The Edge of Me (8 page)

I turn to him in the oily darkness but he’s looking straight ahead. I follow his gaze. Headlights strobe through the trees. A very old and battered Range Rover comes into view. The sides are pocked with holes and one of the back windows is shattered. I force myself to breathe.

9

Two people get out of the car. The first is a big woman – broad rather than fat. She has a man’s body: barrel chest, wide back and sturdy legs. She looks old although her hair in the headlights shines bright orange. She wears a fur coat that looks like it’s taken about a thousand small mammals to make. Her companion is tall with a shaved head. He’s wearing a camouflage jacket and army boots.

A long and heated conversation follows. They’re talking about Joe and how he wasn’t part of the plan. They speak quietly but I’m sure I hear the word ‘Branko’. All the while Boris is pointing the rifle at us in a rather half-hearted way.

My mouth is stale and my stomach boils. I put my hand out to Joe and he takes it, locking his fingers through mine. His eyes are steady.

Eventually Andrija and the woman come over to us. She folds her arms and her mouth is set while he speaks.

‘This is Madame Milanković. She is … she will take you.’

‘Where I belong’. Is this where I belong?

‘What’s going on?’ I say. Joe is still as a rock but I feel the blood thumping in his wrist. I say in Serbian, ‘We’re not going anywhere until you tell us what you’re doing. You can’t do this.’

Andrija mutters something which I don’t catch, then turns away and spits on the ground.

‘Mirko, put them in the car,’ says Milanković. The tall man steps towards me. Joe gets between us and rams him in the chest with both hands.

‘Run, Sanda!’

We crash though the undergrowth but we don’t get far. Boris catches him across the back with the butt of the rifle and he sprawls headlong onto the ground.

‘Joe!’

I stop and I go to him but Mirko gets there first. He sweeps him up in one powerful motion and carries him to the Range Rover. I try to follow but Milanković has me kneeling in front of her with one hand pressing vice-like on my neck and her knee in my back.

I see Andrija and Boris hovering uncertainly until Milanković says, ‘You can go.’ Boris shuffles off and climbs into the cab.

Andrija hesitates a moment, looks back at me, scuffs the ground with his boot and leaves.

As the tail lights of the van disappear through the brush, I see Mirko striding towards me from the car. He reaches me quickly and heaves me over his shoulder.

I start screaming. I’m screaming and it’s like someone else is doing it. It’s like I’m outside my body and floating
high above the forest, listening to the sound tearing up into space.

Mirko opens the car door and tosses me in. I plummet back down to earth.

Joe raises his head, his eyes half closed. He reaches out, finds my hand and grips it. And then I’m quiet again. He sinks back against the seat.

We’re going at speed through pine forests, over dirt tracks, past tiny hamlets, tumbledown houses with broken roofs; I see snow-frosted mountains way in the distance. We’re thrown together then apart as the car careers round sharp bends. We make our way up and up, and the gears squeal and crunch as we skid on. Joe’s head is lolling forward, and every so often he emits an ugly groan. From time to time, Milanković snaps at Mirko who grunts assent.

Then, with the moon high in a black night sky, we turn a corner and pull up through iron gates into a steep drive.

Ahead of us rises a kind of castle: tall grey turrets with evil little windows squinting down at us; steps up to a great door. The windows on the first two floors have bars on them. A large sign is bolted to the gatepost:
Zbrisć Sirotište
. A ringing starts up in my head because I’ve heard the word
sirotište
but I can’t place it. I’m still thinking about it when I catch sight of a child at a ground-floor window. His head is shaved and he watches the car with wide, dark eyes in his pinched face. As the iron gates clang shut behind us, the meaning comes to me:
orphanage
.

The car has child locks so we have to wait to be let out.
I can tell Joe’s as scared as I am; I can see the muscles in his forearms tightening and his fists round on his thighs.

‘It’s OK,’ I say. ‘They’ll let you go now.’

‘I don’t think so,’ he says, ‘I think they want both of us.’

The door on my side is opened by Mirko. Milanković waits in the car while I’m hauled out onto the ground. He yanks me up and frogmarches me towards the door. I’m kicking and hitting at him for all I’m worth and yelling Joe’s name. All I hear are Joe’s muffled shouts and an impotent thumping on the windows of the car.

