The Girl in the Shadows Read online

  As we prepared to leave, there was a final check for the neighbours; we couldn’t leave the house until the coast was clear. A nod was given. Then the front door swung wide and I felt my spirits soar as, inch by inch, Outside was revealed. And then the best moment of all: stepping over the threshold and into thin air.

  It was like being on a different planet. Here, no solid walls blocked me in on all sides – there was distance on the horizon, roads running every which way, and everywhere you looked was another possibility. Different plants and flowers and hedges grew in gardens up and down the street, giving off fragrances and rustling noises quite alien to me. No ceilings curtailed my viewpoint: up, up and away stretched the blue or grey or drizzling sky – different every time, which was part of its beauty. I could have spent hours marvelling at it, savouring the sun on my face or the breeze that gently fingered my dark crew-cut hair, entranced by the ever-moving clouds and the changing vista.

  I could have spent hours marvelling at it – but I felt a comrade push me from behind, sucking on her teeth at my dallying, and I hastily followed AB to the garden gate. With him walking in front of me, I couldn’t really see where we were going; he was careful to keep me shielded so I never had a clear view of the street.

  On any outing I made Outside, there were always at least three people with me. This group protection was not unusual for the Collective; all the comrades had to go out in pairs for their own safety, to preclude an attack from the fascist state. My trio of bodyguards used to walk all around me so I was in the middle. It made it hard to get a sense of things, and if I dared to look around as we walked along our suburban street, Comrade Sian would snap, ‘Don’t ogle!’ I had to focus solely on the back of AB’s anorak, all the way to the bus or Tube station, marching in time with the comrades’ slow steps as though we were soldiers on parade.

  But this was not a drill. I could feel the tension in the comrades surrounding me; they seemed on edge, charged by the responsibility of keeping me safe Outside. They planned the outing as a military operation: Travelcards were bought in advance and handed to the comrades before we even left the house. I never saw them use a ticket machine or have an exchange with the staff behind the counters; when we went on the Tube, we were through the barriers in seconds, the flow of our ever-moving mass of bodies, with me safely secreted at the centre, barely interrupted.

  I thought public transport was extraordinary. I loved the trains the best; I decided I wanted to be a train driver when I grew up. Train drivers got to go to all sorts of different places. Imagine going to a different place every day! The idea of being in control, having responsibility, driving people to all those wonderful destinations, felt very grand to me. On public transport, there was a chance someone nice might sit near me, too, although on the bus AB always put me next to the window, blocking me in by taking the aisle seat. I would be so busy covertly watching the other passengers, hoping to catch their eye and receive a smile, that I had no time to look out of the windows. It was always AB who said, ‘It’s time to get off now,’ and I would follow him meekly, with no understanding of where we were or where we’d been or what we might have passed along the way. Once off the bus, it was back to staring at AB’s anorak as we walked the final stretch to our destination.

  In some ways it was easier to focus on AB’s jacket. Everything else was so colourful, so bright, so noisy, so fast! Even though what I saw were mere glimpses, I couldn’t take it in: it was utterly overwhelming. In the house, nothing happened. Outside, events never seemed to stop. I couldn’t identify the different noises: the squeals, shouts, beeps, roars, whirs and whines were a jagged soundscape without names or labels. I couldn’t separate one from the other; I was just assaulted by this wave of sound.

  It may have been overwhelming, but I loved it. I loved being Outside. Joyful – that was how I felt, walking down the street, going somewhere new. I never felt joyful in the house.

  London Zoo was just one of the places AB took me to when Chanda’s relatives came. The Science Museum and Commonwealth Institute were other favourites (AB always being careful to shepherd me away from any displays that pushed the false messages of the BFS), and we sometimes went to restaurants too. It was so exciting to be Out and sitting somewhere else rather than at the same old table at home. I don’t recall ever looking at a menu and choosing what I wanted; food was chosen for me – and it tasted so good! I probably couldn’t have coped with the choice anyway, with the stress of potentially selecting for myself something Bala didn’t like. I was terrified when I favoured something he didn’t, for fear of the retribution when he read my mind.

