This Road is Red

by Alison Irvine

Jalal and Mariam 2003

  Jalal sees his sister wave her arms above her head from her spot on the veranda. She’s wearing her school uniform. She looks tiny, not tall. Hers is the loudest voice he’s ever heard. She puts it on. She practises it. She yells over his bed in the mornings to waken him. He knows she’ll be laughing at herself and the way her voice sounds. She’s two years older than him.

  Blacks v Scottish again tomorrow. The guy from Side Kicks blows his whistle and Jalal leaves the boys on the football pitch and the girls on the basketball court and runs home.

  Sixty-seven, sixty-eight, sixty-nine, seventy! Yes! Seventy seconds from ground to front door. No stops. Twenty-one floors.

  ‘Mariaaaaaaam!’

  She’s on the veranda and she jumps when he shouts.

  ‘Pack it in, eejit.’

  ‘You’re wearing lipstick.’

  ‘No I’m not.’

  They stand on the veranda and Jalal shakes the pigeon net. If he tries, he can look through the wire squares and see the town laid out below him and not notice the pigeon net. If he squints he can make the net come into focus and become all he can see or concentrate on.

  His sister’s phone bleeps.

  ‘They want to come after school tomorrow. They fancy the asylum boys.’

  His sister goes to school in town. She doesn’t go to the Big Roch like he does. She has a pal from Sighthill who used to live at Red Road and the girls at their school like them because they take them to meet the asylum seeker boys.

  ‘Me?’

  ‘Not you. The older ones.’

  ‘Like Mustapha?’

  ‘Aye.’

  ‘It’s Blacks v Scottish tomorrow.’

  His sister says they don’t want to stand around in the cold watching the boys. Maybe they’ll come another day or talk to them after the match.

  ‘I bet the Scottish girls will want to watch.’

  After their tea Jalal and Mariam stand on the veranda and watch their mother. She likes them to observe her walking around the football pitches and the fields beside the far trees. Keep watch over me, she asks, and her children poke their faces through the pigeon net and watch her walk.

  ‘Why doesn’t she go in the day?’ Jalal asks.

  ‘There’s Mustapha down there.’

  A teenager shoots at goal. It’s not a big game. There’s just a boy in goals and four others. The shot goes wide and Mustapha throws his head back and turns on the spot.

  ‘Too busy.’

  The boys on the pitch play on. Mustapha is the best player. The other boys are younger and less coordinated.

  ‘Where’s mum?’ Jalal says.

  ‘There she is.’

  They look through the green and the dusk to the trees alongside the railway line and see her, small and silent.

  ‘Why does she go off walking like that?’ Jalal says. Mariam doesn’t answer.

  The game below goes on. Mustapha sidesteps around a small boy and the boy topples. Mustapha goes out wide to avoid another boy and weaves the ball around him. In front of goal he looks up. But a man is next to him and the man chops Mustapha’s legs and takes the ball off him and boots it hard. Jalal and Mariam hear the thud of the man’s kick from their veranda. It’s a goal. The wee boy between the sweatshirts has his arms by his sides and stares at the big man. When the big man runs back towards Petershill Drive with his arms wide and chin jutting, the wee boy walks to retrieve the ball. Mustapha stands up and limps a couple of steps.

  ‘Who was that?’ Mariam asks.

  ‘It’s a man called Ebi. He does it all the time. If you’re on his side in Blacks v Scottish and you skin the ball, he hits you. He forgets all about the game and starts chasing you around the pitch. He gets angry.’

  ‘Why does he bother?’

  ‘He caught me doing chap door run away and knocked me down. We don’t chap his door any more. I don’t know why he bothers. Actually I do. He likes to frighten us. Says we don’t know nothing, we haven’t seen what he’s seen.’

  Their mother is walking alongside Broomfield Road. They see her turn her head when a dog barks. The dog is in the middle of the field, jumping and pouncing. Its owner throws a stick.

  ‘Why do grown men play in the Blacks v Scottish matches? I thought it was just for boys.’

  ‘It’s not. They’re big matches. People take it seriously.’

