by Holly Watt
A lie.
‘You know I love you, Miranda.’ Tom spoke into a silence. ‘But this . . . I need this.’
‘I can’t, Tom.’
‘But you can,’ he said. ‘You can.’
The kitchen was silent. Miranda stared at the pink roses, in their crumpled brown paper and the pretty blue ribbon. She thought about shaping herself, time and again, to what the world wanted.
My foundations.
Her fingers curled to fists.
‘You don’t get to fall in love with shards of me, like everyone else.’ The words rushed out of Miranda, flooding from nowhere. ‘You can’t choose the pieces of me to love, Tom.’
‘I don’t . . .’ Tom looked up. There were lines across his face, lines she had never noticed before. ‘Do you love me, Miranda?’ The words startled her.
‘Yes,’ she said. A long pause. ‘Of course I do.’
The words crept around the kitchen.
‘Do you though? Really?’
‘Why do you want this so much?’ Miranda spoke quietly. ‘This is who I am, Tom. Why can’t I be enough?’
‘You are.’ He said the words as if by rote. ‘Of course you are.’
‘Well then.’
‘But . . .’ He leaned against the kitchen counter. ‘Is it just going to be us, like this? Just the two of us? For ever?’
‘You always knew,’ she said. ‘About my job.’
‘Did I?’
She thought back to those early first days, a lifetime ago at university. The dawn after the balls. The cobbles, and the bubbles, and the striped lawns rolling to the river.
It was the kindness: that was what she remembered. Tea in bed in the morning, and supper waiting after a long day in the library. Learning to be normal, as if practising her timetables.
And she had learned kindness, too. For a while, by rote. Even enjoyed those little gestures: running him a bath after an icy game of rugby, buying cough mixture when he had a cold.
Oh, bugger, I’ve forgotten my mother’s birthday.
Don’t worry darling, I’ve sent flowers from us.
Us.
So close to normal, happy, contented. So close to a sensible job, well-behaved children, a decent pension.
And neither of them realised when she took that first job. He had made her a packed lunch that first morning. Her favourite sandwiches – expensive ham and that smelly cheese – and coffee in a brand-new thermos, bought specially. A note: You’ll be brilliant.
The first step into a world with no value on kindness. Bad luck, really. Too easy to slip into old ways.
‘No,’ Miranda admitted. ‘Maybe you didn’t know then. But you’ve known for years, Tom. That everything I love about my job, it disappears, with . . .’
‘But it’s just’ – he was plaintive – ‘a job.’
Miranda thought of Casey, out in the chaos of Bangladesh. Of Hessa, battling not to cry.
‘It’s not,’ she said. ‘It’s not just a job.’
‘But it is.’
‘Why?’ She was standing now, meeting his eyes, and the growing rage. ‘Why isn’t this enough?’
‘You’re never bloody here, Miranda.’
‘I am.’ Her voice rose. ‘I haven’t been anywhere for weeks. I’ve been crushed into this house, saying no to everything.’
No.
Not yet.
‘In your head, you’re a thousand miles away.’
‘But I’m not,’ Miranda heard herself almost scream. ‘I’m here. And I should be in Bangladesh, right now.’
‘You might as bloody well be.’
They froze, still in their beautiful kitchen.
‘Fine,’ Miranda spoke into the silence. ‘I’ll be on the next fucking plane.’
42
At the head of Sandwip pier there was a chaos of little shops. A small herd of black goats scrabbled among the litter, chewing on anything edible. By dawn, Casey and Ed were walking along the pier, gazing south down the coast. It was almost half a mile long, Sandwip pier, reaching right out over the mudflats to where the water is deep enough for the local ferry to chug in. Even this early, porters scuttled up and down, pushing wheelbarrows, or racing on motorbikes, swearing at people in their way. Beneath the rattling planks, the shallow brown water sucked at the uprights. The Sandwip ferry motored backwards and forwards, heading out to the 350,000 people who live on Sandwip island, far out in the Meghna river’s huge estuary.
To the left and the right of the pier, vast ships slumped like drunks in the mud. A crowd of workers were already scurrying around thewrecks. As they walked along the pier, the locals peered at them interestedly.
