This Is Where I Am

by Karen Campbell

  ‘I give you money,’ I repeat.

  ‘I’ll no fucking tell you again.’ His face is red, his mouth twists with unfettered disgust. For me. He sees a black-skinned, lying thief. I see an ignorant stupid man. Stupid can be most dangerous of all, because it is deaf to reason. Stupid people bluster and shout. Often after much shouting on their part, and you, standing still and resolute, it will end with the slow dull realisation that you, indeed all of the people watching them, know that they are stupid. Then, usually, they lash out: with words, fists, actions – by that stage it’s immaterial, because you’ve both lost. They, their dignity, and you, your pride, your argument and – once – your tooth.

  I say quietly, one final time: ‘I did give you money,’ and then I leave. Even though I let him win, I will have to go back to the supermarket in future, unless it’s his wife that’s here. Mah-gret. She works on Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays and, occasionally, will offer Rebecca a sweet.

  The shops – I’ve heard someone call them a ‘parade’ but that jaunty proud swagger of colour and bodies and music I’ve seen marching through the town hardly seems in keeping with these grey concrete cubes – anyway, the shops are in a separate block from the flats we live in. Between the shops and my block, there is another concrete square called the Wally Dug. I assume it’s like a maqaahi but I’ve never been inside. I imagine what it would feel like, to enter the warm blend of alcohol and men’s conversation, to have the sting of drink on my lips, and the garrulous comradeship that comes from it. But women drink here too. Every night, pinched men and women cluster outside with their cigarettes. Are these women their wives? Often, people will stagger, the women too; sometimes, bodies erupt from the door in a clatter of fighting limbs. One night, from my window, I saw a man being dragged behind the building, to where they store the empty bottles. He was kicked to the ground, and then I could no longer see him. But I saw the others, I saw one with a small, sturdy paddle and I saw him swing it, several times.

  To reach my home, there are more choices. I am overburdened with choices. You can climb seven flights of stairs or you can go inside a tiny metal lift. If I tried to explain this to my mother to my grandfather to who would I tell but it is a small, empty space that carries you upwards and downwards. Yes, a hoist, I would say. That’s right, of course you understand. It’s the same as the rope over the branch, and the nets being pulled up then lowered.

  I wonder if we always mean it when we patronise; if it’s always more than unthinking. If you being small makes me grow taller.

  Last time I took the stairs, a man blocked my path on the second landing. He asked me what my daughter’s name was and his breath smelled of beer. He stroked my daughter’s hair, said it felt like a scouring pad. ‘Does your daddy do the dishes wi your heid, hen?’ he said. The last time I took the lift, there was a teenage girl lying inside it. Her eyes were closed, and there was a needle protruding from the crook of her inner elbow. Fortunately, Rebecca wasn’t with me. What would I have told her? I knelt to check the girl was breathing, saw a spit-bubble at her lips. Should I have told someone? I should have, of course I should have, she was a girl in my village in my home in my concrete block and she would have been a daughter too. Her lips moved and I pretended she was fine. Left her there, sliding up and down in the metal cage, and crept inside and locked my door.

  Always lock your door, son.

  A valuable piece of advice, given to me the week I arrived, by an old lady wearing an overall and a knitted hat. My neighbour, Mrs Coutts. It was the first time I met her, it was her greeting. There are fourteen floors in this building, around ten flats on every corridor, and each floor has two landings, I think, each with two corridors running off at angles. The whole building forms a square with a space riven through its centre. So even if each flat only houses one person (and I think the one above me must hold twenty at least, although they, their dogs and their drum kit only stir between three in the afternoon and five in the morning), but even if you discount them as abnormal (which is not a difficult thing to do) and count each flat as one person, that means there are five hundred and sixty people living one on top of the other in this single tower.

  There were two hundred and twenty-four souls in my village and I knew each one. You couldn’t not know them; they lived and died and ate and loved and squabbled in the bleached dirt beneath our gathering-tree, on their stoops, behind straw and dung-packed walls. Oh God, I crave that sensation so much: the scratchy-smooth rub of my handbuilt walls.

