3 - The Invention

Jorge had bad skin. Or at least it had been bad once and now was pitted and scarred in memory of acne past. I had never noticed this before, when we’d sat in the pub back in England talking into the night, when he’d told me stories about his family in Mexico and we’d planned my trip here. Maybe I only saw this now because he wasn’t smiling. Now he was frowning at me from his door and I was grinning back up at him like an idiot, a massive rucksack on my back and a shoebox under my arm.
The shoebox was my hand luggage.
“Fuck,” he said. “I’d forgotten about you.”
My smile wobbled, clung on for a bit, and then fell off my face.
“Is this the wrong time?” I said. “Did I get the date wrong?”
He looked at his watch; maybe it had a date function, I don’t know.
“No,” he said. “It’s the right date. I’d just forgotten, that’s all.”
I looked up and down the street, the ragged collection of three to five storey buildings, cars parked along both sides of the road, some quite newish, but mostly battered up Beetles. There were a few trees poking out of the pavement and a yellow dog was sitting under one of them, watching us. A boy ran by and jabbered something, but apart from that, it was quiet, too quiet for one of the biggest cities in the world.
I couldn’t see any alternative to being there; it was all I'd thought about for months.
“Maybe I should find a hotel,” I said. “If it’s a problem.”
“Don’t be stupid,” he said, and it wasn’t one of those jokey ‘don’t be stupid’s, the kind that come with a playful poke in the arm; it was bitter ─ it was calling me stupid. He didn’t come up with an immediate answer to my stupidity, either, so I looked up and down the street again, thinking maybe I could get a taxi to somewhere, hang out until my money ran out, then fly home, though there wasn’t really a home to fly to anymore, now that I’d left the bedsit.
He stood back a little, creaked the heavy metal door open and gestured with his head.
“Everything is ready,” he said. “I’d just forgotten.”
There was a dark corridor littered with papers, flyers by the look of them, and a stone staircase at the end. One wall was covered with mail boxes with most of their locks broken; the other wall held a bank of whirring electricity meters.
“Come on then,” he said.
I hitched my shoebox under my arm and patted it, and then stepped into the dark.
“Start walking,” he said. “It’s five floors.”
Back in England, after my girlfriend had gone, I’d spent a lot of time talking to Jorge in the pub where I worked. Well, I listened really. He seemed lonely and was always glad to see me, glad to buy me beers and tell me about his wife and kid, the apartment block he owned, and the roof where there were service rooms, rooms that sometimes were converted for maids to live in, where I could live for a bit if I wanted to come over, get some kind of work.
So when we came out onto the roof I recognised the place immediately. Back home he’d painted a pretty vivid picture, waving his hands about in front of my face as he’d described the flat tarmac space, the enclosure where clothes were once washed in big stone sinks, the wire fence cages where clothes would be hung to dry, padlocked against theft, and the service rooms, squat boxes with little doors.
One of these squat boxes was to be my home for the next few months, maybe longer, and despite Jorge’s mood, I was excited. There were three of them. Mine was end of terrace, with double aspect windows, a foot square each, and a newly painted red door, which makes it sound pretty grand. Well it wasn’t, it was a service room, what you might call a utility room. But it was home.
Jorge opened the door using one of a massive bunch of keys on his belt. The door was made of thin sheet metal and wobbled as it opened to a small cell with a single bed, a bedside table and chair, and the smallest fridge I’d ever seen but which made up for its size by making a fucking racket that would keep me awake at night until I had the bright idea of turning it off when I went to bed. Along one of the walls of the cell was a stone shelf about waist height. It was bare except for an icon of the Virgin, blue robed and pale-looking, staring down at the bed wistfully, like someone had strung her son up.
“There’s a toilet next to the washing block, and a shower. It’s not exactly luxurious but it will do.” Jorge was struggling to get some keys off the bunch, but his fingernails were badly chewed and he couldn’t get into the key ring. He gave up.
“I’ll bring your keys up later,” he said.
“Great,” I said. “I’ve got some duty free, if you fancy a drink.”
