Jo Cannon - Nasma's Malady

From time to time something happens to me. There’s a thinning, a delicate disruption, where my skin touches air. Boundaries blur until I no longer know where I end and other people begin. My mind is capsized by the thoughts of others. Crowds confuse me because truly, I can’t hear myself think. This feeling may vanish after a few seconds or last all day.

It wasn’t always so. Like the menopause, these bouts began because it was time. At first I mistook the hot slide on my skin as illness. But I knew something had changed when the radio by the bed began to broadcast news I could feel. A flaw from outside had entered me. Listening to reports of a plane crash, I feel myself fall from the sky. Suicide bombs come nearer until they explode inside my chest. The anguish of dying mothers and lost children overwhelms me. During these times I can’t distance myself from suffering. Like a landslide, it buries me.

Outside I feel better – I can breathe. Night falls early at this time of year but I’m never frightened. A middle-aged woman in a shabby coat attracts no attention in a city. And nothing can happen that hasn’t already happened. Nothing can be taken I haven’t already lost.

I know the shape of every hour that passes on these streets. In January by five o’clock children have returned from school and most people are bolted inside their houses. Shutters blind the shop windows. The health centre remains open but patients in the waiting room are uneasy. They’d rather be home, away from the darkness. They shuffle their problems – headaches that come and go, breathing difficulties – so the doctor will understand. When I pass the surgery other people’s symptoms jangle in my head.

By seven o’clock there’s a different feeling on the street, a change of air. Shadows thicken beyond pools of streetlight. Boys too old for play-stations clutter the off-license door. Sharper, denser shapes slide around them: teenage gangs. Voices suspended in mist erupt suddenly in laughter or glassy fury. I slip past quickly and they barely notice me. A hum, a tension, passes across my shoulders and down my arms. For a second I feel their hostility and longing. Then I pull free and only the wind blows through me.

At eight the doctor leaves the surgery, rolling a shutter down over the door. All day his liturgy of duties wards off sadness. Now as I pass unseen, his troubled thoughts open inside me like flowers. He believes his wife no longer loves him; perhaps she’ll leave. Her eyes meet his with a new, calm withholding of expression. He knows the man, pictures them together. Suddenly it’s too much. His wife, the procession of anguished stories he hears – how can he contain it? All day he talks to people washed up from anywhere. Questions he can’t ask hang like bubbles in air.

Why are you here? What happened to you?

Instead he says, ‘What sort of pain? How do you sleep at night?’

Sometimes I consult him. When I described my malady he listened. He’s a good man; he tries, but has heard nothing like it.

He said, ‘Nasma, women of your age. Your life has been difficult, sometimes the mind play tricks. You don’t get enough sleep. I’m worried about you.’

Some nights I sleep, but fever wakes me. I crawl onto Amos like a raft. His arms encircle me reflexly; his penis stirs slightly in his sleep. I want to melt into the surface of his skin. But the attacks are too strong. I feel sadness not my own, whispering voices. I have to get out.

Our terraced house opens onto the street. Outside the front door is a gutted car. I’ve lived here eight years but know my neighbours only by sight. Many of the original elderly inhabitants have died. I recognise a pattern. An old person stops going out; the district nurse and doctor visit for a few months. The house is suddenly empty, then re-occupied. A hurricane sweeps up people from all over the world and drops them on Popple Street. It’s as good as anywhere. Scattered like salt, we don’t understand each other. Our half-greetings are wary.

Nobody asks, ‘Why are you here? What happened to you?’

We wait for something to happen. For life to regain meaning, or for hope enough to invent it.

This condition of mine is recent, no more than a year old. I’ve yet to discover whether it’s infirmity or power. When I arrived in this country I was ordinary, defenceless. Less than that: nothing. At the immigration desk I rolled up my sleeves to show my arms and hands. Not my flesh – surely someone else’s? The uniformed woman was shocked. Her eyes flicked up to mine as I was led away. A doctor examined me, then a lawyer. Not everyone is given shelter. I’m grateful, I don’t forget.

