The next instalment of Esha Ex, a novel-length work of new fiction, updated daily. For more details click here.
Guests from the party raided the stage and dragged the other dancers off. Orhan fell onto his side, pulled by the ankle, clawing the stage floor. I saw Ruby being pulled by the hair, one hand on her attacker’s wrist as he gripped her scalp, her other fist punching wildly. Bilal, Lighting, Sound and Timing did nothing. They looked enraged, necks swelling, faces reddening, but they didn’t act. I caught Lighting’s eye. He shook his head warningly at me.
Guests from the party raided the stage and dragged the other dancers off. Orhan fell onto his side, pulled by the ankle, clawing the stage floor. I saw Ruby being pulled by the hair, one hand on her attacker’s wrist as he gripped her scalp, her other fist punching wildly. Bilal, Lighting, Sound and Timing did nothing. They looked enraged, necks swelling, faces reddening, but they didn’t act. I caught Lighting’s eye. He shook his head warningly at me.
“How can you just stand there?” I shouted.
I threw myself into the crowd, even though Bilal made a grab for me and shouted “Don’t! You’ll make it worse!” I kicked and punched any brawler within kicking and punching distance. The crowd was baying and had gathered in a circle.
“Freaks! Freaks! Freaks!”
I felt hands everywhere, groping, stiff-fingered. The dancers were down on the ground, and I only saw snatches of them, snatches of skin.
“Get off them! Get off them! Keep away from us!” I screamed. Some of the guests laughed and taunted me.
The crowd was bearing down, beating down. I had been pushed back until the front edge of the stage was pressed against the backs of my knees. I saw the man who had first grabbed Lyceus right in front of me. His face was covered in slimy sweat. He was kneeling on the ground, and Lyceus lay on the floor.
I reached for the pyrotechnics stub that Lighting had set up on the corner of the stage. It had a heavy base and a connecting ring from which the sparks shot. I pulled the base towards me, the sparks shearing my skin. The man noticed the sparks. He looked at the thing for a second. I shoved it into his face, pushing with all my strength. He staggered and fell solidly, clutching his face. The sparks died and I threw the thing to one side.
The crowd backed off. The man was rolling on the ground, his legs curled up. Nobody went to help him. The dancers were shivering and clinging to each other, most of them stripped naked. The music from the stage was still going. Lighting, Sound, Timing and Bilal slowly, heavily stepped out of the stage to help the dancers. They hadn’t seen exactly what I’d done. My ears were ringing loudly. I looked at the crowd. They looked at me.
I turned and ran. The man’s friends followed me in a gang. I shot through the party, ran to the van Lyceus and I had travelled in and threw myself into the back. I locked the doors from the inside. Then I realised I had boxed myself in.
I crawled into the driver’s seat and checked the glove box for a spare ignition key. Nothing. I didn’t know how to jumpstart a vehicle. My heart was beating so loudly that it merged with the sound of the gang outside. Hard hands banged on the sides of the van. I clawed through the bags and boxes as the van rocked and thudded. But there was just costumes and bedclothes. The technical stuff belonging to Lighting and the others was in the other van. The van shook and plumped back on its thick wheels. The hands shoved it more violently, trying to work up the momentum to send it keeling over. The boxes and bags began to spill around me. One of the kit bags opened up and out of the top skimmed a short, fat, rusty revolver with a snub nose. I picked it up, my hands shaking.
The van stopped rocking and there was a thick hush on the other side. I was backed against the seats, holding the solid metal weapon. The pressure on the van vanished and it sank back onto its wheels. Then they wrenched open the back doors. Men began to pour into the back of the van.
I raised the gun and pulled the trigger. It jammed and jerked back in my hand. All the breath went out of my lungs. I raised it again and pulled the trigger again. I shot whoever was directly in front of me. He fell, his head flying back. The others immediately fled, so fast it was as though they were wiped from my vision.
