Here I Stand

by Amnesty International UK

  I give Toni five pounds. “OK. But straight back.” Before I finish, they are barefoot, running towards the ice-cream van at the edge of the lake, disappearing behind it. I listen to the geese, a dog barking in the distance, children’s laughter.

  My eyes read a few more lines. I turn the page of the newspaper. Read half a page. A page.

  A scream. Tife. Tife’s scream. A scream that is other-worldly, the one that she reserves for serious injury, or terrible loss. Her broken arm from falling out of a tree, the death of her grandfather.

  I’m not aware of my body but somehow I’m running and Labi’s mum is beside me, shouting, “Eeeeeeeeeeeee. Eeeeeeeeeee. Eeeeeeeeeee. Is she hurt? Is someone hurt?”

  I see her in the water and my body suddenly slips and my knee cracks and I’m on the ground. An upside-down girl in a lake, her head bobbing up to suck in air, then falling beneath the surface again. My girl. Toni. I try and get up, but the grass is slippery near the water and I fall again.

  Labi’s mum has thrown off her coat and waded into the water in the seconds it’s taken me to stand and scream and grab Tife, who is shouting enough that a crowd has gathered, and run towards the lake.

  “Call an ambulance!” I shout. “Call an ambulance!”

  As we reach the water, Labi’s mum emerges covered in thick green pond slime, minus her wig, her giant breasts clinging in wet clothes. Toni has changed colour. She is dusky, grey at the edges, the colour of moonlight. Labi’s mum sets her on the ground and hits her chest. I can’t move. I can’t breathe. I can’t even cry.

  “Eeeeeeeeeeee,” Labi’s mum shouts. “Naughty girl! Eeeeeeeeeee!” She shouts and smacks her hard again and again. Toni coughs. Suddenly and violently. Labi’s mum rolls her to her side, hits her back repeatedly until she is coughing and vomiting and breathing and her edges become daylight once more. Then she cries.

  I let go of Tife and drop to the ground, let the tears come.

  “Good girl,” Labi’s mum says. “Good, good.”

  The day of Labi’s mum’s flight home, the girls cry until their pillowcases need changing. They do not want to go to the airport. Last time Labi’s mum left they found it so hard.

  “Let us say goodbye here,” she says.

  As they tell her goodbye before Kat arrives to watch them, I tip the leftover schnapps down the sink, clean the mess that Labi’s mum has left in the spare room. I find sweet wrappers, magazines, four empty jars of marmalade, a dummy, seven Ikea catalogues, three pairs of Labi’s pyjamas, my electric toothbrush. I find a handkerchief that smells exactly like her and put it in my jeans pocket.

  Heathrow is not as busy as it was a few weeks ago. There is room for us to spread out, but we don’t. Labi’s mum holds me close. “Taneeeeya,” she says, “I will miss you so much.”

  “Me too.” I feel tears on my cheeks and I don’t know if they are mine or hers. “Thank you,” I say again. I’ve said it hundreds of times but I could never say it enough. The worst moment. “You saved her life.”

  “Of course I did. She is my heart. They both are. And Tife’s scream saved her. It is good that when one child is in danger a person will scream. When one girl is in danger, another girl will scream loudly.”

  Labi puts his arms around us and gently pulls her towards the departure gate. “You need to go, Mum. Have you got any toiletries? They have to go in a clear bag.”

  “I know what to do,” she says. “You came from my body.”

  My head swims with what her body might have suffered. What I thought she agreed with. How wrong I was. The dangers of fearing offence. Of assuming. The dangers of silence. The importance of screams.

  Labi laughs. “Have a safe flight. We love you. And we will see you next summer.”

  “We’d like to visit you before then,” I add. “Maybe in the Christmas holidays.”

  Labi nods and nods. His mum begins to dance. She stops after a few minutes and looks at us both without talking, then begins to walk away.

  She turns, smiles, waves at us, looks around and then disappears into the crowd.

