Bridge 108

by Anne Charnock

  How am I supposed to have proof? I was a kid back then. I don’t understand. Why is she going into all this? I’ve been in the camp all these years. She stands up and, without speaking, leaves the room.

  Thank God. Slow, deep breaths, but it doesn’t calm me. I’m thinking about how the interrogation began—because this isn’t a conversation, she’s after something. Or she’s provoking me into losing my temper. Then my indentures will be extended for bad behaviour. They want to keep me here longer? That can’t be it. New arrivals have increased this summer. Is there a chance I’ll be released early? Is she making sure I’m suitable for early release? Could that be it?

  The door opens. She places a cup of water on the desk and pushes it towards me. I’m so thirsty I down it in one, and as I place the cup on the table, she stares at me, frowning. I feel my blood drain right out, and, I swear, I see a big, dark pool on the floor.

  She says, “In your statement you said your mother had died. But you don’t know that for sure, do you? It’s a calculated guess. Yes?”

  She backtracks, goes over and over my story, the same questions, and I’ve no clue why she talked about my mother that way. I think she’s bluffing, testing my story to the limit. One question after another like a dog that won’t stop barking.

  Silence, at last, and I feel I’ve been in a punch-up with no bruises to show for a solid beating. She sighs heavily. She’s disappointed in me. I look past her, through the window. A single tiny cloud in a blue sky.

  “Please look at me, Caleb. Did you actually see your mother’s body in the ditch as it says here in your statement? I am offering you the opportunity to set the record straight.”

  I’ve had enough. I tell her that my mother must be dead because she’d lost her mind and walked off in the night without any warm clothes, and she hadn’t come back. “I waited over a week for her. She must have died.”

  “So, you didn’t find her body. Thank you, Caleb. I dislike loose ends. And with that particular one tied up, I can show you this . . .”

  She turns her screen to me, but I don’t recognise the woman in the image, not straightaway. Short grey hair. A face full of dirty wrinkles. Cheeks sagging, like she hasn’t smiled in a long time. But she’s my mother. I reach with fingertips, and, as I stroke the deep creases by her eye, it all hits me at once. I feel a jolt and I’m on my feet. My chair crashes back against the floor.

  Officer Sonia says, “I’m pleased to inform you that your mother is alive.”

  “Where . . . ?”

  “There’s no harm in telling you. She’s in a psychiatric wing at a migrant detention facility in the south of England.”

  “Where, where?” I can hardly get the words out. “Exactly where?”

  “Dover. But you don’t need to concern yourself with that. The fact is, Caleb, your mother may have been confused when she left your tent in the night, but she didn’t die. A victim of trafficking. We picked her up in a raid. She had no documentation, and she remains in a very confused state of mind. She hasn’t told us her name or where she’s from.”

  “You mean she’s sick. Really sick?”

  “Yes. But the puzzle over her identity is now solved. Her DNA matches yours. So, the immigration service has decided it’s your responsibility to bring her back to good health. We’ll reunite you as soon as logistically possible. I had arranged for your transfer this afternoon, but the transport appears to be double-booked. We’ll rearrange as soon as possible.”

  “What about my father?”

  “No information.”

  I’m winded. Reunited? Now? Halfway through indentures? Jerome’s warning comes flooding back: it’s easier to stay in the country if your parents are dead. That’s it. They’ll reunite and deport us.

  I don’t know how I manage it, but I stand and walk out of the room. I’ve no idea how long she’s been questioning me. When I arrive back at the warehouse, I take a bollocking from Holden. I don’t hear a word he says. Three hours I’ve been gone and I can’t speak, can’t even say I’m sorry to Holden. He carries on raging, trying to get some reaction.

  The other labourers are shitty with me, too, when I join them in the tilapia packing bay. Take a few shoulder barges, as in The fuck you been, pal? I could say, “Guess what, guys? My mother’s alive.”

  What the hell?

