INTERZONE 254 SEPT-OCT 2014 (4 page)

I choose to write instead about this room. I write in the manner of Robbe-Grillet, of Perec and Touissant, the titans and tyrants of the
nouveau roman
who were so fashionable among my peer group at the university. I describe the objects on the dressing table (a box of matches, a packet of biscuits, the key to this room), the blanket on the bed (the money I could not afford to spend but squandered anyway, simply because the blanket’s colours reminded me so painfully of home), the damp spot on the wall (if you gaze at it long enough and hard enough you begin to believe in its existence as a pocket universe). I write in English, trying it on for size like some uncomfortable new garment, a piece of clothing I would not have chosen for myself but reach for now in the absence of an alternative. I imagine the clothes they give you in prison might feel like this.

My vocal command of English is still hesitant, but it is improving. Even if Marielena returns to me eventually, the person she embraces will be a different man.

I write my journal for as long as I can bear to and then I go out. I have found it best not to stay in the room for too long, even if – as so often – the weather is unsuitable for walking. It is too easy to imagine losing the courage and the motivation to leave it at all.

What is a city, when the bland pursuits of getting and spending are all but closed off to you? Shops – even the most commonplace of high street clothing stores, the most utilitarian of kitchen suppliers, electrical repair stores – begin to take on the aspect of mythical emporia, their merchandise the impossible relics of the deep past or the far future. In the dying light of early evening, the denizens of this alien universe guffaw and cavort. As I pass through the concrete canyon of the shopping precinct, I see a group of young people whooping and groaning, excitable primates that they are, in front of the supersize flat-screen TV in one of the windows. There is a football match in progress, but their noise seems to be about itself – the act of making it – more than any excitement or rancour about the game. I hurry past with my head down. I know their attentions could be transferred in an instant from the football to me.

When they look at me, what do they see? Not the reality, but a rumour, a cheapened, pirated image from that same TV screen: vagrant, raghead, scrounger, cheat, immigrant, shifty-eyed Ay-rab
suicide bomber
. Most of them don’t know what these things are, not properly. The television has told them that they are harmful, and that is enough. They are with their friends, which makes life easier, even when it’s hard. None of them have yet been forced into a position where thinking for themselves could mean the difference between life and death.

Their motiveless aggression is almost a comfort. For these young people I am simply a brown space, a foreign-made receptacle for their various frustrations. They don’t care about me, only what they believe I might represent, and I feel glad. Being attacked for who you actually are is a hundred times worse.

On some days, I might almost feel sorry for them.

I walk as far as the canal. It is now full dusk. The concrete stanchions of the road bridge soar upwards into the darkness like the forelegs of some monumental beast. The street lamps along the canal’s edge turn the carrier-bag-infested surface of the viscous water to an orange soup. Beyond the lights, the towpath, swallowed in blackness, extends indefinitely.

It is a dangerous place, the towpath, it is beyond the pale. If I were to be killed there, or badly beaten, no one, least of all the police, would express surprise.

Asking for it, aren’t they?

Stupid foreigners
.

Yet still I stand at the kerb, daring myself to walk between the stanchions and on to the towpath, for no other reason than to prove to myself that it is my right to walk where I choose. What have I come to this country for, if not for this?

I scrape my shoe against the dirt, a glinting mixture of topsoil and cinders and broken glass. I’ve heard it said that the frisson of active transgression soon becomes addictive.

“I wouldn’t go down there, if I were you.”

I jump inside my skin. I believed myself alone. It is disconcerting and a little frightening to discover someone has been sharing this space with me all along. The voice is a woman’s. I stare at the figure before me. There is something familiar about her, but it takes me a moment to realise that it is the woman with the shopping cart I saw outside the Border Agency. She is wearing the same too-big overcoat, and a dark woollen cap pulled down low over her forehead.

Seeing her here is surprising, almost ominous. I don’t know why that should be, but it is so.

You thought she couldn’t speak, didn’t you? Go on, admit it.

She loves to goad me, Marielena. She claims my best work is mostly the result of her goading. She is not here, of course she’s not – her voice is my own wishful thinking – and yet there is truth in what she says, that it was easier for me to believe the woman with the trolley must be stupid as well as homeless, to assume she has mislaid her voice along with her sanity.

I am no better than the youths on the high street, yelling obscenities at the television screen and lobbing dog shit at passing pensioners. How easily we convince ourselves that those who have fallen into the mud have nothing to say.

“I didn’t see you,” I say to her. I realise my words are true in a multitude of ways. The act of speaking to this stranger unnerves me. It comes to me that other than my ritualised encounters with the Border Agency and my fumbling conversations with shopkeepers and library staff, these are the first words of English I have exchanged with another person since I first arrived here. I savour the words again inside my head, hoping the woman can understand my accent. That she will not laugh, or turn on me like the street kids.

“The canal path is a low place,” the woman says. Her voice is soft and rasping as a tarnished key in a rusty lock, and I have some trouble in comprehending her. I am confused by her use of the word low. Does she mean that the path is on low-lying ground, that it is dangerous because it passes too close to the river? When I look up the word later, in my battered Collins paperback English dictionary, I discover that low can also signify degraded, poor, evil, or mean.

I take a single step towards her. She is standing close to one of the streetlamps leading to the road bridge, and in the light it throws I am able to observe her face clearly for the first time. She is younger than I imagined, and the firm set of her mouth reminds me for just a second of my mother, the way she always looked when she was trying to tell me something important.

“Are you from here?” I ask, then immediately feel foolish. What is my question supposed to mean, exactly? From this city, this country, this planet, this dirty strip of pathway alongside the canal? When the woman begins to laugh I am not surprised.

“That’s a tricky question,” she says. “I was born here in the city though, if that’s what you mean. We lived on Coulter Street.”

