Asylum Road

by Olivia Sudjic

  I’ve looked. Nothing comes up. Nothing I can make sense of anyway. I really think it’s odd Luke’s never met them. I know he says they’re just not close but I’m beginning to think it’s more really.

  Snip.

  More than she’s let on you mean?

  For a few moments I was paralysed.

  . . . contribution . . .

  . . . never . . .

  . . . marquee . . .

  Snip.

  If that’s what he wants.

  Snip snip.

  . . . clever seating plan . . .

  Sometimes I could hear whole sentences very clearly, other times only random words as they moved with secateurs along the trellis against the wall. They must’ve assumed we’d gone together – but would see when Luke came back he was alone. Given the open window, it would look like I’d been listening, and I knew I wouldn’t be able to pretend I hadn’t heard.

  I put my hands over my ears, then pulled the covers over my head but could still detect certain words. I longed to close the window but forced myself to be still.

  Savages,

  If they come,

  Children,

  Communists,

  Christmas,

  I told you,

  Stuck with it darling.

  I pressed harder into the pillow. Trapped there, with my eyes closed, I could almost see the words as illuminated streaks firing through the window.

  When Luke got back I said I had a headache and needed to stay in bed. I gave the kind of vague explanation – fine, tired – he always gave that drove me mad when I knew something else was wrong. I didn’t come down for lunch and saw Anne and Michael only to murmur bye and thanks as we put our bags into the car.

  On the motorway I was silent, listening to the murder Luke put on – a woman who’d stabbed her fiancé in the heart with a steak knife – until we stopped for fuel. Luke bought food from Marks and Spencer which we ate across the dashboard. When we’d finished, I slotted the oily containers one inside the other, and asked if he still wanted to meet my family.

  SPLIT

  4

  You can’t fly direct to Sarajevo from London. We decided to take a connecting flight on the way back (using Luke’s preferred calculator to determine the carbon footprint and how much reforestation would offset it) but on the outward journey chose to fly to Split instead, where we’d rent a car and drive along the Croatian coast for a few days (what Luke called a holiday and Christopher called assimilation), then head inland to stay with my parents.

  The night before we were due to fly I crawled out of bed, staggered to the bathroom and lay with my cheek against the cold tiles before reaching my arms around the toilet to be sick.

  When I stood, the walls disintegrated and I was sick again, depositing, into the basin this time, the little food I’d eaten. I stared for a minute, then tried to wash everything down, succeeding only in blocking the pipe. The sink began to fill. Sensing the end was far away, I hobbled out for a bucket and rug, teeth chattering, then sat back on the bathroom floor to ride things out.

  When Luke’s alarm sounded at five, I felt too weak to call between rooms, so stayed there on the floor, waiting for him to find me.

  What are you doing? he said, reaching over me for his towel.

  Sick, I whispered, jaw rigid.

  My mouth barely moved but still the effort produced another spasm. I raised my hand in warning. I thought of that gesture in religious paintings. Noli me tangere.

  Luke said we didn’t have to go. Or didn’t have to go that day. I hadn’t slept, the flights were cheap, we could always catch another. I said I suspected I’d feel the same way until I got there. That though I still felt nauseous I’d passed the bile stage and didn’t have anything left inside me to eject.

  I’m not prone to action, but once I do commit I find I can’t change course. I’d consulted Christopher about the trip. It might be good to make things normal, he’d advised.

  We had to leave the blocked drain for when we got back.

  Luke got an Uber to take us to the station and from there we boarded the airport express, where my ashen face did not stand out from the other passengers headed for early flights with other budget airlines.

  He got me a seat facing forward and began to make a circular stroking motion on the back of my hand. I shook him off.

  He nodded and turned back to his phone while I sat, straight-backed, taking small sips of water.

  At the airport he checked in our shared suitcase and I responded to Christopher’s chirpy bon voyage, thumbs shaking. Already a nightmare, I typed.