“No, I’ll let you settle,” he said, then stood in the doorway for a while, staring at a spot on the stone floor.
After he’d gone I set about making the place my own. I lay the Madonna face down on the shelf and put my shoebox on top of her. I unpacked my clothes onto the bed, but there was nowhere to hang or store them so I put them back in the rucksack and pushed it under the bed and then sat down on the chair. I was installed.
It was dark when I woke up. My head was slumped on my chest, and Jorge was standing in the doorway again. The bulb hanging from the ceiling snapped on with a tiny squeal like the electricity going through it was some kind of torture. The light came with moths and tiny black flies fluttering about it, always.
“I brought you some things,” said Jorge. “Some things you’ll need.” I rubbed my eyes and took in the sheets and blankets piled on the bed, the bread and packets of ham and cheese and a bottle of chillies on top of the fridge along with some plates, glasses and cutlery, a packet of serviettes, and next to the fridge a cooler water bottle, but without the cooler.
“Here are your keys and a map of the area,” said Jorge, laying them on top of the sheets. “I’ve marked where the supermarket is. If you do need something, in an emergency, I’m in number 5.”
I knew that; I had his address after all, but I didn’t say anything because I was feeling a bit confused. I wasn’t even sure what time it was.
“So,” he said then. “Your new beginning. How does it feel?”
I shrugged. “Dunno. Do you want a drink?”
“No,” he said. “No thanks. But I put some beer in the fridge. Help yourself.”
And he left, closing the door behind him. I got a bottle out of the fridge, but I couldn’t find an opener, so I had a swig of duty free whisky, lay down on the bed, and went to sleep.
It rained for two days. I heard rumbling that first night, even in my sleep, then a steady rattle on the door and windows. The first morning I could sit in the doorway smoking, watching the rain, watching dark clouds roll across an enormous city of flat roofs, aerials and disks, planes lolling in to land in the distance. But when the wind changed in the afternoon, the rain slanted toward me and I had to close the door. My only choice with the door closed was either to stand and look out the window at the rain or lie on the bed and listen to it, so I alternated between the two.
I hadn’t banked on this weather. I’d packed for a sunny beach holiday. Well, I would have done if I’d owned any sunny beach clothing, but all I did have with me was some shirts, jeans and T-shirts. If I’d gone out I would have been drenched before I got down the street. I was soaked just running to the toilet, and it was hard to get dry again. There was no heating in the service room, and a general dampness crept into the room and into my clothes and skin.
I had no books either, no pens or paper, nothing to entertain me. So I read every label to hand; import information on the ham, nutritional information on the cheese, that kind of thing. The longest text I found was stuff about my passenger rights on the back of my airline ticket. I'm an expert on passenger rights.
So I paced, and I lay on the bed thinking about a girl I’d seen in a magazine, a girl with dark skin and wavy hair standing arms akimbo, pointing her tits at the sky from the top of a pyramid, except she wasn’t on a pyramid when I was thinking about her, she was in the bed with me. After I’d thought about her a bit I felt drowsy and slipped in and out of dreams, messed up images of planes and airports, yellow dogs and brown girls. I woke and paced a bit more and thought about that girl again. Later I ate the cheese and ham and bread and jalapenos, and I spent ages getting the top off a bottle with a key and drank the beer in one go. When it got dark, I watched the wildlife round the light bulb and drank the whisky, then passed out.
The next morning there was no let-up, but I was getting stir crazy, so I stripped down to my underwear and went out to explore the roof. There were the clothes cages and washing area, the shower and toilet, all as expected, and television aerials and parabolic dishes and big steel cylinders hissing, smelling of gas and creating tiny mirages in the air where the gas passed through valves into copper tubes. The area with the gas cylinders was the closest I could get to the edge of the roof. The wall was about waist high and so I leaned over, but there wasn’t much to see, just a different view of the street I’d stood in a couple of days before, and that yellow dog taking shelter in a doorway. The dog looked up at me before turning round twice, stretching, and lying down.