  A strange thing happened when the comrades went Outside. As I watched them interacting with people – white men aside – they seemed … friendly. It was most peculiar. Though I was told not to talk to anybody, they would chat quite easily with the people we encountered; no trace of vulture or monster to be seen. You would never have known AB was the covert leader of the world, fighting a war with fascist agents. I guess that’s what made him so good at it.

  We had an amazing time at the zoo, seeing all the animals. For someone who never saw anything different, here was variety in spades. We went to the reptile house, where I was fascinated by the slide and slither of the snakes. My senses were assaulted every which way: the calls of the creatures, the stink of their pens, the diverse textures of their pelts and coats. Yet it wasn’t just the animals I was watching. Everywhere I looked in London Zoo, families weaved their way in and out of the crowds: children running about; a boy hoisted high upon his father’s shoulders; a daughter scooped up in her mother’s arms. Everybody seems so nice, I remember thinking. Why is there not that niceness in our house?

  I stared jealously as a woman embraced her child, affectionately ruffling his hair. The rationale behind the no-hugging rule had been explained countless times to me, but I still felt it as the cruellest of blows. If only the comrades could hug me like that, I thought, feeling melancholy in the certainty it would never be allowed. If ever I dared to express a longing for it, I was called ungrateful and selfish.

  There was only one disappointment to the visit. I’d wanted to see the aviary, but we couldn’t, for some reason. It may have been because I’d enthusiastically pointed out the condor I’d spotted in the brochure, impressed by its majesty, but was told I was bad for liking it because the bird had an affinity with the bald eagle of the USA, a country populated by genocidal war criminals.

  I adored birds. Although I was still officially banned from looking out of the window at home, every now and then I’d catch glimpses of the wrens or sparrows flying here and there in the garden. There was something about them that felt so free.

  The very worst part of any trip Outside was having to come home. I remember being castigated for saying, ‘I’m upset to be back.’ AB said it showed ingratitude and that if I carried on he would never take me Out again. Immediately, I would zip my mouth shut and hurry to get ready for bed.

  That night in 1989, after the trip to London Zoo, I lay down in bed and closed my eyes.

  Vroom!

  Everything was rushing before my eyes, the darkness that was usually behind them when I shuttered my lids now filled with colour and life. Everything I’d seen that day was present: the cars and the train and the bus and the creatures and the sky and the food and the people … I could remember the wind of the Tube train arriving almost flattening my face, the sheer energy of it pressing into me. The roar of the traffic; the grunts of the animals. At home, the only thing I heard grunt or roar was Beloved AB.

  I lay there so happily, my brain alive with memories, and imagined myself flying like those birds I’d seen Outside – going up, up and away from this house and zooming back to all the places I’d been. Whenever I went Out in the world, I always wanted to go back. I always wanted more.

  I guess that’s how Leanne felt, too. On 18 May 1989, she finally left for good. She didn’t say she was leaving – she didn’t say goodbye – she just went Out to
work one day and when she was meant to come home, she didn’t.

  It was perhaps that same evening, in Discussions, that the words I’d been dreading were said. I’d feared it when she was absent, but now I knew: she was dead.

  8

  Life seemed even emptier than before. I felt really sad without Leanne; I missed her. Aisha was still banned from looking after me, so even the snatches of happiness I had sometimes found with my two favourite comrades were denied to me now. I grieved for Leanne. I wished I’d spent more time with her when she was alive.

  AB didn’t grieve. ‘Good riddance to the traitor,’ was what he said. He didn’t even care that we had lost the income of her salary and now had to rely solely on Cindy; even before Leanne had gone, he’d declared ‘rent strike’ against the fascist state and was no longer paying any money to our landlord, whom he despised. Even at that age I remember thinking that it didn’t seem fair to the landlord.

