by Simon Lelic
There was this woman. Which already makes it sound like I fell into the same trap Bart did, but it’s nothing like that, I promise. This woman, she came to our offices looking for help. She was being evicted, she told me. She was hazy on the reasons why, which perhaps should have set off some alarm bells, but most people in her situation when they come to us, part of the problem is a lack of information. They often don’t know exactly what’s happening to them, or – even more commonly – what they’re supposed to do about it. And Sabeen, I thought, was no different from any of the others.
Our meeting didn’t last very long. I learned that Sabeen was a refugee from Iraq who’d been granted leave to remain. She was thirty-five years old, with black hair and green eyes, and a habit of gnawing the skin around her fingernails. I assumed initially that she’d come to me to apply for emergency accommodation, but what she wanted was to stay exactly where she was. The thing was, what Sabeen had presented to me was basically a dispute between a landlord and his tenant. And though I was obviously sympathetic, this just wasn’t my department at all.
I tried to tell Sabeen this. She listened, and seemed to be taking in what I was saying. I gave her some numbers she could call, the names of some organizations she could speak to, but when at last I reached to offer her my hand, instead of taking it she suddenly started crying. Genuinely, I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone so distraught. And believe me, in my job you see people in tears on a daily basis. There was no chance either that Sabeen was faking it. I see that sort of thing often enough, too.
I didn’t promise her more than I could offer. I said I’d call her landlord, that was all, and try to get to the bottom of what was happening. Such was Sabeen’s gratitude, I immediately felt guilty for having got her hopes up. She left with a smile that sparkled, as though I’d given my word that I would find a way to help. Which I hadn’t. I tried to remind myself later that I’d done no such thing. Not that it made any difference. When I discovered what it was that Sabeen was hiding, one way or another I found myself committed.
The landlord laughed when I told him who I was – who, notionally, I was representing – and when I asked him why Sabeen was being evicted he told me, first, to mind my own business and, then, if I was so bloody interested, to go and take a look for myself.
There were five of them. Crammed into a bedsit barely big enough for one. Amira, at seventeen, was the youngest. She was Sabeen’s sister. Ali was the second-born, and you could sense immediately that he was furious with his powerlessness to improve his family’s lot. But as well as being in the country illegally (they all were, other than Sabeen), Ali had lost a foot on the journey from Baghdad. He’d got it caught under the wheel of a lorry. He’d had it amputated in Germany, but had fled the hospital before the authorities could take too great an interest in him, so the injury had never had a chance to properly heal. It pained him constantly, though not as much, I’ve always suspected, as the sense he’d allowed himself to become a burden. His family had waited for him in Germany, had half carried him the rest of the way to England, and for Ali that wasn’t how it was supposed to have been. He’d left Iraq in order to help them. His younger sister, Amira, but also his parents: Kalila, his mother, and Hakim, his father, both of whom looked older than their sixty-something years and who had their own ongoing health issues to cope with.
It was Sabeen’s parents who had the greatest effect on me. I mean, once I’d convinced Sabeen to open the bedsit door and I’d seen them all huddled on the sofa, my first instinct was simply to turn around. I could tell just from the look on Sabeen’s face that she’d misled me. But she pulled me inside, sort of dragged me apologetically before her family, and even though I couldn’t understand what it was that she was telling them, or a word of what her parents were saying back, they were looking at me like … well … this is going to sound kind of pathetic, I know, but they were looking at me the way I’ve always wished my own parents would. Just, I don’t know. Proud, I guess. Approving. Like even though I hadn’t done a thing yet, they were just grateful to have me on their side.
What could I tell them? The truth, I suppose, is the obvious answer: that their landlord was entirely within his rights, and that they were lucky he hadn’t reported them to the authorities. That technically I was the authorities, and that I should have been reporting them, too. But the thing was, I couldn’t. I just … I couldn’t. They needed me and it felt good to be needed – I won’t deny that was part of it. But also, when I heard what they’d been through, when I saw what they were going through still … I simply didn’t have the heart.
