Esha Ex: Chapter Seventeen

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A pink neon flower pulsed on and off. The Pink Orchid: Rent Rooms By The Hour, flashed in yellow letters. Our headlights lit a long wooden shack complex and the whole place throbbed with a billion massed insect sounds, a constant chord of fretting, ribbing and frigging.

Bilal got out, slammed the door hard and went to the motel’s reception book, a black leather bum-bag – containing all the group’s money, I assumed – swinging from his hand. Vero opened the back doors and we all got out, dragging the kit bags with us. Below the neon sign were notices saying that tissues, soap, toothbrushes, toothpaste and different kinds of liquor were on sale.

            The second van pulled up alongside us. Sound got out of the front, while Lighting and Timing lumbered out of back, rubbing their stomachs like dozy bears.

            Sound immediately squared up to me.

“Why don’t you just get lost?” he said. “Go into those bushes and don’t come back. You’re putting us all at risk.”

“What’s it to you? You’re technicians. You three guys can all get jobs anywhere you like,” I answered sullenly. He turned his back.

            Bilal returned holding two sets of keys. He threw one set to Timing and gave the other to Ruby:

“Go to the toilet block and get cleaned up. Stick together. Don’t talk to anyone. And  you,” he said, rounding on me, “I want to talk to you.”

            I gulped and nodded. Sound Etc crashed into their room and came out again immediately, talking about getting some liquor. Immediately behind us was the toilet block. There was a tube well and a brick washing area, visible to everyone, and a row of shitting cubicles behind flimsy doors. Behind the block, shady but visible, I could see people lurking.

Shekhar whispered to me,

“There are a lot of attacks near there. But the motel won’t give us rooms out front, even though we can pay.”

“You can’t wash there,” I warned.

“It’s fine. We all go together,” insisted Ruby, her voice low, her face turned away from the watchers in the bushes.

She glanced over my shoulder and clammed up. Bilal’s hand clamped onto my shoulder and he frogmarched me around the front into a small room adjoining the reception. The lino on the floor was cracked and there were two plastic chars askew in the middle of the room. From end to end, the place smelled of onions. Against the walls were vending machines selling tissues, toothpaste, chewing gum and condoms.

“Let go of me, my shoulder hurts,” I said tightly. Bilal let go.

I kept my back to him and looked at the things in the vending machines. I wondered how much money was saved inside each one, or if they’d recently been emptied. I put my fingers into the change chute - there was old, hard chewing gun stuffed into it. I snatched my fingers away. He paced in front of me.

“Go on,” I said, sinking down onto on of the plastic chairs. “Shout at me.”

“What were you thinking?” he said quietly - so much worse, as it didn’t give any release.

I grew heavy and insolent.

“What? What was I thinking, fighting the gang that attacked your son, and the others? What was I thinking, leading them all away like freaking Harinder the Hypnotist with his magic lute? Yeah - how dare I save your dancers’ lives.”

            Bilal braced his hands, the fingers stiff, as though he was crushing an indivisible melon in front of my face. This was what he wanted to do to my skull.

“The gun, is it registered, with a licence?” I asked, all bravado, all cool.

“Registered with a licence? Who’re you, Miriadh security council controller? Of course it’s not licensed. It’s like writing your name and address on every bullet and sending it to the authorities.”

“Why d’you have that gun in the first place?” I wheedled.

            He began grinding his teeth.

“Every driver in Miriadh has a gun. Car-jackings are at 60%. The police do nothing, they’re as likely to rob you themselves as find a robber.”

The humidity was thick in the room and we were both too tired to get any more of a rise out of each other. My shoulder ached, not just from Bilal’s grip but from the fight. The skin on my hands crawled when I remembered the shape and weight of the gun.

“You don’t know what they do to people like Lyceus, and the others,” he said.

“Dancers?”

“Eunuchs, you fool. Hermaphrodites. The ones they call,” he could barely say it, “half-and-half. They’re nonpeople here, monsters.”

“I’m sorry, okay?” wormed itself out of my lips, miserly and weak. “I didn’t think.”

            Bilal fumbled a packet of cigarettes and lighter out of his pocket and strode out, returned a moment later.

“Come with me. You can’t be alone in this place.”

“You’re the good guy,” I needled sourly, “protecting me from the bad guys.”

“Gods, you’re a pain.”

            We stood outside the Pink Orchid sign. There were about a dozen cars parked out front, most of them with moving bodies in them. Every so often a tiny, lost-seeming bat flapped unevenly around us. The road was directly ahead. I pointed to it.

“Is that where you want me to go? I’ll just walk along it until I reach somewhere-you-don’t-care-where,” I said. “I’ll be snatched into a car within twenty paces of here. But that’s not your problem, right?”

Bilal said nothing. A lorry passed, wheezing, pouring black smoke from its exhaust, churning up road dust.

“First goods transportation of the day,” said Bilal. “There’ll be thousands more, all going to Binar. Half of them’ll stop over for some rest between dawn and dusk.”

“Is that your word for it? A ‘rest’? This is brothel central …Give me your gun. That’ll give me a chance.”

“You’re not touching that again.”

“Where would I be if I hadn’t used it once already? It’s only…” I looked at his fake gold watch, nestling in his wrist hair, “4am. I’d still be being raped by the oil baron’s son’s friends, locked in a room in the mansion or lying in the van. I know how that goes.”

            Bilal sighed, finished his cigarette, threw it into the dirt.

“I’ve bought you one day. You can sleep through the daylight hours. Don’t say anything, don’t do anything. Stay indoors. Keep the curtains shut. We leave tomorrow, soon as the sun goes down. Then straight to Binar central core.”