  I feel bad I didn’t know her face. It took a few seconds. And I know I shouldn’t think it, but it’s obvious—she’s a different person now. I’m wrong to feel angry, but I can’t help it. I’ve gone through all this shit on my own, slaving away, lost all my friends, and none of it’s my fault. Look at the total fucken mess she and Father kicked off.

  But, still, I could see her. Just about. Behind those eyes, somewhere.

  I keep my mouth shut, take the elbow digs, and I work on auto: fish, ice, box, fish, ice, box.

  CHAPTER 9

  OFFICER SONIA

  Not a single hair out of place. The side parting in Superintendent Guidy’s jet-black hair is exactly straight. I imagine him standing in front of his bathroom mirror this very morning. He slicks back his hair and executes the division well off-centre. With comb and palm, he sweeps his hair from one side of the parting, then sweeps from the other side. Not a single speck of lint on his dark, deep-blue suit. It fits his large frame perfectly. He dresses as though he’s the manager of a six-star hotel rather than the superintendent of an unstarred migrant education and indenture camp.

  I devote barely a second’s thought, any day of the week, to my appearance, my clothing. It’s all arranged for me. Standard-issue attire: one work suit and five shirts, laundered by housekeeping at the rest station and delivered to my room on Sunday evening. Two sets of casual clothing. We all wear the same. It saves so much time. But, of course, I’ve no need to impress anyone by the way I look. No one ever questions my abilities. I dress plainly. I deliver results without fail.

  Unlike Farquharson.

  “My technicians won’t be happy,” says Superintendent Guidy. He slumps down in his chair, his suit now rucking up above his shoulders. “The kid’s made himself useful.” And half-heartedly: “Can’t you turn a blind—?”

  I raise my left palm to him. “Superintendent, we must right this wrong. The solution to institutional corruption is not more institutional corruption.”

  “That’s a bit strong,” he says.

  “Farquharson sent eight migrants—who ought to have been deported—to various indenture camps. Caleb should never have entered this camp.”

  “She made a few mistakes. That isn’t corruption as I know it. No money changed hands,” he says.

  “Not in a literal sense. Farquharson’s mistakes, as you call them, all took place during the last six weeks of her appraisal period. Those eight mistakes allowed her to meet her targets for admissions to migrant education and indenture camps. And thus, she received a bonus.”

  “Hold on, that’s not the same as a backhander.”

  Do I really need to explain? Much as I appreciate leaving the office, it is tiresome dealing with such muddled thinking.

  “Surely you can see, Superintendent, there’s a substantial cost to the public purse. Farquharson, in her role as a first-contact case officer, logged Caleb into the system in Liverpool and almost immediately received notification of a DNA match. She buried that information. Caleb’s mother had already been detained as the result of an immigration swoop, but we could not deport her because she didn’t have documentation and didn’t even know her own name. If we’d paired them up, and with Caleb’s birth certificate and so on, we’d have deported them to Spain forthwith. Instead, Farquharson won her bonus—one cost to the state. Caleb came here, and that’s another cost regardless of his indentured work. In addition, look at the cost of accommodating his mother in a psychiatric wing. Farquharson’s actions are indefensible.”

  I stand, ready to take my leave, but Superintendent Guidy doesn’t budge. I don’t think he’s ready to acquiesce.

  He says, “The trouble
is, you see, it’s difficult to cope with all these targets because the priorities shift from one day to the next. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t condone Farquharson’s actions, but I can sympathise.” Oh dear, he thinks his experience will sway me. “Look at my situation,” he says. “One year I’m told to retain as many migrants as possible; the next year I’m told to push them out.”

  “Supply and demand. We can’t take a static position.”

  “I prefer things more clear-cut, Sonia.”

  I smooth the creases from my jacket. Why does it . . . rankle, or is that too strong? I must address him as superintendent, but he may call me Sonia. And now I wonder, seeing as Superintendent Guidy “prefers things clear-cut,” maybe the entire immigration process, the whole shebang—I like that word—should be delegated to us simulants. Be done with it! People with brain chips imagine they’re one rung down on the IQ ladder from us. They’re way below, closer to organics than to us. And it may seem counterintuitive, but I find that my interpersonal relationships are far more straightforward with organics.

