This Is Where I Am (28 page)

The first time you do that for a child . . . well, you think you can walk on water.

Rebecca looked very smart today. They give them a wee red tabard to wear over their clothes, which she loved, and I’d bought her a pair of gym shoes in the hope she’d relinquish her wellies. That didn’t go so well.

Nooooooooo.

She’ll be fine
, smiled the nursery nurse, shooing us out the door. Abdi looked like he was about to greet, and I thought, let’s
do
something, let’s not just sit in a café and watch the clock. So we came up here. Further to the right and up, up, up, you can make out the onion dome of the City Chambers, where we held our protest march about the housing contract. Mill, really. Can you have a protest mill? Despite the posters and articles and Twitter appeals and posts on Facebook decrying the decision to axe asylum accommodation in Glasgow, all we got was a few hundred folk. Is that good for an ad hoc protest? I don’t know; it was my very first time. To be honest, it didn’t feel like we were storming the barricades. We were a hubbub of earnest do-gooders shambling before the seat of civic power, waving our homemade placards, shouting slogans. It was really hard to think of a snappy chant for ‘don’t send all these asylum seekers away from the homes they’ve struggled to make’. It was Gamu who finally came up with:
Don’t Go from Glas-Go!
Which segued into:
Our home is Glas-Go
, topped with several choruses of: ‘We belong to Glasgow, dear auld Glasgow toon!’

But I think it was a catalyst. Some of those few hundred folk were the asylum seekers themselves, visible as scared, angry individuals, and the media picked up on the human-interest angle. With perfect timing, UKBA then issued a letter to all the city’s asylum seekers, informing them they might have to quit the city with five days’ notice – and that they could take only two pieces of luggage. Then another, bigger protest was held outside Brand Street, statements issued from Glasgow’s Archbishop, from Scotland’s First Minister – shocked, indignant, sorrowful. Crisis meetings were convened between housing and Home Office officials. Within a week, the decision had been reversed. Glasgow’s asylum seekers would stay, the contract picked up by the strew of other housing providers and charities in the city.
Storm in a teacup
, cried the press. But it wasn’t.

‘C’mon then, Mr Impatient,’ I say. ‘Let’s go and get Rebecca.’

Abdi sticks his tongue out at me. The tower stutters and bends in the breeze. How precariously we’re balanced.

Later that evening, I’m sitting having a cup of tea and the doorbell goes. I decide to leave it,
The Book Show
’s started on Sky Arts and it’s rare to get a programme devoted to only books. Abdi’s never told me how he’s getting on with his reading list. Maybe Kelman and an omnibus edition of
A History of Scotland
weren’t for him. The bell rings again, one of those strident finger-digging rings that goes right through you, so I drag my weary carcass off the couch (the combination of paint fumes and strenuous bending has conspired to make me sleepy. It’s nothing to do with the massive plate of pasta I’ve just eaten). Naomi my neighbour is standing there, and, behind her, a policeman. He’s wearing his hat, which is usually a bad sign, and my heart seeps into the hollow of my chest is it Gill the girls Abdi Rebecca but as I’m thinking it I’m thinking no, why would they go to Naomi’s door and then Naomi says ‘It’s Rula’ and, God forgive me, I relax.

Only Rula. What has she got herself into now – and why am I being included? Not a single word from her since she failed to turn up for the cash. I doubt Naomi’s overly exerted herself to find out why. Out of sight, out of Naomi’s hair – and her purse.

Naomi speaks first. ‘Oh, Deborah. Glad we caught you in. Listen, there’s been some bad news –’

The cop removes his hat. He looks old-school, ex-army perhaps. Very neat and clipped, as are his sonorous tones. ‘I’m afraid a woman we believe may be Ms Kadyrov has been found dead. We need someone to identify the body, and Mrs Houston felt –’

Naomi is fair dancing in her need to physically wedge herself between and get in first. ‘I mean, of course the police traced her last address to me, but I explained I’d only let her stay a while, as a favour to you. Because she was one of your refugees.’ She simpers to the policeman. ‘Deborah works at the Refugee Centre, she’s always bringing home strays!’

‘Mrs Houston thought that you might be better placed to identify her. And possibly help trace any next of kin?’