The best views seemed to be on the other side of the roof, where the city fell away and faded into the low-lying cloud, today at least. But you couldn’t get there because of the clothes cages. I tried the padlocks but they were locked. Someone had had the same idea as me, though, because in one of the cages there was a plastic chair propped up against the wire. This cage looked cleaner actually; newer, better cared for than the others, and its lock was the biggest.
The cold got through to me then and I shivered. I went back to my cell and tried to dry off, do everything over again, doze and half dream.
I woke with a square of light on the wall; my first taste of Mexican sun. I jumped up and threw open the door, sucked in a lungful of air. I’d arrived, and I was starving. I needed to wash before I could go out to hunt, and the shower was hot and powerful, though on the walk back my feet got filthy again.
I was arranging my clothes on the bed, trying to find the least creased items, when I saw Jorge walking across the roof with a small woman in his arms. I stopped dead, stooped over the bed like a hunter that’s spotted prey unexpectedly, and from the corner of my eye I watched Jorge prop the woman against the cage as he unlocked it, pick her up again, carry her the few feet to the edge of the roof, and set her down in the chair.
He stayed there for while, looking out across the city, before turning and walking out of the cage, straight towards me.
“You survived then,” he said.
I rummaged in my backpack, like I’d seen nothing.
“Yeah,” I said.
“What’s your plan?” he said.
“Plan?” I said, looking up at him, but I could see the woman in the cage behind him so I looked down again. “Do I need a plan?”
“Well, I suppose you don’t have to start right away,” he said, sitting on my chair. “Your feet are dirty.”
“I know,” I said. “So how’s the museum thing going?” Jorge had this grand scheme that he was going to tour around the country in a van setting up micro museums where he could collect local knowledge from the Indians, preserve their cultures and all that.
He fiddled with the keys hanging from his belt. “The museum thing didn’t happen. Something came up, so now I work here.”
“You work here?” I said. “But you own the building, don’t you? Why work here? I thought this museum business was everything you’d dreamed of.”
He shrugged. “The place needs a janitor, someone to fix things, paint things, clean the floors.”
I thought about the rubbish in the hallway downstairs, the cockroach carcasses in the shower. Not sweeping up seemed a bit of a come down after all those big ideas.
“Have you got a bottle opener?” I said. “It took me a fucking lifetime to get the top off a bottle.”
Jorge took a bottle out of the fridge and opened it with a gizmo that was stuck to the back of the door. The top rattled on the floor and Jorge handed me the bottle.
“Oh,” I said. “Thanks.”
He drifted off, not saying goodbye or anything, and I dressed for the supermarket.
When I got back after an episode at the checkout, loaded with bags of crap, the woman in the cage was still there, staring out across the city. I made some loud coughing noises and rattled my bags to show that I wasn’t creeping up on her, but she didn’t move or say anything so I stopped to have a proper look. There was a bit of a breeze, and it was pulling at her blouse and her hair, which was like a long black wave down her back. She was wearing a plain black skirt above the knee. Her hands held each other on her lap. I couldn’t make her face out very well, just a small ear, a round cheek, one set of eyelashes and the tip of a nose.
I went to my room, put away my food as best I could, closed the door and lay on the bed.
The next day I woke late. I’d bought a lot of beer at the supermarket, and I’d drunk most of it, even the warm stuff, while looking at a photograph of my dead girlfriend and sobbing like an idiot into her knickers. When I opened the door in the morning the woman was there in the cage again, as though she’d never moved, except she’d changed her blouse and maybe her skirt.
I had a shower, padded back to my cell, and lay on my bed, watching her. The next day I did pretty much the same, and the next, so this became my routine, and the woman in the cage was my constant, framed in my doorway, and I would lie on the bed, watch her watch the city in sunlight that over the day stretched a shadow from one side of the building to the other, day after day.
When I ran out of stuff I’d go to the supermarket for more beer, cheese and bread, more of those chillies I was getting addicted to, maybe some crisps so I could eat them while I watched her and drank a cold one.
