Divinity Road (37 page)

She pulls out the table, removes the tablecloth and runs her hands over the rough surface. She can pick out the acrid tang of oils and with it all the memories and associations. Without thinking, she heads for the cupboard and begins to unpack the equipment so carefully stored away. Before she knows it, she’s set up an easel and propped a blank canvas on its lip. She pulls out the toolbox that Greg had used to store his oils and brushes, grabs a bottle of turps and a handful of rags.

Nuala selects a half-used tube of oil, a scarlet, and unscrews the cap. She lifts the paint to her nose and breaths in deeply. She’s set out a palette and she begins squeezing out her colours.

First she covers most of the canvas in a grey hue leaving the left hand edge untouched. Then she uses vivid reds and yellows and oranges dabbed onto this edge in an arc. She paints in thick blobs, merges the different shades with her brush, then uses a palette knife to scratch lines through the colours so that they shoot out like fierce hot sparks. The effect is like the rim of a sun or fiery star.

Nuala is utterly absorbed. With the background and sun completed, she starts on the central detail. She begins to sketch out a large black figure, a sort of naked silhouette kneeling in supplication, its arms held out towards the sun’s burning heat, an image of worshipful surrender. She works away in silence, oblivious to the smears of paint she has inadvertently transferred to her jersey, the black trousers she is wearing, even her left cheek.

When she finishes, she steps back and surveys the product. She feels breathless, shaking with excitement. Her watch tells her she’s been working for almost two hours, and for that period she’s been entirely lost in herself, a giddy exhilarating escape. And yet, at the same time, since the crash she’s never felt closer to Greg, never felt more aware of his absence.

She leaves the painting to dry on the easel, puts away the oils and cleans the brushes. When she leaves the basement, twenty minutes later, she’s still on a high.

***

Nuala remembers the moment of revelation with that strange mixture of alien dislocation and absolute clarity that is the hallmark of life-turning shocks.

It’s late afternoon. Mary has called in to collect Joe, who has come back to play with Sammy after school. Nuala comes into the kitchen together with Mary and the boys. She’s making small talk but is focused on her next chore, to get a chicken stew on the go. Semira’s sitting at the table filling in a form. Nuala remembers Semira’s comment earlier in the week that her permanent resident application had arrived from the

Home Office. As she passes the kitchen table, she glances down at the form just as Semira has finished filling in a section.

Oh, look, she says brightly. You’ve filled that bit in wrong. You’ve put that you’ve got four kids. She points at the appropriate box. Look, you’ve put four, not two.

She looks up into Semira’s face. As she does so, her mind searches for a joke, a witty comment, perhaps something about doubling your troubles, two being enough for anyone, or wishful thinking.

But as soon as her eyes meet Semira’s, these witticisms seem pathetic, are banished from her mind. Semira’s glance is only momentary, a fleeting instant of contact, but a split second afterwards Nuala feels as if she’s been slapped in the face, so potent a cocktail of emotions does it stir. Nuala experiences within it a tremendous maelstrom, a confusion of raging pain and tender longing. And then, a moment later, it’s gone, Semira’s face is a blank.

She gets to her feet, form in hand, and leaves the room in silence. Mary, who has witnessed the exchange but not the full force of Semira’s gaze, is sidetracked by a squawking Joe and is soon engrossed in locating his schoolbag, his shoes, supervising his preparations to leave.

As soon as Mary’s gone, Nuala heads for Semira’s room, the chicken stew entirely forgotten. She knocks at the door, waits, knocks again, then pushes the door open tentatively.

Semira’s standing at the window, her back to Nuala and the door.

Look, I’m sorry, love. Really, I didn’t mean anything, I shouldn’t have been so nosy. It’s nothing to do with me.

There’s a long pause. Nuala waits for a response, considers saying something else, then shrugs. She’s about to turn around and leave when Semira speaks. She remains facing away from Nuala. Her voice is low, almost inaudible, as if she’s really talking to herself, to someone inside her head, someone absent.

