by Ruth Dugdall
When she stumbled, Uncle touches Jodie’s waist to help her from the truck. “Only one language you’ll need here,” he tells her with a wink. “We are in Luxembourg now.”
Amina doesn’t know what language he means, but she knows she doesn’t want to learn it. She wants to learn other things. She wants this to be the start of good things.
Around her is green, though a different type from her home. And muddy, which is the same. The building, though, is tall and concrete. It is not pretty, not like European homes in her imagination, but there is a white van parked outside the house and there is a swimming pool painted on the side, just like Jodie spoke about.
The back door opens and a woman stands there, well-fed and wearing a colourful apron over black clothing. She is also smiling, and half-hidden behind her back is a boy, younger than Pizzie, but still Amina’s heart softens to see him. She can only see one cheek, one eye, and a mop of dark hair, but she has the impression of a smile across his almost hidden face.
“Say Salam alaikum to your new auntie,” Uncle Jak tells them, and they all lower their heads in respect.
“Salam, Auntie,” they say, as they enter the house that smells of spices, turmeric and cayenne pepper. Amina takes this as a good sign. The boy watches them carefully, his face still half-hidden by the fabric of Auntie’s flowery apron, but as she turns back toward the stove the boy’s whole face is revealed. One eye is dark brown and seems to be smiling. The other is completely covered by a white bandage, sealed at all four edges with white tape.
“Salam alaikum,” whispers Amina. “Hello, little one.” Hoping that the boy understands. He lifts a hand to wave, but his hand is skinny and the wave is a limp-wristed attempt. Though he is smiling, Amina senses that he is unwell. He moves back, as if wanting once again to hide his bandaged eye from view.
Auntie becomes irritated with his clinging, trying to ready the meal, and she pulls her apron free. “Are you hungry, Fahran? We’ll eat soon, but you could go and wait in your room. Go and play.”
Amina can see he is reluctant to leave, with the excitement of new guests, but there is much pushing and commotion as Uncle brings in only two bags, Jodie’s and Amina’s.
“What about Safiyya and Reza?” Jodie says suspiciously, and Amina is glad to hear her ask the question she herself was wondering. “We only have one spare room,” snaps Auntie, over her shoulder. “Just space for two of you. The boy will work with my cousin in Germany. The girl will be more useful in Belgium.”
“You can’t separate us!” Reza places a hand firmly around his sister’s shoulder. She looks close to tears, but her brother is angry. “We won’t go to different countries!”
Uncle sighs. He considers the boy closely.
“The Belgian border is just fifteen minutes away, and Germany isn’t much farther. You wouldn’t be so far apart. You need to work, Reza. The work is building a café at a swimming pool in Germany.”
“But we stay together,” insisted Reza, and Amina wished that she too had a brother who would fight for her in this way.
“Impossible!” says Uncle. “I cannot have a boy in a nail salon in Bastogne! This is Europe now. With motorways and fast cars so you can forget your village idea of what is a long way to travel. We are in the heart of Europe, everything is possible.”
Auntie intervenes, she can see that the boy will not be persuaded. “Jak, let them stay together. He can work, and she can be helpful in other ways around the swimming pool. When they are settled, then is the time for the girl to move to Bastogne. But not now.”
Reza’s face relaxes, just slightly. Safiyya has her head on his shoulder, her eyes are closed, but tears run down her pale cheeks.
“Okay,” says Uncle, grudgingly. “You will both go to Germany. For now.”
Auntie reaches for Safiyya and lifts her head. “Do not cry, girl. You are now in Europe and like Uncle says, everything is possible.”
Safiyya manages a small smile and Uncle leads the twins out, back to the van.
Auntie is turned towards Fahran now and her face shows all her love, also her hope that what she has just said is true, that everything will be possible for the boy with the bad eye.
Day 2
Ellie
She won’t be sick again. And she won’t cry.
