Breach

by Olumide Popoola

  When it’s me and him I can make him laugh. He will say, ‘You’re not as funny as you think,’ but he will still laugh.

  Like when I told him, ‘I know now! Twins plus one.’

  And he looked at me with his what now? look. I pointed at Ibrahim, Suleyman and Alghali.

  He laughed.

  I put my hand on GPS’s shoulder. He jumps a little. He hasn’t yet come back from where he went this time.

  ‘We’re getting ready.’

  I don’t believe it will take eleven minutes. Everything so far has taken longer.

  It’s quiet. Nobody is saying anything. I can only see where my feet are touching the street and the edge of a field on this side. The houses have stopped. Calculate and MG are ahead of us – I saw their shadows passing the sign. I check my phone. They made it in nine minutes. Calculate wanted to see whether all was clear. If not he would warn us, because Suleyman cannot run today. They will be waiting for us. I wasn’t in the mood to hurry myself. Why? Eleven is eleven. It’s not less than eleven.

  The twins plus one, GPS and I are walking by the side of the street. We make it in seventeen minutes. That’s good enough.

  There is nothing special on the other side. It looks the same. But now we are in France.

  I can hear his ringtone, an old pop song, before I can see his shadow. I have heard it so many times in the last few days it drives me crazy. I said to GPS, ‘Why can’t he put it on vibrate?’ I don’t want someone to notice us. GPS agreed. We arrive where they are waiting for us. Calculate answers his phone and walks off.

  He is back in less than two minutes, sweating.

  ‘Let’s go.’

  It is annoying. We were going. We only stopped because of him. But I cannot say this. I look at GPS; my eyes are rolling, but he doesn’t see it. Calculate rushes ahead now, pulling MG with him. He walks arm in arm, but I can see it’s not to be close to MG. Not this time. It’s because he wants to show us that we are too slow for him. MG turns around, confused, but there is nothing he likes more than being close to Calculate. Except talking about his brother.

  Ibrahim says, ‘We can’t walk all the way to the train station. We have to stop somewhere to rest. Suleyman –’

  But Calculate has already gone. I don’t think he knows where he’s going. GPS hasn’t even shown him the map on the phone. But this is the only street here. After some time, we see them waiting.

  ‘We better –’ Ibrahim is pointing with his head at Suleyman. He is really trying today, trying to become three instead of plus one.

  MG and Calculate are like stones. The air has run away from them. Calculate has one knee on the ground, MG’s black plastic bag and his leather jacket in front of him.

  ‘I was only checking.’

  MG’s face, which can shine like the sun, is closed. Much more than GPS’s has ever been. His body is shaking as if he is on vibrate and someone is calling him on repeat. I walk up to him.

  ‘What’s wrong, little brother?’

  ‘I went for a pee over there…’ MG’s voice is crawling over his lips.

  GPS asks Calculate, ‘What happened?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  Calculate gets up. There is money in his hand.

  ‘I was just checking to see what is left –’

  ‘It’s not yours! It’s mine! My brother sent it.’

  ‘I was just trying… We are all tired, we need to take the train.’

  MG presses his eyes shut.

  Calculate is getting angry now.

  ‘I need to get to Calais. I have to make the last train. Someone is waiting for me.’

  I still try to understand what I am seeing. Since we first met, Calculate has called MG ‘son’.

  ‘An agent. It’s already paid… My family, they are waiting. Waiting for me to get them out.’

  Calculate is angry because all his things were stolen in Puglia. He has nothing but his good English. He went to the police. I wanted to ask him if he was stupid but now that I know him I think that his anger makes him do things no one can understand. Not even he himself. He didn’t think. Next thing he was standing in a police station and someone wanted to fingerprint him. But you can’t get fingerprinted there. Unless you want to stay. Italy is like Greece. Collapsed. There is no future there. It won’t come if you stay. Your future will disappear. And I have already seen that. In my own village.

  That’s when he ran, found us, walked off with us as if we were friends.

