by Andy Cox
I could tell you I have no understanding of what drives my fellow supplicants to such acts of violence, but the truth is I do. The choking tide of rage and despair, the brain-freezing boredom, the night sweats and blurred vision and shortness of breath, all synonyms for the terror that overthrows you as you are dragged feet first out of your life and into this limbo. You are no one here until you can back up your personal tragedy with the appropriate paperwork.
The temple servants in their ugly uniforms know nothing. They are simply minions. Why waste energy committing suicide when there will always be more?
“I’m sorry, Mr Wahid, but we’re still waiting for a date for your hearing.”
“Do you have any idea when that will be?”
A resolute shake of the head. “I’m sorry, but I really can’t say. Your forms are still in the system, I’m afraid.”
“Does this mean I can’t look for work yet?”
“That’s all set out in your information booklet. Paid employment of any kind is strictly forbidden unless or until your request for asylum has been granted.”
I am not allowed to work, or to sign on for income support for another three months, maybe six if my application is left pending. I am permitted to claim my £20 weekly allowance from the Red Cross. I am allowed to pick up my free food vouchers, officially stamped, at the start of each week. It is not exactly the financial advancement we are said to be chasing.
In my country I was a qualified teacher on a generous salary. I taught basic literacy to village children, the study of literature to any adults who showed interest and who could spare the time. Some of the places I went to teach were accessible only on foot. Marielena, walking beside me, told scurrilous stories or composed sestinas, breaking my heart with her talent, which she took so lightly.
The children welcomed me as a preacher, or as a freak.
When I say asylum seeker, what do you see? A teacher and poet, laughing and sore-footed, or a pitiful wretch in an unwashed shirt, standing in line for handouts at your DSS?
The way they look at me, the people of your country. I do not know which is worse: the aggressive suspicion of the youths who hang around the supermarket car park, or the prim-voiced, closed-hearted annunciations of the servants of the Border Agency. There is pity in their eyes, or at least there is sometimes, but it is a pity that soon converts itself into indifference. The curt syllables of their textbook English slide into my bloodstream like injected toxins, coating the arteries that feed my brain with their fatty deposits. I can feel my soul asphyxiating. I hear their language in my own mouth and it is like eating thorns. The blunt presumptuousness of this foreign tongue, this barbed intrusion, cutting the sensitive flesh of my throat like the trefoils of thistles.
The airport enclosure where they held us was fenced in with razor wire. I had not expected, so soon, to experience something that reminded me so sharply of what I hoped to escape.
Your English feels like a language I will never master. I cannot even order a cup of coffee at a restaurant stand without revealing myself for what I am: a foreigner. And you thought it was the language of poetry? says Marielena, and laughs.
I pass my weekly report card across the counter. The youth stamps it, and hands it back, and then I leave.
By the time I get outside, it is raining again. People are sheltering in shop doorways. A woman in a man’s overcoat pushes a supermarket trolley in a wavering line along the pavement. She shuffles rather than walks, her shoulders hunched over, almost as if she is expecting an assailant to launch himself upon her from behind. The overcoat is horrible, filthy with the stains of some dried-on contaminant that I think might be spaghetti sauce. At first the sight of the shopping cart confuses me. Then I realise the woman must be a homeless person, what in colloquial English I have heard referred to as a bag lady. She is using the stolen trolley to transport her possessions. At home, the sight of a beggar would arouse in me nothing more than the accustomed feelings of guilt and regret, but my visit to the Border Agency has scourged my soul of charity. I am filled with resentment for this unknown woman, who has so carelessly squandered her birthright and her privilege. Whatever misfortune has befallen her, she still has her country. However sordid she becomes, no one can make her give up her name, or force her to leave.
How could anyone born into such riches dispose of them so thoughtlessly?
Annoyance hastens my step. I am eager to pass her by, to forget she exists. As I draw level with her, the woman turns her head briefly in my direction. Her eyes are huge and tired, and there is a scab on her lower lip. We gaze at one another with surprise, and for a moment I am almost convinced she is someone I know.
For a moment, she is not a stranger, she is Marielena.
What has happened to me is not so very different from what has happened to you.
I open my mouth to say her name, but she has turned her back on me. The wheels of her shopping cart tangle briefly with a piece of litter, and then she is gone.
My allocated lodgings are on Davenport Street, which is a busy bus route, one of the three or four main thoroughfares that traverse the city. The houses on Davenport Street are tall and old, their windows and brickwork streaked with the residue of traffic fumes, their roofs steeply pitched, like praying hands, covered in moss. My room at number 13 Davenport Street is ten feet by twelve feet, a little larger than the average English prison cell. The room contains a single bed, a wardrobe, and a dressing table. The bed is against the far wall, with its head beneath the window. The wardrobe, which is of the cheap, mass-produced variety that can be purchased in its constituent pieces and assembled in situ, stands at the foot of the bed. There is just enough space between it and the wardrobe to open the doors. The dressing table is kidney-shaped, with a discoloured oval mirror, a monstrosity whose past is likely as long and as obscure as the history of the house itself. When I first came to live in this room I hated the dressing table with an insidious, soul-destroying mania that seemed to suck on my sanity as a parasitical, venomous worm might eat away at my brain. It was as if this outmoded and ugly piece of furniture had been placed there deliberately, to mock me, an emblem of the hopelessness of my situation.
