The Girl in the Shadows Page 4

  ‘If it’s a new world,’ Aisha explained, ‘you can’t take the old with you.’

  His teachings were that the women had to cut all ties to anything outside the Collective: it was the only way to prove their fealty. This extended to the women’s families. Unlike me, who had no parents and was born on to AB’s hand, each comrade had once had a mummy and daddy. It was an alien concept to me, but from the way AB described it, I wasn’t missing out. Not for me the daily task of denouncing the family from which I’d come, which was what the other comrades had to do, writing vicious essays and publicly rejecting those they’d once loved. Sian, as ever, was hailed as a model student. A favoured anecdote was often cited: Sian’s mother, Ceri, desperately seeking her daughter’s whereabouts in the early 1980s, had finally tracked her to our home, only to be greeted by the curt message: ‘Go away, I’ve got no mum.’

  Self-criticism was encouraged too. We had to write down all the things that were wrong with us; Comrade Sian eagerly wrote mine for me when I was small. It could take up a lot of time – because there was an awful lot wrong with all of us.

  ‘There is nobody as useless and stupid as those who come around me,’ AB would say. According to Bala, the comrades’ ineptitude was such that direct assistance from a deity was the only solution; that was why they had sought him out. ‘I never invited any of you,’ he would rant. ‘Out of the goodness of my heart I am taking care of you, so remember how lucky you are.’

  In Discussions they would slavishly agree. Aisha would say, ‘Thank you, thank you’ repeatedly if he spoke to her. Oh picked coyly at the front of her blouse. Comrade Josie used to gaze adoringly at him, as if she was truly seeing the divine apparition she believed him to be, and she would knit her brows together tightly, the better to drink in every drop of heavenly nectar dripping from his lips.

  Though sometimes AB denounced the whole group, most attacks were sharply personal. He always seemed to know exactly how to turn the screw. Josie came from a wealthy family, so AB falsely condemned them as genocidal war criminals who’d profited from the blood of innocents in unjust wars and occupations. Sian’s father had committed suicide when she was seventeen – she’d been the last person to speak to him – so AB declared that she was the reason he’d blown his head off with a shotgun; and maligned her too for the madness that surely now ran through her veins. With Aisha, he’d remind her that deportation could be just a phone call away if she did not follow him properly.

  With AB having taught the comrades that annihilating self was to their benefit, many were keen to help their colleagues achieve that empty interior: the zenith to which they aspired. So when AB went after an individual in Discussions, his was not the only voice that stabbed and slashed. Like a pack of hyenas, they would all come together to hunt their quarry. Not everybody joined in, but even when just one person did, it made it that much worse. Laughter ran round the circle like wildfire, licking fiercely into places that AB’s own words may not have reached.

  I hated it when it was my turn to be attacked. Bala used to haul me up from where I sat in the circle and insult and abuse me while the others watched or sometimes joined in. I developed a nervous giggle: a hugely unhelpful tic given I was beaten for laughing. But I just couldn’t help it; it was a coping mechanism: If I don’t laugh, I’ll cry … I’d feel a bubble of giggles threatening to burst out of me and try to hold it back, like a burp – but it was just as unstoppable and just as uncouth. Out it would come: the obscene sound of a child laughing.

  They’d take it in turns to have a go. I’d be picked to pieces, vultures feasting on the very meat of me. Perhaps the scariest thing of all was seeing the comrades, who could be sweet people sometimes, turn into these unadulterated monsters who would set upon me at a word from AB.

  While it was happening, I tried not to think. I tried to pretend that it did not upset me. I knew I was not permitted to cry – and there was supposed to be nothing to cry about, after all, because this was only for my benefit – but in all honesty I would not give them the satisfaction of adding that misdemeanour to my charge sheet of crimes. I did not have much, but I did have my dignity, and I was determined to preserve it at all costs. Often, just to get through it, I’d stare at the carpet or the walls and I’d pretend they were a blank canvas – a canvas I was writing on with my eyes.

  ‘Who cares about your feelings?’ AB would sneer at me.

  I’d fix my eyes upon the wall and slowly create my own secret words.