Ellie took the bottle of bleach, the heaviest thing she could find, and held it like the P.E. teacher said to throw a javelin, hurling it straight at the window. The bang was loud, ricocheting around the caravan, and that spurred her on. Again and again she picked up the bleach bottle and threw it with all her might but the window didn’t break. Her arms ached, her breath caught, and she felt anxiety threatening to overtake her, but she pushed it down and ran at the door, the weight of her seventeen years bashing against it. She began to yell with each push, and to shout again and again, hysteria taking hold now. “Help, help, help.”
She returned to the tiny window, banging her palms and screaming in frustration that there was no opening. She pulled the mattress from the bed, threw it, slammed the empty bottle of water at the door, then the bleach again. She did everything she could to attract attention, to break free.
And then, just when she was giving up hope, the caravan door opened.
Bridget
Meanwhile, Bridget stands at the window, staring out onto the street. Waiting. Her eyes, unblinking and wide with exhaustion, scanning the empty road, her ears straining for a van or car, but finds nothing. Her thoughts are running, fast, faster, until she cannot contain them. She sees then that her hands are shaking. I have to do something with my hands, she thinks. Remembers how the doctors would give the patients paper and pencils, and ask them to draw. It seemed so simple, so pathetic, but to Bridget’s surprise, it worked. A drawing, a story. Solace for the boy who had lost his mother to AIDS, whose sister was raped because she was a virgin. An old woman, mad with grief, and seven children to care for. A piece of paper, that was all she had been able to offer them. It had helped.
She remembered there was a notepad in the coffee table drawer, last used at Christmas to keep Scrabble scores, and she found it, still with the biro slid into the spiral binding. Bridget put the pen in her shaking hand, telling it to move, because she didn’t want to go mad. This was how she started: I could go mad, Ellie, with this grief. But then she strikes through this line. It was not good enough. If she was going to write to Ellie she was not going to be self-absorbed, every word must count.
Dear Ellie, she begins again. Then: Oh, my girl, I would give so much to be able to talk to you, to say these words rather than write them. But Ellie, would you listen? Can you hear me now, thinking these thoughts for you?
Bridget paused. The pen hovered above the paper.
There are things about me you should know. And then the words flowed, because this was what Bridget really wanted to say to her daughter, all these months of conflict, but had been unable to. These were the things she most wanted to say:
I know how you see me. And you’re right, I am tense, I do worry. I shout and swear too. I want you to forgive me, but I think that will only happen if you understand.
It’s just that I don’t fit. This person, the one you see, the parts of myself I can’t escape, worked well in other places. Are you bored of hearing my stories of sick people in sick places? But there, I wasn’t angry or stressed, I was the one who fixed things. I had answers, medical and moral ones. I had skills.
I wonder if my skills have gone, since I haven’t used them in so many months. In all the seventeen years that you have been alive I haven’t been the person I was best at being. Instead, I have been your mother and it seems I’m not very good at that. I’ve failed you.
I’m sorry, Ellie. You should be home. You should already be here and I don’t know what has happened, what has gone wrong, or what to do to stop it.
As Bridget waits for the police to arrive and take her statement, she does not cry. She simply stares at the words she has written to her daughter and hopes that Ell
ie can understand.
Ellie
The caravan door swung open and Ellie’s moment of elation was stolen as soon as she saw the man, his size, his thick neck, and realised that it was the bulldog man from the fair. He had been directly behind her. Speaking with Malik, after he had dropped from the bar. And later, when she had followed Malik and his beautiful friend away from the ferris wheel, this man had been there, at a distance, but watching.
“Where’s Malik?” was the question that came first, though there were others crowding in, like why was she locked in a caravan, and why she couldn’t remember anything of the night before. When the man stepped forward she had to steel herself to keep her stance, to keep her eyes fixed on his almost black pupils, squashed as they were in his doughy tanned face. His arms were thick and strong. She wouldn’t let him know she was frightened.
