Devi Patel was minding his own
business when he heard the passing car brake to a screeching halt, shattering
the midnight silence. He collapsed the empty
newspaper stand and refused to turn around. With only two weeks left before his
corner shop was sold and replaced by a Taiwanese Nail Bar he concentrated on
thoughts of the six month Cruise he would take with his wife.
The car parked close by and a
strong smell of stale and fresh cigarette smoke polluted the summer night air
and he heard the sound of something dropped onto the pavement.
‘Go on, get lost,’ the young
female voice, harsh and raspy mingled with the jangle of bangles.
Devi knew the sound of gold. The bangles were not gold.
The cheap car door banged shut. The idling engine shifted into gear and as it
sped off there was a dull thud before it roared away into its own mystery.
The shutter already down over the
window, Devi blinked in the bright strip lights of his second home. Having stowed the newspaper rack behind the
display of sugary sweets he turned to close and lock the door.
He wouldn’t have heard the silent
footsteps because the filthy feet wore no shoes. Filthy ...
it was the only word to describe the surprising four foot high apparition
standing in the open doorway. The dreadfully
thin small boy wearing only oversized underpants cradled a dying, furry Mr
Twinkle across his bare arms. It was the
victim of the ‘dull thud’.
Devi stared at the two pitiful sights
facing him. Mr Twinkle’s black eyes,
unfocused pools of pain watched him while the boy’s blank eyes focused on Devi
silently pleading from the depths of their own misery.
It was pointless to run out into
the street and search for the car. It
was far gone by now, the driver having no intention of returning for the unwanted
passenger. While Devi hastily locked up,
his mind raced with the urgent intention of helping his two visitors.
Standing behind the boy his nose
was assaulted by the choking stench of unwashed body odour, vomit, urine - and
worse.
‘Make better?’ The boy turned his head to the side as he held
out Mr Twinkle and Devi saw his fragile body retreat into itself as though expecting
a verbal or actual blow, simply for asking the question.
Bags of crisps were thrown from a
cardboard container onto the floor and Devi tore off his aged, cashmere jumper. The boy knelt on the floor with him and
together they carefully wrapped Mr Twinkle in the warm wool, settling him inside
the box.
‘I’ll leave Mr Twinkle here to
sleep. If he feels better in the night
he’ll probably make his own way home. You
look hungry. Come and eat. We have toast and hot chocolate.’
He’d expected a smile from the
suggestion of food or at least the anticipation of chocolate. The boy looked about four years old,
neglected and half starved.
Instead, without a word, after
stroking Mr Twinkle’s shit streaked fur, he followed Devi to the warm kitchen
where his wife was preparing their supper.
A recently retired doctor she
could only stare in open-mouthed disbelief at the boy standing next to her
husband. Her blinking eyes communicated with
Devi across the room and each waited for the other to speak first.
‘Sit down. I’ll make you a drink,’ he pointed to a chair
at the small table they used for snatched meals during the long opening hours. ‘What’s your name?’
“I’m an ungrateful bastard” the
boy snarled in an adult male’s voice and dropped down onto the dusty
floor. He hunched his bare knees to his
chest trying to make himself even smaller.
His dirty underpants hung around his bony bottom.
‘I’ve never seen anything like
it.’ The stunned words were whispered
like a soft summer breeze.
Devi watched his wife stoop down
and gently touch the boy’s elbow. ‘You
must sit on the chair to eat.’ She
didn’t rise until the boy was seated. Instead
of toast she ripped open a sachet of microwave oats that had never see Scottish
land. After a few minutes she pushed the
dish, flowing with cooling milk toward the “ungrateful bastard”.
‘Eat slowly,’ she said, her Asian
accent still strong even after living in Bradford for fifty years.
The boy watched the strange man
and the woman contemplating him. He
picked up the spoon with both hands and dropped it, uncertain of its use. Devi scooped a small blob of porridge and slurped
it with a grin of exaggerated pleasure.
The boy copied him, grinning like
a monkey after each savoured slurp, quickening the pace as he enjoyed the
cereal. ‘Slowly,’ Devi’s wife advised
and sat in the empty chair opposite the boy.
He swallowed in slow motion to
prolong the delight and relaxed his tense shoulders, eyes fixed on her.
‘Are you A Paki?’
‘No. I am A Nita.’
Inured to insults from old and
young, Devi and Anita lifted their deep brown eyes to the ceiling. She
joined him at the sink where he fussed with hot milk and powdered drinking
chocolate.
They spoke in lowered whispers
without shifting their attention from the boy.
‘Tell me,’ ordered Anita and Devi
related the events after the car stopped.
‘You must call the police. They’ll have to find his mother.’ Anita headed upstairs to fetch her medical
bag. ‘Sachin will know what to do. I’ll call him.’
‘I’m not calling the police
unless they’re looking for him,’ thought Devi.
‘He’s been abandoned and by the looks of him treated worse than an
animal. There’s no way he’s going back
to whoever did this.’
Distracted by concern he poured
steaming liquid into a mug and placed it in front of the boy. ‘Drinking
chocolate,’ he said and half smiled at Anita when she returned, bag in hand.
‘He’ll need a bath and we can find Sachin’s
old pyjamas for him to sleep in.’
