Chaplin & Company

by Mave Fellowes

  Odeline had arranged to meet Ridley and John Kettle at 11 a.m. outside the Lock Inn. She dressed lightly, in shirt, waistcoat, braces and trousers, imagining that her tailcoat might be cumbersome on the journey. When she came up from her cabin with the holdall there was an enormous bird perched silently on her roof. It was a grey heron like the ones she’d seen from the barge cafe during one of her hot chocolates with Vera. She had never seen a heron this side of the canal before, so close to human life.

  Odeline looked at the heron and it looked back, blinking along its long yellow beak, closing and opening eyes that were perfect black dots in perfect yellow circles. It was standing on one leg, with three yellow talons splayed for support. This close, it struck Odeline as remarkable that one twig leg could carry the whole oval bulk of the body. Its head was folded into its shoulders and Odeline noticed how the black-edged wings curved back to a point, like the shape of a tailcoat. Its chest plumage was shaggy and striped with black, but as she watched, it flattened, the black stripes stretched, and the heron began to lift its head and unfurl its neck. Odeline watched as the neck continued to extend – impossibly long! The bird kept its eye on her all this time, beak down. It blinked again, at full height, its shape now a series of long, soft curves.

  Odeline didn’t hear what John Kettle called out from behind her but watched in dismay as the bird flinched, shook its huge wings out and then dipped its whole body into lift-off. It took two wing beats towards her and then turned away up the canal, its long legs hanging down and then straightening behind the body. She watched it go, ignoring John Kettle, who called her name and then called it a second time. As the bird reached a steady height over the water its wings slowed and Odeline imagined the up and down movements were breaths in and breaths out. She thought of the badger-haired accordion player on Angela’s boat widening his arms to stretch the accordion and then bringing them together.

  The bird dipped under the far bridge and John Kettle called out again. She walked past him and on to the pub without answering.

  Odeline has no idea whether they are travelling north, south, east or west. Even when Ridley showed her the place on the map she couldn’t orient herself. I must get better at geography, she thinks. It will be essential once I am a fully qualified steerer.

  They turn off the motorway and swing wildly on to a roundabout in front of an estate car which holds its horn at them as it follows.

  ‘You almost killed us, you stupid man,’ snaps Odeline, picking herself up from John Kettle’s blue-shirted arm, which stinks of sweat and tobacco, and has bits of soil living in its creases.

  ‘I’d like to see you lot try and drive this bloody deathtrap,’ shouts John Kettle. He grimaces as he reaches under Odeline’s legs and pulls the gearstick down. The engine screams and he jiggles the stick, shunts it back up again. ‘Absolute effing tin can.’

  ‘Off here,’ says Ridley. And then, ‘You did pull out without looking, John.’

  ‘Where’s your bloody driving licence then?’ He turns the steering wheel with both hands as if he is pulling in a rope. They swing off the roundabout and the estate car’s horn trails away. ‘Get some driving lessons and then come and tell me what’s what.’

  ‘Left in about a mile. I did start learning once and then I thought, there just don’t need to be any more cars on the roads.’

  John Kettle sniffs.

  ‘Do you disapprove, John?’ says Ridley, leaning forward.

  ‘Bloody gypsy,’ grins John Kettle through his beard. To Odeline’s surprise they both start laughing.

  On Ridley’s instructions John Kettle takes a left and they drive along a tall wire fence before coming to a barrier in the road. Ahead is a square building painted dirty pink, with small blue barred windows and a brick porch. Other buildings in the same colours stretch out behind it and the wire fence continues around the whole compound. There are small patches of green grass in the car park in front of the central building with rubbish bins positioned on them. It is quite like the motorway service station they visited on the way out of London.

  John Kettle leans out of the window and presses a button next to the barrier.

  ‘I’ll speak,’ says Odeline and leans over him. There is a fuzzy ringtone and then a voice.

  ‘Reception.’

  ‘We are here for a visit.’

  ‘You got a permit?’

