This Is Where I Am (8 page)

‘Thank you.’

‘Turn it over.’

On the other side was a picture. It was the painting we had seen of Our Lord, hanging in the bluest skies.

‘It’s the –’

‘Dali,’ I said. ‘I know. Thank you.’

I’ve put the picture in this frame. Rebecca made it at Sunday School. The children collected strips of wood from the fruit ices they like to suck, then glued them together and painted them. Rebecca painted her frame in bright stripes of yellow and blue. Along the top, once the paint had dried, someone (I suspect the Sunday School teacher, because it was very neat) had written in black ink: ‘Thank you for . . .’ and then, at the bottom of the frame, Rebecca had written ‘Aabo’. Before I put the Christ inside the frame, I copied Deborah’s number into my phone. Her mobile number starts with ‘M’ for mentor, but I gave this one her name.
Deborah
. It jumps to the top of my list. I know no one here with names who start A, B or C – except Mrs Coutts, and I’m positive she has no mobile.

As we passed outside, Deborah had asked me where the camp was, and how long had I been there? She said
So
before her straggly question, as if it was a final thing, and that she had been waiting to ask it from the start. Immediately, I shrank from answering. Wished I had never said a word to her, I should have refused to tell her anything at all except ‘my life is here now thank you’. But that would have been rude. And I’d already embarrassed her . . . And I had agreed to this whole – No. I had reached out gladly, to the false creation of a ‘friend’. And friendship means to give something of yourself. Just something, a piece no bigger than a little picture.

I return the frame to its shelf, go into the kitchen.

I had
known
there would be this necessary exchange, but I wasn’t prepared for it. Stupid. Of course I must revisit the camp. But it’s so hard to sift the silt, to make bright fragments of sense and clarity from the mass and mess of those days and years. You forget deliberately how the purpose of your coming, the focus of your search, the transitory – necessary – nature of your stay eked out to weeks, then months, then years of sloth. Of hope and future seeping out and sinking through the dust. To remember means to search for landmarks, for anchors in the grinding endless time that yawns and weeps itself to sleep and yawns some more. So all of your time there merges until there are only two fixed points – the first day and the last and the last the last I will not there is not I am I will only remember the first.

‘Dah-dah!’ The man swept his arm back, a wide and knowing gesture like when the witchdoctor scatters bones.

‘You get it?’ he grinned. ‘
This
is the centre. Right here. This is Dadaab.’

Grinning and chewing. All the time chewing, from the moment he began to lead me through the camp, the slack khat swilling in his mouth, making his eyes too round and his speech too slow. Which was good actually – it helped me to understand him more. We don’t all speak the same language. I crouched, peered through the plastic curtain and into a long dark shelter. Many men lolling there. I recognised the low murmur of madness and a quick, rising shriek that may once have been laughter. One or two turned their heads as the light drove in, but most continued in their steadfast stares, or carried on monologues with unblinking neighbours. All locked in their constant chewing. We had walked through this swarming, stinking human sea for over one hour. He had brought me to a khat house. I moved back into the light.

‘No, friend. I was looking for food?’ This place smelled evil. I had to get back to my wife. I had left her and the baby with a group of women, told her to stay in the middle of them and not to move. But I wasn’t sure, now, if I could even find the way back. Never had I seen so many shacks, so many people. Such vast barren tribes of scattered people. Someone told me there were three hundred thousand human beings crammed here, but I didn’t believe there were that many lost souls in the world. Me, who had lived in my village with my friends and my kin, who had learned from meagre books and from the generosity of my grandfather, from the love of my mother. Who had ventured from the village to the
big town
. I was book-boy, learning-boy – I had been to school. Over four hundred in my school!
But so many, child!
My mother fussed, made me patties.

