The Devil's Garden by Edward Docx

said.
    I made myself hold her eyes.
    ‘I saw him,’ she said.
    ‘It was a dream, Sole. You woke in the middle of a dream.’
    ‘Why does he come back?’
    ‘I don’t know.’
    ‘He wants to speak to me.’
    She passed the water and lay down on her side, facing me. As a younger man, I would have recoiled. Now I was drawn further in – I wanted to show solidarity with her experience. I wanted to
tell her that I knew some of what the human heart is required to endure.
    Her body tensed: people were coming up the path. It was too late to extinguish the lamp.
    ‘I’m going to buy a gun,’ she whispered.
    Her husband had been a miner but he was poisoned by the mercury and then shot for his gold.
    ‘No,’ I said softly.
    ‘If you were me, you would have already got one.’
    There were two voices. And an eerie rhythmic squeaking sound that I both did and did not recognize. They stopped directly outside. We breathed the wet air. Our door was locked but I was afraid
that they were about to demand Sole out again. They were arguing. I could not make out what they were saying. Where had they been? I did not believe that they would bother with the bathing hut to
urinate. They had not done so thus far. The squeaking began again.
    Sole rose and soundlessly crossed to the window. She motioned me to douse the light.
    ‘Who was it?’ I asked. ‘Lugo?’
    ‘No. The youngest one with the metal mouth and his rat friend.’
    ‘What are they doing?’
    ‘I can’t see. They’re using our cart.’
    The cart, of course: the wheels squeaked.
    ‘What for? What are they moving?’
    ‘I can’t see. It looks empty.’
    ‘I’m going to go out.’
    She turned from the window. ‘Stay there.’
    ‘They won’t do anything to me, Sole.’ I threw back the sheet. ‘It would cause them too much trouble.’
    But I hesitated. The cart was moving away. I twisted again to light the lamp at its lowest burn. She stood looking towards me in the flickering light, fingering the hem of her T-shirt. My heart
was filled with feeling for her.
    ‘They’re going,’ I said. ‘Come back to bed.’
    ‘Everything is changed.’ She shook her head. ‘They are changing everything.’
    ‘What, Sole, what are they changing?’
    ‘Ministry of Agriculture to Ministry of Interior.’ She said these formal, masculine words with a terrible finality.
    ‘How do you know?’
    ‘Everybody knows.’
    ‘Do they?’
    ‘Yes. That’s why Rebaque went away. That’s why he won’t be back. Right now, I bet he’s in the capital getting a new job somewhere else. Maybe he already has one.
This place isn’t about research any more. It never was. It’s about money. Like everything.’
    The noise from the comedor was dying down. I spoke softly: ‘You don’t know that. It’s just rumours. Nobody official has said anything.’
    ‘There is no official.’ She raised a single shoulder in her habitual shrug and scoffed. ‘Maybe they will send one letter in a few months and maybe – if it makes it
as far as Laberinto – someone will open it before they wipe their ass. But even then they won’t be able to tell us the good news because they won’t be able to read.’ She
leant back against the wall and raised her eyes to the ceiling. Quiet again, she said: ‘Our jobs will go.’
    ‘If that happens . . . if that happens, I can increase the money I pay you. We need more help, we’re going too slowly.’
    ‘I do not want you to give me your money.’
    Inwardly, I cursed my clumsiness.
    From somewhere in the night came the sound of a small plane.
    ‘Cocaine,’ she said.
    ‘Sole, come.’ I reached out. ‘I will massage your head.’
    She moved from the wall but only as far as the end of the bed, where she sat down sideways with her legs curled beneath her.
    ‘Perhaps you are the reason for my dream,’ she said. ‘My husband wants to talk to me about you.’
    I wished only to crawl across to her.
    ‘Tell me about your dream,’ I said.
    ‘You tell