In minutes we’re inside. I hear footsteps hurrying over flagstones. Mirko lets go of me and dusts himself off. Again footsteps, but different: a fat slap of rubber this time and a figure comes into view. A thin woman with bleached hair piled up in a beehive. She wears overalls and rubber boots like she works on a farm. She takes hold of my arm while chatting to Mirko.

After a minute, they exchange a curt good bye and she steers me away down a shadowy corridor.

She takes me to a concrete cell with a low arched ceiling and bolts the door behind us. The room smells of bleach and is lit by a single bulb. At one end, is a tiled section of floor and wall and at the other, a table and two chairs. On the table is a small brown parcel tied with string.

She says nothing. She sits at the table, crosses her legs and gestures to me by plucking at her clothes that she wants me to strip. In spite of the cold, I’m burning. I want to refuse but I can see it’s pointless. I make up my mind I won’t cry. Slowly I bend to untie my shoelaces as
she touches up her lipstick. The floor is wet and there’s nowhere dry to put my clothes. I leave them in a heap, carefully tucking the photograph and cutting I’ve carried from London inside a sleeve. I stand there in my bra and pants, shivering and rubbing my arms, my flesh blue and goose pimpled.

She looks up then and comes around the table to face me.

‘Everything,’ she says. She waits while I peel off my underwear. I must not cry. I must not cry. I fold my arms across my body and shuffle back towards the tiled wall. She twists me around to face the wall with my palms flat against it.

And then water. Cold water: a force like I’ve never known pummels my back and legs. She shouts at me to turn, and holding my arms across myself to protect my frozen body I do as she orders. She grips the hose in both hands and the icy jet rams against my face and nearly knocks me off balance. I brace myself against the wall to stop myself falling.

Just as suddenly, the water is switched off; she throws me a towel and I start to rub myself dry.

She opens the package on the table to reveal a set of clothes and motions to me to put them on. I ignore her. I’m dry now.

I wind the towel around me and I say: ‘Where’s my friend?
Where’s my friend?
I want to see him.’

Her mouth contorts into a sneer. ‘You’ll find out soon enough.’

Rage surges through me and I spit at her. Time slows and in the moment of peace before she hits me, I watch the bubbles of my saliva crawling down her rouged cheek. Her lips are slightly parted and a curl of spit licks its way into her mouth. She snaps her mouth shut.

The blow lands hard on my face. She shakes her hand a few times as though to soothe the sting. Something in me, some small defiant part of me, gives me the strength to hold my ground. I meet her gaze and again, very calmly this time, I ask, ‘Where is my friend? What have you done with him?’

She curses in response and goes out, locking the door behind her.

I take out the clothes. They consist of a garish collection of hand-me-downs that smell of stale dishtowels: flared cords, boots, a knitted jumper with a zip, a T-shirt that says
‘University of Michigan’
on it, and a pair of men’s socks. I gather up the cuttings and stuff them into the pocket of the cords.

The woman returns with a large pair of blunt scissors and cuts off my hair. And when it’s done, she steps back and looks at me in an odd way as though she’s about to say something but then thinks better of it. She goes to the door, beckons me. I pick up the little bundle of my old clothing and follow her down dimly lit corridors with doors opening off them into wide rooms like hospital wards or dormitories, full of beds packed tightly together. Many of the rooms are lit by candles, and I can just make out indistinct shapes huddled on beds and in corners.

Every nerve in my body, every cell, is like a lit match, fizzing and spitting.

Everywhere the floors are wood or stone and the high ceilings make the place almost as cold as the outside. The walls are bare and giant hides of peeling paint spiral away from them. In places there are even holes like some massive fist has punched through from the outside, and the freezing wind saws in as we pass. I stop at a mottled mirror and I don’t recognise the person staring back at me: my hair stands up in tufts, bits she’s missed hang down around my ears, my face looks thin and drawn and there are dark purple shadows under my eyes. My parents have done this to me.
My family
.

Finally I’m locked in a room and left to sleep on a thin mattress. I wake at dawn and lie there watching the dust motes glittering like beads in the light.

