by Kate Simants
And as if the charge in the room had just been spent, Bear stopped struggling. She took a deep breath, and she looked him right in the eye, and she said, ‘O ore sool.’
‘OK, baby,’ Nadia said, ‘I hear you. We’ll talk it out, OK?’
But his little girl’s eyes were still locked on his. ‘O. Ore. Sool.’
He looked to Nadia for help, and without a single degree of pride in her ability to translate for him, she met his gaze. ‘She’s saying, no more school.’
The tears in the corners of his daughter’s eyes broke and tracked towards the pillow, pooling in her ears.
He sighed, and nodded, and a tiny crack opened at the side of his heart.
‘OK,’ he said.
Nadia blinked. ‘OK? You mean—?’
‘I mean, OK.’
Fact of it was, if she had a better chance of happiness somewhere else, only a complete arsehole would stand in their way.
‘Just don’t let her forget me completely, all right?’
And Bear understood. She squeezed his hand, closed her eyes, and after a few minutes her breathing had slowed into a rhythmic sleep.
As he stood, his pocket caught on the arm of the chair, and he thought of something. He reached inside, and brought out his mother’s watch. He weighed it in his hands, then slipped it into Bear’s half-open palm.
Nadia came round the bed, and hugged him.
‘You deserved better,’ she said into his neck. She didn’t need to tell him she meant his mother. They’d spoken only the once about what had happened when he was young, about her decision to pack up and leave. The months and months of searching for her until she finally sent them that message telling them to stop, that she should never have had children. That she wasn’t coming back. Nadia had been the only person he ever told about it, the only person he would ever tell.
As they disengaged, something Kit had said came back to him. About dealing with things. Shit happens, and you move the fuck on.
Nadia squeezed his shoulder and went out to join Mike in the corridor, and the two of them huddled there for a time, talking in whispers.
For a little while longer, Mae stayed where he was, thinking about the practicalities of it. It wasn’t like they were talking about emigrating to Mars. It wasn’t like she was lost forever.
He guessed there was always Skype.
When he left Bear with Nadia an hour later, he almost walked straight past Kit. Hours had passed since she’d dropped him off: it hadn’t even occurred to him that she might still be there. But she was. Seeing him, she was on her feet in half a second, and then her arms were around him, tight.
Disengaging, she gave him a slap on the back. ‘You did the right thing.’
It took him a moment to piece it together. ‘Oh, so you’ve met my ex-wife, then.’
She grabbed his elbow and led him down the hall.
‘You’ve got news?’ he asked as they walked, glad of the distraction. ‘Finish the interview with Cox?’
‘Yeah, but look. The data dude who did the file recovery—’
‘Guild of Thieves?’
She laughed. ‘That’s him. His name’s Guy. Anyway, he went through all the images and categorized them. So we had the fifty-five images that must have come from Cox. But then he found two other things that are really interesting. Firstly, all of those other images were downloaded to the laptop in one sitting, about a week before Matt lost his job.’
Mae waited. ‘And?’
‘Come on. Matthew Corsham had the laptop for months, and there’s no images like this at all on it. Then all of a sudden he gets a boner for naked little kids, and someone at work happens to see this stuff on his screen like two days later?’ She drew in her chin, incredulous. ‘Doesn’t add up.’
Mae filled his lungs all the way down, and blew the air out in a thin stream. ‘I don’t know, Kit. Occam’s razor, you know?’
‘Yeah, sure, simplest explanation is that it’s his machine, so it’s his material. But at the same time … And Cox said Matthew thought he was being set up. So, what if he was?’
‘It’s a theory,’ he conceded. ‘But we’d need a lot more than that. What’s the other thing?’
‘Ah!’ she said, clearly trying to contain her excitement. ‘The other thing is this.’ She swung the bag she was carrying off her back and unzipped it, handing Mae a folder. Inside were printouts, a couple of scanned images. ‘You remember that photography group he joined?’
‘The social group thing?’ Mae had given up trying on it.
