Deqo reaches the ditch and turns off at the red-berried shrubs that mark the path towards her barrel, speeding down the slope and only staggering to a stop when it comes into view It is a mysterious sanctuary that swallows her up at night; she doesn’t know who brought it here and only found it herself by accident one moon-bright night. She scoops up the rainwater that had so tormented her the night before and quenches her thirst, the taste of kerosene faint at the back of her throat. Then she pours the rest over her head and torso, squeezing the excess from her thin smock. It will dry in the time it takes her to collect all the fruit she needs from the farms.
She hurries over to Murayo’s plot which lies near the right bank of the dry waterbed, far from the noise of the road, where a flock of birds roosts and chats, their nests like bad imitations of wicker baskets. They fly up and hoot at her approach as if to warn Murayo. It depends on how Murayo is feeling each day as to whether she will allow her to glean the fruit, but since Deqo alerted her to the burglar crouching on the roof of her mud-built home she has been generous. Deqo scans the ground for the squishy, over-ripe mangoes she can eat herself before bothering with the hard, green fruit still ripening on the branches. Today there is only one lying splattered in the weeds, its orange flesh trembling with black ants.
Up in the trees she checks the foliage for snakes. She once grabbed a sleeping green snake as she climbed, its mouth suddenly yawning, rigid and white in her face, making her fall clear out of the tree. She spits into her palms and hugs the slimmest trunk, above which are a clutch of mangoes that have a nice red blush to them ready for picking; her hands hold her up while her toes slip against the smooth trunk. Before she loses her grip she grasps the branch that holds the mangoes and plucks them off one by one, throwing them gently to the ground, then edges back towards the trunk and slides down, enjoying the sensation of the trunk against her skin. She collects the mangoes in her damp skirt and rushes away before Murayo comes to water her crops. The next plot is larger, dominated by dense banana trees, some so laden that the bananas hang near her head; she takes six, all that she can carry in her skirt, and turns back to town.
At the faqir market Deqo retrieves her piece of cardboard with the slice of advertising still visible on it from the pile on the ground and lays out her merchandise in two rows of six, alternating banana and mango. She has tried other jobs: collecting scraps of qat to sell on to the dealers, pulling grass to sell as goat feed to housewives, sweeping the main market when there aren’t enough girls in the evening, but this is her favourite. Her workday is over early and she has no boss to tell her what to do, and on the days that there are no customers she can eat the pilfered fruit herself.
Most of the other sellers are middle-aged women, with hefty arms and feet overflowing the edges of their sandals. The only one of them who is always kind to her, Qamar, is not there today so Deqo sits on her haunches and waits for customers. They come slowly, browsing the other stalls before deciding they can get the cheapest price out of her. She watches how the other sellers haggle and imitates their impatient gestures and harsh words. ‘Take your shadow off of me if you’re not interested,’ she shouts. ‘You are blocking people with more than lint in their pockets.’ She says this with a straight face despite her tiny ramshackle body and the twigs in her hair.
The bananas go first to a woman carrying a toddler on her back, and then the mangoes disappear in ones and twos. She holds the money in her hand with satisfaction; there are no dramas today no thieves encroach and no arguments take place. She hates those days when honking, clumsy women stampede through her patch in pursuit of someone or other.
She rises and shakes the dust off the cardboard.
‘Yaari, little one, come over here a minute,’ calls a woman with a blue and gold threaded turban on her head.
Deqo walks to her and stands stony-faced with her hands on her hips.
‘I’ll give you a few shillings if you deliver something for me.’
‘How much?’
‘Twenty?’
‘Forty.’
‘Thirty.’
‘Fine,’ Deqo smiles in triumph. ‘What do you want me to take?’
The woman reaches behind her back and pulls out a package wrapped in the light-blue-inked official newspaper October Star.
Deqo takes it in both hands and feels the shape of a glass bottle inside.
‘Don’t drop it and don’t you dare open it. The person waiting at the other end is called China – you hand it to her and no one else. If any police approach you just throw it away, you listening?’