‘Ed and I will have to pretend to be a couple,’ Casey had said. ‘Tourists. The three of us together would look too odd.’
‘I’ll chill out in the hotel for a bit,’ Hessa grinned, the anger of yesterday forgotten.
Now Casey felt peacock-conspicuous, trying to ignore the stares as she gazed along the coastline.
The boat to the south of the pier must once have been a supertanker, built for efficiency not charm. Oil rainbowed the silt below her: violet, orange, electric blue, gold. Casey could make out a worker climbing carefully out of the ship. The man jumped and landed, ankle-deep in the grey-brown mud, carrying some piece of junk for the breaking yard. As Casey watched, he slipped, falling to his knees in the mud.
The ship to the north had been enormous, once. Her wreckage dripped with rust, her name painted out for shame. This ship had been a cheery cherry-red once, apple-green beneath her waterline, but only fragments remained. She was picked to a carcass, the steel of her hull stripped away.
Casey ran her hand along the pier’s rough and ready wooden barriers as a stray dog contemplated her thoughtfully. Ed was talking to a boy with a little fishing boat, maybe 10 feet long. The boy laughing, as Ed brought out his scraps of Bengali.
‘He’ll do it,’ Ed triumphed in the end. ‘Although I have no idea how many taka I have just agreed to pay him.’
A few minutes later, the boy’s little boat was grumbling its way down the coastline. The smell of sewage was sharp in the air. It seemed to take hours to manoeuvre past dozens of beached ships, the outboard motor puttering like a sewing machine.
The white fibreglass boat was a dot beside the huge hulks on the beach, but they crept as close as possible to each vast blue shape, peering up for identifying marks.
Finally Casey pointed, with relief. ‘There she is.’
Ed turned to see a familiar broad blue hull slumped in the distance. The Tephi. Her name was painted over in a splodge of black, but her shape was instantly recognisable from the photographs they had seen. The distinctive red stripe ran all the way around her, and her forest-green keel had buried itself in the mud.
They bobbed closer.
As she travelled the oceans, the Tephi would have been piled high with a Rubik’s cube of containers. Now she lay empty, slumped sideways. Beside her lay another huge shape, the Beauvallet: Casey could just make out the letters on this ship’s prow. From her shape, the Beauvallet must have once been a cruise ship. Casey imagined her in her heyday, holiday-jolly, skimming joyfully across the waves.
The Beauvallet had been hacked away in sections, bit by bit. Her bow, high up the beach, looked almost normal, but a hundred feet back the ship had been sliced cleanly from deck to mud. Patches of rust spattered the remaining hull, like a terrible plague.
The fishing boat sidled closer to the two beached ships. Compared with the other wrecks along the Bhatiari coastline, the Tephi looked new and intact. She had come to a halt in the silt, listing heavily to port.
‘She looks like she might go over altogether,’ Ed warned. ‘Incredibly dangerous for the workers.’
Casey was studying her map, trying to work out exactly where they were. She pointed towards the mudflats, hoping the boy would take them closer to the shore. But the shipyard’s workers had seen them already, and were peering down at the little boat from the height of the
Tephi’s bridge. The boy flinched away.
Behind the Tephi, the coastline rose up to straggly grass that disappeared beneath some trees. Beyond the trees, Casey guessed it was only a few hundred feet to the coast highway. In the shipyard, two huge barns faced the coast. There were no signs giving away the name of the shipyard. Behind the barns was a long, low building, with no distinguishing features. It was built of grey bricks, solid, with a blue corrugated-iron roof.
‘Could that . . .?’ Trying to see better, Casey stood up in the little boat, almost tipping it over. Beside her, the boy was cringing down in the boat, trying to hide his face from the workers.
‘Casey, come on,’ said Ed. ‘Let’s get out of here.’
‘But . . .’
‘It’s not fair, Casey.’
Ed signalled to the relieved boy, and the little fishing boat turned swiftly, chugging away, north towards the Sandwip pier.
‘Ed . . . I need to . . .’
‘What exactly are you going to be able to see from here anyway?’
