The next instalment of Esha Ex, a novel-length work of new fiction, updated daily. For more details click here.
We’d been put down so early that I managed a few hours of proper sleep, but was awoken hard at three, four and five by the clanging alarm calling others to work. From four o’clock they kept the main lights on, bright enough to prick my eyeballs through the lids. From five, with a scrape of metal on concrete, they opened the doors and the rising sun filled the room. The bell at six was mine. Me and dozens of others got up, heads drooping, soles scuffling. We were all the same sort: dog poor, dirt humble and bone tired.
We’d been put down so early that I managed a few hours of proper sleep, but was awoken hard at three, four and five by the clanging alarm calling others to work. From four o’clock they kept the main lights on, bright enough to prick my eyeballs through the lids. From five, with a scrape of metal on concrete, they opened the doors and the rising sun filled the room. The bell at six was mine. Me and dozens of others got up, heads drooping, soles scuffling. We were all the same sort: dog poor, dirt humble and bone tired.
Nimet’s patch was such a distance from me that I could only make out the top of her head and her shoulder. Agonia and Greve were gone. Nimet was sewing, with Femi on her lap. I wondered how long she’d been up.
At the side a woman was creating and selling vast bubbling quantities of dark brown, crispy, salted, oil-glistening onion rings on her burner. Between her bare feet was a wooden chopping board, a plastic bowl with the raw batter mixture in it, a saucer with flakes of pepper-blackened salt heaped on it, a pile of onions and a meat cleaver dripping with onion juice.
“Trade you?” I asked her.
“Cash only.”
I washed with the other women concealed behind the wall. Amaro Solanki was in his chair at my end of the room, watching everyone. His yellowish eyes were rimmed red and his face hung heavy. I wondered which teriyaki grill, whisky bar or gentleman’s club he had gone to after the lights snapped off.
Everyone left their possessions neatly piled on their patches, in full trust that they wouldn’t be stolen. I returned to my patch to find my dead-asleep neighbour awake and neatening his sheets.
“It’s all right. It’s safe,” he said, seeing me hesitate.
He was actually quite young, I noticed. I took him at his word and left my bundle up near where my head had been.
I went up the steps of staircase 4 to Minus One, hearing the footsteps of the workers who were assigned to higher floors slapping above me. As I came out I was surprised to see Barzakh, twiddling his baby moustache, talking animatedly to Zizi. The corrugated shutter of the key-cutter’s was half up.
“Hi, Zak,” I said, and got a swaggering nod. I put my shoulder under the shutter and shoved until it caught momentum and pulled itself up.
Barzakh was dressed in his white kitchen hand’s apron and a white cap. Zizi was fastening something onto his wrist.
“This one thinks he’s a rock star,” she said to me.
“I’m in a band,” he said, all smooth.
“Good luck to you!” said Zizi heartily. “Your can go on tour and save money by doing your own catering.” Zizi showed me Zak’s wrist: “Leather thong bracelets. I’ll teach you how to make then. Always look for a side business. That’s the first lesson of the day. For our friends, we don’t charge money. Why pass the same five token note around among ourselves, only to have to beg for it back when things get tight? But there’s lots of schools round here. The young gals come in here and roam up and down with their pocket money. Go for them.”
The dog grooming women tottered in. When they passed our little crew they gave us sniffy looks.
“They’re in a bad mood today because of the extermination units doing their circuit,” said Zak. “The vans that go around picking up stray dogs and gassing them.”
“So what?” said Zizi. “Binar’s got a dog problem. We come in here and see them being treated like precious possessions: ridiculous. Go out on the street and there are twenty on every corner, licking their own balls and passing on the rabies and the plague, e-coli, salmonella and all manner of dirty stuff. Can’t be sentimental.”
We went into the shop, Zizi still pulling Zak by the wrist. I went behind the counter, put Zizi’s empty plum wine flask discreetly into her cubby hole and brought out a fistful of the bits of punched metal we’d been betting with yesterday.
“We could do some bracelets that’re threaded with these,” I said.
“Those are cool,” said Zak quickly. He was carrying a thin paper bag soaked through with oil. He put it on the counter where it left a dark patch.
“Not bad, Esha. Don’t know why I didn’t think of that,” said Zizi.
She joined me behind the counter.
“So, Zak, Esha’s looking a bit thin and you want a new bracelet with spiky bits on it. We can take that one off you and doctor it. But that’s extra work. An extra pair of hands means an extra stomach to fill.”
Zizi put her hand inside the paper bag, pulled out a fat triangular samosa, its corners deep-fried till their were pointed and dark, and casually handed it to me. I took a bite. Zak looked from her, to me, to his new bracelet, to the bits of punched metal I’d scattered on the worktop.
“I can’t give you any meat,” he said.
“Who said anything about meat? Did I say anything about meat?” said Zizi.
“We make a vegetable special every day…” Zak was already unpicking the knot of his bracelet and giving it back.
“I promise, Zak, we’ll make you something really cool,” I said.
“And you show your friends, and tell them where you got it from,” said Zizi as she sent him off.
Next up was a quick swap: a man in a dusty black waiter’s suit with a burgundy nylon waistcoat came in with another flask of something, and in return Zizi took his cigarette lighter and put his initials on it, showing me how to use the engraving machine as she did so.