  Someone else appeared to share my view because, a month after Leanne died, an envelope arrived at the house with her handwriting on: she’d sent a cheque to cover the rent; something AB ranted about in Discussions.

  The world skewed on its axis as I heard him talk. So Leanne was not dead, after all, despite what Bala had said; despite the fact that she had so brazenly gone against him! I felt the relief at her survival wash through me, almost as pleasurable as the waves of sounds I heard Outside. I think AB must have deemed me too young or stupid to pick up on his contradictions, but I was super-sensitive to them, given this was my only way to learn about the world.

  The more he talked about Leanne’s ‘death’, however – because he did so time and again – the more I realized what he actually meant when he said she was dead. Though she was still alive in body she had lost what mattered to be alive: AB. Therefore, she was worse than dead.

  There was a song we often sang in the mornings, ‘Which Side Are You On?’ At the end of it we would recite the list of AB’s enemies. For years, Bad Dennis had received citation; now, Leanne joined her – but she was no longer Leanne. In transgression, she had been transfigured. AB declared to the group that we would call her Fartcolour from now on; a racist joke.

  The rest of that year was taken up with denigrating Fartcolour. In the immediate aftermath of her departure, everyone except me was asked to write a report on how evil she was. Though I didn’t want to write an essay like that, part of me was still sad not to have the chance to write my own report, simply because seeing all the comrades scribbling away made me hugely jealous.

  I loved to write. Yet I never had an opportunity to write anything other than my lessons and my praise for Bala. I would have been ecstatic to be able to write down a made-up story on a piece of paper, but AB insisted that he didn’t want any imaginary rubbish from me: I had to be real when I did anything, whether it was writing or playing. I’d once seen a woman with a baby Outside, pushing her child in a pushchair along the tree-lined street, and promptly pretended I was doing the same thing. That was nonsensical behaviour, according to AB, and immediately banned. I was not to do ISA (Imagining, Speculating, Assuming) because imagination of any kind was poisonous.

  Ironically, the ban meant the only way I could indulge my love of writing was to use my imagination even more. I soon extended my canvases of the walls and floor that I’d discovered in Discussions. Now, when I lay in bed, I traced words and sentences on to the sheet with my finger in the dark. I loved it – my only form of expression – but my writings were as insubstantial as me, the shadow-child no one ever saw.

  Though I could not write creatively, I was allowed to read. I inhaled the books I was given, the act of reading as essential to me as air. I was always craving to read more. That was why, when AB gave me the Puffin Reference Atlas of the World but instructed me not to read the blocks of text headed ‘Did you know?’, I could not resist temptation. I found it enthralling! I was particularly taken to learn that Junko Tabei of Japan was the first woman to climb Mount Everest. I liked the musicality of her name.

  The inevitable happened. In the loo with Josie one day, I accidentally sang the words, ‘Junko Tabei of Japan!’ Josie interrogated me as to what I was talking about and I clammed up. At dinner she raised it with Sian. Guessing where I must have found it, Sian checked the Puffin book and reported to Bala that I had been reading the prohibited text. He was furious and slapped me, then forbade me from going near that book again.

  I was devastated. I yearned for knowledge. So much confused me about the world. My gender, for example. The disabled neighbour had thought I was a boy when she’d said to Comrade Sian, ‘I haven’t seen him for a while.’ People Outside seemed uncertain which I was. I couldn’t help but notice the differences between the comrades and AB; the women had rise-and-fall to their chests whereas Bala’s was flat as a pancake … as was mine. I asked Comrade Sian about it once.

  ‘Your chest is flat and you are like Bala,’ she explained. ‘You are special, because you are like him. And if you carry on being good, then you’ll be like him for ever.’

  Yet when the comrades talked about me, they always said ‘she’; they didn’t say ‘he’ or even ‘it’. I held on to that ‘she’ as though it was a port in a storm. Because I didn’t feel ‘special’ about all this, whatever Comrade Sian declared. I felt freaky. If I was a girl, why couldn’t I be one?