‘I don’t know . . .’ Casey flicked the water with annoyance. ‘But we have to get closer . . .’
‘Not now, Casey.’
They bobbed along with the tide, Casey scrambling through her thoughts.
‘Do you know the name of that shipyard . . .’ she tried, but the boy was blank. Finally, she brought out the name of the garment factory. ‘Arakny?’
The boy glanced at her, eyes dark. Then he shook his head slowly. No.
He looked away, avoiding her eyes. Casey leaned back on his fishing nets. It was hot on the boat, with almost no breeze coming across the water. A surge of frustration. She flicked the dinghy’s painter back and forward across the water and tried to make sense of it all.
They were almost back at the pier when Casey’s phone jangled.
‘Hello, Raz,’ she answered it, her mind elsewhere.
‘I’ve got good news for you, Miss Emily.’ Raz paused, building the moment. ‘It looks like your baby will be born tomorrow. The girl is in labour, right now.’
A baby.
A baby.
A baby, almost forgotten . . .
‘Oh, Raz,’ Casey managed to whisper. ‘It feels like a miracle.’
‘It is a funny sort of miracle,’ agreed Raz. ‘And it will be soon.’
A mist was rolling in, blotting out the oily rainbow of the sea. As Raz carried on speaking, Casey sat staring over the waves. ‘Thank you, Raz,’ she murmured when a silence fell.
‘I am very glad for you and Mr Dominic,’ Raz said politely.
As he spoke, the thought of another girl, so much nearer, crowded Casey’s mind. A woman screaming, in a darkened room, as the sun disappeared from the day.
Right now. This minute. Would she be alone? Or would the other women be with her, helping her, the best they knew how? Would Romida be there too, dark eyes wide, a new fear growing?
Where are you, my girl?
‘Shall we meet you in Chittagong?’ Casey made her voice crisp. ‘Where should we come?’
As he gave her the instructions, Casey reached for Ed’s hand, and he squeezed it.
43
Although it had no windows, the room was far too bright. The hotel called this a banqueting room, but no one had feasted here for years. Strip lighting was tacked to a ceiling too low for elegance. Trestle tables were scattered here and there, with cream polyester tablecloths. Each table had a grimy blue runner down the middle, and a dusty bowl of red plastic flowers at the centre. A burble of noise came through double doors from the lobby. Chittagong’s Jalico Hotel was spelled out in blue neon behind the receptionist’s desk.
Ed and Casey sat on gold chairs, padded in faded scarlet. They were alone.
‘He said ten o’clock.’ Casey was fidgeting.
A digital clock flickered, red numbers on the wall. 10.47.
How can we go home if . . .
‘Just wait.’ Ed put his hand over hers. She stared blankly at his fingers.
But how can we go home . . .
Casey forced herself to gaze at the plastic flowers.
Where is she? The jolt again. Where is this baby right now?
10.49.
A woman screaming. Somewhere, out in this city.
Hands, clenching. Flesh, tearing.
And all the pain for nothing.
Casey thought of husbands. Waiting out in the corridors, beside cream polyester and red plastic flowers and strip lighting pinned to the ceiling. There, and not there. Vital, and quite insignificant.
10.50.
Who is she, this woman?
A mother, and yet not a mother.
What happens, in those last frantic minutes, when the pain is all there is? Gripping, and raging, and howling.
And that sudden first squall. She’s alive. She’s alive.
A baby, brought around, just for a moment: small, slippery, mewling. A hand reaching out, for a second. And the baby abruptly lifted away.
10.52.
Then the drugs, to stop the milk.
My child, and not my child.
All the dreams of a lifetime, and only a couple of seconds.
The love of a lifetime, gone. The cries, fading away down a corridor.
You never know how you can run, until you run for your daughter.
And Emily, somewhere. A mother, and not a mother.
10.56.
The double doors flew open.
Beyond the banqueting room, they were all in play. Miranda, just off the plane, was sitting in the hotel lobby, casual in jeans and an embroidered tunic. Outside, a tuk-tuk waited patiently. Up in Bhatiari, to the north of the city, Hessa was lingering just outside the gate to the shipyard, sitting on a low wall in her old blue sari.
