Glass Collector (7 page)

After a while they stop for a second and silently agree to bag the broken glass, jars, and burned dishes. Shareen squints at the light at the edge of the alley to check on the pony’s hanging neck and moving mouth. Lijah suddenly twists from the sun and stares back, untroubled by the pony’s fate or their distress.

“He doesn’t care,” Shareen cries, tugging frizzy hair from her damp neck and swallowing hard. She realizes she’s as thirsty as the pony and hasn’t had a drink since before they left Mokattam this morning.

“Hey! We missed this …” Aaron smiles as he twists off the cap. “Some idiot’s only had a few sips.”

“Can I just … ?” Grabbing at the bottle, she knocks it out of his hand, and the plastic hits the edge of a broken laptop before Aaron can catch it. But by then only a few mouthfuls of water remain.

Shareen leans flat against the alley wall. Will he lash out at her? She’s never seen him lose his temper but suspects he might now.

“There’s a bit left,” Aaron says calmly while taking off.

A moment later, when he lifts the almost-empty bottle to the pony’s mouth, Shareen starts to wonder what would have to happen to make Aaron show his anger. Everyone in Mokattam says that since his mother died he hides his feelings to protect himself. As they clear the rest of the alley and continue down the street toward the main highway, Shareen decides she agrees.

The few drops of water revive the pony enough for it to plod slowly toward the second-to-last hotel for some respite while Aaron works. Once this alley has been cleared, instead of heading to the Imperial Hotel, Lijah turns to Shareen, who’s curled up on a bag, half asleep in the back.

“Get off! The pony has to rest.”

“I’m tired. I’ve had enough,” she grumbles.

“Shareen, come on,” Aaron says.

Not wanting to provoke Lijah any further when his eyes are popping like that, Aaron’s at the side of the cart in record time, waiting for her to get down. The high-voltage sound of a police siren helps catapult her to the street. The cart swiftly pulls over, along with honking cars and taxis.

Everyone swings around to witness a convoy of police cars heading in their direction. Instinctively Aaron shoves his hands in his pockets, ready at any second to jettison the stolen bottles of perfume, but the police cars sweep past in clouds of dust, surrounding a black Audi, which is safely cocooned in the middle of the huge escort.

Shareen screws up her eyes toward the sun to catch sight of the passengers of the Audi as it speeds past, but the glossy black windows hide them. She wonders what it would feel like to be in the air-conditioned car instead of out here on the hot pavement. Crossing the busy street, she’s tired and fed up, but she can’t help smiling with delight when the Audi and its police convoy come around the roundabout to a sudden halt outside the dark, swinging doors beside them. She’s frozen by a rush of excitement when a young, good-looking man in a smart suit gets out of the back of the car, glances at her for a second, and jumps into the seat next to the chauffeur. He almost smiled.

Then the cavalcade continues on its way.

In the alley, as she helps Aaron by holding out the plastic bag for him to throw in beer and wine bottles, she imagines the man from the hotel is the son of a sheikh who’s fallen in love with her—a poor Zabbaleen girl. Imagining holding his hand and sitting beside him on the black leather seat as the car shoots away, she can’t help blushing when she thinks about what might have happened if he’d stopped to speak to her.

While Shareen invents, Aaron reflects. Swinging the clanking bags on the cart with hands stinking of beer, he pushes hair from his face to glance back at the glass doors of the Imperial Hotel. The smoky doors revolve as guests enter and leave the hotel, but the Virgin Mary is nowhere to be seen today. For a second his mind goes blank. A small voice inside his head doubts he ever saw her in the first place and his world shrinks with the thought that this road, these cars, that wide sky are all there really is to this hard, lonely life.

Back on the cart as they skirt the edge of the city, Aaron starts monitoring his stepbrother’s breathing. A couple of times it seems as if Lijah might push him into the road again, so staying alert is always on his mind. By the time the silence of Mokattam settles on them like old sheets, Lijah has calmed down, Shareen is a princess in love with a man she saw for only ten seconds, and Aaron’s lost in a vision he saw on the Imperial Hotel’s glass doors.

Once the chaos of the main road is left behind, the pony begins to stagger, gasping heavily and barely able to move in a straight line. Aaron and Shareen get down and walk slowly beside the cart as they enter the village. Aaron pats the pony’s drooping neck and hot ears, trying to calm himself by studying the tiny arrows of glass on the dusty ground that glitter in the sun.

