Call Him Mine Read online

  ‘You don’t have to ask every time.’

  The can clicked open. ‘Stressful times, though, vato.’

  ‘Aren’t they all.’

  Even so, when Carlos popped the can and swigged the whole thing I had to turn my back on him and light up again.

  Carlos took out his phone, started texting.

  ‘You telling your mother?’ I said.

  ‘Nah. Just chit-chat,’ said Carlos. ‘You OK?’ He didn’t look up from his phone.

  ‘I’m fine. You’re the one who got hit.’ I lifted his chin. The bruise on his jaw had now darkened from cinnamon to aubergine.

  He jerked his head away. ‘It’s cool, honestly.’

  ‘All right.’ The doughnut I bit into was so stale that it powdered in my mouth. ‘It’s weird, though,’ I said. ‘Leaving that body out there.’

  ‘Yeah,’ said Carlos, and I shut up, dunking the other half of my doughnut until it didn’t taste like chipboard.

  At some of the graves we’d been to in Cocula, all that the locals had found were nubs of bone and yellowish gelatine traces in the dirt, because the bodies had gone into vats of caustic soda. At the burial pits in Taxco, we’d seen mould eating tattoos of saints, of kids’ names, of gang affiliation.

  ‘If it’s so easy to make a body vanish,’ I said out loud, ‘why dump one in public?’ I kicked the dirt.

  Carlos puffed out a long breath, his eyes shut. ‘You know, you could keep asking questions.’ He opened another can. ‘Or, you know, we could just – drive back and ask. Like reporters, or something.’

  I ignored him. ‘You see a single lookout on the street back there?’

  Carlos shrugged.

  ‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘So, whoever dumped that body, they wanted it found.’ The second chunk of doughnut went down about as smoothly as a bite of highway. ‘Why?’

  Carlos clicked his tongue. ‘Ni puta idea, güey.’ He pointed at the jeep. ‘This magic thing, we should get in it, and go ask people who the kid was.’

  ‘No mention of Julián Gallardo on the missing persons site.’ I flipped through the tabs on my iPad. ‘Nothing in local news. Nothing on Twitter.’

  ‘Check his Facebook.’

  I scrolled down. ‘Couple pictures of him at a protest. Some hashtags about pollution.’

  Carlos tapped one of the hashtags, which read ‘AJENJO ASESINO’ – ‘Ajenjo are murderers’ – and said, ‘That’s a lead.’

  ‘Not when every oil company gets called “murderer” round here,’ I said, and locked the iPad screen.

  Carlos’ hands were deep in his pockets. Another wave of fog rose and broke. He bit his lip, scuffing his heels against the concrete and said, ‘Bit of a waste to find a body and do nothing about it.’

  ‘Our day-rate’s not high enough to do something about it,’ I said.

  ‘Maybe,’ said Carlos. His eyes moved from the screen of his camera, still showing the picture of Julián Gallardo’s ID card, over to the bikers unwrapping their breakfasts.

  ‘Let’s just see if his name shows up in the papers over the next few days,’ I said. ‘If it links to what we’re working on, I’ll ask Dominic if we can do a follow-up.’

  Carlos didn’t say anything.

  ‘It’s a compromise,’ I said, cuffing him on the shoulder. ‘I feel for him too. But, well.’ It was my turn to shrug. ‘You know how it is here.’

  ‘I do,’ he said, peering at Julián Gallardo’s thin, serious face, then up at me through falling strands of his brown hair. ‘But you?’ He wavered his hand in the air.

  ‘I’m tired,’ I said, opening the door of the jeep. ‘Come on.’

  From the jeep’s speakers rose another old bolero song, all lorn tenor harmonies and guitar notes the colour of almonds.

  Carlos was looking at the bikers again. ‘You know what, you just keep going.’ His fingers drummed the roof. ‘I’m going back.’

  Pure close tenor harmonies sang about the madness of trying to change a lover’s fate, and I could almost see the beaten smiles on the singers’ faces, see the lyrics printed on the air, feel each word sticking deep in my belly.

  Carlos tapped a cigarette against the pack. ‘Unless you want to come too. Keep me warm.’ He winked at me. ‘You and me, cosy inside that foreign correspondent ring of fire.’

  ‘You know how much it costs to ship a body from Mexico to Ireland?’ I said.

