“Hello, Mrs?”
“Please call me Juliet. I am here about my house boy.”
“Your house boy?”
“No, actually my friend. He was taken by the police to a detention centre. I want to help him. I thought that you might be told where they are taking him. His name is Aaman, two A’s at the beginning.”
“Oh dear, oh dear, you have lost your friend. A great shame, a great shame. He will be lost now in the Greek system. If only you had come sooner.”
“I didn’t need to come sooner if he wasn’t detained!”
“No, but if you are his friend, as you say you are, then coming sooner we could have got him papers maybe. If you were willing to employ him full time, we could have got him a blue card, a work permit. And maybe, depending on how much of a friend he was, for a little money, a passport.” He licks his lips until they glisten before he smiles. “Such a shame. Such a shame. Would you like some tea?”
Chapter 14
The lane is flooded. The water seeps from under the gravel of Juliet’s drive and runs toward the village. Juliet unlocks the gate in haste to find one of the watering connections for the garden has popped apart, the timed water no longer reaching its intended destination.
The beans look all but dead. Juliet lifts a sad leaf and lets it flop. She crouches to the seedlings. They have shrivelled to nothing, and some of the flowers have slug holes in their leaves, flowers gone. The lettuces have melted. Juliet drops her bag by the seedlings and scrabbles in the dry soil for the water connector and pushes it home. She stands and stretches her back. The vegetables need weeding. The grass needs cutting. The edges by the wall need trimming. The vines need a pergola. There are no tools poised for action. No trowel waiting in a flowerbed. No lawn mower momentarily left halfway to the lawn. The garden looks back at her blankly.
A glass of wine and a cold tin of beans. She forks the beans straight from the tin and balances her wine on the back windowsill. Her stomach fills, the wine relaxes her but does nothing to relieve her emptiness. Just since she left, the garden is full of weeds and budding trees, the late April rain and damp giving the wilder side of nature an adrenaline shot. But her tender vegetable plot has suffered from the lack of care and regular watering.
To Juliet, the garden looks bare. Her body is glad her travels are over. She sits slouched, bottom on an upturned paint bucket, legs stretched out before her.
Too tired to move, she drops the can of half-finished beans on the floor beside her. They land on a stone and balance. She pulls her high ponytail free and rests her head back against the wall. The bean can tips over and the juice puddles on the floor. She wonders where the cats are. But she has been gone a day longer than she planned.
Greek bureaucracy and red tape! Officials who found her funny, officials who didn’t have the time, computer systems that failed, logs that hadn’t been filled. Men who didn’t know their jobs passed her from department to department, from people who didn’t care to other people who didn’t care. Juliet is glad to be home even though home has a piece missing.
Aaman is gone. Juliet doesn’t know if the Greek system is as bad as has been apparent or whether each and every one of the people she came into contact with blocked her progress to save themselves work, to stop further hassle, use of their energy. The laid-back ease that attracted her to Greece is now the very thing that frustrates her.
The paint bucket begins to feel small and hard. The temperature has dropped a fraction as evening takes hold. She looks at her glass of wine, which, since she sat, has been just out of reach on the windowsill. A slight movement in the grass at the edge of the lawn calls her attention. A snail peeks out between the blades and begins its slimy trail to the upturned beans. Its ommatophores extended, waving muscles make slow progress. Juliet pushes a tiny twig in its path with her foot. The snail glides smoothly over, unimpeded. She determinedly stretches for her wine, the bucket creases on one side under her redirected weight and she slithers onto her hip on the floor. Slowly standing, she brushes her jean leg, gathers her wine and fork, and carefully steps over the feasting snail to return indoors.
The laptop sits open on the expanse of kitchen table. The screen unblinking, black, useless, no-one giving it purpose. Juliet pours a second glass of wine. She will have to mow the lawn herself. But, by the power of wine, she will ensure herself a good rest tonight.
Aaman turns on his mattress. His legs itch. Knees to chest, he looks and scratches his ankle where there are many pinprick bites. The man on the mattress to his right is restless, glottal sounds on the in-breath, wheezing on the out-breath, a minor part in the symphony of sleep that fills the room. The dawn sun hits the farthest walls, wakefulness following its spread across the room.
He lies on his back, in his head the rich, thick smell of coffee with buffalo milk, the quiet of sitting at Juliet’s kitchen table, the cool of the computer under his hands, the aromas of Saabira’s cooking promising lunch, a perfect existence. A boy of no more than eight pads his path across Aaman’s mattress to the sole toilet, shared by eighty men and boys.
He doubts he will see either Saabira or Juliet again. His savings tucked in a hole in a mud barn miles away. There are whispers of people remaining in these detention centres for years. The man next to him wriggles in sleep to face him and exhales loudly. Aaman turns from the fetid smell of his breath. The boy pads back from the toilet; an old man stands from his mattress and shuffles to replace him. Someone passes wind loudly.
There is no sound of the outside world. No dogs barking, no cars on the road, a strangled, hushed silence of hundreds of men sleeping, grunting, snoring, scratching.
The old man returns, another takes his place. Aaman realises that soon all will be waking and the one toilet will become awash. He stands and picks his way to the cubicle, across the uneven mattresses, avoiding limbs under spread blankets. The toilet stands surrounded by thin, half-height metal walls in the corner. The smell is obnoxious. In his hesitation, an Albanian pushes past him, his bare feet slipping in the wet as he stands rigid, unconcerned if he hits his mark.
Aaman wonders if there is a corner outside where he can relieve himself. There is no door to the yard. There are no doors and no windows anywhere, only gaping square cavities in the cancer-ridden cement. The only cavity with a door is the one that brought him in. Aaman wanders into the yard.
There are several men on their knees silently bowing and praying, facing Mecca. Two men stand talking in hushed tones by the fence between two of the blocks. There are no guards visible in the tower but faint sounds of the television betray their presence. Aaman steps towards a corner between block and fence. As he nears, the stains of a thousand before him are noticeable before the lingering stench invades his nostrils. The consensus of a thousand like minds before him. Aaman looks, as he stands, between the blocks, out through the double fence to the scrub land, barren.