Nowhere Girl (15 page)

“I was frightened, but I don’t think Omi was. She was sad to say goodbye. But why should she be frightened?”

“She was sending you to another country, many miles away. With people you did not know.”

“We know Uncle Jak,” Amina protested. “He has been to my town before. We all know that he saved a baby once, who would have perished. He is a good man.”

“Maybe,” the older woman conceded. “But you don’t know me and I may not be a good woman.”

“Omi doesn’t know you,” Amina agreed, “but she knows me. And she knows I am a good girl, and so the world will be good to me. If you want an object to be solid, make it from your own clay. This was a favourite saying of hers. And I am of her clay.”

“And so it goes,” said Auntie, nodding as if the girl had spoken a great truth.

Just before nightfall the white van returns. Amina is impatient to see Jodie and to hear what more she knows. All day Fahran has been in his room, playing but also sleeping, and Amina has had no chance to speak with him. But she will, once an opportunity arises. She is resolved to befriend him.

Jodie waits until all is quiet in the house below, and still she whispers, serious over all that she has learned.

“Uncle told me that Fahran started falling over,” she tells her. “He told Auntie that the boy, he say that his world was spinning and Malik said this was the same thing he said before the tumour was discovered two years ago. The elders tried many things and finally Auntie took him to see a doctor, then to a hospital in Algiers. That is when they were told that Fahran has brain cancer and they took out his eye. As soon as he was well enough, they decided to travel to Europe, to get medical help.”

Amina thinks about how desperate they must have felt, to make that terrible journey with a sick child.

“And now?” she presses.

“Wait, Amina, I have not finish with this part of the story. After they arrive here, Uncle saw that he need money to live and that is when he returned to Algeria, started the collections, of girls like us,” Jodie says. “It was supposed to pay for the medicine, the special treatment that Fahran need, to stop the cancer from coming back.”

Amina smiles. “That makes me feel good, that my mother’s money will be helping this little boy get better. So, then.”

“You fool, child,” says Jodie. “By the time that boy got here, the hospital say he is too sick for a big treatment. They give him radiotherapy, but that makes him weak and very ill. They cannot give him anything else. The illness is in him, deep in his blood. There is nothing else for it.”

Amina shakes her head, thinking,
How, if the tumour has been cut out, can he still be dying?

But Jodie isn’t a doctor, she doesn’t know the answer to this any more than Amina.

“Auntie was in the stock cupboard today,” Amina whispers to Jodie, glad that she has some information of her own. “She was crying.”

“Why are you whispering? No-one can hear us, we’re too high up.”

Amina moves closer to her, so that even if she didn’t whisper she could speak quietly. “Auntie has been very upset today. How was Uncle Jak?”

“Strange too.” Jodie frowned, as if thinking back to something that had taken place earlier. “He left me for a long time again, I was just with Malik, which I didn’t mind.” Here she giggled, and Amina feared she would change the subject, but mercifully she didn’t. “I do not know where he went, but when he returned he was sweating as though he had run a great distance, or been in a fight. I’ve seen men like this, Amina, and it is never a good thing. We were at the Schueberfouer.”

“What’s that?”

“A fair. A big one, more colourful than anything you’ve ever seen, louder than anything you’ve ever heard. I tell you, Amina, this is a better kind of religion.” Jodie sat taller, her eyes lit with energy. “It’s a huge place with rides and food stands and so many people. More than you could ever imagine here in Luxembourg, or even in the whole of Europe. It was so exciting.”

“And what were you doing?” Amina asked, trying to hide her jealousy because all that she had yet seen of Luxembourg was the beauty salon and the storage cupboard and the small square of concrete Auntie called the yard.

“Malik and I had lots of different jobs. One was to stand around a circle, while Uncle did a card trick, and to pretend to be customers. I had to say which cup a ball was under, and when I got it right he gave me one hundred euros. Then Malik would do the same.”

“A hundred euros,” Amina marvelled. “But that’s a fortune!”

