by Chris Cleave
I stopped. I was so scared, I was struggling to breathe. The other girls looked the same. The girl with no name, she whispered in my ear, “Please. Let us turn around and go back up the hill. These people do not like us, can’t you see?”
The tractor man got down from his cab. The other man, the one who was tying up the gates, he came and joined the first man. They stood in the road, between us and the detention centre. The tractor driver was wearing a green jacket and a cap. He stood with his hands in his pockets. The man who had been tying the gates—the man in the blue overalls—he was very big. The tractor driver only came up to his chest. He was so tall that the trousers of his overalls ended higher than his socks, and he was very fat too. There was a wide pink roll of fat under his neck, and the fat bulged out in the gaps between the bottom of his overalls and the top of his socks. He was wearing a woollen hat pulled down tight. He took a packet of tobacco out of his pocket, and he made a cigarette without taking his eyes off us girls. He had not shaved, and his nose was swollen and red. His eyes were red too. He lit his cigarette, and blew out the smoke, and spat on the ground. When he spoke, his fat wobbled.
“You escaped, ‘ave you, my children?”
The tractor driver laughed. “Don’t mind Small Albert,” he said.
We girls looked at the ground. Me and Yevette, we were in front, and the girl with the yellow sari and the girl with no name stood behind us. The girl with no name, she whispered in my ear again. “Please. Let us turn around and go. These people will not help us, can’t you see?”
“They cannot hurt us. We are in England now. It is not like it was where we came from.”
“Please, let’s just go.”
I watched her hopping from one foot to the other foot in her Dunlop Green Flash trainers. I did not know whether to run or to stay.
“But ‘ave you?” said the tall fat man. “Escaped?”
I shook my head. “No, mister. We have been released. We are official refugees.”
“You got proof of that, I suppose?”
“Our papers are held by our caseworkers,” said the girl with no name.
The tall fat man looked all around us. He looked up and down the road. He stretched up to look over the hedge into the next field.
86
“I don’t see no caseworkers,” he said.
“Call them if you do not believe us,” said the girl with no name. “Call the Border and Immigration Agency. Tell them to check their files. They will tell you we are legal.”
She looked in her plastic bag full of documents until she found the paper she wanted.
“Here,” she said. “The number is here. Call it, and you will see.”
“No. Please. Don’t do dat,” said Yevette.
The girl with no name stared at her. “What is the problem?” she said. “They released us, didn’t they?”
Yevette gripped her hands together. “It ain’t dat simple,” she whispered.
The girl with no name stared at Yevette. There was fury in her eyes. “What have you done?” she said.
“What me had to do,” said Yevette.
At first the girl with no name looked angry and then she was confused and then, slowly, I could see the terror come into her eyes. Yevette reached out her hands to her. “Sorry, darlin. I wish it weren’t dis way.”
The girl pushed Yevette’s hands away.
The tractor driver took a step forward, and looked at us, and sighed.
“I reckon it’s bloody typical, Small Albert, I really do.”
He looked at me with sadness and I felt my stomach twisting.
“You ladies are in a very vulnerable situation without papers, aren’t you? Certain people might take advantage of that.”
The wind blew through the fields. My throat was closed so tight I could not speak. The tractor driver coughed.
“It’s bloody typical of this government,” he said. “I don’t give a damn if you’re legal or illegal. But how can they release you without papers? Left hand doesn’t know what the right hand is up to. Is that everything you’ve got?”
I held up my see-through plastic bag, and when the other girls saw me they held up theirs too. The tractor driver shook his head.
“Bloody typical, isn’t it, Albert?”
“Wouldn’t know, Mr Ayres.”
“This government doesn’t care about anyone. You’re hot the first people we’ve seen, wandering through these fields like Martians. You don’t even know what planet you’re on, do you? Bloody government. Doesn’t care about you refugees, doesn’t care about the countryside, doesn’t care about farmers. All this bloody government cares about is foxes and townspeople.”
