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I wanted to be part of Agnesa’s secret world of gossip and boy-talk and clothes, but every time I thought I was catching up to her she would outgrow me again. I remained ‘the pest’, a tiresome younger sister, who eavesdropped on her conversations and needed babysitting and asked her stupid questions.
Mama and Papa were constantly warning us about girls who went missing in Albania. Everybody knew somebody who had gone. Some had been lured by boyfriends, who showered them with gifts and promises. Others were snatched from outside school gates or from bus stops or from the street.
A girl called Kira, who came from a neighbouring village and went to Agnesa’s school, was taken off the street by three men, one of them her uncle. ‘Come to Italy,’ they said, ‘or we kill your little brother.’
They took Kira across the Adriatic in a speedboat and north to Milan, where she was beaten and raped, before being sold to a brothel. Two years later, she escaped and went to the police, but they didn’t believe that she’d been abducted. They said that she’d chosen to come to Italy and work as a prostitute.
Kira was sent home to Albania. By then, her mother had died of a broken heart and her father was a drunk. Two months later, her younger brother was found frozen to death on a mountainside. The police said he’d become lost in a snowstorm. We knew the truth.
These were stories that our parents told us. Modern-day folk tales. Instead of children getting lost in the woods or being lured into gingerbread houses or eaten by wolves, they were kidnapped by criminal gangs and taken on boat trips to hell. English folk tales begin with ‘once upon a time’. In Albania they begin, ‘This will happen soon.’
Mama and Papa wouldn’t allow Agnesa to catch the bus by herself or to walk home alone. She pushed back, defying them. She was fifteen. Single-minded. Stubborn. She read magazines like American Girl and Seventeen and said she was ‘liberated’, which meant she could decide her future. She would go to university and become a lawyer and get a job in London or New York. Papa called her a dreamer. Mama said she was a fantasist. I wanted to be just like her.
The first of June every year was Children’s Day. We were given new clothes, and new shoes, and were allowed to visit the funfair that set up rides on the playing fields of the high school. The school choir sang from the back of Mr Berisha’s truck and the town’s brass band played patriotic songs. Papa played the tuba, which Agnesa said sounded like a ‘hippo farting underwater’.
I hung out with Mina until she had to go home after she ate a dozen tulumbas and vomited on the super slide. Papa told Agnesa to look after me and I was to look after Agnesa. Only one of us liked that idea.
At dusk, the lights came on, blinking like stars from the branches of the trees. There was music and dancing. Agnesa bought me bread stuffed with cheese and told me to wait for her near the drinking fountains. Boys had been flirting with her all afternoon, offering her cigarettes and soft drinks and compliments. She kept borrowing breath mints from me and telling me to keep watch in case somebody caught her.
I saw her talking to Erjon, the bully. He was a man now, eighteen, working for his father. He drove around in a BMW and had let his hair grow long, so it touched the shoulders of his dark leather jacket, and he had a thick gold bracelet on his wrist and a matching gold necklace.
Erjon told Agnesa he had something to show her. It was in one of the classrooms, which were supposed to be locked up for the public holiday. They disappeared. I waited. The air smelled of sugar and cooking meat and woodsmoke. Some of the men were singing. A fight broke out. I grew cold. I wanted to go home.
I went looking for Agnesa. A fire door was propped open. The corridor was empty. The coat hooks were naked. I heard her voice, telling someone to stop and that it hurt. She was bent over a desk in a classroom with her dress rucked up above her waist and her knickers hooked around one ankle. Erjon was between her legs, moving his hips, pushing the desk across the floor, making a scraping sound that was no less wretched than the noise coming from Agnesa.
I threw myself at Erjon, punching his back, telling him to get off her. He swung his arm and knocked me backwards. I was sitting on the floor with my ears ringing and eyes watering. I launched myself at him again. Erjon raised his fist. Agnesa begged him not to hurt me.
‘Tell her to leave,’ he said.
‘Go,’ she said. ‘Please.’
I ran out of the classroom and down the hall and out of the fire door. I wanted to find Papa, but he had already gone home and most of the men were drunk and the women were dancing in a circle around a newly engaged couple.
I waited near the drinking fountains. When Agnesa came out of the school she was crouched over, holding her stomach. Her lipstick was smudged and clownlike. Sad, not funny. Her hair was a mess. Her dress was torn. When she moved her hands to wipe her eyes, I saw the blood.
We walked home in the dark. The sky was vast and empty and a red blinking light showed the path of a plane flying above the mountains. Agnesa stopped at a tap and washed her face. Then she ran her wrist along the sharp spikes of a barbed-wire fence until blood appeared. She cut deeper until it flowed freely, smearing it on her dress.
‘What’s wrong?’ I asked.
‘I’m an idiot.’
‘Why?’
She turned around and slapped me hard across the face.
‘Ow! What was that for?’
‘For being you.’
‘That’s not fair.’
‘Nothing ever is.’
When we arrived home the sound of the TV droned from the front room. Agnesa slipped along the hallway and into the bathroom. I heard the water running into the bath.
Later, she came and lay next to me in bed, shiny and pink and clean. ‘I’m sorry I hit you,’ she whispered, wrapping her arms around me.
‘What did he do to you?’
