The Orchard of Lost Souls (10 page)

Deqo rushes back to the kitchen, ashamed to be caught spying, and throws the blanket over her head; she balls up her hands and digs her nail into her flesh, angry that she has made Nasra angry.
She doesn’t cry but sits with her back to the wall feeling bereft. Nasra doesn’t come and eventually she hears the man leave through the back door. She spends another sleepless night in
the kitchen, her sense of safety breached, waiting for more giants to jump over the wall and appear right before her in the middle of the night, with guns, or knives, or with nothing but their
strong hands to squeeze the life out of her.

Deqo wakes late to footsteps all around her. The charcoal stove burns a few inches from her feet and Stalin kicks her leg to move her out of the way.

‘Deqo, get us some sugar from the shop,’ Nasra asks, as she fans the fire and takes a bundle of notes from her brassiere.

Picking up her
caday
from the mat, still bleary-eyed, Deqo stumbles out into the street, brushing her teeth while she walks. She is met by a cacophony of crowing cockerels, braying
donkeys resisting their harnesses, young boys play fighting in school uniforms, women shaking buckets of feed at their goats, and the drumbeat of adolescent girls beating carpets with sticks. She
stops to watch a cat suckle the kittens mewling around her and then continues onto the corner shop feeling content with her new place in the world.

In the camp it was as if each day brought a new threat – maybe a fire, or flooding, a new outbreak of illness, or someone would die inexplicably; life was just a tightrope to be walked
pigeon-toed. Deqo and Anab would imitate the German doctors in the camp by checking each other’s pulses, feeling their foreheads for fevers, and knocking sticks against their joints; they
made a joke of it but the fear of falling sick was always there. Of the children in the orphanage, five had already died, three from disease and two in a violent clash between different clans. She
remembers the tubes of reed matting they had been wrapped in before burial, the rolls so narrow and small they resembled cigarettes.

During the fighting that killed the two boys, the aid workers were sent away for a few days, and it had occurred to Deqo then that they belonged somewhere else, that this camp was just one of
many camps they had seen, that their real homes were far away, safe and rich. Nurse Doreen was the only one to stay behind. She was like a mule, tireless and uncomplaining; the harder it was in the
camp, the more excited she seemed. She had tried to describe her childhood in Ireland to Anab and Deqo; she had a pony, she said, and cows, and it rained nearly every day she could remember, and it
wasn’t the kind of rain people looked forward to here but a hard, cold, stinging one that made her grandmother’s bones ache. Deqo had liked playing with Nurse Doreen’s long,
grey-streaked hair as she spoke and imagining it the tail of her own horse; Nurse Doreen had liked Deqo to place her cool fingers on the red, burnt skin of her shoulders where it refused to go
brown like the rest of her arms. Nurse Doreen was good, was goodness; she gave that word meaning in a way few people did.

Deqo feels a pang of longing for the woman her life had once orbited around. She wonders how the
Guddi
will explain her disappearance to Nurse Doreen. They will probably just scratch
her name off the register and give no explanation; no one dares challenge them, least of all the aid workers who have to do what they are told by the armed policemen who bounce around the camp in
jeeps.

Just a few paces from the corrugated-tin store, Deqo’s attention turns away from the blue sky criss-crossed with vapour trails to the street, and the blur of flared jeans, afros and tight
shirts as dozens of young men and boys pelt past her. They are pursued by soldiers in various vehicles. As the street narrows the soldiers disembark and chase on foot, jumping on their quarry as
they scramble up walls and seek shelter in the rambling confusion of yards and alleyways. A young boy inside the store creeps out of the back of the structure and hides inside a derelict goat pen
nearby. It is like a huge, furious game of hide and seek that Deqo is excluded from, one reserved just for boys.

A lorry pulls up to block the far end of the street and some of the captives are led to it, heads bowed, arms twisted behind their backs. A woman bars the entrance of her bungalow with her body,
but two soldiers throw her out of the way and drag a boy out by his long hair. The woman trots behind, pleading for his release: ‘Let him go, he is all I have, he is too young for
conscription, let him go,
walaalo
.’