  “One thing is perfectly clear,” I say. “No matter how handy this boy, Caleb, has proved to be, Superintendent, we both know the place won’t fall apart for the sake of one indentured labourer. Plenty more where he came from, especially now with the resurgence of drought and wildfires in southern Europe.”

  “Makes you bloody wonder, doesn’t it? Are there any trees left to burn?”

  I let that hang in the air. Allow myself a discreet eye roll.

  He says, “We thought we’d seen the worst of the wildfires, and here we go again.”

  Better to leave him on a good note. “You have to admit, Superintendent, that immigration has succeeded in transforming a negative into a positive. Look how your camp has expanded over the past fifteen years, and how you’ve taken those basic fish farms and moved into large-scale aquaponics. They play such an important role in food supply. So, feel proud.”

  He sits up. “I do. And, I’ll have you know, Sonia, I’ve achieved more. The department acted on my advice regarding the revised conditions for right-to-remain. I told them: make simple, minor adjustments. And that’s what they did—gradually toughening the tests for spoken and written English. Let’s face it, no one could object to that, could they? New punishment tariffs, too, so that rule infringements incurred significant extensions in the period of indenture service. We were smart about it, don’t you think? No single change rang alarms for the bleeding hearts here or abroad.”

  I’m nodding, but I wrap things up. “Have the boy ready. I’ll reschedule the transport pickup—I hope for tomorrow.”

  The overhead lights flicker along the corridor. I’ll sleep easier tonight, knowing I’ve made a start on Farquharson’s aberrant case files. Not that I’m anxious. I feel a sense of repulsion as if—what’s that idiom?—I’m washing someone else’s soiled linen. She had to be sacked, though I recognise her impulse wasn’t entirely self-serving. She wished to provide better for her daughter, to take her on holiday, to visit family in Scotland. And Farquharson isn’t the only one deviating from the approved process. I’ve sifted ten years of case files at the Liverpool Reception Centre, cross-checked the communication streams with other agencies, flagged when data has been incorrectly assigned, pinpointed incorrect decisions, those at odds with legislation and guidelines.

  I smile to myself. When I undertook my orientation programme with the immigration service, I made an observation that fell on stony ground. I suggested that the costs to the state of an open-door policy would be less than the present costs of the state’s immigration control apparatus. My supervisor informed me that direct costs and direct benefits did not reflect the full economic picture. He’d no idea that I had considered the full picture.

  I’m opening the door of my small transporter when Superintendent Guidy calls across from the office entrance. He walks gingerly towards me. “Fancy a nice fish salad for dinner? I’ll get one of the boys to prep some fillets. I’ll pack them in ice. And a salad selection too. Follow me!”

  “Wait. I don’t cook. Never have. I don’t have a kitchen.” I fall in behind him, trying to explain. “We dine in a canteen, Superintendent.”

  He’s striding off. “Come and take a look.”

  I don’t have a keen sense of smell, but I can certainly smell fish!

  “It doesn’t smell like this all the time,” he says, reading my mind. “They’re packing the cold boxes for tomorrow’s deliveries.”

  His technician spots us, wanders over. Superintendent Guidy asks him, “How about a tilapia takeaway for our visitor?”

  A familiar request no doubt. The man doesn’t blink. “No problem.” He turns to me. “Salad box too?”

  I nod, attempt a smile. “Thank you.”

  Why explain? I’ll simply hand over the fish and salad to the canteen boss. I watch the technician shoulder into the packing line, lean over to pull out enough tilapia to feed both sittings at the C6 Rest Station. All the labourers look identical in their overalls and boots, but I catch sight of Caleb. He must sense my eyes on him because he throws a backwards glance. His face is pale. Ashen. Now that I reflect on it, he wasn’t joyous at the news of his mother’s discovery. I didn’t focus on his lack of reaction at the time, as my priority was to complete, without delay, the next steps—organising transport, booking their passage to Santander. I actually felt relieved for Caleb, that he’d escape this dead-end job. All told, was it really worth the trek to England for this? Surely he’s better off with his mother. Start afresh back home. It’s not as though he’s seeking asylum. His life isn’t in danger.

