Girl, Balancing & Other Stories

by Helen Dunmore

  ‘Maybe I’d better just check in case there’s anything I’ve forgotten,’ I said, to tease him.

  ‘No!’ His spoon stopped scraping. ‘It is all done, Jacinta. Everything that you need. Don’t you trust me?’

  ‘Khalid, what a question. Of course I trust you.’

  ‘Don’t you think I will look after you?’

  ‘Of course, of course I do—’

  His emotion surprised me.

  ‘We have to trust each other,’ he said, stepping forward, cupping my face with his free hand. ‘Don’t you see that? Without trust, there is nothing.’

  ‘Khalid, what’s the matter? It was beautiful, the way you packed—’

  His hand, his eyes were frozen. ‘You opened the case?’

  ‘Well, yes—’

  ‘You looked? You took things out?’

  ‘No. It was only that I’d forgotten my styling tongs.’

  His hand dropped to my shoulder, digging, squeezing. He said nothing. His eyes scoured my face. He said nothing, but I stepped back.

  ‘Khalid, I’m sorry, I just put the tongs on top, I didn’t mess anything up.’

  He thought I’d found his surprise. He was wounded, angry. He was … what was he? I had to make him believe I hadn’t found it.

  ‘You did a great job,’ I said, keeping my eyes on his, showing him through my eyes how much I loved him. Slowly, slowly, the hand gripping my shoulder relaxed.

  At eight, Khalid went to his study group. He never missed it. ‘They are my brothers, Jacinta. We study together, we help one another.’ He’d creep in later, because I needed an early night. I only had to check Johnny, and put out my clothes for the morning.

  The phone rang. Carola.

  ‘For God’s sake don’t forget your waterproofs, Jass. I nearly left my cagoule on the peg behind the door.’

  ‘It’s all in. Khalid packed my case so beautifully. It looks like one of those magazine features.’

  ‘Lucky we’re not flying.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘You know, all that stuff. “Did you pack your bag yourself? Are you carrying anything for another person?”’

  I pause.

  ‘Yes,’ I say.

  ‘You OK, Jass? Don’t worry, Johnny’ll be fine with Mum.’

  Her voice boomed in my head as I split into two people. One was on the phone to Carola; the other was silent, hearing echoes that spread like rings from a plunging stone.

  Did you pack your bag yourself?

  Almost midnight. Khalid wasn’t back. I went to my drawer and lifted the clothes that hid the parcel. I could scratch off a corner of the paper. I could look inside.

  No. I have to trust him. I have to believe.

  Just a corner.

  Did you pack your bag yourself? Could anyone have interfered with your bags? But they don’t ask questions like that on trains, and they don’t look inside your bag.

  People don’t do things like that. Not us, we live together. He loves me, we trust each other—

  They are my brothers. We help one another.

  Johnny cried out, and I went to him. His forehead was moist, but he wasn’t really awake. I said to him what I always say: ‘It’s all right, Mummy’s here.’

  He settled into sleep again. Mummy’s here. Mummy’s here. Did you pack your bag yourself? It’s all right, Mummy’s here.

  My mind changed by itself. I didn’t have to change it. I lifted Khalid’s package from my drawer. My fingers opened the straps of the suitcase, lifted the layers of clothes, and repositioned the weight of Khalid’s surprise back into its place in my case. My fingers were as light and terrified as my breath. I packed another bag, with Johnny’s things and some of my own. I woke Johnny and wrapped him in his duvet and carried him down to the car.

  I left the suitcase on the bed. I didn’t leave you a note, Khalid. Maybe your present was a thousand roses, packed so tight that the parcel weighed like lead.

  HAMID IN THE PLAYHOUSE

  ‘IS IT GOING to snow, Nan?’

  ‘It looks like it. I’ll have to get that sledge down from the loft.’

  His small hand squeezes mine. He won’t keep his gloves on, even when it’s as cold as this.

  ‘Are we just around the corner now, Nan?’

  ‘Yes, just around the corner, Lewis.’ I’ve said that to him since before he can remember, I suppose, on our way home from the shops.

  There’s a big silver van slewed across the street. Dreadful parking. Some builder who can’t find a space and thinks it’s all right to block everyone else. I’m still thinking that when I see the black figures swarming out of the back of the van. I pull Lewis against me.

