The Pink Walk Of Fuseta

Stealing kids had happened by accident. A leftover one in the backseat of a stolen car had started it. When Helena handed the 4x4 over to Paulo and mentioned the five-year-old, he raised an eyebrow, licked his lower lip lasciviously and added an extra hundred to her share.  It was only as she went to step away with the cash that she realised with sudden clarity the most likely next outcome for the child.

Reluctantly dropping her hand from the exit door handle with a sigh, she swivelled to face Paulo.’ I’ll take her, you keep your money.’ She didn’t want another child to mirror her own experience.

 ‘At least I’ll be kind to her, feed her, leave her with me,’ he wheedled, ‘She’ll most likely starve with you.’

 Helena gave him a contemptuous look, awkwardly gathered the dozy child into her arms and made her escape. Paulo shrugged with momentary disappointment, then carried on preparing the newly stolen Swiss-plated car for quiet export. He knew where to find another babe when he fancied one, like all paedophiles.

Helena had worked her way out of the clutches of men with menace, demanding she satiate their random sexual needs by the time she was 15. Even as she hit eleven, she had achieved more time than men on her hands and began developing her breaking and entry skills. Thieving and driving stolen cars through late-night streets bought food and respect in an offbeat street society. The café, connection. At 17, she was now attracting a different type of male attention, but she wasn’t interested; it wasn’t that they were male, more that she had experienced sufficient sexual attention to last her lifetime before even reaching puberty.

Now, Helena lived quietly, alone and happy in a dilapidated, stone building amongst several small, abandoned salt flats. Stealing the occasional luxury car sustained her reputation and increased her security stash, safely secured to an overhead roof timber in her kitchen area.

As she left the underground garage, Helena had first thought to take the child back to where she had found her, but the hammering rain and a potential 5-kilometre walk made her pause and divert.

It wasn’t cold, and the storeroom at her part-time job would serve her purpose just now. She half smiled, thinking back to her last shift at the cafe as she bent her head against the weather and tried to shield the child in her arms. It was a lightweight, no shoes, a thin pink dress, long lashes and a smudge of lipstick. Helena frowned and tried to wipe it away with her fingertips.

‘What's the pink in pink salt? Iron oxide, rust!’ Luigi had raised his Sagres bottle and pointed at the white salt mountain in front of the boatyard cafe on Fuseta estuary. ‘the difference in price? Ten to twenty times more per kilo than white salt! Someone should chuck a rusty pole in the next dry-out pool and make their fortune.’

The group of leather-clad bikers had laughed and nodded in agreement as they ordered another round. Helena was surprised at how few of them wobbled on their Harleys after so many cafe stops and rounds of thirst-quenching refuelling opportunities. Smiling, she had moved amongst the tables, clearing empty bottles and doling out refreshments for another hour before they roared off into the sunset. Oddly, she didn’t mind most of the local biker community; she could always hear them coming.

The pink salt idea kept going around her head. Was it possible, she wondered, to cheat and make salt pink? Or maybe green? Or darker magenta perhaps? Would people pay more for rainbow salt? 

Just as the rain began to ease, they reached the quayside and slipped inside the unlocked storeroom. It was a small, trusting local community, existing in almost splendid isolation within a vast transient and tourist population. Real Fuzetens did not steal from each other. Safely inside, Helena sat the child carefully on top of the large chest freezer.

 ‘What is your name, sweetheart?’ she asked, receiving silence and tearful, welling eyes as an answer. Then a swift decision to trust and a quiet whispered avalanche.

‘‘Rosa,’man says, ‘Rosa!’ when he open the door. He click at me again and hurted. When he dropped his picture thing, I runned outside. I runned and runned. Then rain came. All wet. Rosa into car and sleeping. Then you, you save me.’ Rosa reached out to Helena, who held her gently. Tears mingled.

‘And your Mama, Rosa, where is your Mama… your Papa?

‘Mama in water’ Graphically, Rosa tipped her head to the side, eyes closed, tongue hanging from the side of her mouth, then.

‘Mama gone’

Papa?

Just a shrug, then, ‘No, Papa. Rosa is hungry’ she whispered, looking wistfully at Helena. ‘You can be Mama?’

Helena’s answer was a gruff ‘No, no, I have no place for a child. Let me find you something to eat.’

Rosa was used to No and turned away. She kept her eyes down when Helena handed her a little chicken pie from the fridge and focused on eating it quickly. Staying quiet had its advantages, she’d found, especially in avoiding trouble and bruises.

Helena was flummoxed. Children were not in her plan. What if Rosa was mistaken, her parents missing her, looking for her? Helena struggled to know what to do, who could help. She couldn’t exactly own up to where she had found her without repercussions. She couldn’t really keep Rosa. Could she? Finally, she settled on Harley rider Luigi. She would find him in the morning. Settling Rosa down on a pile of outdoor cushions in the corner of the room and covering her with a discarded tablecloth, Helena sat herself down to think. As the sun rose, so did Helena.

Not just Luigi, but the whole biker community, under his guidance, made a real difference. Each child abuser's location discovered was marked with a large pink target. Many took aim at the residents of a marked building, including the GNR. Missing children records were checked, and some children returned to their families via police station drop-offs. Rosa was not amongst them. She was an invisible.

Helena’s home underwent a quiet transformation inside through the diligent efforts of bikers. Bedrooms fashioned out of the ends of high-end local building projects, children's furniture and bedding as needed. Over the years, a steady influx of small girls arrived, snatched from degradation. Occasionally, they made their own way there in the dead of night or were abandoned by those who couldn’t help themselves.

 In support, local farmers would often drop off excess produce on their way back from the weekly market at the gate at the end of their salty track. Sometimes, there would be so much of a single type of vegetable Helena and the girls would be sick of the sight of them and carefully deposit them in a ditch at the back of the building to quietly rot.

That’s how it first happened. A large sack of beetroots silently leached into the closest abandoned saltpan and over the course of the week turned the residual salt pink. She couldn’t resist it. Helena and her small girls, sworn to secrecy,  were soon busy filling jars and decorating labels, handing boxes of them back to the farmers to sell at the next market to tourists looking for something to tuck in their luggage and take back to wherever they had come from as a gentle reminder of the Algarve. Helena soon had a regular order with the beetroot man. Gradually, the path to the newly nicknamed Pink House gathered a sheen of beetroot-encrusted salt and the residents were easily recognised by their perpetually pink fingers and toes.  

Without really intending to, over time, Helena acquired an air of respectability in her community. The police and authorities worked quietly with her to help the girls in her care and those who needed to be. Helena, quietly dropped the carnapping, helped by a healthy weekly pink salt income.

As Rosa turned 18, Helena was celebrated by her town council for services to children and a new law, Rosa’s Law passed in the district to swiftly legalise the nationality, status and papers of abandoned and found children. The town fiesta that year began with a cavalcade of bikers with pink ribbons streaming from their handlebars. Next came the town brass band and sports club participants waving pink flags. All marched in celebration from the gate to The Pink House to the town square with women and children lining the roads and joining the procession as it passed them. The mayor gave her speech, acknowledging Helena and Luigi’s contribution to society, bestowing upon them shining medals and bouquets of pink roses. Helena and Luigi exchanged glances, struggling to maintain straight faces, their dignity saved by the exuberant popping of corks and flow of bon amie.

And so began the tradition of the annual Pink Walk of Fuseta.

The Pink Walk

Caroline Anderson   1502 words

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