This Is Where I Am (5 page)

‘Is there train?’

‘Not really. Only to Central, but Kelvingrove is up by the university.’

I noticed how much slower she spoke to me than she did to Simon, the enunciation and roundness of her words. Then she added: ‘There’s the subway.’

‘I do not know this?’ I made my voice into a question. That way, you don’t always have to know the right phrase, but if you frown and lilt, they usually understand your statement needs an answer.

‘Clockwork Orange? The underground? The train that goes under the ground?’

‘Abdi,’ said Simon. ‘You can get a bus. I’ll give you the number of the buses that go there, OK?’

I said thank you. But I knew I’d take the train.

I fold up my contract and put it in the pocket of my backpack. The other letter stares balefully up at me. It’s been in there all week, rustling to itself. I hide it beneath my contract, zip up the pocket tightly. From the big pocket, I take out my milk and packets. As I move through the hallway into the kitchen, I see a shadow at the little bubbled window in my front door. It sees me. The banging starts again, insistent pounding on my flimsy sliced-wood door. If I was allowed, I would build a fine door. Strong planks from a healthy tree, jointed with its own wood, which is best. That way the dowels and pegs swell with the same sap, they naturally graft and fit as the sun and the healing lets them grow into their own snug shape. Maybe here it would be different: the cold would shrivel the wood, the structure would collapse. Maybe here thin sheets of pressed-up fragments and sawdust bound with paste is best.

I wait in the kitchen until the banging stops, and then I go to fetch my daughter.

3. February

Kelvingrove

City of Architecture & Design, European City of Culture, UNESCO City of Music – Glasgow’s artistic credentials are second to none. One of the jewels in the city’s cultural crown is the internationally significant Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum, which sits on the banks of the River Kelvin and houses one of Europe’s greatest civic art collections.

Constructed in the Spanish Baroque following Glasgow’s International Exhibition of 1888, Kelvingrove is Scotland’s most visited attraction, with twenty-two galleries displaying an astonishing 8,000 objects. Collections include a vast natural history display, Egyptian artefacts, arms and armour and many outstanding artworks by the Old Masters, French Impressionists, Scottish Colourists and proponents of the Glasgow School. Some of the museum’s most famed exhibits comprise a full-sized Spitfire aeroplane, the much-loved Sir Roger the Elephant, the famous Kelvingrove Pipe Organ (played daily at 1pm) and – arguably Kelvingrove’s finest treasure – Salvador Dali’s
Christ of Saint John of the Cross.

Entry to Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum is free.

*

Oh. One of those headswims is happening again. The cool wall offers an upright for my spine. What have they done to the museum? I thought it would make me feel better. I lean further into the wall, unpackaging the scene. I haven’t been here in ages. It was my favourite place as a child; a quiet douce cavern in which to marvel at soft-lit colours and soaring beasts. Today, it’s screeching. Chaos slaps me: bright plastic chairs spilling from the Costa outlet on to the central marble floor, weans eating sandwiches, sketching pictures and shouting, and surmounting it all: a flock of dangling heads. Seriously. Laughing and girning from the majestic ceiling (where I’m sure there used to be chandeliers). Massive creamy things, carved in grotesque masks, their mouths grimacing. It’s the swinging and the dancing of them. Their pupil-less eyes are scary. The place feels so . . . busy. Too many people; everything loud and jiggling – they’ve stuck coloured lettering by some of the paintings.
Interpretation areas
. Cartoon bubbles beside cracked oils, the hidden genius of the painting turned inside out. They’ve even reproduced sections of oils and watercolours, with the rejoinder to:
Touch the surface! You can feel the paint!

We shouldn’t have come here. No, they haven’t . . . Oh. Yes. Good. Thank goodness for that. At least the elephant’s still here; I thought for a moment they’d ditched it too. Massive big moth-eaten thing. Sad as well. Sir Roger used to perform in Buffalo Bill’s Victorian circus, until one day the indignities and the small, ridiculous podium on to which he had to climb got all too much. He ran, trumpeting for his life, all the way down Sauchiehall Street. They shot him, of course. If you look closely you can still see the bullet holes, the ones the taxidermist didn’t manage to buff and plump out.

