No Ballet Shoes In Syria

by Catherine Bruton

  Aya glanced at Ciara, who had said nothing until now. The other girls had been much friendlier recently but things were always different when Ciara was around. She had been acting even more cold and uptight than usual lately, and Aya wondered if she was more stressed than she let on.

  “I’ve got the most important audition of my life coming up,” Ciara shrugged. “I don’t have time to be playing at putting on shows.”

  “This isn’t just about the show though,” Blue said, glancing awkwardly from Ciara to Aya, as if she felt she had to take sides.

  “Yeah,” said Lilli-Ella, coming to her aid. “It’s to raise money. For asylum seekers like Aya and her family.”

  “To help pay for a proper lawyer,” added Grace, ignoring the scowl on Ciara’s face. “And medical stuff – and food and clothes and everything.”

  “Whatever. If you girls want to mess around putting on a silly show, go ahead!” said Ciara. “But count me out.”

  She stormed into the studio, slamming the door dramatically behind her. For what felt like forever nobody said anything. It was Blue who broke the silence.

  “Aya, my mum showed me this article about refugees and the terrible journeys they have been on to get to England,” she said. “Was it like that for you?”

  Aya glanced at Dotty. She hadn’t told the others about the journey in the container, the boat. “I—”

  “We’re also raising money for a counsellor,” Dotty cut in quickly, shooting Blue a warning look. “Because a lot of the people who have come here have had traumatic experiences that they find hard to talk about.”

  Aya glanced at her gratefully, and fortunately at that moment Miss Sylvie appeared.

  “Girls – to the barre, enough chat!” Miss Sylvie’s voice was crisp and curt.

  “If Ciara doesn’t want to perform, that’s fine,” Dotty said, linking arms with Aya and grinning at the others. “We can get this show on the road without her – and it’s going to be awesome!”

  Chapter 36

  “We did a gala at Madam Belova’s one time,” said Aya.

  She and Dotty were out in Miss Helena’s overgrown back garden, making a dozen cat tails out of old socks and the contents of a moth-eaten eiderdown. The sun was shining through the beech trees, casting dappled light on the small space of lawn and making the red brick of the Victorian villa glow almost crimson.

  “Ooh, what did you do?” said Dotty.

  Lately Aya had found herself telling Dotty more and more tales of home. Not the sad ones – just the stories of her ordinary life: school, parties, shopping, sports days, dancing lessons. Not so different from Dotty’s life – not really.

  “I did a dance with my friends – Kimi, and Nadiya and Nooda,” she smiled. “And Samia! She was a lot like you.”

  “Poor her! So how was it?”

  “Samia, she stumbled and fell off the stage.” Aya smiled as she remembered how everyone had gasped and then a second later Samia had popped her head up with a giant grin on her face. “She got the biggest cheer of the whole show!”

  She remembered Samia looking up, eyes wide with shock just for a second, and then the audience erupted into laughter and Samia was on her feet, clowning and playing along, as if it had all been part of the performance. Aya and the others had to try to carry on with the dance through their own giggles. So much had happened to her friends since then. She didn’t know if she’d ever see Samia again but that was the version of Samia that Aya wanted to remember.

  That was when Mumma appeared by the patio doorway. Aya had left Mumma with Miss Sylvie, cooking in the old big kitchen. Mumma had been teaching Miss Sylvie how to make manoushi bread, the two women somehow communicating in a mixture of gestures and the few words of each other’s languages they had managed to glean, while Moosa made a nuisance of himself sticking fingers in the dough. Both women had been laughing when Aya left them, but now Mumma was holding a letter and she looked different somehow.

  “What is it?” Aya was on her feet, crossing the grass, taking Mumma’s hand.

  Mumma said nothing. She’d also changed since they’d come to live with Miss Sylvie and Miss Helena. She’d been eating and sleeping better, and her hair and skin had regained some of their shine. Miss Helena had taken her to the doctor who had given her some pills and referred her to a counsellor. Her eyes still looked tired – and a little blank somehow – but the dark shadows under them were less pronounced than they had been. But now she looked frantic, more anxious than Aya had ever seen her.

