This Is Where I Am

by Karen Campbell

  It was the swearing that drew me up. I rarely swear (well, not the ‘f’ word) – and never in my dreams. The anger doesn’t seem to permeate there. It’s more of a wistfulness, a melancholic reaching out for . . . a place that is unreachable. In my dreams – and it doesn’t matter if they’re the waking or sleeping ones – I imagine a shape beside me, a mote in my peripheral vision. That’s where I think our memories lurk. They’re not behind you at all, but perpetually dancing like sprites just outside the corner of your eye. Desperate for you to notice them, and you, blinking like fury and just getting on with life. Or sometimes they lie heavy on your shoulder, and then I imagine them as fatter entities, goblins maybe – but wheezy, old ones who mean no harm.

  Away with the fairies, her.

  I don’t think I’m mad, though – and I did not imagine hearing tears. The actual smash of them striking a wooden floor, a slo-mo pause, then the elegant tinkle of hot salt specks bouncing upwards in sprays. A grief so profound that I opened wide into the night to lap it up.

  The waiting room’s full of leaflets. I take one, crack it like an open fan.

  Our street is a beautiful terrace. Modelled on Grecian and Egyptian lines, it’s a dark and leafy sleeve. Rich foliage clads sandstone walls; laurels, conifers and patient spreading beeches all jostle for position in the scraps of fenced-off gardens. Occasionally, a breeze will shift a bough and you catch a glimpse of egg and dart sculpting, fine cornice work and corbels over the door. You’ll see flashes of bright tulle at a window, and know the dance school are practising for their end-of-term show, or a shiver of pink feather will tell you Mrs Gilfillan is dusting again before her home-help comes. An amazing woman, Mrs Gilfillan. Studied mathematics and languages at Oxford, served at Bletchley Park during the war. And now she wears an orange pendant round her neck, which she can press if she falls and an alarm will ring at some central location and someone will, eventually, come. I’ve told her just to carry a mobile, ring me instead, but she’s terribly private, is Mrs Gilfillan. We all are, I suppose.

  For a while, it seemed as if those private barriers were being erased, a war-spirit camaraderie melting the rigid squares and circles we draw round ourselves, just as it once melted garden railings. I definitely felt it. Between me and my neighbours, there was a brief melding of our separate lives. As they saw me lugging shopping bags and struggling with the wheelchair, when I had to tap on doors and ask if they could listen out or sit in for five minutes while I nipped to the chemist’s for a prescription, when the nurse’s little green car became our most frequent visitor, it seemed too ridiculous to care if I knew the woman two doors along’s name before I spoke to her. All I would know is she was in and that my husband had fallen and I needed another pair of hands to lift him up. So I would go and ask. Politely brusque, not caring if I offended some hidden sensibility, upset some social more. But people were lovely, in the main. They would respond with generosity and care, they would treat him with dignity and me with genuine, open concern.

  If there’s anything else I can do . . .

  Please don’t hesitate to ask . . .

  So I didn’t, and they did. They did lots of things, and we would speak, animatedly, when we met in the street. Folk would touch my arm, frown and nod and it might be the first person who had spoken to me all day. Allison Black would call with her toddler twins, ask if I needed anything at the shops. Sophie, who runs the deli in Nithsdale Road, would bring in the occasional casserole. Oh, please. We cooked too much. Mr Patel’s mother-in-law made us gallons of delicious lemonade, guaranteed to slake even the most desperate thirst.

  His throat was paralysed at that point.

  Yes. If it hadn’t been for the part where my husband was dying, I would say it was all very jolly indeed.

  And I would find myself, at eleven o’clock at night, standing in my nightie in the garden, pegging out another load of sheets and joking with Moira over the fence who’d nipped out for a fly cigarette about incontinence pads and did she know there was such a thing as the Bristol Stool Chart. Funny then how, afterwards, folk began to retreat. They would smile, but would no longer stop for a chat. Allison would hush her joyous twins, as if I were the actual spot where his grave lay. I was treated with kindly respect. People never know what to say, so often tend to say nothing at all.

