I made myself undesirable. I declined to wash, and I let my skin grow oily. Under my clothes I wound a wide strip of cotton around my chest, to make my breasts small and flat. When the charity boxes
arrived, full of secondhand clothes and shoes, some of the other girls tried to make themselves pretty but I rummaged through the cartons to find clothes that hid my shape. I wore loose blue jeans and a man’s Hawaiian shirt and heavy black boots with the steel toe caps shining through the torn leather. I went to the detention nurse and I made her cut my hair very short with medical scissors. For the whole two years I did not smile or even look in any man’s face. I was terrified. Only at night, after they locked the men away, I went back to my detention cell and I unwound the cloth from my breasts and I breathed deeply. Then I took off my heavy boots and I drew my knees up to my chin. Once a week, I sat on the foam mattress of my bed and I painted my toenails. I found the little bottle of nail varnish at the bottom of a charity box. It still had the price ticket on it. If I ever discover the person who gave it then I will tell them, for the cost of one British pound and ninety-nine pence, they saved my life. Because this is what I did in that place, to remind myself I was alive underneath everything: under my steel toe caps I wore bright red nail varnish. Sometimes when I took my boots off I screwed up my eyes against the tears and I rocked back and fro, shivering from the cold.
My big sister Nkiruka, she became a woman in the growing season, under the African sun, and who can blame her if the great red heat of it made her giddy and flirtatious? Who could not lean back against the doorpost of their house and smile with quiet indulgence when they saw my mother sitting her down to say,
Nkiruka, beloved one, you must not smile at the older boys like that
?
Me, I was a woman under white fluorescent strip lights, in an underground room in an immigration detention center forty miles east of London. There were no seasons there. It was cold, cold, cold, and I did not have anyone to smile at. Those cold years are frozen inside me. The African girl they locked up in the immigration detention center, poor child, she never really escaped. In my soul she is still locked up in there, forever, under the fluorescent lights, curled up on the green linoleum floor with her knees tucked up
under her chin. And this woman they released from the immigration detention center, this creature that I am, she is a new breed of human. There is nothing natural about me. I was born—no, I was reborn—in captivity. I learned my language from your newspapers, my clothes are your castoffs, and it is your pound that makes my pockets ache with its absence. Imagine a young woman cut out from a smiling Save the Children magazine advertisement, who dresses herself in threadbare pink clothes from the recycling bin in your local supermarket car park and speaks English like the leader column of
The Times,
if you please. I would cross the street to avoid me. Truly, this is the one thing that people from your country and people from my country agree on. They say,
That refugee girl is not one of us. That girl does not belong.
That girl is a halfling, a child of an unnatural mating, an unfamiliar face in the moon.
So, I am a refugee, and I get very lonely. Is it my fault if I do not look like an English girl and I do not talk like a Nigerian? Well, who says an English girl must have skin as pale as the clouds that float across her summers? Who says a Nigerian girl must speak in fallen English, as if English had collided with Ibo, high in the upper atmosphere, and rained down into her mouth in a shower that half-drowns her and leaves her choking up sweet tales about the bright African colors and the taste of fried plantain? Not like a storyteller, but like a victim rescued from the flood, coughing up the colonial water from her lungs?
Excuse me for learning your language properly. I am here to tell you a real story. I did not come to talk to you about the bright African colors. I am a born-again citizen of the developing world, and I will prove to you that the color of my life is
gray.
And if it should be that I secretly love fried plantain, then that must stay between us and I implore you to tell
no one.
Okay?
The morning they let us out of the detention center, they gave us all our possessions. I held mine in a see-through plastic bag. A
Collins Gem Pocket English Dictionary,
one pair of gray socks, one
pair of gray briefs, and one United Kingdom Driver’s License that was not mine, and one water-stained business card that was not mine either. If you want to know, these things belonged to a white man called Andrew O’Rourke. I met him on a beach.
