The Edge of Me

by Jane Brittan

  ‘We’ve had so many disappointments. So many times when we thought we’d found you but it turned out to be nothing. I wanted to be sure. I didn’t tell your mother until I knew for sure. I didn’t tell you because … because … well. I didn’t know how to. I thought this would be better. That’s why when you asked, I didn’t give a straight answer. I hope you understand. I never thought this day would come. We are so, so happy to have you home with us. Aren’t we El?’

  In answer, she comes to us and reaches out her arms. Tears are coursing down her scarred face. Shyly, I embrace her and there’s the scent of roses. Cheek on cheek, I can feel her ravaged face, feel the tightening, the warp, as she smiles. And my tears fall on her shoulders and soak into the weave of her dress.

  ‘Majka, Majka, Majka.’ I now remember crying those words as I’m wrenched from her arms. The fuzzy picture I’ve carried in my head for so long is finally clear. It makes sense. I make sense. I’ve woken up.

  Branko’s crying too I see, but quietly to himself.

  As we cling to our mother, I hear her say more to herself than anyone else: ‘My children. My little ones.’

  Later on, around the table in the kitchen, over homemade soup and bread, Elzina tells us her stories. Kristina was right. They did shoot her.

  They were put on a bus with other women and children at Potočari. She was told they were going to safety. The bus drove up into the hills and, at a checkpoint on a lonely road, it was stopped. The Škorpioni were waiting. And with them, Kristina. The women and children were taken off the bus and made to stand in a field by the side of the road. They told them the bus had broken down, and they had to wait for a replacement.

  They were all starving and exhausted. Our mother sat on the ground with Senka and me, apart from the others, and as she did so, Kristina spotted her. Elzina recognised her at once.

  She tells us how Kristina was beautiful then: tall, poised but how her eyes were ice. ‘She said, “You love these children, don’t you? Look at you, how you hold them, how you care for them, how they cling to you. Don’t look so frightened, I’m not going to kill them. But I’m going to take them. I’m going to watch them grow up without love, without hope. Without you.” And the man with her, he took you both. I was screaming but she pushed me back. He put you in the jeep and came back, and the last thing I remember is him pointing his rifle at me.’

  She heard later – she had no conscious memory – that, as panic took hold, the soldiers opened up their machine guns on the women and children. She was saved because other bodies fell on top of her. That night when all was quiet, she crawled out and limped away into the forest.

  She was helped by an elderly couple who took pity on her. They took her in and nursed and hid her. She recovered a little, enough to escape to safety.

  For years she searched for Branko, for us. She took work in a centre with children orphaned by the conflict, always hoping against hope that one day we would be brought in. And that was how, years later, she and Branko were reunited. Having finally got out of the camp and started looking for us in earnest, he went there one day following a lead.

  They tried to make a new life but never stopped looking. Branko says their love for us and each other kept them strong.

  That night in bed, the house sings me to sleep. It holds me. It’s as though the house is a part of what I’ve been looking for all this time. A part of what’s been missing, along with my family.

  And in the morning, I wake to sweet-smelling linen and a jar of cornflowers on the dresser. The room looks out onto the lane that runs along the side of the house. There are hawthorn hedges and beech trees, their bare branches reaching into a silver sky.

  I pad next door in my loose pyjamas, open the door to Senka’s room and lean around the door. The gentle hum of her sleeping greets me. Her head is resting on her clasped hands. A low voice then from by the window: ‘Sanda.’

  Our mother is there, sitting on a little chair. She smiles at me and beckons me in. I cross to her, kneel at her feet and put my head on her lap while her fingers weave in my hair.

  ‘My heart is mending,’ she says. ‘To see you here together, to see what I thought I would never see – it’s closing a hole here.’ And she places her hand on her chest.

  I look up. ‘What they did to you …’

  She touches her scarred face. ‘This is nothing. It means nothing. When it happened, in between, now. The real damage was always inside of me, and now you’re here.’

  The room spins into a snail shell, and she and I are curled in it for one, two minutes before she lifts my head, kisses me lightly, and presses something into my hand. It opens into my palm: an envelope with my name on it.

  As I take it, she sits back and smiles, cupping her poor broken cheek. I look at her, puzzled, as I score my finger under the seal.

  Untidy, slanting scrawl in heavy black pen. On lined file paper:

  Look under the apple tree.

  I look at my mother and there’s that secret smile. She points to the window.

  The window is old and it bulges out of the house. Under it, a seat has been built, covered with a thin cushion. I kneel up on this, put my hands on the window and look out. The garden stretches away down to a gate, and through it, I can see high rushes and a glint of water running through them. Beyond the stream is a field, where a number of fat, shrunken trees stand with twisted boughs. I go to ask her but she shakes her head and puts her finger to her lips.

