The Shadow Girls

But little of this remained when Tea-Bag awoke. There was only the fading impression of her father on the roof. There was nothing left of her other dreams, only the fleeting faces of people she wasn’t sure she recognised.

Tea-Bag pulled the dirty blanket up to her face. Was the dream trying to tell her that perhaps she was the one who was now on that rooftop, sharing the pain that her father had suffered? She didn’t know, didn’t find any answers. The rain fell steadily against the sailcloth of the tent and the thin light that came in through her eyelids told her it was seven or seven-thirty in the morning. She fumbled for the watch that she had stolen from that Italian engineer. But it had disappeared after the shipwreck. She still had very few memories from that night. There were no precise details, she could remember only their desperate attempts to survive, not to be pulled down and die a few metres from the land that meant freedom.

Tea-Bag opened her eyes and looked up at the tent. Outside she could hear people cough, sometimes saying words in a language she didn’t understand. They moved around slowly, just as she would do when she got up, the movements of a person without hope. A heavy, reluctant gait, since they had no goal. In the beginning she had kept track of the days with small white stones that she gathered down by the fence. But then they had lost meaning for her. During that time she had been sharing her tent with two other women, one from Iran and the other from Ghana. They had not got along well, had chafed in the limited space inside the tent. Refugees were loners; their fear meant they couldn’t stand to have people come too close to them, as if the sorrows and despair of others were a contagious disease.

The woman from Iran was pregnant when she first arrived. She had cried all night long because her husband had disappeared somewhere along the way during their long journey. When her contractions started the Spanish guards put her on a stretcher and Tea-Bag never saw her again after that. The girl from Ghana was an impatient type, someone who couldn’t see a fence without immediately plotting to climb over it. One night she and a couple of boys from Togo, who had sailed to Europe on a raft made of empty oil barrels that they had stolen from a Shell depot, had tried to climb the fence. But the dogs and the spotlights caught her and she never returned to the tent. Tea-Bag assumed she was now in the part of the camp where those labelled ‘difficult’ were held under stricter supervision.

Tea-Bag sat up in bed. Loneliness, she whispered, is my greatest source of suffering. I can walk out of this tent and immediately be surrounded by people. I eat with them, I walk along the fence and look at the sea with them, I speak with them, but still I am alone. All refugees are alone, all are surrounded by invisible walls. I have to get rid of all hope if I am to survive.

She put her feet on the ground and shivered from the cold. At the same moment she was again reminded of her father. He would always plant his feet firmly on the ground when confronted with an unexpected difficulty or anything he was not prepared for. This gesture was among her earliest memories, and connected with her understanding of the potential for mysterious action that even the people closest to her were capable of. Later, when she was six or seven, her father had explained to her that a person needed to have a secure foothold when facing unexpected troubles. If she remembered this rule she would also be able to remain in control.

She pressed her feet firmly into the ground and told herself that nothing special was going to happen this day. If something did occur, it would be a surprise, nothing she had been waiting for.

Tea-Bag sat up and waited for her strength to return, the strength to carry on another day in this camp in which people were forced to renounce their identities and were constantly searching for signs of where they might be welcome.

When she felt strong enough she got up, pulled the old nightgown over her head and put on a T-shirt that the girl from Ghana had given her. It had a Nescafé logo on the front. The logo obscured her identity in the same way that the camouflage uniforms had hidden the soldiers who took her father away.

She shook her head to rid herself of these thoughts. She could allow herself to dream about him sitting on the roof until he fell to the ground of exhaustion. She could think about the way in which he used to press his feet into the ground. But she could not allow herself to think about his disappearance, except sometimes in the evening. She felt strongest right before sunset, filled with supernatural powers for a few short minutes. Then it was as if she slowly started to sink, her pulse grew slower and her heart tried to mask its stubborn beat deep inside the hidden recesses of her body.