Shed

So much effort trying to grow up. Maybe it was because I was a little short for my age and looking younger than my age: some big chip on my shoulder. A kind of reaction to arriving a little late to chin bristle (like not yet) and having more gravel voiced boys taking the Mickey while I was still at the wrong end of puberty with a complexion like a deep dish pizza. Maybe that was behind the whole trip; trying to force growing up in a hurry, proving I wasn’t a kid.

Now, I was probably there. I had grown up physically on my travels. I was taller, carrying my stuff around on my back like a snail, and keeping active had made me lean and my shoulders and arms were thicker, and my skin was pale brown and clear as day. Now I’d taken the last step. I had a home and a job. Maybe university would come later, who was to say? Who knew if I could tread through those kind of waters and stay utterly honest?

‘I didn’t do my essay because I sleep all day and drink all night.’

If I was going to do it, I would have to be diligent, hard working and honest, and that wasn’t exactly the kind of student life I’d anticipated. Of course, if my principal course was Spanish, a lot of the work would be done. Already speaking like a native would go a long way towards making the rest of the course work a lot easier.

But for now, I was at a later stage of adulthood than university. I had a job, I lived in my own place. A real full-time job. I had been in the job for three months. I called my mum regularly and she sounded glad I had some kind of shape and regularity to my life. In a place with regular phone service, she could even call me and find what I was up to. And she did know what I was up to because of course when she asked, she learned the truth. The truth was, I was already colossally bored. I worked hard and I fitted in fine. Painted Wind was bi-lingual, with mostly Anglo waitresses and barmen—though their Spanish was OK; had to be with a mixed clientele too, and the kitchen staff, apart from Don, were Mexican, a couple of them commuting across the border daily from the other, Mexican Nogales. I moved up pretty quickly. There were plenty of Mex restaurants in Nogales, and plenty more across the border, so competition for staff was high. Don was happy to have me as I stuck around and was keen to learn. Learning staved off the boredom. I did get to make pizza in the afternoons, then Don added Mex pizza to the menu, which went down well. Then I got him to give made-to-order flatbreads a trial for a week, so I could get back to my regular bread making learned in the galley. He was reluctant, because the ready-made numbers were dirt cheap, and these cost staff time too. But they went down a treat in the dining room, so Don made something of a deal of them, and they were soon written up in the Nogales International, which made Don a happy guy.

When the reporter came to do the story, Don sent me out to meet their table, had me spinning the breads on my finger nail like a frisbee as I went out. That made the centrepiece of the story. They seemed to think I was pretty newsworthy: a sixteen year old English kid, living in a trailer park in Nogales, a spit away from the world’s biggest supplier of Mexican chefs—Mexico—tuning up the performance of a Mexican restaurant with his fine home-cooked flatbreads.

The next week I was in the paper again. They thought the story had gone down well, so they had the mayor come along and try a burrito made with my flatbreads. He pronounced them fine, and now we were out of the entertainment pages and into news. Sure, hands up, it was a slow news week.

That was when I went up to twelve dollars an hour. But I worked for it. They say if you can’t stand the heat stay out of the kitchen – and this was a kitchen in a desert town. It was a hot place even now in February. I was still here, working the hours, earning the money, taking the heat.

We were busy. So busy we were booking in shorter time slots and still turning people away. But still, I was soon bored. I don’t think it was anything wrong with me. And I know it was nothing wrong with Painted Wind. For someone who spoke little, Don was a nice guy, treated his staff well, the other guys in the kitchen were a good enough bunch to spend your time and earn a living with, and the girls out the front, they were great. They were the best part of the job. All young and sexy, I was a novelty (again). Apart from Don, anything but a Mexican chef was pretty rare in Painted Wind, so between me and the girls, there was lots of flirting going on. That was fun. But it needed to be, because guess what I discovered about adulthood? Guess what I discovered about why adults spend so much time looking so glum? They’re tired, they’re bored, and they can’t see anything better in the near future. Work sucks hard.

Eventually, I sorted out my passport. After almost three months with not a single shred of ID, I’d taken a bus to LA one Sunday, been in the queue at the British Consulate first thing on the Monday, and because I’d done the preparatory work on the phone and filling forms in and sorting it through the post, they checked my ID and my photo against some stuff my mum had taken in to the Foreign Office in London, and there I was, a guy with an identity, who could buy air tickets. With any luck I could grab a shuttle back to Nogales International Airport. (International because it took the odd Mexican flight as well as the LA and Houston flights and lots of weekenders in light aircraft.)

