Pamela tapped her cigarette onto an ashtray. Her bones were tired and her back hurt.
‘No, no, I don’t mind. I saw it.’
‘Where?’
‘On a boy. A Kosovan boy.’
‘I hope you didn’t rip it off him like you did the last lad.’
‘No, no, I just saw it.’ Pamela smiled.
Iris was making tea for Pamela’s two children.
‘Do you want some?’ she said.
‘No, I can’t eat nothing, my stomach’s all tight,’ Pamela said and she sat on the couch and chewed her fingernails before she went home to the house she lived in by herself. She came to see her ma and the kids on good days. Her kids were growing up well. Lauren had the most beautiful long hair. Callum could count to ten.
Concierges 1999
The first time they caught the boys on camera playing about in the lifts they let it go because they were good boys from a good family. All the Kosovan families were good families. The boys didn’t smash windows or kick in cars, they weren’t aggressive and they didn’t answer back. But the time they opened the fire hatch on the ceiling of the lift and climbed through was different. Serious, dangerous and foolish; it was everything that angered John and George after everything they’d seen over the years.
‘Get down, now!’ George said through the intercom which shocked the boys and George and John left Moira in the office and went to find them. It took them a wee while because thirty floors of evading capture gave them good odds. They got them though, with the help of Moira on the radio and a short spell of running up the stairs which wore them out but was enough to surprise the boys on their way down.
‘You’re coming with us,’ John said and put them in the lift with him and George. No back-chat, no refusing to go, no threatening to call the police if they touched them, which the young ones did now.
At floor fourteen they took the boys to their front door and knocked on it. The boys’ parents motioned for George and John to come in, like they always did, proffering them juice and fruit and making them sit for a while.
‘No, no, thank you,’ John said. ‘Boys, will you tell your parents you’re in trouble with us.’
The boys nodded and spoke in Albanian.
Their parents looked from one concierge to the other and laughed.
‘Did you tell them?’ George said.
‘Aye,’ one of the boys said and spoke again in Albanian. The parents talked briefly, as if conferring, and pointed to
George.
This wasn’t going the way George and John had thought it would.
‘Tell them we’re sick of you playing about in the lifts. It’s dangerous,’ John said.
Again, one of the boys spoke to his parents in Albanian.
Their parents widened their eyes and smiled and ruffled the boys’ hair.
‘If we catch you doing it again you’ll be in trouble.’
More talking and gesturing and innocent-looking eyes and again, smiles from the parents. The mother said ‘Thank you’.
One of the boys volunteered something else although neither George nor John had asked him to translate anything and the parents laughed and motioned again for George and John to come into their house.
‘Thank you but we’d better get on. Another time.’ George turned to the boys. ‘You tell them we’ll be watching you. You’ve been very bad boys.’
A burst of Albanian and the parents ruffled their children’s hair again.
When they’d shut the door John said to George, ‘Keep an eye. It’s all we can do.’
Ermira 1999
Ermira stood at the window with her brother. He was taller than her. Thin and tall with awkward teenage arms. He’d started at the school in Hillhead and took two buses each morning and afternoon with the other kids.
‘You should see the West End,’ he told her. ‘It’s like a different country.’
A fat seagull glided past the window. The day was grey.
‘See if it will take this,’ her brother said and took a slice of bread from the bread bag. He pushed hard on the window and tipped it up so that it turned in on itself. The cold wind hit them. They held their bare arms out. Wind rushed over Ermira’s wrists. Her brother threw his bread up into the air. They looked down, following the bread and watching the seagull, seeing if it would swoop to catch it as it fell. It didn’t. Ermira looked up to see the bellies of more gulls gliding on the air currents. Some pigeons flew about too, but with less grace.
‘Ramiz was looking for you,’ Ermira’s brother said and Ermira flopped onto the window frame and let her hands dangle out of the window. Her brother grabbed her T-shirt and pulled her upright.
‘Stop that. How old are you?’
‘I wasn’t going to fall.’
‘I know, but.’ He paused. ‘He said have you made a decision.’ Ermira’s brother shut the window and she leaned her forehead against it.
Ermira had made a decision but she couldn’t see how she would be able to sit and learn in a college with her head jumping the way it did. Her brother leaned his forehead on the window pane too. Wind sprayed rain onto the glass and whistled through the gaps in the frame.
‘Ramiz is a bully.’
‘No, he’s not.’
‘He should concentrate on looking after his own wife and kids. Weans.’
‘Tell me what you’re going to study?’
Maybe it came from the woman in Macedonia who had taken her in when she’d lost everyone.
‘Tell me what you’re going to study, Ermira.’
‘Did you look for me at the border?’
Her brother shot her a look. ‘You know we did.’
‘How hard did you look?’
‘Very hard.’ He kicked a foot against the wall.
Ermira knew her brother and her parents didn’t like to talk about what happened at the border. So they didn’t. When she asked them they acted guilty and told her they’d found each other in the end so the trick was to look forwards now.
