More bad news. Aunt Harmonium might have symptoms of coronavirus. “You know what this means,” Uncle Testosterone had yelled down the phone. “If word gets out we’ll all be thrown into quarantine, including you, and that will be your business up the spout and down the plughole!”
As Uncle Testosterone well knows, Diogenes Fernando’s business is to provide a discreet 24-hour, 24/7 tuk-tuk delivery service for The Man, who is über-scary at the best of times. So yes, this would indeed put a serious spoke in the wheel—but only if word gets out. It was therefore up to the two of them to make sure it doesn’t.
First thing to do, he had told Uncle Testosterone, is to keep her quiet. Confiscate her phone and make sure she doesn’t leave the house. Then get her to a no-questions-asked private clinic for a test. Next, find a nice quiet place by the beach where we can keep an eye on her while we wait for the test result.
Then we’ll see. This had been two days ago, and things had not gone according to plan. First, Aunt Harmonium had noisily and strenuously objected to being bundled into the back of a van at two in the morning. Second, the test had proved inconclusive, and would have to be done again. And third, Uncle Testosterone’s ‘nice quiet place by the beach’ turned out to be a ratty old two-roomed shack in the wrong half of the fishermen’s quarter.
Things had quickly gone from bad to terrible because by this time Aunt Harmonium had calmed down and realised she could parlay the situation into something to her own advantage.
She could, she said, either go and cough all over the neighbours and spark a major COVID-19 alert, with all that would entail—or she could cooperate. And the price of her cooperation, as she had made crystal clear, be substantial. Cash only. Today. Plus, she would not spend another minute in this s***hole, so find her somewhere better. Much better.
Diogenes is now counting the cost of the debacle, the bottom line being the equivalent of three month’s gross revenue, courtesy of The Man, plus whatever the ‘much better’ place might cost. The only consolation is that he managed to convince her it would take a week at least to find the money, and that meanwhile, they would put her in a hotel for the night.
But just as bad—in fact a whole lot worse— is that Aunt Harmonium would now have him firmly by the nuts, a fact he knew she would not hesitate to remind him of every day for the rest of her life. It doesn’t bear thinking about. How had it come to this, he asked himself. Since when did blood ties accrued over generations of Fernando’s count for nothing, especially now, at a time when families should be bonding, fighting the common COVID-19 foe shoulder to shoulder, cheek by jowl, and taking arms against a sea of troubles together, united, come what may?
And certainly not taking shameless advantage of the victim of a global disaster, whose only sin is trying to run a small to medium enterprise in the harsh and volatile world of business…