A bell rang across the mall. It was seven o’clock.
“Showtime,” said Zizi, “but first, a fortifier.”
She picked up the new flask, unscrewed the metal cap and sniffed delicately.
“Aniseed. Vanilla. New blend. Ready for a shot?”
I refused.
“But… it’ll help you digest your samosa,” she said, astonished.
“I don’t want to digest it, it’s got to last me all day.”
It took a hundred rebuttals for her to accept that I didn’t want some forty per cent proof vanilla flavoured liqueur at seven o’clock in the morning.
“Uh-oh, it’s Smelly Feet Man,” muttered Zizi as the first customer approached.
“How can you tell?”
“Large feet, closed shoes, baseball cap. nylon-mix football top. In this heat. This gent does not know the meaning of ventilation.”
“Can you resole these? They’re for a wedding,” asked the man when he got to the counter.
He clunked a pair of large, heavy, formal shoes out of a plastic bag onto the counter. They smelled fine.
“Heavy tread, is it?” deadpanned Zizi. “Puts a lot of pressure on the sole, especially if,” she lifted up one shoe and looked at the underside, “you favour the outside edge of the foot. Bad for you, sir. Bad for the arches. We can make you some foam inserts to correct that. Custom made.”
“They’re very effective sir,” I piped up.
The man wasn’t buying. I filled out a receipt for the resoling while Zizi made more small talk.
“You wear long gloves for work?”
“How do you know?” asked the man in surprise.
“Most gentlemen of your type, if you don’t mind me saying, they’ve got sunburnt arms. But your tan begins above the elbow. Makes me think you’re a man that works in gloves.”
“Well – yes,” he said.
“Is chain mail? My apprentice needs some, for when I teach her blade work. I don’t care for them myself – but she’s young.”
“I wear rubber gloves,” said the man. “Anti bite gloves. I work in the vans. I’ve got my nephew waiting for me now, just outside. Well – my nephew-in-law to-be. My daughter’s future husband’s brother. That’s my business: extermination.”
Zizi took a thin, flexible knife, blunt along the edge and rounded at the end, so fine it could slice between layers of skin, and prised the stiff uppers of the man’s shoe from the soles. It came away slowly, with a cracking sound. She gave me the other shoe to work on.
I twisted the knife and the shoe came apart, exploding in a puff of thick white powder that smelt of decades of compressed, congealed sweat. My stomach turned over, I felt the blood rush to my feet and the next thing I knew I was sitting on my stool with my head resting against the edge of the worktop, the man had disappeared and Zizi was holding her wine flask to my lips.
“What happened?” I said, coming to. I accepted a sip of liqueur. It was so sweet it shocked the nerves deep in my teeth.
“You went. Happens a lot at this time of year. It’s the heat.”
“Is the customer gone? Dead dogs he’s fine with but fainting ladies make him squeamish.”
“He got a call from his nephew. There was a problem with the van. Parking wardens, probably. Easiest way to make money in this city is harass the drivers who’re only trying to do their business.”
The skins and soles of the man’s shoes were lying in a lake of stinking, clotted powder.
“This is a frequent problem,” said Zizi. “The client: his feet smell. His shoes smell. He doesn’t want to try a sandal or a flip-flop. He can’t be bothered to wash himself. So he pours baby talc in the shoes.”
I swept the talc into a plastic bag – it was so live that the bag actually puffed out and steamed up – and dumped it in the bin. When I straightened up again there was a red devil on the other side of the window, beckoning to me.
It was a tall, thin apparition in a red jumpsuit with orange pom poms down the front, white gloves and a yellow cap. The face was thickly masked in caked white paint, with arched eyebrows painted in constant surprise and a red sausage-lipped smile, outlined in smudged, weeping black. An orange corkscrew curled wig was jammed underneath the cap. Thick lines of sweat poured down the whiteface, thickening the pan stick and melting it unevenly.
“It’s me! Your neighbour! We met this morning!” The clown pointed to itself. “I’m Rastro.”
She gestured for Rastro to come in, and he did, followed by about thirty noisy, wriggly, knee-high children wearing cardboard masks decorated with buttons, glitter, crayon scrawls and bits of macaroni. They all streamed in, putting their hands into clamps, stroking razorblades and picking up the knives and hammers that were lying around. Zizi watched, fists on hips, grinning broadly.
“I work in the crèche. I’m leading a pirate expedition around Minus One,” said Rastro, and the kids cheered. He added quietly, “The air-conditioning’ broken down in the crèche and nursery and it’s unbearable. We’re not allowed to come up to the ground floor, but we had to get out of there. Kids’ll be fainting. It’s agony, especially in this.” He plucked his nylon costume unhappily and it sucked back onto him, charged with sweat and static.
Some of the kids had sunk their arms elbow deep into the lug nuts box while others were hitting each other with metal files, cutting each other’s hair with secateurs or trussing each other up in chains from the rolls by the door. Underneath the high-pitched yelling of the children I heard a strange, frantic whimpering and howling from the dog grooming parlour, which increased in volume until it was cut through with a shrill human scream.