He looked up at the razor wire of the detention centre behind us, then he looked at each of us girls in turn.
“You shouldn’t even be in this situation in the first place. It’s a disgrace, that’s what it is, keeping girls like you locked up in a place like that. Isn’t that right, Albert?”
Small Albert took off his woollen hat and scratched his head, and looked up at the detention centre. He blew cigarette smoke out of his nose. He did not say anything.
Mr Ayres looked at the four of us girls.
“So. What are we going to do with you? You want me to go back up there with you and tell them they’ve got to hold on to you till your caseworkers can be contacted?”
Yevette’s eyes went very wide when Mr Ayres said this.
“No way, mister. Me ain’t nivver goin back in that hell place no more. Not fo one minnit, kill me dead. Uh-uh.”
My Ayres looked at me then.
“I’m thinking they might have let you out by mistake,” he said. “Yes, that’s what I’m thinking. Am I right?”
I shrugged. The sari girl and the girl with no name, they just looked at the rest of us to see what was going to happen.
“Have you girls got anywhere to go? Any relatives? People expecting you somewhere?”
I looked at the other girls, and then I looked back at him and shook my head no.
“Is there any way you can prove that you’re legal? I could be in trouble if I let you onto my land and then it turns out I’m harbouring illegal immigrants. I have a wife and three children. This is a serious question I’m asking you.”
“I am sorry, Mr Ayres. We will not go on your land. We will just go.”
Mr Ayres nodded, and took off his flat cap, and looked at the inside of it, and turned it around and around in his hands. I watched his fingers twisting in the green cloth, His nails were thick and yellow. His fingers were dirty with earth.
A large black bird flapped over our heads and flew away in the direction where our taxi had disappeared. Mr Ayres, he took a deep breath and he held up the inside of his cap for me to see. There was a name sewn in the lining of the hat. The name was written in handwriting on a white cloth label. The label was yellow from sweat.
“You read English? You see what that name label says?”
“It says AYRES, mister.”
“That’s right. Yes, that’s it. I am Ayres, and this is my hat, and this land you girls are standing on is Ayres Farm. I work this land but I don’t make the law for it, I just plough it spring and autumn and parallel with the contours. Do you suppose that gives me the right to say if these women can stay on it, Small Albert?”
The wind was the only sound for a while. Small Albert spat on the ground. “Well, Mr Ayres, I ain’t a lawyer. I’m a cow-and-pig man at the end of the day, ain’t I?”
Mr Ayres laughed. “You ladies can stay,” he said.
Then there was sobbing from behind me. It was the girl with no name. She held on to her bag of documents and she cried, and the girl with the yellow sari put her arms around her. She sang to her in a quiet voice, the way we would sing to a baby who was woken in the night by the sound of distant guns and who must be soothed without being further excited. I do not know if you have a word for this kind of singing.
Albert took the cigarette from his mouth. He pinched it
out between his thumb and forefinger. He rolled it into a little ball and dropped it into the pocket of his overalls. He spat on the ground again, and he put his woollen hat back on.
“What’s she blubbin’ for?”
Yevette shrugged. “Mebbe de girl jus ain’t used to kindness.”
Albert thought about this. Then he nodded, slowly. “I could put em in the pickers’ barn, Mr Ayres?”
“Thanks, Albert. Yes, take them there and get them settled in. I’ll get my wife to dig out what they need.” He turned to us girls. “We have a dormitory where our seasonal labourers sleep. It’s empty at the moment. It’s only needed around harvest and lambing. You can stay there a week, no longer. After that, you’re not my problem.”
I smiled at Mr Ayres, but Mr Ayres waved away my smile with his hand. Maybe this is the way you would wave away a bee before it came too close. The four of us girls, we followed Albert across the fields. We walked in a single line. Albert walked in front in his wool hat and blue overalls. He was carrying a large ball of bright orange plastic rope. Then it was Yevette in her purple A-line dress and flip-flops, then me, and I was wearing the blue jeans and the Hawaiian shirt. Behind me there was the girl with no name, and she was still weeping, and then there was the girl in the yellow sari, who was still singing to her. The cows and the sheep moved aside to watch us as we walked across their fields. You could see them thinking, Here are some strange new creatures that Small Albert is leading.
