Disharmony (11 page)

Abrafo’s eyes suddenly locked onto him.

Luke felt his own eyes begin to stream as he fell into the frigid pools of light. He wondered dimly how Abrafo was blocking Zac’s punches. But somehow that didn’t seem important now. Luke swayed with Abrafo’s movements, his body following the taller youth’s actions. Abrafo ducked and blocked, his hands a blur, as Zac danced and spun ceaselessly, trying to find an entry point for a body blow.

Suddenly Abrafo stopped. His eyes still locked on Luke’s, he shot out an arm just as Zac moved in again to strike. Abrafo’s forearm smacked into Zac’s neck and the smaller boy dropped.

Luke knew he had to do something. Now. But he couldn’t move. He opened his mouth to shout out. And then, from the corner of his eye, Luke saw Zac fly again. In slow motion this time. From the floor at Abrafo’s feet, Zac sprang upwards, his sneakers suddenly head-height. His legs scissored, midair, and one heel cracked into the albino’s forehead.

The blue eyes closed and Luke vomited all over his shoes.

‘Move, Luke, now!’ yelled Zac.

Still bent double, stomach convulsing, Luke recognised the panic in Zac’s voice and threw himself sideways. He’d learned long ago that if someone warned him to move, he moved. Fast. He registered a blur of movement flashing past the spot where he’d been standing, just as his ribs cracked into the side of the desk.

‘Oh my God! What on earth is going on here?’ Matron stood in the doorway, her radio in hand.

‘Code Nine Administration building,’ she yelled into the radio. ‘Officer down! Inmate at large. Black, Nguyen, on your knees. Now!’

Luke was happy to oblige. He allowed himself to slide
down the legs of the desk. He sat back on his haunches and bent his head forward over his lap. The stench from his shoes filled his nostrils and he lurched upright again.

‘You stink, Black,’ said Zac, kneeling next to him.

‘Kill me now,’ said Luke.

‘I don’t think you’ll have to wait long to die, dude,’ said Zac. ‘Holt should be here any minute.’

Mirela blew a kiss to the middle-aged woman who was red-faced and screaming at them from the driver’s seat of her dilapidated Volvo station wagon. In the rear of the car, two children in school uniform pulled faces, their middle fingers raised.

Samantha tugged at Mirela’s bare brown arm.

‘Maybe if you didn’t just dawdle across the road, Mimi,’ she said, using Mirela’s baby name, ‘people wouldn’t be so mean to you.’

‘What are you,
new
?’ Mirela laughed. ‘The Gaje hate gypsies, and you know that as well as I do. They’d treat us that way even if I offered to wash that crappy car for them for free.’

‘Not all of them are like that,’ said Samantha.

‘Yeah, right,’ said Mirela. ‘That’s your opinion, but don’t forget – you believe in fairytales.’

They strolled up the main street of Pantelimon, peering into shop windows. Samantha smiled for two red-haired, sunburned tourists falling over one another to take their photo. Right when they sing-songed, ‘Cheeeese!’ Mirela poked out her tongue.

‘What?’ she said, when Samantha frowned at her. ‘You don’t think that’s gonna make a great photo? They’ll be back home one day, maybe ten years from now, looking at that photo of the two colourful gypsy girls. Of course, they’ll be stunned by the beauty of the dark-haired one sticking out her tongue. And then off they’ll go and pay to watch me star in a movie at their local cinema, and they’ll never know that they once almost met the most famous movie star in the world.’

Samantha laughed and linked arms with her.

‘You should be a writer, not a movie star,’ she said. ‘You spin enough bull–’

‘Hey!’ laughed Mirela. ‘Do you eat with that mouth?’

They walked past McDonald’s, and Mirela gazed in wistfully. ‘You wanna go in?’ she said.

‘You got any money?’ said Samantha. ‘No, you don’t, so I don’t want to go in.’

‘We’ve got
some
money,’ said Mirela.

‘Oh yeah, sure. We’re gonna use the cash your mother gave us for groceries to buy McDonald’s. That sounds like a great plan. Especially if we want to be
murdered
. Pass.’

Just ahead, Samantha spotted the two happy photographers at a stall selling overpriced junk for tourists. She watched them examining a coffee mug bearing a blurry transfer of Count Vlad Dracul, the Impaler.