I let go of the gun and collapsed on the floor, choking some air back into my lungs. The men weren’t afraid of me. They weren’t afraid of eight dancers. They were afraid of machines. Sparks from a pyrotechnics display. The shot from a gun. So that was what I needed to get some respect: a weapon. The thought repelled me. My stomach was churning. I dragged myself to the edge of the van, batted the doors open where they had swung shut and threw up, acidly, over the edge.
I felt lights on my face and went heavy with fear. But it was the other van, driven by Sound, whose eyes bored grimly into mine from behind the wheel. He parked alongside me, the back doors opened and everyone got out, looking shaky. The dancers dressed in whatever clothes were to hand. They joined me, limping, holding each other. We all went into a huddle, lying inside my van. Lyceus crawled to the very back and curled up into a ball, head down, eyes shut.
Bilal and the other men followed.
“Shouldn’t’ve done that,” said Bilal to me.
“That man was attacking Lyceus and the others.”
“Shouldn’t have done it,” he said.
“Yes she should! She stuck up for us,” said Orzala.
I closed my eyes and the figure of the man I shot reared up in front of me. I blinked the image away, throat dry. Guilt washed through me, and fear. Bilal hadn’t even seen what I’d just done.
“Where are they now, the – them,” I asked.
“Destroying the security tapes from the garden,” said Lighting with a curt laugh.
“They’re letting the Family know,” said Bilal.
“The Family?” I said.
“They’re all friends. All rich people know each other, didn’t you know that?” said Bilal, sneering at me. “This is the end for us. We’re blacklisted.”
“I don’t care if we are,” said Orzala.
“You will, when you haven’t got enough to eat,” said Bilal.
“It was their fault,” said Orzala.
“This isn’t about fault! Nobody cares who’s at fault!” said Bilal.
“We don’t have to do private shows in the villa areas, we can get to Binar and do the music-halls and cabarets,” said Ruby. “Go underground.”
“I prefer it there,” said Shekhar, and the others nodded.
“One private show’s worth ten cabarets,” said Bilal.
“But nothing’s worth what happens to us in private shows,” said Ashva. “They treat us like animals – ”
“No. They treat their animals well,” Orhan corrected her.
“They think they can do anything to us, just because we’re different,” finished Ashva.
We were sitting together in the one van, tightly packed, too shocked to think, to move. We should have shot straight onto the motorway, merged with the night traffic to the capital.
“It was self-defence,” I said.
“You say that to people. Those people. See how far you get,” said Bilal.
“I know what I saw. They were the attackers, not us. I’ll tell the police that.”
The four men laughed. They were all smoking. It was like conversation to them, bearing the weight of every unsaid thought. Instead of arguing, answering, debating, they smoked, as if each puff was a furious word.
“What police? The police couldn’t catch your great-grandmother,” growled Sound, “there’s no police here, just rich people and their guards and their lawyers. The law’s got no place in rich people’s world.”
“This isn’t a life,” said Shekhar.
“It’s this or nothing. You want to end up hanging from a tree in some gods-forsaken village in outer Miriadh?” said Bilal.
“Raped and lynched in the country or raped and strangled in the city, what’s the difference?” said Gena, hugging herself.
“What are we still doing here? Let’s go, you guys, stop arguing,” said Lyceus from the back in a tiny, battered voice.
Lighting, Sound and Timing went back to the other van muttering about how much it would cost them to replace the equipment they’d left behind at the villa.
“You don’t seem that bugged,” I called to them.
“They’ll pay us off in the end,” said Timing.
“Rich families sort things out their own way,” said Orzala as we eased out in the back of our van, “they hate for things to get into the papers. That’s what they’re really afraid of. Not the law. Damage to their image.”
“And now, because of me, you have to flee to the city, where you’ll work harder, to earn less, in a place where everything costs more,” I said.
“Finally she gets it,” snapped Bilal.
