She did both jobs simultaneously, one from nine in the morning until two o’clock in the afternoon, the other from two in the afternoon until eight at night. One desktop computer open on a fold-out table in her bedroom, containing the work from two jobs. After a while, she bought a second screen to avoid confusing them. Nobody ever found out. She was productive enough in short hours, and didn’t mind the lack of free time.
She left that flat after less than a year, and those two jobs paid for rent on a place of her own for the next five years, until she got tired and longed for just one job: the job behind the bar, where she met Damien.
She feels the same now, that same thing that looks like, appears like, ardent resourcefulness but is actually masking desperation.
Back in Nueva Rosita, she finds a strip mall. A gym, a bank, a restaurant and a supermarket line a wide road opposite a park. The shop sign readsSORIANA LOS PINOS, and Simone heads inside, thinking of those long-gone two-job days. They prepared her well for a busy career, then the days in kitchens somehow, in turn, prepared her well for this. Her body is hardy. She isn’t sure her mind is, but everybody always said it was. The social worker, when she did her final visit to Simone’s new house in Camden, praised her for leaving the flat, for getting out of the benefits system. ‘And all by yourself, too,’ she had said. What she didn’t realize was that she was really congratulating Simone on thinking nobody in the world gave a shit about her. Fending for yourself at eighteen ought not to be praised, Simone thought. Lucy’s that age now, and the thought of her balancing up two incomes causes Simone physical pain.
The supermarket is a red-and-white building, branded on the outside withCOCA-COLAon painted bricks, a small and shabby awning up ahead. There’s accommodation above it with wrought-iron balconies and an old metal basketball hoop hanging half off the wall.
Inside, she tries not to think about how many CCTV cameras she might have passed by after getting the bag. She tells herself that if people have begun to scrutinize footage, it’s all over anyway. She isn’t trying to convince anybody she is innocent; she is trying to have nobody suspect her in the first place.
She wanders the aisles slowly, unable – even in this nightmare – to avoid looking at the interesting foods. She has hours to kill, anyway, she thinks, and nowhere to go. She willjust look. Tortilla maseca – just-add-water dough made from ground corn, in little plastic packets. She buys two. Prickly pear cactus in slices. Dried chillies, their skin as thin as Christmas party hats. A comal, a round griddle pan. Basics, too: bread and brioche and fruit and water.
She runs a hand over the fruit and vegetables, bright, jewel-toned colours. Goes to gaze at the fish counter, just for interest. Red snapper, she thinks that is, and octopus. And lobsters, of course; they’re alive in a tank at the back. She watches them walking lazily along the bottom, antennae rising and falling.
Simone can’t cook lobsters any more. It’s the only thing she avoids entirely other than alcohol. During her unofficial training with Timeo, he made lobster linguine often. Most chefs cook lobsters alive to minimize bacteria, their bodies held straight and tied to a spoon to make carving easier. There’s a unique brutality to it, but that isn’t what did it for Simone. She had always heard that lobsters squealed when you put them in the pot, but the reason Simone won’t cook them is because the truth is worse than that: they tap the lid, insistently, helplessly, a little claw on glass. Simone saw it happen only once, then took them off the menu. ‘Why?’ Timeo had said, and she had replied that nobody wanted to eat lobster, they just wanted to order it and say they’d had it. A lie, but something that sounded true, and which Timeo had laughed at.
She leaves the fish counter and continues to browse. Even though she’s doing it to disguise her illegal activities, she is heartened to find food still has the same effect it always does on her: it soothes her. Maybe this will work. Maybe she will be home, in England, with Lucy and Damien, cooking these things one day soon.
At the till, she accepts a plastic carrier bag and bundles theitems into it. It isn’t perfect, but it will help to make the sports bag less conspicuous. She walks and walks for the rest of the afternoon. She eats the cactus – surprisingly good, lemony, slimy like okra – and some real tortilla chips. And she walks and walks and walks.
Eventually, she finds herself at a graveyard called Panteón de Cloete, on an unnamed road. A cemetery feels fitting, and Simone wanders with her carrier bag and her awful, criminal sports bag underneath the hot sun. She hasn’t slept. She hasn’t eaten much. She’s exhausted in both senses: bone tired but also emptied, physically exhausted of some anxiety or perhaps the initial fire she had at the very beginning. Her body is heavy, her eyes are gritty, and she ascends a brief dusty hill, not really knowing or caring why.
