Poetry Magazines - The best collection of poetry magazines online - Simon Armitage

       The playground this morning is unusually silent.  Nothing has happened to change its appearance since Friday - just three short days ago.  The tree tops still hang over the grey stone school building, but where the trees held the playground in protective embrace on Friday, today they loom threateningly over it.  The wind which on Friday blew down golden leaves and conkers still encased in their covers for children to delight in now bombards the playground with menacing missiles from which the children fearfully shelter.

       The mothers who on Friday chatted together in gaily attired groups now huddle together, pulling their winter coats around them, whispering as though afraid of what may come of speaking too loudly. Even the babies in their prams, being gently rocked to and fro, are not crowing as happily as they did on Friday, adding to the usual playground hubbub. Today they whimper mutedly, as though they too have heard and understood the dreadful news which has hushed the playground and frightened the mothers and children into this unusual silence.

       In the spot where she stood on Friday, as she did every school day since last summer, locked  in her misery and her loneliness, her spirit now lingers, with its arms wrapped around her ghostly children, holding them to her in permanent embrace.  And all around the playground is locked in the grey gloom of grief only half understood.

       The finger of death wags in my face, reminding me that it is too late for regret. Yet in all of us there is a need, in the face of such immense and sudden sadness, for reflection on what could have been. Whilst I wait with the other women for the bell to release me from my little charge, I find my attention riveted to her place and my memory calls her unbidden before me.

       I first saw her last summer when I came to drop my daughter at school.  She interested me, for she stood out amongst the chattering groups of mothers in the playground - big, silent, unsmiling and alone save for the sleeping infant in the pram and the little girl who hung onto her hand as all new children cling to their mothers.

       In the usual playground hubbub, she alone remained silent, alone, seemingly friendless. like most of the mothers she was pushing a pram with a baby or toddler in it and arrived or left with a school- going child clinging to the pram.  She was tall and thin but she moved clumsily, shuffling, shifting her weight awkwardly from one foot to the other like a much older or more heavily built woman. It seemed that pushing the pram took all the strength that she could muster, and yet she was so much bigger than I, and even I or any of the older children, could have pushed the pram with the sleeping infant in it, with ease.

       Her long dark hair hung partly over her face and down past her shoulders. It would have been beautiful if it were not lank and tired-looking.  Her face too would have been lovely but for two things. There was the pallor - was it the dirty air of the inner city, the dampness of the council block from which she emerged each morning and into which she disappeared each afternoon?  Was it lack of proper food, general poverty? And yet her little girl seemed happy and healthy enough.  But then again the children of immigrants and refugees, as almost all of us were, usually looked better fed and better cared-for than their parents. Perhaps partly because their parents' bodies reflected too keenly their physical need for the countries which they had been exiled from.

       And then there was that frown. She seemed to scowl sullenly at all around her, as if daring the world to touch her.  I couldn’t stand that frown.  It hurt to see one of us - refugees, immigrants, exiles - isolated and perhaps in need of support.  There was of course also my own need for a touch of warmth from her, the need of one exile for the sympathy and friendship of another - recognition from a fellow traveller in an alien world.

       I’m like that - the kind of person who greets all and sundry as I go along. It’s not that I have a particularly sunny disposition. It’s the desperation to fend off the loneliness, which despite husband and child and new friends, threatens to engulf me. The loneliness of exile from a
close-knit community which allowed a gregarious soul like mine to flourish. It’s the determination to try to recreate that here, amongst strangers made cold by what we’ve learned to call civilisation, the warmth of spirit I've known all my life, as I know many of my felIow exiles, refugees and immigrants have. I have a serious case of not wanting to let the bastards get us down.

       Her constant rebuffs of any attempt at friendliness hurt me deeply. I was not easily deterred.   I held the gate open for her, smiled at the little girl determinedly and even tried to lean over the pram to coo at the infant - which is not in my nature. I detest cooing at infants as much as I am sure they detest being cooed at. She acknowledged my greeting but otherwise steadfastly ignored me. Finally, even I gave up all attempts to befriend her.  And yet, she continued to fascinate me.

       I work at the local law centre as a volunteer. I was a qualified lawyer in my own country so they let me do fairly skilled work like taking client and witness statements and drafting documents. When they asked me last Friday to take a client’s preliminary statement  I didn’t recognise the name, because I never knew her name.  She was as startled to see me as I was to see her.

