This Is Where I Am (7 page)

‘This means Rebecca cannot go to school?’

‘No, no, they’re not saying that at all. What they’re asking is . . . they want you to see a kind of doctor. Has Rebecca not been –’

‘I have seen doctor. He says Rebecca is well.’

‘Yes, but this is another doctor, one who’ll talk a bit more to Rebecca herself, find out if something’s . . . och, I don’t know – upsetting her maybe?’

When I was a teacher, this bit was always hard. Suggesting to a parent that their child might need ‘a wee bit help’. I’m wondering what it is: trauma? Problems with concentration, displaying inappropriate behaviours –

‘Rebecca does not talk.’

Abdi’s hand is shaking as he drains his unpleasant drink. A quietly horrible thing to see. I try to look away from his shaking skin. It’s too intimate when our public bodies display our private truths. Callum’s hands would shake terribly. The greater his paralysis became, the more his hands would tremble. His hand and his fingers, laced stubbornly through the handle of his cup, and the brown liquid spilling. How flat and round the brownness of it was as it skittered down the edges of his cup and I suddenly remember: here, it was here in Kelvingrove, sitting by the old tearoom up the stairs and this is why the place upsets me.

It’s not Rula, and it’s not the stupid heads at all.

It’s me, insisting that of course there’ll be a lift, and how it would do him good to get out, now we have the new Zafira and the folding chair – of course no one’s looking, don’t be stupid. Saying it more crossly than I meant. Terrified of the power and weight and length of the car, and then there not being a lift, not then, not a proper one. Just a goods hoist, and they’re very kind, the curator folk. They sling us in – Callum’s chair and his knees pressed against the lattice grille, the curator talking to me, always me, above Callum’s head, the awkward sliding of us out. The limitations of where we can trundle to, and what time do we want the hoist back down, because you have to be accompanied, you know. So we decide on tea. Tea and a scone in the old-fashioned salon that used to be in the museum, up on the first floor. But there are three small steps. Three shitty steps, don’t you know, little ones that you would never normally notice, pointless, decorative absurd humps of stone that bar our passage and make us sit out in the corridor beside some marble statuary. I insist,
insist
that we’re having tea, and I leave him there, parked nose-up to a statue (lest he pose a fire-risk), to queue for tea and scones.

I fumble with tea and plates and change, then scurry back to my husband, my beautiful fine husband encased in his shell. His neck is locked, his eyes fixed on the marble forms before him: a bereft father and his motherless child. I arrive just in time to see the tears run freely down Callum’s perfect cheek. And him, unable to wipe them dry. It’s me, me who spills the flat brown tea. I’m doing it now, in fact.

Funny, how I’d forgotten that.

‘Honestly, don’t worry,’ I’m saying to Abdi, who’s staring at me. ‘It’ll be fine. Trust me – I used to be a teacher. I know . . . I have a friend who works in special needs –’

‘You are teacher!’ Spontaneously, he reaches for my hand, claps the back of it, once, and then retreats. That glow is back about him. ‘
I
am teacher,’ he beams. ‘I may teach Rebecca. Can I do that here?’

I was sure Abdi was a fisherman. I’m positive Simon told me that.

‘I think school would be good for her, Abdi. She’d make friends there.’

‘I think this too. But if they will not take her –’

‘No, they will. We’ll get it sorted. Have you had other letters from Education? From the school? Has school written to you before?’

‘
Yes.
And I know is in February I must go, I wrote it down, and I am to go to school next week, but then this letter comes.’

I read it again. You’d think the
Education
department would write coherent letters.

‘All they want to do is check that she’ll manage. She doesn’t speak – at all? Doesn’t speak English or doesn’t speak Somali?’

He shrugs. ‘It is . . . I can speak for her.’

‘But she can hear OK? She hears you speak?’

‘Oh yes. She hear everything. We learn English together, she is clever, clever girl.’

‘OK, well, what you need to do is contact this educational psychologist – see the number here? You phone them, they’ll tell you when you and Rebecca should go and see them, and they’ll make sure she gets to the right school.’