  Carlos exhaled a long coiling gust of smoke and flexed his tattooed fists: praying hands, a watching eye, an anchor marked NEC SPE NEC METU – no hope, no fear. ‘C’mon, man, you have some making up to do. Weren’t for you being so tired and wanting to get home, maybe the cops wouldn’t have caught us.’

  ‘So hard of heart,’ sang those voices on the radio.

  ‘No?’ Carlos doused his cigarette in one of the coffee cups littering his side of the jeep.

  The radio voices sang about lying on the floor of a motel room, peering up at a lover who was seated on a crescent moon.

  ‘Stop,’ I said.

  ‘Ah, but where’s the lie, bro?’ Carlos’ fish-hook smile deepened to a leer.

  My fingers pressed against my forehead. ‘What do you want?’

  ‘I want you to do your job,’ he said. ‘I want the story.’

  ‘These brown tiles under my cheek,’ sang the radio, ‘colder than the heart in your chest.’

  ‘This guy’s story.’ Carlos held up the iPad screen to show me Julián Gallardo’s mute eyeless scream. ‘Right here.’ He leaned into the car, his breath’s heat reaching me across the gearstick. ‘Be a real journalist, vato,’ he said. ‘For once.’

  ‘Drunken madness,’ sang the radio, ‘to think I had anything good to offer you.’

  A truck roared out of the fog, threw fantails of rain over the windscreen, and shook the jeep on its suspension.

  ‘OK.’ I turned the key in the ignition so hard I thought it’d snap. ‘We’re done.’

  ‘Drunken madness,’ sang the radio, louder than the engine roar, ‘to think you might ever be mine.’

  ‘Pussy.’ Carlos jerked his camera bag from the foot well and it thunked against the door. ‘I’m off. I’ll text you.’

  ‘What, hitch-hiking?’ I snorted.

  ‘Eh, yeah?’ Carlos jutted his chin toward the bikers outside the Pemex, then slammed the door, and started walking back across the forecourt, face lowered against the thin rain, already waving hello to the bikers.

  In my rear-view mirror Carlos shook hands with each of the bikers in turn, borrowed a helmet from one, and slung his skinny leg over the saddle of a BMW.

  ‘Ever the charmer,’ I told nobody, lighting another cigarette.

  As the motorcycles blatted into life, Carlos raised one hand above his shoulders, the middle finger aimed backwards at me. The praying hands tattooed on the back of that hand looked like they were begging me not to be mad at him.

  ‘Good fucking luck, then.’ I took off the handbrake, put the jeep back into first gear. Gravel rasped under the tyres like a record needle jerked from its groove as I punched off the radio. Before merging onto the freeway I watched him disappear.

  Carlos flipping the bird like that as he vanished in the rear view, I thought maybe that was him saying this was just another fight, that he wasn’t about to get himself killed in Poza Rica, that he’d be right back.

  Yeah, well, you know – turns out I was almost right.

  4

  My phone pinged just the one time as I was driving back to Mexico City, and it was when Carlos sent the photo of Julián Gallardo’s dead face. When I called him to yell at him, he sent me straight to voicemail.

  My heart ticked in my mouth. All the way home, mile after mile along that freeway, under the blazing white sky, I kept calling, and Carlos kept hitting ‘Reject’. By the time I passed the pyramids at Teotihuacán, an hour from home, I figured I’d tried past hope and earned his time, but he didn’t pick up. So I left messages instead.

  ‘Carlos, if you get this, you’re being a di
ckhead.’

  Joining the traffic on Avenida Insurgentes, I messaged him again.

  ‘Carlos, if you get this, you’re a drama queen.’

  At a red light on the corner of Xola and Dr Vertíz I called him a poser, a wanker, a glory hound.

  The streets of my neighbourhood were busy already: hip, tattooed graphic designers or wait-staff or hairdressers, street-sweepers in orange overalls, stressed-out nine-to-fivers in cheapish suits, all half-jogging along the pavements, in that baroque show of trying to be on time in a city where on time just doesn’t exist.

  The tianguis market was already in full swing by the time I pulled in outside my house, food-stall workers scrubbing detergent into the pavement. Pickups from Estado de México and Morelos and Tulancingo stood parked by the curb, laden with strings of chorizo and big wheels of white cheese, stacked egg-boxes, whole forests of cilantro. Just another day, I decided, and all that normality around me stacked the odds in Carlos’ favour, because he couldn’t vanish on a day like that.