The pasta in my stomach has twisted in a lumpen knot. Rula is dead? Beyond this fact, I hear my telly, and the husky voice of Mariella announce the publication of another political memoir; hear Naomi prattle on and on, her nervousness spilling on to me in sharp stinging drops and why am I getting worried and what is it she’s saying? That
I
was Rula’s friend, not her?

‘I’m sorry, but –’

‘Well, we both knew her, of course we did, so we’ll both come. But for your records, you know I – didn’t really have that much to do with the girl . . .’

‘How did she die?’ I ask.

‘Gosh, yes.’ Even Naomi must realise her giggle, here, is inappropriate.

‘Suicide, I believe.’ The cop says it plainly, without emotion. ‘Do you have transport? She’s in the mortuary next to the High Court. In the Saltmarket.’

‘Yes,’ I say. ‘I have a car.’

‘OK. I’ll let them know. Someone will meet you there.’ Then, as an afterthought, he adds, ‘I’m very sorry.’ The snide way he says it; he’s just seen us vie to prove how little either of us knew her.

‘That’s Rula.’

There is a face made of wax, on which someone has painted blue shadows. The shadows run across her lips and under her eyes, where they become green. Bloated. Her hair is tangled-damp from the water, from the Clyde where they fished her out.

Suicide, no doubt.

Because a lady and her wee boy saw Rula jumping in. Nobody pushed her, just as nobody saved her. The lady hid her son’s eyes as she phoned the police, a passing bus driver stopped and clambered out of his cab, found a lifebelt that hadn’t been vandalised and chucked it in, but the current and the depth and Rula’s determination to die were too profound. They found a cross round her neck and stones in her pockets. The cross sits in a see-through bag, along with her other effects. She had placed her handbag on the stone balustrade, carefully zipping it up before she swung her legs over the side and was gone gone gone. That was how they found Naomi’s address. From a piece of headed notepaper on which was written an old shopping list.

On the way to the mortuary, in the car, me driving and fuming, Naomi continually going ‘Oh God, isn’t this terrible?’ and ‘How was I to know?’ until I burst and shouted: ‘What the hell was all that about, with the police?’

‘Oh, Debs, please. Just say I knew her through you, will you? If it comes out we were employing an illegal, that’s Duncan’s career over, you know it is.’

‘But you
were
employing her.’

‘Oh Christ, Debs. That’s hardly the point. Please. What difference does that make now?’

‘Tell me the truth. Did you know what she wanted the five hundred pounds for?’

‘No. Not really.’

‘Not really?’

‘I think she might have owed some money.’

‘To who?’

‘I don’t know. People. Digs money or drug pushers? How the hell am I meant to know? She chose to run away. She chose to lie and say she had a work permit. It’s not my responsibility.’

The mortuary technician told us Rula also had a broken leg. He probably shouldn’t have said anything, but Naomi was crying and going:
We didn’t know where she was. Oh, if only she’d come to see me
, and I think he thought he was being kind.

‘Don’t beat yourself up, dear. I doubt she’d have been able to go and see anyone. Looks like she was out of action for quite a while. Left knee’s been smashed up pretty bad. Some time in the last two months, the doc thinks. Could’ve been a car accident, or a bad fall, who knows? It’s healed no too bad, mind.’

Or maybe it was administered deliberately, by whatever shitey scum Rula owed money to. And maybe that was why she couldn’t make it to Maxwell Park that night. And maybe, ultimately, that’s why she died. The policeman who meets us at the mortuary takes a couple of desultory statements, but his every tut and headshake suggests this is all ‘for the files’. ‘Tragic, isn’t it?’ he agrees, when Naomi reiterates that I work at the Refugee Council and how terrible it is when these poor souls have no hope. ‘What happens now?’ she asks, once she is assured of his sympathy.

‘They’ll hold a post-mortem.’

‘But after that?’

After that they hope Rula will be able to go home. There is a father called Vlad, perhaps, in a town called Tsentoroi in Chechnya. It’s Naomi that knows this, but me that pretends to. Why? Well, she briefed me in the car and she’s right: what purpose would it serve now to drag Naomi in? To punish her would just be vindictive. And it was me who saw Rula through my window. Me who has learned nothing from my past.

Me who did nothing at all.

14.