‘Bath. Sleep.’ Anita hissed, her dark eyes wide, smoothing
out the shadowed circles beneath them.
‘Are you crazy? We cannot do
anything like that. We’ll be accused of
all sorts once the police get here. We cannot
even touch him.’
The boy ignored their whispers
and licked spilt porridge from blackened nails.
Too late not to have helped him wash before eating, thought Devi.
‘I know you want to be kind,’
Anita continued, ‘but these days, it’s wrong to be kind. You have to step back and let Social Services
do their job.’
The boy reached for the mug and
squeaked when his fingers touched the fiery sides.
‘Oh no, sorry,’ Devi was
devastated; ‘I should have said it will be hot.
I’m very sorry.’
The boy bit his lip and blinked
hard when he heard the word ‘sorry’.
“So you bleeding well should be,”
he rasped at Devi who recognised a perfect imitation of the voice he’d heard
from the car.
He turned to Anita. ‘Can’t you see he’s never had a decent word
said to him in his life? We can decide
what to do after we’ve cleaned him up and he’s had a good night’s sleep. I don’t think he’s even capable of talking
properly – not to us anyway.’
As Anita struggled to decide on
the right decision, she and Devi passed a hand over their faces, trying not to
breathe in the smell of urine trickling onto the floor. The boy leant over the hot chocolate sniffing
the pungent cocoa, oblivious to the acrid smell of ammonia rising from beneath
his swinging feet.
Devi breathed hard, ‘Okay, this
is my plan. We’ll use the mobile and
video everything we do …’
‘Then they’ll think we’re
paedophiles … No Devi … that’s …’
‘Not if we do it in a decent
way. I will document everything from the
moment the car stopped outside. We’ll
take him upstairs. You help him bath – he’s
probably never had one in his life. I’ll
check the Internet for a missing child.’
Anita placed her trembling hands
each side of his face. ‘Devi Patel, you
are a veRy lovely man.’ She still over
pronounced the ‘r’ in very and Devi loved her for it.
An hour later, the boy snuggled
into the comfortable single bed in the spare room, breathing deeply from long
overdue sleep in clean bedding. Devi huddled
on the carpet outside the open door, ready to leap up and reassure their
visitor if he woke in the night, frightened or crying.
He needn’t have worried. The boy slept for six hours without moving.
To pass the time, Devi trawled
through local and National Internet news pages, finding nothing about a lost or
missing boy.
Wide awake at 3am he heard their barrister
son walk up the carpeted stairs.
Encouraged by Anita, Sachin peeped into the bedroom often used by nieces
and nephews. Spotting a well-worn teddy
bear, he tucked it under the duvet.
Standing with his son on the
landing Devi embraced the young man who was his image; taller, wider in the
chest, thick rather than thinning hair but with the same unmistakable even
white teeth and brown eyes.
‘Pops, what on earth are you
doing? You know you can’t keep him like
some stray dog or cat. You could get
into a lot of trouble. The law sees
things in black and white.’ He groaned
as he sat on the floor next to his stubborn father who had returned to his
vigil.
Devi’s sobbing sigh lingered in
the air. ‘Tell me Sachin, how have we
lost the right to show kindness? Who
decided it was so wrong?’
How could Sachin argue with the
questions? ‘We didn’t lose it Pops. It just happened gradually. The bad guys make things change and the good
guys have to accept it.’
Anita appeared with hot drinks
and chocolate biscuits and knelt on the floor with them, her patterned silk
dressing gown billowing around her like a gaudy parachute.
‘Sachin, you know what will
happen if the police and social services get involved. He’ll be taken to a foster home and who knows
how he will be treated. Or worse, they’ll
send him back to wherever he came from.
Our house in town is big Sachin, plenty of room for a small boy. When he’s older he could work …’
Sachin snorted and smiled. ‘… in the shop? No mum, the corner shop is dead with all this
competition from late night Tesco’s and Sainsbury’s. The authorities will make sure he doesn’t go
back to his parents.’
He nudged Devi’s phone. ‘Call them Pops. You can’t afford my fees if you end up in
court.’
It was fortunate their regular PC
Brian Hadley was on duty that morning.
His bulky frame filled the open shop doorway as he swiped left through Devi’s
photo record from the boy’s arrival to transformation from discarded urchin into
a human being. He breathed heavily and
his fingers tensed.
‘Don’t worry too much Devi. There are still a lot of good people in the
world. Social Services are not as bad as
you think. I’ll make sure they know you
want to foster him.’
The boy stood in his new clean
clothes clutching the teddy bear, each with matching glassy eyes. Looking up at Devi he held the bear in front
of his face.
“Devi Patel, you are a veRy lovely
man.”
He imitated Anita’s accent
perfectly.
Devi laughed out loud and patted the
boy’s head, ignoring Sachin’s warning gestures. They’d left Anita upstairs cancelling the
cruise, prepared to lose their money.
‘This boy is a born mimic,
Brian. You’ll learn a lot from the
things he comes out with.’
This time Devi didn’t mind his own
business and helped Brian secure the boy’s seat belt in the back of the police
car. He waved as the vehicle drove the
boy away from his life – leaving him with a hopeful plan for their future.
1,997 words
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