  After security we navigated the speciously winding path through A WORLD OF BRANDS. Salespeople in black menaced us with perfume and Luke steered them away protectively. Ahead of us a figure in an unidentifiable animal suit lurched toward small children and their parents, listlessly waving a Union Jack.

  Waiting on the transit bus, I studied faces. Some were young couples going on holiday, familiar in that they looked like us, but then I noticed others, perhaps returning. Strangers with faces I somehow knew.

  Our seats were in the middle of the plane and as we shunted past each row, the sight of so much irradiated human flesh made me convulse again. Luke gave me his aisle seat so I could make a swift exit, just in case, and he took the middle one. When the seatbelt signs turned on we realised no passenger had claimed the window so Luke shifted over, leaving the seat between us empty.

  I placed my water, phone, book and A4 thesis notebook on the empty seat (with the fantastic notion I might feel better and want to work) until a stewardess told me to hold or stow all of these away. I knew I couldn’t tolerate holding water as it sloshed about, and I couldn’t face bending over or standing up again, so placed the items inside the leather pocket in front. I remember telling myself not to leave them behind, which was something I usually told Luke, who was always losing things. The stewardess then asked if we were aware that ours was the emergency exit row, and whether Luke was prepared to open the door in the event of emergency.

  Her make-up sat thick and matte over her face, while the back of her neck and behind her ears, where her hair was pulled tightly into a doughnut, was pale and shimmered with blue veins. It seemed less like make-up than an actual mask. I imagined that behind it she despised her job, which involved making so many life-saving announcements and yet never being listened to. She carried on down the aisle. Whether they knew it or not, the surrounding passengers, like myself, now had no choice but to place their faith in Luke. The idea distracted me a little from the nausea. I glanced at the rows of waxen faces, strange companions in this aluminium tube, with a new feeling of shared destiny, or powerlessness.

  Then it occurred to me that any one of these captive strangers might yank the emergency door in a suicidal act. I closed my eyes and felt the plane start to roll away from its moorings.

  When I opened them again Luke had started reading my copy of the Rebecca West. He’d asked if he could borrow it, if I thought it would be good to read, and I’d said yes without admitting I’d never read it. I’d filled whole shelves with books about the Balkans but couldn’t bring myself to open any. I’d told myself that on my thirtieth birthday I would finally begin to read them as a symbolic transition into adulthood, having respectfully observed something like a governmental thirty-year-rule. I was thirty-one then.

  I felt the ground begin moving, vibrating through my feet. I had to lift them off the floor but that also made me dizzy. An acrid taste coated my throat as we rose up and into the air.

  I fell asleep at some point and woke to find the cabin peacefully aglow. The stewards were making their way along the aisle with the trolley. I looked at Luke, still absorbed in Rebecca West. The sun shot through the window, bleaching the fibrous edges of the page. His face, where he hadn’t shaved, was haloed with white fuzz. Beyond him the sky. Our plane was its sole occupant, and I felt my stomach relax for the first time since the pain had woken me in the night. By keeping my gaze steadi
ly on the blue, its refuge at once a private and unbounded space, it was possible to forget the confined one in which I sat, the proximity to treacherous neighbours.

  Then I heard a small thud. My feet felt the reverberation too. I started and looked down. A dark, compact object had appeared beneath the seat in front. Unwilling to risk renewed nausea by bending forward, I watched as a woman’s arm emerged, followed by her upper body which bulged around the armrest before becoming trapped. A hand groped on the floor beside her for what I now saw, with horror, was a navy plum.

  The woman was too wide to extend far enough out of her seat to retrieve it, and the seatbelt signs remained lit. The plum rolled toward my foot. I felt the muscles in my stomach tighten. As the plane turned slightly, the plum rolled hopefully toward the stranger’s hand, then back again toward my foot.

  Luke, I murmured, unable to raise my voice above the engine and the rushing in my ears.