  When I opened my apartment door, the venetian blinds were slicing the light into grapefruit-orange lines. Newsreader voices burbled from the speakers of a laptop. I’d asked my friend, Maya, a staff writer at a big local paper, to do some house- and cat-sitting for me while I was in Poza Rica because she hated her new apartment. She sat by the table on a red leather Gio Ponti knock-off that I’d picked up at the Mercado Lagunilla, while my cat, Motita, eyed her from the chair, her tail swishing.

  ‘How’d you two get on?’ I hung my jacket on a coat stand that stood beside a Guatemalan deity that my friend Luis had covered in Hello Kitty stationery. The deity had a rather distraught plaster Jesus half-down his throat.

  ‘This cat, yeah?’ said Maya. ‘She’s a misogynist.’ She didn’t look up from her laptop. ‘Three days. Three nights. She yowls, I feed her. She yowls, I clean up. And still –’ she swatted the air beside Motita with the back of her hand ‘– this resting bitch-face.’

  Motita could tell I was there but she didn’t look up. Cross-eyed, obese, and almost nine, she could no longer miaow: she just uttered this weird yowl-cough instead.

  ‘She’s ignoring me, too, if that helps,’ I said, dropping my backpack and crossing the room to the fish tank. ‘And how’re my fish?’

  Maya’s fingers thrummed on her laptop keys. ‘They have snails.’

  Curled amber shells pocked the glass, the pebbles, the thin green weeds.

  ‘Fuck’s sake.’ I took a butterfly net and a tin bucket from the shelf. ‘An algal bloom.’ I started scouring the depths. Motita thought it was the fish I was after and coiled herself around my feet, so I flicked water at her until she coughed and waddled across the room, body checking a cupboard on her way to her food bowl.

  ‘Fucking snails,’ I said.

  In the tank, clouds of tetras billowed around a male and female betta couple who twitched their lilac fins and glided between the ferns and sword-plants.

  ‘The cannibal snails just didn’t cut it.’ I tapped where a tiger-striped shell inched along the glass. ‘They eat a couple of small ones then go into a food coma.’

  ‘Never lead with desperation,’ said Maya. ‘Especially not in pet shops.’

  More snails tinked into the bucket.

  ‘They’ll screw you, man,’ said Maya. ‘Matter of fact, they already have.’

  ‘The bait, those chunks of calabaza I left, they didn’t work either?’

  ‘Fish ate them.’ Maya flicked through a book she’d found on my shelves – a retrospective on the Semefo collective, ’90s artists who put on black-metal raves, flayed horses, stole body-parts from morgues. She flipped to a diamond-studded tongue on a pedestal and stuck her own tongue out. ‘Should I get one of these?’

  Julián Gallardo’s face flashed in my head.

  ‘What, a piercing?’ I said.

  ‘Yeah,’ said Maya. ‘Looks good on this guy.’

  ‘That’s just the tongue. How can you tell?’ I shook the bucket, studied the clacking wet load. ‘Look at this. A disgrace.’

  ‘I was house-sitting,’ said Maya. ‘Not paying the mortgage.’ She flicked the page so hard it nearly tore. ‘You flushing all those at once?’

  ‘Eh, yeah?’

  ‘You sure that’s wise?’ said Maya. ‘There’s all sorts of mutant crap down in those sewers. You want killer snails to murder you in the night?’

  ‘Then don’t put trash down my sink.’

  Maya slammed the book shut. ‘I did not.’

  The toilet emptied, sucking the snails out of sight.

  ‘An algal bloom,’ I said again, shaking my head as I stowed the bucket under the tank.

  ‘Blame the pollution,’ said Maya through a yawn. ‘Not me.’

  She wasn’t wrong. Every day on its website the city government published an air-quality map: green dots for clean air, yellow for not-so-clean, then down through grey and red all the way to black. On my way home, I’d checked the map, seen how the city’s stomach-shape was rashed all over with grey, yellow, red.

  Mexico’s worst pollution since 1983, the papers said, but you didn’t need the papers to know. Mornings, your throat hurt from the bad air you’d been breathing all night. Afternoons, your eyes turned bloodshot and stung. Nights, mosquitos and flies collected on the cold ceramic of your toilet cistern like a galaxy in negative.

  You could taste it in the ozone sting of the air even going up the stairwell of your apartment building. You could see it in the sepia colour of your windows even an hour after you’d cleaned off the airborne crud.

  Times like that, the pipes burst in the heat. The sewage dried, the dust rose. Got so bad you’d sometimes wind up writing news stories about nineteenth-century diseases in the poor areas of the city: typhoid, dysentery, cholera.

