New Short Stories - 2

Paradise

Nicholas Hogg

Mercy Lang crawls on her hands and knees between the naked men and women. She apologises to the bodies for asking them to move, but twice a day she has to wash and scrub each and every wooden slat of the sauna. She wears pads like a skateboarder to protect her knees from the flagstone floor. Guests at the Black Forest Lodge, awkward with their nudity in the company of someone clothed, ask her if Kenya gets this hot. They know Mercy is from Kenya because it says so on her name badge. She smiles for tips when she answers and paints them a pretty picture of Africa, sunshine after rain, steam rising off a melting highway, banana leaves limp with humidity.

   But this is a memory. It is now 2012, seven years since she has been home to Mombassa, eight years since she has seen her children, and ten years since she buried her first husband in the hills of the Great Rift Valley.

   Fancifully, she likes to compare this kind of sweat and heat to the exertion of giving birth in a hut of clay and straw, the jubilation of life, Kembe and Lana, the son and daughter she has not seen since the day she caught a plane to Germany and married a man she did not love.

***

My mother was not as beautiful as the other prostitutes, but she levelled a pool cue as though aiming the barrel of a gun. She was as patient and poised as an assassin, leaning across the bright green baize of the table and sighting her shots, snapping the air with a crack when she fired. 

   And some men in the Paradise liked this more than a young girl in short skirt or flimsy dress. Especially the white men sweating through their suits, the fat men with shiny bald heads, the scorched men with pink noses, all watching her play, as were my brother and I, as though she were the last woman on earth.  

   Mother would wait for Kembe to fall asleep then kiss him on the forehead. She would tell me to be a good girl and take care of my brother. Sometimes she promised to buy me a new dress in the morning before locking the door of the apartment and leaving her scent in the room like a guardian spirit. I would try to climb from the second floor window alone, without waking my baby brother, not wanting him to know certain things about his mother he could not yet understand.

   But if you share a bed that dips and rolls two into a single dream, then an eyelid lifting becomes a quadruple action. And anyway, his cries would wake the whole neighbourhood whenever he woke up alone.

   By stepping off the ledge and onto the wall that stopped the stray dogs peeing in our yard, we could balance our way to the bar without ever touching the ground. We stepped between the shards of glass cemented into the brickwork, across the shacks of corrugated tin and over the Mombassa bus depot roof before dropping down onto the columns of stacked barrels at the rear. Unless one of the staff popped out with a crate of empties, or we came across a couple banging against the rickety fence like cats in heat, we had made it to the Paradise without being rounded up by the police as street children.

   We skipped across the barrel tops and scampered up and along the higher branches of a mango tree to where we could peek between the leaves into the bar. The sign said Paradise, but nothing I ever saw in that room made me think of this word.

Nicholas Hogg was born in Leicester in 1974.

After graduating from the University of East London with a psychology degree, he travelled widely, living in Japan, Fiji and America. He is now settled in London teaching literary skills to refugees.

Winner of the £5,000 New Writing Ventures prize for fiction in 2005.  His novel "Show Me the Sky" will be published by Canongate in 2008.