  Luke – please –

  He appeared not to hear, or maybe he just ignored me. I couldn’t look away from the plum, throbbing on the floor like a grenade.

  Sometimes language helps in these situations. Not articulating what I’m feeling, but putting the scene into words as if I was transcribing it, separating me from the experience. I put the different elements into separate lexical sets. The plum rolled against my foot. An explosion. Seeds, skin, liquid, flesh. I thought about the etymology of grenade. In French it means pomegranate, after which the explosive is named.

  A slow tear slid around my cheek and without warning, I saw the toe of my own shoe kick the plum away from me.

  A gasp.

  A pause.

  Then the plum owner’s eye emerged in the slit between the seats in front, swivelling from Luke, hidden behind the enormous book, across the empty seat, to me. It narrowed as she took in my appearance, calibrating her response.

  Well thanks, she said at last. Thanks very much. Can’t fucking eat it now, can I?

  Luke shot a hostile glance in my direction but otherwise pretended not to know who I was.

  A muscle in my eye quivered. Since this was out of character my brain could not admit guilt. I took a deep breath and shut both eyes until the woman stopped speaking in my direction and began complaining about our disintegrating social contract to her neighbour.

  Everyone just looks out for themselves now, don’t they?

  I went back to my view, but another plane was visible now. It hovered like our plane’s shadow on a bright blue floor. This changed the way I’d interpreted the scene before. Now the emptiness felt exposing. I was desperate to get off the plane.

  The second, miniaturised one changed the nature of our aircraft as well as the sky we travelled through. No longer containers for human transportation now, but sentient beings almost. The pair seemed conscious of each other, and not merely in that they registered on their respective radar screens.

  I wondered about the people on board the other. What, if anything, any of them made of us. But then the second plane rolled away or ours veered slightly to the right and in an instant the sky was empty. Once its wake had dissipated, it was as if neither the slow, synchronised dance, nor it, had ever existed.

  At Split Airport, Luke walked up the jet bridge to the terminal ahead of me, carrying my small bag as well as his backpack. I stared at his back with a feeling of tenderness. How well I knew it. Watching his long, purposeful strides I felt unusually light, carrying nothing in my hands or on my shoulders, and optimism swelled inside me.

  I watched him move through the double set of motion sensor doors that sealed the terminal from its points of entry, and followed him through, enjoying the way the two panels pulled apart in quick succession with a curving mechanism. The moment I passed through the final doors and heard them swish behind me, I knew I’d forgotten the items I’d stored in the seat in front of mine.

  I stopped abruptly. My whole body seized up. The person behind rammed into me but I stayed rigid. I called to Luke, who continued marching ahead, before I took a few reluctant steps toward where he was already rounding the first bend of a ramp to immigration and connecting flights. I stopped again and turned back toward the doors, above which were written, in several languages: DO NOT STOP, DO NOT RETURN.

  I waited for a few minutes like a cat, watching people pass through, judging the brief pause between the first closing and the second opening, looking for an opportunity to push back through, the precise manoeuvre such doors are designed to prevent.

  Then I felt my arm restrained above the elbow and Luke appeared at my side.

  My book’s in the seat, I said, stumbling. And my phone. Which has everything. But the book has everything, everything. Everything for my, every – all in there. Actually – too – but mainly—

  Luke patted his backpack, I’ve got the book.

  I was confused for a moment.

  No. The other one. My thesis.

  Oh that.

  He sounded irritated. I stared past him in disbelief. How could I have done this?

  Well the phone’s backed up right?

  I don’t know.

  How can you not know?

  I don’t even know what that means.

  His thumb dug painfully into bone, pulling me away from the people trying to get by. There was no way he was letting me try to get back to the plane. I’d get stuck, or shot, he promised, looking warily around. We’d be better off presenting ourselves to one of the kiosks beyond passport control, getting them to call someone on the plane. I kept staring at him. He stared back. I thought about pulling my arm from him and making a run for it but my legs were rooted.