  ‘Nan, who are those men?’

  Before he’s finished saying it, I’ve understood. Black meshy suits like bikers, big helmets, visors down over their faces. Shouldering out of the van, moving fast. Some at the door of the flats, some by the van. More and more of them pouring out. Two heading for the back, but the wall is too high. They don’t know that they have to go down the alley, off the main road. They run back to the van, and come out with a ladder. How many seconds does that take? Two, four, six, eight. More men. Eight men at least now, moving so fast I can’t count them properly. No markings on the van. Ladder against the wall. The first man goes up it, too fast, gets his weight wrong, the ladder tips, the other man catches it. They shout all the time. Now he’s up. Razor-wire on the top, surely he must have seen that before he started climbing.

  They’ve got guns.

  ‘Nan, I want to go to your house.’

  ‘In a minute, Lewis.’

  ‘Are they baddies?’

  He pushes in close to me, face in my coat. The men swarm. Another two charge forward with something I don’t recognise until they run it into the front door of the flats. A battering-ram. A window on the top floor flies open and a woman leans out.

  ‘What the fuck?’ she shouts. She isn’t dressed; you can see that. A young girl, not a woman, clutching a towel round her.

  ‘Police! Get away from that window!’

  ‘Are those men police?’ asks Lewis.

  ‘I think so.’ My heart is thundering. Fear. Anger. Disbelief, as the door cracks and comes off its hinges. Surely to God they could have rung the bell and that girl would have put on her dressing gown and come down to open it.

  ‘Come on, Lewis, we’re going back to the shops. You can have a hot chocolate.’

  Lewis crouches down, grizzling. He doesn’t want to walk any more. He wants to go home. ‘Nan, why can’t we go to your house?’

  For heaven’s sake, I think, lifting him into my arms, he’s only three. The shops are half a mile away and he’s already tired. We can squeeze past the van on this side. He wants the warm, and his toys, and his tea. ‘You be a nice quiet boy for Nan. We’ll be home in a minute.’

  They’re inside the flats now. Two are left by the van, looking up and down the street. I wrap Lewis in my arms. No, it wouldn’t be safe to try and slip past the van. They’re so keyed up, any movement and they might let fly. Instead, I keep my distance and call politely, ‘Excuse me?’

  They whip round. I can’t see them taking me in, because of the visors, but I know what they see. A nan. Sixtyish, overweight in spite of religious attendance at Zumba in the church hall, wearing glasses, clutching grandchild. Worried, conciliatory expression.

  ‘Excuse me, officer,’ I go on, ‘I live down the end of the street. My grandson’s not very well and I need to get him into the warm. Would you be kind enough to help me through?’

  It works. I’m not a threat, and I don’t want to get involved. Through the broken door, I can hear the girl shouting – screaming, really – but I carry on regardless. ‘Just that house down there, the end terrace.’ I point. They look at each other. For a few seconds, the carapace cracks. There’s no one else around. No audience, no one to play up to, or down to.

  ‘All right, love. Quick as you can, and stay indoors once you’re there.’

&n
bsp; I keep Lewis in the back, away from the windows, until Rachel comes to pick him up at six o’clock. She’s all nerves, grabbing hold of Lewis and squeezing him hard.

  ‘There’s police all over the end of the street. Yellow tape everywhere. They wouldn’t let me bring the car through. I thought there’d been an accident. Are you OK, Mum?’

  ‘Everything’s fine.’

  ‘Someone said it’s the anti-terrorist squad.’

  ‘It’s the “late for tea and turn on the blues-and-twos” squad as far as I’m concerned. Frightening people like that.’

  When they’ve gone, I can’t settle. I go upstairs, and without turning on my bedroom light, I pull up the sash and peer out. The van is still there. I go downstairs, and decide to light a fire. I don’t have one very often, but it makes the place cosy. I keep bags of smokeless fuel outside the back door.

  It’s very cold, and just starting to snow. Lewis will love that. A white world, when he wakes up. We can make a snowman tomorrow – I’ve got that old red and black scarf somewhere—

  I stand quite still. My hair hackles. I can’t have mistaken it. A cough, quickly smothered. It came from Lewis’s playhouse, at the end of the garden.