  ‘You’re the most disgraceful, stupid, idiotic person I’ve ever met …’ he would continue.

  Meanwhile, I’d luxuriate in the imaginary sentences I’d crafted, taking comfort from them, taking strength. I made this sentence. I am still here. I haven’t vanished beneath the pecks and scratches of their many beaks and talons.

  Perhaps worse than when I was the focus of Discussions, though, was when AB encouraged me to become a vulture myself. As far back as I can remember, I wanted to be outside it all and not be part, but Project Prem was dedicated to my learning new-world ways. I was to be a pioneer, a leading light showing others how it’s done. My reticence was not good enough; AB used to call me ‘weak-kneed’ for not going after the other comrades all guns blazing. He wanted me to learn from him. He wanted me to be like him. The highest praise he and Sian ever gave me was when they called me ‘Little AB’.

  Though Bala was fair, at least, in ensuring that every comrade was attacked, that summer of 1988 Leanne was frequently the target of his rage, given her aborted attempt to leave the Collective in April. ‘I never forgive and I never forget’ was AB’s motto. He thought forgiveness was for the weak.

  Yet it seemed Leanne hadn’t forgotten her forbidden hope, either, for on 22 July 1988 she once again tried to leave. She got as far as Southampton, from what I remember, but became disorientated: a fish out of water once permanently out in the old world without AB. She rang the Collective and returned.

  ‘If you ever do that again,’ AB shouted when he brought her home, ‘you will never be allowed back into the fold.’

  The pack of wolves was out in force for her. ‘Traitor! Renegade!’ they hissed and jeered.

  Comrade Sian pulled me aside one day shortly after she’d returned.

  ‘Tell Comrade Leanne she’s betrayed AB!’ she ordered. ‘Tell her she’s a vicious traitor!’

  I felt uncomfortable; I didn’t want to do it. Everyone else was already attacking her – wasn’t that enough? Even though I knew I shouldn’t like Leanne, I couldn’t help the affection present in my heart. She told me bedtime stories. She made indoor bicycling fun. I didn’t want to call her names. I didn’t have any friends, but the closest I had ever come was the time I spent with her.

  One day passed, and then another, and I thought I’d got away with not doing it. But Sian kept reminding me: ‘Don’t forget …’ I knew she was watching; that AB was watching too.

  I mulled over my dilemma. I thought of all the things that could happen if I went against AB. I thought of how Bala and Sian were trying to help me become a better person – not the bad child who always needed beating, but someone who could be a shining example to all.

  So I found a quiet time, when the whole group wasn’t around. Just one or two comrades were present as I reluctantly walked up to Leanne. She smiled at me, as always, and that made what I had to do ten times worse.

  I spoke in a halting voice. I was supposed to tell her that I despised her, but I couldn’t quite bring myself to claim the words.

  ‘I was told to tell you you’re a traitor.’

  She did not look shocked that I’d said it; that I had denounced her too. Resigned, is how I remember it; as though she had almost expected it.

  It was my destiny, after all.

  6

  Ring, ring! Ring, ring!

  The telephone chimed in the back room and Comrade Sian went to answer it. It was somebody for Comrade Chanda, AB’s wife.

  Cautiously, in case anyone caught me, I tiptoed to sta
nd behind the door of the back room, where I could eavesdrop on the conversation.

  Please be someone asking to visit, I thought, please be asking to visit …

  The only times I got to go Outside these days were when Chanda’s relatives came to the house. Though they weren’t fascist agents, for some reason AB didn’t want them to know I existed either, so on those infrequent occasions when they came to see his wife he deemed it best to take me away from the house.

  It was one of many inconsistencies of life in the Collective that Chanda and AB were allowed to maintain contact with their families. A two-tier system was in place and AB treated Chanda and Shobha better than the rest of us because they were his legitimate relatives (even though such a connection was supposedly old world). That’s not to say he wouldn’t put them in their place when needed, and they suffered the same humiliations and physical violence as the rest of us, but they were raised up as paragons of virtue and given special privileges. We had to be slavishly subservient to them: no one was allowed to disagree with anything Chanda said, no matter how outrageous or downright wrong.

