Luna: New Moon

Two dozen men, two dozen friends, and Rafa doesn’t want to speak to any of them. Jaden Wen Sun calls from the depths of a club chair across the salon; Rafa waves an answer and strides for his room. He is charred with anger. He slams the door, lifts a chair and slings it effortlessly across the room. Table, lamps smash and fall. He kicks the shards high and hard. He rips the old-fashioned screen from the wall, how the owners watch their team in the so-discreet PHO Club, smashes it across the edge of the dressing table, smashes and smashes and smashes until it breaks in two. He wedges the broken screen halves into the output hopper of the printer, levers them until he has warped the printer into uselessness.

A tap at the door.

‘Mr Corta.’

‘Nothing.’

The rage has burned to embers. He breaks everything. This room, the deal with Nik Vorontsov – all the same rage. He spat on Nik Vorontsov’s ship. He might have spat on his daughter. When he called João de Deus, Lucas’s pauses and long silences were more eloquent condemnations that any outburst of anger. He has failed the family. He always fails the family. Everything he touches falls to ruin.

Rafa has been careful in his room-smashing red rage. The bar is intact. He sits on the bed, eyes the bottles like lovers across a crowded room. The club keeps Rafa’s room stocked with his personalised gins and rums. It would be a fine night with them, drinking together. Drinking himself to maudlin regret; drunk-calling Lousika in the small hours.

Have some fucking dignity, man.

‘Hey,’ Jaden Sun calls again.

‘I’m going out,’ Rafa says.

The club staff will have the room rebuilt by his return.

Madrinha Flavia is as surprised to see Lucasinho at her door as he was to see her at the foot of his hospital bed.

Lucasinho opens the cardboard box he has carried so carefully from Kojo’s apartment. Green fondant-frosted letters spell the word Pax.

‘They’re Italian,’ he says. ‘I had to look up where Italy is. They’re really light. They’ve got almond in them. Are you okay with almond? It says Pax. It’s kind of like the Catholic word for paz.’ A boy naturally speaks Portuguese to his madrinha.

‘Paz na terra boa vontade a todos os homens,’ Flavia says. ‘Come in, oh come in.’

The apartment is cramped and dim. The only light comes from dozens of small biolights, arranged in every crevice and cranny and along every shelf and ledge. Lucasinho frowns in the green glow.

‘Wow, it’s kind of small in here.’ Lucas ducks under the door lintel and tries to find a place to sit amid the paraphernalia.

‘There’s always space for you,’ Flavia says, taking Lucasinho’s face between her hands. ‘Coração.’

When you need a roof, a bed, hot food, water and clean, your madrinha will always be there.

‘I like your place.’

‘Wagner pays for it. And my per diems.’

‘Wagner?’

‘You didn’t know?’

‘Um, my Dad doesn’t …’

‘Talk about me. Your mother neither. I’m used to that.’

‘Thank you for coming to see me. In hospital.’

‘How could I not? I carried you.’

Lucasinho squirms. No seventeen-year-old male can bear being told that he was once inside an older woman. He settles on the indicated spot on the sofa and surveys the apartment while Flavia flicks on the boiler and brings plates and a knife from her kitchen cubby. She shifts icons and biolamps to clear a space on the low table in front of the sofa.

‘You’ve a lot of … Stuff.’

Icons, statues, rosaries and charms, offering bowls, stars and tinsel. Lucasinho’s nose wrinkles at the collision of incense vapers, herbal mixes and stale air.

‘The Sisterhood is big on religious clutter.’

‘The …’ Lucasinho catches himself before the conversation descends into asking parrot-questions to his madrinha’s every statement.

‘The Sisterhood of the Lords of Now.’

‘My vovo has something to do with that.’

‘Your grandmother gives us money to support our work. Irmã Loa has been visiting her as a spiritual adviser.’

‘What does vo Adriana need with a spiritual adviser?’

The boiler sings. Madrinha Flavia crushes mint leaves and infuses.

‘No one’s told you.’ Flavia pushes more statues and votives to the end of the low table and settles on the floor.

‘Hey, I should …’

Flavia waves away Lucasinho’s offer to take her place.

‘Now, this cake you’ve brought me.’ She lifts the knife before her eyes and whispers a prayer. ‘You must always bless the knife.’ She cuts a tiny fingernail of cake and sets it on a dish in front of a statue of Saints Cosmos and Damiano. ‘Unseen guests,’ she murmurs then takes her own slice of Pax cake between fingers as thin and precise as porcelain chopsticks.

‘This really is very good, Luca.’

Lucasinho blushes.

‘It’s good to be good at something, Madrinha.’

Madrinha Flavia brushes crumbs from her fingers.

‘So tell me what brings you to your madrinha’s door?’

Lucasinho lolls back on the patchouli-smelly upholstery and rolls his eyes.