When his daughters returned from school the eldest said her mobile phone was lost but Mhambi didn’t tell them about the intruder. His wife confirmed that the mobile phone was left on the bed in the girls’ room and the couple resolved to always lock the door and to peek through the spy hole when there was a knock on the door in case it was the young man from across the landing. No milk. No favours. Thandie hated being suspicious of people but there it was. Enough was enough.
Khadra 2004
Khadra crossed in front of the cctv cameras. Still some slush and patches of ice on the ground. She sang the song they practised in choir. Out loud; she didn’t care. A head popped up from behind a hedge. Pop. Then another. More heads. Pop. Pop. Pop. Oh God, she thought, they were like teenage hoodlums with hoodies pulled tight around their heads and silent staring faces. Yet if anything, they seemed like amateur hoodlums. One had a sweetie stick in his mouth.
‘All of you behind a hedge,’ Khadra said. Her English was good now. Plenty good enough to give conversation a go; to banter with the best of the Glaswegians.
The boys stared at her.
‘You stopped singing,’ one of the boys said.
‘Did you like it?’
‘Aye.’
The hedge moved as the boys shifted their positions. Some stood up.
‘Sing it again,’ the first boy said.
‘Only if you sing it with me.’
‘No way.’
‘You’re not singing, I’m not singing.’
She made to go and the first boy pushed a tiny boy into her path.
‘He’ll sing it with you. He’s got a lovely voice.’
‘Shut up,’ the tiny boy said but looked up at Khadra.
So Khadra sang and was amused when the tiny boy joined in and more amused when the other boys behind the hedge joined in too and began to sway and clap their hands. If they were taking the piss out of her they were doing it in a good-natured way. When she stopped they looked at her with open mouths and tilted chins and there was a pause before anyone spoke.
The first boy did. ‘What’s that you’re singing anyway?’
‘It’s not English. It’s a South African hymn. ‘Jesus is the
Highest’.’
‘You a Muslim?’
‘Kind of.’
One of the boys began to sing the song again and laughed at himself. The tiny boy bent his knees and wiggled his bum. Khadra smiled and wished she could sit down with them and share their evening. It was making her weary, the months of her asylum; the insecurity, the boredom, the fear of what people might say, suddenly.
And there it came.
‘My granny wants out of Red Road because she says she’s the only Scottish person left.’ The tiny boy spoke innocently, looking at Khadra as if she was a teacher, as if she could help him work things out.
She didn’t know where to start.
One of the other boys helped her. ‘They’re just people,’ he said.
Khadra nodded.
‘But why can’t my granny get what the asylum seekers get?’ the tiny boy said. ‘She hasn’t had her house decorated in twenty years.’
‘And the asylum seekers get brand-new kitchens and furni- ture,’ another boy said.
Khadra attempted to say that the people she knew from the choir and the photography workshops in the ymca, were people who had fled with nothing, who were exiled out of necessity, not because they wanted a new kitchen.
‘They’re building new houses,’ she said.
‘For asylum seekers.’
‘And for us,’ one boy said. ‘We’re moving to a new build.’
‘My uncle moved out of Red Road to a house on Broomton Road and it’s not a new build, it’s old. And he had to get the roof fixed because it was leaking.’
It went on and on. Khadra listened, and spoke when she felt she should, and came to her old conclusions; that housing mattered, that jobs mattered, that integration mattered. That people should not be left in isolation.
They said goodbye and the boys asked her if she’d come back and sing with them.
‘Aye, if you like,’ she said.
The next day she went back to court, as instructed in her letter from the Home Office. In the building on Bothwell Street the woman on the bench took away her leave to remain. Why? Inaccuracies with your story. Your accent isn’t from the part of Somalia you claim to be fleeing. But I... You have one more appeal.
Last chance.
Jim 2005
Jim suspected the boys were playing at their chap door run away but he got up anyway. Even to see the legs or hear the feet of living boys would be a thing, a fact of that day. And boys should play chap door run away. His own did.