I imagine you’ve guessed where this is heading. In the end I didn’t just bend the rules. I broke them. It was easy enough to do: I added Sabeen’s name to the appropriate list, used certain criteria to ensure it jumped to somewhere near the top, and then bypassed the usual bureaucracy to assign her the first social-housing unit that became available. It only had the one bedroom, but it was far more spacious than the bedsit, and most importantly it was almost entirely self-contained. There’d be no nosy neighbours to worry them, nor any more bothersome landlords. As I say, easy. But it was also reckless. I thought I was helping, but the way things are looking right now it would have been better for Sabeen and her family if I’d never allowed myself to get involved.
It was Ali, Sabeen’s brother, whose call I missed, that day I first encountered Elsie’s father. In the time since I’d been introduced to Sabeen’s family, it was Ali to whom I’d become closest. He was a good six or seven years younger than me, but given everything he’d been through I looked up to him as I would an older brother. I half suspected Ali looked up to me as well – for no other reason than he thought my job was more important than it was – though what I liked best about our relationship was that neither one of us was prepared to show it. We mocked each other mercilessly, vied openly for his parents’ affections – again just as though we were brothers, though without the complication of any genuine sibling rivalry.
‘The pissing weather in this country.’
Ali’s English was even better than his older sister’s, and he had a fluency with swear words in particular that even Syd would probably have been impressed by.
‘Is that why you wanted to see me, Al? To ask me to do something about the weather?’
I was smiling, but the fact is I was also apprehensive. When I’d texted Ali in response to his phone call, he’d replied requesting we meet up. Even the phone call had been unusual, something we’d agreed would only happen in an emergency, so the fact Ali had wanted to talk in person had told me it would be about something serious.
He scowled as he bracketed me with kisses, then turned one of his palms up towards the clouds. The sky was grey, the colour of used washing-up water, and the air was heavy with a precipitation too cowardly to be described as proper rain.
‘Allah himself couldn’t do anything to part these clouds. That’s why he gave England to the heathen.’
We were outside Balham Tube and I looked for somewhere we could go that was under cover and also away from the crowd. I didn’t suggest coffee, because Ali would only have ordered tap water and then insisted after we finished that he paid the bill. I pointed instead towards the nearby railway bridge and when we reached it we hunched together in the gloom.
‘How’s the foot?’ I asked him. I’d managed to put Ali in touch with a doctor – someone Bart knew, not exactly NHS – and he was getting by now with a prosthetic and a crutch.
‘Still missing,’ he replied. ‘I keep hoping it’ll turn up in one of my socks.’ He adjusted his weight so he was standing more comfortably. ‘Listen, Jack. You said to call you if anyone ever came around asking questions.’
The fact that he was so quick to get down to business only unnerved me all the more.
‘Has someone been hassling you?’ I asked him. ‘Who?’
‘Not hassling us exactly,’ Ali replied. ‘Just … watching.’
My frown was a question mark.
‘Sabeen
mentioned it first,’ Ali said. ‘There was someone following her home from the Tube. And Amira, she thinks someone’s been going through our bin.’
‘What?’ I said. ‘Why would anyone want to go through your bin?’
Ali rolled his eyes at me. ‘To look for evidence,’ he said. ‘Obviously.’
‘But … what kind of evidence?’
‘Evidence about who we really are! Amira said it’s happened more than once. She’s taken out the rubbish and when she’s opened up the bin the other bags have all been ripped open.’
‘That could be foxes, though. Couldn’t it? Or, I don’t know. Birds.’
‘Then why was all the rubbish still inside, the lid of the bin left closed? Foxes don’t tidy up after themselves, Jack. Not even in this country.’
I opened my mouth, shut it again. I knew Ali wouldn’t have come to me had he not been genuinely concerned, but I knew as well how helpless he felt and how susceptible they all must have been to paranoia. To be honest I was surprised it hadn’t manifested itself sooner.
‘What about this person Sabeen says followed her?’ I said. ‘Did they say anything? What did they look like?’