  I step forward and take the money out of Calculate’s hand. It’s more than twenty euros. Enough for the train but not enough for two. MG takes the money, tears on his face. GPS comes over too and touches his hair.

  Calculate is standing with his hands open, like GPS did when he told me about to compensate. His shoulders are trying to say sorry, they sweep the floor. But his mouth does other things.

  ‘I have a son. A real son. I left him. They are waiting for me… I need to…’

  Alghali says, ‘We have shared whatever we have with each other. Not by force, not by theft, but by choice.’

  Suleyman speaks too: it sounds like it hurts him. ‘Just because we put it all together doesn’t mean you can take it.’

  But Calculate’s cleverness has collapsed – he is losing everything he knows.

  ‘Do you understand? There is a boy like you waiting for me to get him to safety. My son, my real son.’

  MG pushes us away. He looks at Calculate. Nobody is making a sound. He takes some time, then he clears his throat. His lips form an O; his tongue helps to push it out, the spit. It lands, summing everything up, right in front of Calculate.

  We all move now. All of us. Except Calculate. I say to MG, ‘Adnan, you really are someone.’

  MG smiles. It’s sad but he is also proud. I have never called him by his name.

  ‘I have it from my brother.’

  We walk for a bit without talking. Calculate is behind but he is too far gone – he is not part of the group any more.

  MG says, ‘Thank you,’ turning to all of us.

  I ask, ‘For what?’

  He puts his arm through mine and through GPS’s on the other side and starts walking again.

  ‘Welcome to France, Michelle.’

  Suleyman starts laughing, but his chest pushes up too much and he holds it, bending over, coughing. Harh-harh-harh. GPS opens his face; the laughter falls out like his hands: beautiful and long.

  The Terrier

  My concern on that particular afternoon was to prevent the boy from walking into the bathroom, where Luc was on his knees, swearing. I call Luc a friend. We’ve known each other for many years, so I’m aware of his politics. Now, I don’t lie, not for anyone, certainly not to placate Luc, but it would be so much easier if the boy – I could hear him walking up the path – did not appear at the bathroom door. He wouldn’t need to say a single one of his new French words. Luc is no fool and his brother lives close to that open space on the dunes near the harbour where the camp is, the place they’re calling the Jungle, so Luc is familiar with the migrants who stay there. He would recognise the young man’s olive skin, his dark eyes, in an instant. His stance, even, would give him away. And what do I know? A plumber like Luc, so attuned to the stink of shit, might pick up some odour from the life in that dirty camp.

  But he didn’t appear, the boy, thank God. I heard him start across the kitchen, then turn back to remove his shoes and leave them by the door, as I’d asked him to. Why he goes back to that camp, day after day, in the wind and cold and rain, now that they have rooms in this warm house, I don’t know, but I’m not having him tramp filth and disease into my establishment. Next, he padded down the passage in his socks to his sister’s room, knocked on the door and went in. Sometimes they shout at each other in there, or she wails and cries, but that day, the day she blocked the toilet, they only murmured and I was relieved.

  Luc heard them and looked up at me, plunger in one plastic-gloved hand, his lips turned down like a cartoon character. �
�Foreign?’ he asked and I nodded. Luc snorted. He thinks I’m crazy, allowing strangers into my home. If he’d known these two were not tourists but refugees, dear God, I hate to think what he’d have said. He loses no chance to rail against them, all of them, with their tents and shacks. Trash strewn far and wide, and the noise at night, terrible thumping music distorted on the wind, waking his brother in his own bed. How are his nieces to walk safely with all those men hanging around? Luc holds the bald bowl of his head in his hands when he starts to rage. It burns him. He could spit. Sometimes he does, but not in my bathroom.

  Let me be frank, I wouldn’t miss Luc as a friend, but a good plumber is hard to replace.