  Wet grass licks at my ankles as I make my way across to the little gate. The water is thick with weed that streams and trails like hair. I glance back for a moment at the house to see my mother at the upstairs window. She raises her hand in a shy wave and I wave back.

  The stream is wide, and as I look about for something to steady myself to cross it, I see a figure, tall and dark, standing perfectly still a little way off through the trees. A breeze moves the branches around him.

  ‘Joe!’ I call. ‘JOE!’ I launch myself over the stream and run through the long grass to where he’s waiting to catch me.

  I’m against his chest then, breathing him into me. He draws me into him. He half pushes, half lifts me up against the tree and kisses me. His hands are on my back under my pyjama top, and I can feel the rough warmth of his palms on my shoulder blades as he pulls me against him.

  He says, ‘I was starting to think I’d never see you again.’

  I look up at him and his eyes are full.

  ‘Me too,’ I say.

  ‘I wish I’d stopped you going that day – or gone with you. Did they hurt you?’

  ‘It’s OK. It’s OK now…’

  ‘Christ,’ he rakes a hand into his hair.

  ‘Listen Joe …’

  ‘I should have been there. I could have …’

  I put my hand in his. ‘It’s OK. You’re here now. How did you know where to find me?’

  ‘I called Peter. I wanted to see you. Be here. When you …’ but he’s distracted.

  I say, ‘Listen. It doesn’t matter. What happened. None of it. I’ve found my family, my real family, and I have you …’ and then I think I shouldn’t have said it because, do I have him? What do I mean by that? I mean he hasn’t asked me to marry him. He’s just …

  ‘Stop it.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I know what you’re doing …’

  ‘What? What am I doing?’

  ‘You’re worrying about what you’ve just said …’

  ‘I … I …sorry. I just didn’t want …’

  He’s laughing now. ‘I know. I know. You didn’t want to presume that you ‘had’ me because maybe I just wanted to fly to Bordeaux which is nearly five hundred miles by the way, for a laugh, then I was just going to go home and forget about you?’

  I nod slowly, but I’m smiling. ‘And …’ he adds – I look up expectantly – ‘STOP saying sorry.’

  I push him against the tree, and he ends up with a quiff of lichen and cobwebs on his head. He pulls me towards him, an
d I feel his breath on me, warm and sweet.

  He whispers, ‘You remember what I told you once? In that van?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘How people notice you?’

  ‘I …well, I …yes.’

  Of course I remember. I remember every conversation we’ve ever had; even back at school in Year Ten when he once asked me the way to Room 104. Tragic. Totally tragic.

  ‘Well. I meant it. You are beautiful. You’re … you’re lovely.’

  I don’t know what to say because ‘No, I’m not …’ would just be so completely lame and wrong right now. I’m thinking what to say when there’s a call from the house.

  My mother: ‘Come and have some breakfast you two!’

  Before we go, he leans in and kisses me hard on the lips, his mouth is open and his lips are firm and he tastes so good. And for a full minute after, when my head is spinning, he takes my face in his hands, and looks and looks and looks at me. Into me. Inside of me. And he fills me up with him.

  And arm in arm, we track back through the grass and the fallen apples to where my family are waiting.

  25

  As the months pass, we’re really starting to feel like a family.

  It’s been a difficult ride for Senka, it’s been hard for her to be in a family, but she and I are very close. Her reading and writing are going well, but her real love is drawing. She draws everything she sees: sparkling rivers over stones, the paint-box brightness of meadow flowers in the high grasses. She’s drawn hundreds of pictures of our mother and father in her own scratchy style.

  They’ve bought her a set of pens and inks in different colours, which she loves. Possessions are still so new to her that she guards them very closely. She’s learning French and English now, and while she’s not yet ready for school, she has a tutor. She’s really close to Branko, and finds being away from him hard. She helps him in his wood shop and is popular with the customers. She perches on the chair in his office, leaning on one elbow, drawing.

  As for me, the transition has been easier. My French is getting better, I go to a local school and I’m doing my Baccalaureate. School is OK now. I miss Lauren but we talk all the time. She tells me she’s impressed: I guess maybe I found my inner cool. I can be by myself or with other people and it doesn’t bother me. I don’t get tongue-tied or nervous any more. What happened to me has changed me forever. One thing’s for sure, I don’t take any shit from anyone. Ever.