Kit nodded. ‘I hassled the guy who ran it and he eventually called me back. He didn’t have much to say about Matt socially exactly, but he did say they’d bonded a bit about the same kind of niche, they’re both into analogue photography. But the interesting this is that Matt called him up a couple of weeks ago about a particular photo. He says Matt was agitated, wanted to meet up straight away. So they arrange to meet, right, and Matt’s got this whole load of technical stuff, notes and everything printed out about a photographic format, this baby photo of Ellie’s.’
‘Go on.’
‘The photo he’s talking about – there’s a scan of it, here – it’s supposed to be Ellie, right? As a newborn. So we’re talking 1992.’
‘With you so far.’
‘The format is a Kodak Instant. The old-fashioned ones that come straight out of the camera.’
‘As in, shake it like a Polaroid—’
‘Picture, exactly. But Kodak stopped production of that film at the end of the eighties, they lost a legal battle with Polaroid. But the stuff doesn’t keep. If it’s not used within a year, less, it basically goes off.’
‘Meaning what, though?’
‘Meaning that, for that film to have developed properly, for that picture to exist, it had to have been taken, like, a year before she was born? Two?’
‘So it’s not Ellie?’ Mae crunched his face up, trying to twist out the implication of what Kit was telling him. ‘A sibling, or something?’
‘No. It’s her. You can see from the eyes. Different colours, one green, one blue. And her face: it has to be her.’
Mae gave a slow nod, and without making it happen consciously, he felt his shoulders fall by an inch. There was a moment, in every investigation, where the fog gets almost so thick that you have to start striking out blindly. Peak Bafflement, he’d heard someone call it, or Total White-Out. It had many names. But the thing was this: that after that point, if you were lucky, all it took was one thing.
One little movement, like a key in a music box, to make the whole thing sing.
70.
Ellie
I held on to the edge of the torn back seat, my body tight with adrenaline. Sarajevo was hours behind us, and we’d stopped only once for petrol and food. Rana’s daughter Emina met me from the airport, and insisted we get in the car straight away, her mother was desperate for our return. Her English was clear but limited, so there was no chance of an explanation from her: of why Rana had seemed almost to have expected my call, to know who I was.
Emina shared with me the pastry she had stowed from her hastily curtailed breakfast meeting, but apart from that, she just drove. She kept checking on me, her wide, immaculately outlined eyes flicking up to the rear-view mirror whenever we swerved a pothole or rounded a corner. She drove fast, locking her arms intermittently to brace for another pothole under the wheels.
There were fruit trees, something Mediterranean about the landscape, but not like Italy, not like Spain. We passed a village, quaint and pretty at first with whitewashed, tiled houses on the outskirts giving way as we progressed to the hurried, brutal Soviet style of construction. A greying block of flats sat empty in the middle of the village, car-sized slabs of concrete missing from their exterior walls, their buckling steel veins exposed along one side. I knew almost nothing about the war here, but it showed me its face anyway, scarred and unblinking, in every derelict building and pockmarked road. Outside a skeletal petrol station, a We
stern couple sat on their backpacks, thumbing their guidebook and waiting fidgetingly for the bus out.
I rolled down the window and held my hand out in the air, rubbed the fine red dust between my fingers, tasted it. I wasn’t afraid. I was hundreds of miles from the people I knew, hours from anywhere familiar. But this – this felt like coming home.
‘You are smiling,’ Emina said, and I pulled my gaze from the landscape.
‘I suppose so.’
Outside a village, she turned hard onto a track between two cracked, cropless fields. I gripped the handle above the window and pressed my feet down into the footwell, lifting myself slightly from the seat for stability.
‘Over there. See?’ she asked, pointing out of the window. I squinted across the half-mile of scrubland, and I saw it.
‘My god.’
It was of a long, low construction, two storeys at the far end reducing to one. A stable to the east of it, roofless. The whole place, somehow, caught in its own shadows. Three wide trees, which I knew were almonds even though the fruits and the leaves were all long gone.
