I saw that he had been gored through the arm as well. I tore off another strip and wound it around his arm. The rest of the cloth lay right by and was now ruined from soaking up the man’s blood.
“Go back to your work. The medics are coming,” said a voice through a megaphone, over our heads.
The other staff obeyed, although I didn’t move. At the four corners of the villa were raised towers with men looking out and security cameras up on supports every few feet along the walls. I could see a man watching me through binoculars. It was the man next to him who had the megaphone. I stood up slowly but both men beckoned to me to stay down.
Two medics holding a stretcher between them ran onto the green and joined us. One of them medics replaced my hand with hers on the wound.
“Very well done. Quick thinking. Make up another wad?” she said.
I tore off some cleanish fabric while they put him onto the stretcher. I pressed it to his wound and ran alongside them back inside. There was a large marble hallway with a round table in the middle, closed doors and white-painted corridors going off in either direction. It could have been built two centuries ago, or yesterday. To the side of the lobby was a lift and the medics edged into it, leaving me standing outside. The inside of the lift was decorated more lavishly than any room I’d been in, with dark red walls and a little bronze chandelier, even a loveseat with stiff silk pillows.
“We’ll take it from here,” the medic told me. “You did very well. You probably saved his life.”
“Where are you going?” I asked as the doors began to close.
“The helipad on the roof. An air ambulance is coming.”
The doors shut and I went out. The injured man, who I’d assumed was a gardener, must have been a Family member. If he was just a worker he’d have been driven out to a local hospital in the back of any vehicle to hand, to wait in line for a few hours and bleed to death.
There were still dozens of people outside, and more trucks arriving, although the boar had disappeared and the green was pegged out in long lines again. People noticed me as I came out – my clothes were smeared with blood.
Nikko was waiting for me.
“Impressive,” he grinned.
“I used the Family’s cloth.”
“They won’t miss it.” We were walking back around to the yard. “Whatever they told you, of everything you saw today, eighty per cent gets to the Family. And of that, they use only half.”
“What happens to the rest?”
“Ask me no questions and I’ll tell you no lies. But put it like this: we’ve got nothing. They’ve got everything. They don’t notice when a little bit’s missing.”
“Are they not good to you?”
“No – they are good,” he said hastily. “They just don’t think.”
In the yard we counted up the bolts of cloth.
“What’s it for?” I asked.
“Drapes and linens for the summer party and the guest bedrooms. Guests come and go. Politicians, famous people. It’s a fantasy palace for them. These foreigners think we all live like this, for real, all the time.”
There was a tap flowing directly into the yard. Nikko ducked inside to the half-open kitchen area and came back with two tin cups. I drank three cups of water to fill my stomach.
“I have to tell you, I’m new. I don’t really work here,” I said to Nikko.
“I know, I’ve been here since I was small and I know every face and nearly every name. My mother works here too.”
“Please don’t tell on me.”
“You’ve already proven yourself. And there’s more than enough work to go round. But they don’t pay.”
“They don’t pay?” I wondered when I was ever going to get my hands on actual money.
“What d’you need money for?”
“To buy what I need.”
“They give you everything you need. And you get the most important thing in Miriadh: the protection of the Family. We think of ourselves as the Family’s family: the people they can trust. And we can trust them. This is the best there is. I mean, for people like us.”
The next job was to pluck a pile of chickens which had just been beheaded by a woman at the food-prep end of the yard, near the steeply angled drains for blood and guts, water and waste. The woman was sitting on a stool with the blade’s wooden base braced between her feet. She took a chicken, pushed its neck through the blade, threw the head aside and held the body upside down over the gutter by its feet as the blood flowed out and the wings flapped. Then she sliced the wings off by pushing them through the blade.
“My auntie once sat on a blade like that, by accident,” commented Nikko.
“Twenty years, hundreds of visits to the hospital and she still pisses wonky,” said the woman killing chickens.
“Ma, this is my new friend Esha,” said Nikko.
“Lalita,” said the woman. “Make yourself useful.”
We plucked the chickens until my knuckles were sore and the animals lay in a floppy, bald, bulbous pile in a tureen of water, ready to be made into a stew for the foreigners. Lalita saved many of the kidneys, dropping only a few into the pot. As we were completing our work Nikko left us for a moment and came back with a sharing dish of white rice and different vegetables with a mound of strong red pickle.
“Good boy,” said Lalita.
I noticed the proportions: tons of the cheapest thing, the rice, but not quite enough of the vegetables to comfortably share between three, or even two.
The afternoon drew on and everyone carried on working, with me taking directions from Nikko throughout. A beautiful, well-dressed young woman entered the yard and looked about, her expression sharpening when she saw me in the dirtiest corner. I stood up slowly, bracing for the scolding and expulsion to come. I was covered in human blood, chicken blood, bloodstained water and feathers.
“Hello, you’re the one, from the …incident… earlier today,” the young woman said to me. Her voice was so elegant it chimed in my ears.
I bowed my head.
“Would you come with me? The Family want to see you.”