by Ruth Dugdall
Fighting back tears, Amina wants to hold Jodie, and tell her she’s only a girl and not ready to be a wife yet, that they have their whole futures ahead of them. If they work and learn. But Jodie is too interested in boys as the ticket to a better future, to that house with the swimming pool she wants so badly. Amina has only met Malik a few times, but he always works with Uncle Jak, and so Jodie has seen him plenty. Amina fears for her friend, she fears for Omi too. She wishes more than anything to be free from this. All of this.
“You know, Amina. When Malik said ‘wife’ he looked at me like I was a delicious treat, so he could swallow me whole. He said my titties look like pieces of okra for him to chew.”
Amina reaches forward to grasp her friend’s leg. “Jodie, you mustn’t let him say these things to you. He is Uncle’s son, so like a brother to us. He is supposed to look after us.”
Jodie waved her hand dismissively. “Auntie won’t let him do anything bad! She was there and shooed him away, kicking his backside as he left. He’s frightened of her.”
Amina felt calmer, knowing that. Auntie wasn’t easy to like but Amina felt safe with her and that was more important.
“I don’t think he’s Uncle’s son, anyway. Malik does not call him father.”
Then Amina remembered that for once she had some news to share.
“Auntie put me to work in the front of the shop, where the customers are, but with a warning: ‘Nosy customers ask questions, so you no speak to them. Remember, you “non parlez anglaise”, okay? Once they know you do it will be, you so pretty, how old you are and then why you not in school. Next thing we in trouble. Nosy pushy, should just shut up and let us paint them nails, they so rich they can’t paint them on they own. Probably have maid at home cleaning up they shit while we file and polish.’”
Amina mimics Auntie’s voice and likes it that Jodie can’t stop laughing. She could always make Pizzie laugh. Never with words like this though; she can feel herself changing, becoming braver. More Western.
When Jodie caught her breath she put her hand over Amina’s knee. “Auntie is right about that, though. We, all of us, just seem the same to those Western types. They don’t see where we come from, our long history, our different stories. All they see is our brown skin. You and me, we speak Arabic differently, we follow different customs because our homes are far apart. But not to them.”
Amina didn’t tell her, but all the whites she had met so far looked similar. Sounded it too, loud booming voices, fleshy legs and arms, straight long hair. No wrinkles but shiny skin where the wrinkles belonged. Auntie had told Amina that these white women inject poison into their faces to freeze the lines, but she thought this must be a joke, as surely no-one would be so stupid. Wrinkles are pretty, Amina’s mother had many and they showed she’s had a good life, that she’s laughed a lot, at least until a few years ago. Amina hoped to get many wrinkles, to have things to smile about. She was waiting for this to happen.
“Come now, Amina.” Jodie pulled on her red dress. “I am ready for my breakfast.”
The day began as the others had before. Both girls had bread with jam, and the white tablet medicine that Auntie said was herbal and would help them relax, washed down with black tea. After breakfast, Jodie left with Malik and Jak and Amina opened up the salon to begin her work.
Though Amina had been told not to get into conversation with the white women while she was working, she allowed herself to look. And she was diligent, doing as she was told. Auntie had shown her how to clean the equipment with a blue solution so powerful she had to wear latex gloves that felt loose on her hands, so her fingers wiggled inside like the gloves are a plastic bag and she was reminded of their goat and how it felt to milk her. As she worked, Amina wondered if Pizzie was doing this very thing, right now. She often occupied herself with that thought, of what Omi or Piz may be doing, but sometimes she was too homesick and tried not to think of them at all. Amina used a tiny brush for the cleaning, and did a good job in making the tweezers and nail files gleam.
Amina likes work, and she finds the tasks she has to do in the salon are easy, the tools begin to shine and the muck comes away much easier than it lifted from Pizzie’s clothes. She works slower than she could, not wanting her morning to end as she’s happy in the shop, and wants to see and hear as much as she can before Auntie sends her back into the house, to prepare for lunch. The brush on the steel reminds her of the sound of the broom, when her mother cleaned inside their home, corner to corner, so every scrap of the floor was fit to eat a meal from.
