by Holly Watt
The woman picked up another two pieces of material, whirr. Pick, whirr. Pick, whirr. Pickwhirrpickwhirrpickwhirr.
‘This is a good factory,’ said the man.
Smile, Casey had said. He has to enjoy showing you around. You need him to flaunt it at you.
And Hessa smiled.
The girl’s hands were rough, nicked here and there by the machines. The air was filled with tiny wisps of thread, gold in the sunlight.
Hessa glanced up at the big windows. The sun sloped in, so that every tiny stitch could be checked. As Hessa gazed up, a supervisor in a black suit paced past, peering at the little T-shirts, the pink hearts, the blue arrows.
Hessa stared around the rest of the room. Huge cardboard boxes were piled up against the fire exit. She imagined this room if a spark caught. Nylon goes up like a torch, she knew. For a second, Hessa saw the place filled with smoke, the sewing machines crammed together making an impossible obstacle course in the dark. She heard the screams. One staircase and a thousand desperate women. That beggar outside: a pleading face, her mouth a gash.
There were no addresses on the big packages, anonymity a habit. Hessa peered and squinted, feeling the camera belt bite her side.
The man was running through the terms. Thirteen hours a day, six days a week, fifty dollars a month, maybe. Bangladesh’s selling point to the world, that figure. They took pride in it even. Pickwhirrpickwhirrpickwhirr, forever.
Hessa leaned against a work table for a second, forcing herself to breathe.
The second woman along the line looked as if she was in her late fifties, but was probably only forty. Her body had shaped itself into a crouch over the sewing machine. She could barely look up, must have sat there for years, in just that shape. A wisp of human in a line of appliances.
At the far end of the room, Hessa saw one of the supervisors stop by a machine, grab a pair of indigo jeans and fling them to the floor. A woman cowered and the supervisor slapped her, very hard, straight across the face.
None of the other women around her reacted. The woman bowed her head, just for a moment. Then she reached out, and picked up two more pieces of denim. Pick. Whirr. Pickwhirr.
‘What is on the floor above us?’ Hessa smiled so sweetly. ‘I have never worked in such a big factory before.’
This man was bored today, she could see. Tomorrow she would disappear into the crowd, bent for ever over her sewing machine. But today . . . He gestured to the stairs.
It was the same on the next floor, and the next. On the fourth floor, they were cutting material, the grey pinstripe stretched tight. Hessa thought of the red taffeta skirt, a piece of silk tucked into its petticoats.
‘Where do they go, these clothes?’
‘All around the world’ – a showman wave. ‘Germany, England, France, Australia.’
Hessa thought of these clothes, first sprayed with formaldehyde, for mildew and moths. Unpacked, with pursed lips, at their destination. Steam-cleaned quickly, and rammed on hangers, in those long bargain rows.
Here you are, darling.
I don’t liiiike it, Mummy.
Chucked in a corner, and forgotten. And a year later, gosh, this is far too small. Landfill.
They climbed the stairs. All the floors were open-plan, clattering with racket as the bright sunlight streamed through.
‘Thank you,’ said Hessa, at the end. ‘I will come back tomorrow, sir, to start my work.’
Hessa fled out of the factory, and down the hot dusty streets to where Casey was waiting. She scrambled into the tuk-tuk without words.
They were half a mile away before she could speak. ‘It’s not there,’ she said precisely. ‘Not there.’
‘Are you sure?’ Casey forced her face to stay calm.
‘Every floor is the same,’ said Hessa. ‘They’re huge open-plan rectangles. There isn’t space for any other women to be held in there. And Romida would have mentioned the noise. It is like the roar of a dragon.’
Hessa pushed the grille open as the tuk-tuk moved off again, gasping for air.
‘Could you see who they were producing for?’ Casey asked.
‘No,’ Hessa admitted. ‘I couldn’t get close enough. I don’t know if those blue silk messages could have been sent from there either. There was no way to tell.’
She looked apologetic, sheepish.
‘It doesn’t matter,’ said Casey. ‘You’ve got the footage.’
The tuk-tuk purred on.
