The Inbetween People by Emma McEvoy Page A

silent. She doesn’t plead with me anymore, doesn’t look at me; she stares at the ground, the dust that has piled up, from people walking in and out, bringing the smell of autumn to this sterile place, for dust has a scent, I realise then. She moves her toes around in the dust making swirling shapes on the floor. She raises her eyes. I watch Zaki smoking and she watches him too until he is exactly halfway through it, then she turns back to me, but still she doesn’t speak.
    We regard each other, and there is a light of recognition in her eyes, something like the last gleam of a match before the flame is snuffed out. For a moment she recognises me completely, knows me, and a part of me that I don’t want to recognise reaches out to that part; but then life goes out of her visibly, absolutely, so that she lets out a gasp, a deep breath, swallowed far into her lungs, and expels it in one go. She turns and walks away—I don’t call after her and she doesn’t look back.
    I stand up, I want to call after her, but the words don’t come; I have to tell her something, a promise, an amount of how much I can give, I try to estimate that, but my mind is empty. I want to tell her about the dead, how they come back, how they always come back. I look at Zaki’s cigarette, it’s burnt down now, but he hasn’t stubbed it out, it’s between his fingers and his hand is halfway to his open mouth. He is watching the doorway. I watch the doorway too, long after she has vanished, so that the shadow it throws across the floor grows longer, the whispered conversations around me become less urgent, tired. I smoke too, and Zaki takes another one, and then eventually he begins to bring the other prisoners back to their cells, leaving me to watch the empty doorway.

    M Y MOTHER sent me a present for my tenth birthday. It is an important birthday, she wrote, you are now a decade old. I read the card first, it arrived three days before my birthday. I didn’t open the present until the morning of my birthday. Father granted me permission to open it but I couldn’t bring myself to tear open the paper she had touched. I imagined her wrapping it, her tongue against her lip as she concentrated on folding the paper around the present, the cool scent of her perfume, the sound of her other children squabbling in the background.
    I opened it carefully, peeling away the layers of paper, my nails scraping against the tape, until eventually an oval snow globe fell out into my hands. There was a girl inside, a blonde girl with pink Wellington boots and anxious eyes, clutching the hand of a fat toddler in a red woolly hat and green coat. I stood with it in my hands, and Father stood behind me, and we both looked at it for a time, until eventually he found the words.
    Shake it, he said, give it a shake.
    I shook it and the snow began to fall around them, so that the two figures seemed to stand closer together. I watched them for a long time, shaking the globe sometimes, and then the snow would fall again. They stood in front of an old stone house that looked like a castle. My mother had two other children then, a boy and a girl, and it seemed to me on that day, my tenth birthday, that those were the children in the snow globe. When I imagined them and their life in Holland, it was those children I saw, it was that stone house they lived in; and they played in the snow, threw snowballs at each other, wrapped themselves in the immensity of that coldness, before returning to the warm house, the fireplace, warm toast with melted butter, thick vegetable soup, while I swam in the warm sea.
    Sometimes I would take the snow globe, shake it hard and watch the snow falling on the frozen figures inside and stare at them, standing as they did in their frozen wintry world where summer never came, even when the white summer sky of my country burnt beyond them. I came to believe absolutely that they were indeed my mother’s children, her northern children, different from