“Yes, but we had to give it back, silly. It was to make the customers have a go, and once they did we would move to another corner of the fair and pretend to be a customers again.”

“But why? If it was only you, Uncle was not winning or losing.”

“Oh, Amina, you are so simple! The plan is that others at the fair saw me win money, and so like fools they would decide to play. But then they would guess wrong, and lose their money. You see?”

She didn’t really see. If Jodie could see which cup the ball was under, then why would the real customers get it wrong? It seemed a very easy thing to know.

“And Uncle was strange today?”

“It is hard to say for sure, because he is never exactly chatty. But he was much quieter than normal and he went off alone. Me and Malik went on the big wheel. Malik flirted with a girl. Her skin was as pale as Reza and Safiyya’s, but her hair was like their blonde hair had got dirty. She had a yellow t-shirt, but I think this is a bad colour for a white girl. With the hair and the clothes she looked like a yellow weed, those weeds that are everywhere here, and not pretty. Malik told me they are called dandelion.”

Amina thought it was a beautiful word, and she tried it on her tongue, wishing she could see these yellow weeds for herself. “And what did Malik do?”

“He went and spoke with her. He asked her to join us, and Uncle Jak was pleased.”

Jodie began to nibble her thumbnail and Amina could see that even if Uncle was pleased, Jodie wasn’t. “A non-Muslim! And Uncle seemed so happy that Malik was with this girl.” She half laughs, partly scandalised, disappointed in Malik, but also thrilled. “Imagine, Amina! Luxembourg could be a place where the rules of home no longer exist.”

Amina thought that this could be a good thing, but it scared her too.

“So what happened to the dandelion girl?”

“She rode the ferris wheel with us. And then Malik took her for a walk.”

“What is a ferris wheel?”

And Jodie told her then of the massive wheel and Amina tried to let her tellings transport her to the great height, and to imagine what it must be like to see out over the whole of Luxembourg. She wished that she would see it for herself one day.

There seemed to be so much to ask, so much Amina didn’t know.

“And I have one more thing to tell you, about Fahran. Something that may make you happy. But first, do you have my prize?”

Amina lifted her pillow and under it was the bottle of nail polish that she had eventually managed to steal, as an exchange for the information. Jodie snatched it, held it up to see the tiny white stars floating in the delicate pink.

“But don’t let anyone see,” begged Amina. “Please, it must be our secret.”

“Please let me go home.”

She stumbled, her head was pounding and her words came out slurred. Shock made her weak, as she was walked to the white van, Malik holding her right arm the bulldog gripping her left.

It was clear that there was no escape, yet still a part of Ellie refused to believe this and she began to beg. “I won’t say anything, I swear. Just let me go. Please, my mum will be so worried.”

She wondered, somewhere back in the cold storage of her calculating brain, where she had learned this script. She must have been taught it from so many films where girls begged to be freed even as the audience knew it wasn’t going to happen; and the logical part Ellie’s brain was of the same mind as that audience, calmly stating through the shock and fear:
They have you. You just need to survive, find the time for escape. But this isn’t it
.

Not now she was on the bench in the back of the white van, her arms restrained at her side by Malik, being driven by the bulldog to God knows where.

“If you fight me, I’ll have to use the rope,” Malik told her, though she felt he was saying this for the bulldog’s benefit. The rope was on the dusty floor of the van, coiled like a snake, but as he spoke, Malik pushed it away with his foot and gave her a look that seemed to be begging her to cooperate. He gripped her arm as if he was keeping her safe, and his body was supporting her.

She still felt odd, woozy, and she wouldn’t fight anymore, she was so compliant now it sickened her, but the headache was powerful, a grip all of its own, and she knew that she wasn’t ready to fight. Not yet.

Survive, Ellie. Live to see your mum and dad, to see Gaynor again
.

And this thought was enough to still her, to sustain her.

Bridget was also being driven somewhere she did not want to go.