For years I couldn’t believe my luck. I was safe; those men with mouths twisted like wire couldn’t reach me. I believed I’d got away. And if I waited long enough Hasim would escape too. The hurricane would fling him down in Popple Street. It had to be true. He was with me all the time, even in dreams. In my thoughts I talked to him constantly, referred everything to him. If I flirted a little with someone, I imagined him jealous. I went to college, worked hard to learn English. Looking back, I can’t believe I was so optimistic. Elated even – I was a little mad. Sometimes I glimpsed the prison: a dark corner; a tail of anger that disappeared into somebody’s eye; shouts on the street. And in nightmares, so I learned not to sleep. My body and face became softer, middle-aged. I didn’t mind; it was safer that way. Hasim would recognise me.

For a while my old life – as teacher, rich woman and Hasim’s wife – felt like a dream. My memories, of conversations mostly, were surreal. I used to be garrulous; friends and colleagues laughed because I never shut up. Hasim and I talked all the time. Here, closed on myself like a folding chair, I rarely speak. When my English was good enough I found a job on a supermarket till. Nobody asked where I came from or why I was here. I couldn’t believe people with access to so much information could be so ignorant. I met Amos stacking boxes in the storeroom. But my spurious confidence was beginning to slip. The memories I evaded had caught up and would soon overtake me. I began to see things, delicate as a hair on a lens, in shadows and at night. Then all at once it was upon me. Heart racing, sweating, flooded by fear, I remembered everything. Had I really forgotten? Again and again, in scarlet explosions, those men came back to claim me.

And like damp through a wall came the cold, seeping certainty that Hasim was dead.

I clung to Amos then. Huge and slow moving, he asks little of me. He walks as if on crumbling ground, one careful step at a time. His English is poor and we’ve no words to bind us. He traces my scars with his fingers, but says nothing. His back is deeply gouged by knife or machete. Why are you here? What happened to you? I’ve never asked. His massive male aura surrounds me, fills doorways, blocks light from windows like a sandbag. Amos would stop them. He would protect me.

Hasim’s wrists were thin like mine. He wept as they pushed us into different cars.

Amos whimpers in his sleep but I never wake him. I don’t want nightmares to leach into his day. When headlights sweep the window or there’s sudden noise outside, sweat pours from him and I smell Africa on his skin. I watch over him, this stranger, uncertain who’s stronger. When I return from my night walks he’s awake, waiting, fearful as a child. I let his body engulf mine. We’ve no other way to comfort each other.

My life now is a book bent back along its spine. Two broken halves. Every moment two moments: before and after my arrest. I’m not a brave woman. I gave them everything, did what they said, told all I knew. When they’d taken all I had, they let me go and I boarded a plane. But I brought the prison with me. Many times an hour I’m there. Triggered by a colour, a smell, a movement: cascades of connecting images I’ve learned to step round. The present is lost – a pause, a missed heartbeat – as I keep the days going. And always I’m vigilant. I never sleep long.

Midnight. As I open the front door streetlight pours into the hall, sudden and scouring. The turbulence inside me is cold as the skin of frost on the pavement. I pass emaciated boys, their drugged eyes flat as ironed sheets. At the hospital gates I turn and walk back past the mosque. Later there’ll be the call to prayer. Elderly men will leave their houses in traditional dress and flimsy footwear. Few believe they’ll stay long enough in this cold country to make use of a stout pair of shoes. Or accept, even after thirty years, that a temporary situation has become permanent.

I’ll stay until Hasim comes. Where else in this big cooling world could he find me? If I walk far enough and check every face I’ll recover him: my darling, my true love. Eight years have passed since the police took him away, but I’ll know him. I spot him sometimes in a retreating back or turned head. Once outside the mosque in traditional dress. My atheist husband, I had to smile: are you really so changed? But close up just a boy, not like my Hasim at all.

One o’clock. I’m tired now, sick with the thoughts of others. Seeking solace, meaning, in other minds, I find only tracks in snow that loop and vanish. I don’t know the reason for this malady, or the good of it. One day it will become clear. But now I must hurry home. Amos needs me. He can’t be left alone too long.