Drown My Books

by Penny Freedman

  I turn to go back home. I gave my details in my phone call; they can find me. I am shaking so hard now that they may find me collapsed on the pebbles, too, if I don’t get inside. Caliban is reluctant to leave so I lean down to put him on his lead, and that is when I see the book, lying open, face down, on the far side of Kelly’s body, her copy of The World’s Wife. I shall be rebuked for this later, by the police, but I can’t leave a book – a library book at that – lying out in the rain. I pick it up and take it home with me.

  Back at the house, I rub Caliban down with a disgusting old towel kept for the purpose, put the kettle on, change out of my wet trousers and look for something alcoholic to put in my coffee. This is not easy. I don’t mind becoming a weird, scary, cliff-dwelling woman but I won’t become a sad old drunk. I can see the temptation of the comforting glass or three in the evening, when my own company begins to lose its charm, so I don’t keep spirits in the house and I buy wine sparingly, one bottle at a time. I have some cooking brandy, though, left over from making the Christmas cake, and I slop some into my mug, surprised to see how shaky my hand still is.

  As I start to feel better, I take a look at Kelly’s book. Why on earth did she take it to the beach with her? This has been nagging at me: a woman lying on a beach, book and beach towel beside her. It is like a grotesque version of summertime normality. What was she thinking, and what went wrong? I spread the book out on the kitchen table. It was lying face down, so the sticky-back plastic coating that the library service puts on its books has saved it a bit from the rain, but the inner pages are sodden from the wet pebbles. I insert sheets of kitchen paper between the wettest pages so they don’t stick together, and I see, as I do so, that the book has been defaced. Someone has drawn a circle in red felt pen round the title and opening lines of the poem Medusa. Did Kelly do that? Medusa was a gorgon, with snakes for hair, who could turn a man to stone just by looking at him. And haven’t we all wanted to do that from time to time? It would certainly be my superpower of choice – far more useful than being able to fly or mind-read, in my opinion. Was that what Kelly was after with her alarming hair?

  I hear sirens approaching and go upstairs to look out of my bedroom window. The one interesting feature of the front facades of these otherwise unremarkable houses is that the upper front windows are angled outwards – two windows, meeting at an angle, with a triangular sill inside, just big enough to make a window seat. Looking out of the left-hand window, I can see an ambulance and a police car. Two paramedics come running along past the house and disappear down the steps. I have no view of the top of the beach from here because the sea wall is in the way. All I can see is some milling about around the police car and another car that has now arrived. I think about getting an injured person up those steps; they would surely have to winch her up over the sea wall, like Cleopatra hauling Antony up into her monument. Easier to bring up a body, of course. The paramedics return; they are not running now.

  I go downstairs to consult the kitchen clock; one of the affectations of my new life is that I don’t wear a watch. It is not yet ten o’clock but I would like to crawl back into bed. I consider this as an option but I need to plan what I’m going to do with my asylum seekers this afternoon, so I get out my work bag and consider once again what one really needs to be able to say when living on borrowed time in an unfriendly foreign land. I have hardly got started when my doorbell rings and I find a young man on my step, waving a police identification card at me.

  He is DC Aaron Green and he looks extremely young. I don’t comment on this, though, as I do like to avoid clichés. I sit him down, provide him with coffee and answer his questions. He does pretty well with his questioning. Personally, I would have taken things in a different order, but he covers the ground in the end. In the course of our interview, I tell him who Kelly is and how I came to find her. I tell him that she runs the village shop, lives alone and has no relatives that I know of, apart from her father, now wandering far in the wilderness of dementia. I suggest that Matthew O’Dowd (phone number supplied) might be able to give him more information. Asked about the nature of their relationship, I reply that I really couldn’t say, but he delivers her newspapers. I tell him that she swam every morning without fail, and it is only when he asks whether other people knew about her morning swim that I realise that the police suspect unnatural causes.

  When DC Green has gone, I look again at Kelly’s book. I should have handed it over to him, of course, but I wanted a chance to look through it when it is dry, to see if she marked anything else. If she marked it at all, of course. That circle could have been made by any borrower, at any time, I know, but the Medusa image fits Kelly too well for me to discount its being her work. Kelly is Medusa until someone tells me otherwise.

  I decide to record the BBC news for my class this afternoon. One of the things I discovered early on with these students is how isolated they feel from the wider world. The B&Bs some of them live in are not the sort that boast TVs in every room; they can’t afford newspapers and if they once owned smart phones they have, without exception, had them stolen in the course of getting here. They are desperate for news, hungry for information, so I persuaded Ruth and Ernest, who organise these classes, to invest in a combi TV/DVD player, which I found in a charity shop, and install it at the hall. There is no aerial there, so they can’t watch live TV but we can watch recordings. The BBC news is their favourite, and listening and arguing is excellent language practice. They frequently know more than I do about the background to foreign news stories, so I am learning quite a bit, too, and it’s good for them to be telling rather than asking.

