‘Them kids,’ she said.
‘Oh fuck, my trainers!’ Ella heard the motorcyclist wail as she and Phoebe manoeuvred past the gaggle that gathered around him. ‘They’re ruined.’
‘There, there,’ said the woman with the chair, ‘They’re only scuffed, they’ll come up fine again if you wash them – mind, on the Delicates cycle.’
In the offices of the Centre, Ella and Phoebe sat down in orange easy chairs side by side in the waiting room, where copies of leaflets were racked: dozens of them, on communicable diseases, hereditary and genetic transmissions, help lines for drug problems, domestic violence, housing, procedures for official complaints, dietary and sanitary recommendations, language and interpreting assistance.
A woman came out to find them. ‘Ella? And you must be Phoebe?’ said Freddie Asman. ‘Hello. I’m your interpreter – we’ve already spoken, I think, when you made the appointment.’
‘I’ll help, too,’ said Phoebe.
‘My daughter,’ said Ella. ‘She’s good. She speaks very well.’
Freddie Asman had short blonde hair, a sparkling turquoise sequin between her eyebrows and loose silk trousers and tunic. ‘The council’s interviewer will be joining us shortly, in one of the quiet rooms. This way.’ She led Ella and Phoebe up a steep flight into a small office; asked them if they’d like a cup of coffee, and went softly outside and down the corridor, her fluid trousers undulating over the plush plastic treads of her squishy shoes.
The interviewer entered, smiled at mother and daughter encouragingly, silently. He had the kind of pale eyes that look so transparent the capillaries seem to be bleeding. Placing a lawyer’s yellow, ruled pad on his knees, which were sharp and thin and tightly pressed together as if in his zeal to hear their story, he leaned forward towards her.
He asked Ella, ‘And how are you both doing? Did the operation go well?’
Ella said, ‘The doctors made my daughter a new skin. It’s miracle, I think.’
‘They’re wonderful at the Children’s Hospital. Thank God it wasn’t closed down. There was some threat of that, at one time. And are you comfortable, Phoebe? No problems?’
‘No, no problems. It’s fantastic; feels like a silk shirt.’
The interviewer looked questioning. ‘Something you’re wearing? Not part of you?’
So he was paying attention to them. Phoebe softened, and said, ‘You know those stories about how you feel pain in a limb, even after it’s been amputated?’
He nodded.
‘So it’s like I still feel my old body, like a ghost inside me, but it’s not really there. You know, they gave me a colouring book in therapy at the hospital, with dresses you cut out and fitted with flaps on the figures. If you lifted my flap, you’d find the old me there still. But it doesn’t mean anything now – before I couldn’t do things, I was a wimp. Now . . .’
‘Yes,’ said Ella. ‘You’ve changed. I’m glad, it’s better, much better.’ She put her hands together and inclined to the interviewer, as if to thank him.
Freddie came back, set the coffee mug in front of Ella and nodded to her warmly. ‘There’s a lot of traffic noise, unfortunately,’ she said. ‘We’re hoping for a new building, but meanwhile we have to make do . . . we’ll take notes at the same time, so if there’s anything drowned by the usual urban chorus of sirens, we shan’t have lost it altogether.’
She settled herself down, with a small, ring-bound pad. ‘James, I’m all set.’
James Lowther nodded to Ella and began, with Freddie translating. ‘Everything you tell us will be kept in confidence, of course. We’re here to help you. To do that, it may be in your interests for us to disclose what you tell us to the relevant authorities. Do you follow? About the circumstances of your coming to this country. Your story will shed light on your reasons for wanting to remain here. As I know you know, there’s huge pressure on the border authorities to keep the country sealed against . . . well, opportunists and impostors. So we do need to be able to convey to them the particular urgency of your case. The exceptional nature of your request. Clearly, many of the usual causes of alarm don’t apply in your case – Phoebe was specially brought for the operation. But if you want to stay on, we have to put cogent reasons . . .
‘Please start wherever you wish. Real life doesn’t have beginnings, middles and ends, not like stories in books.’
