The White Flamingo Read Online Free PDF Page B

The night market had become home, the place where they drew their pensions and lived out their days wandering the alleyways and avenues of desire. They had seen it all. Old age, depression, illness, sickness, bankruptcy; mistakes too hideous for remonstration or regret. They had not only been around the block, they had built the entire estate and then they had knocked it down. They laughed at the legless beggars on skateboards and the broken-toothed prostitutes patrolling the streets. They had lost houses both here and in the west. Some had lost limbs too. They knew that the mafia looked after the beggars, that the women were not really poor, that the deaf women were not deaf and the blind were not blind. They knew that the crazy men who painted their bodies blue and paraded themselves in the streets for a coin or two were only half-crazy, half of the time, and the blue washed off. They knew that fish swam in the river and fruit fell from the trees. The schools were free and were worth it, the hospitals were somewhere you could go and die free. They knew everything about Fun City, yet, they knew nothing. They knew too much. They had lost children too. No one bought their drinks. No one bought them a new house in their home village. Where was their new 4x4?  Respect was a remote abstract animal in a desert of thieves and whores. Brokers of tailor-made suits, shady tour agents, language schools, marriage brokers, estate agents, swam in the seas of impossible hope. In Fun City, men were reborn condemned. A phoenix from the ashtray. A handsome man. A knight in a crusty white stained singlet vest. With the right girl, they could become a king and build a castle in the country. They knew that was a joke.  No, mister, he was not paying to fuck, he was paying to be fucked. And if you are going to be fucked, you may as well be fucked properly. Fun City was excellent at this. Yet the receipt of pleasure and the receipt of pain were two sides of the same coin. The answer was to keep distance and keep cool. Be brief, cold, and precise. The answer to a bargirl’s prayer was not the wet-eared Scandinavian with buckets of cash to declare. It was the grizzled old expat sitting in a bar on the seventh road. Grey-skinned, dark-eyed, sat alone in a bar plotting his own demise.    
    He wasn’t looking for the bar.
    He didn’t find the bar.
    The bar found him.
    A lump of concrete with half a dozen pairs of brown thighs and a pool table.
    A sign above the door.
    The Blue Rose.
    The Detective walked inside.
    She was aged about twenty with features that grabbed at what was left of his heart and tugged. Her hair was cut the way women used to cut their hair in the nineteen sixties: straight fringe with a bob. Full lips. Those lips pouted like a passionate flower. The Detective wanted his mouth on that mouth. Her skin was the color of Belgium coffee. Snake hips, large bust. From the way she carried herself across the bar, the Detective guessed that she hadn’t finished seventh grade education and her father had left home when she was still a kid. She moved with the grace of an animal, barefoot in the jungle, wary of snakes and centipedes, these were her movements, rather than those of a sophisticated woman in the city.
    Once she was a baby. Once she was a little girl. One day she would be dead. Then she would be put in a box and set on fire. She would be dust. Dusted. However, right at that moment, she was a shining star under the Fun City neon city lights. There were no stars in the polluted city sky, the stars were all in the streets and the bars, young women and men selling dreams and weaving spells. She was a bargirl in Fun City, one of thousands. Yet, some shone brighter than others did. She didn’t know it. The Detective couldn’t explain abstract thought to a woman with a grade seven education. Instead, he asked, “How old are you?”
    She showed The Detective her I.D. Twenty-one years old. Female. She was from the poor northeast