Achim had got angry with Detective Massard, he was outraged that they wouldn’t interview Bridget in her own home, why did they need her to go to a filthy police station? But the detective insisted, so Achim told the man he would drive his wife himself. They would follow the police car in his Land Rover. But in the passenger seat next to her husband, Bridget was wondering if she would have been better with the detective, who at least wouldn’t be sulking over the steering wheel, banging it with his fist as the police car stopped at an amber light.

“Achim? They asked if I’d like a solicitor,” Bridget said weakly.

“Fuck that. You’ve done nothing wrong, they’re just trying to frighten us. If I speak to anyone it will be to the press. Or the British Ambassador.”

Bridget stared out of the window, to the rain-soaked pavements and homes of other people, people whose lives were untouched by Ellie’s disappearance and wondered how life could continue when hers was falling apart.

“Bridget?” Achim was speaking to her in that tone she hated, like she was a child being told off. “Don’t tell them how bad your relationship with Ellie was. Don’t give them any excuse not to search for our daughter.”

“I don’t know what you mean,” she said, confused that her husband didn’t understand how her heart was bursting for Ellie, how her head was full of her. “I love Ellie.”

“I know that,” Achim snapped, frustrated as a car cut in front of him just as he was indicating to turn into the police station. “But don’t say you hit her. Don’t mention her cheekbone. Okay?” He pulled in, parked, and stopped the engine. Then he turned to her, his bloodshot eyes fixed on her own. “Okay?”

“I never hit our daughter,” Bridget said, confused and hurt. The bruised cheekbone had been an accident. “I love her. I just want her to come home.”

As it happened, the police didn’t just want to speak with Bridget, they wanted Achim to be interviewed too. Bridget thought that he was the one who needed a warning, he was already close to losing his temper.

Bridget found herself in a cool room with no windows, sitting at a desk, across from Detective Massard, who had visited the house just two days before brandishing a business card and empty promises to find her daughter, and who was now asking about her treatment of Ellie, recording every word that she said. Did he not see, that by bringing her to the police station he was sabotaging everything? Ellie would be home, should be home, by now. Bridget should be back there, waiting for her daughter to return.

The police room offered no comfort. The only thing that soothed Bridget was to speak to Ellie, to mentally continue the letter that she had started to write to her girl on the night she went missing.

Dear Ellie
,

Your father and I, we are very different. It is not just that we are from different countries, different cultures, it is in our very personalities. He knew that when he met me, all those years ago in Durham, but he’s never accepted it. I am sick of him trying to change me
.

When I was nursing in the field, my behaviour would have shocked him. As well as the smoking and the drugs there was sex too. With doctors, mainly, but also some of the local volunteers. Every day I saw five or six deaths and each night I craved life. Sex is life
.

I wonder what you will say to this. You see me as being so stiff, so serious. Maybe you prefer that, to thinking about your mother as a slut, but I promised you a full disclosure. I should have told you this, maybe when I found out you were no longer a virgin. But I got angry and I’m sorry. I made you go to the doctors for a morning-after pill even though you tried to tell me there was no need, as if I was naïve enough to believe that. It wasn’t disgust, though, or disappointment. It was fear
.

Because you have so many choices to make, so many places to see, and sex can be a trap
.

I don’t want you to think I mean getting pregnant with you was a trap, because I swear that, once I decided to keep you, I never for a second saw it that way. I love you, and I’ve loved you since the moment I knew that I couldn’t go ahead with the abortion, that my life path was changed. And all because a soldier had placed a baby in my arms and taught me something about my own needs
.

But what if I had refused to leave MSF, and continued nursing in Algeria? I could have placed you in the care of a local woman while I worked, or found a school that was still functioning and maybe, much later, have married one of those doctors, or one of the other workers I met in the field. Brave and unconventional and terrifyingly moral; a morality that was higher than the laws of the country, we often made decisions that other people would question
.

It would have been a different life for us, certainly, and you would have been a different girl. I don’t think you’d fight me so hard, if you respected my work. You wouldn’t demand so much, if you knew how others have so little. I blame myself for giving up on nursing, for not being able to show you these truths
.

I have done us both a great disservice
.