But no one but Ermira had seen the man the Macedonian family had taken in as well. He apologised for crying but cried all the same. Like Ermira he had no luggage – that was left behind and lost in the crush – but he’d crossed the border on
his own and said his whole family was gone. The Macedonian man sat up with him on hard-backed chairs by the window and the woman put water and cotton wool on his injuries. She made up beds and Ermira cried in hers for much of the night.
‘You’re going to do childcare, aren’t you?’
‘No.’
‘Catering.’
‘No.’
‘Hairdressing?’
Ermira paused. ‘The Macedonian woman, she couldn’t have children and she loved children, so she asked if she could sit with me and brush my hair because she’d always wanted to brush her little girl’s hair. I let her brush my hair and all the time I was thinking that she wasn’t my mother, that only my mother should brush my hair. And then I felt bad because she’d taken me in so when she said have you had enough, I always said, no, you can keep going, and she kept brushing. I thought I might have to stay there in that house with those people forever. I didn’t even know that she’d let me or want me to. I thought I might have to go to Britain with the man who’d lost everything. He was like a madman. I didn’t know how long I should stay there at the border waiting for you and looking for you. I thought you might have gone on without me.’
‘But then we found you.’
‘Yes, you found me.’
‘From the message on the wall in the community centre.’
‘Yes.’
‘So look forwards, Ermira.’
‘All right, little brother.’
A plane flew low and loud across the sky. Ermira left the window and sat on the couch. Her brother threw her the remote control for the television.
‘So it’s hairdressing isn’t it?’ he said.
‘Yes.’
‘In memory of the woman who brushed your hair.’
‘Yes, because I thought bad things about her and I feel guilty. Poor woman. She couldn’t have any kids.’
‘That’s no reason to do something.’
‘I need to have some reason.’
She could have said more. They could have talked on. But the Saturday football programme was on and her brother liked to follow the football in the Scottish leagues and the English leagues, so they sat together on the couch and watched the men with microphones standing in the empty grounds giving their thoughts on the matches to come.
Hairdressing. Her brother would let her practise on him. Probably.
Khadra 2002
Six months after the attacks in the United States, Khadra came to Glasgow via a camp in Kenya and God knows where else. She spent a week in a hotel in Argyle Street. Then they sent her to Glasgow Airport. A special centre in which people like her could be processed, the planes landing and taking off while she sat in the room waiting. A passenger could get across an ocean in the time she sat in that room. The tension was tough on her body. It made her sick.
When it was her turn they took her into a room and told her to stand against a white wall and before she was aware of what was happening they took her photograph. Click. Flash. They didn’t ask to hold her fingers but they took them and rolled each one on an ink pad and then on a piece of paper, their own latexed fingers manipulating her fingers, pressing them firmly. She thought they were finished with the ink but they held on to one of her hands and pressed it, palm down, to the ink pad and took its print. They took the other hand and did the same. As she wiped her hands with the cloth they gave her she watched a woman take a cotton bud and plastic bag and indicate that
Khadra should open her mouth. The woman rolled the cotton bud on the inside of her cheek and put it in the plastic bag.
Then they spoke.
Tell me how you came to Glasgow, they said. Name? Date of birth? Where are you from? Khadra spoke no English. They got her an interpreter and the interpreter told the officials what Khadra said. I am from Somalia, an island called Koyama. I’m twenty-four. I’m here alone. I don’t know how I got here. Really? Yes. I was drugged. I escaped to a refugee camp in Kenya and then I got here, somehow, and they left me outside the doors of the Scottish Refugee Council. Do I have to tell them every- thing? It’s best to.
My parents aren’t alive anymore. My dad was shot. My mum was raped. I was raped. My mum died. I escaped. The political and religious situation in Somalia is such that you are persecuted if you hold different beliefs to the people who take control of your area. If your ethnicity is different, you are persecuted too. I am mixed race, a minority; my dad Indian, my mother Bantu. We were persecuted. As I said.
The officials didn’t look at her. They studied their computer screens and paper documents. Khadra still felt sick with the telling and the tension. She was hot. It was horrific.
‘You understand you would do better to be married,’ the interpreter told her when the officials had paused in their questioning. ‘A Scottish man. Then it will be harder for them to kick you out. You’ll get your status in three years.’
It confused her, what the interpreter said. It made her faint with the shock of the sentiment and she didn’t have words to say that she wasn’t here because she simply wanted a better life but she was here because she had to be here, because she had to escape before she died too. It made her weak to think that one of her own people, a Somali woman, could make her feel so utterly and desperately alone. She sat quietly in the chair while they finished processing her.
They sent her back to the hotel in Argyle Street where along with the other asylum seekers she stuffed her pockets at breakfast with rolls and cheese to eat in her room later in the day. She wasn’t lonely. We’re all asylum seekers, we’re all fucked together, they said and she agreed. With the thirty pounds they gave her each week she went with another woman to Boots and studied the labels on bottles, trying to find one that contained shampoo. She learned the words for currency first: pound, pence, one, two, three, four, five. When a woman asked for eight pun she stared confused, cloth covering all but her eyes, until the cashier turned the plastic screen to face her and said that.