Sometimes the door to the roof would creak open and I would close my eyes, pretending to be asleep, but I could feel Jorge watching me. He never said anything; I just felt his body stop, felt his eyes on me.
Late one afternoon I suppose I must have dozed off for real because I opened my eyes to find Jorge standing hands on hips looking at the tarmac floor outside my door. I rubbed my eyes and went out to join him.
“There’s not much point you showering and washing your feet when they’re just going to get dirty again,” he said, without lifting his head. “We need to paint the roof.”
I looked at him and at the woman in the cage, wondering if he was talking to her. I was still a bit dozy.
“What do you think?” he said, looking at me. “We brush off as much of the crap as we can, then we paint a path from the shower to your room.”
“Sounds good,” I said. "Or I could get some kind of slippers or something."
"No," he said. "We need a path."
When I got up the next day the two of them were waiting for me. The woman was out of the cage but still sitting in her chair, watching me, and Jorge was next to her, leaning on a sweeping brush.
A path had been outlined from my door to the shower and toilet block. Jorge stepped forward and handed me the brush.
“Clean it up as much as you can,” he said. “The cleaner you get it, the less trouble you’ll have painting it, and the smoother the paint will be, so it will be easier to keep clean.”
“OK,” I said. I thought it might be nice to have some kind of breakfast first, but obviously they were keen for me to get started, so I did. I began to sweep the dust and grit off the path, and they watched for a moment until Jorge sighed loudly.
“Put some effort into it,” he said.
I pushed at the floor with exaggerated strokes, making dust and bits of loose tarmac fly in all directions, and very soon I was building up a sweat. The woman said something and I stopped dead; it was the first time I’d heard her voice. Jorge stepped forward again, snatched the broom out of my hand and pushed me away. He didn’t say anything, just started sweeping. I couldn’t see how he was doing any better than me.
The sun was hot on my back that afternoon as I knelt on the roof, smearing a thick layer of red lead paint onto the tarmac. Normally I wouldn’t have taken my shirt off, not with people watching, but the sweat had made my skin itch like a bastard so I’d had to strip down. Jorge had told me a few times how to use the brush, how to dip it into the paint, each time pushing me aside to demonstrate, and one time knocking me over so that I rolled into the dust and grit that had been pushed away from the path. Now he was sitting next to the woman from the cage, in my chair, half watching me, mostly nodding off. I didn’t like him much right now; he wasn’t the happy bloke who’d invited me here.
By evening I was finished. Jorge woke, inspected my work, took away the paint and brushes, and then took away the woman. I sat in my chair watching the path dry.
The next day the woman was back in her cage, and everything was the same except I had a red lead path to my door and I was aching from the effort I put into making it. It was like she’d forgotten again that I was there, or didn’t care, even when I began the exercise routine.
It was thanks to that aching that I had a flash of inspiration and began the exercise routine a few days later. I had this idea that if I ever did get off the roof and move on I would have to be fit enough to get about. I didn’t know much about exercise, but obviously it would have to involve some form of jumping about and running around. And so every afternoon as it was getting cooler I would do that, and add in a few squats and lunges, all pretty breathless, with a grunt here and there, the odd fart for punctuation. I would spend an hour or so like that, bouncing around the roof like a Mexican bean until I got quite agile for me. But the woman in the cage never turned around, and I never asked her to.
One coolish afternoon I was in the middle of my routine when I saw dark clouds starting to roll across the city from the south. I stopped to watch them pass over the dry yellow buildings, dousing each one as they passed. The woman, obviously expecting a drenching, looked from side to side. If she was looking for shelter that she could get to, maybe crawling or dragging herself along the ground, I couldn’t see any. I went to the stairway door and looked down into the darkness, pricking my ears for any sound of Jorge running to the rescue. There was no sign though, and as the first fat drops were plopping onto the roof, kicking up dust, she was still in her cage, still completely exposed.
It was like picking up a little kid, like she had the bones of a bird. She didn’t look too pleased at first, maybe a little panicked, but the raindrops were coming thicker and faster now and she put her arm around my neck so I could pluck her to safety.