This small plastic bag is what I was holding in my hand when the detention officer told me to go and stand in the queue for the telephone. The first girl in the queue, she was tall and she was pretty. Her thing was beauty, not talking. I wondered which of us had made the best choice to survive. This girl, she had plucked her eyebrows out and then she had drawn them back on again with a pencil. This is what she had done to save her life. She was wearing a purple dress, an A-line dress with pink stars and moons in the pattern. She had a nice pink scarf wrapped around her hair, and purple flip-flops on her feet. I was thinking she must have been locked up a very long time in our detention center. One has to go through a very great number of the charity boxes, you will understand, to put together an outfit that is truly an
ensemble.
On the girl’s brown legs there were many small white scars. I was thinking, Do those scars cover the whole of you, like the stars and the moons on your dress? I thought that would be pretty too, and I ask you right here please to agree with me that a scar is never ugly. That is what the scar makers want us to think. But you and I, we must make an agreement to defy them. We must see all scars as beauty. Okay? This will be our secret. Because take it from me, a scar does not form on the dying. A scar means,
I survived.
In a few breaths’ time I will speak some sad words to you. But you must hear them the same way we have agreed to see scars now. Sad words are just another beauty. A sad story means, this storyteller is
alive.
The next thing you know, something fine will happen to her, something
marvelous,
and then she will turn around and smile.
The girl with the purple A-line dress and the scars on her legs, she was already talking into the telephone receiver. She was saying, Hello, taxi?
Yu come pick me up, yeh? Good. Oh, where me come? Me come from Jamaica, darlin, you better believe that. Huh? What? Oh, where me come
right now
? Okay wait please.
She put her hand to cover the telephone receiver. She turned around to the second girl in the queue and she said, Listen darlin, what name is dis place, where we at right now? But the second girl just looked up at her and shrugged her shoulders. The second girl was thin and her skin was dark brown and her eyes were green like a jelly sweet when you suck the outside sugar off and hold it up against the moon. She was so pretty, I cannot even explain. She was wearing a yellow sari dress. She was holding a see-through plastic bag like mine, but there was nothing in it. At first I thought it was empty but then I thought,
Why do you carry that bag, girl, if there is nothing in it?
I could see her sari through it, so I decided she was holding a bag full of lemon yellow. That is everything she owned when they let us girls out.
I knew that second girl a bit. I was in the same room as her for two weeks one time, but I never talked with her. She did not speak one word of anyone’s English. That is why she just shrugged and held on tight to her bag of lemon yellow. So the girl on the phone, she pointed her eyes up at the ceiling, the same way the detention officer at his desk did.
Then the girl on the phone turned to the third girl in the queue and she said to her, Do
yu
know the name of dis place where we is at? But the third girl did not know either. She just stood there, and she was wearing a blue T-shirt and blue denim jeans and white Dunlop Green Flash trainers, and she just looked down at her own see-through bag, and her bag was full of letters and documents. There was so much paper in that bag, all crumpled and creased, she had to hold one hand under the bag to stop it all bursting out. Now, this third girl, I knew her a little bit too. She was not pretty and she was not a good talker either, but there is one more thing that can save you from being
sent home early.
This girl’s thing was, she had her story all written down and made official. There were rubber stamps at the end of her
story that said in red ink this is TRUE. I remember she told me her story once and it went something like,
the-men-came-and-they-
burned-my-village-
tied-my-girls-
raped-my-girls-
took-my-girls-
whipped-my-husband-
cut-my-breast-
I-ran-away-
through-the-bush-
found-a-ship-
crossed-the-sea-
and-then-they-put-me-in-here.
Or some such story like that. I got confused with all the stories in that detention center. All the girls’ stories started out,
the-men-came-and-they.
And all of the stories finished,
and-then-they-put-me-in-here.
All the stories were sad, but you and I have made our agreement concerning sad words. With this girl—girl three in the queue—her story had made her so sad that she did not know the name of the place where she was at and she did not want to know. The girl was not even curious.
So the girl with the telephone receiver, she asked her again.
