More Than Love Letters (12 page)

Otherwise, not much to report here. I spent the weekend at my gran’s – she’s had a fall and sprained her ankle, to compound still being shaky and restricted in what she can do after her stroke. Oh, and Monday is when I’m going to see the borough’s housing man with Richard Slater. What about you? Have you sorted it out with Declan, about meeting his brother?

Love,

Margaret xx

 

 

From:
Rebecca Prichard [[email protected]]
Sent:
10/5/05 22:53
To:
Margaret Hayton [[email protected]]

 

Declan and I have kissed (and a lot more besides) and made up. Elliot is coming for dinner at Declan’s on Saturday and I am going to join them.

We didn’t have a Nativity Play, multi-cultural or otherwise, even at the regular season at Brunswick Road. It is too hard to get parents to come to anything. Except fund-raising bingo nights. And unfortunately those had to be stopped last term after the police were called in to quell a minor riot, triggered by an argument over a blue teddy bear the size of a St Bernard.

Merry Christmas,

Becs xxx

 

 

IPSWICH BOROUGH COUNCIL

MRS BARBARA MCPHERSON, MA: DIRECTOR OF RECREATION AND AMENITIES

Civic House, Orwell Drive, Ipswich IP2 3QP

 

 

Mrs McPherson met Mr Richard Slater MP, at his request, to discuss repairs and improvements to play equipment and street furniture in and near the public park located between Gledhill Street and Emery Street. It was agreed that steps should be taken at the earliest possible opportunity to replace the zip-wire in the children’s play area. After considerable discussion it was also decided that three additional hygienic dog-waste disposal facilities should be installed in the area, these to be situated (1) on the iron railings beside the Emery Street entrance, (2) on the lamp post outside the Gledhill Street entrance, and (3) on a free-standing wooden post to be installed close to the gravel path immediately south-west of the British Sugar gazebo (see highlighted map in file). It was further agreed that the installation of these units should be moved forward in the schedule from 2010, and be placed in the programme of works for winter 2005/06.

 

The meeting ended at 5.35 p.m.

 

Ipswich Borough Council
–
Working for
Your
Community

 

 

From:
Richard Slater [[email protected]]
Sent:
16/5/05 21:56
To:
Michael Carragan [[email protected]]

 

Michael, hi! I was hoping to catch you outside the chamber after the vote just now – where did you disappear to? I am a deranged and ever so slightly desperate man – I badly need someone to shake me out of it.

We had our meeting in Ipswich with the chair of housing today. Margaret arrived in a flurry of books and raincoat and glossy dark curls, with the aroma of poster paints still fresh upon her, and we went in together to see Ted Nicholls. He was more than willing to go along with the proposal of allowing Witch House to be designated as appropriate statutory housing for Margaret’s Albanian girl, thus providing me with an excellent opportunity for being bathed in gratitude from those wide, sincere grey eyes. As we came out I was about to suggest a celebratory drink, but suddenly I didn’t want her to think I was the kind of dissolute parliamentarian who is in the habit of hitting the bar at 4.45 p.m. (yeah, I know, but save it, mate!) – and this was Ipswich not Westminster, so finding one open at that time of day might not have been easy anyway. So I just blurted out, ‘Shall we go somewhere for a cup of tea?’ as if I was her great-uncle Oswald come to take her out for her twelfth birthday. This piece of buffoonery was rewarded, surprisingly, by a smile, not pitying at all but so full of warmth you could have toasted muffins in its lambent glow. It was the first time I have seen her smile, really smile I mean, and it made me lose all the feeling in my knees – not a physiological effect I remember experiencing before, and one which makes it hard to do very much other than totter.

So totter I did, in the direction of the café at the Corn Exchange which was her suggested venue for our grand-avuncular tryst. The pavements were pretty crowded, by East Anglian standards, at that time of day, and as we walked side by side through the semi-throng it would have been the most natural thing in the world (according to a persistent voice in my head) to take hold of her hand, or at least to tuck a gently steering palm just beneath her elbow. Of course I didn’t, but she did move very close to me a couple of times, to avoid on-coming pedestrians, so that there was light shoulder-bumping (she is tall, so we are almost of a height) and I could almost smell her hair. I even caught myself wishing it would rain so that she would have to lean in close under my umbrella – until I remembered that I don’t possess an umbrella, and that I am not Jo’s professor from
Good Wives
.

