The next instalment of Esha Ex, a novel-length work of new fiction, updated daily. For more details click here.
Zizi and Rastro ran out, followed by all the children. There was a macabre face-off happening across the floor of Minus One.
Zizi and Rastro ran out, followed by all the children. There was a macabre face-off happening across the floor of Minus One.
At the bottom of the escalators was the man who put talc in his shoes, wearing his thick black rubber gloves, a padded black rubber suit and a convex cage mask. In his left hand he carried a lasso on an extendable rod. In his right hand he carried a tranquiliser dart gun. Behind him was one of the women who guarded the front doors of the mall, trembling from head to foot, holding a Taser.
In front of them was a rabid dog. Its head was low, it was trembling, its bald-picked coat was covered in popping white foam and its eyes were red.
In front of the dog, immobile with fear, was Zak. It was he who had screamed – the last echoes cut the edges of the air, bouncing off the marble surfaces. In a polystyrene tub he was carrying what I assumed was the vegetable special he’d promised me.
“Do something, sir,” said Zizi to the extermination man.
The dog scratched the ground and advanced on Zak. The children were all clutching each other, looking up at Rastro, who gave them a beaming smile as if it was all part of the show. The dog turned its long-snouted head, noticed the children, gave a twitch, snapped around to face them and braced itself. The children screamed and surged around Rastro, to whom they clung, until his costume began to tear at the shoulders and peel off.
The extermination man was aiming his dart gun. Someone had stopped the escalators and I could see mall workers at the top, setting out Area Closed cordons across the mouth of the escalators. All the shop workers on our floor had locked themselves in and were staring out, some of the younger staff filming the scene on their phones. The dog took a step towards the children, growling deep in its throat, ears stiff, fur bristling and switching.
I looked around me. The workshop floor was a mess. Anything that could have been unravelled, emptied or upended had been. Close by was a length of sharpened metal. It was thick, with a point and bevelled edges, like a stake. I picked it up and went out.
The dog leapt toward the children in a high arc. The extermination man fired his dart gun, which hit it in the haunch but didn’t slow it down. I threw the stake, hard. It hit the dog through the neck, thudding in. The dead dog hit the children square on, fresh blood hosing from its neck, its body contorting and contracting nose to tip. The blood-covered children ran screaming in a dozen directions. The dog fell onto the ground, making a bubbling sound as more blood gushed out – the blood was exactly the same colour as Rastro’s costume.
Rastro was clinging to the wall. He slid down onto the floor. I too lost my strength, fell to my knees and crawled to him. Zak joined us and we three sat and watched the pool of blood flow smoothly outwards until it almost touched us, reflecting the lights of the ceiling in its seamless red surface. Then the security guard, her eyes huge, Tasered the dead dog. When the Taser had emitted its full charge, the security guard threw it from her and burst into tears.
A type of mall worker I’d never seen before – middle aged men in middleweight tailored brown suits – ignored the cordon and came down the escalators, their cool eyes scanning the scene and taking in every person, in every position. The extermination man immediately began scrambling to cover himself. He got on the phone to his nephew, shouting at him showily for having left the van doors open “while I was conducting a meeting.” I knew that whatever he said, everything had been recorded on the security cameras from a dozen different angles.
“I can’t be seen here,” said Zak, suddenly coming to life. He threw the food package into my lap and disappeared down the staff staircase.
Slowly, I pulled myself up to standing, although I felt very shaky.
“Go and wash,” I told Rastro.
Underneath the painted smile and startled eyebrows his face was flat.
“They’re going to come for me,” he said.
“You don’t know that.”
“I shouldn’t have taken the children out of the crèche. I shouldn’t have taken them to your shop. I shouldn’t have put them in harm’s way.”
“You’re in shock.”
“They’ll want to talk to me,” he said.
“They probably will.”
Customers and staff were now coming out of the different units to gawp. Mall workers surrounded the body with Hazard signs. The children were all crying, squatting down covering their faces, calling for their mothers or favourite servants or pointing tearfully to the dog. The doors of the dog grooming parlour opened and some of the women who worked there came out, sweet-talked the children and guided them back to the crèche.
