Emily’s headaches were getting worse. Dizzying. Nauseating. But she forced herself out of bed, up and inwards, towards the city. To Euston, or Kings Cross, or Victoria. She had three cleaning jobs now. But the destination she travelled to most often was Kentish Town. She had seen the advertisement for the charity on a desk at one of the offices she cleaned, and she had picked it up, plastered with yellow stickers, and stared for long minutes at the photographs of happy, elderly faces, frail but slipping slowly into incapacity. A gentle demise. The carers with them looked strong and confident, and capable, almost like doctors. If you’re building a house and a nail breaks, do you stop building, or do you change the nail? she’d heard, in her mother’s voice, in her head. So after five days of hesitation and procrastination, she had finally made a nervous phone call to a person to whom she’d never spoken, and had supplied her name, and the following morning begun a training course to become a carer.
During the first class – learning Health and Safety, and how to use a fire extinguisher, and how to wash her hands – Emily had found herself drifting off, dreaming of days in which her ambitions had amounted to far more. But after that they got on to the moving and handling of the sick and elderly, and medication, and catheter care, and there were talks about the ethics and principles of health care. And now they were doing emergency aid, which felt like a real skill, and soon she would be assigned a Buddy and begin her stint of shadowing. And so far nobody had asked her about her childhood.
The course distracted her from it. It filled the too-bright days. And when she allowed herself to consider it, fleetingly, she found it was good to be learning something again. Still, time persisted and there remained long stretches of daylight when things felt uncontained and uncontrollable. And so she took the bus and clung to the crowded, protective, urban sprawl.
No longer limited to places one could stand for free, with her new wages from her cleaning jobs, Emily bought herself soup or a sandwich and sometimes a sweet piece of cake, eating it alone at the windows of different cafés. There, with glass between them, she watched real people strolling by, oblivious to her, oblivious to the others like her who existed now only inside her head.
Like Cassien.
She tried not to think of her youngest brother. But in and out of the cafés came friends swathed in greetings and goodbyes, and Emily could still feel the warmth of his arm when he placed it casually around her shoulders.
So she stood. And she sat.
She imagined reinforced glass.
She walked. She walked.
Clicking her tongue, her mother said: You can outdistance that which is running after you, but not that which is running inside you.
And inside her, both she and Cassien were running fast.
Once, Before, about two years before the violence began in earnest, they had found themselves caught in a riot. It was difficult now to imagine that they had ever been so naïve, but they didn’t believe anything would happen then, not to them, not really. It was true that things were changing – the adults said nothing though all the children could feel it – but at the beginning it was still like one of Cassien’s stories, the kind that hovered tauntingly on the brim of their consciousnesses but they would never truly see: like monsters, or landing on the moon, or America.
They were on their way to school when they saw them. Cassien had been carrying a football – new, bought for his birthday, prized – intermittently dropping it on the floor and dribbling it through yellow-flowered bushes. She had a satchel slung over her shoulder on top of the neat, cream school uniform of which, having only just been admitted into senior school, she was excessively proud. There was a pale blue trim around the edge of the sleeves, and as Emily swung her arms she liked to catch flashes of it, like a promise just to the side of her of calmness and cool.
The men in the street were uniformed too but in louder, hotter colours. Flashes of green and yellow were emblazoned across their chests, tied around their heads, and raised on flags that flapped atop spears and masus and machetes. Hutu Power, they chanted. Hutu Power, followed by more words that were angry and aggressive and aimed, suddenly, at them. Emily had seen these men before in smaller groups or from a distance, but never with such empty space between them. Putting his arm around her shoulder, Cassien moved them carefully into the void. He was a year older than she and a foot taller. The football was now tucked securely under his arm. His jokes had been replaced by an unnerving silence. Emily knotted her hand into his shirt and pulled back slightly, but without conferring they both knew they had no choice other than to move towards the road upon which the sweaty, raucous men were assembled. It was their only path to school and Mama and Papa reminded them daily how fortunate an education made them.