In time our relationship changed. I began to see myself and the dressing table as comrades, as fellow survivors. I look after it now as a treasured possession, my own sacred monster. I have washed the faded damask curtains that hide its bow legs, I keep the glass top dusted, I polish the mirror. At times I have even tried to picture Marielena seated before it, combing her hair like Sheherazade, studying her features in the clouded glass.
She glares at me from the corner of one eye.
You’ve got to be joking, comrade.
The best thing about my room at 13 Davenport Street is that no one is likely to burst into it and try to kill me. I have yet to find the words to describe the full extent of my journey to this place and time. Perhaps Marielena is right – the sudden absence of imminent danger makes me feel like a fraud.
I choose to write instead about this room. I write in the manner of Robbe-Grillet, of Perec and Touissant, the titans and tyrants of the nouveau roman who were so fashionable among my peer group at the university. I describe the objects on the dressing table (a box of matches, a packet of biscuits, the key to this room), the blanket on the bed (the money I could not afford to spend but squandered anyway, simply because the blanket’s colours reminded me so painfully of home), the damp spot on the wall (if you gaze at it long enough and hard enough you begin to believe in its existence as a pocket universe). I write in English, trying it on for size like some uncomfortable new garment, a piece of clothing I would not have chosen for myself but reach for now in the absence of an alternative. I imagine the clothes they give you in prison might feel like this.
My vocal command of English is still hesitant, but it is improving. Even if Marielena returns to me eventually, the person she embraces will be a different man.
I write my journal for as long as I can bear to and
then I go out. I have found it best not to stay in the room for too long, even if – as so often – the weather is unsuitable for walking. It is too easy to imagine losing the courage and the motivation to leave it at all.
What is a city, when the bland pursuits of getting and spending are all but closed off to you? Shops – even the most commonplace of high street clothing stores, the most utilitarian of kitchen suppliers, electrical repair stores – begin to take on the aspect of mythical emporia, their merchandise the impossible relics of the deep past or the far future. In the dying light of early evening, the denizens of this alien universe guffaw and cavort. As I pass through the concrete canyon of the shopping precinct, I see a group of young people whooping and groaning, excitable primates that they are, in front of the supersize flat-screen TV in one of the windows. There is a football match in progress, but their noise seems to be about itself – the act of making it – more than any excitement or rancour about the game. I hurry past with my head down. I know their attentions could be transferred in an instant from the football to me.
When they look at me, what do they see? Not the reality, but a rumour, a cheapened, pirated image from that same TV screen: vagrant, raghead, scrounger, cheat, immigrant, shifty-eyed Ay-rab suicide bomber. Most of them don’t know what these things are, not properly. The television has told them that they are harmful, and that is enough. They are with their friends, which makes life easier, even when it’s hard. None of them have yet been forced into a position where thinking for themselves could mean the difference between life and death.
Their motiveless aggression is almost a comfort. For these young people I am simply a brown space, a foreign-made receptacle for their various frustrations. They don’t care about me, only what they believe I might represent, and I feel glad. Being attacked for who you actually are is a hundred times worse.
On some days, I might almost feel sorry for them.
I walk as far as the canal. It is now full dusk. The concrete stanchions of the road bridge soar upwards into the darkness like the forelegs of some monumental beast. The street lamps along the canal’s edge turn the carrier-bag-infested surface of the viscous water to an orange soup. Beyond the lights, the towpath, swallowed in blackness, extends indefinitely.
It is a dangerous place, the towpath, it is beyond the pale. If I were to be killed there, or badly beaten, no one, least of all the police, would express surprise.
Asking for it, aren’t they?
Stupid foreigners.
Yet still I stand at the kerb, daring myself to walk between the stanchions and on to the towpath, for no other reason than to prove to myself that it is my right to walk where I choose. What have I come to this country for, if not for this?
I scrape my shoe against the dirt, a glinting mixture of topsoil and cinders and broken glass. I’ve heard it said that the frisson of active transgression soon becomes addictive.
“I wouldn’t go down there, if I were you.”
I jump inside my skin. I believed myself alone. It is disconcerting and a little frightening to discover someone has been sharing this space with me all along. The voice is a woman’s. I stare at the figure before me. There is something familiar about her, but it takes me a moment to realise that it is the woman with the shopping cart I saw outside the Border Agency. She is wearing the same too-big overcoat, and a dark woollen cap pulled down low over her forehead.
Seeing her here is surprising, almost ominous. I don’t know why that should be, but it is so.
You thought she couldn’t speak, didn’t you? Go on, admit it.
