Asylum Road

by Olivia Sudjic

  11

  A child’s glove hung on the railings.

  You’re sure he’s not going to be in? Mira said cautiously behind me as I stopped at the gate before the tiled path to Luke’s front door. Painted the tasteful grey I’d selected before it became so prevalent in that neighbourhood, the typographic number in frosted glass above.

  She was carrying several of those large, tartan-patterned plastic bags. The kind my mother had with the fraying plastic threads.

  She looked at me, eyebrows raised, as if there might be an ambush waiting.

  I doubt he’d do that.

  Well, you know him best.

  I wondered if I could really say that.

  We climbed the steps and I fumbled with the keys, my fingers numb and inflexible, forgetting, for a minute, which way the lock turned.

  On the mat there were notes from numerous parcel delivery companies. We missed you. We missed you. I’d always signed for his deliveries.

  Luke had lined up some of my things in the hall. I walked past them into the living room. It was the sameness of everything that depressed me, as if my absence had left no mark.

  It was only two in the afternoon but the winter sunlight was thin and Mira pressed down all the light switches but somehow that made it darker. Across the street I could see my former neighbour standing at his open window, watching us as if he thought we were intruders.

  I looked at what Luke had left out. Mainly things from the attic and under the bed, in case I forgot them I guessed. There was something so final about this – so deliberate and determined that this was no longer my home to come back to, that I broke down for a moment. Mira squeezed my shoulder and I collected myself, noticing the roll of black bin liners in her other arm.

  You look like you’ve come to rig the place, I said, wiping away tears.

  Did you just make a joke? That’s good. Tell me what you want to take and we’ll get it over with.

  I realised she’d switched out of English. We were back to our private language, which helped somehow in this familiar place I was now estranged from.

  Who owns the plants?

  He does, but I watered them.

  So they come with you now. Same for everything else you took care of.

  A defiant energy coursed through my body as it had the night before on the bus when the passenger ahead had screamed. Now he’d seceded, withdrawing protection, I didn’t have to treat him or anything that belonged to him with reverence. I felt a flicker of temptation to break something. I wanted to do something rebellious, mainly to show him I was capable of doing it. As I took my pictures off the walls, I saw the nails I’d driven into the plaster and the black marks left by the frames. I scanned the rooms, the insides of drawers, picked up items at random. A lip balm bought in Copenhagen – a holiday tacked on to a conference he was speaking at. My noise-cancelling headphones – which I’d selflessly put over his ears to drown out the neighbours’ parties. I put them down or resisted touching them altogether. Each banal object was a noose on the ground, ready to sweep me upside down with it.

  Then I went into the bedroom. I stared at the crease marks like a sandbank in the centre of the bed. I tried to decide whether it looked like more than one body had been sleeping there.

  I think the bed sheets haven’t been changed since I left, I shouted.

  Gross, she yelled back, then came upstairs to join me.

  Changing your sheets alone is a struggle, she said dryly. You’re lucky we’ll be sharing a bed from now on. It made me feel so lonely the first time, and the weight of everything, all the thoughts I’d been holding off, suddenly dropped down all at once. I fell backward onto the bed in fact, with my arms and head inside the cover. Then I cried – the first time in a long, long time. I felt panicked, and sort of thrashed around trying to get out, and then I just surrendered. I must have fallen asleep. I think that’s when the self-narration started, I had to talk myself out of there.

  She asked if she could have a Fanta from the fridge. There were loads.

  I’d never known him to buy Fanta and for a moment I lost my balance.

  Sure, I said.

  She went back to the kitchen.

  I opened his bedside drawer. Looking for something incriminating I suppose, but the only thing I didn’t recognise was a small blue book which I took and brought down slowly toward Mira.

  I just found it in the drawer.

  She took the Bible and turned it over, then opened it. Carefully, as if it might contain drugs.

  I opened it already.

  And this is a new thing? That you know of.

  I nodded dumbly and sat at the table, digging into the base of my skull.

  Well, she shrugged. That might explain some things.

  I imagine it’s his mum’s. They’re both quite into eschatology.

  Do they know you’re on a break?

  I don’t know what they know, they haven’t been in touch.

  It started to rain, a real rainstorm, drumming on the windows and darkening the cardboard boxes we’d already put outside.

  She rolled her eyes and went to shield the boxes. Thunder and lightning in quick succession.

  Whenever Mira stood beside me, I felt as if I might be better off in some essential way from now on. The minute she stepped out, this calm evaporated.

  I wondered where to leave my keys. The kitchen table seemed too much like a message. I put them casually at one end of the sofa, then took them back again. I might still need them, I reasoned.

  After everything had been gathered and stacked by the door, she ordered a six-seater taxi which appeared almost immediately so there was no time for any ritual.

  She sat in the passenger seat and I sat in the only back seat not folded down, surrounded by belongings. As she confirmed the address with the driver, he turned and pulled a face. Asylum not as in lunatic, she explained, but almshouses before the welfare state. He laughed and said where we were going was no good.

  Peckham is only bad people. Bad place, full of bad people. Always fighting each other. Like civil war.

  Where do you live? Mira asked him.