  ‘The name is Vera Novak, she is a resident here.’

  ‘Official permits only.’

  ‘We need to park our vehicle.’

  ‘This is a staff car park. Visitor access is by foot.’

  ‘But we’re not on foot. We’re in a camper van.’

  The line cuts out and Odeline reaches forward to press the button again. This time the ringtone fuzzes on and on. She presses it again: the same.

  Ridley opens the door and jumps down. ‘Why don’t you go on and start making the enquiries. I’ll help John park somewhere and we’ll join you in there.’

  ‘All right.’ Odeline shuffles out of the seat.

  ‘Righto.’ John Kettle begins shunting the gearstick around. ‘Where the bloody hell is reverse?’

  Ridley gets the holdall from the back of the van and helps Odeline lift it on to her shoulder. ‘Good luck,’ he says. ‘We’ll be quick as we can.’

  Odeline walks across the car park crookedly, the holdall straps cutting into her shoulder. She should have worn her tailcoat for extra padding. She keeps one hand resting on her moneybelt. At the entrance to the main building she turns around and sees the camper van shunt violently back into the grass verge behind the barrier: Ridley and John Kettle both give a thumbs-up signal through the windscreen. She walks through a revolving door into the centre.

  The reception area is starkly lit with a flecked linoleum floor and rows of blue fabric seats linked by metal bars and screwed into the ground. There are people sitting at intervals along the rows: a withered old couple with two bin bags of clothes on their laps; a man in a turban with a grey plastic suitcase; two young men in jeans sprawled across several chairs; a young woman leaning forward to talk to a child in a pram. At the far end, slightly separate, sit a cluster of people in suits with briefcases, flicking through papers on their lap. They don’t look up when Odeline comes in. All the others do.

  There is a window opposite the seats, with an officer leaning on a counter below a square clock. Odeline goes straight up and puts the holdall down on the linoleum beside her.

  ‘I’m here to collect Vera Novak.’

  ‘Name again, madam?’

  ‘Vera Novak.’

  He taps away at something for a minute.

  ‘Nothing here about a release. Look. Says here her case hasn’t even been heard yet.’

  Odeline unzips her moneybelt and brings out three of the clear plastic packets of fifty-pound notes. She places them on her side of the counter and, fixing the official with a look she’s practised – the look of a seasoned conspirator – she slides them towards the glass.

  ‘I’d like to collect her now, please.’

  The officer straightens. ‘Madam, you’d better put those away. I’m not sure I understand your meaning and I’m not going to ask. There are other people in this reception area.’ He gestures with his eyes to the people on the seats. ‘You are making yourself vulnerable, miss.’

  Odeline nods – she gets the message – and pulls out another two packets, puts them down on the counter.

  ‘Madam. There are cameras in all four corners of this reception area.’ He points to one in the back of his booth. ‘I strongly recommend you put those back where they came from.’

  ‘I need to get Vera Novak out of this place.’

  ‘There is a proper process for that, madam. Perhaps you could discuss this with Miss Novak herself. She will have been briefed on the procedure. You might get a visit this afternoon but I can’t guarantee it. Name?’

  ‘Odeline.’

  ‘Your full name, please, miss, plus surname.’

  �
��Odeline Milk.’ Her throat is suddenly tight. Her nose feels hot and runny. She stuffs the bags of cash back into her moneybelt. ‘Are you going to send her back? To her country. It’s terrible –’

  The officer points along the counter to a stand with leaflets in it. ‘Read the information. All legal options are outlined in there.’

  ‘I’ve brought a bag of her things.’

  ‘They’ll have to be checked if you get a visit. When you get called up, take them to the window round the corner.’ He points along the counter again.