  I’m standing on the tongue of light from the doorway. If I scream they’ll hear me from the end of the street. Someone’s in the playhouse. Pretend not to have heard. Go back into the house, lock the door. Call the police. Say: I’m probably being stupid, but I thought I heard something …

  It’s so cold. Too cold for anyone to sleep out. Why would a burglar go and shut himself up in a child’s playhouse? I go back inside and fetch the brass candlestick from the hall table. Ugly old thing. Heavy as lead. I get the torch, switch it on, and then, without giving myself time to think, I go straight out of the back door, across the lawn, and I pull back the door of the playhouse.

  ‘Oh my life,’ I say, for there he is in the torch beam. Hamid from the flats, jammed into the playhouse like something out of Alice in Wonderland. He’s wrapped himself in the old dhurrie from the floor. He rears up, squinting against the light.

  ‘What are you doing here, Hamid?’

  For a moment, all I can think of is that he must have had a row with his girlfriend, and she’s locked him out.

  ‘Please!’ he says in a desperate whisper. ‘They will hear you.’

  I know Hamid. He’s been in the flats more than two years. He’s a postgraduate student at the university. Social sciences, I think. He plays football with Lewis sometimes, on the bit of tarmac they’ve got at the side of the flats, for parking.

  ‘Get up off the floor, you’ll freeze to death down there.’

  ‘I cannot. Please, turn off the light. They will see.’

  I get him into the house. He is so stiff with cold that I have to give him my shoulder to lean on. I run upstairs, fetch my duvet and prise the edges of the dhurrie out of his hands. It falls to the floor. He is wearing a bright red dressing gown with the words ‘Santa’s Sweetheart’ blazoned across it.

  ‘It is my girlfriend’s,’ he says apologetically as I wrap the duvet around him.

  I make him a cup of tea and put three spoonfuls of sugar into it, and then I remember the snow. Our feet will have left a trail. I run to the back door, but the snow is coming down heavily, wiping away our footprints.

  That dhurrie needs to go under the stairs. And Hamid …

  ‘Why were they looking for you?’ I ask as I fill my hot-water bottle for him.

  ‘They have also been to the university. They say I am in contact with proscribed groups, but it is for my research project.’

  I am not naïve. I know that terrorists may also be young men who play football with the children of their neighbours, and pass the time of day pleasantly.

  ‘Hamid, you’re shaking. Are you still cold?’

  ‘I am claustrophobic.’

  I bought the playhouse in a kit, for Lewis. The instruction sheet was all diagrams, and I couldn’t make it out. Hamid was cleaning his motorbike, so I showed him the sheet. He said it would be no problem to put the playhouse together. He could do it in half an hour.

  ‘I expect they only want to question you,’ I say, and think of the battering-ram.

  ‘They can keep me for many days. Fourteen days.’

  Lewis will be here in the morning, I think, at quarter to eight.

  ‘You can stay tonight,’ I say, ‘but you’ll have to be gone before Rachel brings Lewis in the morning.’

  Hamid’s asleep now, in the back bedroom. He wouldn’t give me his girlfriend’s mobile number. He said it wasn’t safe. He threw away his own mobile when he climbed out of the back of the flats, he said. They can track you, even if it’s switched off. He seems to know a lot. Too much? I feel dizzy, as if I haven’t eaten all day.

  The van is still there, but they’ve pulled it over to the side of the road. Through the window I see lights on in the flats. It’s still snowing. I suppose in the morning he could go into the cupboard under the stairs, like Harry Potter. Lewis wouldn’t think of looking in there. But Hamid’s claustrophobic, he said.

  The way they came swarming out of that van. They all had guns. You wouldn’t want to get in their way. When I was a child, the Prime Minister could walk in the park with a single policeman.

  All right, love. Quick as you can, and stay indoors once you’re there.

  Up the road I went with Lewis, while they watched me. I know what they saw. A little boy and his nan, grateful and bit cowed. I don’t think they’ll come here looking for terrorists.

  Hamid’s fast asleep in that ridiculous dressing gown. I wish he had something else to wear for tomorrow. It’ll show up so bright against the snow.