  We stand in silence amid the noise of the airport for the longest time, looking at the air where she stood. I reach for Labi’s hand, and with my other hand reach into my jeans pocket for her handkerchief. I bring it to my face and close my eyes.

  “In writing this story I wanted to highlight a reality that so many girls in Britain are facing. I believe in a future world where female genital mutilation is eradicated and young girls never have to suffer this most extreme form of gender-based violence. We must all shout.” Christie Watson

  WHAT I REMEMBER ABOUT HER

  A.L. Kennedy

  There was just something weird about her – not right. She was not right. You could watch her – not watch her, exactly, because you weren’t that interested, but you could see her going along the corridors and up and down stairs and that, and you could see that she wasn’t right. I mean, you noticed her, because people who aren’t right stand out. You didn’t have to be trying to notice – it was just something about her.

  It’s not that you would hate her, or anything like that, it was just this way she had of moving which made you notice her. We’re in a big school, massive, but she was always there. Too much. In amongst everyone else, you could see her too much. She stood out. And she joined Year Seven in January so her uniform still looked like she just got it out of a shop when nobody else’s did. Tina said it looked like someone sent it in some kind of aid package – refugee aid package. It was too neat.

  And it stayed too neat right until practically now – which is June, almost the end of the year. Her in her refugee ironed-up clothes.

  She wasn’t a refugee, though.

  I said that.

  We’d have known if she was a refugee.

  I did say that.

  And now we’re sure she wasn’t. We’re like sure we’re sure.

  Not that it’s bad to be a refugee – I didn’t say that then and I’m not saying it now – she just wasn’t one. That’s the truth.

  Tina said it would be a food bank, then, who gave out the blazer and the rest of the uniform. They give you clothes in a food bank as well as food. Or your social worker gets stuff for you.

  Her blazer was like it was meant for her big brother. Which she didn’t have. Or not round here anyway.

  She did seem like she wouldn’t have a big brother, or any brothers or sisters. And there was no one but her at our school and when you saw her you could tell she was an only child. I think that’s a fact – her being by herself.

  She didn’t look like she’d understand how to be with other kids in a family. She would walk about in this kind of a sliding way. She’d be on the stairs and she would slide along the wall, slide with her shoulder against the wall, like she was cleaning it, or as if she was showing us how we were all too much for her – which we were not. We’ve never been too much for somebody. When she did that, it was like she was being a demonstration for us of how she was really sensitive, and shouldn’t we be paying her lots of attention, or caring, or stuff?

  You couldn’t try that in a family – they’d tell you to quit it. When she was sliding, she looked like she really did have a social worker.

  Or else like she lived somewhere weird.

  Sonja said that was probably true. Tina and Sonja and Sinead and Elshaday made up this whole story about some orphanage place with metal beds and stuff and eating at a big, long table and we were all laughing. I did laugh, because it was so stupid, it was funny. Then it ended up that we were imagining this horrible kids’ home so it was more and more like Hogwarts and we added in a Harry Potter and hundreds of Weasleys.

  Then Sinead practically screamed, “Dobby!” Right in the street.

  We were out near the back of the mall on lunch break and we’d got sandwiches and Sinead had a salad and we were going to spot the ugly shoes in that crap tiny shoe shop next to the crap tiny card shop on Arlington Drive and the shoe assistant was practically standing there i
n the doorway as if he wasn’t going to let us inside – when there would be no point stealing his get-them-free-with-a-Burger-King-burger-shoes and when we’re not thieves.

  If you’re a kid, people assume you’re a thief and it’s crap and not true.

  And Sinead just yelled.

  And we didn’t know what was wrong for about a second and the assistant jumped right back, but then we realized – she meant Dobby in the Harry Potter movies. Dobby, with his sad little elf refugee face and his sad little elf I-need-you-to-help-me shirt thing he wears, and how he’s so pathetic the whole time and you’re supposed to feel sorry for him when he dies – that Dobby. Dobby was just exactly like the girl.

