Dead Tomorrow

28

The baby had been quiet for several hours and now it was Simona who was crying. She lay, holding Gogu tight to her face, curled up beside the heating pipe. She sobbed, slept a little, then woke and sobbed again.

All the others, except for Valeria and the baby, were out. On the crackly music system, Tracy Chapman was singing ‘Fast Car’. Valeria often played Tracy Chapman; the baby seemed to like her music and went quiet, as if the songs were lullabies. Outside, up on the road above them, it was a cold, wet day, rain on the verge of sleet, and an icy draught blew in down here. The flames of the candles, jammed on to stalagmites of melted wax on the concrete floor, guttered, making the shadows jump.

They had no electricity, so candles provided the only light and they used them sparingly. Sometimes they bought them with money they got from selling stuff they stole, or with the cash from picking pockets and snatching handbags, but mostly they shoplifted them from mini-markets.

On occasions when they were desperate – although Simona really did not like doing this – they stole candles from Orthodox churches. Working with Romeo, distracting onlookers, they would cram their pockets full of the thin, brown candles, the ones bereaved people paid for and lit for their loved ones, placing them in large three-sided metal boxes; one box for the living and the other for the dead.

But she was always scared that God would punish them for this. And as she lay sobbing now, she wondered if that had been God’s punishment last night.

She had never been to church, and no one had ever taught her how to pray, but the carer at the home she had been in had told her about God, that he watched her all the time and would punish her for every bad thing that she did.

Beyond the yellow glow of the flames, where the shadows never moved, darkness stretched away into the distance, until the tunnel housing the pipe ended at the point where the pipe surfaced and then ran overground across the suburb of Crângaşi. There were whole communities of street people there, she had seen, who lived in shanty villages, in makeshift huts built against the pipe. Simona had lived in one for a while herself, but inside it was small and cramped, and the roof let the rain in.

She preferred to be here. There was more space and it was dry. Although she never liked to be here entirely alone – she had always been afraid of that darkness beyond the candles, and the mice and rats and spiders it contained. And something else, far worse.

Romeo used to explore the darkness, but he never found anything, other than skeletons of rodents and, once, a broken supermarket basket. Then, one day, Valeria had brought a man back here. She regularly had men here, screwing noisily and openly, not caring who saw. But this particular man spooked them all. He had a ponytail, a silver cross hanging from his neck, and he carried a Bible. He did not want to sleep with her, he told her. He wanted to talk to them all about God and the devil. He told them that the devil lived in the darkness beyond the candles, because, like them, the devil needed the warmth of the pipes.

And he told them that the devil was watching them all, and they were damned because of their sins, and they should be careful when they slept, in case he crawled out of that darkness and snatched one of them.

Simona called out suddenly, ‘Valeria, is God punishing me?’

Valeria left the baby asleep, on a bed made from a quilted jacket, and walked across to Simona, crouching to avoid hitting her head on the rivets that protruded from the cross-girders supporting the road above them. She was dressed in the same clothes as always, emerald puffa over her gaudy-coloured jogging suit, her lank brown hair hanging as straight as laces either side of her haunted face. Then she put an arm around Simona.

‘No, that was not God punishing you. It was a bad person, just a bad person, that’s all.’

‘I don’t want this life any more. I want to go away from here.’

‘Where do you want to go?’ she asked.

Simona shrugged helplessly, then began sobbing again.

‘I want to go to England,’ Valeria said. She smiled wistfully, and her face suddenly came alive. She nodded. ‘England. We are in the EU now. We can go.’

Simona continued to sob for some minutes, then she stopped. ‘What is the EU?’

‘It’s a thing. It means Romanian people can go to England.’

‘Would it be better in England?’

‘I met some people a while ago who were going. They had jobs as erotic dancers. Big money. Maybe you and I could be erotic dancers.’

Simona sniffed. ‘I don’t know how to dance.’

‘I think there are other jobs. You know, in bars, restaurants. Maybe in a bakery even.’

‘I’d like to go,’ Simona said. ‘I’d like to go now.’ She sniffed. ‘Will you come with me? Maybe you and me and Romeo – and the baby, of course.’

‘There are people who know. I have to find someone who can help. Do you think Romeo will want to come too?’

She shrugged. Then behind them, they heard Romeo’s voice.

‘Hi! I’m back and I have something!’

He jumped down from several rungs up the ladder and walked over to them, dripping wet and panting, his hood up over his head. ‘I ran,’ he said. ‘Long way. Several places, you know, watched me, they got to know us. I had to go a long way. But I got it!’ His huge, saucer-like eyes were smiling brightly as he dug his hand inside his jacket and pulled out the pink plastic bag.

He stopped and coughed violently for some moments, then removed a squat, plastic bottle of metallic paint and twisted the lid to snap the seal.

Simona watched him, everything else suddenly gone from her mind.

He poured a small amount of the paint into the bag, then, holding it by the neck, passed it to her, making sure she had a good grip on it before letting go.

She brought the neck to her mouth, blew into it, as if inflating a balloon, then inhaled deeply through her mouth. She exhaled, then inhaled deeply again. And a third time. Now, suddenly, her face relaxed. She gave a distant smile. Her eyes rolled up, then down, glazing over.

For a short while, her pain was gone.

The black Mercedes drove slowly along the road, tyres sluicing through the rain, windscreen wipers clop-copping. It passed a small, run-down mini-market, a café, a butcher’s, an Orthodox church covered in scaffolding, a car wash, with three men hosing down a white van, and a cluster of dogs, their fur ruffled by the wind.

Two people sat in the back of the car, a neat-looking man in his late forties, wearing a black coat over a grey, roll-neck jumper, and a woman, a little younger, with an attractive, open face beneath a tangle of fair hair, who wore a fleece-collared leather jacket over a baggy jumper, tight jeans and black suede boots, and big costume jewellery. She looked as if she might once have been a minor rock star, or an equally minor actress.

The driver pulled over in front of a decrepit high-rise building, with laundry hanging from half the windows and a dozen satellite television dishes fixed to the bare walls, and turned off the engine. Then he pointed through the windscreen at a jagged hole where the road met the pavement.

‘There,’ he said. ‘That’s where she lives.’

‘So there’s likely to be several of them down there,’ the man in the back said.

‘Yes, but careful of the one I told you about,’ the driver said. ‘She’s feisty.’

With the wipers off, the steady droplets of rain were fast turning the screen opaque. Passers-by became blurred shapes. That was good. On top of the blacked-out windows, that would make it even harder for anyone to see in. The cars in this neighbourhood were beat-up wrecks. Every person walking past was going to notice the gleaming S-Class Mercedes, and wonder what it was doing here and who was inside.

‘OK,’ the woman said. ‘Good. Let’s go.’

The car pulled away.

Beneath the tarmac under its tyres, the baby slept. Valeria read a newspaper that was several days old. Tracy Chapman was singing ‘Fast Car’ again. Romeo held the neck of the plastic bag in his mouth, exhaling and inhaling.

Simona lay on her mattress, serene now, her head full of dreams of England. She saw a tall clock tower called Big Ben. She dropped cubes of ice into a glass, then poured in whisky. Lights glided past her. The lights of a city. People in that city smiled. She heard laughter. She was in a huge room with paintings and statues. It was dry in this room. She felt no pain in her body or her heart.

When, a long time later, she woke, her mind was set.