  “The hearing. The asylum appeal. It is next week.”

  She handed Aya the letter. Dotty was beside her in an instant, reading it over her shoulder.

  “This is good news, right?”

  “I don’t know,” said Aya.

  “Course it is! After the appeal, everything will be sorted. You’ll be able to stay forever!” said Dotty.

  The sun suddenly felt too hot on her back, the light too bright. “Only if we win,” Aya said. “If we lose, they will send us back.”

  “Then you can’t lose!” said Dotty. “When is it anyway?”

  That was when Aya looked properly at the date on the letter. “Next Tuesday,” she said.

  Then she looked at Dotty in horror.

  The day of the audition.

  Souda Refugee Camp, Chios Island, Greece

  Aya remembered sitting on the pebbly beach, staring out at the blue smudge where the water hit the horizon. Her hands were bleeding again – fresh red coming through the darkened bandage where the boat’s ropes had burned through her skin during that long, long night on the ocean before the rescue boat turned up – but she scarcely noticed. Her eyes were constantly scanning the horizon. Looking for Dad. Waiting for Dad. Praying and hoping for Dad.

  She sat there on the beach all day, every day. But he never came.

  After the rescue boat arrived, they had been taken to the Souda refugee camp on the island of Chios. It wasn’t an official camp – just a makeshift settlement that had sprung up next to the ruins of an ancient castle, overcrowded tents pitched on the edge of the pebbled shore, rats roaming among the garbage. There were over three thousand refugees living here, mostly from Afghanistan, Syria and Iraq. It was not safe to go out after dark. Aya had started covering her head because of the way some of the men looked at her. At night, in the tent, they often heard shouts and screams that made it hard to sleep. And in the day there was nothing to do but stare at the sea.

  Everyone here was waiting to be granted asylum, or to be assigned a relocation country. A translator in the overcrowded help centre had tried to explain to them that as a single mother with children, Mumma could claim protected refugee status, apply for asylum in Greece. But Mumma had just shut down by then, stopped talking. She didn’t cry. She just sat, silent, all the time.

  “But then can we go to England?” Aya was the family spokesperson now.

  “You can’t apply for asylum in more than one EU country.”

  Aya tried to remember what her dad had told her but it all seemed muddled in her brain. The money, the paper with the names – everything had been lost. “My dad said to meet him in England…”

  The aid worker was young, with red hair pulled back into a messy ponytail. She spoke Arabic with a strange lisp and her eyes were different colours – one blue, one brown. Her name was Ezi – Aya remembered that for some reason.

  “Aya, your father…” she started to say. “He was out at sea for over twelve hours. We have no reports of any other rescue ships…”

  Aya stared hard at the young woman’s one blue eye, the colour of the water, the sky.

  “Dad said he would meet us in England,” she repeated quietly. “So we have to go there.”

  She could hear Dad’s voice in her memory telling her: “If anything happens to me – if we get separated, you take your Mumma and Moos and you go to England, OK?”

  Ezi looked at her, her mismatched eyes full of concern. “Aya, your father…”

  She didn�
��t finish her sentence. And anyway, Aya wasn’t sure she could do it. Not on her own. And maybe Dad would come. Maybe if she waited – and watched – just a little bit longer… maybe he would come.

  Chapter 37

  It was one of those mornings that felt like the last day of summer. The sun woke Aya hours before the rest of the house was up, pouring through the curtains, spilling over the bed, blazingly bright.

  “As if the sun is saying goodbye,” said Aya when Dotty came to pick her up after breakfast. She’d had that feeling for days now. As if she was saying goodbye to people, places, things that she had come to love and which she might never see again after today.

  “What a funny thing to say,” said Dotty, whose hair was pulled back into a bun so severe it made her whole face look different – more serious somehow. “But then today is a funny old day. I can’t decide if I feel sick with nerves or just relieved it’s finally going to be over. At least we get to know one way or another now.”

