She waved off his anxiety with a plump hand. “Wait, just one second.”
He indulged her, shifting nervously until she returned with a small paper bag.
“She will hate it less if you bring her some of these,afteryou take your share, of course.”
Alex inspected the contents. A dozen cookies coated in sugar, and at the bottom of the bag, a small, tightly wrapped package he knew would contain three or four joints.
“Lucia, I can’t take these to work.”
The old woman pouted indignantly. “What grumpy bitch would begrudge you a few cookies?”
He grinned at her conspiratorially, tucking the bag deep into his knapsack. Bidding him good day, Lucia withdrew to the tiny ground floor apartment she occupied which doubled as her office, muttering something about him not running into or sucking off any police officers along the way. Alex couldn’t hear her clearly, but he was sure it was the latter. Hmph. That had only been once. In the stairwell. And shehadallowed them to finish on the condition they not leave a mess.
The walk from his apartment through Chueca to the Plaza Mayor would take a brisk twenty minutes if the Puerta del Sol wasn’t packed. That was no sure thing. Even with classes in summer recess, few of the young, energetic students who’d flocked from around the country to make their contribution to—or take their bite from—Madrid’s free hedonism wanted to return to the sleepy church bells, gossip-hunting glares, and dead-after-dark piety of their home towns. On the city’s biggest public square, that meant one thing… protests.
Red banners, Basque flags, and signs calling for independence, protesting the steps the new government had taken to try and retain Joanna’s home province, flooded the square, waving and turning over in the late morning sun like waves turned red by a volcanic sunset. Alex shook off the romantic metaphor and stuffed Lucia’s cookies into the side pocket of his bag. He’d need them for the inevitable grovelling.
Keeping to the edge of the square, he tried to circumvent the crowd. But as he pushed nearer the demonstration’s ringleaders, who’d taken up position with speakers and bullhorns on the square’s western edge, the crowd swelled to its edges, spillinginto the streets that fed it. He barely dodged another banner as its owner climbed the steps from the metro. With a quick apology, they too disappeared into the fray. Alex swallowed his nerves as the bodies of eager protesters, stripped down in the summer sun and painted with reds and greens, including one that resembled Jesus, bounced off him. He grimaced at the smear of green paint on his sleeve, grateful he'd kept his clean shirt in his knapsack as he pulled it tighter against his body.
Another shove, unintentional as it was, sent him stumbling forward. If he could just make it… no. He’d never seen a protest this size, not even on the Puerta del Sol. How many of the assembled crowd were invested in Basque independence and how many were invested in something to do on a Saturday, he couldn’t tell. But he could feel his breath quicken as the heat of so many bodies caged him, amplified by the hateful ball of hot gas slowly cooking him from above in his black t-shirt. He cried out as the momentum of the crowd caught him once more, until at last, a street sign indicating Calle de Preciados promised him freedom.
He didn’t wait for a second invitation, weaving his way between protestors until he at last broke free of the stragglers coming down from Gran Via. Darting left again, he took a second to catch his breath on Calle de Tetuan. This was fine. It wasn’t the first time he’d avoided a protest on the square. He checked his watch, tummy still rumbling. A few months ago, he would have had time to stop at San Ginés for some breakfast, but a steadily increasing number of English tourists had made that a dicey proposition. To hell with it. Victoria’s churros would do.
Another left led him toward Calle de Arenal, but the regular hum of the city had quieted, leaving in its place low voices and the clip-clopping of hoofs. He glanced behind him, eyeswidening to see a line of mounted police keeping a steady pace behind, black uniforms and helmets looming over their steeds like battlements.
He moved to quicken his step, then hesitated, acutely aware of eight pairs of eyes—not counting the horses—watching him. As he crossed Calle de Arenal, and the street narrowed approaching Calle Mayor, they neither hastened nor broke off their steady rhythm. Would it be smarter to let them pass? Or would that draw just enough attention to invite a quick search that would quickly find the weed buried under the cookies in his bag? They weren’t here for him. But under the Fascists, the police had been predictably brutal; something to be avoided at any cost. Things were less predictable now, even in Madrid. Not all of them wanted to trade blow jobs in a stairwell. But if he could just get across Calle Mayor…
He could no longer ignore the shouts of the crowd as it funnelled slowly from the square into the street, any more than he could ignore the sound of hooves behind him. By the time he saw Basque Jesus, leading the protest in all his red and green painted non-finery spy the line of police closing at his left, facing them with shields and batons at the ready, Alex knew it was too late to run.
As the mounted cops closed off any chance of escape, Alex retreated into the relative safety of a café’s shuttered doorway. Seconds ticked by until the scene reached its inevitable combustion. The protestors charged first, not with violence, but taunting the steel-faced officers with the same slogans Alex had heard in the del Sol. They stopped just as abruptly, and for a moment, he felt himself relax, some naïve corner of his brain hoping this would be the sum of strife on Calle Mayor that morning.
Without warning, the crowd charged. The police responded in kind. Horses blocked off his retreat. A flaming bottle sailed over Basque Jesus’s head before exploding at the feet of the cops. It was the perfect starting gun, as if Satan himself had lifted the gates of hell.
As more people swelled into the intersection, Alex resisted the tidal crowd, trying to put some distance between him and the horses, only to catch an elbow to the face. From the corner of his eye, he saw several protesters, including Basque Jesus, go down, felled by the unsanctimonious blow of a baton. His creative mind had just enough time to wonder what the deceased dictator’s cronies in the church would have thought before something clocked him hard across the cheek, toppling him into the street. Curling his body into a foetal ball, Alex tried to protect his head, as one stray kick and footstep landed after another, each no more malicious than the last, but stinging with the bruise of a fight that wasn’t his.
“Come on!”
A pair of firm hands gripped his underarms and hoisted him to his feet. The taste of blood filled his mouth, the shouts of the crowd filled his ears, and an acrid mingling of blood, horses, summer sweat and rage pricked his nostrils, any trace of the peaceful demonstration that had filled the square now caught alight on the leftover embers of some Fascist bootlickers eager to crack some leftie heads.
With an arm draped across his Samaritan’s shoulders, Alex at last recognised him.
“We have to stop meeting like…” He abandoned the attempt to be funny.
Jago shot him a sly smirk. “Just keep moving.”
They didn’t stop until they were well away from the crowd, narrowly dodging another dozen police who’d been waiting in the Plaza Mayor. Alex took a moment to catch his breath in one of the side streets, startling a cat from its investigation of breakfast’s leftovers.
“Let me see you.” Jago examined his face with cold passivity. “I think you’re okay. Can you walk? I can’t carry you.”
He backed away as Alex coughed. When no blood came up, he took it as a good sign. “I’m fine, thanks. Lucky you were there.”
“I don’t envy your luck today, my friend. That could have been much worse for you.” Jago shook his head as more cops paused at the end of the alley. They looked straight at the boys for a moment, then kept running toward the sound of the angry crowd as it grew louder.
“Yes, yes, I know. Like I said, thank you. Where… I need to…” He eased himself off the wall and staggered forward a couple of steps until Jago caught him again.
“Woah, where are you going?”
“Work.” Alex held up the miraculously unscathed satchel. “I’m okay, really. It’s just on the other side of the plaza. I just need—”