The guy who sorted out my passport at the Consulate looked at me as if he didn’t really think I should be there. He was only maybe six or seven years older than me, but he was very professional, very adult. He was an important guy because instead of dealing with it at the counter, we went to his office. It was the size of the most lavish and well proportioned kennel you ever saw. A palace among broom cupboards.

‘You’re going home now?’ he asked.

‘Yes.’

‘I expect your parents will be glad to see you.’

‘Misunderstanding, sorry. Not that home. I’m not planning to go back to London until next summer.’

‘So where?’

‘Nogales, Arizona.’

‘Right by Nogales, Sonora, Mexico?’ he asked.

‘That’s the one. Now I have a passport, I can check out the other Nogales.’

‘If you don’t mind me asking, what are you doing there. I noticed you said you weren’t just staying there, you said living.’

I did mind him asking, because asking meant telling. No fibs, just telling.

‘I’m staying in a trailer park there.’

‘I’ve been there, to Nogales. We get a lot of tourists up by Santa Fe, so we like to go see where people are going. Helps when things go wrong if we know the lie of the land. I met the mayor in Nogales. Nice chap.’

‘Marco Lopez.’

‘You’ve met the mayor? You’re pretty settled in there. It’s a nice little town, but why are you there?’

‘When I was mugged and lost my passport, I hitched to the nearest city. It was Nogales. I knew some people there who I’d met in the middle of an earlier spot of trouble in Punto Arenas.’

‘In Chile. Down near the Antarctic?’

‘The same.’

‘You’re still sixteen. Your parents are fine with all this?’

‘Not happy but kind of satisfied I’m surviving,’ I told him.

‘When you were mugged, did you have travel cheques? That was a while back; are your parents sending money?’

Sometimes you can answer the wrong question and someone might feel like they’ve been given information and move on, even though it wasn’t quite where they were going. The longer I lived with Balarubu, the less I felt inclined to go weaselling about looking for half answers that didn’t answer questions but that still weren’t lies. I found more and more that it was better just to come right out and tell someone what they wanted to know. (Unless they wanted to know about me and my God in which case I was best just to keep very, very quiet. No point inflicting perpetual truth on someone who doesn’t deserve it.)

‘I’m working as a chef in a restaurant in Nogales. That’s where I met Mr. Lopez. He was eating there for a photo opportunity for the local paper. I’m a chef but I also do the baking for the fresh Mex pizza and the hot flatbreads.’

‘Painted something?’

‘Wind.’

‘I ate there. The mayor recommended it to me. I ate the flatbreads. He recommended them too.’

‘You liked them?’

‘They were good. They usually taste like they come from a packet. These were closer to chappatis back home. That’s amazing.’

‘It’s just a co-incidence.’

‘A pretty amazing one though, wouldn’t you say?’

‘No, I’d say it hardly rates on the scale: you met someone who works in a restaurant where you ate. It only gets on the scale because it’s a long way away. How many times do you eat somewhere, then never meet anyone who works there?’

‘Plenty.’

‘So sometimes, just now and then, you will. If you go out to eat somewhere next year, and I’m working there, then that will be a co-incidence.’

He shrugged. ‘Looks like a co-incidence to me. But while we’re on the subject of work, you’re on a tourist visa—issued where you entered the country through the docks at San Diego, and I don’t even want to know how you came to enter the country there, but I’m presuming you’re working without papers or permits.’

‘I am.’

‘Which will also mean you’re working without paying taxes.’

‘I am.’

‘So what do you propose if the tax people come snooping around?’

‘My guess would be they wouldn’t look at me first, in a kitchen full of Mexicans and Mexican Americans. Not a nice fact, but probably true.’

‘Maybe so, but if they do ask you?’

‘Then I tell them I don’t have papers and ask them how I can get them, and how much I need to pay them.’

‘They’d love that approach. They don’t get that too often: “how much would you like?” Your employer would be pretty unhappy too.’

‘They ask me a question, I give them an honest answer. Can they ask more? It’s the best I can do.’

‘They’d probably suggest you don’t work illegally in the first place.’

‘Kind of an impractical suggestion though, isn’t it? It’d mean I’d have to travel back in time and make different choices. I’d be looking for the best option at the point they ask.’

‘All I’m telling you is that the British Government cannot condone your actions in working illegally, and this representative of the Diplomatic Service has to express his wish that you should keep making bread when you get home because it’s damn good bread.’

