Tuesday 15th: Mathilde – the café and the cops

Outside, to her relief, the van and the militia men have gone. She catches a glimpse of herself in the plate glass window as she passes it: her face looks surprisingly pale and frightened, framed by her pony-tailed light brown hair The two Muslim women across the street are describing what happened to a third who’s joined them: one points with the toe of her sandal to the splashes of Russian blood drying on the cool, shadowed pavement. Mathilde walks away, dreading the blue van and the militia men pulling up at her shoulder and asking her ‘what her problem is’.

When Mathilde was a girl, growing up in her parents’ rented Corporation house [on the estate in the suburbs], ‘foreigners’ were few and far between, although that ‘foreigners’ word seemed to appear frequently whenever grown-ups talked together – and especially after they had had a few drinks. As a snot-streaked, curly-haired blonde child, Mathilde had spent plenty of evenings sitting on uncomfortable chairs listening to smoke-smelling grown-ups discussing how everything was ‘worse’: how ‘they’ were ‘taking over all the jobs’ and ‘getting all the houses off the Corporation’. Every cigarette-smoking uncle or aunt seemed to have a sotto voce account of someone who had been ‘bumped’ out of a job by a dark-skinned foreigner who had undercut their wages. These conversations usually took place in wooden-floored church halls or community centres, at weddings or post-christening parties, when people’s heels squeaked across the crudely-waxed floors and ancient relatives lined the walls, cemented into plastic bucket seats while their grandchildren and nephews and nieces made dutiful forays to talk to them before disappearing to the minimally-stocked bar to replenish their Cinzanos or pints of bitter beer. Mathilde remembers the smells of those drinks on her parents’ mouths as they kissed her goodnight, and she recalls how romantic those smells seemed back then, and how loving and close her parents seemed on those (typically) summer evenings, when they’d all walked home hand in hand from wherever the big family party had taken place. In her room on those nights the hiss and hum of the party music would echo in her ears until sleep came.

From her bedroom window, in the mornings, she could see the big tower block emerge: in the winter, the lights from the flats would presage the dawn, and in the summer the big rectangular bulk of the concrete structure would hang there against the growing light, cool and shadowy, with the dawn light passing – clean and dazzling – through a couple of well-angled flats at the lower left corner. The flats, she knew, were where all the ‘foreigners’ lived: this was a ‘bad thing’ – she knew that too…although, if you asked her where that knowledge came from, she wouldn’t be able to tell you. It was just obvious and self-evident – undeniable, as everyone thought the same thing.

In her primary school, there had been a couple of children with brown skin. She remembers registering how they smelt of spices – their skin seemed to exude the fragrance of exotic foods that she and her family had never eaten – and how the boys had strange twists of cloth around the knots of hair tied on the top of their heads. She was both fascinated and repelled by these foreigners: their difference made them interesting and compelling, but she knew – somehow – that she had to keep them at a distance; that they were different from ‘her kind of people’, and that she must keep them at a distance. ‘Their type’ and ‘our type’ should not – could not – mix. Where on earth, and how on earth, did she ever learn that? […]
(c. 610 words)