He took us to a long building beside a stream. The building had low brick walls, as high as my shoulder, but it had a high metal roof that rose in an arch from the walls, so that the building was like a tunnel. The metal roof was not painted. There were no windows in the walls but there were plastic skylights in the roof. The building stood in a dirt field where pigs and hens were scratching at the ground. When we appeared, the pigs stayed where they were and stared at us. The hens moved away with a nervous walk, looking behind them to make sure we were not following.
The hens were ready to run if they needed to. They picked up each foot with a jerky movement and when they put the foot back down you could see the claws trembling. They moved closer to each other and made a muttering sound. The pitch of the noise rose each time one of us girls took a step closer, and it fell each time the hens put the distance back between them and us. It made me very unhappy to watch those hens. The way they moved and the noise they made, this is exactly how it was when Nkiruka and me finally left our village back home.
We joined a group of women and girls and we ran off into the jungle one morning and we walked until it was dark and then we lay down to sleep beside the path. We did not dare to make a fire. In the night we heard gun shots. We heard men screaming like pigs when they are waiting in the cage to have their throats cut. There was a full moon that night and if the moon had opened its mouth and started screaming I would not have been more terrified. Nkiruka held me tight. There were babies in our group and some of them woke up and had to have songs sung to them before they would settle. In the morning there was a tall, evil line of smoke rising over the fields where our village was. It was black smoke and it curled and boiled as it rose up into the blue sky. Some of the very young children in our group asked what the smoke was from, and the women smiled and told them, It is just the smoke from a volcano, little ones. It is nothing to worry about. And I watched the way the smiles left their faces when they turned away from their children’s eyes and stared back into the blue sky filling with black.
“You all right?”
Albert was staring at me. I blinked. “Yes. Thank you, mister.”
“Daydreaming, were you?”
“Yes, sir.”
Albert shook his head and laughed. “Honestly, you young people. Heads in the clouds.”
He unlocked the long building and let us in. Inside there were two rows of beds, onexow on each long wall. The beds were made of metal and they were painted dark green. There were clean white mattresses on the beds, and pillows without pillowcases. The floor was concrete painted grey, and it was shining and swept. The sunlight came down in thick stripes from the skylights. There were long loops of chain hanging down. They stretched right up into the roof, which was the height of five men at the centre of the building. Albert showed us how to pull on one side of each chain loop to open the skylight, and on the other side of the chain to close it. He showed us the cubicles at the end of the building where we could take a shower or use the toilet. Then he winked at us.
“There you go, ladies. The accommodation ain’t up to ‘otel standard, I’ll grant you, but then show me the ‘otel where you can get twenty Polish girls sharing your room and the management don’t even bat an eyelid. You should see some of the things our harvesters get up to after lights out. I’m telling you, I should chuck in the livestock work and make a film.”
Albert was laughing but the four of us girls, we stood there just looking back at him. I did not understand why he was talking about films. In my village, each year when the rains stopped, the men went to the town and they brought back a projector and a diesel generator, and they tied a rope between two trees, and we watched a film on a white sheet that they hung from the rope. There was no sound with the film, only the rumble of the generator and the shrieking of the creatures in the jungle. This is how we learned about your world. The only film we had was called Top Gun and we watched it five times. I remember the first time we saw it, the boys in my village were excited because they thought it was going to be a film about a gun, but it was not a film about a gun. It was a film about a man who had to travel everywhere very fast, sometimes on a motorbike and sometimes in an aeroplane that he flew himself, and sometimes upside down. We discussed this, the children in my village, and we decided two things: one, that the film should really be called The Man Who Was In A Great Hurry and two, that the moral of the film was that he should get up earlier so that he would not have to rush to fit everything into his day, instead of lying in bed with the woman with blond hair that we called ‘The Stay-in-Bed Woman’. That was the only film I had ever seen, so I did not understand when Albert said he should make a film. He did not look like he could fly an aeroplane upside down. In fact I had noticed how Mr Ayres did not even let him drive his blue tractor. Albert saw us girls staring back at him, and he shook his head.