  “Yes,” said Aya, but she was thinking as much about the appeal as the audition.

  Sally and Miss Sylvie and Dotty’s mum and dad were both going to the hearing with Mumma. “To give character references – say what a nice family you are – help your mum explain stuff right,” said Dotty. “Oh, and Mum’s going to work the celebrity angle. ‘Famous ballerina fights for young refugee dancer and her family to stay in the UK’, and all that!” Dotty grinned. “She’s got newspapers coming and everything.”

  “Really?” said Aya.

  She felt almost overwhelmed by everything people were doing for her and her family. The kindness of strangers, Miss Helena had called it. Sometimes it made her want to cry more than the cruelty she had seen, though she could not explain why. And it made it all the more important not to let them down.

  “And did you tell her – your mum – that you want to do musical theatre, not ballet?” Aya asked. Dotty had been saying for the past week that she was just going to tell her mum once and for all.

  She’d been preparing a musical theatre medley for the show. “It makes me feel like I can see you do when you dance,” she had told Aya. “And I want to feel that way all the time.”

  “So did you tell her?”

  “No point,” said Dotty. “She kissed me this morning and told me to enjoy ‘the best day of my life’!” She gave an ironic grin. “What exactly am I supposed to say to that!”

  Mumma wanted to do her hair for the audition, just as she used to back in Aleppo when Aya was little, and so after breakfast Aya sat in front of the old dressing table, staring at her own reflection as Mumma ran the brush through her brown locks. Neither of them said anything. Through the window Aya could see the tall trees that towered over Miss Helena and Miss Sylvie’s house. How old were those trees, she wondered? Miss Helena said they had been nearly as tall when she had come here as a girl, eighty years earlier. How many wars had been fought while these trees grew? How many thousands of families driven from their homes, fleeing conflict, seeking refuge in faraway lands? Their story was hardly unique. They were one family among thousands. Why should they be allowed to stay? Why should anyone care?

  “There,” said Mumma, when Aya’s hair was ready, pinned tightly into a bun, swept back off her face so that it accentuated the dark of her eyes, making them look huge in her pale face.

  Aya reached up and took her hand. Mumma squeezed her fingers tight. “You look beautiful, habibti,” Mumma said. “My beautiful balletka. My beautiful dancer.”

  Miss Sylvie drove the girls to the audition in an old-fashioned Morris Minor that looked as if it had spent most of its life under dust sheets in the garage. They drove out of the city, through giant concrete underpasses, past the towering edifice of the football stadium, and the new red pavilions in the old cricket ground, through rows of terraces, then out into the suburbs and finally the surrounding countryside.

  “Remember also to enjoy yourselves, yes?” said Miss Helena as they drew near to the school.

  “Flipping heck!” Dotty whispered. “It’s bad enough that we have to survive this ordeal, without being expected to enjoy it now too!”

  Aya tried to smile. Today was too important to worry about enjoying herself.

  The Royal Northern Ballet School was accessed via a pair of imposing-looking gates and then up a long drive that seemed to last forever. Aya had seen pictures in the brochure, but she was still overwhelmed.

  “Did you ever come across a school that had its own deer park?” laughed Dotty.

  The sun beat down relentlessly and as they turned the corner and saw the rich red-brick stately home, it seemed to glow coppery like sunset. Aya felt her heart beat hard in her chest at the thought of dancing every day in this beautiful, magical place. She tried to push the feeling away, train herself not to hope, because hope hurt so much when it was shattered. And how could she come here anyway, if Mumma and Moosa were sent away?

  “Come on!” said Dotty, dragging Aya out of the car. “Let’s get this over and done with!”

  Inside was shabbier than the outside suggested. The entrance hall was grand but battered, the paintwork scuffed by generations of young ballerinas who had bustled through the hallways and up and down the staircases, scuffing their feet across the wooden floorboards and leaving the carpets threadbare. It smelled a bit like the refugee centre, Aya thought. That same mixture of sweat and school dinners – but without the smell of sadness.