Deqo nods, intrigued.
‘Hold it like that!’ The woman’s upper arm wobbles as she arranges the package in an upright position under Deqo’s arm. ‘Tight, tight, squeeze it.’ The whole exchange has raised sweat beads on the market woman’s forehead. ‘Go, keep your head down and look for the blue painted house on the street leading left off the end of this road.’
The area the woman points to is a part of town Deqo has been frightened to venture into before. The market women refer to the place as a kind of hell in which dead souls live; people who have left behind any semblance of goodness congregate in its shacks – drunks, thieves, lechers and dirty women.
The road tapers into a narrow alley, the market disappearing more with every yard until there are just fragments of it: a cloth, a squashed tomato, a torn shilling note that Deqo picks up to add to her stash. The sun is high above and the smell of goat and donkey droppings grows stronger in her nostrils. She passes fewer stone-built bungalows and more mud brick and traditional aqals modernised with tarpaulin and metal sheets in place of wood and animal skins. It will be easy to pick out a blue bungalow from these neighbours. She sees children everywhere, bare-bottomed and tuft-haired, five-year-olds carrying two-year-olds on their hips or staring out from entrances with solemn, hostile expressions. ‘Dhillo! Whore!’ one little boy in a red shirt that stretches to his knees shouts at her.
She picks up a small rock and lobs it at him, missing him by a short distance; he ducks back into his shack with a squeal.
Her sandals are full of grit; she stops to shake them out and notices a gully of dirty water running to the side of the track, small jagged bones lodged in the mire as well as pieces of plastic and twisted wire. This side of town seems abandoned by the rest, left to sink and slump and rot; she wonders why anyone would stay here if they had the whole of Hargeisa to choose from.
She finally spots a small, blue breezeblock bungalow and knocks on a metal door painted in diamonds of orange and green. The tin roof buckles loudly in the sun and flies buzz in the wire mesh covering the windows. Beside the blue bungalow is a jacaranda tree with a goat happily lost in its high branches, nibbling at fresh shoots.
Deqo waits a long time before knocking again; she checks around the sides of the house for any movement.
‘Who is it?’ someone shouts from inside.
‘I have a delivery,’ Deqo answers nervously.
Three locks click open and then a figure takes shape within the gloom of the hallway.
Deqo recognises her hair first, the broad band of yellow at the tip of her waves.
‘Give it to me,’ Nasra says yawningly.
‘I can’t. I need to give it to China.’ Deqo looks down as she speaks.
Nasra throws her head back and groans; she doesn’t seem to recognise her.
‘Take it to her.’ She pulls Deqo into the bungalow and locks all three latches again.
Nasra leads her into the courtyard and her pale pink dirk lights up in the sunlight, engulfing her body like a flower bud. The bungalow smells incredibly sweet despite the rashes of black damp growing up the interior walls, and Deqo inhales deeply.
Nasra knocks on the bare wooden door on the opposite side of the whitewashed yard. ‘Isbiirtoole, drunkard, your nectar is here,’ she calls.
China opens the door and the courtyard fills with music in a foreign tongue. ‘Give here.’ She snatches the package before Deqo can ha
nd it over. ‘I know you . . . It’s our little jailbird. I didn’t know you were in the trade.’
‘What trade?’
‘The booze trade, of course.’
‘I’m not. I have a stall in the market.’
‘There is no need for pretence here; one thing about Fucking Street is you can be yourself.’
‘Where do your family live?’ Nasra asks.
‘I have no family.’
‘No grandmother, no aunt, no cousins?’
Deqo shakes her head. ‘No grandfathers, no step-siblings, no half-uncles. I look after myself.’ Each time she says this it feels more true.
‘So where do you sleep?’
‘Over in the ditch.’
Both of the women tut.
‘Ooh, you have a stronger heart than me sleeping in that haunted wasteland,’ China says, unwrapping the newspaper and unscrewing the lid of the bottle.