What?
she said.
Yu no talk neither? How come yu not know the name dis place we at?
Then the third girl in the queue, she just pointed
her
eyes up at the ceiling, and so the girl with the telephone receiver pointed her own eyes up at the ceiling for a second time. I was thinking, Okay, now the detention officer has looked at the ceiling one time and girl three has looked at the ceiling one time and girl one has looked at the ceiling
two times,
so maybe there are some answers up on that ceiling after all. Maybe there is something very cheerful up there. Maybe there are stories written on the ceiling that go something like
the-men-came-and-they-
brought-us-colorful-dresses-
fetched-wood-for-the-fire-
told-some-crazy-jokes-
drank-beer-with-us-
chased-us-till-we-giggled-
stopped-the-mosquitoes-from-biting-
told-us-the-trick-for-catching-the-British-one-pound-coin-
turned-the-moon-into-cheese-
Oh, and then they put me in here.
I looked at the ceiling, but it was only white paint and fluorescent light tubes up there.
The girl on the telephone, she finally looked at me. So I said to her,
The name of this place is the Black Hill Immigration Removal Centre.
The girl stared at me.
Yu kiddin wid me,
she said.
What kine of a name is dat?
So I pointed at the little metal plate that was screwed on the wall above the telephone. The girl looked at it and then she looked back to me and she said, Sorry darlin, I can not
ridd
it. So I read it out to her, and I pointed to the words one at a time.
BLACK HILL IMMIGRATION REMOVAL CENTRE, HIGH EASTER, CHELMSFORD, ESSEX
. Thank you precious, the first girl said, and she lifted up the telephone receiver.
She said into the receiver: All right now listen mister, the place I is right now is called
Black Hill Immigration Removal.
Then she said, No, please,
wait.
Then she looked sad and she put the telephone receiver back down on the telephone. I said, What is wrong? The first girl sighed and she said, Taxi man say he no pick up from dis place. Then he say, You people are
scum.
You know dis word?
I said no, because I did not know for sure, so I took my
Collins Gem Pocket English Dictionary
out of my see-through bag and I looked up the word. I said to the first girl,
You are a film of impurities or vegetation that can form on the surface of a liquid.
She looked at me and I looked at her and we giggled because we did not understand what to do with the information. This was always my trouble when I was learning to speak your language. Every word can defend itself. Just when you go to grab it, it can split into two separate meanings so the understanding closes on empty air. I admire you
people. You are like sorcerers and you have made your language as safe as your money.
So me and the first girl in the telephone queue, we were giggling at each other, and I was holding my see-through bag and she was holding her see-through bag. There was one black eyebrow pencil and one pair of tweezers and three rings of dried pineapple in hers. The first girl saw me looking at her bag and she stopped giggling. What you starin at? she said. I said I did not know. She said, I know what you tinking. You tinking, Now the taxi no come for to pick me up, how far me going to get wid one eyebrow pencil an one tweezer an three pineapple slice? So I told her, Maybe you can use the eyebrow pencil to write a message that says HELP ME, and then you can give the pineapple slices to the first person who does. The girl looked at me like I was crazy in the head and she said to me: Okay darlin,
one,
I got no paper for to write no message on,
two,
I no know how to write, I only know how to draw on me eyebrows, an
tree,
me intend to eat that pineapple
meself.
And she made her eyes wide and stared at me.
While this was happening, the second girl in the queue, the girl with the lemon-yellow sari and the see-through bag full of yellow, she had become the first girl in the queue, because now she held the telephone receiver in her own hand. She was whispering into it in some language that sounded like butterflies drowning in honey. I tapped the girl on her shoulder, and pulled at her sari, and I said to her: Please, you must try to talk to them in
English.
The sari girl looked at me, and she stopped talking in her butterfly language. Very slowly and carefully, like she was remembering the words from a dream, she said into the telephone receiver: ENGLAND, YES PLEASE. YES PLEASE THANK YOU, I WANT GO TO ENGLAND.