by Ali Smith
Not detention estate as in housing estate. More like when Brit’s father died and they talked about his estate and it meant what’s left of you in terms of what you’re worth after you die.
This made the place that pays her a salary like a kind of underworld, she thought. Place of the living dead. The gate to her underworld was the new little rows of hedge sprigs in the boxes they’d put at the front between the car park and the building to smarten or maybe soften the place up for visitors arriving. Every day now, going into work then leaving for home at the end of the shift, she nodded at them, DMZ between underworld and rest of world.
Hello, hedges. (Wish me luck.)
Goodbye, hedges. (Another day done.)
She went inside on the knowledge. She left on the knowledge. The knowledge was, she could leave. She could leave at the end of every day (or morning, if she was on nights).
But she was sort of always there even when she wasn’t. Even though she could leave, and at the end of the shift she just did, went out, past those hedges, cross the road, cross the car park, walk along the airport road to the station and get on the train, get home.
What do they make you do there? her mother said when she’d been a fortnight into the job.
I’m a DCO at one of the IRCs employed by the private security firm SA4A who on behalf of the HO run the Spring, the Field, the Worth, the Valley, the Oak, the Berry, the Garland, the Grove, the Meander, the Wood and one or two others too, she said.
Brittany, her mother said. What language are you speaking?
Brit wasn’t stupid. She’d been good at languages. She’d been good at everything at school without trying. She’d wanted college, but they couldn’t afford it now. Be sensible. They couldn’t have ever. But her mother gave herself a hard time over that not happening. So Brit never complained. Whenever she got home, how was work? Fine. What did you do today? Stuff, you know, the usual. Then you give a little laugh.
As long as you had a laugh, her mother said. Hard work and laughter go together like seaside and bad weather.
I’m finding that out all right, Brit said.
Then her mother said one day,
Brittany, what’s a deet?
Had she really said deet out loud to her mother? Deet was a Torquil word, what he called them. But not unpleasantly. Torq was all right.
Deet, Brit said to him, in her first week. I mean the actual stuff. It’s an insect repellent, you know.
Uh huh, he said.
But the joke’s on us, then, she said. If they’re the deets.
Uh huh, Torquil said.
You calling them deets makes us the insects, she said.
Uh huh, Torquil said.
The bloodsuckers, she said.
Uh huh, Torquil said.
She laughed.
Uh huh, Torquil said.
Torq was Scottish which was why he had the funny name.
I’ll explain, he said. Everything about this job is repellent. And you got to be careful with Deet. Your speech can get slurred, you can feel really sick, it’s a neurotoxin, under your skin going right into you. Numbness, coma. Just warning you early on so you can monitor yourself for the signs, Britannia.
Brittany, what’s a deet?
Oh, you know. (Laugh) Slang. Short for the word detail.
How was work, then?
Fine.
What did you do today?
The usual. Stuff. (Little laugh)
As long as you had a laugh. Hard work and laughter.
Her mother turned back to the 24-hour news channel. She shook her head like she does every day at the stuff happening.
So many destabilizing things happening in the world, she said.
It’s just the news, mum, Brit said. It’s rubbish.
Her mother always thought the news mattered. Everyone knew nowadays it wasn’t what you watched to find out what was really happening. Except her mother. She still believed in TV. Old people did.
Wonder what on earth’ll happen, her mother said.
Her mother hadn’t a clue about the real world. Hard work, laughter. Not that there wasn’t a lot of laughing at work. There was the laughing from deets that sounded like something had broken, and the laughing at deets from certain DCOs, laughter closer to the bone, threat-laughter. There was a lot of noise generally: laughing, crying, banging doors, thumping doors, shouting. It was a noisy job. Unless you were on scanning or recep or visits room. Make ’em laugh, make ’em cry, make ’em wait: whenever a deet laughed in that mad way that’s what Torq said, make ’em wait all right: there were people in here, in a place designed when it was first built for 72-hour detention at the most, who’d been here for years, years and years.
Seventy two hours? Three days.
Most of them in here’d been in at least a couple of months.
Hello, hedges.
Goodbye, hedges.
Day after day.
But that day? The whole place was different.
It was weird-quiet.
Nobody laughed. Nobody cried. Nobody, deets or DCOs, banged the doors.
The story went round.
A kid, a girl wearing a school uniform, apparently just walked into the centre.
First, it’s not possible to do that. Nobody can, at this centre, or any centre. Just walk in. Not possible full stop. Here – and this isn’t the tightest security place – you’ve got to be searched, checked, photographed, checked, assigned the visitor lanyard, checked, scanned, checked again, then security gates, doors, fences, doors, three more checks then wing recep final check.
Word went round that this kid had also walked in – and out – at four other IRCs.
Lies, Brit said. Fake news.
Then she saw the toilet in the room the Turk and the Pole deets Adnan and Tomek were in.
Then some other toilets in B wing.
They were really clean.
Is this, like, a giant April fool’s thing? she said to Dave. In fucking September? Is it some kind of SA4A test?