  That was just the truth.

  She was Dobby.

  And she couldn’t help it and we couldn’t help it. That’s what she was like is all we were saying.

  Or I wasn’t the one to say it, but I was there. Sinead said it. I did agree. I probably nodded.

  So after that we called the girl Dobby.

  I mean, we didn’t call her Dobby when we talked to her, we didn’t really talk to her, why would we? But when we were talking about her, we called her Dobby.

  Somebody, though, somebody a few weeks after that bumped into her, coming down the corridor from double chemistry and said out loud, “Sorry, Dobby.”

  People thought that was hilarious. It was loads of LOLs.

  I heard it was Nikki who bumped the girl, or if it wasn’t Nikki it was Steve who’s like Nikki’s boyfriend, or this kind of stupid thing that’s not a boyfriend so he gets to do what he wants, but Nikki only wants to hang about with him, so they break up a lot, even though they’re not together. It was either Nikki or Steve who did it. I wasn’t there.

  The girl got bumped into and didn’t say anything herself, but she looked at either Nikki or Steve – is what I was told – and it was like she was going to answer as if Dobby really was her name.

  That cracked people up.

  When I first heard about it, I did think it was funny.

  And I told Sinead, only she’d already heard and said it happened on the way to citizenship and not on the way from double chemistry. She corrected me – which is what she does. She always wants to make you feel like you’re an idiot and that she knows best. That’s why she eats salad. One day she’ll be someone’s mum and then she’ll get to be that way in her own house all the time. Her husband will have to eat salad – everyone will – and they’ll all have to keep on being wrong, so that she can stay happy. In the end, her kids’ll run away from home, or get married to just anyone, or be terrorists, or go crazy.

  Dobby might have been a bit crazy – if you looked at her it seemed that way – which wouldn’t have been anyone’s fault. Being crazy is an illness, like breaking your leg. I’m just saying that she looked a bit crazy in her eyes. She mostly didn’t face where she was going and just checked out the floor, probably so that you wouldn’t catch her eye. Or because she was hiding, trying to hide.

  She looked like a person in a prison or in a mental hospital. It was pretty much her face I described when I had to write an essay about paying a visit to a relative in prison. I think the essay was in case any of us had relatives in prison, so the whole class could join in and be sympathetic, only Carl actually does have a cousin in prison and he said he could do without writing essays about it as well as having to hear about the cousin whenever his dad had a go at Carl about being rubbish at maths. This cousin is supposed to be a warning about terrible shit that will happen in the future if you don’t know about maths. Even though nobody is sure if the cousin could do maths or not – and it’s not like he’s in prison because he can’t do linear equations, or that stuff they keep asking us. One of our maths tests had this question about plastic bottles being made into fleece jackets and how many bottles would make how many fleeces, which was a total waste of time. That doesn’t teach you anything. All it does is prove that fleece jackets are shit, which you already know.

  And Mrs Martin – who teaches English, so the essay was her idea – didn’t know that some of us were in John’s Road Infants together and knew this boy called Graeme whose dad committed suicide because he owed this monster amount of money to a gang and couldn’t pay it back. He killed himself to stop them killing him. And he probably didn’t want the gang to hurt Graeme, or Graeme’s mum. That’s what Graeme said. It was sort of a kind of type of suicide. There can be that type. There’s lots of types, but they’re all stupid. They all make other people feel bad.

  Having been in the same class as Graeme means we know, or some of us do, about prison. Or people that ought to be in prison.

  They never caught whoever Graeme’s dad owed the money to, and it isn’t a crime to lend money, plus it was Graeme’s dad who killed Graeme’s dad, so really there was no way anyone was going to prison, but they should have. People who are guilty should go to prison.

  Anyway, that’s why I didn’t write about a man in a cell. I wrote about a woman, but she had Dobby’s face, pretty much, the way I described it.

