by Ali Smith
How there was isolation for kicking off. No bedding, lights on 24/7, security checks every 15 mins 24/7.
How one of the things you could say to deets on suicide watch was, go on then, I dare you, because mostly they were doing it to get attention or to annoy staff.
How according to some DCOs scrotum, pigbollocks, penis and prick were all suitable things to call deets.
How statistics had come back from an inspection visit saying that the deets liked the staff, found them on the whole approachable and reasonable. The statistic on this was particularly high from the deets who couldn’t speak English.
Which DCO was known as Officer Spice (the DCO called Brandon). He gave them what they wanted, what they really really wanted, and if there were any kids in, the kids were who Brandon or the deets got to test the spice to check it was any good.
How there was generally paracetamol available for the Kurdish deet on the wing with cancer unless it was the weekend when no doctors were in, in which case he’d have to wait like everybody else for Monday.
How management was thinking of putting a third bed in every room. Nobody working the wings thought this was a good idea. Staff had told management repeatedly it was a bad idea, Dave told her, but management was doing it anyway. Not Three Men and a Baby, it’s Three Men and a Toilet. That was a reference to an old film. There were toilets in every room. Ensuite. Ho ho ho. The toilets had no lids and most of them were in the room with no screen or anything between them and the beds. This had a good knock-on effect of a lot of deets not eating much, given that nobody unless they’re insane wants to shit in front of anyone else, and deets get locked in rooms for 13 hours 9pm till 8am and twice for roll call during the day, which Dave said was all good exercise for the sphincter.
How the deets who’d been brought up in the UK were the most depressed and could be particularly troublesome, partly because none of the others would make friends with them. I knew one, Russell told her. I saw him in here and I said to him, Laurie, man, what you doing in here? We’d been same class all through primary and secondary. Twelve years of school. He said, I got stop and searched outside a supermarket, I was standing too close to a Porsche. They took me into a station God knows where, then in the middle of the night woke me up, put the cuffs on and brought me here. Next day I went into the office and I got his notes looked up and he was about to be deported to Ghana, literally next morning. So I told him.
Ghana? he said. I don’t know nothing about Ghana. I never been to Ghana. I don’t even know where Ghana is.
How Russell was all right but filthy minded, crude as fuck. How Dave was all right. Torq was all right. Torq liked books, a bit like Josh except gay. He said in her ear on their first shift together, as a famous writer put it in the 1930s, cruelty to animals will get you punished but cruelty to humans will get you promotion. Was it advice? She wasn’t sure how to take it. She didn’t know Torq well enough at that point. She didn’t yet know what was funny and what wasn’t. Someone in the staffroom told a story like it was a joke about the deet who’d been put on a plane before he had a chance to find out that the papers saying he could stay had arrived at the centre. Was that funny? A lot of DCOs laughed. Someone else told everyone this: okay, so a deet makes a complaint to the HO. He says: I was in prison at home because they didn’t like my politics. And prison at home is not that different from being in detention here in the UK, except that here in the UK I haven’t been beaten up yet. So the HO writes back to him and says: happy to help (smiley face). Joke? Definitely meant to be. Big big laugh.
Where’s Josh these days? what’s the story with you and him? her mother’d said again at supper.
How should I know? Brit said.
Sorry I spoke, her mother’d said.
It was still September. Brit was on her bed in her bedroom now, getting some privacy.
The last time she’d seen Josh, in August, they’d gone to bed, rare enough now because of Josh’s back but they had, good, then afterwards Josh had been going on and on about a history book he was reading where a man goes up to an SS guy in a city the Nazis have taken over and the SS guy has just clouted someone undesirable in the face with his pistol or something Nazi like that, and the man, a civilian, an old guy from a university or a school, professor type, goes to tell the SS guy to stop it, the words he actually uses are have you no soul. And the SS guy turns and shoots the professor in the head right then and there and the man falls down dead in the street.
Josh had started talking about it because she’d been telling him, before they got into bed, about how there was a deet called Hero in the centre and that sometimes names were really ironic. And when Josh said the stuff about the man that shot the learned man in the head, a darkness, but on the inside of her head, happened.
It came down over her eyes and forehead like a thick curtain, like old curtains from houses in past history or on Most Haunted on the Really channel, so real she could almost smell the curtain material.
Damp. Fust.
What I’m wondering is, Josh was saying. What the ethos is.
The what? she said.
Like, say in a Tarantino film, Josh said, when you see a man who’s supposed to be a hard man turn on someone else like that and just shoot him dead it’s pretty much supposed to be approved of, when it happens. Usually we’re supposed to find it comedic.
Comedic, right, Brit said.
She and Josh had been top students in their year at school.
And we’re supposed to think, Josh said, even if he’s a bad cunt and a villain, that he’s as cool as a hero because he’s really hard. But. Does that mean the heroic can have no soul, I mean that someone with no soul can be heroic? And that we’re supposed to think this is a good thing or a thing to aspire to?