I put her on my chair in the corner of my cell and sat on the bed opposite her. The rain was splashing in through the door, but not too much, so I thought it better not to close the door, thought it might not look good if I did. I hadn’t been off the roof in a few days and I had nothing to give her except a jar of jalapenos, so I just smiled.
After a few minutes during which she looked around and I picked at the edge of a tear in my jeans, she pointed at my shoebox and said something. I took the box down and opened it.
“This is my girlfriend,” I said, holding up the photo. “I mean it was. She was just a kid in this photo, she was my girlfriend later. And that’s her dog. They’re both dead.”
I didn’t normally tell people things like this, but there didn’t seem to be any harm in it; it was like confessing to a deaf priest from behind a screen.
“This was her sewing kit,” I said, taking out the little plastic box and putting it on the bed next to the photo. Then I took out the jewellery box and held it open for the woman to see. “I bought her this necklace for Christmas,” I said. There was some other jewellery, some cheap rings and stuff that I ran my finger over for a moment. She didn’t have much.
I left the tear-stained knickers in the box.
The woman frowned, pointed again and said something else. I looked back at the shelf. All that was left there was the Madonna icon. I picked it up and gave it to her. She slipped it into the pocket of her cardigan. She leaned forward, pointed at my knee, and tapped on the sewing box.
“I can’t sew,” I said. “I tried once, but it did my head in.”
She started jabbering, made gestures so that I stood up, and then more gestures for me to take off my jeans. But when I started to undo my belt she waved her hands dramatically and turned away, shouting “no no no no no!” She pointed at the door.
I ran across to the shower block, changed into some other trousers and then ran back. I felt quite shy handing them to her, but she already had needle and thread ready, and she began to make tiny stitches, incredibly slowly, like she had all the time in the world.
A couple of hours later it was still raining when Jorge came running up to the roof, looked around in confusion, and then came to my room. He stood in the doorway, hands on hips, and looked in turn at her, me and the small pile of mended clothes on the bed.
“It was raining,” I said.
“Yes, thanks,” he said. “I was on the other side of town.” And he picked her up and carried her off.
The next morning when I came out, late again, Jorge was fiddling in the cage with a massive umbrella and some string. She was in her chair as usual, not paying attention, until he barked a few words at her and she watched as he demonstrated his solution. He had suspended the umbrella from the top of the cage and then attached a string to the handle. He yanked the string and the umbrella sprang open, casting a shadow over her. It was simple but effective, and Jorge seemed pleased with himself, even as he struggled to fold the umbrella again.
When he came out and met me on the way to the shower he was still smiling.
“My wife says that if you have any more clothes to repair, you can take them to her,” he said.
“Your wife?” I said.
“Yes,” he said, the smile dropping. “What did you think?”
I shrugged. I wanted to ask where the baby was, but I thought it might not be a good idea.
“Well,” he said. “Anything you have. The sewing soothes her; takes her mind off the pain.”
After my shower I rummaged through the rest of my clothes. It was all crap, but nothing was in need of repair, so I selected a shirt and ripped it up the back. It was quite a violent wound and she looked a bit shocked by it, but she rummaged in a big box she had next to her and picked a few things out. I stood there, watching for a bit, until she looked up at me and gestured for me to sit down. So I got my chair and sat next to her, first watching the city, the planes in the distance, then her tiny fingers steering steel in and out of the cloth of my shirt. In the afternoon the rain came again, and I waited as Jorge’s wife took hold of the umbrella string and pulled it. The umbrella sprang open, sprang off the mesh ceiling of the cage, and fell on our heads, making us both laugh. I held it over us for a while, but we were still getting wet, and so I carried her back to my room.
So the days went. Every morning I would tear up a shirt and sit next to her in the cage as she repaired it, and in the afternoon we would sit out the rain in my room, eating cheese and bread, the odd tomato, and I even tried some olives but I didn’t like them. She did though — sat there popping them one after another into her mouth, staring at the wall. Sometimes she would accept a beer, but just one was enough to have her giggling and talking away at me ten to the dozen, though I didn’t have a clue what she was saying. It was nice watching her laugh, though, her shoulders bouncing.