I poured, as any self-respecting great-uncle would. Some of what I had been hoping was girlish shyness but feared was deference, which had so far hung around her, evaporated into the steam as she hugged her cup close to her chin with both hands, and she began to talk. Really talk, quietly, but with a passion which set the air between us zinging, about the Albanian girl, Nasreen, and what she has come away from. I was mesmerised, not so much by what she was saying – although I genuinely did want to listen, and to understand and share her concern – but by the sheer ardour which trembled in her voice and shone from her eyes. I found myself considering their colour again – they really do repay careful study. They have a chameleon quality. Sometimes they seem the palest of greys, like the soft underneath of a tabby kitten, but in the café, through the steam from her teacup, they were pure, fathomless twilight. My God, Mike, listen to me – see how far gone I am! Anyway, I tell you this whole toe-curlingly embarrassing tale in order to bring you some way towards understanding what I did next, idiot that I am. She was leaning forward over the table in her earnest desire to make me comprehend the extent of Nasreen’s suffering and valour, and her hair, which was loose and tumbling like a curtain at one side of her face, looked in imminent danger of falling in between me and one of those spell-binding eyes. And before I even knew what I was doing, I had reached out, and taken hold of a thick curling strand, and was brushing it back from her cheek in the direction of her ear – behind which, I suppose (had I thought this through), I would have tucked it.

The recoil was instant, and unmistakable. It wasn’t just surprise, or awkwardness, it was quite decided – a door shutting in my face. She went on talking, but her voice had slid into neutral, and her eyes dipped, so that instead of that glorious full beam I was getting half-lids (fringed, I have to say, with the densest profusion of not-quite-black lashes). Suddenly I knew she couldn’t wait to get away from me.

And then it got worse. It was when she mentioned Durrës, and I suddenly realised, Nasreen is from Albania. I mean, she’s not just an Albanian, she’s an
Albanian
Albanian. I’d always assumed she was from Kosovo (I’ve no idea why) – but of course Albania is on The List! So I had to break it to Margaret: that this created a strong presumption that there could be no ground for an asylum claim, that Albania is deemed to be a ‘safe’ country. All her earlier passion returned then in a blaze of righteous anger, directed at a government (and by association, any elected member of the governing party) which was so blind as not to recognise other forms of oppression than political tyranny by the state. All I could do was sit and be buffeted by the blast, and watch the wreck of my pretensions crumbling before me.

Even so, I just wanted to stay and stare at her indignant, unattainable face until they threw us out on the pavement. I knew I couldn’t, and I told her that I had to get back to London tonight for a division – and then hated myself because it sounded such a pompous line, me the big-shot politician, just when politicians were to her the lowest form of pond-life.

HELP!

Richard.

 

Richard Slater (Labour)

Member of Parliament for Ipswich

 

 

From:
Michael Carragan
[[email protected]]
Sent:
16/5/05 22:19
To:
Richard Slater [[email protected]]

And this is the madwoman who sent you the anthrax, right? You’ve certainly got it bad, Richard old son . . . Stay where you are. I’ve got a bottle of single malt and I’m coming straight over.

Michael.

 

Michael Carragan (Labour)

Member of Parliament for West Bromwich West

 

 

From:
Margaret Hayton [[email protected]]
Sent:
16/5/05 22:36
To:
Rebecca Prichard [[email protected]]

 

Dear Becs,

I’ve got to tell you the latest about Nasreen’s case. I’m so enraged about it I can hardly think about anything else! It all started off so well. You know we were meeting Mr Nicholls from the housing department? I mean Richard Slater and I, we were going to see him together. Well, the meeting went very smoothly – Mr Nicholls said he was happy for Nasreen to stay with us and receive her funding. Richard was brilliant – he seemed to know Mr Nicholls quite well and said all the right things. All I had to do was sit there and nod, really. And then when we came out Richard suggested we go and have a cup of tea, so sweet of him I thought, and also sort of businesslike. We went to the café at the Corn Exchange, and it was funny walking through the streets with him – I mean, me, walking through Ipswich with the town’s MP! I kept wondering if people recognised him, from the TV and the papers.

