Baz remembers little dark snatches of that first time she was on her own. There was noise all the time and it was night-time, lights flashing by, cars maybe, coloured lights too. Someone tugging her hand all the time, and her legs so tired she could hardly keep up. She can’t picture the person holding her hand. She thinks it was a woman, but doesn’t know if maybe it was her mother. She remembers walking and walking till the noise got less but the dark got thicker so she couldn’t even see her feet, and she was crying, wanting to be picked up, but the person holding her hand wouldn’t pick her up, just kept tugging her along, wanting her to keep going.
Baz remembers pulling her hand away because she didn’t want to go any further. Maybe the woman stopped and said something to her, maybe not. She remembers the dark shape walking away from her, hunched up a little, like perhaps she was carrying something. Baz wonders sometimes if it was a little baby this person was carrying in her other arm and that was why she wouldn’t pick Baz up; or maybe she was sick, or maybe she just didn’t want a child hanging on her hand, bawling all the time; maybe she felt it was a better thing to let Baz go and not see what happened to her. Leave her in the darkness.
Baz tries not to think about this woman, but she wonders about her all the same and imagines that if she met her she would ask her why she let go of her hand. Baz believes that if a person is lucky enough to have family, real family, you don’t let go of the hand holding on to yours. Any fool knows that family is the most precious thing.
It was the next morning that Demi found her on a piece of wasteland near the market, all curled up and fast asleep. A dog right next to her growled, he said, when he came up. She always liked that bit of the story. Seemed like that dog reckoned she was its pup, he said, but he shooed it away all the same. Baz thinks about that dog a lot – how maybe she’ll find it one day, though she knows it’d be an old dog now. But she dreams how she would look after it, give it bread softened in milk because it might not have teeth any more.
She remembers waking and seeing Demi looking down at her, the sun shining right behind him, and asking him his name.
‘Demi,’ he said. ‘You got a name of your own?’
She remembers that hollow feeling in the pit of her stomach, hunger, and panic because she didn’t know anything, and she might have cried again except this shadowy face above her laughed, and his laughter made her think of sunlight and that had made her feel better. ‘Why you called Demi?’ she had asked him.
‘Don’t you know nothing?’ he said. ‘Means half, cos I’m half grown. Going to be like a giant when I’m big.’ She remembers him saying that, and her believing him because he was so much bigger than her then; now she has caught up with him some – even with his strutting and big talk she doesn’t reckon that Demi will ever make giant.
He took her back to where he and Fay lived, a shack with a roof and dirt floor. It was a long walk but he talked all the way, and there was Fay right at the door and she picked Baz up in her arms and hugged her like she’d been missing her all her life and wiped her face and gave her her name right there and then and she had food, and they sat on the floor and ate together, and that is how they became a family, kind of. Fay looked a lot younger and prettier, seemed softer too. Men came and took her out places, and she taught the two children how to take things out of pockets without anyone noticing.
Soon after that Demi and Baz began working together, not thieving on smart streets, but small stuff: bit of shoeshine, going to the market and lifting a little fruit from the stalls maybe, looking lost so that someone gave them a piece of money. Then they began picking pockets. Had to learn to run then.
Now their legs are a little longer and they run a lot faster. They’re a good team, know what each other are going to do before it happens, almost. She knows where he’s heading now, up to the street where the shops are so cool you can walk past the door and the door swings open like magic and it makes you shiver because the air that comes out is cold as witch breath. That’s the truth. And they have more jewels in those shops than you could ever imagine, but unless you look like you’ve got money swelling out of your pockets, you can’t hardly look in the window without a guard breathing down your shoulder.
Demi is standing on the corner. She crosses over to his side of the road but stops about twenty paces away from him, right at the mouth of a little slip of an alley. She knows he’s hoping he can strike lucky, maybe get a little parcel with a silver ring all wrapped up in it.
The two of them wait.
Sometimes taxis pull up and rich men and women get in, parcels hanging off them like strange fruit.
They wait.
Five minutes. She’s edgy. It’s too long. She’s seen a police car drive by real slow. She steps back in the shadow, but she’s sure he is going to get noticed – even looking good, he’s out of place up here. Children don’t come to this part of town, not on their own.
Then it happens.
