One Year of Ugly by Caroline Mackenzie

Author:Caroline Mackenzie [Mackenzie, Caroline]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3, mobi
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 2020-03-02T17:00:00+00:00

A TIGRESS NOT TO BE FUCKED WITH

After Bethan’s visit, there was no family meeting, no grand plan to liberate Aunt Milagros from her holding cell. We didn’t do anything because we couldn’t. We were illegal immigrants housing other illegal immigrants. Our hands were tied, our mouths gagged.

Our only hope was Bethan, and she wasn’t much help. All she told Papá the day after she came and the day after that and every day the following week until she stopped taking his calls, was: ‘Our church brother is doing all he can.’ Which was apparently nothing.

Papá called various immigration lawyers, blowing money on consultations, but they all gave the same advice: Don’t go to the police station. Don’t do anything. Not unless we wanted to land up in that holding cell with Aunt Milagros.

I overheard my parents talking in the kitchen after one of those disheartening consultations. ‘No legal recourse and no loopholes. That’s all he kept saying,’ said Papá. ‘He said if any of us gets caught living here illegally, we’re out. Milagros doesn’t have a chance and there’s nothing we can do to help her. It’s either prison or deportation for her.’

I felt for him. I felt for Aunt Milagros.

More than anything, I felt for myself: I hadn’t seen or heard from Román since the day before Aunt Milagros shot the Dominican boy.

The day after Bethan’s visit, I didn’t expect to see him. I figured he’d have his hands tied sorting out the Aunt Milagros mess. I expected to see him the day after, though.

And the day after.

And the day after.

But nothing.

Seven days and nothing.

To anyone else, a week might seem like no time at all, but every day that I didn’t see or hear from him felt slower than the last, like I was living in an hourglass filled with treacle. My mind ran rampant as one week trickled slowly, excruciatingly, into two and then three, with no way to contact him because his only regular cell phone was tapped by Ugly, and he normally called me from untraceable burner phones anyway.

At first I suspected that Aunt Milagros’s breakdown had driven him away, then when there was still no word, my neuroses really started picking up speed, whirring gyroscopes of panic generating an unbearable anxious energy in me. I convinced myself that it wasn’t Aunt Milagros – that I’d done something to offend or repulse him. I picked apart every second of the last times we’d seen each other. Had he been quieter than usual? Did he hold my hand like he normally did on the drive home? Had he kissed me goodbye? I ran through each memory until they were smeared blurs in my mind, impossible to grasp with any clarity, drained of colour and movement – grainy sepia stills splotched with hurt and confusion.

A month passed. Still no update on Aunt Milagros and nothing from Román. I was a woman possessed. When a new illegal turned up, now heralded by the doorbell ringing, never the triple

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