One of Us by Iain Rowan

looking out of the window as if she was watching something out there that she did not want to lose sight of. She wore a coat that looked as if it would have a very expensive label inside it, a pair of tight jeans, trainers that were very white. Her hair was dark, and pulled back into a simple pony tail held with a glittery band, like a child would wear. I could tell by the way that she was standing that she was in pain. She held herself with the delicate stillness that you use when any movement at all hurts.
    “Hello,” I said. “I am Anna.”
    She didn’t turn round. She dragged on her cigarette. Blew the smoke at the glass in front of her.
    I stood there, waiting for her.
    She stared out at the roofs of the houses opposite. I did not know what she saw, but it was not what was there. I waited.
    “So,” she said in the end, stubbing her cigarette out on the windowsill. “You going to get on with what he’s paid you to do?”
    “He doesn’t pay me.”
    She laughed, but there was no humour in it. “Yes, he does. Somehow. Or you would not be here.” The woman was a foreigner here too, I could hear it in her words. Her voice made me think of home. She turned from the window, and sat down on the bed. But still she did not look at me.
    I picked up my bag, dragged the chair from the wall across to the bed, and sat down on the edge of it. I had learnt that if you sat in the middle it sank down towards the floor as if it was trying to eat you. “Where are you hurt?”
    She ignored me, focusing on the cigarette in one hand, the lighter in the other, trying to make one meet the other when both were shaking. She got there in the end, took a long drag, and blew the smoke out towards her lap. Then she looked up at me.
    “Only on the outside.”
    “OK,” I said. “Then let’s have a look at the outside.”
    For a moment she hesitated, and her brittle shell cracked and I saw the girl beneath. Then the mask was back. She looked at me.
    “You’re not British. You’re foreign, like me. A long way from home.”
    “That’s right,” I said. I did not want to commit to any more. I did not want to talk about my home. I could not place her, did not want to get caught up in any of the eternal rivalries of the region. But she wasn’t interested in where I came from, only interested in the fact that I did not come from here.
    “You like it here?”
    I shrugged. She nodded. We both understood. It was nothing against the country. Just the fact that we both worked for Corgan meant that we were part of the country beneath the country. And that was a different place.
    “I could live here,” she said. “Some day. Live like one of them. I am saving up what I can and one day I will have enough to leave all of this. One day. I will move to Canada, to Vancouver. One day.”
    And what if he doesn’t want to let you go, I thought. But I did not say it.
    “I have a boy,” she said. “Back home. He is with my sister now, but one day, when I am settled and have a new life he will come with me to Canada.”
    “How old is he?” I asked.
    “Three,” she said, and she stared past me into the distance, through the dusty flowers on the wallpaper, through the damp plaster and the crumbling brick and out, across the land and over the cold grey of the sea and then on to land again, where she saw him, playing with some toy cars. Or maybe sleeping, his face so still and peaceful. “Three,” she said again, and then she looked down at the floor and smoked furiously at her cigarette until it was all gone.
    I sat and waited, and thought of my family, and said nothing.
    “I want drugs,” she said in the end, and she unzipped her coat, and shrugged it off. “For the pain. You are no doctor if you do not give me drugs for the pain.”
    “I will see,” I said. “First show me where you are hurt.”
    She laughed, and pulled her t-shirt over her head, without any embarrassment, but with an intake of breath as if I had kicked her. She was not