Thursday 17th: Mathilde

And yet there was something very attractive about this difference, and the exoticism, that drew her towards these classmates and made her want to find out little facts about them, little nuggets that she could stash in her memory, and bring out at home when the opportunity arose. Sometimes, when the grown ups were talking contemptuously or insultingly about ‘them’, she would toss in one of these bits of information in a faux-knowledgeable way – “Yeah, and they don’t even eat ham!” – as if this were insightful. But the grown ups never seemed to pick up on the hollowness of her observations, and smiled at her.

She’d never been in the block of flats, but she knew that ‘foreigners’ lived there. At first, she pictured them as like the Slavic enemies from the Eastern war, as these had been the dominant image of bad foreign people when she was growing up: in the war films, darker skinned men with black hair and moustaches were routinely offered up as shifty, duplicitous traitors and cowards, who would shoot you in the back at point-blank range or knife you with a cunningly hidden gimlet blade after pretending to surrender. In these contexts, it was quite understandable that the films’ allied troops treated all Slavic soldiers – and civilians – with suspicion, and were prepared to shoot them rather than take risks. In time, these machine-gunned bodies ceased to be people in the viewer’s mind: they were sacks of clothes, ciphers – personality-free representatives of an alien, enemy race.

And so Mathilde grew up thinking that the tower block was peopled with dark-skinned refugees from the eastern war, and she suspected that they had hidden weapons, and that their children harboured grudges against their victorious enemies. They had infiltrated the country on ostensibly peaceful missions (to work), but they held the potential to threaten the host nation. (The language of the films stuck with Mathilde, too: soldiers cursed their Eastern enemies as ‘maggots, scum, vermin’, and Mathilde associated those words with the gloomy flats and imagined corridors of the tower blocks. She imagined the smell of decay, and dog shit, and crawling things in the shadows, and the taint of germs and ‘lurgies’ that you could catch from the foreigners’ hair, breath, and handshakes.)

Gradually, under the influence of the real, ‘Asian’ foreigners she encountered at school, Mathilde began to re-imagine the denizens of the tower block. Before she knew them as Asians, or Indians, or Pakistanis, and before she ever understood the history of the Empire or of migration or citizenship – long before that, she knew these brown-skinned people by the names she heard the older children and adults call them by: ‘wogs’, ‘ragheads’, ‘hudgy budgies’. These names had a real feel of humour to them, and to use them and laugh was a mark of fitting in with the other children, and of belonging to a more grown-up group; these names were a kind of passport to pseudo-adulthood, to a world where, by using the right language, you could be accepted into a group that you aspired to join. And so she and her school friends aped the older children’s language habitually, as they did when they discussed the disabled children (‘spas’, ‘flid’, ‘mong’) whose pictures they saw in the annual charity booklets that came round the school. None of the foreigners or children were individuals, of course: they were just instances of the abstract 'foreigner' or 'defective'.

In Mathilde’s mind, the corridors of the flats began to smell of spices and incense sticks, the walls began to be hung with bright cloths, and the doors had glittering curtains strung across them. Exotic food smells permeated the clothes of the people who lived there.

In class, she found herself sitting next to a skinny Indian girl with glossy brown eyes and a talent for maths, and Mathilde cultivated for a few weeks, until some of the older girls chanted ‘Paki-lover’ at her in the playground one windy, drizzly break time; for the rest of the afternoon, Mathilde worried that she had broken some rule, and that the girls would be waiting to beat her up after school. She approached the gate with trepidation after the last bell, but the gang of girls was already way off down the street. She didn’t forget the fear, though, or the sense of having done something that was unacceptable, and worthy of ridicule and contempt.

(c. 730 words)