His children invited him to move closer to them – Rutherglen, Stirling, London or Leeds – take your pick, they said – and he said, I pick Barmulloch. I pick Red Road. I pick living within sight of Provanmill where me and your mammy tramped each day of our working lives. I pick the view from my window. I pick my pals at Alive and Kicking. And now I’m going to pick up my glass and carry on with my wee half. Did you have any- thing else to say? How are the wee yins?
Yes the boys who played chap door run away were at it again. Not a soul on his landing. Not a sound.
Teenage Asylum Seekers
At night.
If you go by yourself at night you’ll see it.
You need night vision goggles and you need to go at midnight. You have to stay. The moment you hear even a click you
have to start running.
Down the stairs. You touch the lock.
You have to touch the lock and then you hear like a rattle and you start running.
No you don’t, you have to kick the door. I’ve seen it. Black hair.
Invisible.
It’s a woman crying.
There was this woman getting raped, yeah, and she died and the next day the man died.
So there are two ghosts.
Do you remember the time we all came up here and we started screaming?
Yeah, ages ago, it was night, yeah, it was winter, it was dark, we went up to twenty-three floor yeah, and he knocked the door and you see the door open.
The rest of us just ran out.
Last time we came here we were playing football in the landing. And there used to be this metal door and somebody kicked the ball on it and we just heard somebody walking up. Everybody start running.
Thandie 2006
Music filled the flat. Brenda Fassie: God rest her soul. Oh, the songs were brilliant. Up went the volume. Thandie danced when she should have been preparing for the party. The ‘Scotland’s Towns’ table cloth, like the dish towel pinned to the wall, was folded and ready to go on the table, the paper plates and napkins and uncut bread put out. Beers were cooling in the fridge, thanks to Mhambi. Mhambi was on the veranda organising the spot for the braai.
She turned to see her daughters watching her dance from the lounge doorway. Tall, taller, tallest. Their eyes in triplicate. Beautiful girls. All washed and dressed and hungry, probably. She swung her hips more emphatically to wind them up and the girls turned and went in the direction of their room. Thandie heard the sounds of the Black Eyed Peas starting up. So up went the volume on Brenda Fassie again. Oh Brenda, with your talent and gifts and weakness for drugs; some voice, some woman.
The volume didn’t matter. Hardly a neighbour anywhere near. The nice woman across the landing, gone, the family who borrowed the milk powder, gone, and the door boarded up with a steel sheet, the other house on the landing long empty. The block sterile and silent and cold and mouldy. Sing out, Brenda.
Her husband came in from the veranda and turned the volume down to nothing. Thandie stopped dancing and was about to protest.
‘Listen,’ he said. Nothing.
‘I thought I heard…’ He went out to the veranda and
Thandie followed.
‘Listen,’ he said again.
‘It’s cold out here.’
‘Sh
oosh. It doesn’t matter.’
Then Thandie heard the noise. There were shouts from the ground and she recognised the voices. The pigeon net prevented her from leaning over and waving but she knew her friends had arrived. When they came into the flat they said they had been waiting downstairs and buzzing and calling on the mobile and nobody had come in or out of the building to let them through the door. Only a couple of teenage boys on bikes, circling. All the friends were there at once and Thandie took them into the house.
One friend gave her a bag from Solly’s, the African food shop on Great Western Road. Thandie put her nose in the bag and sniffed. Maize meal and star fruit. All the African women she knew had come to the party. From as far as Yoker. Two women had Scottish husbands.
The women stayed in the lounge and the men stood squashed on the veranda. The braai – a discounted barbecue from Tesco’s – was lit by Mhambi and Thandie asked him if he was ready for the beef but he said no, it had a while to heat up.