  Enfield. But I’m from Iraq.

  I was not taking part in the conversation and did not want it to continue in this vein, but Mira was suddenly interested.

  Did you move here during the war then?

  He shook his head. After. I was an interpreter, for your country.

  Oh, she smiled, we’re not from here.

  He was silent and I hoped he would not ask the obvious.

  So, Mira persisted when he did not, they gave you asylum then?

  He nodded, staring at the traffic jam ahead. Sometimes I wish they did not.

  Will you go back there at some point?

  He glanced behind him in the mirror.

  No.

  Mira looked steadily at him.

  They killed my family who stayed, he said quietly. It took me two years to get out with my wife and children. There, I am a traitor. I thought the English would have gratitude, but I have no more use to them these days. It’s me who is supposed to be grateful. My children want to go back. We get everything here – school, doctor, so on – but they imagine Iraq as paradise. They live here since they were very small, but miss home more than me. They have a – a very idealised . . . image of the place. My youngest wasn’t even born there but she knows all the old songs. She taught them to herself.

  We settled into uneasy silence as the car slotted into more traffic on the Old Kent Road. It was dark already. My energy had waned and I slumped against the armrest with my forehead on the glass. The glass was frozen and the sensation was unpleasant – like a drill boring into me – but still I kept it there.

  The rain slowed. I took in the neon glare of shop windows, Nigerian churches and floodlit retail parks. Their light and colour in the beads of water on my window. As we turned off at the forecourt of a shuttered Toys R Us, Mira reached round and squeezed my hand.

  I forgot to tell you,
she said as we parked outside. They have a mouse. But it means they don’t have rats. We aren’t allowed to put down any traps or poison they told me. We’re just supposed to let it be. It comes with the territory, kind of like a pet. Maybe another reason why it’s cheap.

  I nodded, thinking about the set-up from the perspective of the mouse. Imagining her alarm if, with our arrival, she found herself unwelcome, having considered herself an established member of the commune.

  Luke had once discovered a mouse making a nest underneath the floorboards. Making a nest, he said, meant she was having babies. It was sad. She was putting herself in danger just by getting on with her life because now she needed to be dealt with.

  The interpreter helped us make several trips back and forth across the road to the pavement below a tall, dark-bricked house. Mira held the iron gate open with one of my bin bags and we carried everything up the steps. The cold, after the warmth of the car, was awful. I waited, stamping my feet while Mira tried to unlock the door, noticing that the ground-floor window had been covered completely with cling film, so that it sparkled in the glow of the street lamp.

  We piled my belongings in the hallway first, to get them out of the wet. I hoped no one would come out to greet us. As if she’d read my mind, Mira said everyone was out for the night.

  They invited us, actually. Some opening. An exhibition. So we have the place to ourselves.

  She could still sense my anxiety. Apart from her, the nurse, and Christopher, I’d hardly spoken with anyone in weeks.

  It’s not like that. Really, nothing too intimate. Each flat’s on a separate floor with its own door. Trust me it’s nothing you can’t handle after the basement.

  The lights in the hall were motion sensitive. When they went out, Mira nudged against the dark to activate them and I followed her up the stairs to the very top.

  Shit, I said. I left the pictures by the gate.

  I ran down again, almost falling where the carpet treads were loose. My new forgetfulness was becoming habit.

  Gone already.

  When I came back up, Mira was unpacking for me. Putting my books beside hers. I wandered past her to the one other room which was the bathroom, the only place in the flat which afforded privacy through a door with a patterned glass window. I went in and shut it.

  It looks dirty but it’s not, she called after me. I tried to clean the shower and nearly fumigated myself. It’s the enamel, not dirt – it actually makes it worse trying to clean it because then more gets stripped away.

  I stood over the basin, waiting for a familiar wave of nausea to pass. When it had I came back to the window which overlooked the garden, now too dark to see anything except what looked like a chicken coup on a patio directly below.

  Hens, Mira said. What were the names of ours again?

  Agata was mine. I can’t remember what yours was called.

  Her father had sold things on the black market to buy them, but it was too cold for them to lay eggs. And, he told us sadly, they were very stressed. Mira and I would try to soothe them, warming them between our thighs, stroking their heads. Singing. I think it calmed us more than them. When the shelling’s over, Mira would tell them, we’ll go to the beach. Lie in the sun, swim. We’ll all relax together.

  I remember carrying one of the rare eggs to my mother with great ceremony, but my hands were smooth and numb with cold and the egg slipped as I tried to turn the door handle. The horror of that moment, as if I’d dropped a whole planet.

  I saw now that Mira had taken Luke’s juicer and an expensive set of Japanese knives. She winked at me as she put them on the kitchen counter then ordered us Vietnamese and two beers.

  What does your ex think about you moving here? I asked her.

  Oh – she waved her hand dismissively. I don’t care what he thinks. He’d say I’m overreacting. He criticises people who move away from the Balkans.

  She checked her phone to see how far off the Deliveroo was.

