Asylum Road

by Olivia Sudjic

  At a certain point I noticed it was dark again.

  My first thought when Luke calls is that he’s heard about Eddie. Then maybe that he has heard about my mother. It occurs to me I wasted my time translating for him when I could have been paying attention to the last words she was saying to me.

  He asks questions about what I’ve been up to. He’s nervous. He hates speaking on the phone. I prowl around the room to leach the adrenaline from my limbs, to settle. I feel canny and sharp-clawed. I use a formal, cold tone. I control the silences, letting them go on as long as he does. I put down slow, deliberate pauses. Brief answers between his questions.

  Anyway, he says at last, the main reason I’m calling – I feel myself speed up again, slow slow – they found your book and stuff. I gave them your number when they called mine, but they said you never answered.

  I’m silent for a long time.

  The baggage people, he prompts. The company I found online.

  Still I say nothing. I have stolen his silence.

  Well, I thought you’d be pleased. When they called me again I just paid the fee and confirmed my address, so I’ve got it. The package arrived yesterday.

  I move toward the sink, wanting background noise so it will sound as if I’m busy. I boil the kettle while he continues talking, unceasing now, about logistics – ways he could now get the package to me if I tell him where I am. My hands tremble slightly. Once the kettle has boiled I pour the water away down the drain, producing a cloud of steam.

  A tiny screech and smudge of brown in the corner of my vision alerts me to my victim. The mouse has somehow found its way into the sink and is now making small cries. It seems to have lost a foot thanks to the action of my kettle, dragging itself in frenzied circles.

  You need to put it out of its misery, he says when I tell him. Show no mercy. Do you have a hammer or anything? Something very heavy?

  I go out into the garden to fetch a brick from by the chicken coop and Luke talks me through what I need to do. I say I’m worried I’ll damage the sink and he says I will have to take the risk or it’s inhumane. An amputated mouse will not survive in the wild. I don’t tell him that she lived with us.

  We are poised to do it, me trying to control the tremor in my hand, Luke coaxing me, but when I bring the brick down, his gentle encouragement in my ear, I feel faint. His tenderness makes me hesitate at the last moment, so that instead of dashing the mouse’s brains out before it can feel more pain, I torture her with a slow, medieval death, slowly pressing into the softness of her body until there’s a snap and then a crunch, like a plastic cup under a wheel.

  I have tried to go back and explain who I was in those last moments, and what I return to is the mouse, the brick and that sound.

  I try to explain that I felt my own power, godlike, and as I did, the way I saw things changed. I look at the head of a small dog now, and know that I could crush it. My chest felt cold but no longer tight as if something had unzipped it.

  I gave Luke my new address and said that he could either post it or, if getting to the post office was too much trouble, drive it round to me that night.

  Stay there, he said, as I knew he would, I’ll come to you. Forty minutes. Forty-five.

  Darkness presses in at the windows. Mira’s still not back. I take my washbag to the bathroom and place it on the swirling linoleum before taking out a razor and tweezers. I stand before the mirror, serene and just visibly pregnant. I think of internal rupturing. The idea makes me giddy. I run the hot tap and hold the razor to my arm. Pause. If I start at my knuckles, why not drag the blade over every inch of me? I replace the razor and put my hand against my swollen stomach.

  I notice a hangnail and as I pull, skin comes with it. At the sight of the pinkness, my mouth begins to water. I must be craving iron. The finger pulses and yes – I am craving meat.

  Mira has a whole chorizo in the fridge. I take it, crouching on my haunches.

  I can see the man at his window again, watching me eat, stark naked. I slide the mouse into the bin, still warm like a discarded teabag.

  There is the swaying noise of a car alarm outside. Either it has just started or I have only just noticed it. Louder then quieter in waves but never ceasing. I try to decide whether it is really outside my head or only inside. It sounds almost like cicadas.

  I start rifling for the box I know has souvenirs. All the mementos I kept from the early days. Venetian saints. I find the programme for the Olympics opening ceremony, Isles of Wonder, the intro by Danny Boyle.

  I lie in wait with the brick beside the bed, imagining the scene, the road locked down, trembling cordons and blue lights glimmering. I take a picture, turning my phone’s camera, staring directly into the eye of its black lens.

  When Luke arrives at the front door I wait to buzz him in, then lope a few more times around the room to let off steam. I visualise smoothing fresh tarmac over everything, filling every crack, every flaw I have been picking at obsessively for years. The way is clear and new again.

  I smell him in the hall before I see him.

  The nowness of him in fisheye, the specificity, caught in my throat. This time I did not see a stranger. I saw exactly who he was. When he entered everything about him seemed enlarged. Certain. He gleamed and bulged. His pores, the shine of his teeth, the flakes inside his ears all magnified. He told me that I looked different though, his eyes sliding over my new frame as if afraid.