Ella began. Freddie stopped her at intervals to translate; she was quicker at following than The Fanfare’s interpreter, for she was accustomed to hearing such testimony, day after day in her job at the Council, from people who’d come from a wide range of mountains, valleys, ports and villages with different accents and dialects – and languages – in the ever-widening territory of the conflict. Now and then Phoebe stepped in to correct her and adding commentary of her own, as her mother related how she had first worked in the hospital in Tirzah, but then got a job in the Hotel Metropole as a cleaner which was much better work because there were always foreigners staying there – journalists, arms dealers, medical supervisors, aid workers – and some sort of standards had to be maintained. (She showed them the needlework case.) She told them about the felling of all the trees in the streets and then in the gardens for firewood, about the famine and the rodents and the flies – the traps for foxes and squirrels that brought in food until there weren’t any left, about the ceaseless shelling and the intermittent truces. About burying the dead. About Phoebe’s struggles with pain (‘Don’t go on about it,’ protested Phoebe.) She told them what they already knew.
‘But you,’ pressed James Lowther. ‘What about you? Perhaps we had better begin at the beginning.’
They ran through a ‘Data Maintenance’ form, with questions about her date and place of birth, her nationality, her ethnic origins and present allegiances, her religion. To all of them, Ella responded readily, but inconclusively: ‘I don’t know,’ she would answer, with a worried twist to her obliging smile, ‘because I lost all my documents when I was too small to remember the details.’
‘Don’t worry, we’re used to that,’ said James. ‘But your religion – you must know that at least.’
‘For a time I was close to some nuns,’ Ella began. ‘And the priest of the Lazarus mission was brave and kind – that was the last time I went to church – I took shelter there some time before the end came, during a shelling I got caught in . . . I am what you call a stateless person, the officers at the border told me. Without the newspaper, without the photograph of Phoebe, we would never have managed to enter the country – me and Phoebe.’
‘We’ve all the cuttings in our dossier,’ James riffled through, showing Ella the photocopied pages in her file. ‘But public interest is fickle and the newspapers run a story for just as long as they can squeeze juice out of it. No longer. We need to know what you suffered, and the threats to your survival and wellbeing if you and Phoebe are returned home – well, not home perhaps, but sent back to where you came from.
‘You must understand, Ella, that there are hundreds of thousands of refugees seeking admittance to this country at the moment, and each case will be considered on its merits. We want to help you – you must help us. You must give us more to go on.’
‘Mum!’ Phoebe remonstrated. ‘You’ve got to tell them.’ She looked sharply at the interviewers. ‘Mum was raped, you must have figured that out at least. I’m the product of war rage – me and my brother.’ Phoebe looked rosy, fierce. ‘If we go back, we’re dead meat –’cos mum’s a whore – in their eyes. And I don’t belong to one side nor the other. Call me a half-breed, like when a pedigree dog’s been fucked by the wrong kind of mate, and they kill all the puppies. They’re not worth anything and they’ll bring down the value of the whole breed . . .’
Ella sucked in her breath, whispered, ‘Where do you get these ideas, Phoebe?’
‘I keep a look out, Mum. I see what you don’t want to see.’ She addressed the interviewer. ‘She’s always making do and getting by. And she’s looking for my
brother.’
Ella went on, ‘After the siege, when Dr Martin said she’d help Phoebe, I had to find her, so we needed money to follow her. We went to Pontona. Then we came here to look for . . .’
‘Your son?’
Ella nodded.
‘You’d like to find him. Of course. I can see that,’ began James. ‘Do you have any idea where to begin?’
‘I want to find him,’ said Ella. ‘But not so that he knows.’
‘Aw, Mum!’ cried Phoebe. ‘What about him and me? What are you so afraid of?’
‘Ah, Phoebe.’
So, accompanied by the rhythmic murmur of the interpreter, Ella began trying to piece their story together:
‘The shantytown district in Tirzah was down by the river on the east side, where at one time there had been a busy tannery district. After the . . . bombing at Tirinčeva, the hospital did what it could for Phoebe, but they thought she would die anyway, so this was the place for us to go. Those trades – tanners and dyers and furriers – they carried a heavy stigma then, because they touch dead bodies. Besides that, tanning is a dirty business – they use cat piss and dog piss for the mordants. So those people are shunned, even more than undertakers. They blur distinctions between living and dead things. They keep hair and pelts supple and lustrous long after the bodies they covered have perished. But when Phoebe didn’t die – this was the first miracle – and they found out we weren’t . . . natives, and didn’t belong to one side or the other, we were left there to fend for ourselves. When the war spread and began taking all the men off to fight, the women tanners continued, making boots and gun belts and holsters. As for the market in furs, well . . . some generals had girlfriends, but otherwise . . .
