“What gate?”
“It’s a long story, Pedro.”
“We’ve got all night.”
Matt nodded. For the moment, they seemed to be out of any danger. In Poison Town everything would be quiet. On the island, they were alone with no sign of the swan that had twice come swooping out of the darkness. And what was the significance of that, Matt wondered? There was still so much he didn’t understand.
He told Pedro as much as he knew, starting with the death of his parents, his growing awareness that he was never going to have a normal life, his life with Gwenda Davis in Ipswich, his involvement with Raven’s Gate and everything that had happened since then.
“I came to Peru to find the second gate,” Matt concluded. “That was two days ago, although it feels a lot longer. Everything went wrong the minute we arrived. If I can find the Nexus, maybe they can help. Or they may be looking for me. I don’t know.”
Matt took a deep breath. The reed boat rocked gently on the water. He wondered if they should get into it – and if they did, where it would take them.
“I knew you’d come,” Pedro said. “I’ve always been expecting you. But there’s something I want you to know. When you were asleep… when I took your watch… I thought you were just some rich tourist kid who’d got lost. I didn’t know it was you. I’m sorry.”
“When did you realize?”
“When you woke up. I recognized you then. And the truth is, I wasn’t too happy to see you. I wish you hadn’t come.”
“Why?”
“Because you’re going to bring trouble with you. Everything’s going to change now.” Pedro paused. “You may not think I have much of a life but it’s the only life I’ve got and I was sort of happy with it. I’m sure that’s not what you want to hear. But this isn’t what I want.”
“No. I understand.”
Matt knew exactly what Pedro meant. He felt the same.
“I don’t know anything about you,” he said. “Only your name. Do you have another name? What do you do in Lima when you aren’t juggling in front of cars or stealing from tourists? And who is Sebastian? Why do you live with him?”
“I don’t like talking about myself,” Pedro said. He paused. “I will, because I suppose you ought to know. But I’m telling you now, there’s not a lot to say… and anyway, you probably won’t remember any of it when you wake up.”
That possibility hadn’t occurred to Matt. He sat down on the sand, wondering what time of day it was in this strange dreamland. Was it even day? The sky was dark but he could see quite clearly. The sand was warm although there wasn’t any sun. It wasn’t day or night but something in between.
Pedro sat down opposite him with his legs crossed.
“First of all, Pedro isn’t my real name,” he began. “Everyone just calls me that. It’s what Sebastian called me when I first came to Poison Town. He used to say he named me after his favourite dog. I know I had a family before I met him although I don’t remember very much about them. I had a sister. She was a few years younger than me.
“I used to live in a village in the province of Canta, which you’ve probably never heard of. It’s about sixty miles from Lima. A three-day walk. It was a very boring place. The men went out to work in the fields – they grew potatoes and corn – and the women stayed at home and looked after the kids. There was no school in the village but I went to one that was two miles away. I didn’t learn very much though. I mean, I learned some of the letters of the alphabet but I’ve never been able to read.”
He reached out and drew a capital P in the sand with his finger.
“That’s P for Pedro. It’s also P for parrot – papagayo. I remember the letter because it always looked like a parrot to me.
“My mother used to say that I was born under an evil star but I don’t know what she meant. There were four of us in our family and we had a nice house even if it was mainly made of wood and cardboard. And we had a big bed. All four of us used to sleep in it. I can’t tell you much about my mother. I don’t want to think about her. Sometimes I remember the feel of her next to me in the bed and that makes me sad. That was always the best part of the day for me… falling asleep.
“The worst thing about Canta was the weather. The wind used to come down from the mountains and it went right through you. I never had enough clothes to wear. Sometimes I only had a T-shirt and my underpants and I’d think I was going to turn into a block of ice.
“It used to rain at the start of the year. You never saw rain like it, Matteo. Sometimes it would rain so hard that all I could see was water and I used to wonder how I could live if I wasn’t a fish! It would be raining when I woke up and it would never stop. You couldn’t walk from one end of the village to the other because of the great sheets of rain and if you slipped over in a puddle you might drown.
“And then there was a day – I must have been about six years old – when it rained so much that the river burst its banks. The River Chillon… that was what it was called. There was too much water and it got out of control and this great flood came pouring down. It was like a monster… brown and freezing. It swallowed up our house and just threw it away. I remember someone shouted a warning but I didn’t know what they meant and then the whole world exploded. Not with fire but with water and mud. It all happened so quickly. All the houses were smashed up together. People and animals… they were just killed. I should have died. But someone grabbed me and put me high up in a tree and I was lucky. The tree must have had strong roots because it wasn’t ripped out like the others. I stayed in the branches of that tree all day and all night and when the morning came my village wasn’t there any more. It was just a sort of swamp with dead people floating on the surface. I guess my parents and my sister were among those who were killed. I never saw them again and nobody told me. So they must have all drowned.”
Pedro stopped. Matt was amazed that he could tell all this in such a matter-of-fact way. He tried to imagine the horror of what it must have been like. A whole community had been destroyed. He realized that this sort of thing must happen often in some parts of the world, but that it wouldn’t have been given more than half an inch in a British newspaper.
“After that, things became very difficult,” Pedro went on. “I think I wanted to die. Inside me, I thought it was wrong that my parents were dead and I was still alive. But the strange thing is, I knew I was going to be all right. I had nowhere to live. There was no food. People were falling sick all around me. But I knew that whatever happened, I would make it. It was like my life was beginning all over again.
“Anyway, some of the survivors came together – there were quite a lot of them – and they decided to go to Lima. They’d heard there was work there. They thought they’d be able to build themselves a new life. I went with them. I was the youngest and they didn’t want to take me. But in the end I followed and there was nothing they could do.
“And so we came to the city but it wasn’t like we thought. Nobody wanted to see us. Nobody wanted to help us. We were the desplazados. That’s the word we use for people with no place. There were already enough poor people starving and dying in Lima. They didn’t want any more.
“There was a woman looking after me and she had a brother in one of the shanty towns and for a while I lived with them. They made me work, searching for food in dustbins. I hated it. I’d leave at five o’clock in the morning, before the dustcarts came, and I’d take anything I could find. Vegetables that weren’t too rotten. Bits of fat and gristle cut off meat. All the scrapings from rich people’s meals. That was what we lived on and if I didn’t find enough or if it was too rotten, they’d give me nothing to eat and they’d beat me. In the end, I ran away. If I stayed, I was afraid they would kill me.
“And that’s my story. Did you enjoy it? I’ll tell you the rest of it. You wanted to know about Sebastian. Nobody knows who he is exactly, Matteo, and we don’t ask too many questions. I’ve heard people say he was a university professor until his wife left him and he took to drink. But there are others who say he was a waiter in an expensive hotel and that’s where he learned to speak different languages. Anyway, I went to Poison Town to get away from the woman and her brother and I found Sebastian and he took me in.
“He’s not a bad man. He’s only ever hurt me when he’s very drunk and he always apologizes the next day. All the kids in his house work for him. He was the one who taught me how to juggle in front of tourists’ cars. Sometimes I can get five American dollars although I have to give four of them to him. We wash car windows. We
