The Illegal (9 page)

Y
OU WERE SUPPOSED TO LIVE WITH A MOTHER OR A
father or some sort of caregiver when you were fifteen years old, but John had been on his own for a while. His mother would surely make it back home eventually, when she was healthy, and John would welcome her. He tried to remind himself that his mother and he had been through this ordeal before and had always found their way back together. It would be good to live with her again in the half shipping container that they rented from Lula DiStefano, queen of AfricTown. But for now, at the start of his third term as a Grade 9 student at the Clarkson Academy for the Gifted, John was supervised by Lula but living alone in the container next to Water Tap 17 in the Bungalow Hill district of AfricTown. Some hundred thousand people lived in AfricTown, many of them—like John and his mother—paying rent money to Lula.

John had not seen his mother in two weeks. The last visit had not gone well. She was still in the secured area of the Wintergreen Psychiatric Institute, and she was still speechless and lying in a fetal position. He didn’t like having to play the role of parent and ask the nurses questions: were they bathing her enough, changing her clothes, brushing her teeth, and what about that big bed sore on her hip? He especially hadn’t enjoyed it when some power-tripping nurse tried to turn the tables and interrogate him about where he was living and who was taking care of him. What is your
street address? she asked. There is no street address, he said, it’s AfricTown. Who is taking care of you? she said. Lula Brown, he said, lying. Where does she work? She has no job, John said. What is her telephone number? Again he lied: We don’t have telephone service. He got out of there before she could consult with her superiors or try to interrogate him further.

The next time, instead of visiting the hospital, John would call and see if his mom was well enough to come to the phone on the psych ward. It was too upsetting to see his mother reverted to infancy. And he had a sudden, great responsibility on his shoulders and could not afford to screw up. He now had the fancy computer and video-recording equipment worth ten thousand dollars. Using his overall 95 percent average and his position as the third-highest-ranked student in all of Grade 9, John had won permission from his headmistress to spend his spring term filming the documentary about AfricTown and the fate of Zantorolanders in Freedom State. He was exempted from all but his Journalism in the Age of Apathy class, provided that he made up the other courses in the summer. He had much work to do, and he couldn’t afford to get caught up in a web of well-intentioned questions from nurses in his mom’s hospital. Questions like that could lead to nothing but bad results. In John’s opinion, well-intentioned adults were inordinately gifted at fucking up the lives of parentless teenagers who were perfectly capable of carrying on by themselves.

Clarkson Academy admitted thirty-five students in Grade 7 and kept them until graduation from Grade 12. Two years earlier, when John had written the entrance exams, he competed against thirteen hundred other students. He placed nineteenth, which was good enough to get in but not good enough for a full scholarship. You had to place in the top ten to get that. They offered him ten thousand dollars, far short of the fifty thousand he needed to attend. He was able to talk them up. Yes, he truly lived in AfricTown, he told them. Yes, he was truly a citizen of Freedom State, and here were his citizenship papers. Born and raised in the country. As was his mother.
Yes, he was in fact the child who had written the entrance exams. They put him through more tests to be sure and then agreed to cover twenty-five thousand of his fees, plus his uniform, plus his books, plus hot meals at school. But he would have to find his own transportation to school, because it was considered unsafe to send a school bus to fetch him in AfricTown. And he would have to find sponsors to cover the remainder of his annual tuition fee.

So John had approached Lula DiStefano, who in addition to being his landlady, happened to own the infamous Bombay Booty brothel and the nightclub known as the Pit.

“Say what?” she said. “You? Puny little child of AfricTown? You telling me that little Mr. Falconer has a brain on fire?”

John said that he could attend the school if he could find the twenty-five thousand a year to pay the rest of his tuition.

“How will you get to school and back?” she asked.

“I’ll walk.”

“How far is it?”

“Five kilometres, one way.”

“You’ll wear out a pair of shoes every month.”

“I might need some help with that too.”

So Lula had provided twenty-five thousand the first year. He finished fourth in his class in Grade 7, and after that he was on full scholarship, but she still had to pay for books, uniforms, shoes and special outings, and she ended up giving him spending money for clothes and food, because his mother didn’t make much as a housecleaner, even when she wasn’t in the psych ward.

All of this was very good. Except for the ways that it was very bad. “I own you for life, child” was how Lula put it. She acted like she meant it too.