  It feels odd to be going off to teach as usual after the day’s dramatic start, but there is nothing I can do here and work, I have always found, is a great distraction from life. My teaching session starts, as ever, with organising the canteen-style tables and folding chairs in the hall. At the beginning, I had the tables arranged conference fashion, pushed together so that we could all sit round like the adults we are, but I realised that a lot of the women were uncomfortable with that sort of proximity and now we have the tables set out in lines, facing me, with two students to a table. The men and the women sit on different sides of the room, as they will generally in any classroom, actually, whatever their cultures or religions. The women seem fairly content to sit two to a table, but the men will claim a table to themselves if they get the chance, and I don’t notice friendships developing, people regularly sitting together or working together. I take an informal register at the start of the class but if I ask where an absentee is I get no response. In my past life, teaching overseas students in a British university, I was used to rapidly developing friendships, love affairs, group solidarity, the emotional energy of young people settling in for a two-, three- or four-year experience, eager for friendship, open to newness, excited by life. If my asylum seekers were ever eager, open or excited – as no doubt some of them were – those dangerous emotions have long been knocked out of them. These students are watchful, anxious and mistrustful at best, traumatised and suicidal at worst. They are not making social connections for their projected future; they barely know where they will sleep tomorrow night. And they are not really students, I have to remind myself. Ask any of them to describe him or her self and ‘student of English’ would come very far down on their list.

  I have eight students this afternoon. This is an average catch; there can be as many as twelve and, occasionally, when I sense that there is some sort of crisis but nobody is willing to talk about it, as few as three. Farid is here, I am glad to see, and most of my regulars.

  There are three men besides Farid: Hassim, a hyper-voluble Iraqi who is, I think, acutely post-traumatic and given to unnerving fits of laughter; Hani, a gentle, silent Saudi lad, who is here, I conjecture, because he is gay, and Jing Wei, whose story Ruth has told me. Tricked by traffickers, he was shipped here from China and locked in a house where his job was to tend cann
abis plants. He managed to escape and has applied for asylum because he fears the retribution of the traffickers if he is returned to China. He fears them here, too, but touchingly believes that the law will protect him here.

  Among the four women is a pair of teenage sisters, Yaema and Aminata, from Sierra Leone, fleeing from forced marriages to men three times their age. I asked Ruth how they managed to finance their journey and she told me that they stole the money their father had been given as their bride price. They haven’t yet had the optimism of youth knocked out of them but I don’t think they stand a chance: in the eyes of the UK Border Agency they are thieves, and they will be happy to send them back to face the consequences. The other two women are older: one is Soraya, an Iranian English professor, who has privately told me her story. She fell foul of the authorities through her teaching of English Literature, spent six months in prison, was released only after her parents raised the money to pay an enormous fine, and came here in conditions of such horror she still can’t talk about them. Her English is excellent but she comes to classes because she finds the atmosphere of a classroom soothingly familiar. And after all, as she says, what else is there to do? Ivy, from Zimbabwe, doesn’t really need the classes either. English is her second language, after Shona, but she comes, I think, because she would go mad on her own. When her husband was brutally beaten by the police at a political meeting, they knew that it would not be long before he was arrested. They made their way to Britain in a series of container lorries but many people got sick and their two small sons died on the journey. Her husband is being held at the Immigrant Removal Centre, threatened with deportation to Zimbabwe since the bureaucrats see ‘no credible threat’ to him there. Ivy’s own case is still under review since she is a year older than her husband, born in 1981, before the British Nationality Act, which may make all the difference. She says nothing; I don’t know how much she understands; sometimes she rocks herself in silent grief. I would say that this is the saddest story I have heard, but in this business another will always come along to trump it.

  I start this afternoon’s session by telling them that my dog found a dead body on the beach this morning. This may seem a bit unorthodox but I often start by telling them what I have been doing. I have been used, with more privileged students, to getting them to talk about what they have been doing: Did anyone do anything interesting over the weekend? It is good speaking practice, shaping a narrative and holding people’s interest. It is not a strategy for these students, though: anything out of the way that happens to them is likely to be bad and, anyway, they have learnt that anything they say may be used in evidence against them. So I tell them things instead: the doings of my cat and dog, the occasional anecdote about my grandchildren, things I have seen in my walks along the beach, small domestic dramas. It is not exciting, my life, but I do my best with it. Perhaps I want to remind them about normality, to make them believe that there is the possibility of a dull, uneventful life once they get off the precarious cliff face that is their current existence.

  So I tell them my story. ‘An extraordinary thing happened to me this morning,’ I begin, and off I go. It occurs to me that my experience may not seem so shocking to them, that some of them – maybe most – will have seen dead bodies before, casualties of conflicts at home or of the brutal journeys they have made to escape, but they actually look disturbed. Looking at them, seeing how the mood of the class has tensed up, has shifted from mild interest in what I may have to offer to an unsettled, edgy alertness, I realise that this is the last thing they want to hear. Despite the hostile natives and the heartless bureaucracy, the UK is their place of safety, their asylum. The last thing they want to hear is that one’s neighbours can turn up as dead bodies here, casually dumped on beaches. And Farid looks horrified, white-faced and intent. He thinks it might be Dora, I think. Of course he does. ‘The body of a young woman, someone I knew,’ I said, but nothing more. It feels disrespectful to say any more about Kelly; the purple hair, the daily swim, these seem like tittle-tattle. I can put Farid out of his misery, though, even if I can’t dispel the unease of the rest of them.