‘I suppose Romida might not have been grabbed by Greystone’s lot anyway,’ said Casey. ‘She could be part of a different operation altogether.’
‘Romida is not there,’ said Hessa. ‘None of them are. I am quite sure of it.’
They passed a rubbish dump, a line of flames licking through the stench. Two small boys were playing a sort of cricket beside the garbage sprawl.
‘But where then?’ asked Casey. ‘Where can they be?’
Hessa sat there for a long time, staring out of the tuk-tuk.
‘We should go down to the refugee camps,’ Hessa said. ‘Go and talk to Romida’s mother, and anyone else who might have seen this man. You never know. They might know something.’
‘OK,’ said Casey. ‘I’ll call Savannah. Let’s go and see tomorrow.’
36
As soon as they were back at the hotel, Casey downloaded the footage from the factory. Hessa sat in silence as the computer screen filled with her recording, and looked away as the camera approached the factory gate.
‘We need to link this factory to Rhapso,’ Casey decided. ‘I’m sure a factory on this scale will supply several other retailers too, but we need to start proving the connections between Dylan and the factory and the traffickers.’
‘How’ – Ed was staring at the sea-rough footage – ‘is anyone going to know from this where these clothes are going?’
Casey’s quick smile lightened the room: ‘I know someone.’
It had been the day before a huge royal wedding that Casey had discovered the hidden skills at the Post. As the nation twirled out the bunting, and the papers exhausted every story angle, Casey had been wandering round the office, thoroughly bored by the whole thing.
She was scouting the fashion cupboard once again when she overheard a bustle of excitement from Cressida’s desk.
‘It is,’ Cressida was saying. ‘That’s Lalla Finsbury’s belt.’
Casey had joined the small group around the fashion editor’s desk. The knot of women were staring at Cressida’s computer screen: a paparazzi shot of a woman, blanket over her head, running up the stone steps of the Alperton Hotel in Knightsbridge.
‘Isn’t that where she’s staying tonight?’ Casey asked. She: tomorrow’s new princess.
‘Yes,’ grinned Cressida. ‘Lalla must be going in for a final fitting. They’ll be so thrilled at Manaton’s. They’ve had a rough couple of years.’
Lalage Finsbury was chief designer at Manaton’s. One of the more cutting-edge London fashion houses, Casey remembered vaguely.
‘But how can you possibly tell just from that?’ Casey was staring at the carefully anonymous blanket, the inch of brown belt barely visible.
‘Oh,’ Cressida waved. ‘I just know.’
Cressida had tapped her keyboard, dozens of thumbnail pictures spreading across her screen.
‘There,’ Cressida pointed. ‘Lalla wore that belt last year when she was in LA for the Oscars. It’s the precise colour, that stitch here, the turn of the leather there.’
Casey stared back at the inch of brown belt running into the Alperton, awed. Cressida’s knowledge was encyclopedic.
‘Have you told the newsdesk yet?’
‘Oh no. Manaton would be furious if we revealed they were doing The Dress.’ Cressida managed to capitalise the words as she spoke. ‘They’d be catatonic. It’s their secret.’
‘Yes,’ said Casey cheerfully.
‘They’re one of our biggest advertisers,’ Cressida bridled.
‘Mmm.’
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‘It would spoil the surprise for everyone.’
‘That,’ Casey said, ‘is what we do.’
‘I can’t.’
‘Cressida, I’ll give you a thirty-second head start, or I’m telling the newsdesk and taking the byline. It’ll be tomorrow’s splash either way.’
‘Oh.’ Cressida had kicked out at Casey with her satin heel. ‘Bloody hell. All right, I’ll tell them.’
They contemplated the photograph for a moment longer, Casey surreptitiously admiring Cressida’s glossy highlights, perfect nails, immaculate make-up.
‘What’s your role for the royal wedding?’ Cressida had asked. ‘The newsdesk seems to have a minute-by-minute plan, starting long before dawn.’
‘Miranda and I are on deathwatch,’ Casey said cheerfully.
‘Deathwatch?’
‘If a bomb goes off in the massed cheering crowds,’ Casey explained. ‘We trot towards it and try and work out what’s going on.’
