Those Days and Nights Again

By Susannah Rickards

Alpine Fellowship 2022 – Writing Prize Honourable Mention

Those Days and Nights Again

Joseph’s sponsor, Hester, has landed a television role. A car comes at 5am to take her to the studio. Its engine wakes him, as does Hester, tiptoeing around her living-room where he sleeps on the sofa-bed, whispering upbeat apologies as she locates what she forgot to pack in her bag the night before. He doesn’t mind. The door’s thud, clicking lock and her footsteps down from attic flat to pavement – these sounds soothe him. He’s barely been alone since he reached England.

He moves to the window. Already her car is gone. Opposite, a concrete block squats in the grey, rising light. Only a few decades old, but soon to be pulled down, Hester said. Nothing structurally wrong, just an eyesore in an area on the up. The land’s worth more. There are plans for a horseshoe of townhouses with a park between. Council housing’s dying out in England, meaning Joseph, as a single man with a sponsor, asylum notwithstanding, has less chance than Sweet Fanny Adams of being offered his own flat.  He barely understands Hester half the time. Her language is littered with cultural codes. He asked, ‘You mean I’m stuck with you?’ and she laughed, gleeful that he was finally comfortable enough to insult her.

The flats are boarded with metal grilles and yet there’s movement now on the floor eye-level with him. He squints into the gloom. A figure appears on the walkway, holding a bulky package. It moves rapidly, disappearing into the stairwell, and emerges onto the deserted forecourt where it lays the package down, pats it, then sprints back up the steps. He watches it enter the flat and exit immediately, hugging another package. Same journey, same pat and sprint.

His phone rings.

‘Jojo,’ says Hester. ‘I forgot to take the meat from the freezer for tonight. Would you? Happy twytting!’

Twytting is Hester’s acronym for Teach While You Train, his employment scheme. ‘Twyts insufferable again today?’ she asks, theatrically wry, when he comes home bewildered and furious at his supervision feedback following a practise lesson. He’s a teacher of seventeen years good standing in Eritrea. But here? You can’t talk at the class for an hour, he’s told. They won’t focus. You must engage them. Why can’t they focus? he rages inside. Don’t they come to school well-shod, with thick coats against the cold, slurping from glittering packets and cans? Have they no gratitude for heated classrooms, lavish canteens, their birthright in this pampered land?

His own pupils walked miles on empty stomachs. His windows were clouded with faces pressing in from outside, standing on shoulders to reach the glass so they could glean fragments of algebra. The Mission nuns considered him lenient for overlooking this.

 Another thing: he shouldn’t thump the desk or threaten corporal punishment. This will lose him his job. They discuss an anger-management package. His co-trainee, a burnt-out banker who ‘wanted to give back’, is jacking it in already. ‘Gibbons on caffeine,’ he says of the pupils. ‘Your lot have the right idea, Joe. Eyes forward, cane above the blackboard.’

Joseph stretches, stiff with cold. It’s too early for Hester’s heating to kick in. March winds seep through the elderly window-frames to his marrow. He knows he must shower then twyt, but his body feels like unfired clay. He goes to the kitchen, takes Hester’s lamb from the freezer.  When he returns to the window, the bundles and figure have gone.

Next morning, he watches again. The figure emerges. Same rigmarole. Only –

            He leans forward. Blinks. The package on the ground just twitched.

The figure runs back up the stairwell. The package spasms again. The figure returns. Its hood slips as it speeds across the forecourt, revealing a top-knot of hair. A girl. The second package is laid down and this squirms too. Babies. She’s laying out babies on the frozen ground.

‘Jesus Christ Almighty,’ he says. Not blasphemy. A prayer.

By the time he’s dressed and down three flights, the girl’s under a streetlamp with a battered pram. She startles as his front door opens. For a moment their eyes catch, then like prey she pelts off, bent against the weight of the pram.

He shouldn’t follow. Good men don’t follow girls and he was once a good man. But he’s prey too. And besides, they’ve more in common than that. This discovery fizzes through him. He saw it. The spectral, mustard mist that swamps her. He knows that particular aura, has identified it before: in Eritrea, on his journey, but never in England. She is bird-boned, young, looks English. But it’s saddled her. And he wants to know why.

            She’s across Hackney Road when he spots her again. The pram wheels clack on ancient cobbles and she struggles to keep momentum. He’s almost upon her when she turns onto the towpath, picking up speed along the black rod of the canal. Joseph’s heart and mind are bouncing. She might steer into the water. Hester said it’s not as deep as it looks, but still: he cannot swim.

The girl, her pram-load and her mustard mist veer like drunkards along the towpath. After a few hundred metres, she stops beside an entrance to the park. She pushes against its padlock and chain, kicks the gate and howls. The babies join in, a chorus of wounded cats. She sinks to the ground. Long nettles brush against her face and she bats them away, still yowling.