“Take me with you, even a little way.”

“No. We don’t want to see your face again.”

He made an adamant, swiping gesture, a cross between slicing someone at the neck and sweeping things off a table.

“Just get me closer to the city and dump me there. I’ll disappear, I promise. You’ll never see me again.”

            Bilal wouldn’t give me his promise, but he also wouldn’t let me go to the room alone, so we walked back in silence. Embarrassed, I said I needed to use the toilet. While I did so, careful not to touch or look at anything, Bilal kept surly guard, coughing gruffly to warn people off. I wondered how many sad peepers there were in the bushes, squandering their time for a look at my sorry behind.

Bilal waited until I’d knocked on the door of the dancers’ room and, after some delays and scuffling, a more-than-half-asleep Ruby let me in. Bilal went into the neighbouring room, from which the sound of Sound Etc’s manly snoring emerged.

There was one low, king-sized bed. All eight dancers were sleeping on it in a heap. The slow-turning ceiling fan barely shifted the thick air. I wondered how the dancers could cover themselves in this heat, then heard the mosquitoes whining past my ear like police copters. I joined the pile of people on the bed.

            We slept through the rest of the night, the morning and the afternoon. I had nightmares as usual. When I woke up the room looked almost pretty. The deep reddish afternoon sun was coming through the sacking curtains. Orzala had put the box TV on, with the volume muted, and was trying to get it to produce a clear picture. Shekhar was sorting and folding the clothes.

“I can do that,” I said, rubbing my face and sitting up. “That’s my job.”

            Then I realised it wasn’t, not any more. But I went to help him anyway.

“I’ll put these in the van,” I said.

“We’re not allowed out,” said more than one voice quickly.

“It’s not completely dark yet,” added Orzala.

            Lyceus was the only one who had not stirred. I noticed, with nausea, that he had bruises around his neck and wrists.

            Orzala eventually found a TV station playing music videos. The screen was black and white snow but the sound came out okay. The last of the afternoon light petered out quickly and we turned the strip light on. Directed by Gena, Orhan and I pushed the bed, with Lyceus still on it, right up against the far wall.

With a loud snap the electricity went off, leaving us in buzzing blue dusk. We all groaned. Orzala scrabbled in the drawer by the bed. I saw the small flame of a cigarette lighter, touched to a small white fatty-smelling candle. Orzala drew out and lit four more stubs of candles, which resembled broken-off white fingers. We melted the bottoms and stuck them around the room to spread out the light.

“These’ll burn down in an hour, but I’m sure the electricity’ll be back on by then,” Orzala said.

“I wish we could go out,” I said.

We sat tight together on the bed. I hadn’t told any of the dancers what had passed between me and Bilal, but I was sure they knew him well enough to guess that this was our last day together.

“I am so sorry for landing you in this,” I said.

“You did what you thought was right,” said Orzala.

“And we prefer working in Binar anyway, with people who understand us and don’t attack us just for existing,” said Ruby.

“Or think that we’re freaks who live just to be looked at by them, for their amusement,” said Orhan.

“In Binar, we’re famous. They still think we’re freaks. They’ll still never see us as equal. But they see our talent too,” said Gena.

“You saw us,” said Gena. “At the party. You know what we are. You know what they call us.”

“I know the bad names,” I admitted.

“There are laws against us,” said Ashva.  “No business will employ us, not even as hard labour or domestic labour. They think we contaminate everything we touch. If you don’t fit, that’s it. It hurts your family. You become an outcast.”

“So you look for a place, any place, where you’re not,” said Vero. “You look for any person who sees you as a person.”

“And Bilal does that?” I said.

“It’s a choice between living out our days with no work, no money, no food, no rights, open to abuse any time of day or night,” said Orzala.

“Or being bought and sold and used and bought and sold and used,” said Ruby. “Then thrown away.”

“Or what we have now,” said Vero.

“I promised Bilal I’d disappear. I’ve hurt you,” I said.

“No,” said Orzala. “Theyhurt us. You hurt Bilal’s wallet.”

All the dancers apart from Lyceus got up and began to rehearse in the two and a half foot gap between the wall and the edge of the bed. Despite the trouble I’d brought on them they were happy to be heading back to Binar.

“You should see it, Esha,” said Shekhar, “it’s the old theatre, masquerade and cabaret district, but we call them the masque lanes. You can see everything there, comedians, contortionists, jugglers, dancing, plays of all kinds. Cheap. They’re for everyone”

            Lyceus had woken up and recovered a little, and we sat cross legged next to each other on the bed. The other dancers bowed to us.

“This is the story of a young woman who falls in love with a temple boy,” said Ruby.

She crept close to Vero, curling her fingers and blinking in a way that indicated that she liked what she saw. Shekhar said,

“And so she pursues him into the temple one day, disguised as a nurse, eyes veiled for modesty.”

            Ruby pigeon-stepped through an archway made of Orhan and Ashva’s interlinked arms. She mimed holding a veil modestly over her head. She pointed a toe and glided across. Vero looked coy. Just as Ruby was reaching out, there was a thump on the door and Sound’s voice shouting for us. Shekhar opened the door.

“Temple virgins?” said Sound. He was holding a handyman’s torch.

“We were doing a run-through,” nodded Shekhar. 

“Do it with us.”

“Lyceus is resting,” said Ruby.

“Bilal said he can sit this one out. Catch up when we get to Binar,” said Sound, making eye contact with everyone but me.

            The other dancers went next door and I heard the beds in that room being pushed to the walls. Then Lyceus and I were alone for the first time, and the candles were burning low.