I’d said I’d meet Abdi by the elephant. Only because you can’t really miss it. Oh God I’m nervous. Will he think I’m making fun of him, like saying
I’ll meet you in the jungle
? Do they have elephants in Somalia? I have no idea, no idea at all what I’m doing and I feel so daft. I feel thick and slow and ugly. Standing here, by the elephant, I feel faintly colonial too.

I also feel shocked and mean. If I can expel my anger on to the museum, maybe that’s a good thing. Maybe Kelvingrove will work its distractive magic after all. On the way here, I bumped into my neighbour Naomi, and her girls. A Thursday, she was wearing jeans, yet she still had her work expression on. You know, that clouded furrow of a mind constrained, impatient to be elsewhere. We smiled our hellos and she was almost past me before I said, ‘Day off then is it?’ Like that: burble burble staccato-rush.

‘Oh no,’ she said. ‘Just working from home. And shopping,’ she grimaced, holding up a damply darkened paper bag. Then we did that little two-step, where you’re half-past on your way, but lingering on the actual point of execution. That next step, the decisive one, is poised and raring to go, and yet the close proximity of words and bodies makes it somehow rude to leave. I swayed fractionally and said, ‘No au pair today?’

‘No,’ replied Naomi. And I thought she was going to leave it like that, I honestly did, and how could you recover from an exchange so blunt? I’d have to hurry round a corner when I saw her next.

‘No,’ she repeated, shifting a little closer. Her girls beamed and burbled. Lucy, the elder, held on to the pram while the baby jettisoned a pink rabbit. It landed at my feet, but bending to retrieve it might have broken the spell because Naomi was coming ever nearer and her face had changed. She was there, in the moment, and there was a visible softening of her expression – to me, I think, to her confidante.

‘Gone.’ She lowered her voice. ‘One letter from the Home Office, and she’s off like a bloody shot. No notice, nothing.’

‘The Home Office?’

Naomi withdrew slightly. ‘She
told
me everything was fine. And I mean, you always pay these girls cash in hand, don’t you? They prefer it that way.’

‘Do you mean the tax man? Was it from the tax man?’

‘
No
. Rula told me she was a student, but it was all just a pack of lies. She was an illegal bloody immigrant. Can you imagine? I mean Duncan’s hoping to get called to the Bar soon.’ Naomi held up her hand. ‘I know, I know. I should have checked. But her English was good, she had references.’ She sighed. ‘Anyway, that’s me back to paying agency fees, and there’s a two week wait before I get another.’ A shrug. ‘What can you do? So – we’re playing offices with Mummy today, aren’t we, Lucy?’

Lucy had retrieved her sister’s rabbit, but was refusing to give it back.

‘Don’t do that, darling. Give Flora back her bunny.’

‘
No
. S’mine.’ Lucy ducked from her mother’s reach, her arm glancing off Naomi’s paper bag which ripped immediately, in slow parting waves. A pile of fish slid to the pavement.

‘Oh for fucks –
Lucy!
How many times –’

‘Here, here. I’ve got it.’ I tried to scoop up some of the fish, but it kept slithering away.

‘
Christ
. Jesus fu – Just leave it, will you? Deborah! Please. Just leave it.’

Naomi’s face had bricked-up again. Furious, bright bricks. ‘We’ll just have sandwiches for dinner, won’t we, girls? Mm, Flora? Will we just call Daddy at his work and tell him we’re having
sandwiches
?’

Flora’s cheeks were gathering momentum, quivering wetly, and I knew she was going to scream. So we each mumbled stuff about ‘having to get on’, and off we went, Naomi stepping over the puddle of fish and into her house; me to do my mentoring, my badge that I am a responsible and caring adult. I’d watched a stranger disintegrate and had gone to bed. In the fishscales and dried-up rainbows, I kept seeing Rula’s face. Of course I knew all the time that her name was Rula, but it makes it simpler to pretend you don’t.

There’s Abdi now. Punctual. I can see him coming through the crowd. It’s not hard. There are not that many tall black men in Glasgow, and there are none at all at Kelvingrove. He walks with a sloped elegance. An italic, a dark defined slant through a sea of similarity. All those other faces I can see, in their bobbing and pointing bodies, all of them are comfortably anonymous. If they choose not to stand out or make a fuss, they can. Does Abdi feel conspicuous? Like when you’ve had a new haircut and it’s much too short and you have no hair left behind which you can hide?

He does look worried. And he’s got that rucksack again. Bright red. He had it when we met, a wee lost schoolboy. Long concave face. Quick, brisk licking of his lips, his eyes scanning the displays.