  I walked him to his van when he was done, the bloody cotton wool extracted and the flush functional again. But I’d caught Luc’s anger, or perhaps it was the strain of keeping those two a secret. I closed the kitchen door hard, stamped through the house and knocked on the girl’s door. My home, for God’s sake. My grandparents’ farmhouse. I might welcome the city council’s money in these lean winter months – especially since tourists were being scared off by news footage of rampaging migrants on the motorway – but by God I wouldn’t have this disrespect for my property.

  Bang, bang, bang.

  The boy opened the door. On the bed behind him, his sister hugged her knees and bent her head, her face hidden by the headscarf.

  ‘She is sorry, madame,’ he said. ‘She apologises. I apologise for her.’

  He didn’t look contrite. What I felt from him was defeat but with something iron hard beneath it. A proud rage.

  I couldn’t let it go.

  ‘It’s no good,’ I said. Seeing them there, my anger was fading, but I blew on the ashes. I spoke firmly. ‘You need to take more care,’ I said.

  He bowed his head. Then he drew a few notes from the pocket of his jeans, euros, grubby and worn, and made to offer them to me.

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ I said.

  It was the worst thing to say. His eyes turned icy. The girl sniffed back tears, looking up at me from the bed.

  It’s you who are ridiculous, I told myself. I put my hand on his arm. ‘No, no,’ I said. ‘The insurance will pay for the toilet. But your sister needs pads and there’s a bin in the bathroom –’

  But he cut me off. It horrified him. ‘I cannot talk about these things, madame,’ he said.

  He almost pushed me aside in his haste to leave. The girl watched him go, then put her head down and cried some more. The kitchen door slammed and I heard his quick footsteps on the gravel. Heading back to the camp, I supposed, even though it was getting dark. It called him, that place. People there spoke his language, something shared. Whereas my home, my home tongue, everything French, he wanted to escape.

  The girl sat folded over herself on the child’s bed. My old bed, in fact, in the room where I used to sleep when I visited Grand-mère and Grand-père, and still my favourite room in the house, decorated now with a nautical theme for smaller visitors – floorboards painted white, seashells on the windowsills and a crisp blue-and-white-striped duvet. Shipshape. And here, under the bright stripes, this forlorn stranger. Her time of the month and I’d made no provision for it. It hadn’t crossed my mind.

  I dug around in my drawer of guest toiletries to find the pads that I’d bought when I’d first inherited the farm and started the bed and breakfast. I drew the girl by the hand to the bathroom to show her the roll of plastic bags in a drawer and the little bin. I pointed through the window at the big bin outside where she could throw the bags away. It was all done in sign language and my basic English – she had no word of French and barely any English either – and she nodded quietly at each instruction. Unlike her brother’s, her eyes are eerily blue, blue-green but transparent in the way that clear water flowing over sand is transparent, full of light. She generally kept them downcast or fixed on her brother, so it was arresting, it gave me pause, to have her meet my eyes so directly.

  I called her into the kitchen and put the kettle on to make tea. She surprised me then, coming over to where I stood and putting her hands on my waist, looking up at me from under her headscarf – I’m not tall but she is tiny – and then burying her face in my neck, planting three breathy kisses there. Like butterfly wings beating, I thought, and I am not a woman who is given to fanciful notions.

  I call him Omid, the young man. It’s the name he asked me to use when they arrived, he and his sister, and he said I was to call the girl Nalin. They’d stood on the doorstep at first, behind the official from the city council, in the kind of bulky jackets you’d wear for camping or farming, her headscarf under the green jacket hood. The first thing I noticed about him was how tired he seemed: not physically, not in the sense that he needed sleep, although perhaps that too, but a weariness in his eyes and his voice. Old before his time, as the saying goes.

  ‘Who is this in the photograph?’ he asked me in the dining room the morning after Luc’s visit. I was toasting bread for their morning meal. Not my home-baked bread, I should say, which I make with coarse-ground wholewheat and a seed-rich crust, but rather a sliced brown loaf from Lidl. They wouldn’t know the difference, I told myself. They’re not about to rate my cooking on TripAdvisor.

  I assumed he meant the photograph of my grandfather, family hero, wartime Resistance fighter. Everyone asks about Grand-père. But when I turned, it was a different photograph he was looking at.

