The sound of Samir’s alarm is sharp. It cuts through the sweet sap of his sleep like an axe.
He had been dreaming of Sudan. In the dream, his fingers were smeared with brilliant paints of orange and fuchsia – the colours of his niece’s dress. He had been painting her for his sister’s birthday gift.
He consciously banishes the images from his mind and looks at his palms: dry nut-brown, clean of colours; dull and paper-thin. He hasn’t painted for almost two decades.
His throat hurts. He wants to drink so he straightens the brittle bones of his right arm, listening to the air escape from his shoulder. Crack. But his fingers feel numb as he closes them around the glass and brings it to his sandpaper lips. The water is bitter and plain here – devoid of the freshness and colour he took for granted in his youth.
Friday, 20th February. He has worked for thirteen days straight, delivering endless parcels – this is his first day off. Praise be to God.
He rises and walks across his tiny flat, enters his bathroom.
The truth is he’s only half sure he believes in God. One thing is certain: if He does exist, then he’s abandoned the world in favour of other matters.
He can see his pale bar of soap and the dark, obstinate mould on the cold tap. His lined, creasing, lightly stubbled face looks back at him from the lime-scaled mirror. His stone-blue uniform is crumpled and rough on the side of the bath. He reaches for his toothbrush.
The light falls through the bathroom window in a soft lattice of crystal and pearl in a way that would have once caused him to marvel – and then spend weeks ardently recreating the effect on the rough cream of his canvas. He averts his eyes now, turns his back to the beauty.
***
Years ago, Samir fled from Kauda. His village was hit by crude barrel bombs, his immediate family and the woman he loved were killed.
He used to be a painter, and he had been painting the mosque of a neighbouring village when the ordnance hit. He came back to find dust and rubble and blood and shadows.
He left – North – on a truck carrying sesame. He arrived in Khartoum, thin and frail. He lived with a small old woman who owned a pottery stall in the bustling suq. He painted her vases and bowls and cooked her meals in return for her kindness.
He stayed as long as he could, but the government was restricting southerners.
He contacted smugglers, who got him into Egypt through the desert. He stayed in Luxor for a year and soon met a man named Tadele, who had fled Ethiopia, and whom the smugglers brought in to sleep on the same floor. Tadele told Samir of the war with Eritrea, and Samir told him of the mountains and the mosques of his childhood. Tadele rented a shop and they lived in the back.
Their time together was simple; domestic. Tadele made jewelry and wove carpets for tourists. Samir painted portraits in crimson for the visiting Europeans in the Valley of The Kings. He found that crimson offered the quickest and most vivid representation of a character.
They lived in this way for nineteen months, singing on birthdays and eating ripe figs from the tree, sharing language and the money they earned through art and craftsmanship.
But they had no papers, no identity. And Samir wanted to belong – or at least to root himself somewhere irrevocable. The plan was Europe. When at last they had saved the requisite money, they were able to pay the smugglers again. They crossed into Libya together by night – walking across the border – and were then taken to Tripoli by the onward gang.
The perilous boat trip was arranged to Italy. They boarded together but Samir disembarked alone. He arrived in London a month later after a second boat trip with no money left and little English.
***
Now, Samir’s temple presses against the cool, clouded glass as the bus rumbles on. He doesn’t yet know how his precious day off will be spent.
The air is thick and sour with the six million breaths of London. He watches roads and humans and rain and begins to feel the true walls of his existence. He becomes aware of the years he has spent in relief, in gratitude. He made it. Unlike his family, unlike Tadele, unlike the woman he once loved whose name he still cannot bring himself to say out loud.
But he has not let himself smile, or paint, or sing. He survived; they did not. The pursuit of happiness seemed presumptuous. He got to live. And that was more than enough.
Still, he came here to be free. And this cannot be freedom. He has survived for seventeen years. And now he must be allowed to live again.
***
He returns home, empties the contents of his bag onto the kitchen table. Four canvases, acrylic paint, paintbrushes. An oak easel. His hands shake and tears spill as he reaches for a paintbrush, feels the smooth, sturdy wood against his palm. He presses crimson paint out of a tube and applies it to his brush.
He begins to paint.