The young people in the girls’ bedroom, playing r&b, the men on the veranda drinking beer, and the women, hyper and pleased and dashing around the flat helping to get the party ready. One woman went looking for the toilet and opened the door to the big cupboard. It was full of furniture. It made Thandie angry to think of the money they spent on the furni- ture that stayed piled in the cupboard. A hundred pounds extra a month which brought the rent to five hundred pounds instead of four. Thandie had asked the council if they would take away the couch with the holes in and the tatty chairs but the council said the flat was only furnished three years ago and the furniture had to stay. So the furniture was shoved in the cupboard and they were locked into paying the extra hundred pounds a month.
‘I can’t wait to move,’ Thandie said.
‘Do you have somewhere to go?’
‘Not yet.’
The women talked about houses. Some had previously lived in Red Road and moved on to other parts of the city. Some started out in Sighthill.
‘We were so looking forward to having our house up high because in South Africa, in Johannesburg, you just don’t have high houses.’
The women nodded, some of them from South Africa like herself, some from Zimbabwe and recently hauled through the asylum system.
‘I don’t miss it,’ one woman said.
‘I do,’ said another. ‘I don’t feel integrated where I am now. I did at Red Road.’
‘I’m fed up of it now,’ Thandie said. ‘The mould is terrible. See this, come with me.’
She took the women into her bedroom and showed them the mould that dirtied the wall.
‘We have the girls in with us when it’s really cold,’ she said.
‘Wheezing with their asthma, it’s no good. It gets really, really cold.’
The women sat on the edges of the bed and talked about children, about work, about holidays.
‘You’ll miss the view,’ one woman said and Thandie agreed that she would.
‘There’s lots of sky,’ she said. ‘And I like to look at where I’ve been and where I want to go to. I can see so much from here. I can see where you ladies live.’
‘Make the most of it,’ the woman said. ‘It’s not the same down on the ground.’
‘She had a bad experience yesterday,’ one of the women said.
‘I don’t want to talk about it.’
It was so unexpected, the abuse, if that is what the woman was talking about. Thandie worried most about teenagers, but some were so unexpectedly charming and decent that it restored her, completely. The children her daughters introduced her to were polite and honest and clever and her daughters sounded like them now, with their Glasgow vowels and different names for everything. They forgot their Zulu now, especially the youngest, and Thandie reminded herself to speak in Zulu as often as she could so the children could have their Scottish language and the language of their birth too. So much to think about.
‘Come on,’ she said and the women went into the living room and she poured them wine and gave the men meat for the braai – strips of beef and lamb and some cut tomatoes – and then she put Brenda Fassie on the stereo once more. It was as if a charge went into the room. Wine gulped and glasses put down and the women started dancing to the party songs. They danced in pairs and took turns to hip dance, weaving and shaking their hips and their bums, bending their legs and lowering themselves closer and closer to the ground. The teenagers were at the doorway again. Thandie’s girls and other daughters too, one in spectacles, one with a hair band tied around her curls. The girls in the doorway smiled and looked embarrassed and the women danced harder, kicking off their shoes and stepping barefoot on the carpet, showing their daughters how it is done, swaying and shaking and letting the turned-up music bring them back to something of their life in Africa, something that their African- born, Glasgow-bred children might never truly understand.
Smoke came into the room all of a sudden. The men flapped tongs and dish towels at the billowing grey. It rushed to the top of the veranda and spread out across its ceiling. The men stumbled into the house and Thandie yelled out of the door,
‘What do you want, water?’
‘It’s all right,’ Mhambi said. ‘It’s the fat on the coals.’
But the smoke didn’t stop and it began to smell of plastic and chemicals and burning wood.
One of the women came out of the kitchen with a vase of water. Thandie took it from her and hurled it on to the veranda in the direction of the braai.
The hot coals sizzled and her husband roared as the water hit him too.
‘Calm down!’ he shouted but he wasn’t calm himself. ‘It’s just the hot fat on the hot coals!’
Brenda Fassie sang out about a wedding day and Mhambi yelled, ‘Turn that off!’
