by Jemma Wayne
Emily realised now that Auntie had loved her then. She hadn’t been able to feel it at the time but identified it later, like so many things, in its loss. They had done well to put up with her really. They managed it for three years and she knew even as it was happening that the screaming and the silences and the disappearances would one day amount to a final straw. Gradually, Auntie began to raise her voice at her, and Uncle hit her once. Which made everything worse. She wasn’t surprised when they told her to leave. She told herself she felt safer that way anyway: alone, and running.
A white van was parked in front of the entrance to Emily’s building. As she rounded the corner, she studied the men bounding in and out of it, unloading boxes. In Africa, they would be surrounded by people: newcomers were objects of curiosity to be scrutinised and assessed. He who has travelled alone, can tell what he wants, went the proverb, one of many that even after so many years, Emily was unable to rid from her mind. But the proverb held a truth, and it had felt natural for her, in another time, in a place that no longer existed, for strangers’ stories to be tested and repeated, inquiries encouraged, questions asked. Emily shifted her shopping bags higher up her arms and walked past the van without a word.
The lift was broken again so she climbed the stairs, trying not to breathe in too deeply the stench of urine and beer. It amazed her still that a flat had been found for her so quickly, had been given so freely, by a nation who barely looked at each other in the street. Auntie had explained to her once about welfare, about asylum, about how she and Uncle had claimed both before the day came that with a job, and a passport, they needed neither. She’d told this story with pride, gratified by the distance they’d travelled, and though it wasn’t due to a similar sense of aspiration, Emily always remembered this, and didn’t mind sometimes having to hold her breath on the stairs. By the time she reached the fifth floor however she was gasping. Stopping at the end of the corridor, Emily rebalanced the shopping bags and dug into her handbag for her key. She always did this - stopped, prepared, felt the consoling piece of metal in her palm. An instrument of safety. Of power.
Emily looked up. A little way down the corridor, the door of the flat next to hers was ajar, a box propping it open, male voices inside. Emily had only ever seen the flat’s occupant once, but she knew it to be a tiny, hunched-over old woman who seemed not to have any visitors and made noise only when her kettle occasionally whistled. Probably, Emily considered, the woman had died, because it was plain that the foreign voices she heard now were those of the men from the van, who it appeared were moving in. Emily wondered, briefly, how long the woman had laid dead next to her, whether her decomposing body had started to smell, who had found her; but then she heard footsteps on the stairs and quickly covered the last few feet of the corridor to her door, locking it carefully behind her.
The room was minute, the only windows facing directly onto a small courtyard with buildings so closely crammed around its edges and to such heights that it barely let in the light. Emily breathed deeply. She liked it this way. Rat-like. It was useful to be so far removed from the illumination of light, the transparency of sunlit days. Quietly, she unloaded her shopping, slipping the stolen avocado out of her pocket and onto the countertop to ripen, and placed a slice of bread into the toaster. She knew she shouldn’t really eat the beans that night, but she was hungry so dug around under the sink for her solitary pan and, with a knife, pried open the tin before sense could change her mind. The dark red contents gushed with satisfying, hearty thickness into the pot. As it heated she opened the tap and let the water run until it was cold, then held a tall glass under it, allowing it to overflow, still finding pleasure, and promise, in this small excess.
When it was ready, Emily carried her meal over to the cushion in front of the TV. In a moment of charity – or pity, or guilt – Auntie had let her take it with her from the room she’d once slept in, along with the clothes Auntie had paid for over the years, and a wad of ten pound notes folded together and pressed into Emily’s hand with a look of exhaustion at the door. Now the TV was Emily’s biggest distraction from the dismal reality of everything else, and the floor in front of it had become a place from which she could watch laughter, glamour, optimism, frivolity, extravagance, romance, hope, dreams, success. She wished sometimes that she could be one of the happy people inside the screen, or even one of the girls who worked in the café around the corner that sat outside on their cigarette breaks, making jokes and throwing back their heads, light beaming from their eyes. There was a time when she would have given anything for that brightness, that spark, but the darkness that filled her seemed impossible to escape. Her anger was impossible to escape. Misery was impossible to escape. And for the most part, she no longer tried to.
Footsteps hurried past her door then returned a moment later, doubled and slower. Emily placed the remnants of her meal on the ground in front of her, turned off the TV, and slid from her cushion onto the floor. Lying flat she could make out the large, trainer-clad feet of one man walking backwards, and the sandals of another moving forwards opposite him. They were carrying something. The one wearing sandals was dark-skinned, though not as dark as Emily, and the wiry hair on his toes sprouted wildly, impervious to suggestions from the sandal straps of where they should lie. He called out to the other man in front of him and both pairs of feet stopped. Emily remained flat on the floor and listened to the muffled muttering between them in a language that wasn’t English and that she didn’t understand, then after a while the feet moved again, and disappeared from sight.
Emily began to weep.
It crept up on her slowly sometimes, and then there was time to make a cup of sugary tea, run a bath, or find some distraction on TV, but other times it hit her like this, abruptly. Angrily she hit back at the hot tears streaking down her face, but they only ran harder from her nose in polluted floods. She hugged her knees to her chest and forced herself to sit up, but then her mind wandered beneath the sink to the razor blade she had attempted to hide there, underneath toilet roll and toothpaste. The scar below her fringe throbbed, dizzying her. Her stomach tightened and contracted. Afraid that she might be sick she turned further onto her side, but couldn’t muster the energy to reach the toilet, or even the bin in the corner of the room. All she could do was remain low on the ground, clinging to the hard, worn, reassuring carpet, until it was over.
When finally it was, Emily dragged herself back onto the cushion in front of the TV. The last beans on her plate were cold now and sickened her. She felt weak and listless. Her throat was dry and her head pumped after crying for so long, but she couldn’t be bothered to refill her glass at the sink. She switched on the TV. A nature programme investigating the life of insects filled the screen and she changed the channel quickly. Now Jeremy Kyle appeared in front of her, arbitrating the trivial, meaningless, wonderful disputes that were enough to drive the families on the show apart. Emily curled her body inwards, hugged her knees to her chest again and rested her head on the cushion. When her eyes closed she was in a field of sweet potatoes, in a shallow dirt valley between the straight lines of crops, her face crouched next to the soil, her breath unsteady and unreliable, caterpillars taunting her from underneath the leaves.
She opened her eyes.
Another blink and there were voices screaming her name, shouts raised to a gruesome, fever pitch in exuberant anticipation of finding her. Darkness was in her mouth, dry, soil-smelling darkness. It scratched her eyes and covered them.
She blinked again. Her view cleared and suddenly, in the distance, she spotted her mother. Emily scrambled up. She ran towards her, fast, faster, her legs and arms flooding with acid, but somehow, the distance seemed only to grow. She shouted, but no sound came out. She waved, but her movements were slow and minuscule. She ran. But with every metre she covered, her mother fell further away, and the more she ran, the more pain filled the older woman’s eyes, until finally Emily stopped and saw that her mother, on her unreachable plane, was undress
ed, and unhelped and unflinching.
Emily opened her eyes once more.
Her mother was gone.
Jeremy Kyle screamed on in comfort.
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