‘To each their own.’ Cressida arched a perfect eyebrow. ‘I think I’d rather be analysing the bridesmaid dresses.’
‘Fair enough,’ Casey grinned. ‘Good to have the experts this time.’
Casey remembered the last royal wedding, when half the fashion team had actually been invited, leaving the 15-stone Home Affairs editor bawling, ‘That’s sodding ecru, I tell you,’ at the television screen.
‘That’s not bloody cream,’ still got chanted at him when he was late on a deadline. ‘That’s sodding ecru.’
The trials of that royal wedding had been compounded by the Post’s lip-reader going rogue and catastrophically misinterpreting a conversation between the Prime Minister and the Home Secretary as they sat among the congregation. Ross had fired the lip-reader halfway through the ceremony with a newly invented form of sign language.
‘It’s all going to go much more smoothly this time,’ Casey said.
‘At least,’ Cressida had sulked. ‘You’ve got a proper splash now.’
Now Casey took screengrabs of Hessa’s footage, sending the clearest shots back to Cressida.
‘Rhapso.’ The message came back in seconds. ‘We’d have to wait for those jeans to reach the shops to be 100 per cent, but that won’t take long.’
‘How can you be sure?’
‘The positioning of the rivets.’ Casey didn’t need to see Cressida’s eye roll. ‘The angle on the pocket. The curve of the looped seam. I could go on.’
‘That’s OK.’ Casey hoped the sarcasm came across. ‘Thanks, Cressida.’
She thought about the dusty factory with the beggar outside. And she thought about the red velvet curtains and you-have-a-nice-day of the Rhapso shop.
She turned to the others. ‘We can be fairly sure the message came from that factory.’
37
The car jolted into a rut and stalled beside a line of scruffy tents. ‘It was beautiful here, once.’ The fixer gestured carelessly across the crowded refugee camp. ‘And now it is all gone for ever.’
Hessa and Casey stared across the miles and miles of tents, the scale of it still shocking. The car had stopped on a small rise, and from this point the camps spread as far as they could see, in every direction, every single inch used.
‘It’s crammed so tight,’ Hessa murmured. ‘All of these people.’
The Rohingya camps were especially chaotic. In her years of journalism, during her travels to Jordan, to Lebanon, to Turkey, Casey had spoken to dozens of Syrian refugees. In Syria, it had taken the refugees months to leave their country.
A barrel bomb hit my neighbour’s house. Then my brother disappeared . . . He was taken at a checkpoint, and we never saw him again . . . And then . . . And then . . . And then . . .
Until finally, finally, the Syrians packed up their most-loved possessions, and started the long walk to the border. That meant they crossed south into Jordan in threes and fours, fives and sixes. A big family group, now and again. Even at the peak of the crisis, the Syrian refugee camps grew slowly enough that there were rows of tents, blocks of latrines, some sort of a plan.
But the speed of the Rohingya crisis of 2017 took everyone by surprise. The Rohingya moved in whole villages, hundreds of people in hours. Blamed for everything for years, and attacked on all sides for decades, when the militia rolled in, the Rohingya rushed for the border. Thousands in a day.
The soldiers came with rockets. They burned our village, they burned our people. They burned everything, and we ran. We just ran.
As the crisis erupted, the Prime Minister of Bangladesh, in a gesture that was part generosity, part panic, offered up great tracts of the reserve jungle, the beautiful forest that sprawled across the low hills of southern Bangladesh.
‘There were huge trees here, and it was all so green, once,’ the translator grumbled. ‘Now there is nothing. Nothing left at all.’
The translator had turned to Casey with a sigh, as they climbed out of the car. She was called Layla and had developed a tough half-smile after weeks of escorting journalists around the camps.
The Rohingyas cleared this land in days, Layla recited laconically. Like ants. Chopping down trees, hacking away at undergrowth. Total deforestation of whole hills, in an afternoon. She pulled a face.
And now it was April in the shadeless camps, and the sun punched down like a fist.
Layla stopped talking, shielding her eyes from the sun. She was tall for a Bengali woman, her movements both angry and graceful. She wore a simple white shirt, with the charity’s lanyard round her neck. Thick eyebrows came together in a scowl as she made her way down the narrow path between the tents. Her face was an odd combination of compassion and distaste, as if she couldn’t quite decide on her emotions.