  I don’t know where Graeme went after primary. He took a month off after his dad died and then he came back and said he was better off without him, but didn’t act like he believed it. After John’s Road I don’t think anyone saw him again, so maybe he moved away.

  He didn’t kill himself or we’d have heard.

  Carl in Mrs Martin’s English class has never visited the cousin in prison. He says the cousin is a wanker and should stay locked up.

  Dobby wouldn’t have been in prison, but I wondered if maybe she’d been in some hospital somewhere. No one has said. She seemed a bit hospital – more than a bit hospital – because of that way she would slide around. She made it look like it took some big effort when she needed to go through a doorway, or walk all the way across a floor without something propping her up. She never went to the lunch hall, maybe because of that.

  And she could seem like she was waiting for someone to bring her something, or tell her what to do.

  I did sometimes think that I would say something so she could relax a bit.

  Not threaten her – just tell her when it was the last lesson before going home, or something like that. Not because she wouldn’t have known, but maybe it would have been relaxing for her to hear it. And she might have been glad it was nearly home time.

  I know she went home to a flat and that she lived there with her mum.

  I know that now. I didn’t know then. It’s been explained.

  Dobby didn’t do PE.

  I suppose you can’t do PE if you have to slide along walls. You can’t be any use to anyone like that.

  And she would be no use anyway. That was something we thought. I’d have told her not to try in case she hurt herself. That wouldn’t have been ganging up on her.

  I’d like to have been allowed to skip games. She did well with that.

  She didn’t even sit out on the side with whoever was having bad periods, or pretending they were having bad periods – which is the only useful thing about periods, they can get you out of gymnastics, or circuit training, all that rubbish.

  She just never went anywhere near PE.

  She didn’t do games, either. No running up and down pretending to be interested in hockey, or running round and round and round the track in the summer. (That’s not even a sport – that’s just running, like you do for a bus. And pervs hang about along the back fence because we’re in shorts and they can’t get enough of us.)

  I mean, you’re lucky if you don’t have to do games.

  So she just did the things she did – the sliding and the being quiet – and we really didn’t pay that much attention to her.

  You can’t be friends with someone just because you get told you have to.

  You shouldn’t be horrible to people, but you don’t have to be their friend – it’s not fair, otherwise, if you don’t like them, or know them, or want to spend time with them, then you’ve got nothing to talk about or do if you are with
them. You’ll make each other bored.

  I’ve already got friends.

  I already had friends then.

  People have asked since if I’d have done things differently with her, as if it’s my fault, or anybody’s fault.

  It’s not someone’s fault. There’s no need to feel bad.

  Or perhaps it was Sinead’s fault, because she made up Dobby’s name. If that was a problem. The girl might not have known about being called Dobby, though.

  Besides, people love Harry Potter. There’s a theme park and people keep on being fans, even though it’s been around for a while now, and they buy Gryffindor scarves and keep reading the books. So Dobby could have been a good name to have.

  We could have turned out to have given her a good name.

  It’s not fair that all this ended how it did, because we didn’t mean anything. We were making a joke.

  And probably whatever else happened to her was what was wrong and she didn’t even notice us. She never seemed to notice us.

  If we’d known about what had happened at the other schools then I would have spoken to her more, or smiled at her if it looked like that wouldn’t scare her. I would have said it was time to go home soon, or if it was really hot, or if somebody was being a dick I would have made some kind of comment. I would have just had some chat with her, maybe.

  Which would be what I would have done differently, I suppose. I don’t think that would have changed anything. I don’t think she would have enjoyed it, in fact.

  The first I knew that something was wrong was when we were heading home one Thursday and it was going to thunder – it felt that way, really stuffy – and I wanted to get away and have a shower and be online in my PJs and have a chilled evening.

  I suppose online stuff could have been easier for Dobby, for the girl, because then she wouldn’t have had to be in the room with people, or been looked at, but then there’s lots of shit online and crazy and horrible people. I’m not part of anything like that. I wasn’t part of anything like that. She probably had a computer, but I don’t know.