  That person crying, that raw weight I could feel as I stood on my balcony, was eloquent. They were sending their entreaty skywards, and my head kept pecking to trace the source. It was staring me in the face. Coming from a top-floor room in the house facing ours; I could see a girl behind the window, which was shut. It was shut and all the desperate miming muted noise was held inside, but I swear I could hear it.

  I can hear it still.

  At first, I didn’t recognise her. Young girl with wide cheekbones over which her distorted skin played, her mouth shaping sobs. Possibly she was shouting, her twisted brow suggested exertion. And yet, by the way she stuffed the curtain-edge into her face, I guessed she was stifling her cries. It was too young for Naomi, the woman who lived there, and far too old for Naomi’s little girls. The girl’s face was in profile, and then she turned. Eyes meeting mine, and that disturbing elation which had fired me drained away.

  I could have been looking into his eyes. His dead dead eyes when he was still alive. I knew her then, realised it was Naomi’s au pair. Rula or Tula. I had seen her pram-pushing in the park when I was last out wheeling Callum; we had nodded, shyly, at our separate loads. Most mornings, you could catch her serving breakfast in Naomi’s east-facing morning room, bright teeth and bouncing hair, and the children clamouring for hugs. You never saw them tug at Naomi like that. As she registered my presence, the girl withdrew, yanking on the curtains to close them tight. I finished my water, left my computer burning, and went straight to bed. Sleep came quickly, and I despised myself for feeling as comforted as I was appalled.

  It’s all relative

  Misery loves company

  You are not alone

  So. This is me.

  I am here because the sadness made me glad.

  A faint buzzing flits past my nose. The bee is back. He has no intention of stinging. I remember my grandpa telling me: bees hibernate in the winter, they don’t die off like other insects. On mild days, the workers make cleansing flights to stretch out their wings. I put down my leaflet and uncross my legs. As I do, a woman like a dollop of soft dark ice cream comes through the door, smiling.

  ‘Mrs Maxwell. That’s us ready for you now.’

  But I’m not ready. It’s not my turn I’ve changed my mind.

  ‘Thank you,’ I say meekly.

  We trot to a glassed-off office. I can see wee Fraser in the next room; we are specimens on display. The door opens, two men’s faces turn. I feel the lady’s hand touch my sweaty back.

  ‘Deborah. This is Abdi.’

  2.

  She doesn’t know me. She knows nothing of the man I am or was. When she hears me speak, she hears a child, an infant who gropes for words, whose thick tongue can’t translate his deep and bursting mind. I’m angry with her, and I shouldn’t be. Nobody made me do this. It has been one of the few free choices I have made since . . .

  Ah. I am not sure. An image comes hurtling from its cage a hand a wheel rim a hand a choice. I punch it back down. I punch it again, I keep punching it, flatter and flatter until it dies.

  They watch me, those compassionate heads on stalks that bend and tilt and nod their sympathy. What do they see passing over me? Is it transient, or do I wear it like a winding cloth? This is my choice my choice a free choice. I am a free man. Free. I wonder what her word for it will be. Day-bo-ra. Urging my ears to focus, scooping up all these fast-flying words. They are like insects, and I am a lizard; still, then flicking, trying to catch, trying to swallow and digest each one before the next one darts by.

  They screech and chew their words here, spit them out faster than gunfire, their heads crack and dart, they swagger and they duck, all of them. It wil
l be the cold in their bones, making them fragile. These people are stooped and jerky. The sky settles damply, like the cloths we lay over milk. Even now even then when we had a generator and could keep it cool, we I we would still lay cloths over milk I will keep talking in my head and I think only of the heat I think of it I think of it until it comes, obliterating and fierce and it will sear me clean and . . . I miss it. I miss the easy heat that warms your blood, loosens you so you own your posture, own the air you walk in. Here, the cold confronts you, it demands that you draw inwards and down. That you jerk and jabber and squawk.

  She’s looking directly at me. Day-bo-ra.

  ‘Does he mind that I’m a woman?’

  He, Simon, my caseworker, co-ordinator, intermediary integration facilitator, also looks. ‘Do you mind that –’

  I interrupt them. ‘No.’