Dave hadn’t seen the girl with his own eyes but he’d heard some of the stories doing the rounds. He told them to Brit at coffee. Then she was on visits room that afternoon and heard some more of the stories from Russell, who thought like she did that they were a bunch of total wank.
The story went that the girl had also, get this, rung a doorbell on one of the knocking houses in Woolwich, had got in there, and had come out again alive and unhad.
What, even in a school uniform? Brit said.
She and Russell laughed like drains.
The story went that the bent police had been called in by the pimps. Come and get her. Take her, they said. Please. She’s fucking ruining us. Because she’d got in there and in the space of half an hour had gone through several rooms persuading clients out of doing what they were in the middle of doing, well that was pretty funny in itself, and then she’d made the guy on the front door unlock it and fifteen teenage and younger girls got free and ran for it, ran for their lives.
Yeah.
Right.
The story also went that one of the self-harmer deets, an Eritrean on C wing, Brit didn’t know him, had looked up and found the girl in his room just standing there like a vision like the fucking Virgin Mary (Russell). The Eritrean self-harmer had said to her, this place they are keeping me in is like living in hopelessness, so why would I live? Only pain is keeping me alive. Then the schoolgirl’d said something back to him, though he wouldn’t tell anyone what, and now he was like a new man. Russell and Brit spent ten minutes making up things she’d said to him, all of it obscene. Garbage, Brit said. How did she even get as far as C wing with nobody throwing her out? She’s got wings, Russell said. Flew like an angel, little teenage sanitary towel wings on her heels.
The story also went that the girl’s mother was a deet in the Wood, that her mother’d been picked up by the HO because she’d applied to do a course at a uni, she’d grown up here but she’d no passport and the HO picked her up off the street, she�
�d nipped out for ten minutes, gone down to the Asda, no coat on, bag of shopping left on the pavement when they picked her up. And then this girl had got herself into the Wood after the mother’d been in a few weeks and the girl had stood there telling the guys on the gate to sort it that night, get the DCOs to unlock her mother’s room and then unlock the unit and then shut off the system and let her mother out.
Course they did, Brit said. We’d all do it. They just have to ask nicely.
She and Russell laughed like drains.
But.
Listen.
Apparently.
There’d been an internal breach at the Wood and some people got out and there was no visual. But CCTV playback from opposite the front gates shows some woman in the middle of the night just walking out of the Wood and a couple of others with her too.
Brit laughed. It was better than comedy. She laughed and laughed. She laughed so much and so loud that the people visiting the deets up and down the room turned and stared. She had to stop herself laughing.
Then she walked back up the room to make sure no deets were touching or sitting next to anybody. Sitting next to family is forbidden.
But the story bollocks got bigger and bigger all day.
It spread through the whole H block.
Someone, one of the secretaries, had overheard through a door what the girl had said to management.
She was in there for ten minutes at the most, Sandra (Oates’s secretary) told Brit and a couple of others (plus Torq, honorary female) in the Staff Ladies.
Sandra spoke in a whisper, though all the toilet stall doors were open and no one else was in there.
She said it all calm and reasonable, Sandra said. She went so quiet I couldn’t hear much, though I could hear the word why, the occasional why I could hear. It wasn’t like I was eavesdropping, I was listening out in case I had to call security. But she’d already walked right past them no trouble, they hadn’t stopped her, she walked past them as easy as she walked right past me, she gave me a straight look, I can’t call it anything other than that, I didn’t stop her, I didn’t want to, and she knocked on his door and went right in and sat and waited for him. Then he went in. I tried to stop him and warn him but he was in one of his fuck off Sandra moods.
Then, what, five, ten minutes later, she comes out of the office and says, goodbye Sandra, thank you very much, I don’t know how she knew my name but she did. And when she was gone he called me into the office, he’d gone all red, and he sent me to my desk to call up Steamclean and get them in ASAP.
The story went, Sandra said under her breath in the Ladies, that this girl had been visiting several other IRCs and persuading people to do all sorts of unorthodox things like cleaning toilets properly.
What did she look like? Brit said.
Like a schoolgirl, Sandra said. Like you see on the bus.
Sandra took them into her office and showed them the CCTV playback on the computer. Sandra’s office is really nice, like a normal office. Sandra let them peek inside Oates’s office as well, really nicely furnished and very roomy.
On the playback they saw the top of the head of a quite small girl walking around.
She just walked around, like she was meant to be there. Nobody stopped her. When a door in front of her was shut she waited till it opened for some other reason and just walked through it. It was so plain and simple when they watched it that it just wasn’t a mystery. A door opens. She goes through it.
Then Brit’s shift was over.
She could leave.
She went for the train.
She sat and stared out its window. Her eyes went from what was outside the window to the marks and smudges on the surface of the window, the ones on the inside, the ones on the outside, back to the world beyond the marks on the window.
Some staff at work had been saying they knew about the girl, that she went to a Co-op academy with a friend of someone else at work’s kids.
Some of the deets had been saying they’d heard of the girl, knew who she was. She’d survived a dinghy and come up from Greece.
No, she’d crossed a desert past skeletons who hadn’t made it, kept herself alive by drinking her own urine.