The building from Siggy’s dreams.
And then we had stopped, and the door was swung open, and I was helped out, a woman, her grey hair cut in a sharp bob, her green-framed glasses hanging from a beaded cord around her neck.
Miss Filipovic. Rana. She held my shoulder for a moment, shaking her head almost imperceptibly. Somehow, I knew instinctively that she was not a woman who cried easily or often, but her cheeks were wet now, her lips pressed tight in a sad, heartfelt smile.
And then her arms were around me. Her hand pressed against the back of my head; she stroked my hair as if I was an injured child.
‘You’ve come back,’ she said.
*
There was tea then, served in smoked glass mugs with thin milk. Inside the office, we sat for a moment on white plastic garden chairs. Rana, her daughter, and an elderly man spoke to me and each other in a tumble, continually slipping in and out of Bosnian. I didn’t know these people, they didn’t know me. But in that shabby room, with the paint peeling and the rattle of the wobbling ceiling fan merging with the purr of a single computer so ancient its glass screen was rounded at the corners, there was such warm, naked stability, such comfort. Their love knitted around me as if I was one of their own. For her part, Siggy was silent. She was there, but she was calm. As if we were friends. Even with the confusion and newness, I’d never known such peace.
Then we were on our feet, none of us able to sit. ‘Come,’ Rana said, taking my arm again.
She led me out into the cool hallway and into the big room at the back of the building. High windows, a huge, bright mural painted by children on the far wall. She saw me looking, and stood next to me, nodding slowly, then she led me through a glass door. We went outside, round the back of the wall I’d been admiring. We stopped a few feet from it. Ivy from the ground clung to the crumbling plaster, but had been cleared from a wide patch in the centre of the wall. Along the centre of that cleared area, a line of holes. Head height.
Rana took a step forward and bent her head. She muttered something I took to be a prayer before pressing her fingers to one of the indentations.
‘Before we used this place for refugees, they used it as a prison. This was where the men were brought,’ she said, stepping away, her arms folded, surveying it as one might a field of crosses. I followed the line across and noticed two, three, more holes lower than the rest. I stretched out a hand to touch one, a tight ball of sadness in my throat. A careful brush had layered paint in there, smoothing the ragged damage. I drew my hand away slowly, and dropped it.
Rana stood still. ‘Boys of twelve, thirteen,’ she said.
All the while Siggy watched, saying nothing.
We continued the tour in silence. Back inside, she took me up the stairs through a door. As I went inside, I gasped.
What I saw in front of me – and the connection I had with that small, bare-walled room – it wasn’t possible. It made no sense. Because Siggy was just my alter. She was a part of my identity that I had somehow and for some reason splintered from myself: but she wasn’t separate from me. Yet here was her room. This was somewhere she knew, somewhere that was nothing to do with me. This was Siggy’s place, somewhere she had retreated to, where she had slept. I went straight to the corner, touched the place where her head would have been.
Rana was crouching, fiddling with a small, plasticky hi-fi. Suddenly the room was filled with music, something poppy and disposable from the nineties, too loud then turned down. She turned to me, her head on one side.
‘We used to have music in here. You remember?’
I nodded, although I hardly knew what I was saying. ‘The other children. Some of them had brought tapes from home.’
‘Yes.’ She smiled sadly. ‘We tried to find ways for you to be happy. We had dancing up here sometimes, when people were getting too gloomy.’ A sigh. ‘But not you, poor girl.’
‘Rana,’ I said, almost in a whisper, ‘I’m sorry, I don’t understand what’s happened but, I’ve never been here. I’m not – I think you’ve made a mistake.’
‘What do you mean?’
I opened my mouth to speak, but I found I did not have the vocabulary, didn’t even know where to start. Rana dropped her head to one side and reached out a hand, her thumb brushing at my cheek, at a tear. She smiled, and in that gesture, the gentleness of it, something folded in her and she was familiar, softer, younger, all of a sudden.
And I remembered her, this woman. I knew her.