Deqo stands on the outskirts of this scene, enveloped by dust and holding her arms protectively over her chest; she is reminded of the slaughter of animals during
Eid
at the camp, when
nomads arrived with sheep and goats and sold them to the wealthier families, the animals separated violently, bellowing. She enters the empty store, takes a packet of sugar from a shelf and leaves
the money in its place before fleeing to Nasra’s house. The women are at the door when she reaches the bungalow; they peer up the street. Stalin has a smirk on her face but the others look
anxious.

‘It’s the second time this month. What do they want with all these kids?’ China shouts.

‘Cannibals, they want to eat the fruit of our wombs,’ replies Karl Marx.

‘Look at them run! Wasn’t that the bastard who threw a rock at my window? Not so tough now, is he?’

Nasra chews the corner of her headscarf and doesn’t join the conversation; she places a hand gently on Deqo’s back and leads her into the house.

Deqo stands in the gloom of the bathroom and shivers as cold water pours out of the bucket above her head.

‘Scrub your hair,’ demands Nasra.

Thick lather drops into her eyes and sits on her neck; the shampoo smells so good that Deqo keeps stopping to take deep inhalations.

‘You’ll look beautiful by the time I’ve finished with you.’

‘Where are the soldiers going to take those boys?’ Deqo asks with her eyes closed.

‘To the south, to train for the military.’ Nasra fills another bucket from the tap and throws it over Deqo.

‘Don’t they want to become soldiers?’

‘No! Why should they? This government isn’t on their side.’

‘But the President cares about us, he is our father.’

Nasra laughs. ‘Well, that is what the songs say, but I don’t think that is the truth. You learn that in Saba’ad?’

Deqo nods and shows off the dance that Milgo taught her, her feet squeaking against the wet floor.

‘Steady yourself, that dance won’t win you any friends here.’

Nasra slides her hand up and down Deqo’s bare back, washing away the last trail of lather.

Stalin appears and leans against the doorframe. ‘You have your work cut out with this
bedu
. Look at her chicken legs – and she’s not even circumcised!’

Deqo cups her hands around her privates; it had felt natural being bathed by Nasra, as if she was an older sister or mother, but the way Stalin looks at her makes her shrink. The woman’s
eyes pick her apart and seem to say, ‘Look at you, no one loved you enough to even circumcise you; you’re wild and dirty.’

‘You don’t have anywhere better to be, Stalin?’ Nasra says dismissively.

‘Not now, no. I’ve got a knife if you want me to cut it off, hey Deqo?’

Deqo edges away from her, her legs pressed tightly together.

‘You think you looked any better when you arrived? You were followed by fleas wherever you went. Get out of here!’ Nasra scatters water at her.

‘If you’re not careful, I will sell her from under your nose,’ Stalin retorts before retreating.

‘What did she mean by that?’ Deqo asks, her eyes to the ground.

‘Nothing, she’s just a fool and jealous that you’re better looking than her.’ She cups Deqo’s face and squeezes her cheeks playfully. ‘Don’t let her
bother you. I am your protector now and no one gets the better of me.’

Just as the curfew is about to bite, Deqo is stirring a lamb stew that Nasra has put on the stove when someone bangs at the main door.

‘Open it!’ shouts Nasra from her room.

Deqo finds Rabbit, the old drunk from the ditch, swaying on their doorstep. He pushes into the house and without looking at her makes a clumsy beeline for China’s room. ‘My darling,
habibti,
it is your friend here,’ he croons, beating his yellowed palm on the splintered wood.

‘Who told you to come here?’ China bellows, pushing the door open and shoving his shoulder.

‘My love, you have two things I want, let me have just one and I’ll be on my way.’

China reaches into the pockets of his grey trousers and pulls out the empty white lining. ‘Do I look like the Red Cross to you? I don’t service beggars or accept them in my
house.’

‘Just give me a swig of whisky, then.’ He holds out his hands and cocks his head to the side. ‘I was a good customer when I had money, you know I was. I might even be that dear
boy’s father.’

‘In your dreams.’ China grabs Rabbit’s padded shoulders and lifts him off his toes. ‘As if you have anything in you apart from disease and alcohol. You have nothing to do
with my child!’

Nasra enters the courtyard with a smile on her face and then Stalin and Karl Marx join the audience.

‘Beat the fool!’ shouts Stalin.