  ‘The young woman,’ I say, catching Farid’s eye, ‘ran our local shop. Everyone in the village knew her.’

  His face changes but does not relax. He puts his head in his hands. I abort my blundering anecdote and busy myself with the TV. I have recorded three news items: a first meeting of officials from China and Taiwan after sixty-five years, which I put in for Wei, although he doesn’t seem to be much interested, the Winter Olympics under way in Sochi and a second round of UN-brokered negotiations in Syria between the Assad government and a consortium from the US, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Russia and Switzerland, undermined by the Syrian government’s decision to put the names of members of the opposition on a list of wanted terrorists.

  We start with Sochi. The teenage girls, who are usually bored by the news, quite like the snippets of athletes in action, and when the BBC’s pundit on the spot reflects on the difficulties that have emerged in the run-up to the games – corruption among officials, legislation threatening LGBT athletes and supporters, and the danger from Jihadists – everyone except Hani and Ivy has something to say. I let the two of them be: I don’t want to embarrass Hani by challenging him, and Ivy is in some unreachable place that even I won’t blunder into. We move on to the item on Syria. Anything about the Middle East, let alone Syria, usually gets Farid talking but today his mind is only half on it, and the others accept the story with weary cynicism. That’s how governments are, their faces tell me. What else do you expect?

  I wrap up the desultory discussion and move on to a vocabulary exercise. Form filling. This is an activity that looms large in their lives, as you can imagine, and it is one of the ways in which the bureaucrats set out to break them. I try putting it this way to them in an attempt to rouse some fighting spirit, but I get anxious frowns in response, so we buckle down to domicile and abode (definitions of and distinction between), marital status and dependants, eligibility and validity, registration and extension, tenancy agreement and sole occupancy. When we have been through these, they have some other queries: Hani says he has been called for screening and asks what it involves. I realise that the medical associations of the word are alarming and assure him that no intrusive physical examinations will be involved – just a bout of unfriendly questioning. Soraya asks whether the lawyers on the list she has been given of regulated advisors, work for the government, and I tell her that the regulated bit means only that their qualifications have been checked and they are not frauds. I don’t add that, though not frauds, they are unlikely to be any good, asylum work being the least well-paid legal work and those doing it – barring the occasional saint – forced into it for want of anything better. What is the point of discouraging her, after all? Finally, Ivy, who is applying for a British passport, rouses herself to ask what a Crown Dependency is, since coming from one of those seems to make life easy. I tell her that I’m sure Zimbabwe is not one, though I’m not sure which places are. Gibraltar? The Falkland Islands? Maybe just the Channel Islands?

  I would like to find something upbeat to finish with but nothing comes to mind. They drift away until only Farid remains.

  ‘I’m sorry, Farid,’ I say, as I extract the DVD from its slot. ‘I gave you a fright. Did you think I was talking about Dora?’

  ‘Her father,’ he mutters. ‘I thought her father…’

  I stop my fussing with the DVD player and turn to look at him properly. ‘He would never hurt her, Farid,’ I say. ‘He’s not that kind of man. He just wants to protect her.’

  ‘He doesn’t feel his honour is harmed?’

  ‘Well, it’s embarrassing, you must admit, if you’re an Orthodox priest and you find that your daughter is seeing a Muslim, but Dimitris Karalis is big enough to cope with that.’

  ‘I haven’t heard from her since yesterday. I send her text messages but she doesn’t answer.’


  ‘Well, she may have promised her father not to contact you. Or he may have taken her phone away. I did that once or twice when my daughters were teenagers.’

  ‘Because they were seeing boys you didn’t like?’

  ‘Actually, I usually liked the boys. It was more a question of the money. Long calls to a boyfriend who was on holiday with his family in Morocco. That sort of thing.’

  He looks around. ‘Can I pack up these tables?’ he asks.

  ‘That would be great.’

  Released by not having to look at me, he says, as he stacks a folded table against the wall, ‘I feel I made her die, you know, by wishing.’

  ‘Kelly? Why?’

  ‘She was the one. She told Dora’s father, when he was in the shop. She saw us together at the bus stop one day. She said she would tell him.’

  I am really not surprised. There was always an edge to Kelly, a sour resentment of a world that wasn’t treating her well. The years of looking after her father must have been hard; maybe Dora was a particular annoyance to her, loved and secure under her father’s wing.

  ‘You know that’s irrational, don’t you, Farid?’ I say. ‘If wishes were knives to the heart, there would have been a lot of dead people in my life by now.’

  He manages a smile. ‘So what do you think I should do?’ he asks.

  ‘About Dora? I guess she would like you just to give up.’

  ‘No!’ He bangs a table into place. ‘You don’t understand how it is between us. It is – important.’

  There are tears in his eyes and I can feel an answering welling-up in mine. Why shouldn’t he have this, I think, when he’s lost everything else?

  ‘Leave it with me,’ I say. ‘We’ve got a meeting of the book group tomorrow night. I’ll try and find out what she wants. If she knows, herself.’