  Odeline takes a leaflet and carries the holdall across to the front row of blue seats. She puts the bag on the floor and places a foot either side, squeezing it tight to guard it from anyone who might think to snatch it. But the people in the reception area don’t look especially threatening, even the sprawled young men in ripped jeans have stopped their talk and seem smaller now they are inanimate. The people at the other end in suits keep themselves demonstrably busy scribbling and flipping over their papers. But the rest of the waiting people are inactive; their eyes look ahead and their faces are blank. They look as though they have been there for hours, reduced now to statues under the electric glow of the strip lighting.

  The old man in the turban is as still as the others, but his expression can be read – his brow lopsided, his mouth dropped open as if he has just been punched. Odeline knows this look now. That is despair, she thinks, that is the mask of despair. He holds on to the handle of his plastic suitcase, which stands by the side of his chair. He is holding on to it tightly. The skin is strained yellow over his knuckles. She wonders what is in there, and why he is holding on as if it is the only thing in the world keeping him on the ground.

  She looks down into the unzipped holdall at her feet. At the top is Jane Eyre with an edge of the photograph sticking out. Odeline leans forward and slides it out. Vera’s parents in grainy black-and-white. Scrubbed and proud and full of hope. With Vera’s eyes, Vera’s mouth, framed by the doorway, she thinks, of Vera’s school.

  It stiffens Odeline’s resolve. She will study the detention centre leaflet and work out what to do. She will hire an army of professional people in suits with briefcases to fight their case. She will not let Vera be one of those people swallowed up by the unfairness of the world.

  She slides the photograph back in between the pages of the book, and shifts the towel around the books in the holdall so they don’t get damaged.

  And then she hears a sound, so close it seems to have come from just behind her head, and so familiar she registers it without surprise. It is the sound of her mother’s pencil scratching across the columns of an account book, and with it the heavy breathing that accompanied her concentration. Odeline hears it as clearly as if she had just walked into the kitchen in Arundel.

  She twists to the right and left to look around her, but there is no one writing with a pencil, no one there on the seats beside or behind her. She knew there wasn’t. It wasn’t a sound from the reception area of the detention centre, it had come from somewhere else. She knows this more certainly than she has known anything in the last weeks. And with it she remembers: the top of her mother’s head as she bends over the account books at the kitchen table, wiry auburn chunks of hair shaking with the effort of pressing the numbers into the columns. Shoulders moving up and down as she breathes roughly in, roughly out. Eleven-year-old Odeline going to the edge of the table and her mother looking up, the concentration dropping away, her face beaming into a smile. She taps on the table for Odeline to sit down, and Odeline does, hooking her satchel strap over the back of the kitchen chair. She is already tall, her knees press against the underneath of the table. Her mother picks up a big parcel from behind the pile of account books and pushes it across. The parcel has ‘INTERNATIONAL MAGIC’ written across the top, with a shooting-star motif. Odeline looks up and her mother nods at her to open it, wrapping each hand around the other in anticipation. Tearing open the end, Odeline takes out: a copy of the International Magic magazine with a picture of Paul Daniels on the front in a top hat and tailcoat; a magic wand; a deck of cards with the shooting-star motif on the back; a postcard of the nineteenth-century illusionists Maskelyne and Cooke; a pair of glasses with mirrored lenses.

  This was the first parcel Odeline’s mother ordered, as Odeline’s interest was just beginning. Soon she would dress up in her mother’s coats and make things disappear up the sleeves – and Eunice Milk would send off for something after every month’s pay. She would sit and peer through the catalogues with the same concentration as she peered at her account books.

  She remembers this, now; it is right there before her eyes. And soon there are other scenes. The silent laughter of the woman on the sofa watching Buster Keaton on the television, one hand covering her gaping mouth, the other squeezing Odeline’s with excitement. The frowning woman hunched on the sofa stitching ‘O.MILK’ into the items of Odeline’s school uniform with blue thread. The single figure marching, head forward, down the street, thrusting the Arundel Magic business card into people’s hands. What a contrast with the circus clown in hemp clothing, worshipped by his troupe, who had asked, eyes twinkling, about the house in Arundel. Quizzed her about the inheritance. Belittled her plans. Tapped at her moneybelt. Turned away before he had finished waving her goodbye.