  As I washed my hands, I heard Maya ask, ‘And so, how was the trip?’ through the open bathroom door.

  Julián Gallardo’s wet peeled face in close-up, the ant picking slowly across the gouged bridge of his nose.

  ‘Ah, yeah,’ I said. ‘Fine.’ Back in the room, I saw my phone still hadn’t buzzed. ‘Long drive, though.’

  ‘You want coffee?’

  ‘Ah, savage, yeah, cheers.’

  ‘Well, you know where it is.’

  ‘Fuck’s sake.’ I went to the kitchen to make some breakfast. Three mangoes lay at the bottom of the crisper. ‘Nice one on the mangoes.’ I took a bag of Café Garat from the freezer and dumped a thick dark layer into the cafetière, then put water on to boil.

  ‘Got one for Carlos, too,’ said Maya. ‘You drop him home, or?’

  ‘Um.’ I scooped out the mangoes’ wet pith. ‘He’s, you know. Still down there.’

  Maya’s fingers stopped typing. ‘What?’

  Water bubbled on the hob. With the gas off, and the bubbles settled, I poured out water and watched the grounds churn.

  ‘Is he crazy?’ Maya said.

  ‘Well, yeah,’ I said, bringing out a brimming cafetière and the mangoes.

  ‘You know what’s happening down there, right?’

  Shaking my head, I slid her the plate of mango.

  Maya turned the computer towards me. ‘A protest, man. A big one.’

  On the screen, choppy GoPro footage showed students and workers, mothers and kids holding up pictures of a young man’s face, above the words ‘WHERE IS HE?’

  The face on their signs was Julián Gallardo’s.

  Coffee grounds spun in my cup. The lines of my hands were rivers of salt water.

  Carlos, if you get this, get the fuck out of there.

  ‘You knew this was on?’ Maya said over the protest video.

  ‘Not at all.’ I scratched my neck. From the wall, between the cocktail-glasses on my shelf, a Jesús Malverde icon gave me a pained look.

  Maya watched me through a spreading web of cigarette smoke. ‘Something happened down there, didn’t it?’

  ‘México no se vende!’ shouted the crowd on the screen. Mexico’s not for sale.r />
  ‘Kind of.’ With my teeth I tugged a loose dry edge of skin on my lip until the pain zipped red through my skull.

  Maya never let me get much past her: she was the first student I’d had, back when I was still teaching English. Being raised on the same teenage diet of Radiohead lyrics and quotes from Daria, and, given that all she’d needed from the school was a certificate saying she was bilingual to get a promotion at her paper, our classes had consisted of shit-talking, drinking coffee, and occasionally proofreading her articles.

  ‘Well?’ she asked me.

  ‘See that kid on the signs?’ I pointed at the laptop screen. ‘We found him.’

  Her eyes widened. ‘What? And you didn’t tell anyone?’

  ‘No.’ I kneaded my eyes. ‘Police found him – Guardia Civil. They found us, too. But they seemed scared, to be honest. Just gave us a warning. Let us go.’

  Maya sat down hard on the chair. ‘And you let Carlos stay there. After that.’

  My back teeth sounded like someone moving furniture, I was grinding them so hard. Two years, six months, twenty days since my last drink or line, and I couldn’t feel that resolution any more – just the coffee-warmed William Howard Taft mug bought for me by Maya after I’d tried and failed to grow a walrus moustache.

  Swallowing coffee to kill the sting of pollution, I shook my head and said, ‘Honestly? When have we ever stopped Carlos doing, like, literally anything?’

  Maya sucked air through her teeth. ‘You’re not wrong.’

  On the laptop, the crowd was snaking through a gap in the wall of police riot-shields. Their chants beat the air.

  ‘Big crowd,’ I said.

  ‘They’re saying the kid was important,’ Maya said. ‘Some sort of activist leader. Pretty well known.’

  ‘Still a lot of people to get out that fast,’ I said.

  She shook her head. ‘Nah. I mean, the amount of people pissed off at the cops and the companies down there? All it takes is a few Facebook posts and people will be jumping on it.’

  ‘Huh. Well, I’d better add to the story, then, I guess,’ I said, draining my cup. ‘Speaking of which – time to file, I think.’ Maya and the thought of work were all that kept me from buying a bag of coke, speed up the time until Carlos was back to me. ‘Want to hang out here? See if Carlos calls, or whatever.’