‘I can go with her?’

‘Of course you can.’

He visibly relaxes. ‘I thought they would take her . . . she . . .’

I can tell he’s struggling with choosing the right words.

‘She doesn’t like to be away from you? Well, of course not. She’s in a strange country, away from home.’

‘Yes. No. With some people. If she knows them . . . I . . .’ He shakes his head, and I see tears there, poised on the point of becoming real, and we both pretend not to notice.

‘She is good, clever girl.’ He offers it up like a plea.

‘Och, we’re both teachers, Abdi. You know how clingy wee ones can be –’

‘She was always good friendly. Very happy girl and I cannot . . .’ Staring into my head. Not my eyes, but drilling into my mind, grasping through like I’m driftwood for him to seize. I have no idea what this little family has been through. All I can do is sit there, with the sugary taste of icing on my tongue. Too intense, I can’t bear it, but, just as I’m about to turn away, he breaks his stare.

‘I cannot help her,’ he finishes softly.

‘Would you like me to phone the psychologist for you?’

Is that a leading question?

His shoulders slump, and he fingers the top of his rucksack. ‘I would like that. Yes.’

‘OK, then. I will.’

The high planes of his cheeks slacken. I recognise a fellow teeth-gritter. Then he finishes off his bun.

4.

‘Your fish is ready!’

Rebecca gallops in from her room. There’s a smudge of black on her cheek, a dash of green on her knuckles. Felt-tipped pens; a present from Mrs Coutts. I resolve to find a higher shelf to keep them on.

‘Mucky pup!’ I wipe my daughter with the dishcloth.

She giggles.

‘Mucky pup!’ I repeat, and she purses her lips up like she might make an ‘M’.

Her Sunday School teacher told her she was a ‘mucky pup’ after craft-time, when she had glue on her hair and chin. I looked up ‘pup’ in my dictionary afterwards – it means young dog. She called my little girl an animal! But I’ve learned, so many times now, that what you have to study most is the inflection. It’s how the words are given, not what they are, that forms their full meaning, and Miss Blake-call-me-Sophie is always gentle. You can tell from how Rebecca runs to her and takes her hand. Miss Blake speaks frequently through laughter, and always with warmth. A ‘pup’ is just a baby, and it’s striking how amusing people in Yookie find animals to be. You see that on the cards they send one another on their birthdates. You see calendars brimming with fat little kittens, and framed pictures of dogs in strange hats. Yet I also see boys throw stones at shivering curs. I still see dead meat hang on hooks and bleed on slabs.

Still, I decide that to be a ‘mucky pup’ is a nice thing. It makes my baby laugh. And I thought if we spoke sometimes in English . . . it is a different language. If it is a different place . . . If she thinks the past is made anew . . .

‘Here are your fishes, my little mucky pup.’ I slide the crisp orange slabs on to her plate. They’re labelled on the packet as ‘fingers’ but I cannot call them that. ‘And your nice green peas.’ She looks suspiciously at the garish green. ‘They’re yummy. Look, Aabo’s going to have one.’

She picks up the buttons that make the television work. Mrs Coutts calls these buttons a doofer, but then, Mrs Coutts often speaks a language of her own. I doubt doofer is the correct name. It’s another word that makes Rebecca laugh. I grab it from her. ‘You can have doofer when you eat your peas.’ She scowls, I shrug. She eats.

Deborah will telephone the child-doctor for me. It is like stones being taken from my chest. I have heard the expression ‘breathe easier’ before – Mrs Girdwood said it after church, when we were sipping tea and she was talking to another lady about a robber who pretended to be from the council, and was tricking his way into people’s homes. The lady had told Mrs Girdwood the police had a description, and Mrs Girdwood had said: ‘Well, we’ll all breathe easier when he’s caught.’ Often, I don’t ask them to explain phrases. It interrupts the conversation, and singles me out. Plus, I like the challenge: me and my thoughts, wrestling with all the possible connotations as I unpick words like knots in my net. ‘Easier’ was ‘more simple’, so it was ‘simple breathing’, which implied to me breathing that had been difficult before. But I’d never thought of it as an obstruction. I had decided it was to do with holding the air inside your lungs, because you are terrified to breathe out. Like when you shake behind the thick trunk of tree, in whose branches you are perched, your face crushed tight against its bark and your head squashed low, immobile and you feel your head melt and the pressure is of underwater with the force of not-breathing in case the soldiers down below pause in their gutting of your friends – and look up to find you.