Maybe that’s the deal to working with the government. Play straight, tell the truth and bake good bread.

Now and then I spent a bit of time in an internet café, emailed a few old school friends. Once I did a little webcam thing with mum and dad. They saw that I’d grown up, gone all tanned and adult and muscled, sitting there in my white T and bandana, and I got to see mum cry. So that made everyone happy. I spent a few days here and there hopping over the border, seeing the other Nogales, chatting away, tuning up my language, making use of it in places other than just food and drink and chit chat. I joined a group at the Nogales library where they talked about books in Spanish. That gave me lots of the kinds of language you don’t get to use when you’re asking if the pizza peppers should be Jalapeňo or Habaňero, because while it was useful to learn all the skills you need to make great Mexican food, once I got back to London, I was guessing it wasn’t going to be half as handy as it was here in Nogales. All that literary talk was great. Really stretched me, which me and my brain were really in need of.

Work in the kitchen made things pretty simple when it came to living with Balarubu. It was thinking about this, and about the stuff I mentioned before, about how tough it would be to go to University, that made me see something of the future with my truth tyrant. No-one has a problem with the truth when they are very, very poor. When you have nothing, no-one can take much away from you. If you offend someone with your honesty, then tough. If you’re begging in the street and someone scowls at you as they stride past ignoring your pleas, you can yell

‘Tight arse ponce.’ And no-one much gives a damn.

And at the other end of the scale, if you have more money than you can count, then people will take an awful lot of crap from you, any amount of brutal, unnecessary, in-your-face honesty, and they’ll smile sweetly and call you rotten behind your back. Unfortunately for poor old Micky ‘the crazy, wet English lunatic chef’ Jakes, most people don’t fall into these two groups. They have to compromise; smooth ruffled feelings; make people feel good about themselves; generally make like a nice person, whatever kind of misanthropic grouch you feel like behind your have a nice day smile. And when that’s not possible: when you’re doing too well to curse everyone, and you’re poorer than Croesus, (who was a rich guy a long time ago, c’mon, do I have to do all the work, what do you think Google’s for?) where does that lead? Breathe deep. It leads, I was increasingly sure, so a life full of loneliness and heartache. Take Angie for example.

Angie was one of the waitresses. She was cute, smart, funny, easy to get along with, flirty, and she liked me. In the Jakes book of the good life, that is a set of characteristics that puts her right up there. She was only unhappy about one thing. She didn’t want to be a waitress. She was seventeen, and she wanted to go to college. She was smart enough to go to college, her parents wanted her to go to college, in a kind of impractical like the idea but do nothing to help kind of way, and if she went to college, she would do well. But she wouldn’t go to college because her family was as poor as you could go without living on the street. There wasn’t the money to spare for college, not nearly, not even if it was the local community college. Because right now, what Angie brought in from Painted Wind was just about all that kept the family from taking that last rung down and ending up on the street.

But despite all that, Angie was cheerful and fun. We both worked a lot of hours, so we saw a fair bit of each other that way. But as a young man will (see how I’m coming along; confident enough to say young man, not boy) I wanted to see more of her. Spend more time with her, but see more of her in the obvious sense too, and that wasn’t going to happen at Painted Wind.

There was only one way I was going to find out if she would go out with me. Millions of teenagers have waited millions of painful weeks for a miracle to occur and for them magically to have a date without asking, but I told you I was smart. I knew that wasn’t going to happen, so I would have to do the other thing.

‘Hey Angie, how’s things?’

‘I’m cool.’

‘I know you’re cool, but how are you.’

She smiled and I filled with that rush of knowledge that it is possible to be truly happy. She had a sensational smile, set off with honest-to-goodness American Teeth.

‘Good. I’m good.’

‘Good? You’re better than that. You’re fine. But I’m worried about Mexico and I thought you could maybe help.’

She could see a chat up coming but she humoured me.

‘How can I help Mexico?’

‘I read the papers, watch the TV, looks like Nogales Sonora is having a festival, but how’s it going to go without really cool, funny, good looking young people to make it really happen?’

She nodded, slowly. ‘I see your point. So you want us to look around and see if we can find anyone like that.’

‘That’s right. And if we don’t find anyone, maybe they’d settle for us.’

‘OK.’

That’s what she said. OK. So I was going out with her. We had a date. More than that, it actually happened. I rented a car for her to drive, and over we went. We both had the Sunday off and we went to the festival, over the border. She picked me up at the mobile home, and she didn’t even look down her nose at it. She wouldn’t. She lived in a bigger mobile home a couple of miles down the road. We’d collected the car earlier in the day and she wanted to roll up in front of her own mobile, let the family see it, see how the nice English chef was treating her.

