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‘Let’s walk around the block.’
‘I thought you were tired.’
‘It won’t take long.’
At the next corner, I glance over my shoulder and notice the waitress standing on the pavement, still talking on her phone. Ahead of us, two dockside cranes reach into the sky like leafless trees. A red light is blinking from the highest point and a beam of silver sweeps over the sea from a lighthouse.
I hear music. A folk band is playing at the Waterfront Inn. Drinkers spill out onto the pavement, leaning on lampposts, holding pint glasses and glowing cigarettes.
‘Do you recognise anything about this place?’ I ask. ‘Could you have been here before?’
Evie shrugs, or it could be a shiver.
Back at the guest house, we enter through the side door to slip quietly up the stairs. There are still guests in the lounge. They look like travelling salesmen rather than tourists.
Evie follows me into my room. ‘Can I stay with you tonight?’
‘No.’
‘What if someone breaks into my room?’
‘Yell.’
‘What if they cover my mouth and I can’t scream?’
‘Bite them.’
‘What if they’re really quiet, like Ninjas?’
‘Go to bed, Evie.’
She leaves the internal door open. I brush my teeth and collapse into an exhausted sleep where conscious thoughts mutate into fevered dreams and then wonderful, sweet, carefree oblivion.
2
Evie
Cyrus says I’m too young to have regrets, which makes it sound as though heartache and crushing disappointment are things that people grow into or develop a taste for, like red wine or black coffee or dark chocolate. He also says that life is about fixing broken connections.
Why do they break in the first place? I asked. He said, accidents, carelessness, negligence and loss. Sometimes the connection is broken at birth; sometimes it happens later. For Cyrus, it broke when he was thirteen years old and he came home from football practice to discover that his family was dead. That’s why he became a psychologist – to understand what happened – but delving into other people’s minds hasn’t healed Cyrus or let him sleep peacefully at night or stopped him lifting weights until his veins bulge. Instead, I see someone who is more damaged than I am, only he hasn’t realised it yet.
I don’t know when my connection broke. Maybe when Agnesa was raped or when Papa was killed, or when we left home without saying goodbye to anyone. Perhaps the connection was stretched thinner and thinner the further we travelled, until it finally snapped.
It was four days on buses and trains before we stopped moving and I saw the Atlantic Ocean for the first time. Grey, choppy and cold, it didn’t look any different from the sea that I’d seen in Tirana. We had reached an old city full of churches and squares and palaces, but also empty shops and abandoned factories and cheap hotels.
I didn’t know much about Spain. I once asked Papa about a book he was reading called Don Quixote. He said it was set in Spain and was about a man who lost his mind and went on a quest to become a knight and defeat imaginary enemies like windmills and flocks of sheep. Papa said the story was about challenging life and how madness can be a healthy reaction to a mad world. I didn’t understand it then. I do now.
Mama rented a room in a boarding house, and I slept on the floor because the roll-away cot collapsed on the first night and the landlady threatened to make us pay. During the day, we walked around the city, and ate oranges and flaky pastries and I tasted avocado for the first time.
I practised my English with a Spanish girl, who worked in a café downstairs. I couldn’t understand some of what she said because her accent was so strong and she mixed up her tenses, but she taught me swear words that I had never heard before.
On the ninth day, we were woken in the middle of the night and told to pack our things. A covered truck was waiting downstairs. We loaded our suitcases and an extra bag of food into the truck, which took us to the port and into a warehouse where other migrants were waiting. We were told to line up. A man walked down the row, choosing people. Mama brushed my hair and told me to stand up straight.
The man stopped next to Agnesa. She didn’t lift her head. He gripped her face in his hand and raised her chin.
‘This one,’ he said.
‘No, we are family,’ said Mama.