  I didn’t know what I’d done to offend her, but I felt Chanda always looked at me as if she wished I was dead. She barely treated me like a fellow human, more like a bothersome fly. Even uttering my name seemed an affront: I was always just ‘the kid’. I have memories of her slamming doors in my face or cold-shouldering me in the corridor; I felt as if a dark spell fell on any room she entered, when a peculiar mix of terror, nervousness and gloom settled deeply within me. I could almost feel her aversion to me emanating in noxious waves. I wanted to like her, but – her distaste of me aside – she struck me as a rough and rather boorish woman. She often charged about the place, confident in her superior status.

  It was fascinating watching Comrade Sian with her. Sian, who was top dog amongst the comrades as AB’s foremost follower, was like a different woman with Chanda, always trying to please her. She used to make us all fall respectfully silent when Chanda walked past. Yet no matter what she did, as far as I could tell Chanda gave her only dirty looks that were deadly enough to fell a tree.

  Chanda’s little sister, Shobha, spent most of her time with Comrade Oh, who had been given the job of caring for her as Shobha had long been in a wheelchair. Though she was thirty-nine, Shobha struck me as rather childlike, which included the occasional tantrum. Both she and Chanda were fond of bossing the other women around, something I observed when I innocently said one day, ‘Comrades Chanda and Shobha seem to complain all the time!’

  Josie’s face went the colour of puce. I knew that voicing such opinions was taboo, yet I had also always been told to be honest – what a contradiction this predicament presented! AB soon corrected the error of my ways and it wasn’t long before I was sketching out another family tree of his glorious antecedents – something I did several times a year – featuring AB’s mother, Amma, ‘the best woman in the entire universe’.

  I always found the discrepancies of life in the Collective jarring. Why was Chanda allowed to have visits from her family? Why were we told to be good to others … unless AB and Chanda didn’t like them, at which point it was all-out war? Why did AB encourage us to observe AB’s SOWETO day (Serving Others Without Ever Thinking Of Self) when he spent all day, every day, thinking of nothing but himself? Listening in Discussions, the slightest discrepancy had my ears pricking up, but everyone else seemed to overlook it. I think I may even have asked about it once or twice and was told that because AB was the centre, the rules did not apply.

  Standing behind the door, struggling to work out from the one-sided conversation whether a trip Outside might be looming, Chanda’s continued relationship with her family was one double standard I could only embrace. I had just turned six and my life was different from the one I had known even a short time ago when it came to time Outside. When I was very, very small, I’d been allowed to play in the garden with a comrade every few days; I even went Out regularly in a car. But as though AB was gradually stuffing my opportunities for fresh air into an ever-narrowing funnel, the boundaries of what was permitted had grown tighter and tighter over time. In the previous autumn of 1988, I’d accidentally scratched my neck while playing with a stick in the garden; AB had been furious when he’d seen the graze, as though his own property had been damaged, and he beat me forty or fifty times for being careless. I think his greatest fear was that if something serious happened to me, it could lead to others becoming aware of my existence.

  The threat from fascist agents was ever-present and increasing. We had moved from the house with the disabled neighbour, but now lived next door to something worse: an elderly couple with a granddaughter. The girl was a little blonde child, perhaps a bit younger than me. Recently, she’d come up to the fence when I was Outside with Sian and Aisha and tried to talk to me through the wire.

  I was transfixed by her. She was so small! My world was populated by grown-ups, all long legs and looming faces – but this person was my height and with the same short legs and arms. She was an ugly dirty white girl, whereas my skin was lightly tan, but I saw in her more similarity to me than anyone else I’d ever met. I wasn’t allowed to look in a mirror, so this child was the closest I got to seeing someone like me.

  Such was my interest in her, despite everything I’d been told I started moving towards the fence, excited by her presence and her sweet, high-pitched voice calling to me.

  A hand was instantly clamped upon my shoulder. Sian and Aisha dragged me back into the house and warned me never to speak to her. There were lots of hushed whispers and then Sian sat me down with a sombre face, as though about to impart some dark information they’d decided I was finally mature enough to know.