She’d crossed the world wearing her little brother’s Man United football shirt.
They said they knew her father, and that her father was dead, an important man in politics at the wrong time in the wrong place.
They said they knew her mother, that she’d been drowned in a boat off Italy.
They said she’d been bombed out, family had had to run for their life, guerrillas had used them as donkeys, made them all carry the encampment for miles, for days, and when her father had stopped and asked for a rest on the first day the guerrillas had said, here is your rest, and had shot him there and then.
Which is when Brit, who’d been listening to one of the men telling this story, had found herself glancing over, couldn’t help it, at the South Sudan deet, Pascal, eyes down, head low on his neck, saying nothing. His casenotes said he claimed he’d been made not just to watch his father and brother both decapitated but been forced to choose which head he’d play football with, and to do it too.
But what astonished Brit on her way home on the train was what came into her own head when she thought about the girl.
It was a vision of her own mother.
In this vision, Brit’s mother, bewildered, was in lockdown in a unit in the Wood. She was sitting on the plastic bedding looking at the drainhole in the floor. The smell coming through that drainhole was actually visible to Brit when she saw her mother’s face in that vision.
The Wood, everyone knows, is rough on the women there, like living in a shower room with a bunch of strangers. Worse, the body searches. The assaults that never make it to report. The story goes, rapes. Course there are. Brit had heard it, they’d all heard it. No smoke. Plus, the women who’d been sex-trafficked across the world and ended up at the Wood all swore it. Detention there was worse than any of the rest of what had happened to them.
Brit shook her head to clear it.
Her mother was fine.
Her mother was at home watching the parliamentary channel on TV saying out loud to herself in an empty room, wonder what’ll happen.
Leave it behind.
That’s when she realized she’d forgotten today to say the goodbye to the stupid hedges.
Damn.
She was superstitious about it. Stupid really.
She thought about the little dark green leaves. Hedge smell. The smell of good bitterness. She thought how it wouldn’t take long, no time at all, for those fairly new separate little hedge sprigs next to each other in their boxes, they were more than sprigs now, bushes already, to form into just the one hedge instead of all the separate plants they’d been planted as.
Say it now in your head like you’d say it to them.
Goodbye, hedges.
Another day done.
Yeah, but.
Quite a day.
Girl on the wing.
Total myth.
Utter bollocks.
But it was true, the toilets throughout, or on the wing she was on anyway, had definitely been deep-cleaned.
Good. Someone doing something right.
About fucking time.
One afternoon –
this is Torq telling her the story of the only other day that’d been anything like this one, way before her time, a day from back when he was a newbie himself –
I’d been here about six weeks. Four o clock. I was on break, we were in the staffroom, and there was this weird noise through the wing, it got louder, it was, like, a wave when you watch a wave bigger than the other waves coming in on the sea, then we realized it was the deets, it was the deets laughing. We looked at each other. It wasn’t crazy laughing or drug laughing or fight laughing, it was a whole different kind of laughing. We were all, like, what?
So we got into riot gear.
The deets were crammed into every room
with a working TV and they were all watching this old black and white film. I could see over their heads. The silent movie guy with the Hitler moustache and the bowler hat was sitting on a kerb holding a baby wrapped in blankets and looking like, what am I doing holding a baby? and he lifted this drain cover by his foot in the road like he was going to drop it down a drain into the sewer, but then he decided against it, there was a policeman, and then I was laughing too. There was all this laughing, the wing was all the echo of them, and us, laughing. Deets in here I’ve never seen laugh before or since, deets I’ve never actually heard speak, the ones who can’t speak English and never say anything, the violent ones. The fucked-up Iranian guy usually in isolation, even he was laughing, everyone was, they were like kids. He didn’t drop the baby down the drain, he took it home to a really minging poor room, where everything was broken, and he worked out how to feed it and keep it clean, and then it grew into like a clever toddler who went round throwing stones and breaking windows so that the poor-guy character, who was kind of a father to him, and who was a glass mender as a job, could pass a broken window minutes after it got broken with a new pane of glass on his back and get paid by the housewife for mending it.
There was nothing to it, Britannia, stupid story about a child, a man, a pane of glass, a stone, a policeman. After it this place was like I’ve never seen. People in tears at the end of it. People wandered round the wing after it like we were all normal.
Sure it all descended pretty fast to the other normal again.
But I remember thinking it must’ve been a bit like it on the Christmas day in the trenches, remember in the video for the Paul McCartney Christmas song, when they played football with each other and gave each other their rations of smokes and their chocolate.
Here are some of the things Brittany Hall learned in her first two weeks as a DCO at a UK IRC:
How to turn her body cam off until a deet was really about to lose his cool. No point in filming something where someone’s still calm, the DCO called O’Hagan said. Pigbollocks here, for example, is just holding forth right now, but you have to learn to sense when he’ll get to about ten seconds off battering his head against the wall, and then you switch it on. You’ll soon get the hang. No, he’s fine. He’s just kicking off. Nothing wrong with him. He’s just doing it to annoy us.