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I have no photographs of me as a child. I have only a button that was torn from my mother’s coat when I was dragged away from her. It is the size of a fifty-pence piece, tortoiseshell brown, and kept on a windowsill in the attic, which is my safe space. Cubby holes and hiding places are childish things, like security blankets and soft toys, but Cyrus says nobody should be forced to grow up before they’re ready.
My life is divided into two parts – before Cyrus and after Cyrus. My therapist, Veejay, wants me to concentrate on the before and to talk about my childhood, but I don’t want to remember everything that happened. Courage doesn’t always roar. Sometimes courage is a little voice that says, ‘run’, ‘hide’, ‘pray’, but mostly, ‘stay silent’, be as quiet as a mouse within the walls. Don’t let them find you.
Until I met Cyrus, Agnesa was the most important figure in my life. She was six years older than me. Blonde. Pretty. Bewitching. And from the time I could walk, I would follow her around, dressed in her hand-me-down clothes, happy to be her pet, her slave, her accomplice, or someone to take the blame.
She was my hero and my role model and my orbiting moon, pulling and pushing me away like the tides. I missed her when she went to school and the hours of absence were unbearable until I heard the bus chugging up the steep road from the bridge. The grinding of the gears. The brakes. The doors flapping open. I’d kneel on a chair and lean on the windowsill, watching her step down from the bus and hook her satchel over one shoulder, tossing her ribboned hair, and waving to her friends as the bus pulled away.
She was different from other girls her age. Her eyes were dark and bottomless, and she took the long view of the world, my gjyshe said, with a look that would inspire artists. She was also quietly rebellious, sneaking into Mama’s wardrobe and trying on her clothes and using her make-up. I would keep watch when she stole cigarettes from Mama’s underwear drawer, or went searching for our Christmas presents, which were hidden in the cupboard beneath the stairs, already wrapped in coloured paper. Agnesa could guess the contents just by feeling the packages. ‘Gloves’, she’d say, or ‘a journal’ or ‘a knitted scarf’. She wanted a bikini and some new knickers that were lacy and small and prompted Mama to say, ‘Over my dead body.’
We didn’t look like sisters. She was the cygnet who grew into a swan and I was the duckling who grew into a duck. Small for my age, with Papa’s tangled hair and pointy chin and panda eyes because I was born early. One day, when she was angry, Agnesa told me that I was a mistake. I asked Mama and she said I was ‘unexpected’.
‘What does that mean?’
‘You turned up without telling us.’
‘Like Aunt Polina?’
‘Not exactly,’ said Mama, laughing. ‘I didn’t think I could have any more babies. I tried and it didn’t work.’
‘What didn’t work?’
‘My plumbing.’
I was none the wiser.
Still too young for school, I spent weekday mornings with Mr Hasani in his electrical repair shop, which took up the ground floor of his house. He wasn’t married to Mrs Hasani. She was his sister and the two of them had grown up in the house and he had never left, but she had travelled to Greece and Turkey and to Kosovo during the war.
I played in the back room, amid the work benches, which were covered in radios, TV sets and video players in various states of disrepair or disassembly. The shelves had plastic trays of spare parts – valves, plugs, tuners, wires, heads, belts, pinch rollers, picture tubes, transformers and cables.
When someone brought in a broken DVD recorder, Mr Hasani had them carry it into his back room. He didn’t ask what was wrong. He simply adjusted a bright light and magnifying glass on a metal arm, before taking a small screwdriver and unscrewing the base. Quietly, humming to himself, he looked inside and tested some wires, before rummaging through the unlabelled trays, looking for a spare part.
He normally found a way to make things work. If not, he’d buy the broken unit and sell the customer a second-hand one that he’d repaired earlier. I once asked him if there was anything that he couldn’t fix and he said, ‘Only broken hearts.’
Mr Hasani’s other business was renting bootlegged videos and DVDs, most of which he imported from Greece, or purchased from tourists. Before I was born, the government wouldn’t allow people to watch foreign films and Mama still treated it like a revolutionary act when she unboxed a pirated DVD.
She loved American movies, and old-time musicals. I grew up watching Elvis Presley and Doris Day and Gene Kelly. My favourite was My Fair Lady about the flower seller in London who becomes a lady when she learns how to speak ‘proper’. In the same way, Mama was determined to teach us English and used the films as training aids by pausing and rewinding scenes, having us sing the songs and repeat particular phrases. The rain in Spain falls mainly on the plain. In Hartford, Hereford and Hampshire, hurricanes hardly ever happen. I started with a cockney accent and finished up talking like a lady.
Without those films, we had to watch normal TV – news programmes and documentaries and ancient soap operas from Greece and Mexico and Australia. Albania didn’t make many TV shows and my parents refused to watch what they called propagandë.
When we were outside the house, Papa told us never to speak English because some of our neighbours, the older ones, might think we were spiun i huaj, foreign spies.
‘How can we be spies?’ I asked.
‘We’re not, but people have long memories.’
He was talking about the old Albania before communism collapsed in 1990, when the secret police had so many informants that nobody could trust family or friends or neighbours.
Papa had wanted to be a teacher at university, but it was considered a dangerous profession. He still had boxes of books in the attic, which he liked to read, but he never showed them to people or read them in public. Being a butcher was safer. Driving a truck for our landlord, Mr Berisha, was safer. Being ignored was safer. None of it was safe enough.
6
Cyrus
The female paramedic shines a pencil torch into Evie’s eyes. ‘What did she take?’
‘Nothing. I mean, she’s not a drug taker.’
She glances at her male colleague, giving him a look that says, Yeah, they all say that.