  Every time we fight it’s like I cut another thread between us. I get more and more detached and so he feels it more and more – how I didn’t, don’t, care. He’s just so angry. Before I left I gave him a stone from my collection – sodalite – to help him unwind. Obviously, it provoked him. He insisted on coming back to my flat. To help me finish packing, he said. He put the stone back and sat on the bed and told me how worried he was about me – mostly the men making threats but also my mental state. Then he was the one threatening me. He’s just insecure that I don’t need him for my protection. When I finally managed to get him to leave, do you know the last thing he said to me? He told me I should get my ears pinned!

  She pulled back her dark hair and bent her, admittedly prominent, ears forward. I smiled, finding it difficult not to feel envious. He was still trying to make her feel something.

  When the bell rang Mira went down to collect the food, but after she shut the door I could hear her talking still.

  Did you say you wanted driving lessons? she said when she returned. What about with the Kurdish guy? It’s his car in the drive. He’s an instructor.

  Can’t afford it sadly.

  I’d told her I’d been using those online tutorials to distract myself and Mira had agreed I needed to have a self-improvement project to see me through this period.

  I don’t think I’m up for it right now anyway – I waved my hand – having to make conversation.

  She laughed. You’re managing.

  I’d hated the real lessons I’d had, long ago, and even the few I’d done with Luke in the quiet roads near his parents’ house. I’d been confronted with the uselessness of my qualifications when it came to learning something practical. My mind would not cooperate.

  Mira had already finished her food and was staring hungrily at my untouched plate. I pushed it toward her.

  He’s quite handsome actually, the Kurd. Seems quite straightforward too. I need a simple man I think, but I know they find me difficult. And if they don’t they’re already married and looking for something very complicated. I met one of those at that party the other night. Actually, that was a funny story. There was no bin in their fancy bathroom, which I only noticed after I’d taken out my tampon. I thought, OK you deserve to have your toilet blocked. I was angry because the guy who’d invited me – I matched with him on the Heathrow Express – turned out to be married after all. Then I saw all these toilet books in the guest bathroom. It’s the only rule I want to impose while we’re here. No reading in the toilet. Anyway I wrapped the tampon and went to bin it, but one of the catering staff saw me with a wad of tissue in my hand and told me to hand it over like it was a spat-out canapé. I ran. Oh, let me show you something.

  She got up and went to a chest of drawers then came back with a Cuban cigar box with drawings and stickers decorating it.

  Open it, she instructed.

  Drago’s shrapnel collection. I quickly put it down and shook my head, blinking.

  Waking, I got the lurching feeling in my stomach of being in the wrong place. Mira, I remembered, not Luke, was in the next room taking a shower. The windowpanes were covered in condensation. The misty skyline beyond that, back to front, now seen from south of the river.

  She reappeared in a yellow silk kimono.

  Have a meeting. Soho, she announced, an electric toothbrush in her mouth.

  Applying her make-up at the table she told me about the other inhabitants of the asylum. I had imagined them all to be of a type but she said they were an incongruous group, like those motley crews of dogs led along by professional walkers, all yoked together in a faintly comedic way.

  There was the Kurd driving instructor who was also a classical violinist. He tried to practise in the day, he’d said, which made her worry he mainly did it at night. The very tall girl with pale pink hair was, she suspected, his girlfriend. She was studying at Goldsmiths. She was not Kurdish – her family were from Wales – but she talked non-stop about the YPJ.

  I looked blank.

  Don�
�t worry, she’ll tell you about it. That’ll be her boyfriend now.

  She gestured below to the sound of a violin.

  We listened, and suddenly I remembered what I’d overheard in Cornwall, the open window that led me here.

  But I was spared that train of thought as Mira shrieked and pointed down beside her chair. I looked down to see a mouse. I bent closer. Even though I was so close I could have touched it, the mouse seemed unconcerned.

  That’s not normal, Mira said. Why isn’t it running away? Aren’t they nocturnal?

  I shrugged.

  There’s a parasite, I said, remembering something Luke had told me. It removes their fear of cats. Instead of running away from the smell of predators, infected ones are actually attracted to it.

  We watched as the mouse began to move, stop-starting toward the door. Mira looked up mice that lose their fear of cats, read a while, and nodded.

  Toxoplasma can sexually reproduce only in the cat gut, and for it to get there, the pathogen’s rodent host must be eaten.

  It affects humans too – are you serious?

  I watched the mouse come back again, then disappear behind a skirting board.

  Mira continued in a voice of mock-cheerfulness:

  In humans, studies have linked Toxoplasma infection with behavioural changes, risk-taking and schizophrenia. One study found an increased risk of traffic accidents in people infected with the parasite, another found changes in responses to cat odour.

  She rolled her eyes. That’s why we aren’t allowed to kill it. It trusts that we’re not going to.

  After she left, I dressed in random items pulled from bags, found my trainers and ran downstairs. I didn’t want to meet anyone.

  The temperature had dropped again. First, I ran the length of the road back the way we’d driven the previous evening, turning around at a church inside a commercial property called THE MOUNTAIN OF PERFECTION. I peered through the iron railings outside the almshouses. In the middle there was a chapel, surrounded by a lawn and low buildings. One side of the entrance I could see had been left open.