The extermination man was having an argument with the men in brown suits, who milled about bumping into each other like ants.
“We have to wait for the boss,” I heard one of them say.
“This isn’t a police crime scene!” the extermination man argued back. “Just let me do my job and keep out of my way.”
“There should be a inquiry.”
“It’s a bloody dog, not your grandmother!”
“We have to follow procedure.”
“Who do you answer to?”
“The Mall King, sir. Nasser-Khaleb Murat.”
The extermination man paled.
“Surely you’re not going to bother a great man like that with a very small matter like this? I mean,” he laughed and began wringing his hands, “I’m just an ordinary man trying to run a business with his nephew.”
“Your van was parked illegally on the lines outside the mall and your assistant left the back door unlocked and his phone sitting on the dashboard. And one of your dogs got out. That put our customers at risk. We’re going to incur lawsuits from the parents of the children. All of them.”
“Your guards panicked. They let the dog get in because they were mucking about like schoolgirls instead of watching the door. They had tasers and batons and mace and some of them have handguns but instead they flapped their hands and burst into tears. Lucky for you I could get a shot in.”
“It wasn’t you that stopped the dog,” said a brown suited man.
“It wasn’t you either.”
Their heads turned to me. I dropped my eyes. It was a stalemate. The brown suited men backed off, the extermination man’s nephew arrived, looking sheepish, in a white plastic jumpsuit and gloves. He was carrying what looked like a plastic wine cooler. Their clean-up process wasn’t very technical: the man and his assistant picked up the stiffening dog, dumped it in the box and carried it off. Cleaners came with green paper hygiene masks over their faces, but no other protection, and began passing water-soaked mops through the blood.
Down glided Amaro Solanki. The men in brown suits clustered around him. Amaro listened and nodded, then his eyes slid to Rastro. Then his eyes slid to Zizi. Then his eyes slid to me.
“You need to get out of here,” I said to Rastro. “Are there other workers at the crèche?”
He nodded, then sighed heavily.
“Oh, gods. I’ll be put on some kind of register as a risk to children.”
“Go and wash. My vanity case has soap in it, and cream. Take what you need.”
He slipped away and I heard the door to the workers’ staircase bang shut. In shock, I went back to the workshop, put the food Zak had given me on the worktop – I felt like throwing up every time I looked at it – and began cleaning up. I was shaking. Zizi joined me and quietly began fitting the punched metal pieces onto Zak’s leather thong bracelet.
Things seemed to go back to normal. Zizi finished the bracelet, set it aside and finished working on the extermination man’s shoes. The blood outside was cleared up, the cordon gone except for two Wet Floor signs. The fragrance jets were pumping an extra strong infusion through the floor.
There was a clamour of well-bred voices on the floor above and a group of parents charged down the escalators, made for the crèche and dragged their children out. The children, who’d been so noisy and ebullient before, even when horrified, had all gone eerily quiet. They walked woodenly and allowed themselves to be pulled by their wrists.
“The exact details haven’t got out,” said Zizi as we watched them go. “If they had, they’d be coming here to thank you for saving their kids’ lives. And they’d be offering you things to express their gratitude.”
“I don’t want to be thanked for that.”
“Heads up.”
The extermination man was back at the door, protective suit off, baseball cap on, carrying an odour of deep fried falafel and smoky peppers with him.
“Had a nice lunch?” Zizi asked, pointedly. “Good to have a strong constitution, it lets you bounce back from any shock moments,” she went on, but the mockery bounced off him.
I pushed the man’s resoled shoes towards him and he stuck them under his arm, instantly crushing them.
“I wanted to talk to you about,” he said as he paid us. “There’s no need to, er, tell too many people about what happened today, is there? We sorted it out between ourselves.”
Zizi cocked her head.
“Tell who, sir?”
“Well – anyone. The Mall King has business connections all over Block L. And I work all over Block L. And both our dealings point in the same direction: to the Family.”