       I asked whether she needed an interpreter, but she refused, in English fast grown fluent under the yoke of necessity and now no more accented than my own. I explained to her what I was doing and then offered to get someone else to handle the case, if she felt that she did not want to reveal her private matters to me. She declined. She was happy to talk to me.  To my surprise, she said that this was because I came from a country as troubled as hers.  I was touched that she knew this much about me and by her confidence that this would enable me to understand her needs better. Here at last was her recognition of me as a fellow-traveller, and one who could help her.

       Her needs appeared quite simple at first. She indicated that she wanted to leave her husband and take the children with her. I explained the procedures for obtaining a divorce and custody of the children. But this wasn’t all that she wanted - she wanted to get  away from him entirely and to deny him any access at all to the children, or at least the little girl.  This worried me.  I feared that there was more to this than a simple divorce and so I inquired as to whether he had in any way injured her or the little girl and whether she wanted any action taken on any of those grounds.

       Her response was somewhat puzzling - from a legal point of view - in the light of the total separation which she had just asked for. She vehemently denied that he was in any way violent towards her or either of the children and insisted that he was an excellent father to the girl. Yet she did not want him to have access to the girl! How was a lawyer to ask a court to deny him access?

       I explained that, since he was a good father and had not in any way harmed the children, it was unlikely that any court would deny him access to his children. At this she shook her head from side to side and tears coursed down her cheeks. Then I could not help her, she said, for all she wanted was to hide herself and her children as far from him as possible. She had thought that perhaps there was a legal way of making him stay away from her and the children until she could find a place to hide. She stood up to leave, pushing the chair back blindly, so that it crashed against the filing cabinet in the cramped little office.

       I could not let her go like that. I held on to her arm and begged her to wait while I made the necessary arrangements to accompany her. We would talk further about the matter, I assured her, and perhaps find a way to solve her problem.

       I muttered something to the centre administrator about my companion being someone I knew who was a bit upset. I was taking her home, I said, and would not be back for the day. I received in return a querying look - we were not meant to get personally involved with the clients. I ignored the look and took Suraya - that was her name - to a cafe around the corner, where one could sit all day, undisturbed, over a couple of cups of tea.

       I didn’t really know what I could offer her - except our host country’s perennial solution for all problems - that cup of tea. A divorce and custody of the children was insufficient for her needs. No women’s shelter would take her without clear need.  Perhaps over the cup of tea we could sort something out, I thought.

       I was unprepared for what the warmth of the cafe and the tea brought forth. What had appeared for so long to be sullenness and even arrogant aloofness, now revealed itself as the dyke which she had built around herself to hold back the flood of suppressed anguish which she would not allow to overflow. Now over the chequered plastic tablecloth and the steaming teacups, all that sorrow spilled out.

       I was fully aware that in my country and in many other countries, including her own, her story would not be unusual. I think that what dismayed me about her history was that the pain of her experience appeared without end. For most of us the wounds heal eventually and while the scars of past experience itch sometimes, the pain they recall is dulled by distance and time. In her case, it seemed that the wound was still raw, despite distance and time, and would be so indefinitely.

       First she painted for me a picture which many of us refugees and exiles hold dear in our hearts - of our homes in idyllic times past, perhaps in the far distant past, which we hope desperately will come again. The story she told started as the recollection of a childhood and girlhood spent in sunshine and happiness, of a young womanhood of innocence and beauty, fulfilled by wifehood and motherhood as was the natural course of events in that area of her country where she grew up. In a voice filled with tears, she went on to disclose how this harmony was shattered by the clatter of guns, by the murder of entire families, including her own parents and siblings, by her being obliged to barter her body to her family’s murderers, in return for the lives of her husband and child.

       It was in this latter bargain with devils that the currently pending destruction of her last remaining family unit lay. The soldiers, she said, had beaten her husband very badly and were on the point of shooting him too, when she offered them her body in return for his life. They decided that more sport could be had from raping her, his wife, in front of him and letting him live with that torment. She had offered no resistance, for the soldiers had assured her that they would, in return, ensure that she, her husband and her daughter were allowed to escape to safety. The soldiers had dumped a bewildered little girl and the broken bodies of the two adults where an aid agency could find them and nurse their wounds and eventually assist them to a safe haven in this new country.