Thing is, Josh, I can’t really, don’t really, give a fuck, Brit had said.
She’d turned over, away. She was knackered beyond belief. She had a headache from hell. There was a smell of rot in her nose. She closed her eyes. She opened them. There was dark inside and out.
You don’t, do you? Josh had said. You can’t.
He’d shunted himself out of bed.
I don’t can’t what? she said.
Give a fuck, he said. You said it. And it’s true. You don’t even really give a fuck when we’re fucking any more. You can’t give hardly anything. You’ve stopped giving.
Then they’d had the fight where he told her what she was doing with her life was the epitome of excrement. Josh liked to bandy big words about. Comedic, ethos, epitome, excrement.
How dare you speak to me like that? she said.
He laughed when she said that. His laughing made fury go furiously all through her.
What I’m saying is, you’re only able to see things from the point of view of yourself, he said.
So? she said. That just makes me the same as everyone else living in the whole fucking world.
It’s making you unreasoningly self-righteous, he said. It’s not your fault. You’ve taken a job that’s making you go even more mad than the rest of us.
I’ve taken a job that’s got a salary, she said. It’s more than you’re getting right now. It’s definitely more than you got when you were working. It’s a real job. Security delivers results.
(These were low blows. Josh had been laid off from the online delivery warehouse in May.)
Security, Josh said. That’s what you call it. I call it upholding the illusion.
What illusion? she said.
That keeping people out is what it’s all about, he said.
What what’s all about? she said.
Being British, he said. English.
What the fuck are you on about? she said.
Wall ourselves in, he said. Shoot ourselves in the foot. Great nation. Great country.
It’s you who’s talking the epitome of excrement, she said. Political correct metropolitan liberal shit. Getting your opinions from the net and the papers. You’re the fucking epitome of excrement yourself.
Why is that? Josh said.
He said it calmly. He was the kind of calm that made her angry. He was speaking like he was right and she was wrong.
No, really, Brittany, I mean it. Why am I excrement? he said. Tell me. Give me a reason. Just one good reason.
Because I say you are, she shouted.
See? Josh said still in the really calm way. That’s what it’s doing to you.
Slam. (Bedroom door.)
Brit pulled her clothes back on out on the landing, hoping his mother or father or brother weren’t about to come up the stairs. Then she stood on the landing for a full minute and waited. But Josh didn’t come out of his room to apologize.
Okay.
Whatever.
Slam. (Front door.)
Excrement, she thought all the way home, angry when she left his street, turning the corner into her own street angry, execrable fucking excrement, all over her hands at work again that day, and on her shoes, a fleck of it still on her ankle when she thought she’d got it all off.
One of the deets in constant watch had been throwing it. He did it all the time, to get attention.
It didn’t matter how many times you washed your hands of it, or whether people cleaned it up or not. It was still everywhere.
I’ve done three years in here for the crime of being a migrant, a deet said to her. If you’re keeping people here this long you may as well let us do something. We could take a degree. Do a useful thing.
Useful? she said. A degree? Ho ho ho.
I crossed the world to come here to ask you for help, a Kurdish deet said to her. And you locked me in this cell. Now I sleep every night in a toilet with some person I don’t know whose religion I don’t share.
It’s a room, not a cell. And you’re lucky you’ve got anywhere to sleep at all, she said.
One deet was lying on his back on the floor in his room with his head close to the toilet pan. He was staring from this angle upside down at something through the bars and the perspex high above his head.
Why can’t we open window in this prison? he said.
Open a window, she said, And this isn’t a prison, it’s a purpose-built Immigration Removal Centre with a prison design.
When you’re live in Immigration Removal Centre with a prison design you dream air, the deet said.
When you’re living, she said. Or, when you live. You dream about air.
Hero was his name. Vietnamese. His casenotes said he’d got here by being sealed in a haulage container for seven weeks.
A plane roared over.
Thank you for help with your language, Miss DCO B. Hall, he said. It is good to have help from people. Tell me. What is like to breath real air?
Breathe, she said. What is it like. Why are you lying on the floor? Counting the planes?
Planes shook the building at a rate of one every couple of minutes.
I watch clods, he said.
He meant clouds.
I am watching, she said. Clouds. To see if it’s the shape of a horse? Or a map? I used to play that game.
He looked at her, then looked back up and away.
No horse. No map, he said.
That night she’d gone out with the girls on the staff plus Torq for a summer night of expensive drinking and tapas in Covent Garden. On the way from the tube she walked passed a couple caught in a traffic jam in a sports Audi with its roof down. They were screaming at each other.
It’s all about you, the woman screamed at the man.
It’s not all about me, the man screamed at the woman.