‘The tanneries made a warren of low buildings and shelters and wharves rising haphazardly on either side of steps leading down to water, where they’d set up their buckets and vats and blocks for beating the skins. I’d seen this river shining, when I first saw Tirzah from the ridge, but once down on its bank, it was dark and dirty, and there were pitch-black corners where all you could see was firelight reflected in the black surface of the river as you . . .’ she glanced over at Phoebe. ‘I was often desperate, we needed the money.’
James looked uncomfortable. ‘Please explain the reasons for your desperate condition, why you did these things. We know – we think we know why you had to, but we have to build the dossier on you, to argue on your behalf.’
‘Phoebe was in pain all the time. She had to sleep on her front with nothing touching her back where the skin was gone. The stuff that helped her was only available in certain places and the price was always rising. I used to go to a woman, she was a nurse in the military hospital, she was able to keep back medicines for us, for people like us. It was dangerous for her, though it made her rich, too. She was good to us, though. She’d wait for me to come, even if I was late. They were often drugs dropped for humanitarian aid, which had made their way back to the army, as you know. Sometimes we who needed drugs went to her with things – with food and, when we could lay our hands on them, luxury goods. But they had to be the genuine article. She could tell, and she’d give you nothing for the fakes. But I could get a lot of Phoebe’s medicine in return for anything by Louis Vuitton, for example, or for Lycra tights still in the packet or for jeans with the label in the right place, on the back pocket. With rivets.’
‘Levi 501s,’ whispered Freddie. ‘More valuable than hard currency, we know.’
‘Yes,’ said Ella, barely audibly. ‘I sometimes managed to pick up some things like that.’
‘How?’
‘At my cleaning job – at the Hotel Metropole in the mornings, before I went back to work on the river. Sometimes I’d just come straight out with it. I’d say to the guest, “Your jeans are worth a great deal here – I could convert them into food and medicine for my children.” They’d look embarrassed, sometimes angry. Sometimes they’d have tears in their eyes when they handed me the trousers or the belt or whatever. But they’d often give me what I wanted.’
The interviewer peered at the revolving spools of the tape, and Freddie took the slight loss of concentration to put a question. To which Ella replied, ‘Phoebe, I don’t think you should stay here now.’
‘Yes, Phoebe, come with me. I’ll get us all some coffee.’ James rose to leave the room, beckoning to a reluctant Phoebe to follow him. ‘I can stay,’ she protested. ‘I know it every which way. All of it. I was there.’
James shook his head. ‘You, a child! Come on, we all need a bit of sustenance. I’ll bring back some biscuits, too.’
After they’d gone, Ella began again, quickly. ‘Was it a kind of torture?’ she said, echoing the last question. ‘It was work, and it brought the money or the food we had to have. Taking the money at its value then, these were roughly our rates: one handjob: a tin of powdered milk.
‘Taken from the front: a fair-sized pat of lard/one loaf of bread/ half a cup of sugar.
‘Taken from the back: half a kilo of sausages/bacon or two loaves of bread. Really valuable.
‘I could do massages, too. Just massage, if they wanted it simple. And some acts were cheap. Some of the other women preferred it – they didn’t like face-to-face contact. But I . . . I needed more money. Some of the acts were new to me. I learned them in the tanneries. They came with this war. It wasn’t like that – before. Ideas change, and people think of new dangers. And with new dangers come new pleasures. At first when these soldiers came, you could charge a lot for doing it that way, because they hadn’t had it like that and they wanted to try it. But soon it was the cheapest tricks who went for that. They liked you on your knees. Afterwards, it was like they hadn’t done it – or done it with a woman. It was cleaner, they said. And quicker. They were frightened of the dirt inside us. “I wouldn’t put the tip of my umbrella there,” one man said to me.