  My forehead rests inside my flat’s front door. If I touch the walls here, they feel damp. A fine mist clings to my hands and heart. Through the wall, I hear a clatter of metal, the gradual shuffle of feet. It is a stomp and a drag, a stomp and a drag. Quickly, I move away, tuck myself behind the door of my living room, holding it before me like a shield. I hear more rattling, and belching, then the thumping on my letterbox starts.

  ‘You still fucking there, you big black bastard? I fucking know you are. I fucking seen you come in. Away tae fuck back tae . . .’ the voice drifts as my neighbour lurches away.

  ‘Away tae fucking niggerland!’

  I flinch, the sudden poison hitting me. And then I hate myself, even more than him. Bawbag, I think he is called; I have heard his friends refer to him as this. If he goes to his maqaahi he will be gone for hours. If he goes to buy cigarettes he will come back soon. Standing trembling in my hallway, blowing through my mouth. If I blow slowly, I can pretend my rage is expelled. I am a vigorous, tight-packed man, compelled to be dull and slow. Moving round my living room, I circle like a lion, circle smaller and smaller until I am calm. Selecting one of my two chairs, moving it closer to the window. Wiping nothing from my empty tiny table, setting out my things, my things.

  I have things.

  I am lucky; I have things.

  I read the mentoring contract, slowly. My dictionary is by my side. I have a dictionary, a telephone directory and three children’s books. A lady from the church gave us those ones; I think they’re very old. There’s one called The Magic Porridge Pot. Rebecca loves it. Porridge is a kind of mealie thing, it’s all right. Fills you up with a heavy heat. We also have A Child’s Garden of Verses by Robert Louis Stevenson, which I like very much, and a book called Letterland, where all the letters are given names and faces. At home, I used to instruct the children. I had gone to school for two years before my grandfather died. I knew so much that I wanted to share with the village, so we built an awning out from our madrassah and we would sit in the shade after work and I would teach them. Basic things, the things I teach my daughter now. But it was me, I was the teacher. Me, I would instruct and enlighten, encourage and reprimand.

  Me.

  The lady who gave us these books, my neighbour Mrs Coutts, put her arm round my shoulder and squeezed me. ‘You mind and learn your letters, son, and you’ll be fine.’

  I know my letters, Mrs Coutts. I knew them all. Have you read Hadrawi, our poet laureate? Or Nuruddin Farah, or Timacade? You see. This is the measure of the man I am become. Bitter with the people who help me, humble to those who do not care.

  Rebecca is with the minister’s wife. I said I’d collect her as soon as I was finished and Mrs Girdwood said: No rush. You take your time, Abdi. I should get back to her immediately, I always want to stand over her, by her. Know her small hand is trusting mine. But today, I feel . . . I don’t know what I feel. For so long I’ve been a plant that is dying; one whose roots are upended to the sky. Today I did two things. I met that woman, Deborah, and I secured myself a library card. It was my minister who had said how I could get more books.

  All you need is something with your address on –

  But he doesn’t know how long he’ll be here –

  Kate, for goodness sake. Abdi, they’ll show you the internet too. You know, computers?

  He had nodded his head, encouragingly, the way I would do with the shyest of pupils. I wish I could tell him a joke. I wish he could see me at home, teaching my
class. Drinking shaah with my friends or hauling my nets. If he could see the expert way I twist and heave, so that only the tiniest fish escape.

  So. I have my library card. I have papers with my address on. I have my daughter, I have a church, and now I have a mentor. A plant that is dying will take the thinnest of soil. It will gladly relinquish its roots to the smallest, stone-strewn pot if it means that it might live.

  Simon thought our meeting had ‘gone well’. After Deborah left, he smiled at me the way my brother-in-law smiled the first day I met my wife so today I met my mentor I met my mentor, when I got the letter. When. OK, when I got the letter about mentoring the first thing I saw was UK Border Agency in bold black, and the slimmer Home Office words above. Overarching all of that, they place a little black rainbow. I believe the correct word for this is irony? But their irony brings fear. That familiar jolt as my stomach meets my throat, and all the acids mix. I’ve learned that you have to read these things. You have to try to understand it before you give in to the despair, and this time, it was a nice surprise. It said I had been selected (always a word to get you terrified), selected by RIES for a pilot integration service.

