Sam Thompson: Communion Town

Do you remember how you came to this city, Ulya? Think back, because we need to agree on what happened right from the start. I want to help him out as much as you do, believe me. I know you’re worried, and in your place I’d be the same — but I can promise you that conditions are actually quite tolerable in there. So let’s approach this calmly. When I’ve said what I have to say, I’m going to offer you an opportunity, and I hope you’ll feel able to respond.

It was early morning, remember, when you and Nicolas arrived. Did your spirits lift at the first sight of what you’d travelled so far to reach? A world of grey dawn twilight and blackened stone above, rainwater dripping from the girders, pigeons sulking in rows and strangers spilling from carriages to gather on the concourse, disoriented. Even at that hour the Grand Terminus was full of migrants anxious to enter the city. They formed queues for processing, shambling in their soiled clothes, their heads twitching at the noise of the tannoy.

I picked you out of the crowd right away. You weren’t like the rest: with most of them it’s obvious, you can see it all in their faces as they offer up their papers for inspection, clutch their belongings and steal glances at the carbines of the watch. You and Nicolas, though, you were different. I have an instinct for these things, and I’m seldom mistaken in the end.

You mustn’t be surprised if I seem to know a good deal about your life over these past months: maybe more than you know yourself. The fact is I’ve been here all along. You won’t have seen me, but I’ve kept a discreet eye on your progress. So why don’t I go ahead and talk you through the way I see it? Then you can correct me on the finer points, fill in the details, let me know your side of the story. How does that sound?

No one wants to spend the first hours of a new life in an interview room, so let me apologise for what you went through that morning. I hope you feel you were treated with due sensitivity and respect. After they’d taken your photographs and left you waiting for a while, the door was elbowed open by a short man fumbling with a sheaf of papers. He had a preoccupied, officious manner, I’m afraid, and I certainly wouldn’t have chosen him to welcome you to the city with his damp scalp, his rumbling stomach and his tie that kept twisting around to expose its underside. He didn’t even introduce himself. As for you and Nicolas, you avoided eye contact and kept your answers minimal. Who could blame you?

It’s unsettling, isn’t it, being asked to tell your story over and over, when as far as you’re concerned it’s perfectly straightforward. The little man never said he didn’t believe you, but I know you felt that he was listening for a contradiction, waiting for you to slip up. He sighed as if your responses were somehow disappointing. He left the room, then came back, and you had to try again: Where have you come from? How did you travel here? Do you have friends, family, means of support? Can you prove that you have reason to fear immediate danger in your place of origin? Thoroughly tiresome.

At last they issued you with temporary permits to remain in the city, and a list of appointments to attend in the coming days: to apply for your identity cards, to request help with subsistence and accommodation, to make sure we didn’t lose track of you. By the time they let you go, you must have been hungry, thirsty and aggrieved — I know I would have been — but neither of you showed it. Now, you might think this wasn’t much to go on. But I’ve learnt to trust my intuitions, and I could tell that you and Nicolas were going to need my help.

I realise this is all very inconvenient, and I appreciate your patience. You can’t imagine what involvement he might have with Communion Town, but that’s all right — we’ll get there. Would you like a glass of water before we continue? You need only say the word. Everything now is strange and uncertain, Ulya, I understand this, I really do, but keep in mind that you and I can help each other if we choose.

For what it’s worth, I think you did just about everything you could. You tried gallantly to hold it together, but there were certain aspects of your life in the city that you could not have foreseen. It’s always clearer in retrospect. Think of the first time you walked into the apartment you had been assigned out in that half-empty tower block in Sludd’s Liberty. I’ll admit it wasn’t everything you might have wished for, with the stains on the ceiling and the smell of blocked drains. There was no furniture. Nicolas prodded with his toe at the great chrysalis of ripped-out carpet lying in the middle of the room, then gave it a kick, releasing an odour of damp.

You were uneasy, of course, seeing the reticence he had preserved so well at the Terminus already beginning to come apart. You had an inkling he would need to exercise more self-control in future. I have to say I agreed. Yes, I was there with you — at least in the sense that matters most. I’m good at not being seen, and in my job locked doors aren’t a problem.

What could you do? You were concerned about him, naturally, but you had your own adjustments to make, as every newcomer must. Nowhere is exactly as you think it’s going to be, and when you settle in a strange city you soon find out there’s more to learn than you suspected. You know what I’m getting at. You remember it: the day you saw your first monster.

You had been at the Agency all day, trying to see someone about your claim. You’d reported at nine a.m. sharp, as instructed, then queued until four in the afternoon to have an irritable clerk glance over your documents. Afterwards you crossed town to the depot in Glory Part where you queued again to redeem your food stamps. Then, burdened with cans of preserved meat and UHT milk, you rode the city metro west to the end of the line and a forty-minute walk through Sludd’s Liberty.

They have an unfortunate reputation, those banlieues where the old streets are overshadowed by never-completed tower blocks stalled midway through the process of being torn down. Most people I know wouldn’t venture out that way. On your route home stood one half-demolished high-rise with the open sockets of bedrooms and bathrooms visible from down in the street. Another tower, still whole, was trussed up in scaffolding, and the wind sang through the structure of metal poles, wanting to fling pieces down at you.

You walked by vacant lots behind chain-link fencing and under the arterial flyover. You passed a cherry tree in blossom, and an off-licence like a bunker, locked down with steel shutters. You skirted a rubblescape where mechanical diggers scraped the ground and a builder in a fluorescent jacket trudged along with a hod on his shoulder, while another picked his way over heaps of bricks, slowly and helplessly, as if it were the wreck of his own house. Three more sat in a circle, like practitioners of some ancient folk industry, using hand-tools to chip mortar off bricks.

You did notice these things, didn’t you, on your daily trek through the outskirts? It’s important we pay attention to the details, because I want to understand what it was like for you in those first days and weeks. I want you to persuade me of it, Ulya. I really think I’d be letting you and Nicolas down if I didn’t try my best to see things from your point of view.