We were in Turkey when it happened. I remember it like it was yesterday. I play it over and over in my mind until it feels as if my brain is rubbed so raw it bleeds. I don’t even know which town it was, somewhere on the south coast I’m sure, because it was close to where we’d docked after the crossing from Alexandria. Talking to the Turks was difficult. We spoke a broken English together, but one of the men said we were near Antalya. I don’t know for sure. I’d paid the traffickers in dollars, I’d been waiting for weeks in the cramped room, trying to keep my spirits up, the spirits of the children.

She breaks off. Nuala can still only see the back of her head, peers at it for clues.

It happened early one morning. We’d been woken at dawn, they told us to get dressed and gather our things together. Today was the day. We were taken to the meeting spot in the back of a pickup. We pulled up in a dusty car park in an industrial zone of the town, deserted, just our pickup and a lorry waiting. It’s back doors were open, its engine was running. I remember the stinky smell of the exhaust fumes.

Another pause. Nuala has the impression that Semira is gathering her strength.

We got out of the pickup. They ushered us over to the lorry. Two traffickers had brought us over, the driver and our Egyptian contact, the only Arabic-speaker. There were another three waiting, five in total. They were all different, different clothes, features, hair, but the one who brought us over to the lorry was a bear of a man, barrel-chested, black leather jacket, thick moustache, stubble, greasy black hair. It’s his face that’s etched in my mind. When it all runs through my head, they somehow all look like him, they’re all identical.

Nuala waits. It feels like she hasn’t drawn breath since Semira began speaking.

They took us over to the lorry. I asked the Egyptian if we were going straight away and he said yes, that we should fetch our baggage from the pickup. There were two bags so I sent back the older children and made sure the younger ones were close by. I was frightened, you know that feeling when things are out of your control.

Seconds pass. When Semira resumes, her tone is flat, distanced, almost dreamy.

So I am standing by the back flaps of the lorry. I’ve got one hand on Yanit’s shoulders, another placed on Abebe’s head, as if to touch them is to protect them. The Bear is behind me, the Egyptian to my right. Some thirty metres away, next to the pick-up are the older children. They are bent over the back of the vehicle, hauling down the baggage. Close to them are two of the other men, the fifth one up in the cab of the truck. I am feeling anxious. I want to get safely hidden away in the lorry with the children. These thoughts are interrupted when I feel something hard pressed into my back. I turn and find the Bear pointing a gun at my chest. ‘Gold,’ he says, and points the barrel at my necklace, my earrings. When I sold up my life in Addis, I converted everything into US dollars as well as one or two small pieces of gold jewellery. I sewed the dollars into Yanit’s jacket and wore the gold about my person as discreetly as I could. Now I am about to lose it. I start to argue, plead, but the Bear doesn’t hesitate. With the gun levelled at me in his right hand, he pulls back his left and slaps me hard across the face. It’s a backhanded cuff that catches me completely by surprise. His knuckles split my lip and I’m already stripping off the jewellery before the first splash of my blood has hit the ground.

For the first time since she began speaking, Semira makes a movement, a slight shaking of the head, as if denying what was coming next.

So that’s when it happens. That’s when everything becomes confusing. I have got my earrings off, the bangle on my wrist, the thin necklace and my wedding ring. I’m not looking up. I haven’t been aware of the wailing in the distance and only take notice as the police car shoots around the corner and skids to a halt fifteen metres or so in front of the pickup. One moment we’re all frozen, caught like hares in a headlight, the next the police officers are out, guns drawn, barking out orders. And then the traffickers pull out their own pistols and open fire.

The words continue to flow and Nuala takes in the meaning, the raw facts, but it’s only afterwards, later that night alone in bed, that Semira’s words start to sink in, that she begins to understand what it must have felt like. She closes her eyes and takes herself back to the car park, to the pandemonium of fear and panic. Semira is caught in two minds, the desire to guard the younger children she is holding, and the desperate need to protect her older ones caught up in the fighting. Amidst the roar and screams of the men, the crack and hammer of gunfire, she’s dimly aware that the Egyptian next to her has fallen to her feet in a heap, that one of the traffickers at the pickup has been shot, that two officers are also down.

