Nadifa Mohamed - The Orchard of Lost Souls

Some of the prisoners look comfortably at home. One young woman is breastfeeding her baby and charting, her legs stretched out. Her friend is dressed gorgeously in pink and silver, with black hair dyed gold at the tips. They seem untouched by the situation around them. In contrast, the girls with the plaits appear to have been in the cell for weeks. One of them is barefoot, her trousers blood-stained near the crotch, another has small, circular scorches all over her bare arms. All of them are emaciated, their hips like metal frames under loose trousers, their necks long and drawn, their dark-lashed eyes sunken into black holes. Policewomen in navy uniforms pass by the cell bars, their trousers tight across their backsides. Deqo wonders what the girls have done to be treated so badly and if she will be kept inside with them. Looking between them and the pretty women, she manoeuvres closer to the pretty ones to see if their good luck will spread to her.

‘. . that he is free, that the last child wasn’t even his own,’ the one with gold-dipped hair is saying.

‘You believe him?’ replies the mother.

‘No, but what can I do? I have been bitten by love.’

‘Well, bite it back,’ she laughs.

Deqo laughs too and they look up suspiciously.

‘Didn’t anyone tell you it’s rude to eavesdrop?’

Deqo smiles apologetically.

‘Let her be, she’s not doing any harm. What are you doing here? You stole?’

Deqo shakes her head violently. ‘I don’t know, ask these people,’ she gesticulates dismissively towards the students, ‘they put me in trouble.’

‘Is that so?’ she smiles. ‘What is your name?’

‘Deqo. What’s yours?’

‘Nasra, and this is China and her son Nuh.’

‘Why are you in here?’

The women look to each other and chuckle.

‘It is part of our job,’ Nasra answers coyly.

The policewoman has a neat beret perched to the side of her pinned-up hair and possesses a strange combination of femininity and menace.

‘Which one of you is Waris Abdiweli Geedi?’ she calls in a harsh voice.

The fragrant girl pushes past the others and presents herself before the policewoman, who beckons her out of the cell with a henna-painted finger before locking the door again. The prisoners ease into the small space the girl has left behind. To Deqo’s amusement, fragrant girl does not so much as look back at those she has left behind; the girl who had thrown her arm over her in the truck is left to stand there, head hanging. Deqo is pleased: when arrogant people like that are are forced to see how little they really matter she feels a small charge of satisfaction.

One by one the schoolgirls are called, bailed out and hustled home by their fathers, mothers, uncles and elder brothers. They are released before the boys to protect them from shame; the shame that grows and widens with their breasts and hips and follows them like an unwanted friend. Deqo has long been aware of how the soft flesh of her body is a liability; the first word she remembers learning is ‘shame’. The only education she received from the women in the camp concerned how to keep this shame at bay: don’t sit with your legs open, don’t touch your privates, don’t play with boys. The avoidance of shame seems to be at the heart of everything in a girl’s life. There is at least a chance in this women-only cell to put shame aside for a while and flop down without wondering who might see her legs or who might grab her while she sleeps. She finds a space near an elderly destitute woman on a rush mat.

‘Get me a cup of water,’ the woman croaks.

Deqo looks at the reclining figure, so old and self-important. ‘Get it yourself.’

The woman sighs. Deqo notices that she is missing all of her front teeth. The woman nudges her with her foot. ‘Go on, my sweet, just get me some water, I have an axe slicing through my head.’ She makes kissing noises to cajole her.

Deqo tuts and rises to her feet; she will ask for water for herself too, fill up her stomach a bit. She waits by the bars; she can hear the policewoman talking at the end of the corridor.

‘ Jaalle, Jaalle ! Comrade, Comrade!’ Deqo cries out.

No answer.

‘Comrade Policewoman with the hennaed fingers and black koofiyaad, we need cups here.’

The policewoman approaches and pushes a tin cup through the bars. ‘Don’t try and be funny here, little girl.’

‘I wasn’t trying to be funny, I just wanted water.’

‘Aren’t you too young to be selling yourself? Or have you been stealing?’

‘No! I haven’t done anything, honestly. They mistook me for a protestor.’

‘Where are you from?’

‘From Saba’ad.’

‘So what are you doing here?’

‘I work in the market. I never steal, never!’

The policewoman’s face softens a little; she tilts her head to the side and looks over to her colleague.

‘Luul, this refugee girl is here by mistake; she was pulled in with all those protestors this morning.’

The other policewoman comes to join her. She is tall and flat-chested, unable to fill out her uniform like her friend.

She pulls a face. ‘Let her out, we’re not going to get anything for her.’

‘True, she’s a waste of bread,’ laughs the policewoman with the henna on her fingers.

The door chimes open once again and Deqo runs to the old woman on the mat to hand over the cup before stepping out into the corridor of freedom.

‘See you another time, Deqo,’ Nasra calls out.

Deqo waves back.

The policewomen walk on each side of her in silence.

‘ Jaalle , when will that woman be released?’ asks Deqo, before being led out of the station.

‘Never you mind, you should stay away from women like that, they will drag you down into their nasty ways. Stay away, you hear?’ She adjusts the beret on her head.

‘Is she a . . .’ Deqo hesitates at that powerful word that has plagued her throughout her short life.

‘A whore? Absolutely, and much else besides.’

Deqo marches back to the ditch with her eyes to the ground, deep in thought. She still has time to collect fruit from the farms and reach the market before it closes for lunch. Her legs propel her forward robotically but her mind is whirring with memories from Saba’ad, stirred up by her encounter with Nasra and China in the cell. ‘Whore’s child, whore’s child, whore’s child!’ That’s what the other children in the camp had yelled at her for as long as she could recall, but she hadn’t known what a whore was; it sounded bad, like a cannibal or a witch or a type of jinn, but no adult would describe what made a whore a whore and the children didn’t seem to know much more than she did. She was born of sin, they said, the bastard of a loose woman. From the children’s story her nativity went like this: a young woman arrived in the camp alone and by foot, heavily pregnant and with feet torn to shreds by thorns. The nurses at the clinic bandaged her feet and let her wait for the child to be delivered. She refused to give her name or her husband’s, and when Deqo was born she abandoned her own child without naming her either. Deqo had been named a year later by the nurses when she climbed out of the metal cot the orphans were kept in and began disappearing; Deqo-wareego was her full name, ‘wandering Deqo’, and she had learnt that the one thing she could do that the other camp children couldn’t was drift as far as she liked. She belonged to the wind and the tracks in the dirt rather than to any other person; no watchful mother would come after her shouting her name in every direction.

At first she had believed her mother was a jinn who had changed into a human for only a short while and then had to change back, but she was always too cold to have had a mother made of fire. Then she thought her mother may have been blown away by a typhoon, but too many older orphans said they had seen her walk away on her own two feet. Finally she decided that her mother, this ‘whore’ they talked about, was not like other women who lived and died beside their children, but another kind altogether, who knew that her child would be clothed and fed, just not by herself, like a bird who lays her egg in another’s nest.