‘You can meet them some other time,’ Angie said. ‘When I’ve prepared them for you. My mom is pretty protective, and my pop isn’t good with strangers. And for Nogales, you’re as strange as it gets. When my mom saw the piece in the paper, with you and the mayor, she acted like you might as well be from space. “English kid? Sixteen? Wha’s he doin’ makin’ bread for wetbacks.” So we’ll do it some other time. Meantime, I’ll impress the neighbours with my lovely Lincoln.’

I had a pretty big stash of cash, and I figured if I was going to rent a car, even though I couldn’t drive, it may as well be a good one. Angie being seventeen, they wouldn’t rent us a sports car, but because of the extra sixty dollars it cost, they were keen enough to rent us a big, black Lincoln Town Car. It was the same car Mayor Lopez drove, and we felt good, barrelling down to the border. We had a fine day. We drove up to the airport later to drop off the Lincoln and paid extra to get the rental people to give us a ride back into town. Then we went into a bar, nice and smoky and dark and playing music too tired to be picked up: just enough to stop voices echoing in the quiet. That was good for Nogales, because most places played deafening mariachi music. I had a Seven-Up and Angie had a Doc Pepper, and we sat across the table being cool like we fitted in here. Which we didn’t.

Then she kissed me and my head emptied. Maybe if I’d discovered girls earlier I wouldn’t have spent so much time and energy coming up with harebrained schemes. Like travelling to South America when I was only sixteen.

She leaned back and smiled at me. When you kiss someone for the first time, it’s something special. Or it should be. That’s what you want to feel it was for the other person too. I talk a lot as a rule, though less since I met Balarubu. I wasn’t saying a word. I swear I felt a prickling in the corners of my eyes. That’s emotion for you. I didn’t say a word. I don’t even think I smiled. Then Angie leaned towards me again and I didn’t need an invitation. I was very happy. Excited too. And all I’d done all day was enjoy myself, be nice, and I hadn’t had to do anything awkward to avoid a lie.

‘That was nice.’ Angie said.

I tried to say that I agreed but something happened in my throat, so I nodded, slowly and emphatically. Like a dog on the back shelf of a car.

‘Come on.’

We left the bar and took another cab, this time to my mobile home. Then we kissed and cuddled some. We stayed dressed but I have to say, dressed or not, it was more fun than making flatbreads, and I really like making flatbreads.

Things got better with Angie and me. We spent most of the time when we weren’t at Painted Wind, together, and sometimes she slept over. Not all of it taken up with sleep. We slept together. I’m not going into detail because it isn’t really your business. But it was great. So now Angie was cute and bright and smart and funny, just like before, but she was now sexy. And mine. I wasn’t even thinking about Lucia any more. Teenage love is fickle, and it looks as solid and immoveable as the Pyramids when you put it next to teenage lust.

We lay on my sofa, flicking idly around the TV. There wasn’t much flicking going on as I didn’t have cable. Angie reached over and pressed the off button. Her head was on my lap and I looked down. Her lovely pale grey eyes locked on to mine.

‘We have to talk, baby.’

‘Go on.’

‘You’re a regular guy, you’re a nice guy, but we don’t have a future, do we?’

‘I think we can.’

‘Come on, Micky. You want to go start studying for your exams this year, that’s a couple of years, then you go to college, that’s three more. What do you support yourself on? Savings? Parents? You don’t talk about home, but your parents, they’re not like mine, huh?’

‘Some ways. They’re pretty emotionally constipated, but no. They’re pretty middle class. We live in a pretty mixed place: poor people, and then people doing OK: that’s us. And there’s every race under the sun, but it’s not a ghetto. So it’s different in about every way it could be. But we’re us. Not my parents, not yours.’

‘You’re going to go to England. I live in Arizona. That’s a problem.’

I scratched her head and started to run my fingers through her long mousey hair.

‘Aren’t we happy right here right now?’

She locked on again.

‘I love you Micky. I’m sure as I can be that you love me too.’

‘I do.’ I love it when I can tell a big important truth without worrying.

‘So the future matters, not right here right now.’

‘The future could go a lot of different ways. I haven’t been exactly the conventional kid so far. I’m growing up still, so are you, but there’s nothing to say we can’t do it here together, or in England together, or whatever you want.’

‘We could grow up a lot faster, Micky. I could tell you the slow way, but here goes…’

‘You’re pregnant.’