  ‘That’s me,’ I said. ‘And that’s the same motorbike that’s out there on the path, under the cover.’

  He walked past the shrouded bike every day on his way to or from the camp, but now he looked out of the window to check, then back at the photograph.

  ‘This is you, madame?’

  In the photo, I am wearing tight jeans, an air of bravado and no helmet. Today, I’m a little stouter perhaps, and my hair is short, but otherwise not so different, I wouldn’t have thought.

  ‘You ride that big bike, madame?’

  I would’ve liked to claim that I rode it every day, just to shock him, but, as I have said, lying is not something that I do easily.

  ‘Hardly ever,’ I said.

  ‘Ha!’ he said. ‘I want to see that, madame. I want to see you ride that bike.’

  I hadn’t seen him smile before, not in this open way, almost grinning. Before this, when he had smiled it had been from politeness, a wan expression wrung out of grim depths. Now I could see the boy he was meant to be, amused and handsome.

  Nalin asked him something in Kurdish and he replied and she got up from the breakfast table to peer at the photograph with him and smile at me and giggle. Who had they thought me before this? An ageless crone, without any life or history of my own? And why not, really? Why should they have any attention to spare from their own predicament? When I brought fresh toast from the kitchen, I patted the top of Nalin’s head as I went back to boil the kettle.

  I had no idea how long they would stay, these two. When the city official brought them that first day, she didn’t tell me and I didn’t ask. She was concerned with the here and now: how the council would transfer payment to my account, what costs I could and could not expect to be refunded. In the newspapers and on television, the press goaded the government from every side, some demanding, as Luc did, that they close the camp and send these people away, and others, outraged, attacking the authorities for abandoning refugee children in that camp in winter. I’d accepted payment in advance for both my rooms for two weeks, including all meals. I was living in the present too, of course: how to cover my heating bill after almost a month with no guests. A few days later, I called the office. The man asked for the refugees’ names. I told him the names they’d given me, but they rang no bells so I gave my name instead. Well, the official said, he could see the record but unfortunately no, he couldn’t tell me when the council would move them. He would ask. He would call me back.

  As if bureaucrats call anyone back. It wasn’t like I was turning away reservations, so I let it rest. I told
none of my acquaintances that they were here, this sister and brother, in my house – no one from my bridge club, not even Marianne when we spoke, as usual, a few times every week. At first I was embarrassed, perhaps even ashamed, to be earning money in this way. But it’s my own business and nobody else’s, I told myself. It’s not as though I’m lying to anyone.

  Next day, when I drove in at the gate, Omid ran out to help me bring in the shopping, pulling up the hood of his jacket against the drizzle, splashing through the puddles in the driveway. It surprised me to find Nalin standing in her coat by the kitchen door. She held the door open for me and Omid.

  ‘Nalin is lonely,’ Omid said. ‘We go to see her friend.’

  She questioned him in Kurdish – asking what he’d said, I guessed – and he replied, an impatient big-brother tone in his voice. On the kitchen table, I saw a note. ‘We go to see our friends,’ it said. So they had meant to be gone before I returned. This I approved of. It pleased me, somehow, that they asked me so little. If I wanted to help them, it was purely my own decision. I too am proud. I don’t like to be pushed.

  ‘I must go into town now,’ I told them. ‘I will give you a ride to the camp.’

  ‘Oh no, madame,’ Omid said. ‘I know a short way to walk there.’

  ‘But your sister will get wet.’

  And so they climbed in, Nalin in the back, Omid beside me in the passenger seat. They were quiet; we didn’t speak. In the rear-view mirror, I could see Nalin looking out of the window and I realised that she hadn’t left the house since she first entered it more than a week before. I’d served their food and left them to it, just as I would have with any of my guests. Oh, that’s not true. With most guests I would also talk a little, and then a little more if they had questions. That’s what people want in a B&B: good food, some charm, a few local stories but not too much. I am the host and cook, not a friend.