The Illegal by Lawrence Hill Page B

in but not good enough for a full scholarship. You had to place in the top ten to get that. They offered him ten thousand dollars, far short of the fifty thousand he needed to attend. He was able to talk them up. Yes, he truly lived in AfricTown, he told them. Yes, he was truly a citizen of Freedom State, and here were his citizenship papers. Born and raised in the country. As was his mother.Yes, he was in fact the child who had written the entrance exams. They put him through more tests to be sure and then agreed to cover twenty-five thousand of his fees, plus his uniform, plus his books, plus hot meals at school. But he would have to find his own transportation to school, because it was considered unsafe to send a school bus to fetch him in AfricTown. And he would have to find sponsors to cover the remainder of his annual tuition fee.
    So John had approached Lula DiStefano, who in addition to being his landlady, happened to own the infamous Bombay Booty brothel and the nightclub known as the Pit.
    “Say what?” she said. “You? Puny little child of AfricTown? You telling me that little Mr. Falconer has a brain on fire?”
    John said that he could attend the school if he could find the twenty-five thousand a year to pay the rest of his tuition.
    “How will you get to school and back?” she asked.
    “I’ll walk.”
    “How far is it?”
    “Five kilometres, one way.”
    “You’ll wear out a pair of shoes every month.”
    “I might need some help with that too.”
    So Lula had provided twenty-five thousand the first year. He finished fourth in his class in Grade 7, and after that he was on full scholarship, but she still had to pay for books, uniforms, shoes and special outings, and she ended up giving him spending money for clothes and food, because his mother didn’t make much as a housecleaner, even when she wasn’t in the psych ward.
    All of this was very good. Except for the ways that it was very bad. “I own you for life, child” was how Lula put it. She acted like she meant it too.
    J OHN AWOKE WITH A START , AND WITH HIS BACK SOAKED IN sweat. He’d been having nightmares again. In his dreams, his mother had been pacing at night and getting into all sorts of trouble whilehe slept. But as he climbed out of bed, he reassured himself that all was fine: she was still in the hospital, and he was still alone at home.
    It was a tiny living space, even when his mother was not there. Their one room, half a shipping container, rented for a hundred dollars a month, though Lula eased up on the payment obligations whenever John’s mother was too ill to work. In the room: a four-drawer dresser for all their clothes, two single Murphy beds that folded up against the wall when not occupied, one fold-up kitchen table that doubled as a homework desk, two chairs, a portable stove attached to a butane tank, a large cooler that with ice became a fridge, a transistor radio, several reading lamps with spare light bulbs and spare batteries, and four pots whose purposes were never interchangeable—a soup pot, a dishes pot, a wash pot and a chamber pot.
    John heated up water on his butane stove, washed his hands and face, and then stepped out of the container in his underwear to sniff the morning air—the March day was about twenty degrees Celsius and clear and sunny—and to throw the water into the open ditch that passed behind the water tap, carrying sewage, waste and grey water to what everyone called the Cesspool at the far southern end of AfricTown. The end of the community where nobody wanted to live and only the most desperate did.
    After pitching the water, John put on his shorts, T-shirt and runners. His school uniform, tie and dress shoes were in his locker at school. No sense wearing out the clothes on the long walk to the Bombay Booty and then to school, and no sense putting on any fancy clothes that might get him mugged in AfricTown. John’s mother liked to cook him porridge, when she was home. Raisins, cinnamon,