“I won’t hurt you,” said the man. His accent was so ridiculous that Oryx wanted to giggle, but she knew that would be wrong. She smiled her shy smile, and the man took hold of one of her hands and placed it on himself. He did this gently enough, but at the same time he seemed angry. Angry, and in a hurry.

That was when Uncle En plunged suddenly into the room—how? He must have had a key, he must have been given a key by someone at the hotel. He picked Oryx up and hugged her and called her his little treasure, and yelled at the man, who seemed very frightened and tried to scramble into his clothes. He got caught in his trousers and hopped around on one foot while trying to explain something with his bad accent, and Oryx felt bad for him. Then the man gave money to Uncle En, a lot of money, all the money in his wallet, and Uncle En went out of the room carrying Oryx like a precious vase and still muttering and scowling. But out on the street he laughed, and made jokes about the man hopping around in his snarled-up trousers, and told Oryx she was a good girl and wouldn’t she like to play this game again?

So that became her game. She felt a little sorry for the men: although Uncle En said they deserved what happened to them and they were lucky he never called the police, she somewhat regretted her part. But at the same time she enjoyed it. It made her feel strong to know that the men thought she was helpless but she was not. It was they who were helpless, they who would soon have to stammer apologies in their silly accents and hop around on one foot in their luxurious hotel rooms, trapped in their own pant legs with their bums sticking out, smooth bums and hairy bums, bums of different sizes and colours, while Uncle En berated them. From time to time they would cry. As for the money, they emptied their pockets, they threw all the money they had at Uncle En, they thanked him for taking it. They didn’t want to spend any time in jail, not in that city, where the jails were not hotels and it took a very long time for charges to be laid and for trials to be held. They wanted to get into taxis, as soon as they could, and climb onto big airplanes, and fly away through the sky.

“Little SuSu,” Uncle En would say, as he set Oryx down on the street outside the hotel. “You are a smart girl! I wish I could marry you. Would you like that?”

This was as close to love as Oryx could get right then, so she felt happy. But what was the right answer, yes or no? She knew it was not a serious question but a joke: she was only five, or six, or seven, so she couldn’t get married. Anyway the other children said that Uncle En had a grown-up wife who lived in a house elsewhere, and he had other children as well. His real children. They went to school.

“Can I listen to your watch?” said Oryx with her shy smile. Instead of, was what she meant. Instead of marrying you, instead of answering your question, instead of being your real child. And he laughed some more, and he did let her listen to his watch, but she didn’t hear any little voice inside.

Pixieland Jazz

One day a different man came, one they’d never seen before—a tall thin man, taller than Uncle En, with ill-fitting clothes and a pock-marked face—and said that all of them would have to come with him. Uncle En had sold his flower business, this man said; the flowers, and the flower-sellers, and everything else. He’d gone away, he’d moved to a different city. So this tall man was the boss now.

A year or so later, Oryx was told—by a girl who’d been with her the first weeks in the room with the mattresses, and had turned up again in her new life, her life of movie-making—that this wasn’t the real story. The real story was that Uncle En had been found floating in one of the city’s canals with his throat cut.

This girl had seen him. No, that was wrong—she hadn’t seen him, but she knew somebody who had. There was no doubt about who it was. His stomach was puffed up like a pillow, his face was bloated, but it was Uncle En all right. He had no clothes on—someone must have taken them. Maybe someone else, not the one who’d cut his throat, or maybe the same one, because what use did a corpse have for good clothes like his? No watch on him either. “No money,” the girl had said, and she’d laughed. “No pockets, so no money!”

“There were canals in this city?” Jimmy asked. He thought maybe that would give him a clue as to which city it had been. In those days he’d wanted to know whatever it was possible to know, about Oryx, about anywhere she’d been. He’d wanted to track down and personally injure anyone who had ever done harm to her or made her unhappy. He’d tortured himself with painful knowledge: every white-hot factoid he could collect he’d shove up under his fingernails. The more it hurt, the more—he was convinced—he loved her.

“Oh yes, there were canals,” Oryx said. “The farmers used them, and the flower-growers, to get to the markets. They tied up their boats and sold what they had right there, right at the quays. That was a pretty sight, from a distance. So many flowers.” She looked at him: she could often tell what he was thinking. “But a lot of cities have canals,” she said. “And rivers. The rivers are so useful, for the garbage and the dead people and the babies that get thrown away, and the shit.” Although she didn’t like it when he swore, she sometimes liked to say what she called bad words herself, because it shocked him. She had a large supply of bad words once she got going. “Don’t worry so much, Jimmy,” she added more gently. “It was a long time ago.” More often than not she acted as if she wanted to protect him, from the image of herself—herself in the past. She liked to keep only the bright side of herself turned towards him. She liked to shine.

So Uncle En had ended up in the canal. He’d been unlucky. He hadn’t paid off the right people, or he hadn’t paid them off enough. Or maybe they’d tried to buy his business and the price was too low and he wouldn’t do it. Or his own men had sold him out. There were many things that could have happened to him. Or maybe it was nothing planned—just an accident, a random killing, just a thief. Uncle En had been careless, he’d gone out walking by himself. Though he wasn’t a careless man.

“I cried when I heard about it,” said Oryx. “Poor Uncle En.”

“Why are you defending him?” Jimmy asked. “He was vermin, he was a cockroach!”

“He liked me.”

“He liked the money!”

“Of course, Jimmy,” said Oryx. “Everyone likes that. But he could have done much worse things to me, and he didn’t do them. I cried when I heard he was dead. I cried and cried.”

“What worse things? What much worse?”

“Jimmy, you worry too much.”

The children were herded out of the room with the grey mattresses, and Oryx never saw it again. She never saw most of the other children again. They were divided up, and one went this way and one that. Oryx was sold to a man who made movies. She was the only one of them that went with the movie man. He told her she was a pretty little girl and asked how old she was, but she didn’t know the answer to that. He asked her wouldn’t she like to be in a movie. She’d never seen a movie so she didn’t know whether she would like it or not; but it sounded like an offer of a treat, so she said yes. By this time she was good at knowing when yes was the expected answer.

The man drove her in a car with some other girls, three or four, girls she didn’t know. They stayed overnight at a house, a big house. It was a house for rich people; it had a high wall around it with broken glass and barbed wire on the top, and they went in through a gate. Inside, it had a rich smell.

“What do you mean, a rich smell?” Jimmy asked, but Oryx couldn’t say. Rich was just a thing you learned to tell. The house smelled like the better hotels she’d been in: many different foods cooking, wooden furniture, polishes and soap, all those smells mixed in. There must have been flowers, flowering trees or bushes nearby, because that was some of the smell. There were carpets on the floor but the children didn’t walk on them; the carpets were in a big room, and they went past the open door and looked in and saw them. They were blue and pink and red, such beauty.