Seven Ways to Kill a Cat

MAGGOT OF A DOUBT

‘YOU’LL NEVER GUESS who I ran into in Buenos Aires yesterday …’ I say to Mamina, as she sips the sweet mate I’ve just brewed for her.

I wait for her to ask who, but nothing. She doesn’t even look at me.

‘Someone who was asking after you, abuela. Don’t you want to know who it was?’

‘Who?’

‘Toni!’

Mamina doesn’t react. Or she does, but in her own way. She stares out the window. For what feels like a century. She empties the rest of the sachet of sugar into her mate and adds some more hot water. She takes a sip, then looks at me. I’ve seen this look before, cold as hoar frost, but I don’t understand it. I’ve never been able to understand it. And I certainly don’t now. I open my eyes wide, raise my eyebrows, feeling a wave of panic grip me. I’m waiting for her to explain. Mamina knows that. She’s not stupid. She calmly finishes her mate and then says abruptly, ‘Toni is dead.’

‘What do you mean, dead?’ I explode. ‘I just said I saw him, that he said to say hi … What are you talking about?’

Mamina answers, her voice low. Almost inaudible. She always hates it when people raise their voices. When they do, she starts whispering. I used to think it was funny when I was a kid. I’d do it deliberately to wind her up. The softer she spoke, the louder I shouted. Never worked. Mamina always won. Didn’t matter how violent the argument, we always ended up whispering.

‘He’s dead to me. He doesn’t exist … And I don’t want to discuss it any further.’

‘What’s up, Mamina? What did he do?’

‘You don’t know?’

‘Obviously not, since I’m asking you …’ I retort, but I’m careful not to raise my voice above her whisper.

‘Good, that’s good. It’s better if you don’t know …’

I clear away the mate. There’s no point carrying on. When Mamina decides a subject is closed, there’s no arguing. It’s closed, full stop, end of story.

I go back and sit at the kitchen table. I rack my brains but I can’t remember anything. I was only a kid. I would have been — what? — ten, maybe, when Toni disappeared. Not even. Whatever shit he got himself mixed up in must have been serious. Really fucking serious, if Mamina still hasn’t forgiven him. She’s not the kind to hold a grudge.

All this just makes me suspicious, tarnishes the image I’ve had of Toni. Makes me see him differently. Like he’s a traitor, a son of a bitch. Toni said he couldn’t come back to the barrio because he had ‘unfinished business’. I’m guessing this unfinished business is the same thing Mamina refuses to talk about. I used to think Toni disappeared because the Feds were looking for him, but that’s bullshit. Nobody leaves the barrio just because the cops are after them. Nobody gives a shit about the police round here; the only law is the law of the barrio, and most kids are careful to abide by it. Anyone who doesn’t would do well to fuck off before they get sent to a barrio six feet under. That must be what happened with Toni, but I can’t think what shit he could have got himself mixed up in that meant having to vanish without trace. And is whatever it is the same shit that Mamina can’t forgive him for?

I can’t seem to square the two. For Toni to disappear like that means a vendetta, a mejicaneada, score-settling for some scam that went wrong — but all those things are about honour, about the code of the barrio. And Mamina’s not the kind to turn her back on one of her own for something like that. She has her own personal code, and it’s very different. So, what then? She can’t forgive him for abandoning her, leaving her in the lurch and not showing his face for years? I can’t believe that either. It’s not like her. It’s a luxury she can’t afford. The luxury of a middle-class mother more interested in her own pain than the fate of her ungrateful child.

Too many questions. I hate people asking me questions. I hate it even more when it’s me doing the asking and I don’t have any answers. I lie on my bed and try to take my mind off things by reading the whale book, but I can’t focus. I keep turning it all over and over in my mind. I keep turning the book over and over, until the money and the scrap of paper with Toni’s address fall out. I count the money again, and read the note again: they’re my ticket out of here, but now I’m not sure I want to leave. At least not until I find out what the fuck went down between Toni and Mamina.

The sun’s sinking. There’s not much light left. It’s too early to head over to Farías’s bar, but I’ve nowhere else to go. I’m drowning here.

‘I’m heading out, Mamina,’ I tell her. ‘I won’t be back for dinner.’

She answers with a wave, flicking the back of her hand without even looking at me.

Instead of taking the alley up towards the station, I wander along one of the dirt tracks leading off it. The one that runs past the house of Oliviera, the Portuguese guy. This way, I have to take the bridge across the train tracks. It’s the long way round. I’m killing time.

It’s pretty quiet for a Saturday. There’s almost no sound from the row of shacks. I can hear muffled music from one of them, a burst of laughter from another, but nothing else. The buildings round here aren’t so much bricks and mortar as corrugated iron and bits of timber. In the evening light, they look derelict.

Two little kids are throwing stones at a mangy, pitiful dog. The dog shambles away — hasn’t got the energy to run. Not that he needs to, given the kids’ aim. They couldn’t hit a cow at ten feet. They’re only snotty-nosed little tykes with no shoes.

At the end of the lane, just before the tracks, I turn and, after about thirty metres, find myself in front of Ernestina’s place. Without even thinking, I’ve come to fetch Quique. I’ve obviously got used to having the kid around. When he’s not, I kind of miss him.

I cup my hands like an ocarina, put my lips to my thumbs and whistle, the call of a non-existent bird. Quique knows it. He’s been trying to get the hang of it for months but either he’s got his hands clasped wrong, or he’s not blowing at the right angle. He keeps asking me to tell him how to do it, but I don’t know how to explain. So I show him again, but instead of watching, he closes his eyes and listens, like if he can just get the sound right, the rest will come by itself.

I give another bird call and Sultán barks at me. He’s tied up round the back. Quique doesn’t show. He can’t not have heard me. I blow hard. I pop my head over the bamboo fence. No one about. The door is padlocked. His kid sister’s doll is lying in the yard, wearing the fur from the cat that me and Chueco ate the other day. I laugh because the pelt looks like it was made-to-measure. It’s turned right side out now — with the fur on the outside — and wearing it, the doll looks like some crazy old woman with a shock of hair and a mink coat showing off her legs.

I push the chain-link gate, go into the yard and pick up the doll, laughing to myself. The old woman turns out to be a bit skanky. And she stinks. The arms of her fur coat have claws on the end ready to scratch someone’s eyes out. The cat obviously bared its claws before it died and they stayed like that, stiff and razor-sharp. I stare at one of the claws and it’s moving. It’s nearly night, so I can’t really see properly. I hold the doll up to my face, gagging on the putrid stench, and I see the claw isn’t a claw. It’s wriggling like it’s waving to me. It’s a maggot, a two-day-old fly larva. I’ve seen enough flyblown animals that I don’t need to strip the doll to know its teeming with maggots. That’s one sight I’d rather spare myself. I open my hands and the plastic body bounces on the ground. If the old woman were flesh and blood, they’d be eating her alive.