It was in the café that everything went wrong. The first thing was, I was telling Richard about Nasreen’s situation, all about Gjergj, and her brothers’ threats I mean, and suddenly he put his hand out and touched my hair. I suppose it must have been in his way or something. And it was awful because suddenly all I could think of was those head-lice, and how I still hadn’t had a go at them with the tea tree oil, so of course I jerked my head backwards really sharply – I am sure he thought I was completely mad. And I couldn’t rid myself of the creeping fear that maybe he had actually seen something moving in there, and that is why he was touching my hair, to try to flick it out, thinking it was a little spider or something. God, Becs, I can’t tell you how mortifying it was! Up until that point, I think I could quite happily have sat there babbling on all evening, but now all I wanted was to be out of there in order to purge both my embarrassment and any uninvited insect life. I just couldn’t meet his eye any more. I tried to cover up the embarrassment by telling him some more about Nasreen, but all at once he wasn’t so much Richard, more Mr Slater MP again, and you could tell he was offended, because he went all sort of distant in his replies.

And then . . . well, I suppose I hadn’t explained things properly before, but he suddenly asked if Nasreen is really from Albania, not a Kosovo Albanian – and, oh, Becs, it’s awful! It turns out that Albania is on a statutory list of so-called ‘safe’ countries which the Home Office keeps, and if you are from a country on the list you have almost no chance of being granted asylum, because you are deemed not to be at risk of persecution. It’s completely crazy! Just because the Albanian government isn’t actually locking up dissidents, and there is no civil war or genocide going on there, Nasreen is presumed to be safe to go back, even though her family are threatening to beat or kill her if she ever sees Gjergj again, and quite possibly even if she doesn’t. It’s as if there is only one kind of oppression that counts, and that is oppression by the state. But what about women’s oppression? What about dowry killings in India, a country which has been judged to be ‘safe’ since January? (I looked up all this stuff on the internet when I got home. First thing I did, after I’d washed my hair with tea tree oil.) Are those women safe? Is Nasreen really safe? It makes me so angry!

I’m afraid I may have given Richard rather an earful – you know what I’m like when I get going. He seemed to take it quite well, but afterwards I was left feeling vaguely uncomfortable – I mean, it’s hardly his fault how international human rights instruments have defined entitlement to refugee status. And when he left, to go back to the House – he seems terribly dedicated – I remembered that I hadn’t really properly said thank you to him for sorting out Nasreen’s housing situation (even if it does turn out to be short-lived). I found myself wishing that he was still there so I could thank him and, rather more obscurely, that he would touch my hair again.

You were having dinner with D and E at the weekend, weren’t you? What happened?

Love and hugs,

Margaret xx

 

 

From:
Rebecca Prichard [[email protected]]
Sent:
16/5/05 22:59
To:
Margaret Hayton [[email protected]]

 

Hi, Margaret – what a bummer about Nasreen and this stupid rule about Albania. I’d like to see the Home Office official who made the list go and live in Albania and face a good going over.

Yes, Declan, Elliot and I all had dinner at Declan’s flat on Saturday night. Declan did his signature dish of chicken vindaloo (well, actually, it’s his only dish), and he thoughtfully provided me with a large bowl of yogurt to dilute the heat with, on account of my lacking the Y chromosome and therefore not particularly enjoying having the roof of my mouth napalmed. I should have seen the warning signs when Elliot asked Declan if there was any chilli pickle to go with it. Boys competing over curry heat endurance levels is the equivalent of rutting stags locking antlers over the hapless hind at the dinner table. I was breathing pure testosterone fumes. And indeed, when Elliot and I were washing up at the end of the night while Declan was checking on Zoe, he got quite unnecessarily close and flicked me playfully on the bum with the tea cloth. And the worst of it was, I quite liked that I could feel the heat of the vindaloo on his breath . . . But Declan is so great, he really is! I am a weak and wicked woman, and will be going straight to hell.