‘It was too dark to see. And anyway they kept their distance. But again it’s happened more than once and Sabeen, she … she’s worried it was someone from the government. Like … an immigration official.’
This time my smile was genuine. ‘An immigration official?’
Ali curled a corner of his mouth. ‘I knew you’d laugh. That’s why I wanted to talk to you in person.’
‘I’m not laughing, Al, honest. It’s just … I mean … it’s a bit of a stretch, don’t you think? Maybe it was just another commuter, walking the same route home.’
Ali drew back his shoulders. ‘You know if someone’s following you, Jack. And there’s no way my sister would lie.’ There was an edge to his tone that told me I needed to tread carefully. As much as Ali enjoyed a bit of mutual mockery, there was nothing he took more seriously than the welfare of his family.
‘Talk me through it,’ I said to him, appeasingly. ‘Has anyone else noticed anything unusual? Have you?’
Ali, grudgingly, shook his head.
‘What about your parents?’
‘You know them,’ said Ali, ‘they barely ever go out. But I trust my sisters’ instincts, Jack. They’re worried, too, I know they are, no matter how much they pretend they’re not.’
‘What do you mean?’
Once again Ali shifted. ‘They didn’t want me to speak to you,’ he admitted. ‘No one did.’
I could imagine precisely how that argument had played out. Sabeen and Amira and their parents would have resisted sanctioning anything they would have regarded as an imposition. It was hard enough whenever I visited them to get them to accept so much as a jar of honey. Ali, though, would have considered coming to me his duty, imposition be damned. I respected that passion in him enormously: the fact he would have willingly sacrificed his other foot, if it had come down to it, for the sake of protecting his family.
‘You did the right thing,’ I said, which ordinarily would have sounded patronizing as hell, but at that moment was what Ali needed to hear. He visibly swelled in fact, and I could picture him recounting the line to his sisters when he reported back on our conversation later. ‘So this … immigration official,’ I said. ‘How many times has Sabeen been followed?’
‘Twice, she thinks. And she wouldn’t have mentioned it if she wasn’t certain, Jack. I’m not making this up.’
‘Relax, Al. I’m not doubting you. I’ll look into it, I promise. But if you want my opinion, I don’t think you’ve got anything to worry about. Immigration officials don’t tend to loiter in the shadows. And they don’t get paid enough to go checking through people’s bins.’
It was an attempt at a joke – a feeble one admittedly, but even so it drew a reluctant smile.
‘Probably you’re just being hounded by your typical south London weirdo. There used to be an asylum just up the road, you know. It got shut down in the nineties, all the patients kicked out on to the streets. There’s bound to be a few still in the area, and maybe one of them happens to have a thing for pretty Middle Eastern immigrants.’
Ali gave a snort. ‘And that’s supposed to make me feel better?’
‘I said “pretty”, Al. I don’t think you’ve got anything to worry about. It’s your sisters you want to be looking out for.’
Ali laughed again, and I could tell his mind was more at ease. ‘She likes you, you know,’ he said to me.
‘Who does?’
‘Amira. She thinks you look like Doctor Who.’
Ali was grinning now, and even though I was aware he was trying to wind me up, I struggled not to let my embarrassment show. It was something he’d teased me about before: the way we’d both noticed Amira gazing at me, the habit she had of touching my arm. I was flattered, obviously, but I did my best to ignore it – which wasn’t always easy when her older brother was there, grinning at me from across the room.
‘Which Doctor Who?’ I answered. ‘The short one? Or the old one?’
‘The dorky one. With the silly hair.’
I responded with a sardonic smile. ‘Tell her I’m flattered,’ I said, ‘and that if I wasn’t already spoken for – and if her brother wasn’t such a dork himself – I’d be asking for her hand in marriage.’
Ali tutted. ‘I said she likes you, Jack. I didn’t say she wants to marry you.’ He shook his head. ‘You English,’ he said. ‘You always want to colonize everything.’