Amina’s favourite place in the salon is the nail bar. It’s a colourful stall, like she saw in town when Omi took her there on market days, only in the salon, customers choose between pots of nail paint, not piles of figs and grapes in baskets, bundles of herbs and spices. The polishes are all the colours of the market, though: the green of a leaf on an olive branch, the yellow of the flowers, pink as fragile as the inside of Pizzie’s mouth when she laughed, black as her hair after she washed it in the rain. With all the world to choose from, how can anyone select just one colour?
After her morning shift, Amina closes the salon for lunchtime and goes through the bamboo curtain as usual, looking first for Fahran to see if he will smile for her today, but instead she hears men’s voices in the kitchen, talking to Auntie, quick and hushed. As she edges closer she realises it is Uncle Jak and Malik, and she wonders what they are doing home at this time. Usually, she does not see them until the evening.
She hears Uncle say, “It was not what we agreed.” He sounds sad, angry too. “She will think I betrayed her.”
“And you bring this trouble here, under my roof?” Auntie’s voice is shrill. “What a stupid risk!”
“Where else should I take her? This is the safest place.”
“Safe? Ha! And we all go to prison for you, because of your guilt, your stupid promise.”
Amina freezes. Who will go to prison?
“She saved my life. I owe her this.”
Auntie’s voice answers, louder and defiant now. “She will be fine! Rich woman like her, what does she know of trouble? But this is our chance. Our boy’s chance. If you go to prison, we all lose.”
Just on this last sentence her voice falters, and Amina put her fists to her mouth. Was there a way to save Fahran? A sound escapes, she is so happy, and there is silence in the kitchen.
“Is that you, Amina?” Auntie calls out.
She has no choice but to show herself. She steps forward, into the kitchen, with her head bowed.
In the kitchen, Malik is seated, turned away from Amina. He is twenty, Jodie told her, and handsome too despite the green woollen hat that he always wears. Jodie tells Amina it is the fashion, but Amina doesn’t understand why any man would want to cover his dark curly hair, which would make all the girls look. Seeing Amina in the doorway Uncle stops shouting, he looks annoyed to have been interrupted. Malik continues to gaze down at his hands, and she sees that there is a bruise around his eye. Amina has the sickening feeling that she has walked in on something she would rather not know about.
“This here’s Amina, and she’s a good girl. I want to keep her here with me,” Auntie says, her face is flushed and she is speaking loudly.
Uncle nods. “As you wish.”
Amina felt happy that Auntie valued her. Omi would be proud. But part of her was curious too, to know had happened to Safiyya and Reza, and what really happened when Jodie went outside of the house to work. Jodie had described the card tricks and cup game that they played at the fair to fool the tourists, and Amina thought she would like to try to do that work, if only she was brave enough. But she was never good at playing tricks on people, and was not sure that Omi would approve of this work, so she said nothing, just, “I am happy to help in any way, Auntie. Thank you for having me in your home.”
Auntie looked pleased with that and Uncle gave a tiny smile too. “Go now, Amina. Go and check on Fahran.”
She was glad to leave the kitchen,
but the feeling did not last. Fahran was not in his bedroom.
Instead of Fahran, another person is laying awkwardly on his bed. A girl, older than Amina by the length of her, but not by very much. Amina studies her, wondering what this has to do with the conversation she just overheard. The girl lays on her stomach so Amina cannot see her face but her arms are exposed and it is enough to see that this girl has not travelled like she did, her skin is not bruised with dirt and her blonde hair isn’t greasy from days without care. Her clothes are crumpled but they are modern, jeans and a yellow t-shirt. A t-shirt as yellow as the weeds that Jodie described, the ones with the beautiful name. Dandelions.
Amina steps closer, daring to enter the bedroom, gingerly checking the girl is actually breathing. The part of her face that Amina can see is pale and though she seems to be asleep her eye is half open, but blank and empty. A string of dribble hangs from her open mouth.