       Their bodily wounds had healed, she went on, but they carried with them forever the scars on their souls. He called her a whore, she said bitterly, because she had bought his life and the other life he held most dear - that of his daughter - at the expense of something which she could afford to lose far more than she could afford to lose them. Only we women knew, she said, looking at me as if entreating my agreement, that these mythical things called virtue and honour were cold companions compared to those we loved best.

       Their torment was extended, she said, because they carried with them the physical reminder of what the soldiers had done to her - her second child, born in this country shortly after their arrival. Her husband could not stand the child. He wanted her to give the little boy up for adoption. The child’s existence seemed to drive him mad. In his moments of wildest rage, he contended that not only had she been a willing partner in the soldiers’ sexual intercourse with her, but that her refusal to part from the boy was rooted in the pleasure that she had derived from their depravity.

       Now, she went on, he was threatening to remove the little girl from her care if she would not give up the infant boy. He would not let the girl be raised, he had told her, by a whore and in the company of the child of rapists and murderers.

       He was not a bad man, she said sadly. It was because he had loved her so much that he could not stand living with what had been done to her and with its constant reminder - this second child of hers. It was because his brain had been damaged by their experiences that  he was so cruel to her now, forcing her to choose between her two children. This he could not see, she said - that both children were hers, regardless of who had fathered them and in what circumstances.

       This brought her finally to her desperate visit to the Centre. She had thought that we had the means to hide her and her children from him, so that he could not take the girl from her. She did not think, she said, that she could live if either child were taken from her. They were all she had to live for now - they gave her life all the meaning it had, she told me.

       The cups of tea before us grew as cold as the tears on both her cheeks and mine. They were replaced several times by others which in their turn grew cold. The waitress seemed to somehow grasp that something was happening which required lots of her nation’s traditional solace for all sufferings and kept the stream flowing. Still, I had found no solution to Suraya’s problem by the time that we had to leave to fetch the children from school.

       There was no room in our tiny flat for three other people, except for the briefest stay, but I was toying with this idea in my head as we walked in silence towards the school. I would have to talk to my husband about it - he might even have better ideas.

       I left her when we reached the playground, with the promise that I would give the matter my fullest attention and do what I could. I gave her my number and asked her to call me at the weekend if she needed to talk again, or if she felt that matters were getting desperate. That was on Friday afternoon.

       I talked it over with my husband that night. He was able to call around and come up with a list of organisations which Suraya and 1 could contact on Monday, when I thought I would next see her, if she did not call me before then.  We were out on Saturday - did she call then?  I don’t know.  I did not have her number.  She had no phone. I could not call her to tell her what progress I had made. As it was, I never had occasion to use the list.
   
       The next time I saw her face was on the early evening news on Sunday. I usually don’t look at the TV when I’m ironing, but I turn it on to listen to the news. I remember that my husband was drying and brushing my daughter’s long hair in front of the gas fire. She was giggling at something he had said. Suddenly she stopped and pointed at the TV.  We all fell silent and stared at the pictures on the screen. The first two faces we knew, my little one and I - those of another little girl and an infant, recently taken. But the third photograph - that of a young mother who had that morning flung her children, the ones in the preceding photos, from the balcony of her tenth floor flat and had then leapt to her own death - neither of us recognised. It must have been an old photograph found in her flat. It showed a laughing, happy, healthy young girl standing in a sun filled garden, surrounded by flowers. Yet the name the presenter attached to her was that of the drained heartsick woman I had last seen on Friday in the cold grey of this soulless city.

       I am shaken finally from my recollections of her by the ringing of the bell. My daughter kisses me goodbye. I hold her for a moment longer. Then I let her go and she joins the children as they file silently into assembly, there no doubt to mourn collectively their lost playmate.

       We mothers stand silently in the spot where she usually stood. Some of us have brought flowers for her - fellow sufferer, fellow exile, fellow mother, fellow wife, fellow woman - and these we lay in the last place where we all saw her, her corner of the playground. Others will come to lay down teddies for the children, but now - now it is we women who wish to weep for one of our own.