  As the technician hands over the cold box to the superintendent, I ask by way of small talk, “Do these workers give you any trouble?”

  “When they first arrive. Takes about six months for the inoculations to kick in, but then they’re okay.”

  “What about the boy, Caleb?”

  “Good worker.”

  “Anything else . . . ?”

  “What’s there to say? They come, they go. Some work better than others.”

  “I want to speak to him again. Bring him over.”

  Caleb drags himself like a sullen child across the warehouse, comes to a halt a little too far from me. I wave him forward. I turn to the superintendent. “Leave me with him.”

  He shrugs and moves out of earshot.

  “What’s the matter with you, Caleb? Why aren’t you happy with the news? You and your mother can start over, even if your father is still missing.”

  “He’s dead.”

  “But you and your mother? What about that?”

  He glances over his shoulder at the packing line, then back at me. “I didn’t recognise her.”

  “There’s no mistake.”

  “She looks sick. It’s a shock.”

  “A good one though.”

  He’s downcast, a child again, clamming up. I wait him out. He looks up with tears in his eyes, wipes his nose with the back of his hand and says, “I don’t think she’ll know me.”

  The technician walks towards us with an overfilled salad box. I say to Caleb, “Of course she’ll know you. You’ll see her soon. Now, off you go, back to work.”

  As he joins the packing line, he’s jostled by workers on either side. You’d think they’d stick together, support one another, wouldn’t you?

  The superintendent and I carry the boxes out of the warehouse. He says, “No second thoughts about the kid?”

  Is he trying to bribe me with fish? Surely not. “Look, Superintendent Guidy, I accept that Caleb might be an asset. He’s a smart boy. But we’ve known that all along.”

  “All along?”

  “Yes, he came into contact with one of our undercover agents, according to the case notes. Soon after that contact, Caleb handed himself in because the agent convinced him that surrendering was the smart thing to do.”

  The superintendent nods his approval. “Undercover agent, you say? More exciting than our jobs.”

&nb
sp; “Not as safe though.” I tell him that the undercover agent ran into trouble—badly injured in a mugging. In my opinion, it resulted from his own reckless behaviour. The agent, I explain, followed up on Caleb’s story by visiting one of the enclaves outside Manchester, intending to build a case against the boy’s incarcerator. It came to nothing, I tell the superintendent, because the agent couldn’t uncover any corroborating evidence. “He shouldn’t have gone there in the first place without submitting a risk assessment,” I add.

  “They run on pure adrenaline, those undercover types,” says the superintendent. “Who mugged him?”

  “We don’t know. A random attack.”

  “So . . . ?”

  “He left the service. Went back to the legal world. Tried to sue us for compensation, without success.”

  We shake hands.

  In the vehicle, I pass the journey reading recipes for tilapia, a surprisingly versatile fish it seems, pairing with most seasonings. I forward the recipes to the canteen boss at my rest station.

  CHAPTER 10

  CALEB

  What the hell did Officer Sonia want? She expected me to jump up and down, hug her? Wanted me to shout, She’s alive! She’s alive! I was too shocked.

  Does she want tears of happiness now, when I’m still numb? I stare at the concrete floor of the warehouse, at a puddle of water that reflects the overhead lighting gantry. I can’t switch on tears, but there’s one memory that gets to me.

  I bring her back. We’re side-by-side, working together as a medic team. My last clear memory of Mother acting her normal self, being totally in charge, giving me careful instructions. I see my hand, gripping a white metal cup. I’m pouring salty water on a deep, ragged wound. She speaks so quietly. “Nicely done, Caleb,” she says, even though some of the salty water misses the wound. She touches my hand and stops the shaking.

  When I look up at Officer Sonia, my eyes are teary. She studies my face and waves me away.

  I’m back on the tilapia packing line. The work, repetitive, is steadying my mind a little. With one hand I grab the tail. My other hand takes the weight. With each movement, I’m asking myself, what now?