Nadifa Mohamed - The Orchard of Lost Souls

She rises and shakes the dust off the cardboard.

‘ Yaari, little one, come over here a minute,’ calls a woman with a blue and gold threaded turban on her head.

Deqo walks to her and stands stony-faced with her hands on her hips.

‘I’ll give you a few shillings if you deliver something for me.’

‘How much?’

‘Twenty?’

‘Forty.’

‘Thirty.’

‘Fine,’ Deqo smiles in triumph. ‘What do you want me to take?’

The woman reaches behind her back and pulls out a package wrapped in the light-blue-inked official newspaper October Star.

Deqo takes it in both hands and feels the shape of a glass bottle inside.

‘Don’t drop it and don’t you dare open it. The person waiting at the other end is called China — you hand it to her and no one else. If any police approach you just throw it away, you listening?’

Deqo nods, intrigued.

‘Hold it like that!’ The woman’s upper arm wobbles as she arranges the package in an upright position under Deqo’s arm. ‘Tight, tight, squeeze it.’ The whole exchange has raised sweat beads on the market woman’s forehead. ‘Go, keep your head down and look for the blue painted house on the street leading left off the end of this road.’

The area the woman points to is a part of town Deqo has been frightened to venture into before. The market women refer to the place as a kind of hell in which dead souls live; people who have left behind any semblance of goodness congregate in its shacks — drunks, thieves, lechers and dirty women.

The road tapers into a narrow alley, the market disappearing more with every yard until there are just fragments of it: a cloth, a squashed tomato, a torn shilling note that Deqo picks up to add to her stash. The sun is high above and the smell of goat and donkey droppings grows stronger in her nostrils. She passes fewer stone-built bungalows and more mud brick and traditional aqals modernised with tarpaulin and metal sheets in place of wood and animal skins. It will be easy to pick out a blue bungalow from these neighbours. She sees children everywhere, bare-bottomed and tuft-haired, five-year-olds carrying two-year-olds on their hips or staring out from entrances with solemn, hostile expressions. ‘Dhillo ! Whore!’ one little boy in a red shirt that stretches to his knees shouts at her.

She picks up a small rock and lobs it at him, missing him by a short distance; he ducks back into his shack with a squeal.

Her sandals are full of grit; she stops to shake them out and notices a gully of dirty water running to the side of the track, small jagged bones lodged in the mire as well as pieces of plastic and twisted wire. This side of town seems abandoned by the rest, left to sink and slump and rot; she wonders why anyone would stay here if they had the whole of Hargeisa to choose from.

She finally spots a small, blue breezeblock bungalow and knocks on a metal door painted in diamonds of orange and green. The tin roof buckles loudly in the sun and flies buzz in the wire mesh covering the windows. Beside the blue bungalow is a jacaranda tree with a goat happily lost in its high branches, nibbling at fresh shoots.

Deqo waits a long time before knocking again; she checks around the sides of the house for any movement.

‘Who is it?’ someone shouts from inside.

‘I have a delivery,’ Deqo answers nervously.

Three locks click open and then a figure takes shape within the gloom of the hallway.

Deqo recognises her hair first, the broad band of yellow at the tip of her waves.

‘Give it to me,’ Nasra says yawningly.

‘I can’t. I need to give it to China.’ Deqo looks down as she speaks.

Nasra throws her head back and groans; she doesn’t seem to recognise her.

‘Take it to her.’ She pulls Deqo into the bungalow and locks all three latches again.

Nasra leads her into the courtyard and her pale pink dirk lights up in the sunlight, engulfing her body like a flower bud. The bungalow smells incredibly sweet despite the rashes of black damp growing up the interior walls, and Deqo inhales deeply.

Nasra knocks on the bare wooden door on the opposite side of the whitewashed yard. ‘Isbiirtoole, drunkard, your nectar is here,’ she calls.

China opens the door and the courtyard fills with music in a foreign tongue. ‘Give here.’ She snatches the package before Deqo can hand it over. ‘I know you. . It’s our little jailbird. I didn’t know you were in the trade.’

‘What trade?’

‘The booze trade, of course.’

‘I’m not. I have a stall in the market.’

‘There is no need for pretence here; one thing about Fucking Street is you can be yourself.’

‘Where do your family live?’ Nasra asks.

‘I have no family.’

‘No grandmother, no aunt, no cousins?’

Deqo shakes her head. ‘No grandfathers, no step-siblings, no half-uncles. I look after myself.’ Each time she says this it feels more true.

‘So where do you sleep?’

‘Over in the ditch.’

Both of the women tut.

‘Ooh, you have a stronger heart than me sleeping in that haunted wasteland,’ China says, unwrapping the newspaper and unscrewing the lid of the bottle.

The ethanol clears every other smell from Deqo’s nose.

‘It’s not haunted, I’m not bothered there.’

‘Until someone comes to slit your throat while you’re asleep,’ Nasra says.

‘That won’t happen, no one can find me where I sleep.’ Deqo feels a shiver along her spine despite her words.

The women look her in the eye. They see her in a way that most other people don’t; she doesn’t constantly lose their attention.

Nasra rubs a hand over Deqo’s hair. ‘What is it like being all alone in the world at your age?’

The question hits Deqo like a falling branch. She shuffles her feet a little and tries to pick through the words lodged on her lips: frightening, tiring, free, confusing, exciting, lonely. She mumbles incoherently and then stops. ‘I can still have a good life.’

Nasra looks down at her with tears in her eyes.

‘With enough luck you can. You lucky?’ China asks, her voice suddenly louder with the drink.

Deqo cocks her head and smiles. ‘Sometimes. I just found this torn shilling outside, that’s quite lucky.’

‘You are going to need more luck than that, child.’ China throws her head back and lets out a laugh that echoes off the walls and tin roof. Her baby wakes and begins to cry inside the room. ‘Oh, shut up!’ she yells before slamming the door shut.

‘Give this money to the woman who sent you.’ China counts out one hundred and fifty shillings from a huge roll and then squeezes back into the narrow room. ‘Good luck, little girl,’ she says as she waves Deqo off.

Nasra leads Deqo back to the front door and pushes another ten shillings into her palm.

Just as she is about to walk away, Deqo stops and turns back to Nasra.

‘Can I ask you something?’ she says in a faint whisper.

‘Huh? I can’t hear you.’

Deqo bends in closer. ‘Can I ask you something?’

Nasra nods cautiously.

Deqo licks her lips nervously. ‘Are you a whore?’

Nasra tenses with rage but Deqo doesn’t run or laugh, she is waiting, eyes wide, for an answer.

A few moments pass and then a twinkle enters Nasra’s eyes and her smile answers the question.

Deqo crouches down by the roadside an hour later, chewing on a lamb baguette; the bread is stale, the lamb cold, but she doesn’t care. In her mind she goes over and over her exchange with Nasra. If she is a whore then China must be too, so why had she kept her child? If it wasn’t necessary to abandon him then why had her own mother abandoned her? Deqo swallows with difficulty as the notion that her mother might have kept her enters her mind. Did she see something wrong with her? Was she running away from a child whose bad luck was written across its face? As if to punctuate this thought a car drives past and sprays dirty water from a puddle over her legs. She rises and brushes the drops and breadcrumbs away kicking a stone in frustration at the back of the car. Sour-faced and melancholic she walks back in the direction of Nasra’s house.