Can't talk, got to run.

by Megan Brownrigg (United Kingdom (Great Britain))

Making a local connection Ethiopia

I think the blinking is shyness. His eyelids dance like butterfly wings; moving shields from too many questions. He rushes the words “yes yes yes” before you’ve finished your sentences, anticipating your curiosity like bullets. Luckily for Betel, my curiosity is on ice while I can't breathe. My chest is knitting fire above legs which are folding like lead. According to the athletics club, the exertion rate of our run is ‘zero’. So I’m not sure why the altitude of Addis Ababa is hogging my lungs’ attention like a jealous boyfriend. But conversation will have to wait. Whilst I can’t talk and run, it’s obvious Betel can. He weaves between the gum trees as weightless as a ghost. I notice that he’s zigging corners and zagging inclines. Oh god. This is him making it easy for me to keep up. But it’s still very difficult. My toes chase the crown of his silhouette. It’s first light and the forest is too pretty to see through this fug of pain. The balm of eucalyptus is laced with lactic acid. I’m numb to the winking dew. Choking on the fresh air. And the sun slivers fluster me. Meanwhile Betel is picking up speed as easily as I’m dropping blood sugar. But he does not chat. I try not to be childishly hurt. But, to be honest, I’m worried Betel doesn’t like me. Later that day, I drove past him on the road to Millenium Park. He’d been with fellow athletes, cooling down from a real run. An insecure glitch in me had worried that he wouldn’t recognise me. But his neck hooked back in a double take as I slowed at the curb. He didn’t draw a blank. Instead, a huge smile scribbled itself across his face; big, natural and completely outside the lines of our friendship so far. It lit his eyes like a match. They were wide open, unblinking. I really hadn’t bargained for the next bit. Betel’s knees were suddenly at his ears in a kind of one-person Mexican wave; a jubilant dance of recognition. The bold moves brought him to my car’s open window. He flung his arm through. I was dumbfounded. Betel was going in for a fist bump. Although our run had nearly killed me, it had apparently made us friends. Over the next week, I’d have plenty of chats with Betel. Usually they were pretty transactional. "What time is training, where is this place, how on earth do I get there?" But between this, he’d offer me snatches of his story. How he wasn’t born in Addis. How he doesn’t know where. How it was probably a village in the south of Ethiopia. How a man had promised him work in the city. How, aged 8, he’d said yes. “He told me I could support my family and they’d be proud” Betel told me the things missing from his story too. The things that didn’t happen. Like getting paid. And seeing his family again. “Not yet.” Sometimes, we’d just talk about running. “Running is life”, he’d say to me. If I said something like that, it would cramp and spasm in cliché. But from Betel’s mouth, those words were simple fact. Facts that were felt deeply, but existed as simply as a sum. It’s strange what stands out in a story for someone. Telling me his, Betel didn’t say he’d seen a boy - his peer and probably friend - killed. It was from others that I heard how another boy had been beaten to death in the same sweatshop. The police arriving had created a diversion for Betel to escape. Betel and I were speaking in broken English and odd-word Amharic, years after this had happened. I’m not sure even a mother tongue could get around this moment of freedom and trauma bound. I don’t ask Betel about it. Instead, we run. Feet beating rather than eyes blinking.