‘They can’t ever get enough of Dracula, can they?’ said Mirela.

‘Well, they are in Romania, his birthplace,’ said Samantha. ‘But they should wait until they get to Transylvania for their souvenirs. They can buy underwear with his name on it then.’

‘You talk about him like he’s real.’

‘Well, not everything that exists is visible, you know.’

‘Yeah, yeah. I know. Once upon a time …’ Mirela laughed.

‘Shut up,’ said Sam. ‘Where do you reckon they’re from, anyway?’ This was her favourite game.

‘Oh, who cares,’ said Mirela. ‘Texas? Sweden?’

‘Australia?’

‘Yeah, whatever.’

‘I’d love to go to Australia,’ said Samantha.

‘Really? Gee, you’ve never mentioned
that
before.’ Mirela rolled her eyes. ‘I don’t know why you want to go fantasising about riding kangaroos all day when you could be dreaming about moving to LA, baby.’

‘Meh,’ said Samantha.

‘Whatever,’ said Mirela. ‘So, where are we going, anyway?’

‘Now, where do you think?’

‘Aw, man,’ Mirela groaned. ‘Birthday Jones again? I thought you were in love with Tamas.’

‘You’re an idiot, you know that, Mimi?’

Samantha couldn’t explain why she was drawn to Birthday Jones. It would be like having to provide reasons why she loved Lala. Or Mirela, for that matter. Some people just meant the world to her.

Although Milosh’s camp travelled widely throughout Romania, they settled every year in the countryside on the outskirts of Pantelimon. And that’s where she’d met Birthday Jones. Five years ago, on the streets, where he lived.

‘But he’s not even Roma,’ said Mirela.

Samantha sighed. The fence between the Roma and the Gaje was as carefully tended by the gypsies as it was by the rest of the Romanian population. She found the whole thing completely boring. As far as she was concerned, she couldn’t have cared less about a person’s nationality or culture. It made
no more difference to her than whether a person preferred Coke or Pepsi. For the past two years, every summer, she’d been using the internet at the Pantelimon library and she knew that the world was a much bigger place than Romania.

‘Anyway,’ she said. ‘You got anything better to do?’

They found Birthday working his favourite restaurant strip.

‘He is gorgeous,’ said Mirela. ‘I do understand the attraction.’

‘No attraction,’ said Samantha. ‘None. Zero. Zip.’

‘You must have it bad for Tamas, then,’ said Mirela. ‘That boy there is fine.’

They watched Birthday Jones and his crew at work. They relied on the younger beggars to get the ball rolling. When they’d first met Birthday, he’d been eleven and the absolute best beggar. Samantha suspected it was racism at play. Because Birthday Jones was a Romanian street kid with a thick mop of shaggy, light-brown hair, rather than coarse, wiry black, he stood out from the crowd. He appealed to the Western mums and dads with kids at home being babysat by Nanna while they took their trip of a lifetime. The guilt would bite hard and their wallets would be out before they knew it.

Perfect. The older pickpockets would take note – that’s where they kept the cash.

But Birthday Jones had an extra secret weapon. His eyes. An amber-gold colour and yes, damn it, sparkling; he would beam those eyes into yours and all of a sudden you’d forget he was barefoot and dirt-smeared. In fact, suddenly, he looked great, and it seemed like a good idea to buy him a meal, some shoes, a bed. Sam had watched him work plenty of times, and when Birthday brought out the big guns –
his dimples – the tourists started speaking seriously about adoption and the plight of Romanian street children. Sam was at once sympathetic and repulsed by that attitude. Sure, she could understand the attraction of bringing this particularly cute street kid into western suburbia. These tourists would suddenly become the Angelina Jolies of their suburb in a single post-softball weekend barbeque. But what about the smaller kids they looked right through? Andre, with the cleft palate, only eight this year, and three when Samantha first met him. He was still begging, and had three years to go before he graduated to pickpocket. And Belinda, now fourteen – Samantha hadn’t seen her once in the last two years. Word was she was in Russia now, and was owned by the mafia.

Birthday was wearing his Invisible Outfit: black cargos, blue T-shirt, runners. Today, with his sunshine curls tamed by a black trucker cap, and those eyes hooded by its curved visor, he was just another street kid. He was making certain to keep the dimples in their holster. He didn’t want to stand out.