  The two girls stood in the entrance hall, clutching ballet shoes and music, while a severe-looking receptionist ticked them off on her list. There were a dozen or so other girls, all about their age, all waiting, looking pale and nervous. And Ciara was there, of course, looking immaculate and utterly composed next to a woman who must be her mother. Aya realised she had never seen Ciara’s mother before. She was a small, anxious-looking woman, as plain as her daughter was beautiful, and with slightly sloping shoulders and a shy smile, which she turned to Aya and Dotty.

  “It’s lovely to meet you girls,” she said. “Ciara is always talking about her friends from ballet.”

  “Really?!” said Dotty, glancing at Ciara, who would not meet her eye.

  “Yes, she’s never been very lucky with friends at school,” Ciara’s mum went on, a little nervously. Ciara flushed bright red. “So her dance pals are so important to her.”

  Dotty opened her eyes wide and looked as if she was about to say something, but Ciara was looking so uncomfortable that Dotty closed her mouth in surprise.

  It was Aya who said, “They have all been very kind to me also.”

  Ciara shot her what seemed like a grateful glance, then looked quickly away.

  Chapter 38

  There was a nervous wait in the lobby. Most of the girls were talking about ballet, adjusting their shoes, smoothing down their hair, but Aya couldn’t stop thinking about Mumma, sitting in a waiting room like this, outside the courtroom. The hearing was at midday but Sally said they often ran late.

  “I just need to use the bathroom,” she said to Dotty.

  She made her way to the bathroom and was hurrying back when she overheard Miss Helena’s voice. She was talking to someone on the telephone further down the corridor. Aya didn’t mean to eavesdrop but she couldn’t help overhearing.

  “…such a shame about the timing,” she was saying. “If Aya had a place at the Royal Northern it would have really helped the case…”

  Aya froze.

  Miss Helena went on. “…I won’t tell her yet. At least this way she has a chance to audition before they are deported. And maybe she can apply for a study visa. That won’t help her mother and Moosa, of course…”

  Aya did not stay to listen to any more. She ran back down the corridor, back to the lobby, her head bursting as she pushed her way back into the waiting room, where a young woman with old-fashioned clothes was calling out their names. There was no time to stop and think, no time to find Miss Helena to ask what she had meant. Were they being deported? Had they lost the appeal?

>   She and all the girls were being ushered into a large room with high windows, mirrors and a barre running round three sides. Dappled light fell on to the wooden floorboards, and Aya found herself staring at the play of shadow and light on the floor, her head running over the conversation she had just heard as the teacher addressed the class.

  “I am Miss Eve,” she was saying. She was young, early twenties perhaps, but with a streak of silver in her red hair and clothes that seemed to come from another era. “I will be taking the class today while my colleagues observe.”

  She waved to a desk at the far end of the room, where there sat a man with a bald head, small moustache and an alarmingly large bow tie, and an elegantly dressed older lady with violet-coloured hair cut into a stylish bob. Aya stared at them blankly, her mind still racing.

  “Mr Bougeard, our principal ballet master, and Madam Olenska, director of the school.”

  Aya thought they looked like judges in a court room. Her stomach twisted sharply.

  “At least this way she has a chance to audition before they are deported.”

  Miss Eve was explaining that this would just be like an ordinary class. “Just try your best, as you would in your own dance schools,” she was saying.

  Aya stared at her. With her flaming-red hair, she reminded Aya of the helper in the refugee centre in Souda. The one with different-coloured eyes. Suddenly Aya could not remember her name – all she could think of was the young woman saying, “He was out at sea for over twelve hours. We have no reports of other rescue ships…”

  She felt hot, dizzy, hardly able to breathe – so many different feelings swirling around in her.

  “We are looking for potential, so don’t worry if you can’t do everything,” Miss Eve was saying. “Just do what you can and – try to enjoy it!” She smiled.