Nadifa Mohamed - The Orchard of Lost Souls

The heavens break open and she trots forward, skipping and sliding. The rain smells fresh, heady and green; it cleans the town and makes the paintwork on the buildings shine again. On a wall beside the market is a portrait of the old man with protruding teeth, the President. She has noticed it many times, but the raindrops now falling over his face look like tears and she stops, suddenly arrested by the sad expression on his face; despite the military khaki and gold braids he looks out to her with infinite loneliness. The dark clouds and the empty street drag down her already low spirits; in this kind of weather you should be at home with a family, dozing, playing and sitting snug by a fire. She feels cheated, cheated and spurned by the world. She wipes the tears off the portrait and continues up past the main market and antenna-eared radio station, along the perimeter wall of a large school loud with loved children and through her faqir market.

She reaches Nasra’s street shivering and with rivulets of water running down her nose and the inside of her dress. The street has changed entirely; it is full of wild children dancing half-naked in the rain and lifting wide-open maws to the sky. Chickens flap between their feet and goats are forced to dance on hind legs in their arms. A cacophony of music blasts from each dwelling: songs from the radio, others warped by over-played cassettes and a few trilling from the women inside the homes. The previously thick waste in the gully is now flowing away in a small stream and the plastic bags caught in the tree branches shine like balloons. A girl of about eight with hair plastered to her face runs up to Deqo and drags her into the melee; holding her tight to her chest she spins like a whirling dervish, cackling. Deqo laughs too, enjoying the delirium; her sadness floats above her, hanging there for the moment, then the girl slips and they both crash to the mud, limbs intertwined.

‘What’s your name?’ Deqo pants.

‘Samira, you?’

‘Deqo.’

‘I haven’t seen you before.’ The girl smiles and reveals small, brown teeth.

‘I am from far away.’ Deqo knows the way smiles fade when she tells people she is from the refugee camp.

A woman with bare feet leaps towards them; she is thin and angry. ‘Samira! Samira! Get up off the dirt, you little pig!’

‘I have to go.’ Samira rushes to her feet before the woman can slap her bottom. She runs into the shack and the woman follows, her feet like a wading bird’s as she navigates the mud.

‘Deqo, is that you?’

Deqo lifts her head from the mud to find Nasra squinting at her. She slides up and wipes the stripes of dirt off her face.

‘Come inside, you’ll get sick,’ Nasra orders.

An incense burner heats up the room as Nasra rubs a towel over Deqo’s hair and body. ‘There isn’t any water at the moment, you’ll just have to stay a little dirty for now,’ she says.

Deqo looks around the room as the warmth returns to her skin: at the pink walls decorated with film posters, the fur rug on the blue lino floor, and the white furniture crowding around her. This is the finest room she has ever seen. Totting up how much all of the furniture, clothing, ornaments, knick-knacks and cosmetics must have cost in the market, she takes a sharp inhalation of breath. Whores live well, she thinks.

‘Let me put some milk on the stove.’ Nasra drops the towel on her bed and leaves the room.

Deqo tiptoes to the framed photos on a table; all the pictures are of Nasra, but in only one of them is she smiling. Her eyes move aside and she picks up nail varnish bottles one by one: pale pink, bright pink, dark red, electric blue — she would like to paint a fingernail in each colour. Everything in the room is gorgeous, made for pleasure; the soft rug is bliss against her tired feet, sequins twinkle on the gauzy purple curtains, the bed has pillow upon pillow. She struggles to see what shame there is in being a whore if it brings such luxury to a life. Nasra seems incapable of any work apart from beautifying herself; she is too delicate and too pretty to labour in the dust of the market or to wash someone’s floors on her knees.

Nasra returns with two mugs of milk. ‘I was thinking about you earlier.’

Deqo smiles and quickly hides her mouth behind her hand.

‘It is wrong for any child, but especially a girl, to be sleeping anywhere near that ditch, with the wild dogs and even wilder men. If you wanted to, you could stay here; there is space for bedding in the kitchen and you’ll be warm at night. We need help around the house, cleaning, preparing food; you could look after China’s baby too. You would like that, wouldn’t you?’

Deqo looks her square in the eye. ‘Why do you want to help me?’

Nasra puts her mug on the floor and sits back on the bed. ‘Because I was once not too different from you: lonely, hungry, uncared for. I hitched a ride to Hargeisa and arrived with nothing more than a toothstick and a change of underwear. I know how it is to be a girl on the streets.’

‘I can really stay here? You won’t send me away?’

Nasra smiles. ‘Not unless you do something terrible.’

‘That is China’s room as you know, over there is Karl Marx, and in the corner the new girl, Stalin.’ Nasra points to three closed doors made of rough planks on each side of the courtyard. ‘You have to clean their rooms but if the doors are closed you leave them alone.’

‘Are they foreign? Their names don’t sound Somali.’

‘No, those are their nicknames; every girl has a nickname on this street.’

Deqo skips beside her. ‘What is yours?’

‘Every girl but me. I liked my own name well enough and didn’t care about anyone finding me.’ She opens the kitchen door to reveal pots, pans and long knives dumped in a large plastic basket in one corner, and a mat, blanket and cushion in another.

‘It’s not the Oriental but it’s better than the ditch, no?’

Deqo nods. Falling asleep in a warm kitchen with the smell of proper food in her nostrils is good enough for her.

‘We all like to cook for ourselves but you might be asked to help chop or watch over dishes. When you’re not cleaning stay within earshot in case we need you to run an errand.’

That night, as Deqo huddles in the kitchen, imagining her barrel in the ditch empty and miserable without her, she hears men’s voices. She jumps up to peer out of the doorframe. All of the doors to the women’s rooms are thrown open and light spills onto the courtyard.

‘Stay away from me!’ a young girl shouts from the hallway. ‘Oof! I don’t want you anywhere near me, you cannibal.’

Deqo guesses that it is Stalin.

An older man appears, carrying a leather bag into Karl Marx’s room. He looks back, smirking, as Stalin continues to pour curses onto his head. He enters the room without knocking and then the glowing strip of light underneath Karl Marx’s door is extinguished.

All through the night Deqo is woken by slamming doors, raised voices and other more mysterious sounds. She feels more anxiety here than in the ditch, but also insatiable curiosity. She suspects the origins of her own story lie in a place like this, that it is time to uncover the facts of her birth. Her eyes remain wide in the dark, her ears attuned to every little squeak, her dreams evaporating like mist. It had been far easier to sleep in the ditch, where it was too dark to see and so quiet at times that she could hear the blood rushing through her veins.

The morning comes, bright and demanding, just as Deqo is falling asleep. She resists its call for as long as possible before realising just how late it is. She eats the canjeero that someone has placed beside her on a tin plate and washes her face and arms under the weak flow of the courtyard tap, unsure if she is allowed in the bathroom.