When the music stopped the scene on the veranda seemed less frantic. Mhambi remained out there behind the pigeon net and the sound and the smoke decreased to a puff and a sizzle. But someone was knocking at the door.
The women looked at Thandie.
‘Shall I go?’ she said and squeezed past the watching teenagers and opened the front door. It was the concierge.
‘Are you on fire?’ he asked.
‘No.’
‘There’s smoke coming from your veranda.’
‘I know, it’s over now.’
‘It doesn’t smell as if it is.’
‘Do you want to come in?’
‘No, Thandie, but if you’d answered when I buzzed up and had opened the door without me knocking for five minutes I’d have been less inclined to call the fire brigade.’
‘Sorry, Craig, we were having a braai.’
‘What’s a braai?’
‘It’s like a barbeque.’
‘On your veranda? Just do me a favour and calm the smoke down, will you?’
They did calm the smoke down. Mhambi cooked enough to eat and when the coals were cold he folded the foil barbe- ques and put them down the chute. They never had another braai until they left the steel-covered doors on their landing and moved to the four apartment in Roystonhill with the garden and the beautiful kitchen and the water that didn’t slosh around the bath when the wind was up. Thandie played Brenda Fassie and Miriam Makeba and her daughters didn’t object. The older two went out on a Saturday night to the bars on Sauchiehall Street. Tesco’s sold maize meal and some of the vegetables she liked, but she still went to Solly’s when she passed.
Khadra 2007
When the French artist started his walk across the high wire the crowd on the grass turned silent and respectful. He walked on wire Khadra could barely see, step after fluid step, and carried a balancing pole at his waist. A black-clad figure crossing the air between One-two-three and Ninety-three Petershill Drive. And he looked so confident up there, so confident that the people around Khadra began to talk again and comment as he walked, as if he could never fall, as if he couldn’t possibly drop off the wire.
Police stood among the crowd. Kids, dogs, families, con- cierges. Men and
women stood on verandas. Everyone looked up. A plane flew overhead, oblivious.
The wind was kicking about, down on the ground, and when Khadra noticed the French artist walking backwards she realised it was too windy for him up there on the wire. A high- wire walker with a film crew and journalists taking pictures wouldn’t go back unless it was too dangerous to go on. He took graceful steps backwards. Thin and high and balanced.
Then she worried for him. She imagined his foot feeling for the wire and missing, his leg dropping below the wire and his body tipping after it.
‘Why is he going backwards?’ a girl asked a woman.
‘I don’t know pet,’ she said and sounded disappointed.
‘Perhaps it’s too windy. Perhaps he lost his nerve.’
When he was back on the platform at the top of the build- ing Khadra and others in the crowd didn’t move, expecting him, perhaps, to step out again. But he disappeared and never came back.
The crowd dispersed, carrying the mugs and key rings and balloons that the housing gave out. Khadra looked for anyone she might recognise. A group of teenagers stood close by and Khadra wondered if they were the older selves of the boys who’d popped their heads above the hedge. One of the boys glanced at her as they passed but Khadra didn’t attract their attention.
On another part of the grass, children pointed shoe boxes and tin cans at the buildings and stood very still. Pinhole cameras. A woman watched them and although Khadra couldn’t hear her words, she knew she would be encouraging them gently and helping them with exposure times and angles. Khadra remembered standing with the same woman in the dark room on the twenty-seventh floor of the ymca and developing her own pinhole photographs, seeing the skewed, silent images her camera had created. She remembered, too, watching Red Road appear on the silent walls and ceiling of another dark room and gasping at the fine magic of the Camera Obscura; tiny buses and cars, wind-blown clouds, the Campsie Fells. It was a del- icate art and one that had given her solace in the dark years of her asylum. Khadra was happy to see the woman still there.
Then she saw her old friend, the Somali woman she’d stepped off the bus with when she first arrived at Red Road. Two children played near her. They could have been twins. For a second Khadra thought the woman was going to turn away from her, but instead she stood still while Khadra approached.
This Road is Red Page 25