Ixelles by Johannes Anyuru

Author:Johannes Anyuru
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Two Lines Press

Mio

Clap, clap, and now I clap you and you clap back—Nouredine and Amina were facing each other on the bus stop’s precarious plastic seats, playing a complicated girl’s game that Mio was amazed Nouredine had bothered to learn.

Clap, clap, then we both clap, Nouredine.

A primary feather swooped down over the road, dancing in the wind, right into Mio’s hand. He twirled it in his fingers, looked up but saw no bird.

Denis?

Felt a shove in his back, turned around, almost expecting it to be Denis, alive again, but it was the girl with the green hair, though she’d washed out the dye—a pair of turquoise curls hung out of the raised hood. Ruth—he’d asked people what her name was.

He put the feather in his pocket.

Even though it had been a month or so since the fight, he and Ruth hadn’t actually talked, they’d just nodded when they met in the corridors—he was embarrassed that he’d gotten beaten up, and she mostly stood around whispering with Mother Harsha, barely gracing him with a look.

“You going to school?” he said, and looked along the road for the bus.

“Nah, I’m going to the Institute of Future Studies. I work there on Wednesdays.”

“You owe me that twenty-five euro.”

“Twenty.”

“There’s this thing called interest.”

“Interest is haram in your religion, man.” She smiled when she said that. He said:

“Ya, ustadha.”

She smiled at that too, though she probably didn’t know what it meant—O, teacher. Clap, clap—Nouredine missed a clap on Amina’s hands and Amina said his name, Nouredine, making it sound just like their mom—the same hopeless nagging. But Nouredine had lost concentration and was staring up at Mio and Ruth in his suspicious way, as though everyone but himself and Mio were plainclothes police and they were numbers one and two on Interpol’s most-wanted list.

Mio sloped away from the bus shelter so that Nouredine wouldn’t be able to hear the rest of his and Ruth’s conversation.

“I could get a crew together, you know?” he said. “Those geeks would be dead if I wanted. You know that, right?”

She raised her eyebrows, then, mockingly, like: am I meant to be impressed?

Twenty-Seventy girls, walla.

“My old man beats me ten times harder anyway,” he said, expecting her to laugh, like the boys did when they were swapping horror stories about things they’d gotten up to and the beatings they’d gotten afterward—the story of the beating was part of it, it was a measure of just how sick the thing you’d done was. But instead she was just looking at him and thinking god knows what—who knows what girls think.

They sat down on a bench.

“You’re half. Right?”

She laughed at the question, inwardly, and shook her head a little. He said:

“Half-white, I mean. Right?”

“Why don’t you get a crew then?” she said. “If you can.”

He shrugged, leaned back, glared up at the gray sky. They said Denis had been alive when the ambulance came, lying there, staring up between the buildings. Shots to his stomach, thigh, throat. Died on the way to the hospital.

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