  I mind that I am here. I mind that I am grateful.

  ‘Why?’ I ask, then say more words.

  ‘Why’ is a good word to learn in many languages. ‘Why’ and ‘where’ and ‘how’ and ‘when’. I learned these quickly. I can recite them in English, Swahili, German, French and Italian. As well as Somali, of course, but I’ve had little use for that since leaving. I learned them all; it made me useful. Made me heard. I also learned ‘please’ and ‘thank you’.

  ‘Thank you,’ I say, as she tells me. She talks of ‘giving something back’ and ‘it being the right thing to do’. She talks of anger and unfairness and then, when I don’t respond, I hear Simon again:

  ‘Abdi, do you understand all this?’

  ‘Yes,’ I say. ‘Thank you.’ What I said before was wrong. I must have said ‘why is it that you do this?’ I meant to say ‘why is it that you say this?’ Yes, it is ‘dire’ in French, not English. To dit, to do. It doesn’t matter.

  She clears her throat. It’s a vulnerable sound. I look up. I’ve noticed that, mostly, the women in this city try to emulate the girls; they wear clothing meant, I assume, for firmer flesh and daub their faces with colours. She, Deborah, is a contradiction. Her face is unpainted and relatively young. Her hair is wild wire and straw, her legs thin, shoes flat and plain. But the middle section of her is tethered into place, drapes of fine silken fabric. If I cannot grasp all their words, I doubt I can grasp their nuances, but that is my impression. If I had someone to if I was at home and talking to my mother or Az – if you were if you were talking to a friend, you would say she looks odd. As if she is either unfinished or not yet begun.

  She speaks again. ‘And I hope that we can be friends.’

  I leave with a form on which is written a list. There are some dates and directions and a mobile telephone number. The form is headed ‘Mentor/Mentee Contract’. It’s another official document which I can add to my pile. I’m much better at the reading than the speaking. Oh, I’m not particularly good at either, but with the reading you have more time. You can see the shapes and repeating patterns, you can go backwards and forwards until the shapes make sense. My daughter and I read together. I want her to read before she goes to school.

  It’s one o’clock. Une heure, una ora. I never eat lunch. I have a meal in the morning and a meal at night, but I make food for Rebecca. It’s important that she knows. If she sat at school with a book instead of an empty plate, they would laugh at her. And if she asked for fish and beans, they would laugh at her. So I make her reconstituted chicken threads, dipped in powdered bread and fried until hard and greasy. I don’t even make them, I open the brightly coloured packet that they come in, and drop them in hot oil. She seems to like them.

  I go to the grocer’s shop. I can go to any shop now, in theory, but this small stretch of chip shop and licensed grocer’s and bookmaker’s are the shops I know. Thirty minutes’ walk away, there’s also a supermarket, a vast grey space full of tins and freezers which I went to on the first night. My fault. I had turned left instead of right. Eventually I came to its garish lights, and I recognised its blue and yellow sign because it was on the list for vouchers. When I got there, it felt like I had triumphed somehow. And then I realised I didn’t know the words for their food. That was the only time I thought I might lose control. The cold in my hands was intense, my daughter was slipping from my grasp and crying because she was so tired, so hungry. So cold. You cannot imagine the pain of a cold that makes the blood in your fingertips go hard and die. Yes, now I know about gloves and hats, but not then. And where was I to leave my little girl? Alone in an unknown room? So we walked in the freezing night air, my daughter weeping into my neck, and me trying to shelter her inside my own thin coat. I could accept the sun had left us, but I struggled to understand where the moon was. At home, the moon and stars are so big, you can see by them, work by them through the night. Only thin glimmers here, cold specks in the muddy sky. In the shop, it was a little warmer. I put Rebecca down, but she cried so much harder. My arms ached, the burning inside made worse by how the outside was so cold. Liquid was running from my nose, I saw the same on my daughter’s face. Clear and thick. I wiped it off her with the back of my sleeve.