He stayed with us, all the better to keep an eye on me, I knew. He got into the driver’s seat. The spare ignition key was actually under the foot mat, but in my panic when I threw myself into the van I hadn’t bothered to check there. We were an uneven division – me and Bilal and all the dancers in this van and just three men in that one – but the dancers clung together.
“If we’re stopped, act calm,” said Bilal.
Lyceus gave a sudden cry, shifted sharply and held up the gun. The round carriage part for the bullets was hanging open and a few fell out and hit the van floor, rolling off to the corners. I went stiff and Orzala, who’d been leaning against me, mumbled a complaint. Holding the gun gingerly Lyceus tapped his father on the shoulder with it. Bilal shoved it into the glove compartment with one hand.
“Guys,” I began.
“What now?” said Bilal.
“I shot a guy.”
The dancers raised their heads and their attention collected around me.
“Where? When?” asked Vero.
“Just now,” I said heavily. “With that gun. I shot a guy. One of the oil baron’s friends. Or his son’s friends. They tried to get in.” I had another flashback of the man’s silhouette groping towards me and my senses went numb. “It was me or him,” I said, as if in a trance. “It was him or me.”
The van slowed as Bilal took his feet off the pedals. He turned around in the driver’s seat and glared at me, eyes bulging. The van swerved, the one behind us honked and Bilal turned furiously back to face the front. He snatched something under the dashboard. It was a walkie talkie. He thumbed the switch and a voice on the other end of the line answered.
“L27FALCON,” said Sound, or Lighting, or Timing.
“Oh shut up with that rubbish now,” Bilal shouted. “She shot a guy.”
“Huh? Who?”
“The runaway, who else?”
There was a silence at the other end, then –
“You pick up rubbish to help the neighbourhood, but you only get your hands dirty. Ditch her. We told you.”
Bilal put the handset back in its bracket and throttled the steering wheel. I got up, ready to be thrown out, but Orzala and Vero put calming hands on me.
“Don’t worry,” said Vero.
“She should worry!” shouted Bilal, and Vero trembled, letting go of me and hunching into himself as Bilal raged, “She’s not one of us. She’s just some…” he grizzled incomprehensibly, “…this is what happens when you show charity to strangers.”
“They won’t come after us. The guy who got shot, he’ll say he was mucking about with his friends. He’d have to say what he was doing there, otherwise,” said Shekhar. “Don’t be a fool. The police will write down whatever that family tells them to write down,” Bilal shot back.
I sank down, my head on my crossed arms, trying to calculate all outcomes. Bilal and Sound Etc were right: a family like that wouldn’t bother with police, lawyers, detectives. They would hire someone to kill whoever did it. But they’d never find me, I’d make sure of that. For the first time I thanked the gods that I was a nobody, unregistered, undocumented.
After a few turns through the wilderness we were on the motorway, Bilal driving right on speed limit although his torso was straining forward and I could feel him wanting to put as much distance as he could between us and the red mansion. It was now the middle of the night.
The walkie talkie beeped. Bilal picked up the handset.
“What now?”
“This is L27FALCON – ”
“Oh use the name your mother gave you!”
“Boss, we need a break. Two shows in one night – ”
Two shows, a gang assault and a murder, I thought. Down the walk-talkie line we could hear the engine sound of the other van. The voice carried on:
“It’s a three hour drive to Binar central core. If we keep on like this it’ll be morning rush hour by the time we get to the outer rings. Commuters on every inch of lane. We’ll be stuck for hours. We won’t lose much time if we take a break.”
“All right, all right,” said Bilal. “I’ll deal with her then too.”
He put the handset back with a clunk, let out a hot, aggravated breath and continued driving in stony silence. In the back, all nine of us were coiled around each other, riled, upset, half-awake, half-asleep. We lay in silence, feeling Bilal’s rage growing and churning until it was almost suffocating. I wondered what it would be like to have a father like that. In the orphanage, there were no fathers. And there were no mothers.