From only knowing the same faces for ever, I had learned at school that there were many different shapes of nose and cheek, that there were Bantus and Cushties and a whole bubbling soup of peoples that made our little piece of Somalia. And I also learned that, in our scraps and differences, we could still be friends. But there was no sense of that here in the refugee camp. No community, no shape to the place even though it was mostly Somalis packed inside. There was nothing except stench and wide lost lakes of bodies in mud blocks. However far you looked. You have no idea how many tents and mud blocks, shored up with tin and ancient wood, how much sharp-wire fencing, camel-blood and sewers and plastic bags and long dirt roads and dust and gates and guns. Only this, and then the desert. After trudging for so long, you come to this.

The chewing man ignored me, stumbled inside the khat house. I stood in the dull beat of the Kenyan sun. I knew it was the same sun wherever it blazed, but it was no longer my sun. I hated it. It didn’t grow our crops or give us joy and light. It didn’t warm my sea. Just shone above all the atrocities I had seen, drying up land and bones until they could no longer be named. The heat licked the nape of my neck, puckering my skin. People thumping by me; everyone close and surly, no one with anywhere to go.

‘Follow me, son.’

An old man touched my elbow. My first response was to strike him. The single belief I clung to now was that every creature might do you harm. I’d let the chewing man lead me only because he went in front. I could see him from there, and I knew he was alone. This feeble old man had come at me from the side – he might have his sons behind him, and my eyes swung crazily as I lurched away.

‘You want food, boy?’ He gave a toothless smile. ‘Don’t worry. I’m not going to eat you – far too stringy bastard for me.’

Still I hesitated.

‘Suit yourself. I’m going there anyway. You registered?’

‘What?’ I hurried after him, before he was lost in the swirling, aimless ocean.

‘Is it your day?’ he shouted. ‘You got your ration card?’ As I caught up with him, he lifted a piece of cardboard, dangling from a string round his neck.

‘Yes. We just arrived here.’ I took my card from the pocket.

‘Best keep it round your neck. See – make a hole like this, then knot the string tight tight tight. You lose it, you starve.’

‘Won’t they give you another one?’

‘Who? UN? Ha!’

‘Yoo-en,’ I repeated. ‘Is that who the soldiers are?’

‘Some of them. Right – see there. That’s the ice house.’

We had come to a kind of a marketplace. I hadn’t expected to see anything like this. There were even shops, like in the big town. Dirty, rough shops, but they had real walls of metal and mud. The old man pointed to a tin shed. ‘In there, ice. OK? You got any dollars? That one next to it is where you can change money.’

‘Dollars? No. I need dollars?’

‘It all helps. Especially if you lose your card.’

There was so much to assimilate. But I was young, strong. I had survived. Even this decrepit man had managed. He’d come here, old and confused, and he’d found his way. In a week or two I’d be doing the same.

‘How long have you been here?’ I asked.

‘Sixteen years.’

I laughed out loud at his joke. Then I saw it was not a joke. His tree-bark face, crumbling. He wiped his nose with the back of his hand, then poked me with the same knuckles. Snot on my shirt. Old-man snot, which I doubtless deserved.

‘You keep all your papers close, boy, you hear me? Then maybe you’ll get out of here. Every time they give you something official, a paper, a stamp, a name – you guard it like you guard your sister. Understand?’

I felt my knees give under my weight. He wasn’t to know.

‘I don’t have a sister any more.’

He’d touched me, twice now. He was the age of my grandfather and I just thought . . . I had thought in the shock of the moment that he should know. In giving him this knowledge, I’d be giving him trust. Trust and my ration card were the only commodities left.

‘Well, fucking guard your papers better than you guarded her, eh?’ He sniffed. A deep, long gurgle. ‘Right, we’re nearly there. Stay with me; watch what I do.’

The momentum started to build, tramping feet growing more purposeful, arms swinging as the crowd I found myself within became a complex body, a giant, undulating centipede. You sensed that, at any given moment, if one of these many, many feet were to fail or trip or, worse, begin to run, then the whole beast would implode in a bloody, rampant burst and all thoughts of my sister were swept away as the crowd carried me towards a wooden building. It was no bigger than the schoolhouse I was taught in, and the walls were swathed in razor-wire, yet people were reaching to it, clinging like it was God inside. The soldiers separated us into two lines, men on one side, women on the other. Bright hijabs and quivering hands. A silence falling.