  ‘Take Aabo’s hand, baby. Look. Put your cold-cold hand in Aabo’s warm one.’ Together, we trudged the aisles, overcome by coloured boxes and the huge chests of ice-bags. Were my vouchers for all of these things or just some? What were they? Was it food or drink or paper or books? Nothing I could recognise. Nothing I could touch or see the shape or smell of. Was I meant to open up one of the packets to check? Several times, I lifted up an item, then dropped it again. Impotence and hunger growing, trying to keep smiling for my daughter. For so long, all my food had been given to me. I’d forgotten how to provide. At last, a man came up to us, words spattering like oil in a too-hot pan. ‘Help’ was one I seized on. I tried to say what I needed, but I was so exhausted, the only words I could remember were French. He was pointing, jabbing his finger to somewhere beyond my neck, and I became terrified that he’d give up and walk away. All I could do was offer my voucher card. He nodded, fried up more words for me, but I could take nothing in. The thought of returning to the freezing building in which we had been deposited, trailing all that way back with no food, made me want to weep. Then the man stopped talking, gestured me Sit on a pile of tins. I did as I was told, lifting Rebecca on to my lap. The man handed me a sheet of paper and a pen. I shook my head. All of my words had escaped me, I couldn’t write in any language now. He waved his wrist in front of his face – he was miming spooning food. I nodded again, frantically this time, and he pointed once more to the paper. Suddenly, I realised. I held the pen. My fingers were utterly numb, but I held it like a clamp. Drew one curved line that tapered to a point, then reversed it with another. Made the two ends intersect, flick out. Held it up to him.

  ‘Fish,’ he told me. ‘Yous are wanting fish.’

  God bless that man. We did this many times, until I had fish and milk and bread and meat. I also wanted rice, but how do you act out rice? It was enough, what we had was wonderful, and I trudged home in the biting air, carrying two bags and my little girl. Later, someone said I could have got the bus. I have learned I don’t like buses. There is a train as well as a bus. I got the train today because they give me expenses and they said I could, that it makes sense because their office is very close to the station. I wonder if this was a hidden kindness. If you learn the pattern of the name of the station at which you are to get off, you can see it written on a board once you get there. Buses simply go, they jolt and swing and will not stop unless you tell them where. It’s worth the long walk to get to the station near my house.

  In the grocer’s shop, I’m scanning the shelves before me. Long walk. I’ve become flabby, like my surroundings. It’s only one mile, maybe two to get to Cardonald Station. I look again. We need bread and milk, cold sterile stuff that tastes thin. I buy some more of the frozen packets Rebecca likes and I buy myself a pie. It’s an envelope of flaky bread-like stuff, I’ve had them before. This one is called Chik’n’Ham. I count out the correct money. The man behind the co
unter tuts at my pile of coins, tosses them in his till. He has no conception of the effort it took to learn his numbers, learn all the differentials between copper and silver, between their weights and how the smaller circles can be of more value. A woman with bright yellow hair comes in.

  All right, Billy? Howzitgaun?

  Fair tae pish, hen. Fair tae pish.

  I am putting my milk and my food into my backpack. The man and woman begin a conversation about the bloody polis and wee Gringo and the jail and I wait, patiently at first, for the man to hand me the newspaper I had requested. I know I gave him enough money to pay for it, he nodded when I said the words.

  ‘Re-cord?’ I say again. ‘Re-cord please?’

  He breaks off his animated discussion. ‘Whit?’

  ‘The man’s wanting a paper, Billy.’

  ‘Forty pee.’ He opens out his hand, forms it like a cup.

  ‘I give you money.’

  He shakes his head. ‘Naw, pal. You gied me a pile of snash for your messages. No for a paper. You didny say you wanted a paper.’

  ‘Yes, I say Re-cord and I give you money.’

  His hand changes from a cup to a fist, and then a crab. He plays his fingers one two three one two three, tapping them down on the counter. The yellow-haired woman folds her arms.

  ‘You trying tae come the wide-boy, pal?’ he says. ‘Palm me off wi a load of coppers –’

  ‘There was pound coins –’

  ‘Aye – for your fucking MES-SA-GES! Away and piss off afore I call the polis. Christ,’ he turns to the woman again, ‘they’d have the clothes off your back an all.’