  I never asked to fly. Who told them I wanted to fly? (I’m quite a funny man. I was.) And RICE is very tasty. I know that ‘inter’ is good, it means to weave and worm your way inside the system. The more roots and tendrils and suckers I can insinuate, the further and wider they go, is good. Then I will be stuck, adhered not just like a plant, but as the limpets are on rock, and they will find it harder to pull me off.

  RIES. The Refugee Integration and Employment Service. Once you have been granted refugee status, you enter another strange new world. The country that you have been sent to, that had said it would welcome you, and then sends you to hell, now welcomes you again. From keeping you in a war-zone prison block they call homes in an area they cannot make their own people live, from giving you vouchers and prescribing how and from where you will feed your family, from proscribing you from engaging in any meaningful work which would allow you to feed your family yourself, the country turns, once more, benign. And, once more, you allow yourself to engage with the possibility of hope. You sniff round it like a wary dog, you poke it with your paw to see if it will bite, then, when it lies face up and artless, looking you straight in the eye, you seize it hungrily in your teeth.

  And I seize this. The letter told me that, since I had been granted refugee status, I was now eligible to access an employment advice service and a support service to assist with schools and housing – all food to help my body. But I needed food also for my soul. Buried further down the page was a line that danced higher than all the others:

  ‘. . . will offer friendship . . .’

  I read back and forth until I could see the full meaning of it, that they would match me with ‘a mentor from the receiving community’. I am a package to be received. I am a gift; I could be. I want to be. This mentor will be my guide, ‘sharing knowledge and experience’ to help me understand the ways of this fresh-opening world. For this, they seem to want nothing in return. I wonder again about her. Day-bo-ra. What will be the barter? The bribe? Even the minister and his wife seek to secure something of me. I sense their watchful eagerness, their slight thrill of panic that, if not tethered firmly within the flock, I may revert to my heathen ways.

  I am an ungrateful bastard. Oh yes, I know that word too. I am cynical, ungrateful, and almost spent. I concentrate on my mentoring form.

  Agreed aims

  We will work together to ensure that:

  • Deborah and Abdi meet regularly (ie once a month) & undertake to give each other sufficient notice if an arranged meeting has to be postponed

  • Deborah commits to showing Abdi a variety of cultural & historic environments in order to extend his knowledge & understanding of the receiving country

  • Abdi agrees to advising either Deborah or the ‘Putting the Me in Mentor’ project if his personal circumstances (eg address, employment status etc) change or if he wishes to disengage with the mentoring process

  • Deborah and Abdi exchange mobile telephone numbers in order to make contact with one another

  • Deborah and Abdi respect each other’s privacy and confidentiality, offering only information & advice with which they are both comfortable

  • Deborah and Abdi agree to meet over the period of one year from date of this contract, unless either chooses to withdraw from the process

  ‘That all seems fine to me,’ Deborah had said. I had said ‘Yes’ although I’d not had time to read it properly. Reading it now, I’m drawn not to the list of vague things that we’ve agreed, but to the word ‘other’s’. Is that right? I try to learn the punctuation when I learn the spelling (there are five or so pages of grammar notes at the back of my dictionary. It’s a good one, Mrs Coutts tells me), but whenever I think I’ve mastered the apostrophe or understood why a ‘k’ might not be pronounced aloud or how and when and where the ‘i’s and ‘e’s are placed, I see an exception to the rule. And I get even more confused.

  Anyway, the point is we will meet, once a month, and Deborah will take me to different places and we will talk. About what, I have no idea. I’m not clear why they’ve matched us. Truthfully, I was hoping for a man, a man my age that I could observe. That is the trick, you see. That’s the key to blending in. Observation. You come, you go. Place to place, an alien, a drain, a usurper. Everywhere is challenge. If you puff up your chest, you are a target. If you cow your eyes, you are a target. If you stand as an equal, if you answer a question honestly and clearly, you are dragged from the line. You are made to kneel in the hot red dirt and they beat you on the soles of your feet. They beat with switches and sticks until the resultant lattice is more blood than skin. After that, you are always mindful of how you hold yourself, where you look. I want to know if it’s different here, and I think a woman cannot tell me that.

  We’ll see.

  My free choice extends to rejecting my mentor, if we’re not suited. To sniff and savour this piece of hope, then spit it, petulantly, out.

  We’ll see.