Her hair had been a beautiful auburn brown the colour of foxes and she had smelled always like hibiscus and ashes. I knew the softness of her body as she rocked me, rocked Siggy, when she woke up screaming for her mother, for her little brother whose name was Huso, and finding only strangers in a dead place where she found she couldn’t talk. I leaned against the wall and slowed my breath.
But I knew her. Not Siggy. Me.
An awful sadness had formed on Rana’s face. She turned away, went back to the radio and bent to retrieve a box. Full of cassette tapes, mostly boxless, a few CDs. She rummaged in it until she found what she was looking for. Then she got up, smiled, and put it on. David Bowie. A song about a lonely messenger watching humanity from space.
The chorus started. I’d heard it so many times before but as I looked around where I was, blinking and disorientated, something gave way. And suddenly, I was hearing that music as if it was coming from inside me. I knew that song from here – from inside this room.
‘Do you remember?’
I was on the floor now, without having consciously sat down, my legs gone from under me. Everything swimming, my chest sparkling as if my heart couldn’t be held. And Rana was there, next to me, looking into my eyes. Touching her finger just beneath my right eye.
Sometimes I think about that little wedge of time between not knowing and knowing, and what teetered on the fulcrum of it.
‘Ziggy Stardust,’ she said. ‘Your eyes, two different colours, you see? Like the singer. David Bowie.’
Ziggy. Not Siggy. Because of her eyes.
Rana stayed crouched beside me and spread her hand out across my back.
‘I was there too, do you remember? I saw what happened to the little boy. Your little brother.’
‘I don’t have a brother.’
‘Not now. But you did.’
‘I didn’t,’ I said, starting to panic. I tried to get to my feet, needing to get out of there, but my knees wouldn’t take my weight. ‘I’ve got to go. I have to go home. This isn’t real.’ But Rana held me firm.
‘Listen to me,’ she said. ‘When we first came, you wouldn’t talk. You had injuries from a fire: there had been a shelling in another part of the town, and you had hidden in a house that was on fire. There were militia soldiers. I suppose you thought it was safer to risk the fire, maybe. Later, they cleared the town and I saw what happened to the boy, your brother. We didn’t know each other then but
I saw it all, and I saw you. It was … it was the worst thing I have ever seen. A soldier took him from your mother. He had been crying and—’
She broke off, pulling her hands down her face. Then she tried again, her voice stony. ‘It will never leave me, not as long as I live. Your brother, he was crying, and the soldier killed him just like that in front of everybody. And then when we got here, it was too late by then to work out who you were. You’d got separated from your mother, somehow. It happened all the time. You have to understand, people were arriving here in the middle of the night, on foot, in awful conditions, barely alive. Many, many people came here, their first place of refuge after crossing the border. Some stayed, some passed through. Chaos.’ She held onto my shoulders. ‘By the time we found your papers, someone had given you the name, and although you stayed silent you were at least responding to Ziggy. So it stuck.’
I tried to speak but I had to swallow first to get anything out. ‘I think something’s got confused,’ I said, and I started to shake, everywhere. My mind convulsing, unable to link what I had always believed with what was forming in my head. It was an earthquake. An inexorable, impossible rearrangement of who I was.
I forced myself to get to my feet. Went to the window. I laid my hand on the cool glass and let my eyes drift across the courtyard beyond it, out to where Emina was filling the water in her car from a plastic bottle. Out to the scrubby field beyond. There was a horse. A little girl talking to it, reaching up with both hands to pull its muzzle close.
It was as if a page had been turned. Like the skin I had been wearing every day of my life was stripped off in one piece, revealing what was left, shivering and newborn and dropped into existence from the far black reaches of the other side of the universe. Everything Siggy had showed me, all the nightmares, all the terror and pain and desolation, the awful, obliterating violence: they weren’t visions. I hadn’t made them up. They weren’t the creations of a disordered mind.
They were memories. My memories, of my own family.
All of it, all of Siggy, was me.