Casey had called Savannah too.
‘I need your eyes. Can you spare a day?’
‘Well, I haven’t had a day off since I arrived in this wretched country,’ said Savannah, ‘so I guess I am owed a few.’
‘Can you come up to Chittagong?’
‘Course.’
Savannah was sitting in the entrance to a hospital in Chittagong, the one that a woman might be moved to for emergency surgery. Invisible in her charity-branded T-shirt and jeans.
‘Layla wants to help too,’ Savannah had called back, a few minutes after Casey had spoken to her. ‘She says she’s seen too much in the camps, doing all her translating work. That she wants to do something proper.’
‘That,’ Casey had said, ‘would be amazing.’
Layla was positioned a few steps away from the factory in Sagorika, queuing at a street corner, in her oldest sari.
‘But it’s still not enough,’ Casey fretted. ‘They could be being held anywhere, these women. In a suburb in Chittagong. Or out in a village in the hill tracts. Anywhere.’
‘It’s the best we can do,’ Miranda had tried to reassure her. ‘Let’s work out the rest of the plan.’
They had all strategised for hours up in Casey’s hotel room, eating endless biscuits and crisps. Casey hadn’t questioned Miranda about her sudden arrival.
‘I was a university student, you know,’ Layla had told Casey, as they tapped on their laptops side by side. ‘Before all this, before the crisis, we’d all work together on a class project just like this.’
The NGOs, paying Western rates, hoover in anyone who speaks English from across whole countries, causing ripples of difficulties in schools, in hospitals, in universities.
‘Thank you for coming up here, Layla,’ Casey said.
Layla shrugged. ‘I have been talking about surrogacy with a friend of mine in India. She works as a journalist there. I suppose one day the technology will advance, and the babies will be grown in labs, all tidy. But for now . . .’
‘It is so hard to know what’s right,’ said Casey. ‘If the women choose to do it, then—’
‘Do you really think the surrogates in India, or wherever, always get paid when they agree to carry these babies?’ Layla’s face g
rew fierce. ‘Do you think that they get to keep the money to do whatever they want?’
‘I know,’ Casey said quietly.
‘My friend said that the doctors in India needed donor eggs too.’ Layla picked up a biscuit, bit into it. ‘She said they harvest them like a rice crop. You get more money for a Caucasian egg, apparently.’
Casey met her eye. ‘Yes.’
For a second, Casey thought of witches, saving locks of hair and clips of nail and tiny drops of blood. And what would they make of an egg, just like that? Too good to be true.
‘She said the doctors put in several embryos at a time, to hurry things up,’ Layla went on. ‘And abort a few if too many take.’
‘They’ve thought of everything now,’ said Casey flatly.
‘Mind you.’ Layla rested her chin on her palms. ‘In some places, the clients go through the whole thing, and quite a long time later realise that their baby is not actually genetically theirs. Because their own embryos just weren’t working, so someone somewhere in the system just swapped them out.’
‘I heard about that,’ said Miranda.
‘In the women’s contracts,’ Layla said, ‘there is a clause saying that the girls agree be kept alive on life support if things go wrong, but there is still a chance the baby could survive.’
Emily, a thousand miles away, who wouldn’t even know when her daughter was born.
‘It’s barbaric.’
‘The things I have seen in those camps,’ said Layla. ‘Nine months after the crisis first broke out, I was showing journalists around one of the medical centres when a woman came in. She just handed over her baby, no words at all, and walked away. She had been raped by soldiers, before escaping Rakhine. Her husband had been dead for years, and there she was, pregnant. The shame of it, you know? I can still see the nurse, just holding this tiny baby, staring down in shock. Imagine it. Abandoned, as an orphan, in that camp.’
‘Poor little thing,’ said Casey.
‘But another time a different woman came into the health centre, just for a check-up,’ Layla went on. ‘She’d also been raped, but was holding her baby so close. She said, “I carried this boy for almost ten months. I had all sorts of pain and grief for him. And I gave birth to him. He is a son of the Rohingya.” ’ Layla shrugged. ‘So which woman is right? I can’t tell any more.’