  Odeline feels shame now – a deep, sharp shame – for having been embarrassed by her mother. For having wished for the romance of her father. She could have had no other parent, she sees that now. Her head dips and she feels humility rise up her body, the hotness of having been so deeply wrong. She has not been worthy of such a mother. She has been so far from grateful. She is grateful now. So grateful.

  There is a click from above the reception desk and the memory breaks. The hour on the clock has changed: 2.00. Next to the time, the clock’s black and white display shows the day, the month and the year. It is a familiar date. Odeline looks down and unzips her moneybelt, taking out three tickets. She unfolds them to check the date and time of the performance. She is missing Marcel Marceau.

  THIRTY-TWO

  Vera is sitting on her bed, the bottom mattress on an iron bunk in a room she shares with a Kenyan woman, Nadra, who has been here for seven months. She is the Kenyan woman’s fourth roommate; all the others have been sent back to their respective countries: Colombia, the Philippines and Lithuania. Nadra has had three different lawyers take her case so far, each one has done nothing and then dropped it. She says that without money it is hard to get the lawyers to stick. She is meeting a new lawyer this afternoon who sounds better than the others. But she’s thought that before.

  Vera has the room to herself while Nadra meets her new lawyer. This is a relief. She is not used to living so near to another person, with no privacy at all. She finds it very difficult to do things like dress and wash her face in the same room as someone else. And she finds it hard having to talk so much. But her roommate seems happy to have someone to discuss her case with. Vera doesn’t have an opinion and finds it hard to think of what to say in reply. The main problem, though, is this: she feels she cannot process what has happened or develop an opinion on her own case until she is safe in a room by herself. This has been her only request since entering the detention centre and it has been refused.

  They have given her an outfit of a blue shirt and tracksuit bottoms, which she is wearing now with her trainers. It is fine. Not too hot. The window in the room is barred but quite large and can open wide. Looking from the bed she can see the toilet and sink which annexe the room. There is graffiti scratched into the annexe wall in various languages – Vera has counted seventeen different languages that she can recognise. Most of the graffiti is written in English, though, and refers to the prison-like aspects of the detention centre, the treatment of detainees as criminals. Vera is not cheered by this – she would like to write something beautiful instead of anger and swear words and complaints. She would like to fill a wall with the Christina Rossetti poem she once taught her class to recite
by heart:

  Come to me in the silence of the night

  Come in the speaking silence of a dream

  Come to me with soft rounded cheeks and eyes as bright

  As sunlight on a stream.

  Come back in tears

  Oh memory, hope, love of finished years.

  Vera finds some poetry over-sentimental but has always loved this. And it is right. All she has now is everything she can remember.

  In some ways this state of affairs is a relief. Even with nothing, it is a relief to be out in the open. Living in hiding: there is self-censorship, self-surveillance and fear. You have to be your own secret police – hardly better than living under the new regime at home. Now the worst has happened, she would not change it. This is an odd thing to realise.

  When she’d heard the knocking on the barge cafe door she’d thought perhaps it was Mr Zjelko come back to check up on her. He’d been there just before lunch, telling her there’d been a crackdown recently – officials out checking papers. He’d spoken as though he expected her to do something about it; she knew all she could do was pray she’d be lucky. But she didn’t expect him to come checking at eight o’clock at night – perhaps he’d discovered she was sleeping on the boat? Had John Kettle told him? She kept still, sitting on her stool at the counter, and turned the radio right down. There was more knocking and some talking – more than one person out there. Had Zjelko brought his thugs? What would he need them for? Her heart started to knock so hard that she could hear it in her head. Each beat muted everything else. She brought a hand to her chest to try and muffle it, keep it in.

  ‘Vera Novak,’ said a tired English voice, ‘we have reason to believe you are residing in this country on an expired visa. We also believe you are working for a wage without the required documentation.’

  ‘Vera Novak?’ the voice repeated.