The ethanol clears every other smell from Deqo’s nose.
‘It’s not haunted, I’m not bothered there.’
‘Until someone comes to slit your throat while you’re asleep,’ Nasra says.
‘That won’t happen, no one can find me where I sleep.’ Deqo feels a shiver along her spine despite her words.
The women look her in the eye. They see her in a way that most other people don’t; she doesn’t constantly lose their attention.
Nasra rubs a hand over Deqo’s hair. ‘What is it like being all alone in the world at your age?’
The question hits Deqo like a falling branch. She shuffles her feet a little and tries to pick through the words lodged on her lips: frightening, tiring, free, confusing, exciting, lonely. She mumbles incoherently and then stops. ‘I can still have a good life.’
Nasra looks down at her with tears in her eyes.
‘With enough luck you can. You lucky?’ China asks, her voice suddenly louder with the drink.
Deqo cocks her head and smiles. ‘Sometimes. I just found this torn shilling outside, that’s quite lucky.’
‘You are going to need more luck than that, child.’ China throws her head back and lets out a laugh that echoes off the walls and tin roof. Her baby wakes and begins to cry inside the room. ‘Oh, shut up!’ she yells before slamming the door shut.
‘Give this money to the woman who sent you.’ China counts out one hundred and fifty shillings from a huge roll and then squeezes back into the narrow room. ‘Good luck, little girl,’ she says as she waves Deqo off.
Nasra leads Deqo back to the front door and pushes another ten shillings into her palm.
Just as she is about to walk away, Deqo stops and turns back to Nasra.
‘Can I ask you something?’ she says in a faint whisper.
‘Huh? I can’t hear you.’
Deqo bends in closer. ‘Can I ask you something?’
Nasra nods cautiously.
Deqo licks her lips nervously. ‘Are you a whore?’
Nasra tenses with rage but Deqo doesn’t run or laugh, she is waiting, eyes wide, for an answer.
A few moments pass and then a twinkle enters Nasra’s eyes and her smile answers the question.
Deqo crouches down by the roadside an hour later, chewing on a lamb baguette; the bread is stale, the lamb cold, but she doesn’t care. In her mind she goes over and over her exchange with Nasra. If she is a whore then China must be too, so why had she kept her child? If it wasn’t necessary to abandon him then why had her own mother abandoned her? Deqo swallows with difficulty as the notion that her mother might have kept her enters her mind. Did she see something wrong with her? Was she running away from a child whose bad luck was written across its face? As if to punctuate this thought a car drives past and sprays dirty water from a puddle over her legs. She rises and brushes the drops and breadcrumbs away kicking a stone in frustration at the back of the car. Sour-faced and melancholic she walks back in the direction of Nasra’s house.
The heavens break open and she trots forward, skipping and sliding. The rain smells fresh, heady and green; it cleans the town and makes the paintwork on the buildings shine again. On a wall beside the market is a portrait of the old man with protruding teeth, the President. She has noticed it many times, but the raindrops now falling over his face look like tears and she stops, suddenly arrested by the sad expression on his face; despite the military khaki and gold braids he looks out to her with infinite loneliness. The dark clouds and the empty street drag down her already low spirits; in this kind of weather you should be at home with a family, dozing, playing and sitting snug by a fire. She feels cheated, cheated and spurned by the world. She wipes the tears off the portrait and continues up past the main market and antenna-eared radio station, along the perimeter wall of a large school loud with loved children and through her faqir market.
She reaches Nasra’s street shivering and with rivulets of water running down her nose and the inside of her dress. The street has changed entirely; it is full of wild children dancing half-naked in the rain and lifting wide-open maws to the sky. Chickens flap between their feet and goats are forced to dance on hind legs in their arms. A cacophony of music blasts from each dwelling: songs from the radio, others warped by over-played cassettes and a few trilling from the women inside the homes. The previously thick waste in the gully is now flowing away in a small stream and the plastic bags caught in the tree branches shine like balloons. A girl of about eight with hair plastered to her face runs up to Deqo and drags her into the melee; holding her tight to her chest she spins like a whirling dervish, cackling. Deqo laughs too, enjoying the delirium; her sadness floats above her, hanging there for the moment, then the girl slips and they both crash to the mud, limbs intertwined.