“As does everything,” agreed Zizi.
“I wasn’t supposed to be away from the van, but I wanted these resoled for my daughter’s wedding. I’ve worn the same pair to all my children’s weddings.” He began to get worked up. “When it’s Code Red, likelihood of imminent harm to human life, I’m supposed to step in and immobilise, just take it down, not jab it in the arse like a doctor giving a vaccination.” The man stopped himself, took a tissue from his pocket and wiped his forehead. “I’m sorry, ladies. I’m angry with myself.”
“The thing is, sir, we can’t get into trouble for something you did. Not when it was myapprentice who saved the day. She can’t give her skin to save yours, she’s not some Mirian martyr from ancient times. There’ll be people wanting to speak to us. They’ll be saying, ‘Just how did that thing get in here? Who’s to blame?’ And their eyes will cast about until they hit upon the truth.”
“You could say I didn’t come in here and drop off the shoes, that I arrived promptly and stunned it and the dog was dead by the time she staked it.”
“But that wouldn’t be the truth,” said Zizi.
The man reached into his back pocket and dropped a couple of crumpled sweaty notes on the counter. It was thirty tokens. We didn’t react. He threw down another thirty. Zizi and I didn’t touch them. The man tutted and gave some more. Zizi stacked them together and gave me half, putting the other half in her shirt pocket.
“I’ve got your word, then, have I?” the man asked anxiously.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” said Zizi as the door opened, “and here’s Mr Solanki now.”
As Amaro Solanki glided into our workshop, the extermination man ran out, into a huddle of brown suited men who escorted him up the escalators into, I assumed, a room set aside for ‘questioning’.
“Are the police going to talk to him?” I asked.
Amaro Solanki scoffed.
“We’re not the police,” said Solanki. “We don’t care if your man there’s driving about with no licence or a broken tail light or isn’t qualified to kill dogs or whatever. We care that he sullied the name of the Mall King and made this lovely space an unlovely place to be. And he must bear the cost of that. The financial cost, the moral cost, the emotional cost.”
“What is the cost?” I asked.
“It has no limit,” said Solanki mournfully. “Twenty-eight children from twenty good families, who’re going to have nightmares for the next six months. Do you know how much a weekly visit to a child trauma specialist for twenty-eight children for six months would be?” He turned a slow circle around the front of the workshop, inspecting everything. I thanked the gods we’d cleaned up. “That young boy who was here when he wasn’t supposed to be, carrying food he wasn’t supposed to carry, we’ve spoken to him.”
“Zak,” said Zizi. She was chewing her tobacco again.
“You must understand, this brings us under great scrutiny.”
“What about Nasser-Khaleb Murat? The Mall King. Does he know what happened?” I asked.
“He knows,” said Solanki reverently.
“He should give her a reward,” Zizi butted in.
“She only did what any truly loyal employee would do,” said Solanki, “but in doing so, she made herself conspicuous, when all we ask of our employees is that you remain in the background.”
“She killed a dog that was menacing a group of children. You should give her a reward,” repeated Zizi.
Solanki’s expression turned sour.
“Oh - fame is her reward. Isn’t it – ‘Esha Ex’?” He sneered, as if it was a name I’d made up – a superhero’s moniker. “You’re already a top clip on Binar Bizarre. You know that show? It collects all sorts of disgusting stupid things that people in Binar get it into their heads to do. Someone already uploaded it to their site.”
“I don’t know anything about computer things,” I said.
“But it should satisfy you nonetheless. We know you like to be seen by your public.”
He gave me a heavy look and I had the distinct feeling that he had seen the footage of me shouting at Ali Mercator in the square in Block Q, that he knew I had been around the Family and that somehow, in the last hour, some connection of information had been made, far above my head, far behind my back.
“Trouble seems to follow youwherever you go,” he said. “I do hope that’s not true. When someone has a reputation for trouble they become a liability.”
“Nothing wrong with a bit of renown,” Zizi piped up. “The squeaky wheel gets the oil.”
“The nail that sticks up gets hammered down,” said Amaro Solanki.