We got more stuff in the cage. Jorge tried some new remedies for the rain, like extra umbrellas with increasingly complicated arrangements of string, but they just got tangled or the umbrellas would come away and whack us across the face. Then he tried putting a tarpaulin across the whole roof, but the wind got hold of that and chucked it into the street. The rainy season was nearly over by that point, anyway, and so the solutions soon dried up too.
We also got a small table, and a gas burner so that we could make coffee in a silver-coloured coffee pot that was actually blackened from years of use. Jorge’s wife taught me how to make the coffee and that became my job while she made ham and cheese sandwiches with chillies and flavourless mustard. After coffee and sandwiches I’d do my routine and she would watch, trying not to laugh. And before we knew it, it was time for sundown and the big show of the day.
As the rainy season ended, the dry air filled with more pollution from the city traffic and factory smoke came to settle in the valley. For us, high up in our roof cage, this still, dry air created the best sunsets. The sun sank low and the smog lit red and orange, the sky glowed yellow, fading into blue, purple and black, the sun spread out across the sky, piercing our eyes one more time and then plopped behind the mountains, sending up a last splash of light. I never got tired of watching that.
This was round about the time of day that Jorge would come to collect his wife, and he started to watch the sunset with us, eventually bringing his own chair, and at the end of the day you could find the three of us there, drinking thick black coffee and watching the day end, chewing on what was left of the processed cheese and ham.
The only other time that Jorge would appear would be when it was time to replace the gas cylinders. Each apartment had two of these holding about thirty litres of liquid propane each, and it was one of Jorge’s jobs to replace any that had run out. He did this by waiting in the street for a truck loaded with cylinders and wiry little men or boys. The truck would roll slowly along the street and one of the wiry men would shout “El gas!” at the top of his voice. Jorge would shout back to say how many bottles he wanted and then come up onto the roof to wait. Before long, one or more of the wiry little men or boys would come panting up the stairs with a cylinder on his shoulder. They were seriously heavy, those cylinders; I tried lifting one once and I had to have a sit down afterwards. But these little blokes were up and down the stairs all day carrying them.
Jorge would always have a grim look on his face when he handed over payment plus tip to the gas men.
“There has to be a better way of doing this,” he said to me one day. “Seriously, this is so inefficient.”
Jorge had trained as a museographer, not an engineer, and even I could see that this might be a problem when it came to The Invention. His idea, as he sketched it in my cell one evening over a bottle of tequila, was simple enough: a pulley system, a counter-balance, and a rope net to put the cylinders in and lift them up to the roof.
“So if this works,” I said. “What will happen to the guys who carry them up?”
“I’ve thought about that,” he said, looking at me over the top of his glasses. “Someone will have to do the winching, the placing of cylinders into the rope net — full at the bottom, empty at the top.”
“Right,” I said.
“So there will be plenty of work for everyone,” he said.
He began early the next day, and I was put to work holding things and laying things out and the like, but mostly I was keeping him company as he worked. His wife had been placed where she could watch as well, with the coffee table and sandwich equipment to hand, some needlepoint on her lap.
Jorge clamped a steel boom to the waist high wall, then took it down again and welded a pulley wheel to one end, and put it back up again. He then hooked a pallet onto the other end of the boom, and made it my job to place layers of house bricks onto the pallet to act as the counter-balance. Finally, he made the rope basket and attached it through the pulley to a winch.
It took about two hours.
“That was quick,” I said.
Jorge dusted off his hands and took a sandwich from his wife. “We need something about the right weight to test it,” he said, then smiled at her.
“You can’t be serious?” I said.
Jorge frowned at me. “I was joking. Get your fridge, and leave the beer in it.”
I took the fridge down the stairs (I was glad I’d been doing the exercise routine) and waited as the rope net slowly lowered, accompanied by a distant ticking noise from the winch. By the time the net had arrived I had a small boy and the yellow dog for an audience. I loaded the fridge and waved up at Jorge, who was leaning over the edge of the building. He disappeared, the clicking began again, and the fridge, complete with beer, began to rise into the air.