‘You still owe me a hundred shillings.’ Karl Marx bends down and takes the bartered shoes off the man’s feet. ‘I’m keeping these till I get my money.’

They are like cats with a mouse, Deqo thinks, batting him around for pleasure.

‘Ladies, I am a poor man, I give when I can. You should have mercy on me.’

‘This isn’t a place for mercy, you know that, Rabbit,’ Nasra says, winking conspiratorially at Deqo. ‘The world hasn’t done us any favours, why should we help
you?’

‘I’m not like the others, I have never hurt you. Don’t humiliate a helpless old man!’ He sounds pitiful, on the verge of tears.

Deqo giggles guiltily; it’s true he hadn’t hurt her, but it’s exciting to see him dangling in the air, being taught a lesson in respect by these women.

Stalin kicks him in the backside and then they all pounce on him.

‘Throw out the trash,’ they shout together.

While Deqo holds the door open, they each take a limb and carry him out, swinging his body a few times before slinging him into the street.

‘A curse on all your heads,’ he shouts as he hits the dirt with a thud. Deqo closes the door on him.

The women slap each other’s backs and seem more joyful than Deqo has seen them so far; it feels as if it is not just Rabbit that has been expelled, but some tension or cloud has been
lifted too. They laugh and laugh until they are bent over and weak.

‘Poor man!’ wheezes Karl Marx.

Deqo leans against Nasra and wraps her arms tentatively around her waist, beaming too.

Just as Deqo has become accustomed to the heavy drum of rain on the corrugated tin lullabying her to sleep, the rain season comes to an abrupt end. A whistling draught replaces
the leak of water from the rusted roof as
jiilaal
winds try their best to sneak into the bungalow. Nasra stuffs the holes with cloth when Deqo complains of the cold and leaves the stove
burning a little later into the evening. The shrieking wind reminds Deqo of the hardships the
jiilaal
would bring to Saba’ad: red, infected eyes from the grit, old people perishing
from the night chill, fights between the refugees over water. It was a time of forbearance and endless waiting. The only good thing it brought was deep, cloudless skies. She remembers clambering up
the barred window onto the flat roof of the orphanage with Anab and watching the camp settle into sleep. If there was enough moonlight they could see pale mountains in the distance and beneath them
a swathe of the camp. Everything crisp and clean, the sky blue-black and the stars like a thousand kind eyes watching over the forgotten people, smoke from cooking fires spiralling up like prayers.
She feels a pang for that view, for that moment in life when Anab was beside her and the world they knew was calm and peaceful; there is no way to reclaim it even if she returns to
Saba’ad.

The routines of the house have become familiar to Deqo and she knows which customer is for which woman: the younger, smartly dressed men go to Nasra, the middle-aged husbands hiding their faces
behind sunglasses to Stalin, the drunks and gangster types to China, and the humble workers to Karl Marx. Nasra complains that there are only one or two customers willing to brave the curfew most
nights and they are China’s type rather than hers. Once upon a time they had journalists, and businessmen with dollars in their pockets, she said, rather than hawkers, drunkards and
criminals.

The last night of the year arrives and the only male voices to be heard in the house are from the radios; it is too cold, dark and blustery for even the drunks. The evening passes glumly with
Deqo sitting on Nasra’s bed, watching her rearrange the room; she moves the furniture from one place to another and throws out many of her possessions because she claims to be bored with
them. She leaves the pile in the hallway for Deqo to pick over and then throws herself face down on the bed.

‘What I wouldn’t do to leave this place!’ she says, squeezing a pink cushion into her eyes.

Deqo lightly strokes the back of her hair.

‘Who would have said my life would come to this? I’m clever, you know. I’m not a drunk like China or illiterate like Karl Marx. I could have been someone. Once you do this
it’s like you can never get out, never be anything else. I go outside and people look at me as if I’m a ghost walking around in the daytime.’

‘Is that why you don’t leave the bungalow much?’

‘That and I feel as if I have nothing left out there. Why am I even telling you this?’ She drops her head onto the quilt and then brings it up again. ‘I don’t feel like a
real person. I have no family, no friends, no husband, no children. Every day I open my eyes and wonder why I should bother getting up, or eating, or earning another shilling. No one would miss me,
in fact my mother would be happy to hear that I have died, she would clap her hands and say that her shame has been lifted.’