  Once, long ago, before I was a nan, I saw a newspaper photograph of a huddle of men advancing out of an alley, waving a white handkerchief dipped in blood. I was a student then, like Hamid. Everything was in black and white in those days, even Bloody Sunday. The day after, we held a protest march, flanked by police who didn’t think much of us. It was a snowy day then too, and they were ordinary police, in their helmets. Riot gear and kettling hadn’t been invented yet, not on the mainland. A speech crackled through a megaphone, but I could barely make out the words. One sentence, however, has always stuck in my mind:

  ‘Everything that’s happening over there, will happen here.’

  Police in full riot gear, bursting into a suburban street. Guns, roadblocks and helicopters overhead. Machine guns at airports. If they’ve made a mistake, there will be an apology. People who have nothing to hide have nothing to fear.

  I’m a dot in a line of marchers, protesting, black against the rawness of snow.

  I’m a nan, drinking tea in my own kitchen, with a young man in a Santa’s Sweetheart dressing gown asleep in my spare room. At least, I hope he’s still asleep. It gives me time to think what to do.

  WHALES AND SEALS

  SHANNON CUTS THE boat’s engine, and here we are, drifting on the Pacific Ocean. Without the noise of the engine it’s clear how fragile we are, just a speck of metal and flesh in a wilderness of water. But the thought doesn’t trouble me.

  ‘We’re in US territorial waters now,’ says Shannon. She’s a tawny-skinned New Zealander with a beautiful smile and a passion for marine biology. The amount she’s told us already would fill a guidebook, and I haven’t listened to all of it. But I’ve kept a listening look on my face, because I like Shannon. She’s working her way around the world, and then she’ll do her PhD on Baltic herring.

  ‘Baltic herring, Shannon?’

  ‘Yeah, crazy, isn’t it? Maybe it’s because my father’s Estonian.’ Shannon gets up from her seat and beams at the rest of her passengers. ‘We’re in US waters now, guys! Got your passports handy?’

  The man in front of me lifts his camcorder and begins to film the flat silvery US ocean.

  ‘You can go out on deck if you like,’ says Shannon.

  The deck is tiny. If we’re polite and not pushy there’s room for the ten of
us, and because of the big silence lapping round us it doesn’t feel crowded. Everyone’s mind is away out there on the ocean. We’ve seen sea lions, and cormorants, and a school of Dall’s porpoises that rushed the boat. I was afraid of the boat injuring them, but Shannon said it wouldn’t happen.

  ‘They like to ride the bow wave,’ she said. ‘They like the feeling of it. Sometimes they’ll get on to the bow wave of one of those big freighters and ride it for hours. Maybe it conserves energy. Maybe they’re just playing.’

  We haven’t seen whales yet. I look across the water at the Olympic mountain range. The mountains are snow-covered, and a breath of chill comes off the Pacific water. The water is cold and rich, packed with chains of life that man hasn’t broken. Not here, not yet. Shannon tells us that an orca can eat four hundred pounds of salmon in a day. The only way I can imagine that quantity of salmon is to build a tower of supermarket steaks in my mind. Three hundred, maybe? I used to buy four salmon steaks and they would weigh maybe a pound and a half. One for Luke, one for Jasmine, one for Don, one for me. I would ask the assistant to make sure the steaks were the same size. If one steak was bigger than the others I would cover it with sauce to hide the fact.

  Maybe we aren’t going to see any whales, not today. The man with the camcorder is asking Shannon if she thinks they’ll come.

  ‘Yes,’ says Shannon. ‘They’re around. They were here this morning. This time of the day, they’re feeding. I’ll have a listen.’

  She goes to the back of the boat and fiddles with the underwater acoustic device which she’s already explained to us.

  ‘Listen,’ she says. All of us fall silent and listen obediently to noises which sound like music you’d turn off on Radio 3.

  ‘They’re hunting salmon. Hear that clicking? There’s one quite close. Fifty metres off, maybe.’

  We’re all staring out at the bald silver sea, willing it to yield up a whale. I hold my breath. The boat twirls slowly on a current I can’t see. Land is far off. Please, I say inside myself. Please. Our boat bobs like a little ark of prayer. All of us holding our breath; all of us wanting and waiting. Do the whales come at all? Is this whole trip a gigantic pretend, like putting your baby tooth in a glass of water by your bed so the tooth fairy can replace it with a coin, or staying awake on Christmas Eve to catch a glimpse of Father Christmas? I’ve been the fairy myself too many times. I’ve filled those stockings. Why am I holding my breath like a child?