J
OHN AWOKE WITH A START
,
AND WITH HIS BACK SOAKED IN
sweat. He’d been having nightmares again. In his dreams, his mother had been pacing at night and getting into all sorts of trouble while
he slept. But as he climbed out of bed, he reassured himself that all was fine: she was still in the hospital, and he was still alone at home.

It was a tiny living space, even when his mother was not there. Their one room, half a shipping container, rented for a hundred dollars a month, though Lula eased up on the payment obligations whenever John’s mother was too ill to work. In the room: a four-drawer dresser for all their clothes, two single Murphy beds that folded up against the wall when not occupied, one fold-up kitchen table that doubled as a homework desk, two chairs, a portable stove attached to a butane tank, a large cooler that with ice became a fridge, a transistor radio, several reading lamps with spare light bulbs and spare batteries, and four pots whose purposes were never interchangeable—a soup pot, a dishes pot, a wash pot and a chamber pot.

John heated up water on his butane stove, washed his hands and face, and then stepped out of the container in his underwear to sniff the morning air—the March day was about twenty degrees Celsius and clear and sunny—and to throw the water into the open ditch that passed behind the water tap, carrying sewage, waste and grey water to what everyone called the Cesspool at the far southern end of AfricTown. The end of the community where nobody wanted to live and only the most desperate did.

After pitching the water, John put on his shorts, T-shirt and runners. His school uniform, tie and dress shoes were in his locker at school. No sense wearing out the clothes on the long walk to the Bombay Booty and then to school, and no sense putting on any fancy clothes that might get him mugged in AfricTown. John’s mother liked to cook him porridge, when she was home. Raisins, cinnamon, oatmeal, a touch of cream and sugar on top—she knew how to make it perfectly. But she wasn’t home, and he didn’t have time to cook and clean, so he went to the Korner Kook, as he did most mornings.

Jerzy Kook Kook had been selling street eats, as he called them, since before John was born. John had once asked him how old he was, and Jerzy said, “Beyond dying.” He stood bow-legged at his
butane-fired frying pan in his shorts, muscle shirt and sandals, with spatula in hand, taking orders from the five people lined up ahead of John. Jerzy had a box of eggs, three slow-cookers of rice that had been boiled up with onions, red peppers and carrots, and his crate of oranges, which he called Zantoroland Fresh. For fifty cents, John got one fried egg, a big scoop of rice and half a sliced orange. He had to bring his own plate and fork, but that didn’t take long to wash.

“What’ll it be, Professor?” Jerzy said, when John stood before him.

Jerzy always called him that. It annoyed John, but he had discovered that if he complained about it, the old man would just keep saying it.

“The usual,” John said.

“You’re too young for the usual. How about lox and cream cheese with, whaddya call it, eggs Benedictine?”

“It’s eggs Benedict, and you don’t have any of that stuff. Just the usual, please.”

“Thank you, Professor, for correcting my English. I charge everybody else a dollar for this meal, but you get the gifted student rate.”

“Thanks, Jerzy. I’m in a hurry today. Gotta work before school.”

“Stay outta that brothel, once you hit puberty.”

“Thanks a lot, Jerzy. I already hit puberty. You need proof?”

“I ain’t need no proof of puberty at fucking six o’clock on a Wednesday morning,” Jerzy said. “Give me your plate. Your egg is ready. Fried, over, and not quite runny. I make the best damn eggs in AfricTown.”

“Jerzy, you make the best damn eggs in the Ortiz Sea. North or south. Hell, let me be the first to say it. You make the best damn eggs in the entire Indian Ocean.”

“That’s better. Be nice to me, boy, or I’ll up your rate.”

“I’m always nice to you.”

“I’m telling you, don’t go wasting your hormones in that brothel. Not a good place for a young buck with a brain, and I’m serious.”

“Okay, Jerzy. I hear you. Gotta go.”

“Go be bright. Go be the best damn student there is. What was your rank when you finished eighth grade?”

John sighed. “Number three.”

“Ain’t good enough. Here’s what I want from you, if you want to keep up your egg scholarship.”

“Egg scholarship?”

“A fifty-cent breakfast that costs everybody else one dollar hard cash is what I mean by an egg scholarship. You want to keep it, you got to be the best damn student in the school. In the country. In the Ortiz Sea, north and south. And in the whole motherfucking Indian Ocean. From the British Indian Ocean Territory all the way south to Antarctica, and from Madagascar to Australia, you gotta be number one.”