The path rises to meet the park gate, so now she’s let go, the pram rolls back towards the water, fast enough for Joseph to justify sprinting towards her. He catches it and steadies its awkward weight. She’s on the ground, ranting to herself, ‘I jus’ need park. Go roundroundround. Why don’ they open? S’day. Day now. Been day for bloody hoursnhoursn–’ The babies add metallic, high-pitched drones.

He waits until her lament burns itself out.

‘Hello. I’m Joseph. We’re neighbours.’

            She nods, indifferent. The mist coils, serpent-like, around her, fuelling a powerful, loyal anger in him.

            ‘What’s your name?’ he asks.

            ‘I, ah…’ She shakes her head, sniggers quietly, ashamed. ‘I can’t –’

‘You can’t remember,’ he says kindly. Her faltering is no surprise to him. He crouches now, one foot under the pram’s back wheel to brake, as he lays a hand on her arm. He’d love to cradle her but etiquette forbids such kindnesses. Instead, he asks a question, the answer to which her mustard mist already shared with him.

            ‘When did you last sleep?’

The girl’s name is Callie, he learns later from Norene-who-runs-the-paper-shop. The twins were premature. Tubes in their noses for feeding and that. Dear little things. Dad’s a barman down Whitechapel Road. Different fling every Saturday. Callie’s just one. Shame, really. Bright girl. Psychology at Sussex or somewhere. Gave up, anyway, once it was twins. Cal’s mum lives in Marbella now but Joseph shouldn’t worry. They’re rehousing Cal. Lovely new block out Leyton way, almost built. If she’d wanted freedom not motherhood, she could’ve kept her legs crossed. Girls managed in Norene’s day.

A week later, March has deteriorated. Sleet furs the windscreen of Hester’s Citroen as Joseph drives back from twytting in Newham. The car is on semi-permanent loan because Hester says public transport evaporates once you’re east of Bethnal Green. He’s grateful not to be lugging sixty schoolbooks, fifty-eight of them not worth marking. ‘Forgot sir.’ ‘Stressed out, sir.’ ‘Whaaah? You never gave us homework, you wannabe clearer, sir. Get on message.’

            He’s turning onto Victoria Park Road when he sees Callie on the outer circuit path, head down against the sleet, thin legs robotic. He parks, opens the door and calls her name. She doesn’t hear, so he runs to the nearest gate and meets her.

            ‘Callie! Joseph.’  Sleet catches in his throat, makes him breathless. She only looks up when he blocks her path. He gestures to the sky. ‘Can I give you a lift home?’

            She stares, trying to place him. ‘I’m fine.’ Her voice, like her legs, robotic.

But he plants his hands on the front of the pram. Beneath the transparent plastic, her babies are swathed in layers and hats, tiny tubes, as Norene said, taped to their noses.

            ‘You’re not fine.’

            ‘Oh.’ Her jaw slackens. He’s exposed a secret she believed she was protecting. Now it’s out, she buckles.

            ‘You must sleep. You never sleep.’

‘No.’ Her eyes flit, cornered.

‘I recognise the signs.’ His chest cramps at this confession.

‘I can’t,’ she blurts. ‘I don’t dare. They need –. In the night. They don’t breathe. One’s asleep, other’s awake. All night long. And they puke. In the day. They could choke. If I –. There’s only me.’

            ‘I’ll walk them. Look, my car is there.’ He points as he holds out the keys. ‘Go, sleep on the back seat. I–’ his tongue is thick in his mouth as he tries out his next line. ‘I can care for children. I had two. A wife.’ He can’t say more. He can only stand trembling in this wretched sleet.

            Callie points a grimy glove at him. ‘You live above Norene’s?’

            ‘I do.’

            ‘K… Thanks.’ She snatches the keys from him, stumbling over the slippery grass towards the gate.

            He takes her place, already unable to feel his own feet, his hands, his face. Only the shifting grey-white landscape proves to him he’s moving. This is the dull end of the park, no fountains here, or lake. Ahead, just a flat expanse.

‘Make your way to the gate. We’re closing.’ A man on a golf-buggy rounds him up. Joseph has barely gone two hundred metres. Even this tiny mission of mercy is thwarted. Nothing will absolve him. Nothing ever could.

            Back at the car, he’s grateful to find Callie nested among balding velvet cushions and drapes from Hester’s last theatre tour.  He opens the passenger door and tucks both babies inside, leaving the empty pram on the pavement, then sits beside them, willing them not to squawk. The babies’ cheeks are speckled with an orange rash but their eyes are tight, chests heaving rhythmically. Alive, asleep.