  Deborah has arranged to meet me at Kelvingrove Art Gallery next week. ‘Or would you rather wait a month, if you’ve got too much on? It’s just – this isn’t really a meeting, is it? More of an introduction.’ I know from a misunderstanding with Mrs Coutts (that made her heave with laughter and raise her skirts to reveal voluminous petticoats. I don’t want to talk about that, though. It wasn’t pleasant) that this phrase ‘too much on’ doesn’t mean the amount of clothes you wear; it’s not literal. And I don’t think Deborah is trying to be funny.

  ‘Next week is fine. Thank you.’

  Her smile was awkward. ‘Would you rather make your own way there? I don’t have a car, but we could meet . . .’

  ‘Is there train?’

  ‘Not really. Only to Central, but Kelvingrove is up by the university.’

  I noticed how much slower she spoke to me than she did to Simon, the enunciation and roundness of her words. Then she added: ‘There’s the subway.’

  ‘I do not know this?’ I made my voice into a question. That way, you don’t always have to know the right phrase, but if you frown and lilt, they usually understand your statement needs an answer.

  ‘Clockwork Orange? The underground? The train that goes under the ground?’

  ‘Abdi,’ said Simon. ‘You can get a bus. I’ll give you the number of the buses that go there, OK?’

  I said thank you. But I knew I’d take the train.

  I fold up my contract and put it in the pocket of my backpack. The other letter stares balefully up at me. It’s been in there all week, rustling to itself. I hide it beneath my contract, zip up the pocket tightly. From the big pocket, I take out my milk and packets. As I move through the hallway into the kitchen, I see a shadow at the little bubbled window in my front door. It sees me. The banging starts again, insistent pounding on my flimsy sliced-wood door. If I was allowed, I would build a
fine door. Strong planks from a healthy tree, jointed with its own wood, which is best. That way the dowels and pegs swell with the same sap, they naturally graft and fit as the sun and the healing lets them grow into their own snug shape. Maybe here it would be different: the cold would shrivel the wood, the structure would collapse. Maybe here thin sheets of pressed-up fragments and sawdust bound with paste is best.

  I wait in the kitchen until the banging stops, and then I go to fetch my daughter.

  3. February

  Kelvingrove

  City of Architecture & Design, European City of Culture, UNESCO City of Music – Glasgow’s artistic credentials are second to none. One of the jewels in the city’s cultural crown is the internationally significant Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum, which sits on the banks of the River Kelvin and houses one of Europe’s greatest civic art collections.

  Constructed in the Spanish Baroque following Glasgow’s International Exhibition of 1888, Kelvingrove is Scotland’s most visited attraction, with twenty-two galleries displaying an astonishing 8,000 objects. Collections include a vast natural history display, Egyptian artefacts, arms and armour and many outstanding artworks by the Old Masters, French Impressionists, Scottish Colourists and proponents of the Glasgow School. Some of the museum’s most famed exhibits comprise a full-sized Spitfire aeroplane, the much-loved Sir Roger the Elephant, the famous Kelvingrove Pipe Organ (played daily at 1pm) and – arguably Kelvingrove’s finest treasure – Salvador Dali’s Christ of Saint John of the Cross.

  Entry to Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum is free.

  *

  Oh. One of those headswims is happening again. The cool wall offers an upright for my spine. What have they done to the museum? I thought it would make me feel better. I lean further into the wall, unpackaging the scene. I haven’t been here in ages. It was my favourite place as a child; a quiet douce cavern in which to marvel at soft-lit colours and soaring beasts. Today, it’s screeching. Chaos slaps me: bright plastic chairs spilling from the Costa outlet on to the central marble floor, weans eating sandwiches, sketching pictures and shouting, and surmounting it all: a flock of dangling heads. Seriously. Laughing and girning from the majestic ceiling (where I’m sure there used to be chandeliers). Massive creamy things, carved in grotesque masks, their mouths grimacing. It’s the swinging and the dancing of them. Their pupil-less eyes are scary. The place feels so . . . busy. Too many people; everything loud and jiggling – they’ve stuck coloured lettering by some of the paintings. Interpretation areas. Cartoon bubbles beside cracked oils, the hidden genius of the painting turned inside out. They’ve even reproduced sections of oils and watercolours, with the rejoinder to: Touch the surface! You can feel the paint!