She knew the world was jittery about Muslims and terrorists. Someone spat at her on Argyle Street.
Onwards. On the advice of other women she saved her cash because once they processed her she would be on vouchers that had to be spent at specific shops.
At five in the morning they knocked on her door and told her to get in a van. Other women came out of their rooms carrying bags and children and when the doors shut and the van drove off the women thought they were going to a detention centre. The officials didn’t explain anything. They didn’t speak.
The van pulled up at a warehouse and the officials opened the doors. They gestured for the women and children to climb out of the van and go into the warehouse. No kindness, no civility, just strong arms and thick coats. Still early in the morning, somewhere in Glasgow. If they were to be lined up and shot, this is how it would be, Khadra thought.
Inside the warehouse, the officials called them one by one and Khadra realised they weren’t shooting or detaining or taking them away, they were giving them homes. Homes in Birmingham, homes in Manchester, homes in London and homes in Glasgow. Khadra had picked Glasgow. They’d asked her at the airport and she’d chosen to stay in the city her fate had brought her to.
‘Here’s your flat number,’ the official said. ‘Twenty-three/two. Twenty Petershill Court, Red Road Flats.’
They opened the doors of the van and told Khadra and the women and children to get in. The van stopped at other high rises in Glasgow and let people out. She said goodbye to some of the women she knew. She and another Somali woman were let out at Red Road. Two men met them at the doors of the van. One man took her to number Twenty Petershill Court and they got in the tiny lift. On floor twenty-three he opened her blue door and said here is your flat.
The first thing she noticed was the light slamming through the windows. She went straight to the living room window and stood up against all that light and saw in front of her the most amazing view. Hills called the Campsie Fells, the man told her, and stood behind her while she looked out in silence. Then he left her to her asylum process. Welcome, I hope you’re happy here, he said as he closed the door.
Jim 2002
Jim couldn’t stop thinking about Colleen. He missed her. Nearly five years gone and it didn’t make a difference. She could be sitting up in bed next to him, telling him she’d had enough reading and could he turn the light out now, she was so present in his head. Right there. For her, as he did occasionally, to wind her down to sleep, or coax her into loving, he sang his song.
The moon was rising above the green mountains
The sun was climbing beneath the blue sea
As I stray with my love to the pure crystal fountain
That stands in the beautiful vale of Tralee.
In the concert party at Alive and Kicking, the centre he went to every day, he was to step forward after May and Donald and Erica’s second sketch, and sing this song. The first verse
unaccompanied. Then the pianist would join in. And finally the whole concert party would come in with their harmonies. He would put his hand on his chest and sing for Colleen.
Oh go to sleep, you daft old fool, lie down and put the radio on. He did so, pulling the pillow from Colleen’s side and holding it tight to his chest and belly and groin.
Khadra 2002
A letter informed Khadra that her application for asylum had been turned down. The trip to Leeds and the interview with the Home Office had come to nothing. She would have to leave or appeal.
‘Appeal then,’ her Somali friend said.
‘How long will that take? Months?’
‘But they won’t send you back yet.’
‘I’m going to choir,’ Khadra said.
On the bus to Partick some boys asked her what she was wearing underneath her
abaya. Her English was slow and hesitant but she told them a Spiderman costume. The boys blew pieces of bus ticket through straws and asked where her cousin Osama Bin Laden was hiding. When they kept up their taunting she moved seats and sat next to a woman who turned her face to the window.
It was a nothing world she lived in. Living in a flat halfway to the sky, thinking up sentences in Somali, Katchi, French, Swahili, Gujarati, yet fighting to find words in English, travelling like a stranger on buses – even with her face uncovered people still avoided her eyes – and having the fate of her body – her physical body – where it would stay and sleep and eat and piss – crossing the land on printed paper in self-seal envelopes.
‘Don’t you miss Somalia?’ her Somali friend said to her when they broke their fast together later that night.
‘No, I do not,’ Khadra said.
‘But Somalia is still in me,’ her friend insisted. ‘It’s us.’
‘Somalia isn’t me. It nearly killed me.’
‘You’ll regret it if you turn your back on your homeland.’
‘I’ll regret it more if I get deported.’
Khadra ate a piece of lamb and wiped sauce from her lips, finding comfort in food and quiet and the company of her friend, even though her friend and she were finding less and less to agree on.
Farah 2003
And there’s that girl again, calling for her brother. She shrieks his name. Jalal. Jalaaaaaaaaaal. It’s a performance and so annoying I can’t study. I wonder if it’s the girl who gets in the lift and presses number twenty-one. She wears a scarf bunched around her neck. It could be her. She looks as if she has the voice of a banshee.
She shrieks again. I guess her veranda must look out to the football pitch. Ours looks out to the other blocks. They say the views are good up here. Our view’s shite.
Jalaaaaaaal! She sounds tough. She also sounds funny. I
don’t know a single girl here.
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