  I’m doing a lot of writing. I’ve bought a journal and I’m recording my parents’ stories. I’ve spent long evenings with my mother, listening to her and transcribing her words. I’m involved with a charity now that works with orphanages in Eastern Europe, and I’m planning to spend part of this summer helping on a building project in Romania.

  I email Andjela most weeks, and she’s doing really well. She goes to the local school and has made some friends. Peter has bought her a bulldog puppy and she goes walking in the pine woods with him. If I close my eyes, I can still feel the ferns brushing my legs and smell the zest of pine on the air. Last time she wrote, she sent me a photo. She’s standing in front of the inn in the little square, arm in arm with Natalija. They are squinting in the sun, and smiling. Her hair is cut into a smart bob, and she looks well fed and happy.

  They’re coming over at Christmas and I’m starting to think of a cool present for her. Natalija says she’s mad on clothes, so when I go to the city, I’ll look for something she might like.

  I haven’t been back to the street in London. I know some day I must, but right now I can’t bring myself to. It holds so many bad memories and I don’t want to think of them now. I hear about Kristina from time to time on the news. She’s on remand awaiting trial for war crimes in the International Criminal Court. She could be put away for a long time. I tried to make contact through her solicitor once but was told she had no wish to be in touch. I guess that was always the way it was going to be. I think maybe that was the hardest thing about coming here: remembering my life before. What I had and what I didn’t have and the way I used to feel.

  Joe and I see each other as much as we can. We’re going travelling after school ends. He comes to me or I go to London. He’s just passed his driving test, and last weekend, he drove over in his mum’s car and took me out to Arcachon by the sea. We sat on the dunes under a blanket and ate chips. He threw one into the air and a seagull dipped and caught it mid-flight. And I told him how much I loved him. I do.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  ‘Thank you’ is a rather silly expression. It’s what we say when we’re handed a plate of peas or when someone opens the door for us.

  I’d like to take some of those thin little ‘thank you’s and knit them into an enormous, hairy patchwork quilt of ‘thank you’s. And in every patch, there’d be a name: of friends who read bits, encouraged me, were unfailingly positive, offered suggestions, and listened to me whining about rejections and semi-colons.

  Thank you to my wonderful editor Sara, who saw it a long time ago, and made me have faith in it as something that might perhaps work – I’ve learned so much from you, babe.

  Thank you to Catherine, for your encouraging words and for the final top and tail.

  Thank you to my dear stepsons: Jack, James and Oliver, who always say, ‘How’s the book going?’ and ‘Like the cover, Jane’.

  Thank you to my excellent friend and partner in crime at Blowfish, Lisa, whose brilliant brain drilled down into every corner of this book, tweezing out mad inconsistencies and horrible grammatical errors.

  Thank you to my husband, TB, who’s been rowing our little boat against the tide and without whom I wouldn’t have written a single word. Ever.

  Thank you to my three children, who’ve watched me cry and squirm and agonise over plot and character and who’ve given me countless ideas and space and snuggles and practical help and wonderful, bountiful, encouragement and love.

  Thank you.

  The idea for The Edge of Me came to me a long time ago. The Bosnian War was happening when my own children were little and because I was interested in writing a story with its roots in war, I chose this one.

  Many children on all sides were orphaned or separated from their loved ones. Some were taken like Sanda; many grew up scarred and troubled.

  A book I loved as a child was The Silver Sword by Ian Serraillier. It’s set in war-torn Europe in the Second World War about three children whose parents are taken away and who undertake a perilous and frightening journey out of Nazi occupied Poland and on into safety in Switzerland. It’s a book about courage when everything is lost and everyone is displaced. It’s also about salvation.

  In The Edge of Me, Sanda finds the courage to fight for what’s right when everything is wrong and twisted; she also finds herself and what was missing all along.

  NOTE:

  The Scorpions were a Bosnian Serb paramilitary

  organisation that was very active in the Bosnian War and responsible for many atrocities. That they are still operating to this day, as suggested in the book, is, to my knowledge, entirely fictitious.

  To read more about the Bosnian conflict, please visit the Blowfish Books website: www.blowfishbooks.com

  If you have enjoyed this book, please do leave a nice review on our Amazon page.

  Coming soon from Jane Brittan:

  BAD BLOOD

  The first instalment of Jane Brittan’s edgy, fast-paced thriller series follows Ben and Sophy as Ben struggles to make sense of what happened to his father, what he left behind when he died and why certain people seem so interested in it.

  The stakes are high from the very start and the more he finds out, the worse they get.

  His father was a scientist. It’s only later that Ben finds out exactly what kind of scientist. And that’s when things get dangerous …

 

 

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