Once again I find it difficult to grasp her meaning, a failing I put down to my poor command of English. I know Coulter Street, though, because it is close to the library. The houses there are large and well kept. There is something unsettling, not quite real, in the idea that this unfortunate once lived in such a house, that she once had her home there.

It would be easy to dismiss her words as fantasies, yet she seems perfectly lucid.

“My name is Noah, by the way,” I say to her.

“Mary.”

She comes towards me then, dragging her stuffed-full shopping cart behind her. As she approaches I begin to smell the sharp, raw stench of the streets, the odour of bad drains and unwashed clothes, the scent I would sometimes catch on Marielena when she returned to me after one of her periodic absences, the sour reek I fear now emanates from me, also.

Mary. It is an odd coincidence. Her eyes are amber in the lamplight, shading to gold.

“You shouldn’t be out here at night,” she says. “It’s dangerous, even when you think it’s not.” We are both silent for a moment, and then she says something strange. “I have a present for you. Would you like to have it now?”

She turns away from me to reach into her shopping cart. I feel a surge of panic, wondering what I will do if she offers me a filthy rag, a piece of half-eaten food, a plastic bag full of dog faeces. What she gives me instead is a book. She presses it into my hands, like a missionary from the old times, fervently offering a contraband bible to the unenlightened.

“It’s old, but it’s very good,” she says. She tugs the woollen cap a little further down her forehead. “You should read it.”

I glance down at the book in my hands. Part of the cover is missing, but there is enough of it left for me to see that I am holding a copy of
URL Not Found
, by the French-Egyptian writer Zaira Massi. I have never read it – our new government banned it, along with all the rest of Massi’s novels – but of course I have heard of it, it is one of those books everyone has heard of, whether they enjoy reading or not. It was published quite recently, three years ago at the most. I wonder what Mary means by calling it old?

That the copy itself is well worn, perhaps? It is true that it is not in good condition.

“That woman was a hero,” Mary whispers. “She comes to me in dreams. She saved my life.”

I have no idea what Mary is talking about, or why she is speaking about Zaira Massi as if she were dead. Massi is still alive, so far as I know, though I am sure there are people – people in our new government, for example – who would wish otherwise.

“I would love to borrow this,” I say to Mary. “Are you sure you don’t mind?”

She shakes her head. “Keep it,” she says. “I don’t need it.” She hugs her sides and shuffles her feet. There is an aggressive tone to her voice that wasn’t there before, and I wonder if this is my fault, if I’ve done something to offend her. Could it be she wants money? If so I have none to give her.

“I should be going,” I say, lamely. The idea that I have somewhere to go, even if it is only the sorry little room on Davenport Street, makes me feel uncomfortable. I wonder where Mary will sleep tonight, and for the first time since the airport I feel like an imposter. As if in answer to my thoughts, a burst of laughter and a string of curse words float down towards the canal path from the darkened shopping precinct. The TV kids, most likely. What is it about laughter in the dark that makes it so frightening?

“They don’t know what they have,” Mary says. Her voice is softer now, calmer. She speaks in a tone of wonderment, as if she has stumbled by chance upon a truth she had not previously realised. “Those poor children.”

I want to ask her what she means, but before I can frame my question she leans forward on the handle bar of her shopping cart and begins pushing it back uphill towards the city centre. For a while I can still hear the grumbling sound of the trolley’s wheels against the fractured concrete, but after a minute or so even that is gone.

Zaira Massi’s novel is about a woman who falls prey to identity theft. Little by little she is rendered into nothingness. It is a terrifying story.

“We’re very sorry, Mr Wahid, but until the relevant documentation comes through we really can’t…”

“You’ve been telling me this for six months already. I come here every week like I’m supposed to but nothing changes.”

I think about banging my fist on the counter, then realise the very fact that I am still thinking about doing it means I won’t, that the moment for action has already passed. I wonder how it might have felt, for once, just to act without thinking, and in the wondering I find I can almost feel the impact of my fist against the slightly greasy laminated surface of the countertop, the shock to the wrist, the dull glow of pain afterwards. The young woman behind the counter stares at me guardedly. Her expression is the expression of an animal trainer, trying to work out if the tiger she has raised from a cub is about to turn rogue. She shifts her chrome-legged chair backwards, just an inch or two, on the dimpled rubber floor tiles. The woman is new here, or at least I have not encountered her before. She has hair the colour of beechwood, clipped short at the sides and thickly curled on top, like an autumn chrysanthemum. There is a perfectly round, almost-black mole about a centimetre to the right of her right nostril. It punctuates her skin like a strict full stop, an indication of negative certitude. No. Nothing. Never.

“I do understand, Mr Wahid. This is a difficult time for all of our clients. I would advise you to be patient. Is everything all right at your lodgings?”

She tries on a smile, but I can see she is still wondering if I might be dangerous. One of the quiet ones, she is thinking, who turn out to be maniacs after all, the ones you see on the news who cut off the heads of their neighbours with Samurai swords.

I search her features for traces of Marielena, but there are none, just the merest disturbance of her lipstick at the corner of her mouth, a brick-red smear. Like curry paste, I can feel the heat in it. I turn my back on her and walk away, without smiling, without apologising, without thanking her. It is my one small act of revenge and it makes me feel lower than a dog.

From the back of the DSS offices a narrow, concreted alleyway cuts through to the loading bays at the lower end of the shopping precinct. I do not normally walk this way. Apart from in the early mornings the area is usually deserted, a Mecca for muggers. It is too easy to imagine being tumbled against the hard ground and left for dead. Today I don’t care, though. The loss of hope has made me fearless. I stride through the litter, my head filled with images of crashing walls and billowing smoke, terrified people trampling each other in their need to escape.