Stumbling farther past a man bashing a broken cupboard to bits with a hammer, Aaron doesn’t notice the pony’s right knee buckling until the cart comes to a sharp stop. There’s a flapping sound, mixed with a strained creaking from the cart, as the pony sinks to the ground.

Aaron quickly unhooks the shaft and the bags topple, thumping and rolling off the sides as the pony shudders. Shareen jumps clear of the crashing bags in time to stand over Aaron as he leans in and cups the pony’s clamped mouth in his hands. Shareen watches the pony grunt a last breath and flop to the ground before scooting home as if her life depends on it.

The reins loose in his hands, Lijah can’t believe his eyes. A pony is a precious animal that can’t easily be replaced, and the fear on his face reflects what they and everyone watching is thinking: That family’s finished now.

The lane is jammed with people climbing over filth and crossing themselves as they gather and mutter in singsong voices over the corpse of the dead pony. Eyeball to eyeball, they shake their heads as Aaron and Lijah wearily lug the fallen bags out of their way to unload what’s left on the cart.

As the sun beats down on the pony’s thin, bony shape, a doom-laden feeling settles over everyone watching. To lose a pony is too terrible for words. But by the time the stepbrothers fling the last bags at the walls of a nearby building, people’s interest finally peters out. There’s work to be done and they begin to wander off.

An eerie silence falls until the sound of wheels, echoing like a rickety train, starts up in the distance, getting louder as it heads toward them. Soon Shareen theatrically bursts into view, as if coming onto a stage, pushing the wheelbarrow with elbows akimbo.

“You can pay me later.” Unpredictable as ever, Shareen touches Aaron’s arm with the wheelbarrow’s smooth, metal handle.

“Thanks,” he says, and means it. “After we’ve figured out what to do with the pony, you might want to help us carry the bags home in the wheelbarrow.”

Like a princess, she looks down her nose at him. “You’ll be lucky.”

Aaron notices her glowing skin, the strands of gleaming, curly hair plastered to her neck as she swirls her eyes from him, to Lijah, then to the pony and friends in the thinning crowd. Humming with satisfaction, she hugs herself at the sight of so much unexpected drama. But sadly her center-stage moment is cut short when the Mebaj brothers” cart turns into the lane. The Mebaj family don’t swear, curse or drink. They’re the opposite of Aaron’s family.

Just before they reach the crowd, the elder brother pulls the reins and they rattle to a stop.

“What’s going on?” He can’t imagine what’s behind the sad faces walking toward them. All he can see is Lijah, Aaron, and Shareen in the distance.

“Go back,” Abe warns, appearing from a side alley. “There’s something not very nice in the way.”

The Mebaj brothers climb down to push through, curling their lips like pirates at the sight of the pony stretched out in the middle of the path. With only twelve months between them, the brothers act more like twins, and when one pulls a face, the other says what they’re both thinking: “Get the pony on the wheelbarrow!”

The idea’s too much for Aaron. It’s not going to work. Staring at the pony’s limp body, at the skin and bones swarming with flies, he can’t bear to touch it. In a temper, Lijah wrenches the barrow’s handles from Aaron and roughly guides it alongside the corpse. The animal looks ridiculously huge compared to the size of the barrow, which is less than a third of its length. It’s a stupid situation. One or two kids laugh and issue instructions about the best way forward. But there’s only one way to do this. With a superhuman effort, Lijah begins to swing the pony’s hind legs in the air.

“What are you waiting for?” he yells at Aaron.

Having no choice in the matter, Aaron bends over the horse’s chunky mouth and touches the hard skull.

“Not the head, you idiot,” Lijah screams. “Your end.” Aaron drops the head with a thump and grabs the warm body. With a quick shuffle, he reaches under the furry skin and, swallowing his feelings of revulsion, grunts as he tries to lift the pony from the ground. It’s heavier than he thought and he staggers awkwardly until Simon lends a hand by grabbing the front legs and twisting them to the sky. Swinging the corpse between them, they groan as they drop it on the creaking wheelbarrow. Most of the pony is over the sides: legs stretched out at an angle, jaw on the ground. Only by carrying the back legs in his arms, with Abe holding the head up by its ears, is Lijah able to manuever the wheelbarrow and drag the pony all the way to the yard at the edge of the village.