‘They let the females in first,’ whispered my companion. ‘They don’t push so much. You got a wife?’

I nodded.

‘Send her next time.’

I would never send Azira here. I watched the women shuffle forwards, holding up their cards. Their colours shining, wrapping their heads, concealing their arms, beautiful and garish in the midst of all that dust. The soldiers checked each card against lists they held. Sometimes, you saw a head-shake, heard a mournful keen as pleas were ignored and a weeping woman sent away. No one went after these rejects. Each queuing woman, each queuing man, gazing stoically ahead.

‘What’s wrong?’ I whispered.

‘Not on the list.’ The old man shrugged. ‘It happens.’

‘And what do you do then?’

He spat. The man in front of us shifted his heels as the spittle hit the dust. ‘You make sure you’re on the list.’

Once the queues had been culled, the doors to the food store were opened. I could see the shed was divided up, the way animal pens are, and the women were being shoved into one of several lanes. There was no need to push – all they wanted was to be inside the space into which they were being man-handled. After that, I couldn’t see much, just the steady swell of people moving in and out. In and out, in and out. Rhythmic as the throw of my nets. Steady and wild as the sea washing my boat. Eventually, I stopped worrying about Azira. I had no energy remaining. The old man was called forward, disappeared into the throng. I had been standing in bare sunshine for hours, but I was numb beyond discomfort. Until the surge frothed up again and I found myself at the front. It was my turn. All the saliva dried in my mouth. It felt like a paper-moth was dying there, its fluttering death-throes trapping my voice. Mute, I held up my ration card. The soldier moved his pen across the page. Moved it again. We had one heel of bread and some water left. I had three mouths to feed; milk was no longer sufficient for the baby, Azira said. Or she told me to say that when we registered. A smart – and beautiful – woman, my wife.

‘OK,’ he said.

And that was it. Granted access with a blunt-nosed nod. I entered my allocated slot, was pushed with all the others into one of the runs. Then the run processed me into a darker space, where there were many wire cages. For a sick-lurch second I thought I was trapped, that they were going to kill me, until I saw men in the cages. Flour-coated men, dragging out sacks and cans. I tried to watch the man next to me. ‘Keep moving!’ roared a soldier. My elbows, steadying me against the heave. We each had to take a sack, then reach through a hole in the wire for each sack to be filled. I scrabbled with the rest of them, hearing rumours that the cornmeal had run out. It would be two more weeks before I could come back here, and the panic in me grew, the bestial clamouring filling up my head.

‘I’ll kill you!’ shouted a man. ‘Give me my cornmeal now!’

The soldier laughed.

I felt my sack being tugged away from me, but it was only a worker taking it. I reached further in, ensuring my grip remained fast. Wire biting into my crushed-up cheek. I felt the pull of the sack increase as it filled up with food. Cornmeal and flour. Vegetable oil, salt. Stuff we could make lumps of solid nothing from, but I didn’t care. After my father died and before my grandfather took us home, my mother sometimes fed us camel leather to chew.

At last, I was released into the sun. Scorched. My sack dragged, satisfying with all its lumps and bumps, and I was desperate to take it straight to Azira. I used to do that with my fish. No matter what I sold or bartered, I always kept the finest silver for her. But how to find the way? Screwing my eyes up from the sun’s bleak glare. If I could find the market square again, and from there to the khat house . . . Ahead of me, I saw a breeze of shadows, leaping in the sun. People were jumping from the thin dust road, backing themselves into doorways, straddling their robes and hems over sewers. Then a shout, and a truck rolled by. It was open-topped, driven by a soldier, and it was full of people like me. Not parched with the dead-eyed acceptance I saw surrounding us. No, there was life in those faces. Joy and fear and a sense of reawakening.