Amina is not stupid. She has seen men in the village like this, when they have had too much drink. But this is only a young girl, only sixteen or seventeen, so why has she been drinking? And where are her family?
Amina hears feet behind her and turns to see Uncle, coming quickly up the stairs, head down so he hasn’t yet noticed her. Behind him is Malik. He notices Amina, and makes a quick sideways motion with his head, warning her away.
She feels it, deep inside, just like when Samir first suddenly left home. Something bad is happening, it has already started. Amina does not wait but walks swiftly to Auntie’s room, where she finds Fahran. She tries to tell herself that she is safe and that whatever is happening to the blonde girl in the other room is none of her concern.
Later, when Jodie arrives home from the fair, Amina listens patiently to her account. Today she was allowed to work on a stand, a darts game, and she had to count the numbers each customer got and then give them a prize. “These prizes, they so cheap,” she told Amina, “that even if a customer gets the highest number possible we still make lots of money. It’s a good trick, yes?”
Amina wasn’t so sure, it sounded mean to her. But she didn’t want to prolong conversation about the fair, she wanted to tell Jodie about the girl in the downstairs bedroom.
“You were with Uncle all day, then?”
“Not all day, no. He left me to work with another group around lunchtime. Why?”
“I think he has done something bad. I think he has taken a girl who did not choose harraga. Do you think it is the dandelion girl from the fair?” Amina asked, after she had described the yellow t-shirt.
Jodie thinks. “It sounds like her.” They are both whispering now. “She was with Malik, they disappeared together. Maybe she’s his girlfriend?”
Amina thinks about this, and wonders if that was why Uncle seems so involved. Had Malik got his girlfriend drunk, and Uncle is looking after her until she is well enough to go home? Had she lashed out and given Malik his black eye?
The two girls whisper long into the night, wondering who the girl was and why she had arrived. If she is not Malik’s girlfriend, then maybe she has travelled to Luxembourg just like them. But Amina thinks she is American, or at least rich, so she cannot need to travel to work because her family already has money. The two girls cannot understand why she is here, even Jodie cannot make sense of it.
The following morning, Amina makes her way downstairs as usual, thinking through the jobs she must do to ready the salon for the first customers. But as she passes Fahran’s bedroom door she pauses. She puts her hand on the handle and dares herself to open it.
The girl is gone, but Amina can hear movement in the bathroom along the corridor, a scuffle. Perhaps Auntie has taken the girl to get cleaned up.
In the room, everything was as if she had never been, except for a dark patch on the mattress, which may be urine or vomit. Amina is embarrassed for the girl, but does not blame her because she seemed drunk, and certainly not happy. This confirms it, she thinks; the girl was indeed Malik’s girlfriend. She sobered up, and now Auntie is helping her to freshen.
But she cannot see how this has anything to do with Fahran, or what Uncle said about betraying someone. She decides that she is best not to know, something she learned eight months ago when Samir travelled to Paris. “I am just the first drop,” he told her, “but soon there will be a flood.”
Sometimes it is best not to understand what such things mean.
Day 5
Ellie
It was the drink he gave her in the back of the van. As soon as Ellie swallowed it, having snatched the plastic bottle of Rosport from Malik, so desperate was her thirst, she began to feel unsteady. This fizzy water hardly had time to hit her stomach before her vision seemed to close in, as if curtains were being drawn across her eyes, and she had enough time to see Malik, his look of fear, and she lunged at him, her fist landing in his eye socket.
Then she remembered nothing.
Whatever the drug was, it was the same as the one that had been slipped into her beer on the night of the fair, because she woke knowing nothing with a pounding head. They had moved her, she was no longer in the van or back in the caravan, but in a house now. A child’s bedroom, not like her own bedroom at home.
This child, a boy judging by the crumpled shorts and checked shirt on the chair, slept on a mattress with faded but clean blue sheets, and the few toys he had looked old, his brown bear had lost an eye and the battery operated robot was armless. Ellie doubted that the batteries in it worked, though she didn’t care to try. That was the most overwhelming thing about waking up after drinking the water: the heaviness she felt, the way she could actually remain lying in her own urine and fall back into a coma-like sleep.