  The teenagers are quiet for a while. Mariam stares at

  Mustapha and thinks of the girl at school who fancies him.

  ‘Hey Mustapha!’ Jalal calls but Mustapha doesn’t look up. He calls again. Mustapha bounces the ball on the pitch

  and throws it for one of the younger boys to head.

  Mariam takes a huge breath and calls ‘Musssstaphaaaa!’ She puts extra emphasis on the last syllable of his name and her voice falls from high to low until she runs out of breath. It’s an excellent call and they both laugh. She loves it when she makes her brother laugh.

  Mustapha looks up and waves, puts his fingers in his mouth and whistles.

  ‘That same time I got knocked down we went to Sixty- three building and played chap door run away. The boys, they tricked me, they said I had to stand in front of the door, count for ten seconds after I chapped it and run into the lift. They said they’d hold the doors open for me. They didn’t hold the doors and I was stuck on the landing. The door opened and this really old man answered it. He said hello and I had to make something up. I asked if he wanted his floor cleaned and he told me he didn’t need me to clean it because the concierge did it with a buffer because they didn’t let him do it himself any more. He was too old. What’s a buffer? I thought he was going to shout at me but he was friendly. He said this ground here, before the flats, used to be cabbage fields. He said he saw these flats being built. He said he worked over there, at the top of that hill.’

  ‘A buffer’s a thing that makes the floor shine. There’s mum.’

  ‘She’s going quite fast.’

  ‘She’s going fast now because she knows we’re watching. Call her.’

  ‘Muuuum!’ Mariam roars. She makes her voice crazy.

  ‘She didn’t hear you.’

  ‘Mum!’

  Jalal shouts too. They’ve forgotten Mustapha who stands and looks at them then goes back to his football.

  ‘Muuuum!’

  ‘Mum!’

  They compete with each other. Mariam is still the best but

  Jalal is good too. He can’t do it without laughing though.

  Their mum is on Petershill Drive now. She looks in their direction.

  ‘Mum!’

  A twitch, an almost imperceptible switch from casual to urgent. Their mum glances up at them and Jalal waves and shouts again.

  ‘Don’t. She’ll think – ’

  It’s too late. His mother begins to run and she looks up as she runs and they can see worry in her face. She’s not a good runner and her arms pump the air.

  ‘Oh no, she’ll think it’s something bad. She’ll think it’s dad.’

  ‘Or a knock at the door.’

  ‘She’ll think it’s news from the solicitor.’

  Mariam makes a cutting motion with her arms in front of her but that seems to make things worse.

  ‘Oh, look at her face.’

  She runs out of view and Mariam and Jalal go in from the veranda and stand at the door, waiting for their mother to burst out of the lift.

  Farah 2003

  Stupid kids who do not stop shouting from their balconies. It is not funny. This is not funny. I can’t study. Shouting from your balcony doesn’t help you or change your situation. You’re still an asylum seeker. Shouting makes you dumb and stupid, hanging out of your cage. My dad is tired. My mum is tired. They’re tired from sitting and doing nothing because they’re not allowed to do anything except hand in their vouchers and get their food and travel to solicitors and appointments and wait. How can I study when I don’t know if I can stay? Who