“Oh, never mind,” he said. “Look, there’s blankets and towels and what ‘ave you in them cupboards over there. I dare say Mrs Ayres will be down later with some food for you. I’ll see you ladies around the farm, I shouldn’t wonder.”
The four of us girls, we stood in the centre of the building and we watched Albert as he walked out between the two lines of beds. He was still laughing to himself when he walked out into the daylight. Yevette looked at the rest of us and she tapped her finger on the side of her head.
“Nivver mind im. De white mens is all crazy.”
She sat down on the edge of the nearest bed and she took a dried pineapple slice out of her see-through plastic bag and she started to chew on it. I sat down next to her, while the sari girl took the girl with no name down the room a little way to lie down because she was still crying.
Albert had left the door open, and a few hens came in and began to look for food under the beds. The girl with no name screamed when she saw the hens coming in to the building, and she pulled her knees close to her chest and held a pillow in front of her. She sat there with her wide eyes poking out over the top of the pillow, and her Dunlop Green Flash trainers sticking out underneath it.
“Re-LAX, darlin. Dey int gonna hurt yu, dey is only chickens, yu nah see it?”
Yevette sighed. “Here we go again, huh, Lil Bug?”
“Yes. Here we go again.”
“Dat girl in a bad way, huh?”
I looked over at the girl with no name. She was staring at Yevette and making the sign of the cross.
“Yes,” I said.
“Mebbe dis is de hardest part, now dey is lettin us out. In dat detention centre dey was alw
ays tellin yu, do dis, do dat. No time to tink. But now dey all ovva sudden gone quiet, no? Dat dangerous, me tellin yu. Let all de bad memory come back.”
“You think that is why she is crying?”
“Me know it, darlin. We all gotta mind our heads now, truth.”
I shrugged and pulled my knees up to my chin. “What do we do now, Yevette?”
“No idea, darlin. Yu ask me, dis gonna be our nummer one problem in dis country. Where me come from, we ain’t got no peace but we got a thousand rumours. Yu always got a whisper where yu can go for dis or dat. But here we got de opposite problem, Bug. We got peace but we ain’t go no in-fo-may-shun, you know what I’m sayin?”
I looked Yevette in the eyes. “What is going on, Yevette? What is this trick you have done? How come they let us out of that place without papers?”
Yevette sighed. “Me did a favour for one of dem immigration men, all right? He make a few changes on de computer, jus put a tick in de right box, you know, an—POW!—up come de names for release. Yu, me an dem two other girls. Dem detention officers don’t be askin no questions. Dey jus see de names come up on dere computer screen dis morning and—BAM!—dey take yu from your room and dey show you de door. Dey don’t care if yore caseworker be dere to pick yu up or not. Dey too busy peekin at de titty-swingers in de newspaper, truth. So here we is. Free and ee-zee,”
“Except we don’t have papers.”
“Yeah. But I ain’t afraid.”
“I am afraid.”
“Don be.”
Yevette squeezed my hand and I smiled.
“Dat’s me girl.”
I looked around the room. The sari girl and the girl with no name, they were six beds further along. I leaned in close to Yevette and I whispered to her. “Do you know anyone in this country?”
“Sure, darlin. Williyam Shakespeare, Lady Diana, Battle of Britten. Me know dem all. Learned de names for me Citizenship Exam. Yu can test me.”
“No. I mean, do you know where you will go if we can get out of here?”
“Sure, darlin. I got pipple in London. Got de half of Jamaica livin down on Cole Harbour Lane. Prob’ly bitchin on how much dey vexed by all de Nye-jirryans livin nex door. How bout yu? Yu got famly dere?”