‘Can you see their handler?’ said Mirela.

‘Fat cow,’ said Samantha. ‘She’s right there. Stay down. She hates me.’

They squatted by a row of concrete rubbish bins separating the mall from the street. Birthday Jones had had the same handler for the past three years. Cici Illiescu. When Samantha had seen the woman beating the kids because they didn’t bring in enough cash or food, she’d sworn in protest and tried to jump in to help them. But Birthday had yelled at her, told her she was making things worse.

‘It doesn’t even hurt,’ he’d said later. ‘It’s just a bit of hose. But if you get her angry, she’ll tell Drago and then we’ll really cop it. She’s nothing. We all laugh about how
winded she gets just giving out five.’

‘We can’t sit here in the gutters all day, Sam,’ said Mirela. ‘This is getting boring.’

‘Chill,’ said Samantha. ‘I’ll get his attention in a second.’

A shopkeeper on the other side of the street made a show of catching their eye and spitting onto the footpath. He swept the air theatrically with his broom to shoo them away.

‘Why do they call him Birthday, anyway?’ said Mirela, smiling languidly at the shopkeeper. It’d take the Gaje police to get her to move from a public street, and even then she’d give them plenty of chat.

‘It’s his actual name,’ said Samantha. ‘They don’t just call him that.’

‘For real?’ said Mirela.

‘Yep. He was dumped at the hospital on the day he was born. And he had no blanket, nothing. Some wise-arse at the hospital decided to memorialise the moment, I guess, and wrote down Birthday Jones as his name on his birth certificate.’

‘Nice,’ said Mirela, grinning.

‘It’s not funny.’ Samantha nudged Mirela’s foot with her shoe.

‘Hey! I know. It’s pretty mean.’ Mirela laughed. ‘It’s a cool name, though.’

Samantha glowered and turned back to watch the crew work the mall.

‘Maybe that’s why you like him so much,’ said Mirela. ‘On account of … you know … how you came to
us
and all.’

Samantha said nothing. She was sure that had to be part of it. When she’d first heard his story and the tales of some of the other kids out there, she’d felt guilty for having been so
lucky as to have been left with Lala. Sure, there’d been some hard times growing up around Milosh, but it was nothing compared to life as a child in a Romanian orphanage. Even the streets were better than that, and that’s where most of them ended up.

‘Hey, get up,’ she said. ‘He’s coming this way.’

The restaurant strip was the most upmarket in Pantelimon, and a few of the restaurateurs did their best to warn their customers – mostly tourists – about the pickpockets and beggars. The kids would stay away from these cafes, concentrating their trade around the outdoor tables of the other venues, whose owners saved a fortune buying stolen goods from the street kids – often items thieved to order.

Right now, Birthday Jones was making his way through a cluster of people checking out the signposted menu of one of these establishments. Samantha watched him brush past a tall, slim woman in an expensive leather jacket. Waiting for a table with a shorter woman in a red sundress, she barely glanced at him, and didn’t notice that her handbag swayed slightly as he walked away.

From their concrete hideout, Samantha grinned. She gave their whistle. Birthday looked up, spotted her instantly. Other than a slight tilt of his trucker cap, his expression didn’t change at all.

‘Hey, hoodlum,’ she said when he reached the bins.

That got her the dimples.

‘Hey, yourself, superstar,’ he said, looking down at them. ‘Mirela,’ he added.

Mirela nodded. ‘What’s up?’ she said, blushing.

‘Well, you two should know. You’re the talk of the town.’

Samantha frowned. ‘Huh?’

‘Don’t get up,’ he said. ‘Cici will see you and then we’ll all have a very bad day. Just wait here a second. I’m gonna bail. You guys hungry?’

‘Always,’ said Mirela.

‘So you got any money?’ said Birthday Jones.

Samantha really was hungry now. The sights and smells of the food at the outdoor market always drove her crazy. They walked past a particularly fragrant stall. Mounds of deep-brown, sandy, red and golden-coloured ground spices filled the air with cinnamon, cloves, cumin, paprika. She took a deep breath. She felt like burying her face in one of the bowls.