‘What’s your name?’ Deqo pants.
‘Samira, you?’
‘Deqo.’
‘I haven’t seen you before.’ The girl smiles and reveals small, brown teeth.
‘I am from far away.’ Deqo knows the way smiles fade when she tells people she is from the refugee camp.
A woman with bare feet leaps towards them; she is thin and angry. ‘Samira! Samira! Get up off the dirt, you little pig!’
‘I have to go.’ Samira rushes to her feet before the woman can slap her bottom. She runs into the shack and the woman follows, her feet like a wading bird’s as she navigates the mud.
‘Deqo, is that you?’
Deqo lifts her head from the mud to find Nasra squinting at her. She slides up and wipes the stripes of dirt off her face.
‘Come inside, you’ll get sick,’ Nasra orders.
An incense burner heats up the room as Nasra rubs a towel over Deqo’s hair and body. ‘There isn’t any water at the moment, you’ll just have to stay a little dirty for now,’ she says.
Deqo looks around the room as the warmth returns to her skin: at the pink walls decorated with film posters, the fur rug on the blue lino floor, and the white furniture crowding around her. This is the finest room she has ever seen. Totting up how much all of the furniture, clothing, ornaments, knick-knacks and cosmetics must have cost in the market, she takes a sharp inhalation of breath. Whores live well, she thinks.
‘Let me put some milk on the stove.’ Nasra drops the towel on her bed and leaves the room.
Deqo tiptoes to the framed photos on a table; all the pictures are of Nasra, but in only one of them is she smiling. Her eyes move aside and she picks up nail varnish bottles one by one: pale pink, bright pink, dark red, electric blue – she would like to paint a fingernail in each colour. Everything in the room is gorgeous, made for pleasure; the soft rug is bliss against her tired feet, sequins twinkle on the gauzy purple curtains, the bed has pillow upon pillow. She struggles to see what shame there is in being a whore if it brings such luxury to a life. Nasra seems incapable of any work apart from beautifying herself; she is too delicate and too pretty to labour in the dust of the market or to wash someone’s floors on her knees.
Nasra returns with two mugs of milk. ‘I was thinking about you earlier.’
Deqo smiles and quickly hides her mouth behind her hand.
‘It is wrong for any child, but especially a girl, to be sleeping anywhere near that ditch, with the wild dogs and even wilder men. If you wanted to, you could stay here; there is space for bedding in the kitchen and you’ll be warm at night. We need help around the house, cleaning, preparing food; you could look after China’s baby too. You would like that, wouldn’t you?’
Deqo looks her square in the eye. ‘Why do you want to help me?’
Nasra puts her mug on the floor and sits back on the bed. ‘Because I was once not too different from you: lonely, hungry, uncared for. I hitched a ride to Hargeisa and arrived with nothing more than a toothstick and a change of underwear. I know how it is to be a girl on the streets.’
‘I can really stay here? You won’t send me away?’
Nasra smiles. ‘Not unless you do something terrible.’
‘That is China’s room as you know, over there is Karl Marx, and in the corner the new girl, Stalin.’ Nasra points to three closed doors made of rough planks on each side of the courtyard. ‘You have to clean their rooms but if the doors are closed you leave them alone.’
‘Are they foreign? Their names don’t sound Somali.’
‘No, those are their nicknames; every girl has a nickname on this street.’
Deqo skips beside her. ‘What is yours?’
‘Every girl but me. I liked my own name well enough and didn’t care about anyone finding me.’ She opens the kitchen door to reveal pots, pans and long knives dumped in a large plastic basket in one corner, and a mat, blanket and cushion in another.
‘It’s not the Oriental but it’s better than the ditch, no?’
The Orchard of Lost Souls Page 6