‘I kept the children out of it. I was determined to,’ said Ella. ‘So I had to find ways of getting them looked after while I did it . . . It was often difficult to get paid. Always ask for the money upfront was the rule, but men are easier to handle afterwards. It’s difficult to make someone hand something over; we were used to being forced, and there was nothing I could do, I couldn’t find a protector – hah, what a word – a man who’d beat up anyone who tried it on because I had to be free to work when I wanted to – Phoebe being so, well, fragile. We always stuck together; so when things went wrong, they went wrong for all three of us.’
‘You were raped. Systematically. We understand how hard this is.’ Freddie nodded, encouragingly. ‘How long did this go on for?’
‘This is hard to say – you hear stories about girls who can sweet-talk men out of fury, but I never found that the case. A soldier will tremble all over just like any ordinary man in the grip of his passion but he’ll belt you across the face and kick you in the belly if you try to stop him doing what he wants, with even a single word or a simple gesture of recoil . . .’ She turned her head sideways to demonstrate. ‘If you do that, you’re asking to be hit from the other side, so your head will straighten. In war there are no feelings but your own: there are no other needs but the ones you have then and there. It’s the fear of death that drives men mad – and women. Every man feels himself to be the only one alive, with blood and guts and the rest – the hard on comes with that fear, that threat of an end. I saw it over and over again. Even before the bombs fall on their targets, before the guns start blasting away, they’ve wasted everyone around besides yourself; you’re the only living thing left on a planet inhabited by spectres, each and every one of us the only person becomes the last human being on earth left alive – and that’s the excuse for any act, because to act is not to be dead, especially to fuck. Soldiers are always saying they’re going to die and that’s cause enough to have whatever they want, now. But others as well when they come to a war zone like Tirzah they catch this disease – which is the death that takes possession of you inside.
‘So we were a
s good as dead there, all of us.
‘But I kept at it, and I never let the bad days and the bad men stop me – the rapes or the violence. When I was well again I went back to the river and waited for another client. I even hoped that things would improve. After Phoebus went away . . .’ she hesitated, swallowed, and continued: ‘I worked more in the hotel. Phoebe helped me with the linen and the laundry, and I did massages there. The clientèle there were much less rough, and the war was winding down. Things were slower, quieter. We made do, but . . .’ she paused. ‘I had to get out, find a way to leave, to come and find Phoebus.’
Her daughter came in again, with James carrying the tray.
‘Aw, Mum,’ Phoebe put a hand on her mother’s arm. Ella’s eyes were glistening. ‘You could’ve let me stay. Then you wouldn’t’ve got upset.’
James began looking through other papers, as Freddie showed him the notes she’d made of Ella’s disclosures in his absence.
‘I think we can make a case that your existence in Tirzah was in every way intolerable, and that you would be returning to hostile conditions, which would not be conducive to you or Phoebe thriving . . .’ James began, making a visible effort to smile. ‘Let’s see.’ He found the document he wanted. ‘Oh, good,’ he continued. ‘You’ve had a medical. You’re clear. Amazing. Amazingly lucky.’
‘Yes,’ said Ella. ‘Perhaps another miracle?’ She paused.
‘What happened to . . . the boy? The son you mentioned?’
‘My twin,’ said Phoebe. ‘He’s here. Somewhere.’
‘Is he? Since when?’
‘Since the first year of the siege.’
‘And?’ He shuffled through Ella’s dossier. ‘You didn’t tell Catnach? The paper could help you trace him.’
‘I don’t want to find him when everybody is watching. I want it to be . . . between us. Perhaps . . .’ she hesitated. ‘He won’t want to know.’
‘So, tell me what happened? How he comes to be here?’
‘Yes,’ said Ella, quietly. ‘He was stronger than Phoebe. He was miraculously unhurt. He is . . .’ she hesitated. ‘An easier character. Gives no trouble. I knew he would be taken, to somewhere better. Our life – Phoebe’s and mine – was struggle. Nobody would take her, not then. So I sold Phoebus. And with the money,’ she continued, rapidly, full of determination, ‘I bought medicine she needed.’
The Leto Bundle Page 35