The small boy clapped. The dog was less impressed.
That night the three of us celebrated on the roof with safely recovered beer and a couple of tequila chasers, and sat happily in the red light of a Mexico City sunset, ready for the big day.
Funnily enough, the next day almost all the gas cylinders on the roof were empty and there was a distinct smell of gas in the air. Jorge was excited, and in a bit of a dilemma because he wanted to be in charge of the winch but also had to supervise matters on the ground. He compromised by winching all of the cylinders to the ground first, before the gas truck had even arrived, with me supervising the landing area, this time attracting a much larger crowd, mostly women and children. They chattered, sometimes called out, probably asking me what the fuck I was doing. But I ignored them and worked silently, arranging all the bottles on the pavement in neat rows like missiles in a silo. There were eighteen once we were done.
Jorge appeared on the ground and patted me on the back. He was red faced and panting, obviously enjoying himself. He sent me back upstairs with some last minute instructions and then addressed the crowd in a booming, majestic voice.
Back on the roof I waited nervously, turning down all offers of coffee and ham and cheese sandwiches, preferring to lean over the edge and watch Jorge pace.
At last the truck arrived. Jorge flagged it down and started to hop about in front of its occupants, who got off one by one until they were all standing round him with folded arms, man and boy, shaking their heads.
After a lot of gesturing and pointing and a fair bit of shouting, a full gas cylinder was loaded into the net and Jorge waved at me. I jumped at the winch, and remembering Jorge’s instructions began to work the machine slowly. There was a lurch, a tautening of ropes, and then movement. Two of the gas men came up to the roof to retrieve the hoisted cylinder and put it in place. Operation completed, the three of us leaned over the wall, making thumbs up signs and grinning, and a round of applause broke out below.
About five cylinders had been hoisted in this way when Jorge came up to the roof, looking happy and satisfied. He sat next to his wife and patted her hand.
“Excellent work,” he said to me, and I grinned back at him, loving his cratered face. I felt useful for the first time in ages. After a few more cylinders it was all becoming a bit routine, though, a bit like hard work. The sun was high and I was sweating.
“This is getting a lot harder now,” I said.
Jorge had been chatting with his wife, waving his hands about and no doubt developing new schemes, but he stopped short, jumped up and ran to the edge of the roof.
It was all confusion after that. There was swearing, shouting, running. Basically, down on the ground the guys had started getting restless. Sure they didn’t need to run up and down stairs with gas cylinders, but this was taking too long and anyway most of them had nothing to do. Also, who was going to get the tip? An argument broke out, settled by the decision to speed matters up and get on to the next job. Someone else could bring winch-guy’s gas next time. So to jig things along a bit they decided to load up two cylinders rather than one. But that would have left only one more, so what the hell…
As he told it later, when Jorge looked over the edge of the building he saw a bunch of men standing directly below three enormous gas-filled cylinders suspended from a pulley system that was close to coming apart.
He swore a bit. He told me to winch back and damn quickly. He ran off. Moments later there was more shouting from the street, but I was too busy to take a look at what was happening, though I could see in Jorge’s wife's face that things weren't too peachy. After a short while of spinning the winch I felt like the load must surely have reached the ground again, and it turned out that it almost had, but just six inches from ground one of the cylinders, straining too hard on the knots of the net, slipped through and clunked onto the pavement. I saw the boom lurch up, released suddenly of some of the weight, so that the back end tipped down, the unsecured rope on which the pallet and bricks had been suspended slipped off, and the boom tipped forward violently, pulling me and the winch forward. Not far, but far enough. The unbalanced boom crumbled the bricks of the wall it was clamped to, and the whole thing began to creak forwards.
From below, Jorge watched as his invention began to hurtle to the ground. He started running around, pushing people away if they weren’t already running like fuck. But then he stood directly below the falling beam as though he could catch it. I shouted down at him to get out of the fucking way.