I am the host. I step forward.

‘Abdi,’ I call. ‘Hi.’

He comes towards me, smiling.

‘Hello, Deborah.’

His accent is melodic, not the clipped guttural tones I associate with Africa. It’s nice, how he says my name with the emphasis on the second syllable. I sound exotic in his mouth.

‘Hi,’ I say again. ‘How are you?’

‘I am well.’

‘Good. Good.’

He looks at me expectantly.

‘ Well – do you want to go for a coffee first, or have a wander about?’

‘A wonder?’

‘A wander – to move about, to roam?’

His smile widens. Generous.

‘I know this. Yes. We can wonder. Nice elephant.’ He nods at Sir Roger, and at the baby elephant nestled by his side. I’m not sure where that little one came from, but I begin to launch into the sorry circus tale, gabbling like a hyper-historian, when he interrupts me.

‘No,’ he says.

‘I’m sorry?’

Abdi points to a little plaque in front of the display. Another new development. ‘No. This says that he came from zoo. Look.’

I look. The plaque also says he was put down after he got ill and started attacking zoo staff. So. Sir Roger was the villain of the piece. Well, I like my version better.

‘We have been to zoo in Edinburgh,’ says Abdi. ‘My church thought I would like it.’

‘And did you?’

‘I felt very at home.’

He’s laughing at me. His head dips sideways, and he’s smiling at his feet. Now I’m the conspicuous one, a beacon of flustered red.

We go first to the Scottish Colourists – one, because I want to take him up the marble staircase (and away from the damn elephant) and two, because I think, if the bright oranges and blues of Peploe and Cadell don’t impress him, then nothing will . . . I tail off. Wait for him to follow, but he’s gazing skywards. Grinning.

‘Glorious.’

‘Pardon?’

He frowns. ‘Is that the word? Glorious?’

Following his gaze. Seeing those ugly faces above us. ‘Glorious means, um, wonderful, I suppose. Happy and overpowering and . . . grand? You know, big, important – like the sunshine.’

I’m making sunburst gestures, painting circles with my hands. ‘Do you know that word: grand?’

Abdi laughs. ‘Yes, exactly. Glorious. Those faces. They are so full of . . . joy!’

I look again. Everywhere; at the light brightness of the chequered tiles, the new old shimmers. At the wrinkly grey hide and the giant heids.

‘Well. They’re certainly . . . big.’

I lead him up the staircase, pretending I’m in a crinoline. There’s something
Gone with the Wind
-ish about these sweeping stairs. We get to the top, I turn left. Conscious he’s behind me, that I’m leading. The leaflets the Refugee Council gave me said that visiting places or learning stuff will make it easier to chat. I don’t think Abdi got the same leaflet. He is content to walk in silence, as if we’re in a library. But yes, the Colourists are gorgeous, the Impressionists divine. And I think he likes the Mackintosh stuff – I know I do. One of those wee pewter pitchers would look lovely on my dining table. Just one – I finger the glass case – I mean, would they miss it?

Now we’re in the Caledonian gallery. Lots of majestic braes and glens, a fair spattering of mighty stags, and everything worked in muddy ochre. All that’s missing is the haggis grazing on the hills. Haggi? Abdi’s scrutinising one of the good ones. Guthrie’s famous funeral scene: men in sombre black pressing down on their grief; the setting winter light a smear on the horizon. Tucked in a corner, two stiff chairs stand outside the cottage round which the assembled men are gathered – and it is all men. There’s no room for women at this Highland funeral. One stiff drape of black velvet hides the small coffin that rests between the chairs. But it’s the clench of the father; I don’t think I’ve ever noticed that before, how he holds himself so solid. How you do that at a funeral, when you’re the chief mourner and everyone’s pretending not to look, but they are, they’re attuned to every twitch and shift you make. The tiniest emission of breath is measured for tears.
She’s so brave. She’s very . . . controlled
when all the time you’re thinking, thinking I will never see this person again. I will never touch their face. They are in there, in that box in front of me and I will never hear them speak or hold them close or smell their hair. You’re almost calm with the knowledge. Well, I was. Your body has been bled and you function as part-ghost. And yet, at the same time, you’re giving thanks, your crumpled heart is so full of love that it pales your grief, makes it insignificant. You are saturated with love and you are deeply, deeply lost.