CHAPTER 17
Less than five minutes after she leaves, she hears them: sirens. They sound almost the same as back home, but not quite. A universal noise signalling danger, for bad people and bad things, accidents, fires and criminals.
She’s by the side of the road, in plain sight, bag hoisted unnaturally over her shoulders. It’s too large, a man’s sports bag really, and she is conspicuous, a woman alone on a day trip to nowhere.
Sweat begins to gather on her lower back, underneath the bag containing a million dollars’ worth of Colombian cocaine.
The heat fires up panic; she’d get life in prison.
Or worse. Prison might be the safest place for her if she doesn’t get this bag across the border.
She picks up her pace. Her limbs are suddenly heavy and cumbersome, her feet weighed down by her trainers, the bag digging into her shoulders.
She begins to walk faster. The sirens are getting nearer and she won’t be able to get Lucy. She looks around hurriedly. She could go back, into the garage, but if the police are for her, they might know about the location … They might know everything.
She clutches the burner phone in her palm, her own iPhone and Lucy’s in the back pockets of her shorts, and she begins to pace as quickly as possible.
The sirens rise behind her and the bag flaps and thuds against her back. She goes for two minutes, three, the sirens become louder and louder and now she knows they are on the same road as her, coming right up behind her.
She risks a glance. It’s a blue car, POLICíA FEDERAL written on the side. Two officers inside wearing sunglasses. She immediately slows right down, out of breath, trying to look casual, doesn’t turn around again.
Just as her shoulders are up and braced, ready to hand the bag over with an explanation and a prayer, the car passes her, speeding to someone else, some other disaster, and Simone watches it go and then stops dead, only sensing the near miss, truly, now that it has gone.
She puts her hands on her knees, leans over, and her breathing steadies. She straightens up again, trying to gather her thoughts and make a plan.
She checks her phone; she’s a long walk from the coach, but it doesn’t depart until the evening. She’s got to go somewhere – not here, out in plain view on the streets. Somewhere else. She needs to rest. She needs to hide.
Simone arrives in the centre of Nueva Rosita. She is going to do some shopping. Partially to look and act naturally, and partially to justify the presence of an extra bag she can put in the back of the coach along with the damning sports bag.
The tiredness ebbs and flows, and right now it’s abated, and Simone feels a burst of something like positivity.
She’s always been resourceful. After the teacher sounded the alarm on her parents’ drug use, she was taken into care, then quickly placed with a foster family who were – for reasons she doesn’t understand, looking back – at best ambivalent about her.
She had a monthly visit from a social worker, weekly meet-ups with her parents in Costa Coffee (their hands, if the meetings were in the mornings, were still shaking), and the distinct impression that none of them really, truly cared about her.
She told the social worker that her parents were disengaged, still using, and the woman simply wrote it down on a pad of paper.
She moved out of the foster placement at seventeen, after an argument in which the mother called her too opinionated. She left her a goodbye note on the counter that said only, How’s this for an opinion?
She found a flat in one of the poorest areas of London and signed on for benefits even though she didn’t want to. And on the first day, aged seventeen and one month, she had looked around at the bare plaster walls, one window boarded up, noisy neighbours, and thought: I cannot, cannot stay here.
It was the year 1999, the height of the dot-com boom, and so Simone did the best she could: she got two jobs.
The first manning start-up bingo chat rooms, the second copywriting for a high-end beauty brand.
She had to work from the Hackney library at first (no computer), but, eventually, she had enough for a shitty desktop computer.
She did both jobs simultaneously, one from nine in the morning until two o’clock in the afternoon, the other from two in the afternoon until eight at night.
One desktop computer open on a fold-out table in her bedroom, containing the work from two jobs.
After a while, she bought a second screen to avoid confusing them.
Nobody ever found out. She was productive enough in short hours, and didn’t mind the lack of free time.
She left that flat after less than a year, and those two jobs paid for rent on a place of her own for the next five years, until she got tired and longed for just one job: the job behind the bar, where she met Damien.