What roused her was her own resolve, but also voices. Men’s voices in the corridor, she recognised as Malik and his father, the bulldog, but a woman’s voice too. In her disorientated state she thought it was Bridget, and she tried to call out.
“Mum?”
Her voice was broken and weak, no-one could hear her. She crawled to the door to listen.
The door was ajar, and when Ellie managed to peel open her eyes she saw a young girl, a skinny thing. She thought at first it was the girl from the fair, the beautiful one in the red dress, but then she saw that this girl was younger. Ellie didn’t know if she would help her or if she too had been taken. Fear bloomed on the girl’s face, she darted away from the door and rushed along the corridor, as if afraid of the voices. Though the skinny girl was gone, Ellie tried to call her back, “Please…” She lifted her arm to reach out, but now the bulldog was in the room and he was almost upon her, saying something in an angry tone.
“Shut up! You must be quiet while you are a guest in my house.”
Ellie heard light feet going up stairs, pitter-pattering, and then movement above her. If she could get to the girl, ask her to take a message to her mum…
Or maybe the girl knew a way out.
The woman arrived, and then Malik, closing the door to the room so Ellie was locked in with her three guards. She gazed up at Malik, who had tricked her.
“Please. I want to go home,” she said, more bravely than she felt. Pushing herself to sit up, trying to focus her eyes. “If you let me go now, nothing bad will happen to you.”
Malik’s eyes looked wide with anxiety and Ellie could see the bruise where she had punched him. He looked like he might want to set her free, but he was cowed by the other adults beside him. The woman took charge, taking Ellie by the top of the arm and pushing her back to the bed. Sitting beside her, as if she was an over anxious nurse and not her prison guard.
“You rest here, you aren’t feeling so good,” the woman said, almost kindly, as if she were doing Ellie a favour. But even so, it was true that Ellie’s head was spinning. She was thirsty, so parched her throat felt like sandpaper, and though her stomach was empty her bowels were twisting and full.
“I need the loo,” Ellie said, and felt the truth of it. “If you don’t let me go now I’ll shit myself.” She was beyond caring wh
at they thought of her.
The woman, who still had a firm grip on Ellie, propelled into action, yanking her up and into the hallway, then along to the toilet.
It was almost too late, but Ellie was glad to sit and open herself, glad to empty out all the badness, the blackness and urgency that must have been caused by drugs and stress and fear.
She sat with her head in her hands, her body straining, and moaned.
But once she was done the woman returned her to the boy’s room. She left her there, alone. The door was locked.
Still desperately thirsty though glad that the drug seemed to be wearing off, Ellie looked about her for a way to be free, a weapon, a place to escape. The window was small, she could see it was painted shut but she still tried to prise it open. She could break it and scream but they would hear her before she could even make the risk worthwhile.
There was nothing to be done, not now anyway. Ellie closed her eyes and tried to order her thoughts through the haze.
When she was in the caravan she had tried to run, tried to scream, and that had failed. Her next move would have to be cleverer.
Bridget
Across the city, Bridget was back at home, standing once again by the window. There was an unmarked police car parked along the road. In it sat a man in a suit, watching the house, recording everything. Bridget shivered, though it was stuffy in the lounge. She rubbed her arms, knowing that the detective was watching her.
Achim was upstairs, showering. She hadn’t showered, still hadn’t changed her clothes.
Dear Ellie,
This was not what we planned. Not that I planned any of it, how could I have ever known that our trip to Schueberfouer would go so badly wrong? If only you hadn’t run off, if only you’d been a good girl. If Jak hadn’t found me.
It was a moment, that was all. I was angry, I was drunk. Was it such a bad thing?
“Take her,” I said. “Give her a scare.”
Jak and I, we have both seen real danger. We know what the world is, how people can hurt each other. I wanted you to know this.