  will accept me for Medicine if I ca
n’t promise I will stay on the course? You shout up there and your neighbour jumps out of her window because she thinks they’re knocking on her door. You shout and my mum takes her antidepressants and my dad gets fat because he has nothing to get up for. I want to be a fucking doctor and I can’t afford the exams to even try to be a doctor. My guidance teacher says I’m cynical because I’m in the system. You’re in the system too so why are you laughing? Why are you yelling from your balcony? Is four years not long enough to wait here? Do you want to wait another four? Don’t you care that if your application fails and you go back your parents could be beaten or go to prison? Or your parents will leave you – leave you – or try to have you adopted or hide you, but leave you – so that you don’t have to go back. Shout your stupid shouts from your veranda. Make your friends and play your games. Pretend it’s not happening in this building. Pretend the man next door to you isn’t gay and won’t be executed if he returns. Pretend the woman up the stair didn’t get raped and raped and raped. Pretend your friends didn’t witness their brothers or fathers or uncles being killed. Pretend they didn’t see their mother pick up their baby sister and run as they ran too. Pretend they, out there, the Scottish, don’t hate you, pretend their newspapers aren’t full of you and how they hate you. Pretend it doesn’t kill you to get in the van and leave your house full of possessions and go to the airport and then for them to say, oh no, it’s okay, your appeal has been granted, or oh yes, you’re going, and if you don’t go quietly, we’ll tie your hands together with plastic and sit on you. Pretend the world isn’t in chaos and nobody gives a damn as long as they’ve got money and someone to blame. Pretend it’s all about the number twelve bus or the number fifty-six bus or mucking about in the lifts or cheeking the old people. Or about religion. Or about God. Pretend people don’t jump. I want to be a doctor. I really want to be a doctor. I want to be a doctor.

  Her fingers touch her bedroom window. Red Road is out- side. Nothing else. Her father coughs. Her mother’s onions fry.

  Iris 2003

  The concierges couldn’t believe it and they didn’t know what to say. They shook their heads and finally said, no, we’re not letting you go.

  The old folk in her building gasped and held both her hands in theirs, gold rings clinking on soft liver-spotted skin. Who’ll get our messages for us, they joked. Oh Iris, what will we do without you?

  It felt right though. A house with a door near to the ground. No more bastarding lifts. She could get another dog – Zeus was long gone and dreadfully missed.

  The grandweans would move with her. And Pamela, who turned up one night with streaming hair and a methadone script, would come too. I’m doing it this time, Ma, she said and Iris believed her.

  All packed. Lord, it was a big move, away from her pals and her memories.

  Jim opened his door and looked as smart as he always did in a jumper that Iris presumed Colleen had knitted.

  ‘It’s not today is it? Oh, no, I can’t cope with this,’ he said. He seemed too distressed to speak, his brown eyes desperate- looking. Iris sat in his house and drank a couple of halfs with him. He talked about socialism, he talked about Ireland, he talked about children and what a torment they were when they lost themselves before your own eyes.

  ‘I’m never leaving Red Road,’ he said when Iris asked.

  ‘What reason would I have?’

  ‘You’re quite happy here,’ Iris said.

  She stood at the door and kissed him. She pressed her face to his neck and felt his chin and nose and breath on her head.

  ‘So long, Jim.’

  She wouldn’t forget Jim and she wouldn’t forget Red Road. She’d see it often enough when she was out and about, in Springburn or the town or anywhere with a view across the rooftops to Barmulloch. Over twenty years in the same house. Good times, on the whole.

  She would keep slithers of memories in her head, of her Red Road days, and sometimes the memories would come back all at once; a shower, a sieving of remembering, like the way the asbestos covered the house once, when the wind blew and shook the walls.

  Khadra 2004

  ‘You should write it all down,’ Khadra’s Scottish friend said to her. He was more than a friend. He let her lie quietly against him when she was tired of being an asylum seeker.

  ‘I can’t bear to write it all down,’ she said.

  ‘It makes a good story.’

  ‘Not when you’re in it.’

  The first appeal had gone well. Leave to remain. Leave to remain! They stood on the veranda that night and counted stars.

  Nine days later – there were ten days in which to do it – she received a letter saying the Home Office were going to appeal.

  Back to court.

  Thandie 2004

  At their door, Thandie, Mhambi, and daughters one, two and three. Just moved in. The man who knocked asked for baby milk. Thandie, a primary school teacher, Mhambi an electrical engineer, the girls aged nine, six and not yet one. The baby in her mother’s arms, the girls’ heads at hip height and waist height, next to their parents’ young legs. The man at the door, their neighbour, leaned towards them with his hands in his pockets as if to apologise for himself and asked again for baby milk.

  ‘Of course you can have some baby milk. How old is she?’ Thandie said.

  ‘Sixteen weeks.’

  ‘Oh! Come in, come in.’

  The girls stepped back and stood against the wall as their parents took the young man into the kitchen.