She feels the same now, that same thing that looks like, appears like, ardent resourcefulness but is actually masking desperation.
Back in Nueva Rosita, she finds a strip mall.
A gym, a bank, a restaurant and a supermarket line a wide road opposite a park.
The shop sign reads SORIANA LOS PINOS, and Simone heads inside, thinking of those long-gone two-job days.
They prepared her well for a busy career, then the days in kitchens somehow, in turn, prepared her well for this.
Her body is hardy. She isn’t sure her mind is, but everybody always said it was.
The social worker, when she did her final visit to Simone’s new house in Camden, praised her for leaving the flat, for getting out of the benefits system.
‘And all by yourself, too,’ she had said.
What she didn’t realize was that she was really congratulating Simone on thinking nobody in the world gave a shit about her.
Fending for yourself at eighteen ought not to be praised, Simone thought.
Lucy’s that age now, and the thought of her balancing up two incomes causes Simone physical pain.
The supermarket is a red-and-white building, branded on the outside with COCA-COLA on painted bricks, a small and shabby awning up ahead. There’s accommodation above it with wrought-iron balconies and an old metal basketball hoop hanging half off the wall.
Inside, she tries not to think about how many CCTV cameras she might have passed by after getting the bag.
She tells herself that if people have begun to scrutinize footage, it’s all over anyway.
She isn’t trying to convince anybody she is innocent; she is trying to have nobody suspect her in the first place.
She wanders the aisles slowly, unable – even in this nightmare – to avoid looking at the interesting foods.
She has hours to kill, anyway, she thinks, and nowhere to go.
She will just look. Tortilla maseca – just-add-water dough made from ground corn, in little plastic packets.
She buys two. Prickly pear cactus in slices.
Dried chillies, their skin as thin as Christmas party hats.
A comal, a round griddle pan. Basics, too: bread and brioche and fruit and water.
She runs a hand over the fruit and vegetables, bright, jewel-toned colours.
Goes to gaze at the fish counter, just for interest. Red snapper, she thinks that is, and octopus.
And lobsters, of course; they’re alive in a tank at the back.
She watches them walking lazily along the bottom, antennae rising and falling.
Simone can’t cook lobsters any more. It’s the only thing she avoids entirely other than alcohol.
During her unofficial training with Timeo, he made lobster linguine often.
Most chefs cook lobsters alive to minimize bacteria, their bodies held straight and tied to a spoon to make carving easier.
There’s a unique brutality to it, but that isn’t what did it for Simone.
She had always heard that lobsters squealed when you put them in the pot, but the reason Simone won’t cook them is because the truth is worse than that: they tap the lid, insistently, helplessly, a little claw on glass.
Simone saw it happen only once, then took them off the menu.
‘Why?’ Timeo had said, and she had replied that nobody wanted to eat lobster, they just wanted to order it and say they’d had it.
A lie, but something that sounded true, and which Timeo had laughed at.
She leaves the fish counter and continues to browse.
Even though she’s doing it to disguise her illegal activities, she is heartened to find food still has the same effect it always does on her: it soothes her.
Maybe this will work. Maybe she will be home, in England, with Lucy and Damien, cooking these things one day soon.
At the till, she accepts a plastic carrier bag and bundles the items into it.
It isn’t perfect, but it will help to make the sports bag less conspicuous.
She walks and walks for the rest of the afternoon.
She eats the cactus – surprisingly good, lemony, slimy like okra – and some real tortilla chips. And she walks and walks and walks.
Eventually, she finds herself at a graveyard called Panteón de Cloete, on an unnamed road.
A cemetery feels fitting, and Simone wanders with her carrier bag and her awful, criminal sports bag underneath the hot sun.
She hasn’t slept. She hasn’t eaten much.
She’s exhausted in both senses: bone tired but also emptied, physically exhausted of some anxiety or perhaps the initial fire she had at the very beginning.
Her body is heavy, her eyes are gritty, and she ascends a brief dusty hill, not really knowing or caring why.