The next instalment of Esha Ex, a novel-length work of new fiction, updated daily. For more details click here.
I was writhing, caught tightly by the foot, my shirt riding up, the skin of my bare back picking up splinters.
I was writhing, caught tightly by the foot, my shirt riding up, the skin of my bare back picking up splinters.
“We were just rehearsing!”
No reply.
“I haven’t touched your son!”
No reply.
“I’d never hurt him!”
He let go of my leg at the end of the walkway. I flopped back, turning my head from side to side until the dizziness abated, then got up.
“We weren’t doing anything….” I tried again.
Bilal went down the steps and cocked his finger at me. I followed miserably. He grabbed me again, this time around the neck, and carried on dragging me, past the Pink Orchid sign and onto the motorway going to Binar.
“Let me go!”
“You put your hands on my son.”
“He doesn’t belong to you.”
“Yes he does.”
“You’re crazy. Get off me.”
A squat, trundling shape approached, slower than the other vehicles. It was a filthy, dumpy rubbish truck with high mesh sides and an open back. It made a grating, thin sound: it was full of empty drinks cans.
The truck came near. Bilal picked me up and threw me into the back. I sailed through the air, too shocked even to shout, fell among the cans and sank to the bottom, covered instantly in a dirty syrup of fizzy drink dregs. By the time I fought my way back up to the surface, revolted and panicking, Bilal and the Pink Orchid were long out of sight, though I felt the momentum of his rage in my body.
I thought about knocking on the back of the cab to make myself known to the driver but I didn’t know if I could trust him. At least it was dark, and I was obscured by the mesh sides and top of the truck. I lay across the uneven surface, spread-eagled and reeking, headed for Binar.
It wasn’t the way I wanted to arrive at the great city. I stared up through the mesh. It got even darker and the humidity increased. My skin was so sticky with can juice that I wanted to scratch myself all over and the jangling noise was maddening. After a while I let go of my irritation and managed, even there, to sleep.
I woke up to feel the risen sun burning my face. I groped to the side of the truck and pulled myself up. The streets were a dun, ochre and redstone grid of one- or two-storey grocery shops, children’s toy shops full of factory-made plastic stuff, plate-and-glass shops, tea shops, pawn shops, betting shops, nail bars, meat and spice shops. Every third unit was boarded up. In the middle ground were apartment complexes. Behind them were concrete high rise blocks to count. They stood up all over the view, solid and narrow, like the pins of an electric plug. The sky was cut across with wires and the walls and roofs of every building were covered in satellite dishes and aerials.
Road signs pointed away to Binar’s central core, while we kept going straight. On either side of us were trucks and vans just like the one I was in, every one of them dirty and odorous. I saw a wooden-backed cart with bundles of rotting newspaper tied into cubes. There was another with a mound of old clothes on its back. I heard clinking, and we were cut up by a lorry loaded with crates of used bottles.
The traffic thinned from four lanes to two. There was a change in the quality of the air. It was cooler, more mobile. We had arrived at the river Kader. Warehouses and factories were set back from the road, behind vast stockyards and long concrete loading bays.
Further away, like a Lego city constructed by giants, corrugated metal shipping containers were stacked on top of each other, with the names of different countries written on them in white paint. Cranes and forklifts moved between them, slow, careful. The docked ships had their ramps out like hungry tongues and crates were being pushed up into their heavy metal bellies.
The can truck made a slow turn. It was reversing down a long metal ramp. We were getting too close to the river, descending to its level. The ramp got steeper. We were on some kind of platform that moved with languid, slowly rocking strength. The truck rolled, inching back, and I clung to the mesh, certain that we were going to tip over the edge. I couldn’t swim and was afraid of deep water. The truck braked. The back began to shake. The cans began shifting around me. I held onto the mesh. The floor tilted up steeply, quickly, the edge closest to the driver’s cab rising up. I lost my footing, twisting my wrist where my fingertips were hooked into the mesh. I lost my hold and clawed at the floor, which was lifting in front of my face as I slid down. The back of the truck shuddered and became vertical. The floor hit me in the chest. All the cans fell out, and I fell with them. I plummeted about twenty feet in the open air, a view of black water and blackened dock machinery flashing past.
I hit a flat metal surface so hard that I felt a shock go up from my heels to my knees. I fell forward onto my hands and had no time even to raise my head before a tonne of filthy clothes fell around me. I was on a flat metal plate floating on the water, as big as a football field – so large I couldn’t see the edges. I staggered upright just in time to throw myself out of the way of the next load: the newspaper cubes. There was no part of the barge that wasn’t at least knee high in something unspeakable. All the lorries and trucks were tipping their junk into one rotting, insecty, disease-laden muck pile. It was going into the open sea to be dumped there, or to some foreign country nobody in Miriadh cared about, to go into landfill.
Eventually it stopped raining rubbish. The barge began to drag over the surface of the Kader. The industrial sites on either side of the river began to slip away, although I was still close enough to make out the faces of the dock workers.
I was like an animal in a trash warren. There were hills and troughs of it, tunnels and through-ways. I crawled between two piles and looked along the length of the barge. I was towards the back. The barge was being towed by a sturdy boat, blunt shaped and noisy. A long way ahead of us, made blurry by the smog, were several arched metal bridges. A thrill went through me. Those were the famous Kader bridges. I had arrived. I was in Binar. And there was no way I was going to be dragged from it to die on a barge in the middle of the sea.
I kept my eye on a red van that had stalled on the circuit. My urgency made my senses sharp. The driver had got out to talk to a dock worker and get his papers stamped. I waved desperately to the man. I shouted, but the choppy Kader breeze carried my voice away. The driver peered, his gaze sliding around the rubbish. Then his eyes focused, he looked at me, did a double take. I strode the back length of the barge, trying to take up as much space as possible, making my gestures as broad as I could. He stood, his hand hanging down by his sides, but it was too late, and we were gone from each other.
I looked into the water, wondered how many miles down it went and felt my muscles go weak. The sun beat on my back. The barge slowed down and drifted to the side. There was a clang and a wet, knuckly, grinding sound. The boat was pulling the chains of the barge in to draw it close. They had spotted me.