  For I was dressed in boy’s clothes, hateful shirts and trousers, and my hair was always cut brutally short. I used to see little black girls Outside in colourful dresses, beautiful beads braided through their long hair, or Indian daughters with shiny ebony plaits swinging over their shoulders, and I’d think: why can’t I have that? I wasn’t allowed to choose my clothes; the comrades went Outside to shop for me and brought back shoes, shirts and trousers. Even my name, Prem, was androgynous, more usually given to boys. AB also said it sounded like ‘sperm’; I didn’t know what that was, exactly, but apparently it meant I was just like a boy.

  I felt as if my identity was being taken away from me – but, of course, ‘my’ identity was never mine to have. I was Project Prem, my life dedicated to serve AB. What need had I of gender? It was as bad as a family; it would only hold me back.

  If I had to pick a gender to be, however, if one had to choose clothes and haircuts to make one’s way in the world, then boy was best. In AB’s view, female energy was negative. I’m not sure he meant women were lesser than men, per se, but more that women were lesser than him. He was the only man in the Collective; the only man in my world. He was the yardstick by which everything was measured. Yet AB valued that vaunted position. For that reason, although I was dressed as a boy, he didn’t want me to be one, nor grow up to become a man. A man would be a rival to him. Far better was this opaque middle ground.

  I wanted to be a girl. The comrades dressed in plain shirts and trousers too, but I longed to wear the clothes that Chanda and Shobha did; one of their privileges. They donned the most beautiful salwar kameez: knee-length dresses with trousers underneath. Made of silks and chiffons, they were crafted in bright colours, purples and rose-pinks; I thought them so graceful. Comrade Chanda wore her hair long, and sometimes even jewellery. I would beg to be allowed similar things but was told in no uncertain terms that I would never be permitted, and castigated for my ‘jealousy’. AB told me not to MAC (Mimic, Ape, Copy) Chanda and declared I was a ‘spoilt brat’.

  Race was another sensitive subject – and another grey area for me. I knew being Indian was best of all, but as with my gender, I wasn’t sure which race was mine. I had honey-coloured skin and dark-brown hair, but I wasn’t as brown-skinned as Bala – no matter what Sian said. She was emphatic that I be ‘little AB’ in every way and claimed my hair was black as his, but when I pointed out – on a sunny day when the light brought out the brown – that it was much fairer, she flew into a rage.

  Although Sian would not accept that I wasn’t the same as AB, Bala himself gloried in keeping me separate. Because I was born in Britain, he said I was just as re
sponsible for the crimes of the BFS as ugly dirty whites. I wanted to be part of his Indian family – with all the privileges I saw his wife receive. Given AB treated them with so much more affection, too, it was undoubtedly something to aspire to. But Bala kept saying hurtfully, ‘You’re British, you were born here, so you’re not part.’

  I hated the British aspect of my identity, hearing it maligned day after day. When Josie came into my bedroom one evening when I was standing behind the door and accidentally bashed into me, I was thrilled.

  ‘Smash me all up!’ I cried enthusiastically. ‘I’m too European!’

  I felt like nothing about me was right. I’d been born in the wrong place, my body had the wrong bits, my hair was the wrong colour … All I wanted was to belong, but it seemed beyond my reach.

  In December 1989, AB made a decision that put me even further out of touch. The Collective had begun as a Maoist group, but in AB’s opinion one Mao Zedong had been getting a little too big for his boots. Who was he to rival Bala, who was, after all, a god?

  Suddenly, AB declared Mao to be the worst genocidal war criminal the world had ever seen. Denunciations of the man the comrades had previously celebrated now became a key part of the daily routine. I found the change mind-boggling: this was the complete opposite of everything AB had said before.

  But – he now revealed – his previous praising of Mao over the formative decades of the Collective had been a test for his followers: to see whether they were truly loyal to AB or could be tempted to focus on his rivals.