They drew closer. As they did so, the volume of the men’s chants increased and Emily felt her limbs involuntarily tighten. Still, she didn’t truly believe that the men would harm them. Not an unarmed child and his scrawny, barely-there sister. Not them. Not so near to home. Not until Cassien fell.
Cassien.
Turning frantically, the first thing Emily noticed was that his football had rolled away and was already lost in the crowd of stamping feet. Instinctively, she began to go after it for her brother, but from the floor, Cassien yanked her back.
“Cassien!” she protested.
“Shush Emmy.”
The man who had smacked him towered suddenly over them both: tall, broad, wild, stinking of beer and lust and power. Cassien, at 12-years-old drew himself up before him. His nose was bleeding.
“Inyenzi Inyenzi! Cockroach!” the man bellowed, spit spraying from his mouth. Other men grew interested and moved closer.
“We are not.” Cassien wiped his face with the back of a hand that to her horror, Emily noticed was shaking. She looked up. The men held masus, clubs spiked with nails, and bottles of beer. One of them was fondling a spear grotesquely. Cassien took his sister’s hand and kept her tucked behind him. “Come on Emmy. Let’s go back.”
“But school,” she protested. “We’ll miss school. And your football - ” Some of the men were kicking it now between them.
Cassien’s glance back was only fleeting, his last seconds of childhood rolling away as fast as his prized possession. As they ran, the dirt and dust kicked up from their feet settled over her new uniform.
At home, their father took one look at Cassien’s nose and started shouting in language he never used and they were not allowed to. But he didn’t go after the men who had harmed his child. Instead, he ran to the factory where Gahiji worked, and to Simeon and Rukundo’s school and brought all of his boys home. Then he bolted the doors and told them they were not to leave the house. Mama fussed over Cassien and heated a pan on the stove to make them all tea with muffins. She suggested they sit at the table and play a game, and for a while it was almost as if their togetherness was due to a public holiday, or a birthday, or Christmas. They even laughed. Emily sat next to Gahiji and puffed up proudly when in his bird-like way he tilted his head and declared that she was to be on his team. Cassien’s nose stopped bleeding and the drama of the afternoon seemed to melt beneath the hot liquid in the mugs so that soon it felt almost like an adventure survived, and a reason for festivity. But Emily hadn’t realised that this would be her last memory of them all sitting together like that, smiling, though even then they knew deep down that the smiles were only for each other’s sake, because it was better than crying, and because they hadn’t yet seen the first body in the street.
That would come in the morning. And that was the day that Mama made the rules: If they come, run. Be quiet and run. Into the graveyard behind the house. Into the bushes. But not together. Never together. No matter how scared you are. If one is found, at least the other survives. You run, you be quiet, you hide alone.
The adults spoke directly to their offspring now, they told them what was what, they gave them warnings. It was too dangerous to keep them hidden in cotton-padded childhood.
Sometimes, before her first cleaning shift began, Emily returned from her new course, or from her city wanderings, to her flat, lay a blanket on the floor, and prayed the rosary. “I believe in God, the Father Almighty… ” she began, making the sign of the cross and sitting on her knees, just as her mother had taught her. “… He shall come to judge the living and the dead. I believe in the Holy Spirit, the Holy Catholic Church, the communion of Saints, the forgiveness of sins, the resurrection of the body and life everlasting… forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us… ”
She meant none of it. Not anymore. When she used to kneel with her mother, solemnly bow her head, and utter the sacred words, she felt she was whispering to a trusted confidante. Infallible. Unerring. God was her friend then, her saviour. But how could she trust Him now? How could she trust in anything? How could He even exist and let what happened, happen? She didn’t believe in Him. Or in resurrection. Or in some ethereal supreme judgment. It was as cheap a promise as democracy, or community, or help from the UN. Besides, she didn’t want to forgive. She wanted to cling instead to her fury and her hatred; it was all she had.
When she said the rosary now it was with defiance, as a gauntlet, and because it was her only means by which to talk to her mother.