Naveen held her in his arms, and told her. She broke the hug, walked a few uncertain steps on the rocky shore, and began to stagger away.
Naveen followed her closely, catching her a few times when her bare feet slipped between the rocks.
She stumbled on in a daze, her eyes blind, her legs moving in an instinct to flee suffering and fear.
I’d seen it before, during a prison riot: a man so scared that he walked into a stone wall, again and again, always hoping for a door. Her mind was somewhere else, searching for the vanished world.
Without her realising it, Naveen led her in a wide arc, and back to me. She sat placidly, then, on a boulder, and very slowly came back to herself. When she did, she started crying uncontrollably.
I left her with Naveen, who loved her, and returned to the huts to bring Sita and the girls to help. Sita was gone, but I found Karla and the Zodiac Georges instead.
I looked at Didier. Diva’s hiding place in the slum was a secret.
‘I thought it wise, that she have some support,’ Didier said. ‘Especially since we shall all be spending the night here to support her, in this . . . community facility, is it not so?’
Karla kissed me hello.
‘How is she?’
‘It hit her like an axe handle,’ I said, ‘but she came around okay. She’s a tough girl. Good that you’re here. She’s with Naveen, down by the sea. I’d give them a while yet. She’s pretty cut up, and Naveen knew her father.’
‘Didier is too much of a gentleman to keep a secret,’ Didier said, ‘and leave Diva without friends, on a night of such terrible disaster as this.’
‘And Didier is too scared of ghosts,’ Karla added, ‘to stay here alone.’
‘Ghosts?’
‘Clearly,’ Didier said, ‘the place is haunted. I am sensing presences.’
‘Whatever the reason, I’m glad you’re here.’
‘It’s been a while,’ she said, looking around at the slum huts. ‘Any special attractions this time? Cholera, typhoid?’
There’d been a cholera outbreak years before, while I was living in the slum. Karla had come to help me fight it. She’d accepted the local rats, nursed helpless people, and cleaned diarrhoea from earthen floors on her hands and knees.
‘It sounds crazy, I guess, but that time with you, back then, it’s one of my happiest memories.’
‘Mine, too,’ she said, glancing around. ‘And you’re right. It’s crazy. What are the girls doing to Diva’s place?’
‘They’re sprucing it up. Hoping to raise her spirits, I think.’
‘There are spirits being raised from the dead in this wild city tonight,’ she said. ‘That’s for sure.’
‘Terrible business,’ Scorpio added, joining us.
‘Poor little thing,’ Gemini said. ‘We’ve kept her suite open, at the Mahesh. It’s always there, if she wants it.’
‘Just keep this place to yourselves,’ I said. ‘Johnny and the others are taking a risk. Don’t let anyone know about Diva. Are we good?’
‘Good as gold, mate,’ Gemini replied.
‘Yes . . . ’ Scorpio hedged. ‘Unless . . . ’
‘Unless?’
‘Unless someone is forcing me to tell.’
‘What’s that supposed to mean?’
‘Well, suppose somebody started hitting me, to get me to tell, then I would tell. So, I can only promise confidentiality up to the point of physical harm.’
I looked at Gemini.
‘It’s one of Scorpio’s rules,’ he shrugged.
‘And a good one,’ Scorpio added. ‘If everyone in the world spilled their guts at the first sign of violence, there’d be no torture any more.’
‘SnitchWorld,’ Karla said. ‘I think you’re on to something, Scorp.’
A man came through the lanes toward us, wheeling a bicycle laden with parcels.
‘Ah!’ Didier cried. ‘The relief supplies!’
The man unloaded a sponge mattress, a suitcase, a folding card table, four folding canvas stools and two sacks of booze from the bicycle. I looked at the booze.
‘It is for Diva,’ Didier said, catching my eye as he was counting the bottles. ‘The girl will need to get very drunk tonight, if on no other night in her life.’
‘Alcohol isn’t the answer to everything, Didier.’
Diva came out of the shadows suddenly.
‘I need to get very drunk,’ she said.
Didier stared his
‘Will you . . . ’ Diva said, ‘my strange new friends, because none of you are my actual friends, and my actual friends aren’t here, and I may never see them again, like my father, will you help me to get very drunk, and clean me up when I get sick, and put me to bed safely, when I don’t know what’s going on any more?’
There was a pause.
‘Of course!’ Didier said. ‘Come here, sweet injured child. Come here to Didier, and we shall cry into everybody’s beer together, and spit into the eyes of Fate.’
She did cry, of course. She ranted, waved her arms, shouted, paced the little hut, tripped on the patchwork blankets, and called the girls in to dance with her.
When the ululating voices and handclap music reached a peak, she began to fall. Naveen caught her quickly and carried her to the bed of blankets, her arms falling at her sides like broken wings. She slowly curled her knees into her heart, and slept.
