This Is Where I Am (3 page)

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 will 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 counter 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.’

‘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.