  Come on, he said decisively, the irritation checked. It’s not lost, OK? We’ll get it back.

  I pressed the heels of my hands into my eyes and stood like that for another minute, then let myself be guided down the ramp.

  I could count three times I’d lost anything of any value through my own carelessness. My first mobile phone – taken from a leisure centre in Glasgow. A twenty-pound note – escaped from the back pocket of fitted jeans while protesting war against Iraq. A cache of used film – when my bag disappeared at an airport. Each a devastation. I didn’t understand how some people seemed to lose things so often and hardly react. Because I was the kind of person who did not lose things, on the rare occasions I did, I too felt lost.

  You’re exhausted, he said. You were up all night. It’s not your fault.

  As we stood in line to show our passports, I raked a nail along my jaw as he told me about the doorway effect. Moving to the kitchen from another room, we forget what we were looking for as we pass through the door or open a cupboard. Our brain is wiped clean in that new place. What had just happened to me was the reverse, he said. It was passing through the door that had unfrozen the memory of what I’d left on the other side of it.

  Everybody loses things on planes, he concluded as our passports were handed back.

  Well I don’t, I said, forcing myself to stop scratching at my skin. I never have.

  And you haven’t now, I mean. We’re going to get it back.

  The man behind the glass at the counter for airport enquiries and lost property was dressed as if he took his role extremely seriously. His hair was slicked back and a tie clip glinted on his narrow chest. I hadn’t been prepared for this conversation, and when I opened my mouth no words came out. Without the lost things, or in this place without them, my brain seemed to be malfunctioning. I pulled my hands slowly down my face, digging into my cheeks. Tears came but I didn’t cry.

  Officially, the language I was trying to speak no longer exists. Now there are four names for four dialects, though anyone who speaks one can understand the rest. There’s a meme of a cigarette packet that bears the words SMOKING KILLS. Twice in the Latin script and once in Cyrillic. The spelling is exactly the same for each.

  Breathe, Luke said.

  Sorry, I said, observing the man as he made some new calculation as to who the young woman before him was, speaking rust
y Serbo-Croat.

  I handed over the stub of my boarding pass and watched his expression change and then change again as he called the aircraft. I understood that he spoke with a woman who had gone to check my seat. I held on to the counter to stop from scratching at my chin.

  She says it’s not there.

  I closed my eyes.

  Anya, you were sitting in my seat, did you give them my seat number?

  Yes, I said irritably, realising I hadn’t.

  Luke gave me a suspicious look as I added this information.

  Not there either, she says.

  I placed my hand over my stomach.

  Tell her . . .

  No phone has been found.

  I clenched my fists.

  Tell them the book is black and smooth, very smooth. It would feel the same as the magazines and . . . cards. She has to open it, the seat pocket, and look.

  He spoke further with the voice on the other end, looking at me, then hung up the receiver and shook his head.

  Please fill out this form.

  I wrenched the chained ballpoint and tried to contain the urge to scream. In that moment, it seemed preferable to be trapped in limbo between the two security doors than here, free, without the lost items. I felt betrayed by Luke’s caution, wishing I’d followed my own rash instinct to run back.

  What’s that supposed to be? Luke said, peering at my cross-hatchings.

  In addition to filling out my details I’d used some of the blank space to draw a picture of my A4 notebook. The drawing described the situation in three composite ways. Appearance (black, rectangular), silhouette (black, rectangular), absence, and my feelings about that.

  What was in your book? the man asked with new curiosity.

  I gave him the form, blotting my eyes with a sleeve.

  Everything, I said. My life.

  He slotted the form into a folder – whose flap I could make out said LOST.

  I pictured the little beige counter this man presided over, with his shiny hair and tie, his hitherto indifferent manner, as having been set up at the end of the car hire and currency exchange kiosks not as a place to retrieve physical belongings (which evidently was not its chief success) but as a means of rehabilitation to the state of losing things.