‘These camps are just about OK right now.’ Savannah followed Layla along the path. ‘But in a few weeks, the monsoon will come.’ The aid worker stared around the steep-sided valleys of the camps. ‘They’re all built on dust, these tents. Delta silt. When it dries out, there’s nothing there. It crumbles at a touch now all the trees are gone. When the monsoon comes, the tents at the bottom of the hill will flood, while landslides wipe out the ones at the top.’
Casey tried to imagine living for years in this endless camp. A little girl peered down at them, as they passed by. She was leaning against a bamboo railing, loosely tied to an upright pole, above a 15-foot drop down to a dried-up riverbed.
‘It was the British who encouraged the Rohingya to go to Rakhine in the first place,’ Savannah murmured. ‘When the map of this part of the world was all pink.’
‘Quite,’ Hessa nodded.
‘Some of the Rohingya have been in these camps since the early Nineties.’ Savannah spun in a circle. ‘That was when the first wave of refugees arrived in Bangladesh. In the older parts of the camp, no one under the age of twenty-five remembers living anywhere else, ever. This is all they know.’
‘And probably all they will ever know,’ Hessa sounded harder, tougher.
They had parked up near the Balukhali camp, in the shade of a sweeping acacia that had somehow survived. Ed had stayed behind in Cox’s Bazar.
‘It’ll be easier, just two women reporters,’ Casey had explained. ‘I think Shamshun might be happier talking to us. And it’s useful, you being in Cox’s, just in case Dylan checks up on us.’
The camp stretched for miles all around Balukhali, the tents loosely constructed from chopped-down bamboo and tarpaulin. The colour of the tarpaulins depended on the donor, so one stretch of the camp was patterned in pink, the next aquamarine, then coral. A strange plastic Babel, Casey thought.
‘This way.’ Savannah pointed. ‘Two refugees were killed by elephants down there a few months ago. In the most recent rush of refugees, the tents were built too close to one of the old elephant paths. The elephants have gone now, deeper into the forest. Or maybe they’re just gone.’
Occasionally, looking between the tents packed together on the steep hillsides, Casey could see all the way down to the rice paddies.
The flagrant green of the rice was a shock against the browns and greys. Below them, the Bangladeshi farmers still worked, near the heart of the camp.
‘And in England, they rage about refugees at Calais.’ Hessa half-smiled.
They could hear the children chanting in madrassas as they walked up the path.
‘There’s always the money for the mosques somehow.’ Savannah chewed at her lip. ‘They’re the best buildings in the camps, always. It’s Saudi money, every time. Still,’ she brightened. ‘Somewhere more solid for the refugees to hide if a cyclone comes.’
After Casey’s phone call the night before, Savannah had asked Romida’s mother to meet them at a feeding centre, half a mile from her tent. The refugees queued up at these centres in the mornings, clutching their ration cards. But the big blocks were locked and abandoned at this hour.
Casey had asked to meet Shamshun at a distance from her tent. ‘Because we don’t know if the people who took Romida are still operating here. And we don’t want them to know that journalists are searching for Romida. It could be dangerous for us. And it could be fatal for Romida.’
‘Sure,’ Savannah had said easily. ‘I did ask the women to keep it quiet, when I asked around. And they keep their secrets, the women of this camp.’
But when they got to the feeding centre, Shamshun had not come alone. As the little group crowded into a small office, Shamshun pointed to the teenager beside her.
‘Shamshun says this girl is called Jamalida,’ said the translator. ‘Shamshun arrived in the camp from Rakhine just a few months ago. Jamalida’s family came across at the same time.’
Casey looked at Jamalida, familiar somehow, and realised. She was the girl in the orange scarf, next to Romida in the photograph. Casey had stared at that photograph, again and again. Jamalida was the girl with the big wide smile and bright red lipstick, as Romida turned shyly from the camera.
But Jamalida was crying now, shrinking away from Shamshun, smearing the black kohl that lined her eyes. She looked much younger than thirteen.