Across the courtyard, she sees that the third trafficker has pushed the two older children in front of him as a shield and is edging round the pickup, manoeuvring himself out of the two remaining officers’ line of fire. Meanwhile the lorry driver has stuck his head around the side of the truck and is screaming at the Bear to get into the vehicle, gesturing to him to get the back doors closed so they can be off. The Bear turns to Semira, waves his gun at her and growls a command to get herself inside with the younger children she is still holding. Semira can still see the trafficker hunched behind the pickup, her two older ones crouched down beside him as he lets off shot after shot at the remaining officers who have, by now, retreated to positions behind their own vehicle. She begins to scream.

She can no more get into the lorry voluntarily and leave behind her older children than split her own heart in two.

She looks into the Bear’s face praying that he’ll see sense but he’s in no mood to compromise. He whips his pistol across her cheek, punches her hard in the face, then pushes her into the back of the lorry. The younger children, too shocked to protest, scramble into the hold behind her. She has fallen to the floor, lies dazed, spitting tooth and blood. She looks out of the darkness of the lorry, her last few seconds of light for the next twelve hours. The trafficker behind the pickup is shooting at the officers. The Bear too is emptying his pistol, the officers are returning fire. Then there’s a roar, a flash of fire as the police car explodes in a ball of flame and smoke, a final glimpse of the huddled youngsters at the pickup, and the Bear swings the doors across her line of vision.

Kassa! She screams as the doors slam into place and the bolts are pulled across. Kassa! Gadissa!

She’s still screaming their names as the lorry pulls out with a shrieking of tyres and grinding of protesting gears.

***

Nothing has changed for Nuala, there’s no light at the end of the tunnel, no journey completed. But as she remembers Semira’s voice, the dyke is breached, the tears begin to flow. And she discovers, as the minutes pass, that the tears which began as a lament for her friend Semira, for the loss of her two children, soon begin to alter in nature, to become in time tears for her own loss. For Greg and the fifteen years of Nuala-and-Greg, the fifteen years Before the After. And with the tears comes not healing, and end to the meaninglessness, but at least a kind of recognition that henceforth Greg to her may be a memory of breadmaking, a half-finished sketch on the bathroom wall, a flashback of soggy walks in Shotover Park, a photo in her purse of him posing with Beth and Sammy on their Marmaris holiday. All this, but nothing more. Ever.

Dear Kassa You’ll never guess what happened today! The letter was waiting for me when I got back from class, brown manila with the familiar school postmark. I opened it, scanned the contents and let out a scream. The house was empty, so I screamed again, then put the kettle on for a steadying cup of tea.

It was Nuala who spotted the advertisement in the
Oxford Times
a fortnight ago. She circled it in red ink and left it open on my bed: Learning Support Assistant Required for East Oxford Primary School, it said. I had scanned the rest of the information as a froth of panic and excitement began to churn in my stomach. I had found Nuala in Sammy’s bedroom, piling Lego bricks back into his toy chest. When I showed her the advertisement, she smiled.

Well, it’s what you wanted, isn’t it? she told me. It sounds perfect.

But I’m not ready. My English is so bad. I don’t know anything.

Rubbish, she said. Your English is fine. You’re ready, Semira. As ready as you’ll ever be. And it’s Nuala who phoned for an application form, who helped me fill it in, supplied the reference.

And today, the letter. The offer of an interview. Nine thirty next Thursday. So soon! Nuala is the first home, just a half day on Wednesdays. I show her the letter and she lets out her own scream, even louder than mine. She insists on going down to the shop at the bottom of the road and returns with cakes and lemonade and sweets and crisps, a bottle of fizzy wine for herself, for me a carton of my favourite mango juice. Then the children arrive and she’s put some music on the CD player and the children are jumping up and down. Yanit and Beth are performing some complicated dance routine, Sammy is leaping about on the sofa and Abebe’s head is buried in a family-sized pack of cheese curls. The cork pops and Nuala slops the fizzy wine into her glass. I look around at the flushed faces, at the roomful of screaming, twisting, gyrating bodies, and I think, Maybe, just maybe, it’s going to be alright.