“Talk then. This is my cousin, the one who was attacked. Agim.” He winced at her introduction; I was glad not to be the only one, except my wince stayed inside my face.
I turned to Tijana and got on with it. “Did you think it was clever to come after my sister with knives? Say you cut her, do you think you would have got away with that?”
Tijana didn’t even open her mouth. She just rolled her eyes at me.
“No, they would not have got away with it,” her cousin said. “It’s only the other way around that nothing is done.”
“You’re pretty stupid. And you’re lucky I didn’t call the police when she told me,” I said, simply.
“Why didn’t you?” Tijana asked.
“Because there’s obviously been a misunderstanding, and I’d rather sort it out between us.”
“I wish you had called the police,” Tijana said.
I sighed.
“She ran away before I could go and get Agim—”
“Because you were waving knives in her face,” I finished.
“She ran away before I could go and get Agim to confirm that it was her,” Tijana insisted.
To Tijana’s cousin I said, “You really think you’ve met my sister?”
I had pulled a photo off the wall above my dad’s desk. It was at least a year old, from a holiday in Cornwall with Dad and Lily. In the photo Miri and I are sitting on a fence at dusk with an eerily empty square of grass behind us. I took the photo out of my rucksack and showed it to him. “Are you sure?”
He looked at the photo, and I saw his relief.
“That’s Miranda?”
I didn’t answer, and he said, hastily, “Okay, well that’s different. I don’t know that girl. The girl I meant has short hair and smokes these weird red and white cigarettes, and she said her name was Anna. It’s the same word backwards and forwards, the same word in a mirror, she said.”
“Miranda has short hair now,” Tijana said.
“She doesn’t smoke though,” I said. I didn’t put the photo away. The sight of it seemed to calm him down.
Over Agim’s shoulder I could see, through the gritty windowpanes of the Old Building, Martin furtively fetching a hammer out of his locker. Martin had been smoking a lot. It gave him these unrealisable ideas for arts and crafts. He was with Emma, and she was chatting blithely as he stowed the hammer in her bag. I think all my friends at school smoked too much. There really isn’t much else you can do regularly if you’re young and there’s no one thing you’re really into. Miri was the only friend I had who didn’t smoke at all.
“Agim,” Tijana said. “Just tell the truth if you recognise her. Don’t be scared.”
Agim turned to her. “I swear to you… this isn’t the girl.”
“But…” Tijana took the photo herself and looked at it closely. “I don’t understand this.”
I took the picture out of her hands. “Not interested. If either of you bother my sister again, I’m going to the police. Nothing long.”
“He nearly died,” Tijana said. Then she spat in my face.
I wiped my face and went in for the next lesson. The duty to speak when Miri couldn’t, to make sense when she didn’t. I checked that no one was around, then put my forehead to my locker and stood against it just like a plank, with all my weight in my head. I stood like that until I stopped feeling like breaking something. Otherwise I could snap the Biros in my pocket, go into the nearest empty classroom and spin the chairs into the bookshelves, then what? Go home and smash Lily’s camera? Thank you, Lily, for leaving me in charge of someone I just can’t be responsible for. She won’t forget or recover, she is inconsolable.
•
There were protestors outside the Immigration Removal Centre. Miranda and Sade walked into a bristle of placards that tilted as people moved to let them through. “What’s the matter, what’s happening?” Miranda asked. She didn’t notice how tightly she was clutching Sade’s arm until Sade gently removed her hand. They were surrounded by grim faces and black print.
“Another inmate hung themselves.” It was a wiry woman that had spoken; her sleeves were pushed elbow high. “No social visits today.”
Sade made a short, low keening sound that seemed not to come from her mouth.
It was strange on the Western Heights, you could see both town and sea, one seeming to hold the other back with its split brick and glass. On the Heights you were high and not at all secure, you felt as if you could fall at any moment, and that gave the stones and water a vitality of colour — if these things were to be the last you saw while falling, then they belonged to you.
Miranda had known the address of the detention centre before she had come, she knew that the place was called The Citadel, but she had forgotten that it actually looked like a citadel. She had reimagined the building as white and similar to a hospital. But now she understood that that would have been silly. A building of this size would not blend on the Western Heights if it was
white
was a colour that Anna Good was afraid to wear. Her fear reflected her feeling that she was not clean. She had, of course, been baptised in white. As a child she had been buttoned into frilly white pinafores and had subsequently been too frightened to move. At school, her gymnastics class had been filmed for a programme on British sports and pastimes, and she’d been picked to wear a bronze-coloured helmet and a white gown and a blue sash and sit at the top of a chariot built of the other girls’ bodies. She was Britannia, and her shield was a round tea tray covered with coloured crepe and ribbon. There was no lion, but some of the girls dug their fingernails into her thighs, and it was just like being bitten. She had still smiled, though, and waved her arms at the camera. Britannia had to have pluck. Anna never thought she would have a granddaughter who didn’t know what Britannia meant; Lily said that patriotism was embarrassing and dangerous. Who gave you your mind? Anna would wonder, when Lily said such things. She couldn’t believe her ears. How had Britannia become embarrassing and dangerous? It was the incomers. They had twisted it so that anything they were not part of was bad.
When Anna met Andrew she was wearing a cream-coloured dress, the material having been the cheapest she’d seen on sale and easily slid beneath the needle of her sewing machine. Anna smoothed the cloth of her dress over her lap as he, Andrew, walked past the desk she shared with Alice Williams at the newspaper office. Andrew was on his way to see the editor; you could tell he was someone important because of the way he wasn’t afraid to be caught looking at whatever interested him. He stopped and nodded at Liz Welles, who had a little band of scarlet ribbon fixed around a spare scroll on her typewriter. Was it a charm to help her type faster, he wanted to know. His smile was charming, but very dark somehow. Liz laughed shyly and said she didn’t know, her daughter had made it.
“He’s stinking rich, that Andrew Silver,” Alice Williams whispered to Anna. “From an American merchant family, but they had him schooled over here and he’s almost English. Isn’t he handsome? It’s just him in that big house on Barton Road.”
“Stow it, will you, he’s coming,” Anna muttered desperately, smiling hard at her typewriter as he passed.
His manners were strange. He didn’t speak to her, but he looked at her for longer than was polite, and she knew that they had met now, that everything real that had ever been going to happen to her would happen now. She inspected the entire front of her dress once he was gone, convinced that some vast stain had left her and entered the cloth. It was summer. She was sweating slightly, but that was all.