  He is careful not to come too near. I’m a floating terror to him now. Shyly, he puts down the package and picks up the brick, inspects it with a frown, then wraps it in kitchen roll. Then, as if we haven’t just spoken on the phone, he repeats most of what he’s already said to me. I tell him I’ve started running. I’ve been learning how to drive.

  It is inspired, what happens next.

  Do you want to see me driving?

  He is eyeing the bed in the centre of the room. When’s Mira coming back?

  Too soon. Let’s go for a drive.

  Anya wouldn’t use that tone. He looks at me but I am deadly serious.

  Aren’t you going to open it? He nudges the package toward me.

  I shake my head as if there’s something I need more urgently and he takes my hand, kneading my fingers.

  I guess you can drive me down your road, I’d like that. Then would you come back with me?

  As the car slides forward, I feel everything go quiet. The past disappears and so does the future. I have only the present tense. My ears grow alert, my sense of smell so keen I can hold and separate every element inside the car. The leather seats, his sweat, his hair. The silence was like music. I keep my eyes on the road, moving very slowly in the direction of the station.

  The car is automatic. Driving is easier than I expected.

  I’ve had dreams in which I was put in charge of a car without knowing how to drive it, and those were horrifying and exhausting, but this! It feels like when I first broke into a run. I’ll have to rethink what I’m capable of. What other things might come naturally to me.

  I turn to him then again and, as when he’d come through the doorway, it is as if I am seeing him for the first time clearly, except that it feels final now, and when I turn back to the road what I see feels as good as an end. The road stretches on and on. The buildings either side a blur like the edge of a black hole. No place to turn. Level and straight and stretching resolutely nowhere. I put my hand behind my passenger’s head, warm, feeling the weight of his skull. I should have liked to have kept it.

  I press my foot down on the accelerator. I do not see the curb. For a long time it is as if we have lifted off the road and are flying. My passenger, now my captive, holds on to the door. Shouting. Let me out, he repeats, let me out! As if I’ve lost control instead of taken it. Stop the car. Anya, fucking hell! Please, I beg you, stop. The longer I stay silent and the car careers on, the more it seems I can do this, just as he said. Faintly I hear him now. I press my foot down harder.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS />
  This book is dedicated to my grandparents and dispersed Balkan family past and present – from Montenegro to Mexico, Serbia to Scotland, Arizona to Acton. I made a tentative start on AR at the end of 2015, so it exists thanks to many people, conversations and acts of kindness over five years in which the world has changed significantly. It is a work of fiction, but one which draws on a sensitive history and painful reality for many. I’m indebted to the people I met in Bosnia, particularly Jasminko Halilovic´ and the work of the War Childhood Museum. I’m also grateful for conversations with Vesna Petkovic´, Ana Baric, Tamara Platiša, Svetlana Rakocˇevic´, Vesna Goldsworthy, Ana Russell-Omaljev, Maria Ratkovic´ Vidakovic´ and Vladimir Unkovski-Korica, as well as the audiences at the Southeast European Future Festival and Serbian Literary Festival in London. I count my lucky stars for Emma Paterson and Angelique Tran Van Sang – thank you both for your transformative help. Thank you also to Saba Ahmed for her invaluable copyedit, Greg Heinimann for the cover, Lauren Whybrow for prising it out of my hands, and everyone at Bloomsbury and Aitken Alexander. In Brussels, thanks to Piet Joostens and Passa Porta who gave me the time, space and stipend to begin writing in earnest. Thanks to Thea Seger who read the first pages and alleviated second novel syndrome enough to keep going. Thanks to the supportive community of writers, readers and booksellers I’ve met online, I won’t list you but I’m glad Sympathy did not deter you from making contact with an author via Instagram. Thank you to my friends and apologies for any fictionalised anecdotes you may find, also to my cousin who has the kilt/spliff tattoo. Thank you to my parents, uncle Branislav, and ONS, again.

  A NOTE ON THE AUTHOR

  The text of this book is set in Perpetua. This typeface is an adaptation of a style of letter that had been popularised for monumental work in stone by Eric Gill. Large scale drawings by Gill were given to Charles Malin, a Parisian punch-cutter, and his hand-cut punches were the basis for the font issued by Monotype. First used in a private translation called ‘The Passion of Perpetua and Felicity’, the italic was originally called Felicity.

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  First published in Great Britain 2021

  This electronic edition published in 2021 by Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

  Copyright © Olivia Sudjic, 2021

  Olivia Sudjic has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers

  ‘Between the fear that something …’ from Signs by the Roadside © Ivo Andrić (Sezam, 2015)

  ‘A specter is haunting …’ from Imagining the Balkans © Maria Todorova (Oxford University Press, 1997)

  ‘What one wonders about …’ and ‘nothing ever, perhaps, quite safe …’ from Pleasures and Landscapes © Sybille Bedford (Daunt Books, 2014)

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

  ISBN: HB: 978-1-5266-1738-5; TPB: 978-1-5266-1739-2; EBOOK: 978-1-5266-1741-5

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