Brit had looked up. The sky above them all was cloudless. Clodless. She remembered from geography at school. Clouds could only form if they had a piece of something, like a tiny fragment of dust, or salt. Aerosol. The water vapour rises and sticks to it. Those great white shapes like the outbreaths of God in winter weather, or those little shreds of white, or the cloudbanks of dirty grey, were nothing but dust and water shaped by air. She was lying on her bed now looking at the Artex in the ceiling. Artex was asbestos. Her father had died of complications from asbestosis and there it was in all their fucking ceilings.
Never mind.
September now.
All the hot summer, people everywhere had been bright red with rage, near purple with rage.
It’s all about you.
Now it was cooler, she was cooler too about it all. She was learning how to clod, ho ho. Easy as this: she switched the light off. She placed the spare pillow over her head.
She slept. Night passed. The phone alarm went off. She woke up.
She got up, put clean clothes on, got the bus to the station to get the train to work.
One day some BBC people were outside the overground. They were asking people things for something about today. A man put a long mic under her nose. Another man said to her, tell us what Brexit means to you.
She thought about all the people in the centre.
She thought about Stel from Welfare telling her how much harder it was to get anyone to listen to anything welfare-based about deets, out of sight and mind now that everyone from everywhere else was an immigrant too and legal immigrants were just as unpopular with the media and the general public as illegals.
Just get on with it, right? she said into the mic.
The interviewer nodded like what she said mattered.
You think the government should just get on with it, he said.
Yeah, she said. What choice we got? To be honest, it means fuck all now. Excuse my English. I mean there’s a world out there bigger than Brexit, yeah? But. Whatever.
The interviewer asked her what she’d voted in the EU Referendum.
No, see, I’m not going to tell you what I voted. I’m not going to let you think you can decide something about me either way. All I’ll say is, I was younger then, and I still thought politics mattered. But all this. This endless. It’s eating the, the, you know. Soul. Doesn’t matter what I voted or you voted or anyone voted. Because what’s the point, if nobody in the end is going to listen to or care about what other people think unless they think and believe the same thing as them. And you people. Asking us what we think all the time like it matters. You don’t care what we think. You just want a fight. You just want us to fill your air. Tell you what it’s doing. It’s making us all meaningless. You’re making us meaningless, and the people in power, doing it all for us, for democracy, yeah, right, pull the other one. They’re doing it for their pay-off. They make us more meaningless every day.
They thanked her. They asked her her name and what she did for a living.
Brittany Hall. I’m a DCO at an IRC.
The female assistant wrote it down without asking what it was. She wrote it down like the Britney in Britney Spears. People are often careless like that. She wrote it all down wrong. Britney Hall DC RC.
So it didn’t really matter, then, what or who Brit was.
She went through the barrier, got on the train (no seats left now because they’d wasted her time) and went to work.
She got off the train. She walked down the road from the station between the airport fencing rolls of razor wire and through the management/visitor car park.
Hello, hedges.
Here are some of the things Brittany Hall learned in her first two months as a DCO at a UK IRC:
What privacy meant. (It meant she wasn’t a deet.)
What effect an official report about an independent inspection of the centre had on the place: it meant there was a new water cooler installed in the visits room.
How there were 30,000 people detained in this country at any one time, and that was the level of interned deets across detention estate that kept SA4A salaries stable.
How the deets wandered the wings like they were jetlagged. They got more jetlagged the longer they were detained. They’d arrive for the first time and make friends with the people they’d something in common with, place of origin, religion, language. Then that friendship just died, you saw it time and tim
e again, because what they really now had in common was shit, an open toilet, and being stuck in here in indefinite detention, which means no way of knowing when you’ll be out of here or if you ever will, and if you are, how long it’ll be before you’re right back in again.
How to choose which deets to speak to, who to ignore.
How to talk weather with other DCOs while they’re holding someone in headlock or four of you are sitting on someone to calm him.
How to say without thinking much about it, they’re kicking off. We’re not a hotel. If you don’t like it here go home. How dare you ask for a blanket. The day she heard herself say that last one she knew something terrible was happening, but by now the terrible thing, as terrible as a death, felt quite far away, as if not really happening to her, as if happening beyond perspex, like the stuff in the windows in the centre, which weren’t really windows, though they were designed to look like windows.
Detention is the key to maintaining an effective immigration system
HO
Nobody is detained indefinitely and regular reviews of detention are undertaken to ensure that it remains lawful and proportionate
HO HO HO
Then this happened.
It was a Monday in October. Brit got off the train. It was mid-morning. She was on the pm shift. She walked down the stairs to the barriers and out.
A schoolkid was sitting on one of the metal seats outside the station.
Excuse me, the kid said.
Me? Brit said.
(There were quite a few people who’d just got off the train.)
Could you help me with something, please? the girl said.
Brit looked at her phone to check the time.
Shouldn’t someone your age be in school? she said.
That is actually a really good question, the girl said.
Better answer it then, Brit said.
I will, the girl said. In good time. But right now I’m wondering.
Wondering what? Brit said.