She loves to goad me, Marielena. She claims my best work is mostly the result of her goading. She is not here, of course she’s not – her voice is my own wishful thinking – and yet there is truth in what she says, that it was easier for me to believe the woman with the trolley must be stupid as well as homeless, to assume she has mislaid her voice along with her sanity.
I am no better than the youths on the high street, yelling obscenities at the television screen and lobbing dog shit at passing pensioners. How easily we convince ourselves that those who have fallen into the mud have nothing to say.
“I didn’t see you,” I say to her. I realise my words are true in a multitude of ways. The act of speaking to this stranger unnerves me. It comes to me that other than my ritualised encounters with the Border Agency and my fumbling conversations with shopkeepers and library staff, these are the first words of English I have exchanged with another person since I first arrived here. I savour the words again inside my head, hoping the woman can understand my accent. That she will not laugh, or turn on me like the street kids.
“The canal path is a low place,” the woman says. Her voice is soft and rasping as a tarnished key in a rusty lock, and I have some trouble in comprehending her. I am confused by her use of the word low. Does she mean that the path is on low-lying ground, that it is dangerous because it passes too close to the river? When I look up the word later, in my battered Collins paperback English dictionary, I discover that low can also signify degraded, poor, evil, or mean.
I take a single step towards her. She is standing close to one of the streetlamps leading to the road bridge, and in the light it throws I am able to observe her face clearly for the first time. She is younger than I imagined, and the firm set of her mouth reminds me for just a second of my mother, the way she always looked when she was trying to tell me something important.
“Are you from here?” I ask, then immediately feel foolish. What is my question supposed to mean, exactly? From this city, this country, this planet, this dirty strip of pathway alongside the canal? When the woman begins to laugh I am not surprised.
“That’s a tricky question,” she says. “I was born here in the city though, if that’s what you mean. We lived on Coulter Street.”
Once again I find it difficult to grasp her meaning, a failing I put down to my poor command of English. I know Coulter Street, though, because it is close to the library. The houses there are large and well kept. There is something unsettling, not quite real, in the idea that this unfortunate once lived in such a house, that she once had her home there.
It would be easy to dismiss her words as fantasies, yet she seems perfectly lucid.
“My name is Noah, by the way,” I say to her.
“Mary.”
She comes towards me then, dragging her stuffed-full shopping cart behind her. As she approaches I begin to smell the sharp, raw stench of the streets, the odour of bad drains and unwashed clothes, the scent I would sometimes catch on Marielena when she returned to me after one of her periodic absences, the sour reek I fear now emanates from me, also.
Mary. It is an odd coincidence. Her eyes are amber in the lamplight, shading to gold.
“You shouldn’t be out here at night,” she says. “It’s dangerous, even when you think it’s not.” We are both silent for a moment, and then she says something strange. “I have a present for you. Would you like to have it now?”
She turns away from me to reach into her shopping cart. I feel a surge of panic, wondering what I will do if she offers me a filthy rag, a piece of half-eaten food, a plastic bag full of dog faeces. What she gives me instead is a book. She presses it into my hands, like a missionary from the old times, fervently offering a contraband bible to the unenlightened.
“It’s old, but it’s very good,” she says. She tugs the woollen cap a little further down her forehead. “You should read it.”
I glance down at the book in my hands. Part of the cover is missing, but there is enough of it left for me to see that I am holding a copy of URL Not Found, by the French-Egyptian writer Zaira Massi. I have never read it – our new government banned it, along with all the rest of Massi’s novels – but of course I have heard of it, it is one of those books everyone has heard of, whether they enjoy reading or not. It was published quite recently, three years ago at the most. I wonder what Mary means by calling it old?
That the copy itself is well
worn, perhaps? It is true that it is not in good condition.
“That woman was a hero,” Mary whispers. “She comes to me in dreams. She saved my life.”
I have no idea what Mary is talking about, or why she is speaking about Zaira Massi as if she were dead. Massi is still alive, so far as I know, though I am sure there are people – people in our new government, for example – who would wish otherwise.
“I would love to borrow this,” I say to Mary. “Are you sure you don’t mind?”
She shakes her head. “Keep it,” she says. “I don’t need it.” She hugs her sides and shuffles her feet. There is an aggressive tone to her voice that wasn’t there before, and I wonder if this is my fault, if I’ve done something to offend her. Could it be she wants money? If so I have none to give her.
“I should be going,” I say, lamely. The idea that I have somewhere to go, even if it is only the sorry little room on Davenport Street, makes me feel uncomfortable. I wonder where Mary will sleep tonight, and for the first time since the airport I feel like an imposter. As if in answer to my thoughts, a burst of laughter and a string of curse words float down towards the canal path from the darkened shopping precinct. The TV kids, most likely. What is it about laughter in the dark that makes it so frightening?
“They don’t know what they have,” Mary says. Her voice is softer now, calmer. She speaks in a tone of wonderment, as if she has stumbled by chance upon a truth she had not previously realised. “Those poor children.”