I need to get away as soon as possible, to find Joe and get out. Because of all I’ve lost, somehow losing Joe, and the kind of
idea
of Joe, matters more than anything. Where nothing is sure any more, where everything that means something turns out to be false or compromised, Joe is real. Now they’ve taken him too.

Later, I’m sitting on a rickety child’s chair outside what looks like an office. I’m with the beehive woman from last night who knocks at the door. She looks nervous. The door opens and she drags me into the room where Milanković is standing waiting. The office is a complete contrast to what is outside it. The floor is carpeted, a lamp gives out a soft glow, and there are curtains rather than
bars at the window, a huge pink cabbage print that Mum would have loved.

Milanković goes to her chair and plumps the cushions before she sits down. On her desk is a plate of assorted chocolate biscuits. I notice a couple have been nibbled and put back.

She smiles and on her teeth I see traces of chocolate.

She says in Serbian, ‘Sanda. Welcome to Zbrisć.’

‘Where’s my friend? What have you done with him?’ I try not to raise my voice.

‘Your
friend.’
She says the word carefully, rolls it in her mouth. ‘He’s safe.’

‘What am I doing here? You can’t keep me here. I want to see him.’

‘You are going to stay here for a while Sanda, so you need to behave yourself. We do not like bad behaviour at Zbrisć.’

‘What for?
Why am I here?’

‘This – this is bad behaviour, asking questions all the time.’

‘Look, I’ll behave when you tell me where my friend is and where my parents are and why you’re keeping me here.’

She runs her pink tongue around her lips, hoovering up biscuit crumbs like a snake. ‘Your parents are in the country.’

‘Can I see them?’

‘No. Not now. Not yet.’

‘Where’s Joe?’

She shakes her head slowly and reaches into a drawer for a packet of cigarettes. ‘No.’

‘What does that mean,
no
? I want to know where you’ve taken him.’

She settles into her chair and eyes me with interest; lights a cigarette and sits back in a curl of smoke.

‘They were right. You are trouble.’

‘They spoke to you? About me?’

She shrugs. ‘It’s easy. You will stay here and you will behave yourself. That’s all. No more questions.’

I start to protest but she waves me away and I’m shunted out of the room to the sound of her coughing.

I cannot process what is happening to me. I cannot see in front of me or behind me.

The woman says, ‘Come with me.’

We go back down the corridor and stop at a large doorway to a kind of dining room. It’s like the school lunch hall, only not. For a start, it’s freezing. At the opposite end on the outside wall, a gaping hole lets in a rush of icy wind. Someone has tried to patch it with bits of floorboards nailed across it and what look like bin bags. On top of the sour smell of shit that follows us everywhere, there’s a smell of rotting meat and vegetables.

Something runs across the floor in front of us as we move towards the smell: a rat.

It’s the first time I get to see some of my fellow inmates. All girls, in various states of undress, and it’s difficult to tell the age of most of them. All of them are quiet apart from the odd squeak or howl. They queue at a counter
where two women in head scarves and filthy aprons dole out the bread, and they move forward with their eyes fixed on their feet.

As soon as the girls are given their bread, they squirrel it under their arms and carry it away like a precious bundle. I’m pushed into the queue and they move back to accommodate me. Other than that, no one seems particularly interested in me.

The person in front of me is behaving strangely – now and again spasms run through her body and her arms shake. She’s finding it hard to take the bread they offer and I realise they’re teasing her. The larger of the two women holds out the bread, waits for her to compose herself enough to get it and then pulls it away again. They shriek with laughter as the poor girl tries to grab the food.

Then I hear her say softly, ‘
Molim?
Please?’

There’s so much sadness and dignity and humanness in those words. On an impulse, I snatch the bread from the old witch and give it to the girl. She looks at me and for a second I see the person she might have been. She’s small but I figure she’s about my age. A shock of short dark hair and violet eyes. She shuffles away quickly to eat the bread. I watch her go and move up to the counter. The crones are furious. One takes the bread intended for me and with fleshy fingers, she breaks it in two. Half rations.

As I take it, I look her straight in the eye and say, ‘It was worth it.’