‘Yeah.’

‘Oh.’

‘Oh?’ Angie repeated.

‘Yeah.’

‘So what’s “Oh.” What’s that mean?’

‘You want to know what I think?’ There I go again; skipping past convenient avoidance techniques and running straight through to the spirit of the truth.

‘That’s exactly what I want.’ There was a catch in her voice as she spoke.

‘I’m really scared. I’m happy. You were my first time, and it was beautiful. We could make a beautiful baby. A child. What else do I think? I think you might be talking about how we don’t have a future because you’re thinking about an abortion. I expect you think because I’m from somewhere so far we can’t have a child together. I think we can. I want to see our child be born. I want to be there with you. I don’t think we’re so young. Teenage parents are normal. Juliet was fourteen and I think Romeo was about eighteen. If we love each other, we can find a way. Straight from the heart, without time to think to hard about it, that’s what I think. I’m scared, I’m happy, I love you.’

Angie stayed silent for over a minute. I thought it was best not to fill the space. Eventually she sat up. Still silent. Then she stood in front of me, arms dangling loose, head at a slight angle. Very softly, very silently, she was in tears.

‘I didn’t expect you to say that. I love you, Micky, you beautiful English straight talking kid of mine. I knew a couple of girls at high school got pregnant. Both the same. The guys, you’d have thought they’d been raped. Like they hadn’t had a choice. They could have sex, so they had to, so they weren’t to blame. They just didn’t want to know. Neither did their parents.’

‘You could call my mum now. She’d be right behind me. She’d think we were young for this, but she’d be right with us. I know.’

‘Mine wouldn’t. And she watches my periods like a hawk. I think she suspects.’

‘How late are you?’

‘A week. But there’s no doubt. I took a test. But I bought the test in Feinmann’s and I saw a friend of my mom’s. I don’t know if she saw what I was buying, but I’m guessing she did, because she would have said to my mom she saw me for sure, and my mom hasn’t asked what I was doing, which I’m guessing means she knows.’

‘That’s bad?’

‘It is if we want this baby. It is if we even want it to be our decision.. If it’s down to her, she’ll have me off to the clinic and our baby out before I can breathe.’

Big night. This was no time to sit and wait for a decision to wander along and introduce itself.

‘Do you want the baby?’

‘Only if you do.’

‘I do. Do you want the baby? I want to hear it so we both know where we both stand.’

‘I do.’

Hearing her use those words, on such a huge matter, those wedding words, that was how it felt to me—like now we’d made a lasting promise to each other. Me with my handicap, my truth thing, now I’d made a promise, even if it was only in my own head, I’d made a promise to Angie and now I had to keep it.

‘We’re having a baby together then. Do you have a passport? We’ll be safer from your mum if we get to London. I can’t imagine there’d be much she could do to find us there. Does she even know I’m from London?’

She does, but her radar doesn’t really go past Arizona. On a day to day, she focuses on Nogales. If we leave the country that would be just too much—she’d let it go and wait for me to come visiting with the kids. But no I don’t have a passport.’

‘How about this for a plan. You pack a bag, whatever you can get away with without getting her excited. I’ll tell Don I’m leaving—the job, this place, Nogales, I’ll get my stuff together. We’ll do it fast, fly Nogales to LA, maybe fly to New York or DC while we get you a passport—at least it’s in the right direction—and then you get to see London.

Angie took my hands and pulled me. She wrapped her arms around me and hugged me tight. I was planning an escape to London, but at that moment I felt completely at home.

I couldn’t keep my mind on my work, but I couldn’t leave. The plan was for Angie to come to work as usual, we finish the lunch time shift, then take the evening shuttle to LA. Angie didn’t show. I couldn’t leave in case she did. I couldn’t even tell Don I was leaving which made me feel bad—just in case she’d changed her mind and decided to go along with her mum. I couldn’t see it but I had to wait and see. Waiting was hard.

At three in the afternoon, I called her at home. The call didn’t hold its secrets for long.

‘Is that you? You nasty, foreign little creep. Keep away from my Angie you nasty little bastid. Keep your nasty, dirty little thing away from my Angie. She’s gone. She’s gone to get done. And when she gets back she ain’t workin’ in no Mexican joint. And I see you within a mile of that girl, I’ll see to it you don’t have no nasty little thing to go near her with. ‘Cos I’ll have it in a purty little frame on my wall, right there over the TeeVee set.’

There were no pleasantries. She hung up.