It is beautiful. Set against a Mexican canyon, an expanse of graves, all white or pale stone. Crypts with statues and crosses abut and overlap each other like crooked teeth. Figurines stand, frozen in time, some damaged and beaten by weather. There are trinkets and dried flowers and poems written in Spanish. Simone wanders around, then finds shade in a little gazebo. It’s bright white, benches inside covered with old and rotting outdoor cushions. She sits on the bench in the open air and closes her eyes, unsafe but not caring. She keeps the bag on her back; she can’t risk it being taken.
She eats four chocolate brioche buns, three oranges, and drinks two litres of water. She stretches her legs out. She rests her head eventually on the bag, and, within seconds, she can feel sleep coming for her. As she is pulled under, she thinks that she can’t sleep, no, bad things will happen, but she has to. She tells herself, in the hot shade, the bench hard underneath her, that it is safe to sleep here – the dead are, after all.
A lizard wakes Simone, skittering across her legs and disappearing behind the wall. She startles, then checks the time: three hours have passed, the sun having moved around, shining through the gazebo and on to her stiff body. Half her face is tight with sunburn. She stretches and tries to calm the rising adrenaline. Both bags are still here, sports bag behind her head, and maybe it was stupid to sleep, but she couldn’t help it.
She stands and stretches, then begins walking once more, heading off to her fate: getting a million dollars’ worth of Colombian cocaine into America. As she walks, the bag’s zip keeps coming loose, just an inch or two, and she keeps doing it back up.
When she arrives back at the pickup point, the coach is standing like a sentient being in the dusty car park it emptied them into this morning at sunrise, now nearly sunset. The only difference is Simone is worth a lot more than she was, but she feels like she is worth absolutely nothing; she’s a sell-out, a despicable criminal, a drug-dealing loser.
Plenty of the tourists are holding bags, and she joins the queue to add hers to the luggage. It’s still hot out, the air dry as kindling.
It’s quarter to seven, her limbs stiff from sleeping, her face pink with sunburn. There are three people in front of her, and she watches them put their bags into the empty luggage area above the exhaust, the driver standing nearby but not watching closely. She wonders how common what she is doing is. To justify that she’s only added a minuscule amount to the total cocaine circulating in a vast underground industry. To feed addicts who will buy it and harm themselves, and those who love them.
Her turn, and she heaves the bag into the back with a conspicuous thump. As she does so, she thinks about that open zip.
She puts the carrier bag slightly away from the sports bag. She needs anonymity. She is doomed if they begin to investigate the bag: her DNA is surely on it and there has got to be CCTV somewhere of her carrying it. All her subterfuge is ill-thought-through, easily discoverable. She is a child hiding behind a curtain, expecting not to be discovered. Nevertheless, all she can do is hope, so she moves her food away from it, separating her goods from the drugs.
She intended to turn around and see if anybody noticed which bag was hers, but she doesn’t. It gives more away to glance over her shoulder, to lock eyes with the coach operator or anybody else.
The engine is already running, and the exhaust heats and blackens her legs as she moves away from it. She stares at that bag, full of cocaine, from several feet away. She thinks about the people in the graveyard and wonders how many of them died directly or indirectly because of drugs imported from South America. She glances around at her companions and wonders if any of them are involved with drugs, too. She doubts it; nobody would be as foolish as her.
She boards the coach and she wonders, when she next touches those drugs, what will have happened, who she will be.
Four hours in, five. The border looms ever closer and, with it, Simone’s fate.
What next? Where do the drugs go? How does she get her daughter? How do they hand her over? What if they have killed her and it’s all been for nothing? Has she fallen into a trap? Become a drugs courier, a foot soldier for a gang that she will forever owe? What if they want more? What if they demand that she do it again? What if she is arrested at the border and Lucy is murdered?
The questions her brain requires her to answer go on and on.
Simone can only hope that this is a real, true ransom, that the value is drugs. The quid pro quo is Lucy’s freedom.
By midnight, they’re closing in on Del Rio once again from the other side. Simone checks the flip phone but there is nothing. No confirmation she’s collected the bag, and the texts still come from Unknown, so she can’t call them back.
Progress as they approach the crossing is slower and perhaps seems more formal. The officers are in different uniforms, green withUS BORDER PATROLwritten in yellow, with armed police pacing among them.