“Malik is working,” the man said, and his voice sounded cautious, as if she were a wild animal he had caught in a trap that may bite. “He asked me to come and check you were okay.”
“Of course I’m not fucking okay!” yelled Ellie, her resolve to keep control becoming lost to her fear and rage. “I’ve been sick. I’ve been locked in.”
“I’m sorry,” he said. “But the door was not locked, simply stuck.” Here he turned, twiddled the caravan door as if to prove the point, and held it open for her. “Come on, girlie. I’ll take you to Malik.”
“I’d rather just go home,” Ellie said, inwardly pleading that she had simply misunderstood and that it really was possible.
“Oui, home, of course. Come on then.”
She went to the open door, expecting fresh air and the gravel ground of the Glacis, but instead the door opened slap-bang into the open side of a van. Inside the van was a wooden bench and blankets on the floor.
Ellie froze, adrenalin pumped her with fight or flight energy. There was nowhere to run, so she turned, prepared to fight, but the man was solid in front of her.
“Get in the van,” he ordered.
“Fuck off!” she yelled, loud, then she screamed and kept screaming, her legs kicked, her arms thrust from her body and she fought as hard as she could.
Bridget
Bridget placed the notepad in the drawer and leaned back into the sofa, her body sinking into it gratefully though she still gazed towards the window, clutching the soft pink rabbit that Ellie had loved as a toddler and still kept on her pillow. It smelled of her daughter. Not the scent she now favoured or the acetone of her nail-polish remover that permeated her bedroom, it had her girl-hood scent, talcum powder and vanilla, and Bridget couldn’t let it go. She couldn’t get showered either, or change her clothes. She was still wearing what she had worn to Schueberfouer and deep in the weave of her jeans and jumper was the smoke, the oily stench, of the Glacis car park. It was as if to shower and change was to move time away from when she last had Ellie close, and she couldn’t do that, not until Ellie was home.
Achim had visited all of Ellie’s friends, he had been to Joe’s home three times, and had finally accepted that she was not with him. Now he was back home, upstairs in his study, and she could hear him speaking on the phone, an insisting command that she was familiar with. He must be calling the police again, urging them to do more. He had spoken with the school and insisted that they send an email to all parents. Hoping that by doing so someone would remember something, maybe a friend they weren’t aware of would share a secret.
Bridget knew it was a waste of time. She knew that Ellie should already be back and things had gone wrong. While Achim was driven to act, she could do nothing but sit and wait for her daughter to arrive home.
The police had eventually called at the house. A detective named Olivier Massard had told them that cases like this were often resolved by the teenager arriving home of their own volition. Achim had become furious, and Detective Massard has assured him that they were indeed taking the matter seriously, that everything was being done according to procedure. Achim didn’t accept that, so now he was busy doing his own detective work upstairs when she wanted him to sit beside her, to comfort her. This could be a moment that united them; God knows they needed it.
Bridget feared that if she went upstairs and saw him in his study she was in danger of grabbing the laptop and smashing it into his face, just to make him bleed. Make him wounded like she was, because she could do nothing. Life could not carry on for her until Ellie was home, and all she wanted from Achim was love, tenderness. Not his activity, his futile phone calls and trips out, scouring the areas that Ellie loved.
She took the notepad from the drawer again, finding the permanence of ink on paper, of the words, comforting. The only comfort she could find.
Dear Ellie,
There are other things you should know about me, and forgive me for not telling you before. You don’t always hear my voice, so I stay silent, but once my voice was important. Or not even my voice, but my hands. Back when I was an MSF nurse my skills were valued, I was respected.
What we had to work with in the field was so basic, you wouldn’t believe it, even if I showed you photos. How could you, with your privileged life, even begin to understand how people live in houses built of tin sheets, how they clamber on rubbish heaps for food, how they lack shoes. It was amazing to behold, and I saw it often, how tough the soles of their feet became, as if the foot took on the thickness of leather. Maybe their hearts had the same protection, because I honestly don’t know how so many people continued to shuffle forward with such huge burdens of loss. I remember a woman shouting at gunmen, and seeing behind her the shape of a boy, blood seeping beneath him. Yet she had the energy to shout. Maybe she was asking them to shoot her too, I know I would have.