  ‘That little girl was a fascist agent, Comrade Prem,’ she said, ‘sent by her evil grandparents to try to lure you next door. And do you know what they were planning?’

  I shook my head.

  ‘They were planning to drink your blood and eat you in a satanic ritual sacrifice.’

  After that, the garden didn’t seem safe at all. I didn’t go Outside for months and months at a stretch – that was why I was so keen to hear if a trip might be on the cards now. It was so boring, seeing the same four walls every single day. My daily routine was mind-numbingly familiar.

  1. See Beloved Comrade Bala / Discussions.

  2. Singing.

  3. Writing.

  4. Food.

  5. Afternoon nap.

  6. Bathtime.

  7. Study.

  8. ‘Sum up’ with Comrade Sian to debate if I’d been a good soldier for AB that day.

  9. Food.

  10. See Beloved Comrade Bala / Discussions.

  If something exciting had ever happened beyond that painfully regular rota – such as the landlord coming round to demand his rent or a plumber dropping by to fix a leaky tap – I would try to retrace my footsteps in the days that followed, recreating the scenes, wearing the same clothes, begging for the same food to be made, superstitiously hoping beyond hope that if I did, if I could make everything just as it had been, a thrilling event would happen again.

  Comrade Bala still went out just as much as before. He would bring me things back to stick in my diary – his ticket from the London Transport Museum, his Travelcard, some flowers from the East Bridge over the Serpentine – but it wasn’t the same as being able to go Outside myself. Sian told me to treasure these items with my life, and chastised me if I didn’t fall over myself saying ‘thank you’ for them.

  But I felt resentful, rather than grateful. It was a particularly glum time, that spring of 1989, because Aisha had been banned from looking after me a short while before; she’d been sleeping with me one night when I’d wet the bed, and AB had blamed her for it, for being too liberal with me. He’d beaten us both, then outlawed interaction between us.

  That was why I was so desperate for Chanda’s relatives to come – because I was bored and fed up and lonely. I was extra cautious as I held my breath and l
istened. AB didn’t like me eavesdropping; he would say, ‘Don’t listen to telephone calls, trying to listen whether you’re going out! If you don’t go deep into AB’s CC then you won’t be going out at all!’

  Yet for all his threats, every time the relatives came I would be whisked out of the house; it was the one thing about which I could be completely certain.

  I let out a sigh of relief. Good news: they were coming. And I was off to London Zoo.

  7

  ‘Remember the rules,’ Comrade Sian instructed as we stood in the hallway, on the verge of going Outside. ‘Don’t talk to other people. Stay close. Don’t get separated. If you do, don’t talk to the police. Don’t keep looking around. Don’t ogle. Just concentrate on Bala and you’ll be fine.’

  I nodded my head eagerly. I knew the rules; they were drummed into me every time I left the house. I wasn’t frightened about going Outside – the comrades, and Bala himself, would be with me and I knew they would keep me safe. In many ways it was scarier being in the garden, with the certified fascist agents on either side of the fence, just waiting for their chance. Not everyone Outside was an agent, as I understood it, but the neighbours definitely were. That meant, on these trips further afield, I stood a chance of seeing someone nice.

  I think that was what I was most excited about. Forget the benefits of fresh air to my lungs: a stranger’s smile or kind eyes could keep me breathing for months. I liked those people who looked at me warmly, rather than with the guarded, hostile glares I received in the house. Being smiled at when I went out gave me such a feeling of immense joy that it lasted for days, even weeks. It counteracted what I was always told in the Collective: that I was a bad person whom everyone disliked. The only thing that made me uneasy about these interactions was when a stranger glanced at me and then asked in confusion: ‘Are you a boy or a girl?’

  Though not everyone was an agent, I had to remain vigilant at all times about ugly dirty white men. Comrade Sian in particular had a pathological hatred of them; perhaps because she was going out of her way to prove to Bala she was faithful by vehemently rejecting men of her own race. She and the others used to call all men, but white men in particular, ‘elements’, and their fury would rain down on me if ever I had the slightest interaction with them. Outside, they would deliberately ignore white men if they spoke to the group.