  ‘We didn’t expect to run out but she’s just really hungry, you know, and my girlfriend’s thingmy, she’s a bit down in the dumps so I don’t want to leave her, you know.’

  Thandie spooned some milk powder into a glass and

  Mhambi said, ‘Any time, just knock.’

  The young man took the milk and said, ‘Which part of

  Africa are you from?’

  ‘South Africa.’

  ‘Are you refugees?’

  Mhambi shook his head. ‘We came here because South Africa is in the Commonwealth.’

  ‘Are you working?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Thandie didn’t want to say that she was struggling to find work because primary school jobs were scarce and she needed to register with the gtcs and do a couple of courses.

  ‘Oh right.’

  It was a visit to Thandie’s aunt that made them want to live in Glasgow. The friendliness, the shops, the kilts, the music. They stayed, even when the aunt moved to London. And Red Road, it was different to anything they’d known. In Johannesburg the houses were spread out, low to the ground with space around them. To live high up in One-two-three Petershill Drive, with the view and the neighbours above and below was extraordinary. It was fun. Mhambi filled the bath whenever the wind was strong because he loved to think of the steel structure allowing itself to submit to the wind and sway to stay up, and he loved seeing the water move in the bath as proof of the building’s design.

  The next night the young man came back and asked for more milk. Three nights passed and the young man was back again and because he was so young Thandie and Mhambi worried that perhaps he and his girlfriend were finding it hard to cope with their tiny new baby. They understood. Life with children was challenging. They gave out cupfuls and tubfuls of milk but afterwards they would stand in the kitchen and tap the sides of the milk carton to level out the remaining powder and say to each other that they couldn’t continue to give away their baby milk because milk was expensive.

  ‘Is it because we’re new?’ Thandie said and Mhambi said,

  ‘I think that’s got something to do with it.’

  The young man knocked on the door a few days later and offered to sell them a radio for their kitchen. It had a cassette and cd player too.

  ‘I should ask for sixty quid,’ he said, ‘as it’s top of the range, but I’ll sell it to you for fifty because you’re my neighbours.’

  He held out the radio but Mhambi wouldn’t take it.

  Th
e young man told them that they wouldn’t get it cheaper in any of the shops and he said, ‘Go on, have a closer look at it.’

  ‘We’ve got all the radios we need, thank you.’

  The young man shrugged and told them to suit themselves and then he asked for more baby milk.

  They wanted to say no but they didn’t.

  ‘I hope you don’t think we’re taking the piss, asking for the milk,’ he said.

  ‘Oh no, no, no.’

  A few weeks later Mhambi went back to bed, in the middle of the day, a luxury reserved for childless weekends or annual leave. It was day one of his holiday and Thandie would be off work too the following day and doubtless would want to take him in search of the hills she could see from the window and was so desperate to walk on. So this was his one and only

  chance for stillness and sleep. Silence, warmth, a cool pillow against his cheek. He slept easily and when he woke he didn’t know why he was in bed or why he’d woken. He remembered quickly that he was on his holidays and was about to turn over and put his other cheek to the pillow when he heard footsteps behind his bedroom door. He propped himself up on an elbow and stared as he listened hard. His own door began to open – was it opening? – and the hinges creaked. Mhambi watched as fingers curled around the door and an arm and shoulder and then a face peeked around but as soon as the face was there it was gone, because the eyes in the face had locked on to his own eyes and the two men – the other face was definitely a man’s face – stared at each other for a violent second and then the face whipped itself away behind the door and Mhambi heard footsteps and the clicking shut of his own front door. At that point Mhambi jumped out of bed. He strode through his house, once to check that it was empty of intruders and once again to see if anything had been taken. There appeared to be nothing missing. The dvds were still in the lounge, the television was still on its stand. In the girls’ room, which was the first room an intruder would come to as he walked into the flat, all appeared to be okay. Mhambi locked the front door and went to the kitchen to boil the kettle and stood with his hands on the sink, breathing hard, adrenalin and anger fighting it out inside him, nowhere to go, nothing to do but work itself out.