Even then, and this was years before I had you or had even met your father, I knew that I could never bear such loss. So many nights I would torture myself with the images of the day, and I would add up my failings with this patient or that. If I had made a different decision, had more energy, palpitated the heart for longer… Each evening, late, I drank and I smoked, like we all did, because it was something to keep the demons at bay.
If you were here now you’d call me a hypocrite. I was so mad at you when you came home after that night at Joe’s house with a hangover. And furious when I smelt the cannabis in your bedroom. But you never asked how I knew the smell, and I should have told you. So I’m telling you now that I used drugs often, because it helped.
But what excuse do you have? What suffering have you seen, what life-changing decisions have you made? I know it’s not your fault, but I got angry with you, and I’m sorry for that.
I’ve always tried to protect you, Ellie. I never want to be that woman, standing over her child and crying out for mercy. I’ve seen, first hand, the very worst of human behaviour and it scares me. I’ve always done what I can to protect you from that, but you won’t listen. You won’t have me tell you that world is a dangerous place, you had to discover that for yourself.
Well, now you have, so you can come back to me.
Can you hear me shouting out? Can you hear me calling you?
Please come home.
Cate
The first sign that anything was different happened when Cate pulled up at the “kiss and drop” section of the school car park. She was approached by the regular security guard, who acted as bouncer of the school campus. This time, rather than simply waving her on, the guard came and opened the car door to let Amelia out.
“Moien. May I check that you will be collecting her tonight?”
“Of course.”
The second sign was the pained look on the other mothers’ faces, who were standing in tight groups talking, rather than dashing off to the gym or café or shops.
Rather than driving back home, where General would be waiting with his legs crossed, desperate for his morning walk, Cate pulled into a parking space and got out of the car. She wandered deliberately close to a gaggle of women in designer jackets with sunglasses propped on their glossy manes,
to see what they were discussing with such stricken faces. The group wasn’t speaking English, but even though Cate couldn’t make out most of the words, which sounded Russian, the same name kept repeating on their glossy lips: Ellie. Ellie Scheen.
Now that Cate looked around she noticed that the security guards were doubled in number, and even grumpier looking than usual. All wore orange day-glow jackets over their dark suits, despite the nineteen degree heat, and this at eight thirty in the morning.
Amidst the gaggle of women, Cate saw a face she recognised, a nervy Canadian woman who had been designated by the Parents Association to meet her for coffee in the school canteen when she first arrived, one of the group’s welcome services. That she had the task suggested to Cate that the woman wasn’t high on the pecking order, had not yet risen to the heights of organising the wine-tasting event or the autumn charity ball. Cate racked her brain for the woman’s name and once it clicked she called out, “Mary-Ann!” No response from the Canadian who was walking swiftly towards the school entrance, so Cate yelled again, “Mary-Ann!”
She turned, saw Cate and gave a feeble wave. She seemed to be distracted by the security officers. Cate saw that Mary-Ann’s face was drained of colour and she looked anxious.
“Hi, Mary-Ann. Do you know what’s going on?”
There was a moment when Cate saw that, along with anxiety, Mary-Ann was also experiencing the sense of importance that comes with holding privileged information. Her eyes sparkled and she paused before she spoke.
“This morning the Parents’ Association received an email from the principal. A girl from school went missing from Schueberfouer. One of the older pupils, a bit of a rebel apparently.”
Mary-Ann spoke quietly, but the gaggle of Russian women stopped talking and moved closer.
One said, in an awed voice, “It is not the first time! A boy was taken before, just outside of Luxembourg. In Ikea. A Swedish boy, just seven years old, with very blond hair.”
