Call Him Mine by Tim MacGabhann

Author:Tim MacGabhann [MacGabhann, Tim]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781474610476
Publisher: Orion
Published: 2019-07-10T23:00:00+00:00

17

You travel as often as I used to, you never really unpack.

You have your iPad and your laptop and your camera and your spare camera and a whole lot of blister plasters.

You have six days’ worth of clothes: mostly comfortable, mostly weatherproof, but also a pair of slacks that could pass for neat, a shirt that could pass for formal, a tub of boot polish, a brush.

That’s why I never owned a washing machine: even a three-hundred-peso hotel will do your laundry for you if you’re nice about it.

You have a long-sleeve shirt for dry heat, a Hawaiian shirt for wet heat.

You have a jumper and a leather jacket against outdoor cold, but mostly against shitty-hotel cold.

Meaning that when I got home, the packing took all of six seconds, leaving me time to book a hotel in a tourist town outside Poza Rica, book a meet-up with Francisco Escárcega, and get back on the road.

Before leaving the city I stopped for a coffee at the Teatro de los Insurgentes, lit up white against the midnight dark, leaning against the bonnet of my jeep, smoking cigarettes, my flask of LSD and water turning the view into Carlos’ first day in Mexico City, when I’d taken him to the university campus for a walk and a joint, before making our way to the theatre murals.

Towers loomed high above us, their black glass fronts shining like iPhones.

‘When I was a kid,’ I said, pointing at the mural above the doors to the theatre, ‘I used to look at photos of this place. My grandad had all these old encyclopaedias, with this like properly ’70s colour palette on the pictures inside.’

At the centre of the smoke and fumes and scarlet drapes hung an opera mask decorated with a sun and a moon. Red-nailed fingers held that mask up above a space of fire where revolutionaries and emperors and Aztec duchesses twisted like dancers.

A gentle rain fell through the light, the fine white drops chased by the draughts of passing cars into the shapes mackerel form when threatened. Carlos shivered in his jacket.

I pointed. ‘The sky in the background had this powder-blue tint that made everything look like morning.’

‘You mean you found the only scrap of blue sky in Mexico City?’ Carlos’ voice was fake-amazed. He pointed. ‘Love that Devil in the corner. So sleepy. So hungry.’

‘He’s really good,’ I said. ‘But I’m all about that blue. Used to sit at the back of class, stare up out of the window, watch planes cut through the sky, and wish they were lifting me all the way here. And then, years later, I did wind up here. Landed on the rainiest, greyest, most hungover Sunday morning in the history of life. But the trees, they were rinsed green, and their shine was as glossy as the ones in that mural. All I had was two hundred words of Spanish, two hundred dollars in my wallet, and the address of some room the school had found for me, and so I showed the taxi driver the address on my phone.

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