And that’s how we left it: with a grin and a handshake. You might have thought, given the stakes – for Ali and his family, but also for me – that I might have taken my friend’s concerns a bit more seriously. But Ali, I was convinced, was afraid about nothing. What I’d said to him was true: immigration officials didn’t act like members of MI5. They behaved like bailiffs, hammering on doors and demanding ID. So, no, I wasn’t worried. In fact, after what had happened with Elsie’s father, all I felt at that point was relief.
Sydney
There’s not a thing I remember about my sister that I can trust.
Take the stuff I told Elsie. She even looked like you, I said to her, which although I think is probably true, might just as easily be a lie. I have a picture of Jessica in my head but it changes, flickers, fades if I try to look at it directly. The last time I saw her I was thirteen years old, when Jessica would have been eleven, and I haven’t seen so much as a photograph of her in all the time that has passed since. So those high-drawn cheekbones I mentioned, those bottomless brown eyes – I can see them when I picture my sister but that doesn’t mean they were genuinely there.
And what I said about her being brave. Again, it’s how I remember her but it’s an impression based solely on one thing: the fact that she did what I couldn’t bring myself to. I’m living proof that I simply never had the guts.
I have memories of us being together, of course I do, but even these feel like half-remembered dreams. So really, when it comes down to it, there are only two things about my sister I can be certain of. I know I never loved her enough. And I know it was my fault she died. Or perhaps it’s misleading to separate the two when one led so directly to the other.
I say I never loved Jessica enough. The truth, actually, is that I hated her. Not just because she was my annoying baby sister but because our father treated her so differently from the way he’d always treated me. He never hit her, not once, not even on one of those rare occasions when he lost his temper. Lost control, rather. She was spared too from the put-downs, the denigration, the subtle criticisms he’d so expertly honed. The humiliation. The fear. For me there was no escaping his sadistic games, whereas Jessica was firmly a spectator. Although of course this was part of the game-playing as well. My father was manipulating me to resent my little sister to deflect some of the hatred I felt for him. Manipulating my mother too. At the time I resented her as much as I did Jessica. She could have
stood up for me. She chose not to. But Jessica was at least part of the reason why. It was as though my father had a knife to my baby sister’s throat. One little slip on my mother’s part and my father’s hand would have slipped too. He was doing what the Romans did. Was it the Romans? Dividing us, basically, so he could rule.
But whatever. It worked, is all that matters. My sister wanted to be friends, I wouldn’t let us. And I think, just as an aside, that’s why my memories of her are so unclear. The therapists I saw, they all said I’ve repressed those memories because I had to. Sort of like a defence mechanism. Not sort of. Exactly. They say those memories are all still there but to protect myself from the guilt I feel I’ve hidden them behind a wall. Except that wall, if you ask me, came earlier. I never paid my sister enough attention. Never cared enough about who she was to form any lasting memories of her in the first place. Plus the other thing is, I’ve tried. To remember, I mean. If those memories are all still there, how come I can’t see them? I mean, for fuck’s sake: I remember everything else. Everything. Why, if I can remember all the evil shit from my childhood, can I not remember the only thing that was good?
I killed her the day I left home. She died two months later, after an overdose of our mother’s sleeping pills, but it was my leaving her – my abandoning her – that cost my sister her life.
I left on my fourteenth birthday. The night before, to be precise. Birthdays were always special to my father. The day I turned seven, he held my face down against the candles on my cake. Not for very long. Just until I began to scream. And over time his means of celebrating my birthdays (my mother’s too – she didn’t escape the annual ritual. Only Jessica did) became more elaborate. He began to plan for them, the way normal people plan for Christmas. For my twelfth birthday, for example, he bought me a kitten. A little grey one. At first I couldn’t believe my father had been so generous. I don’t mean in terms of money. My father was well off enough – and I suppose, by extension, we all were – that money itself was never an issue. What I mean is, generous in terms of his affection. Because that’s what it must have been – right? For him to have bought me something I’d so desperately wanted? He must have loved me on some level after all. Maybe I’d finally done something to make him proud.