He watches his own breath clouding. He could mark homework, perhaps. There are two book-stuffed bags-for-life in the footwell. The sleet thickens to snow, pearling the windscreen. Whiteout.  His rosewood desk, set on its podium in front of the class, rises before him, polished with lemon oil by Sister Asuma, a set of red bibles, pride of the Mission, stacked ready to be handed out to class. Screams interrupt his lesson from the schoolyard. Daylight breaks through as faces fall from the windows. A rifle’s arc sends bibles from desk and him from his chair. The world uptilts as bayonets slice through his map of the world, posters of multiplication tables, Jesus sermonizing on the Mount.

            They had him for days, nights, he doesn’t know. There were no days or nights, just Amazing Grace blaring round his cell until his ears bled. Made to stand upright for days, nights, until angels appeared, grinning at him, lice crawling on their teeth. He watched his soil bucket grow bark and become a tree he could climb to escape via a hole in the roof where professors leaned in, eager to discuss a point of theology with him, then shrink to buckethood again, the roof sealing up with professorial chuckles. The soles of his feet aflame, his body racked, sour at every pore, as questions speared him, hot on the heels of sweet promises of sleep, until he cried out, ‘Suli Solomon,’ and everything he knew about his friend. Every sacred, honoured secret.

            And the worst? He knows he would betray Suli again. Do it sooner. Nothing could induce him to endure those days and nights again.

            ‘You’re lucky,’ a voice floats to him. ‘I envy you.’

            Callie is awake; he’s been thinking aloud. In the rear-view mirror, she sits up, rubbing her eyes, adjusting her velvet drapes.

‘At least you could hate your tormentors,’ she says. ‘I have to love mine.’  She leans forward, smelling of wet wool and theatre dust, to inspect her babies. They twitch at her voice and pucker their faces, whimpering.

 She sighs sleepily. ‘I feel amazing. How long was I out?’

            ‘About an hour.’

            ‘I see badgers,’ she says. ‘They run, crazed, around the walls of my flat. I have to blink them away. Sometimes I’m stirring soup and it turns into a can of turquoise paint. Just have to keep stirring until soup returns. And a Masai warrior stands by my bed. He’s OK, actually. It’s nice to have another adult around.’

            They are silent for a moment. Outside, a car passes, tyres hissing on the slush.

‘I betrayed my friend and you envy me?’ The words come out, pure as silent breath. He’s surprised to find no anger in them. No self-pity, self-hate. A temporary reprieve, he’s sure, but a blessing nonetheless.

She shrugs. One of the babies builds up to a howl. ‘Pass her to me,’ Callie says.

He lifts the baby, light as a paper cut-out, nothing like his own sturdy offspring, and posts her through the gap between headrests. Callie tucks her in to feed.

‘She never really eats, this one. We just pretend. Most days I think she isn’t mine. She’s an alien implant.’ Callie makes a tiny noise that could be a cough or a laugh or a sob. He glances at her. ‘I’ve never told anyone that,’ she says.

‘Do you think it right now?’ he asks.

‘Not now. I’ve slept.’

‘OK.’

In a moment, he will get out of the car and tie the pram to the tow-bar since it’s too big to fit in the back. He’ll hand the other baby to Callie and she’ll hold them illegally – no safety restraints – as they crawl home to Bethnal Green. She’ll ask about his wife, and he’ll tell her. Njeli was killed. His children too. He was saved because he was in prison being tortured for information about Suli’s political meetings, which he gave eventually and would give sooner if it happened again. Underneath the lifelong Good Man pride he’d fostered was this shoddy little soul. All so he might start again in this liberal land of sleet and idle, unpunishable pupils.

He will take Callie home and carry her babies up her stairwell so she no longer has to abandon them on condemned ground. And sometime soon they’ll come back to Victoria Park. The season will turn. Hester will land another role and move to Prague to film it, leaving Joseph to flat-sit.  He’ll learn their names, Chloe, Phoebe. Callie will spread Hester’s old cape on the grass and she’ll sleep and sleep and sleep until the sulphurous mist subsides and Chloe is no longer of alien born, as Joseph walks and walks and walks this stranger’s frantic children in the open air around perimeter footways and towpaths that are not his own.            

About the author:

Susannah Rickards

Susannah Rickards is a UK author from the North East of England, now living in Surrey. Her short stories Hot Kitchen Snow (Salt, 2010) won the international Scott Prize for best debut collection. Individual stories have won and placed in in literary awards including BBC Opening Lines, Commonwealth Broadcasting, HG Wells, Conan Doyle, Society of Authors Tom Gallon and International Pen.

Her work has been broadcast on BBC radio, appeared in The Independent newspaper, and been anthologised and published in literary journals in UK, USA and Canada. Recent stories towards a new collection have been short and longlisted for the Mogford Prize, Bath flash and short fiction awards and Bridport. Some of her current work is published in Carve Honest Fiction USA, The Forge, Gramarye and via Short Editions story dispensers on the Paris Metro and London Underground. She teaches Creative Non-Fiction, Fiction and The Short Story for Oxford University’s Department of Continuing Education.