When they go, you can ‘breathe easier’. That to me was the definition. But when Deborah read my letter and said she would help, I felt a lightness in my lungs. I hadn’t known they were . . . congested? Being crushed? It was a strange, free feeling when she offered to help. Like a crouching jinn had been removed from me. I kiss my munching girl on her forehead, steal a bite of fish. It tastes, and smells, of paste.

Deborah and I were both ‘easier’ after that. I know I’d embarrassed her, when that guard shouted at us, but it did not diminish my pleasure for the Kelvingrove. The museum wasn’t boastful. It made me feel small as well as full. No coins were exchanged for entry, no bribe was passed to leave. It simply stood there with its doors unlocked and its visitors passing through. Like a temple in which Glasgow kept her history. She chose what of creation to display to the world. In Somalia, people always praise the new. The higher and shinier a building in Mogadishu, the greater it is revered. You can cram more people inside, you can shake your fist at the unblinking sky and say: ‘We are nearly there, beside you. Ha!’ I noticed, though, that Deborah only delighted in the objects that were made, not the ones that were taken. Several times she had apologised, alerting me to signs and explanations. I just wanted to look at the art.

‘You understand?’ she had persisted. ‘A lot of this stuff is stolen. You know? During wars maybe? Or when Britain was “pretending” to help countries.’

I think I annoyed her. ‘If it was war, then much of this “stuff” would have been destroyed. At least it is here.’

‘But that’s not the point, Abdi,’ she began. Then, immediately, she stopped. Rubbed her nose. I noticed she’d painted some of that pigment on her face, very faint, but you could see it gathering in powdery flakes where the bulge of her nostril was. I think we were both thinking the same thought.
You are going to lecture me on war?

Even knowing so much of Kelvingrove was filled with plunder, I loved it. Glasgow is both barren
and
rich, it is poor and it is bold. In Somalia, one wealthy warlord would live here and he would put up gates and guns. Next time, I will bring Rebecca. Tell her we are having a feast. She’s finished her peas and fish, has her hand outstretched for the doofer.

‘You want cartoons?’ I ask. She nods. I press the red button and the house is filled with noise. I go to the fridge to get some milk, pass the shelf above the fireplace. My mother would have . . . I grope for the phrase I heard Mrs Coutts use. What was it again? It seemed to encapsulate all her great excitement . . .
And then I seen that boy off
River City.
You know the shell-suit one? I tell you, I was fair beside myself
. Yes. To find a fire that needed no wood or flame, kept ever-ready in a home that needed no building. My mother would have been fair beside herself. I lift the picture frame that sits on the shelf, wish beyond almost anything that my family’s faces were inside it.

On the way out of the museum, Deborah had asked me to wait in the foyer. ‘Foyer’ – I didn’t know that word. She told me it was the hall between the basement and the grass outside, and that it was French. ‘Sometimes we use foreign words like everyday words.’

‘I do that all the time,’ I said. She liked that. She laughed. A real laugh, with eyes and belly, not simply mouth, then told me she’d be ‘two ticks’. I stood and read the walls; there were bricks with people’s names on them. When Deborah came back, she was carrying a thin white paper bag. ‘Here.’ She handed the bag to me. ‘I put my home number on the back, so you’ve got that as well as my mobile. I know the Refugee folk said we should only exchange mobiles at first, but to be honest, I’m pretty rubbish with them. I always leave it in the bottom of my bag, or forget to switch it on . . . It’s just that, well . . . if I’m going to help with Rebecca, we should . . . I wouldn’t want to miss a call if you needed me, you know?’

Inside the bag was a piece of card with numbers on.