“I’ll see what I can do about that, Jerzy. But now I have to get to work in that brothel.”

T
HE
B
OMBAY
B
OOTY HAD RUNNING WATER AND ELECTRICITY
. Marble floors, rooms with king-sized beds and ensuites. It was the best-known brothel in Freedom State. The Pit next door, where brothel clients went to eat and drink and to watch dance and music shows and bet on snakepit wrestlers, had the finest amenities going. The two buildings were connected, so customers could move discreetly from one to the other. Lula DiStefano owned both businesses, as well as most of the fifteen thousand shipping containers in AfricTown. Of those fifteen thousand homes, only the few hundred nearest to the Bombay Booty had running water and electricity. Some of the others took bootleg electricity, but one or two people died each year trying to hook up wires to siphon electricity from the main line and run it to their homes. The containers shared public taps. There were about a thousand of them, or one for every fifteen shipping containers, with an average of seven people in each container. Some of the containers had windows, but none of them had
bathrooms. You could go to the crapping grounds for free. Or you could use one of the concrete bunkers that doubled as outhouses and have somebody carry away your pee and shit, but you had to pay for that: fifty cents to pee, and a dollar for a dump. Most people just used buckets in their homes and dumped the waste in the ditches that wound through AfricTown, all sloping south toward the Cesspool.

Other than plumbing and utilities, you could get pretty well anything you wanted in AfricTown, if you were willing to pay: knives, guns, wine, whisky, cellphones, milk, cereal, eggs and bread, butane, camping lamps of every size and strength, transistor radios and batteries. You could buy inner tubes and spare parts for bicycles, and you could pay any number of “wheel doctors” a few dollars to fix a broken bike. Most people walked or biked to Clarkson and hauled their staples back. It made no sense to park in AfricTown or leave your vehicle unattended, unless you parked in the Bombay Booty’s lot and paid for the car patrol service. Just a few weeks ago, two undercover police officers had come to AfricTown in an unmarked vehicle, which they neglected to park in the secured lot. While the cops were inside Bombay Booty, the car had its tires and wheels taken. The doors were removed. The car radio was stolen. Lula expressed her regrets but said that the best she could do was have the carcass of the car loaded onto a flatbed truck and hauled back to the cop shop, and, of course, give the cops a lift into town. Discreetly, of course. As usual.

Since there was no electricity, people kept perishable goods in old-fashioned iceboxes, coolers and mini-fridges with the electrical cords coiled up. Men hauling carts walked through AfricTown every second day, selling chunks of ice.

There was a school in AfricTown, and its curriculum was based on the Freedom State standardized exams, but many parents kept their children out of it. Police raided it sometimes, arresting children who could not provide documentation of citizenship. And the teachers were not certified educators but parents who lived in AfricTown and knew about math, science, geography, English,
history and French. Some of them were highly educated and truly motivated in the classroom. Others were useless. John had survived somehow through Grade 6 by listening to elders and becoming an avid borrower of books at the Clarkson Library.

John had mixed feelings about AfricTown. So far it had allowed him to live undisturbed and not become a ward of the state during his mother’s illnesses. It allowed his genius to flower. It allowed him to read thousands of books by battery-powered lamplight in the nighttime and in the early mornings. People let him be, for the most part, except for the name-calling.
Vanilla cake, ice cream, stracciatella, latte boy, cookies ’n’ cream
—people had every sort of food name for him, because he was blacker than white but whiter than black. He had learned to deal with that.

As soon as he bought it with his prize money, John carried his video camera everywhere he went, so people would get used to it and act natural and just carry on as usual while he filmed their lives. On his walk from Jerzy Kook Kook to the Bombay Booty for his one-hour-a-day cleaning job before school, John’s camera caught a man pulling his toddler out of the sewage ditch she had fallen into and wiping her off. It caught a busker juggling five oranges, and a watering hole where men drank homemade beer sold at twenty-five cents a quart. And it caught a young woman fastening a baby to a sling around her back while holding a bag in one hand and shoes in the other. She looked about eighteen. No makeup, no fingernail polish, but she had a radiant face. Her hair was kept to a short, tight afro. Clean skin and clean clothes. She was walking north, toward Clarkson.