My new shoes creak. My belly is coated thick with porridge and my arms swing loosely by my sides. I have plenty of time. Over my head, a green canopy rustles; hundreds of tiny fingers waving me good luck. Birds preen and coo between the leaves – the fat grey ones are pigeons. Mrs Coutts calls them ‘rats wi wings’, but if you look closely they have iridescent necks of green and oil-swirled blue. And it is warm, still warm, and has been all this month. Last summer, my first in Glasgow, I remember only rain. It rained so hard I thought the streets would wash away, was glad for once that we didn’t live by water. Rebecca and I spent the days huddled by the window, searching for a patch of blue. I thought the seasons here would be consistent, like they are at home, but this summer is bursting with juice and warm light; it kisses my skin like a welcome friend. Mrs Coutts has made me a piece –
a piece of what, Mrs Coutts? Just a piece, son. A piece and cheese
. Rebecca and she waved to me from the window, waving and waving and me turning and waving until the blur of their hands was a pindot. This morning Mrs Coutts walked to ours,
because I’m aye up at the cracka dawn, son. And it’s such a bonnie day
. In future I will take Rebecca to her flat. It’s a fifteen-minute walk in the wrong direction, but this is nothing when your limbs are as quick and long as mine.

She is a good friend, Mrs Coutts. And so is Deborah, no matter what she has done. How to say this without invitation? Any words of consolation I might have gathered up for her were lost in the flurry of Geordie’s detention. She has been very unhappy since then. I thought, when she called last week regarding babysitting, that she was ill; her words were monotone and bereft. I should have asked
what’s wrong?
For sympathy only; for if she were to raise the subject of the little boy, I would say
remember the stones
and we would say no more. Gladly I will say no more. I would find it very difficult to offer convincing platitudes, an absolution for abandonment. Maybe one day I will tell her . . . nononot today I look at the birds the sky the ground. Maybe one day I will tell her about my little boy. Women are easy to be around: they listen, but do not try to solve. I unwrap my ‘piece’ – the slippy bread-wrapper in which it’s twisted is undoing itself as I walk. Sniff it. Ugh – vinegar. The sandwich is full of little onions, which make hummocks in the soft white bread. I put it back in the bag and lay it on one of the park benches. Perhaps someone else might like it. I can get something at work.

My first day at work! Five words that make me taller.

And breathless. For a year, I lived in limbo. Then I got my letter and they believed me and my life began again. Granted refugee status in December, given my mentor in January, a new home by May and this job by June. My college application’s been approved and I will begin there in September, to study for my Higher examinations. Without these, I cannot go to university and be a teacher and start to dig my own furrow for my roots. Proper, wholesome roots from which we can grow and grow and grow. For the first time in . . . I don’t want to count it, but I do, as I walk each step closer to my new job I count from the first time our village was taken over, to hiding on the edges of my old life and scrabbling and stealing and coming back and seeing . . . and running, running away and trekking to Dadaab and all those wasted years, not wasted for I saw my son born, saw my daughter born, and Sudan and back to Dadaab and and and – my pace is quickening, I realise I am running, that my hands are crunched and angry there is sweat on my back. I breathe, I slow. Not today, Lord. Please not today.

I am back to being a fortunate man. The early swelling light is warm, my belly is full. I walk with purpose. Slowly.

For the first time in eight and a half years, I will not have to beg for my life. I do not think it’s possible for them to know the humiliation when they
look
at you. The gatekeepers. The people in the offices, immigration, housing, jobcentre, the handers-out of benefits and rights. They endorse or refuse your continued existence in so many ways, and you are powerless against them. You stand or sit with sloping back as they run their eyes across your face, your clothes, your carefully written-out form. Who is one human to judge another? And you see it in their small tight eyes; the assumption that we are there to cheat them, every one of us has come with the sole desire to exploit and lie and scrape our future on begrudged sand. How do you think a man can live like that? Do you think if I had any other option I would beg for scraps? Would you? It is not
your
money you give to us. It is the money society, in its kindness and wisdom, has decreed we may have. It is called ‘humanity’. Do you know this? When ‘humanity’ is a concept, it is fine, but when it is one human being deciding on another’s right to
be
human, then it’s petty and unkind. One day, I want to be like Debs, moving through the city in which I live so successfully and well that I have room for others too. I want my benefits to be self-manufactured, not given by the state – although I am so, so grateful that they were.