By the time the evening light fades and the sun goes down in Mokattam, the pony has been delivered to the butcher, the bags have been wheeled home, and the rubbish has been separated into recyclable piles. The necessary work has been completed, but one awful meeting remains. Hosi was out this afternoon at the bone-fixer’s house, having two teeth pulled because he can’t afford a trip to the dentist. Only when his anger’s been faced will Aaron and Lijah get a morsel to eat and a few hours’ peace. Hopefully, Aaron will get the chance later to run and tell Rachel why the pony hasn’t returned to the yard. She’s on his mind, and the thought that someone else might tell her what’s happened makes him feel so desperate his pulse starts racing.

While checking for the now-familiar bumps of the perfume bottles hidden in his pockets, Aaron gazes down the lane. Shareen and her father are nowhere to be seen. Abe and a few of the kids kick a ball at a concrete wall while Lijah sits, half asleep, picking his nails and breathing in the smells of other people’s dinners. Abe lets the ball bounce from the wall and roll away at the sight of the thin, stooped figure coming toward him.

A shiver of expectation suddenly brings everyone alive. The gossiping stops as they watch Hosi getting closer. Mouth open, hands clasped in agony to the side of his jaw, he’s on fire, and by the look on his face, he already knows what’s happened to the pony.

“How are we going to live? How? How?” Dribbles of blood leak from Hosi’s stained teeth and gums.

Although the past hour has been spent in peace, with hardly a word between Aaron and Lijah, a return to their usual hostility breaks out the moment Hosi arrives.

“Ask Shareen if you don’t believe me. I tried to get water for the pony. Lijah should have got it, but he went off and left the pony to die of thirst,” Aaron says.

Hosi’s expression changes from fury at both of them to narrow-eyed hatred for his son. Lijah squirms at the force of his gaze. But learning the truth of the matter doesn’t mean Aaron’s off the hook and Hosi slowly turns to face him with the same venomous expression.

For the first time in Aaron’s experience, Hosi believes him and not Lijah, but it doesn’t make any difference. He clips Aaron on the side of the head. Cowering, rubbing his ear, Aaron ducks and gazes up at Hosi, shocked. His stepfather’s lips are quivering and he looks like a baby about to burst into tears. With red eyes and a puffy, swollen face, he’s shaking so hard Aaron wonders if he might collapse. If Aaron didn’t feel the same horror and fear as Hosi, he might for once have hit him back.

Aaron shoots down the stairs and runs off down the lane. There’s a lack of restraint in the way he runs; in the way his feet slap the ground before he fists the air to work off some of the fury eating away at his insides. As he races around each corner in the growing darkness, past every pile of rubbish and stinking slum, he searches for Rachel. She’s the only person in Mokattam who can ease the horror of the pony’s death. And Aaron has a present for her—an expensive present.

When Aaron reaches the yard, he’s out of breath and the smell of dung mixed with hay brings on a sneezing fit.

A storm of sneezes that threatens to drown out the growing commotion approaching from nearby. It’s a group of girls, bunched up, crowded around one another, laughing and joking. The girl in the middle is Shareen.

Oh no. Not now.
With two girls hanging on her shoulders and several others whispering in her ears, Shareen isn’t trying to impress them. She’s the natural leader and the group has no choice but to follow her when she comes to a sudden stop in front of Aaron.

She’s clearly wondering if he’s a suitable victim for a pushing-around session. Shareen slowly eyes her mates while Aaron scans the group for Rachel. She’s not there. He glances over the fence at the three ponies munching hay and wonders if she’s up at the church.

“No one’s ever going to marry
you
, Aaron,” Shareen starts.

A giggling ripple spreads through the girls.

Constance, who has a scar on her lip and gray-green eyes, clasps her stomach in preparation for a side-splitting laugh while they move in on him.

“Not like Shareen,” a gawky girl adds.

“You’ve never kissed anyone, have you, Aaron? You’re too scared, aren’t you?” Shareen says. “Oooh, never been kissed and nearly sixteen.”

“I have!” Aaron blushes, surrounded by mischievous faces as the girls shove each other to get closer still.

“My brother got married at fourteen,” the gawky girl adds.

With the fence and feeding ponies behind him, there’s nowhere for Aaron to escape to, unless he crashes through the girls’ linked arms. They know he won’t dare do that, because touching them would bring howls of complaints from everyone in the community and, of course, they’d run and tell the priest immediately. Aaron’s their unwilling hostage and if
they
push or touch him, that’s different because they’re just mucking about, and what would they want from him anyway? Aaron suddenly places his hands behind his back to show them he’s not intimidated in the least, but he swallows too slowly, giving them a reason to continue.