By this point, Jorge’s wife had jumped or fallen out of her seat and was now next to me, on all fours and heaving herself up to the ledge, shouting his name at a volume I wouldn’t have believed if I hadn’t heard it myself. Then she shouted at me and pushed me, and what she shouted, clear as day, was: “Don’t just stand there, go and get him you fucking idiot. Go and help him!”
I had no time to wonder how suddenly she’d got almost functional legs and a good grasp of English, and so I turned and ran, throwing myself down the stone stairs in leaps and bounds, three four or more steps at a time, each time falling heavier onto the ground, straining every muscle, the effort pulling at my groin, tearing at the muscles in my arms and shoulders as I spun round stairwells, I suppose in some way thinking I could beat it, outrun gravity, push my friend to safety, save the day, so that with an enormous last leap I sailed the whole last stairway and hit ground floor straight onto a flyer.
My foot slipped, my ankle snapped back, a bone sprang with a bright splash of blood from my shin, and I crashed onto my knee.
When I woke, Jorge was kneeling over me, holding three severed fingers, which I swear were still twitching.
“I think it needs some adjustment,” he said.
A week later, Jorge and I were sitting in his wife’s cage watching the sun set. Jorge’s left hand was just a club of bandages — not even his wife could have sewn them back on. I, meanwhile, had my right leg in plaster, perched on top of an upturned bucket. Between us we had a cooler full of beer, though, and there was plenty of gas in the tanks, so all was well.
“So is she coming back?” I said. “Gloria, I mean?”
“Oh yes,” said Jorge. “She’s just gone to her mother’s for a few months to get back to full health and get connected with the baby again.”
“So what happened?" I said. "I mean with the not walking thing?”
Jorge shrugged. “I don’t know. Breakdown, maybe. While I was away, over in England, she found it hard here all alone with the baby. Then when I came back, well you know what I was like, full of ideas about travelling around, setting up museums everywhere, a kind of Johnny Appleseed of the museum world. She became ill. Fell out of bed, fell over, just couldn’t walk. I don’t think she was faking it. Her mind just couldn’t cope. She needed me at home.”
“Well, maybe,” I said. “But I don’t see life as a janitor as the right thing for you.”
“No,” he said. “I might not be very safe around such things as buildings. Exhibits, yes, not buildings. Anyway, we talked about it. When I’ve healed and she’s settled back home with the baby, I’ll try to find a job here in the city, something to do with museums. What I didn't tell her is that I'd already been doing some part time work. Anyway, the accident woke her up she says, that and watching you, wasting your life up here.”
I nodded, cracked open another couple of beers and handed him one.
“Just one thing,” he said. “When she comes back, you can’t be here.”
“Right,” I said. I wasn’t surprised. I wouldn't want me around either.
Anyway, I’d done my time and no matter how comforting the cell had become, it was time to move on, forget the dead, or at least their death, and accept that not everything can be mended. Jorge was three fingers less, I would probably always limp, and Alice was dust.
“Do you need me to find you a job,” he said then. “Somewhere to live?”
I shook my head. I meant to say yes, but I shook my head.
I went out to the cage a few more days after that, but it wasn’t the same with no one to share it. Then I took to sitting in my room staring at the walls and drinking and smoking, but that didn’t do it for me either.
On September 16 I stepped into the street outside Jorge’s block. The leg was plaster free, but I still had to use a cane. It was kind of difficult getting down the stairs with the backpack, the shoebox under my arm, the cane. By the time I got down to the street I was breathless. I sat down on the step outside Jorge's building with the shoebox on my lap. I opened it up to check that everything was in order, like I still did several times a day. But as well as the usual items there was the icon of the Virgin with a little note stuck to it.
"Thank you for keeping me company on the roof," it said. And it was signed 'Gloria', no kisses.
I put the icon back and pulled myself up again. It was midday and only the yellow dog was there to say goodbye. He followed me down the street for a while, but by the time I'd turned the corner, he'd gone.

Ray Hoskins

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