After Before Read online

  AFTER

  BEFORE

  Jemma Wayne

  Legend Press Ltd, The Old Fire Station,

  140 Tabernacle Street, London, EC2A 4SD

  [email protected] | www.legendpress.co.uk

  Contents © Jemma Wayne 2014

  The right of the above author to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patent Act 1988. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data available.

  Print ISBN 978-1-9098788-4-6

  Ebook ISBN 978-1-9098788-5-3

  Set in Times. Printed in the United Kingdom by TJ International.

  Cover design by Gudrun Jobst www.yotedesign.com

  All characters, other than those clearly in the public domain, and place names, other than those well-established such as towns and cities, are fictitious and any resemblance is purely coincidental.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher. Any person who commits any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

  Born to an American musician father and English mother, Jemma Wayne grew up in Hertfordshire and lives in North London with her husband and young daughters. She studied Social and Political Sciences at Cambridge University and Broadcast Journalism at the University of Westminster before beginning her career as a journalist at The Jewish Chronicle. She now splits her time between journalism, writing for stage, and prose. Her short stories have appeared in a variety of publications, and her journalism has been featured in The Evening Standard, The Independent on Sunday and The Huffington Post, amongst others. Her first play, Negative Space, was staged in 2009 at Hampstead’s New End Theatre. After Before is her first novel.

  Visit Jemma at

  jemmawayne.com

  or on Twitter

  @writejemmawayne

  For James

  I

  Chapter

  One

  She said her name was Emily. It had always seemed easier for English people to pronounce than Emilienne, and she refused to offer this part of herself, also, for sacrifice.

  “Okay, do you have any cleaning experience Emily?” asked the thick-necked, white woman behind the desk. She shuffled the forms in front of her, impatience spilling into Emily’s pause, but it wasn’t a simple question to answer. The woman said it so easily, rolling off her tongue as smooth as the flesh beneath the skin of a sweet potato, the same as most of the words Emily had had thrown at her over the years: stupid, ungrateful, cockroach. Emily’s mind ran over the dirty floors of her flat that she hadn’t so much as threatened with a vacuum; then to the sparkling windows and door knobs in the house she’d cleaned and lived in once, belonging to Auntie; then tentatively to the dark puddles of blood she’d scrubbed from her father’s floor.

  “Yes,” Emily decided upon. “I have experience.”

  Her smile was gummier than she would have liked, and there was a gap between her front teeth, but it was important always to smile. It conveyed honesty, familiarity, trust.

  “Do you have references?”

  “No.”

  The woman sighed. “So you have no experience.” Tutting, she scribbled out the tick in what was now the wrong box on the registration form.

  “You asked about experience, not references,” Emily clarified anxiously.

  But the woman only smiled, as though such ignorance was what she expected. Emily smiled back at her. Ignorance didn’t matter. Auntie had told her once. What mattered in this country was a willingness to work, to get down on one’s knees and scrub stains out of floors too low for English girls. “You’ll be cleaning commercial properties,” the woman continued, lists of products and rules and company policies suddenly undulating out of her like a well-sung nursery rhyme. Obligingly, Emily nodded along to the beat until she noticed that the woman had paused and leaned forward. “Can you remember all that?” the woman was prompting, smiling again, her over-padded wrists escaping the cuffs of her green blazer. The colour made Emily feel sick. The flesh made Emily feel sick. The woman’s gritted grin made her feel sick.

  “Yes,” Emily nodded.

  The darkness of her skin seemed untidy against the neat, white piece of paper the woman pushed across the table for her to sign. Her hand shook as it hovered over the box where she was supposed to form the letters of her signature. It shook, and she shuddered, and her stomach grumbled queasily.

  Outside, Emily wrapped her scarf around her neck. It wound three times and sat like a woollen brace that she rested her chin upon. Already the beginning of September, the first chill of winter was beginning to seep through the air into her bones and she knew she would be cold now until April at the earliest. It was impossible in this country to warm up once the cold was inside you and she would never grow used to it. But the scarf helped, and she liked the barrier it made between her long, skinny neck and the elements. Auntie used to try to get her out of the chunky knits she clung to and into more feminine shapes, but that was before she’d caused Auntie and Uncle so much distress, and they preferred her to disappear not just inside baggy clothes, but altogether.

  A bus roared past Emily’s right shoulder, her bus. She ran to catch it and smiled at the driver who paused long enough for her to clamber on and touch her Oyster card, but then accelerated with a jerk that threw her sideways. Emily was athletic once, strong, but now she was always a little unsteady on her feet and had to clasp the rail in order not to fall flat on her face.

  She swung rail to rail down the length of the bus until she found a spare seat, avoiding eye contact with the other passengers who were just as furtively avoiding eye contact with her. It had been a shock when she’d first arrived in this country to find that people didn’t greet each other in the street, or on the bus, or talk if they could possibly help it. Sometimes, sun-streaked instinct still got the better of her, but if there was anything she truly loved about England it was exactly this - the anonymity, the ability to live unnoticed, unidentified, undefined. There was a pleasure she found in the vast hoards of people whose names she didn’t know, rushing obliviously past each other. There was comfort in the uniformity of floor upon floor of council housing like that of the building she lived in, her room on the fifth indistinguishable from the rest. There was tranquillity in the busyness of people’s lives, in their individualistic pursuits and their self-obsession. There was isolation. Escape.

  Emily alighted at Golders Green station. Her flat was still a 15 minute walk from there but she needed some groceries and preferred to buy them from the bigger shops with hundreds of customers rather than from the small convenience store on the corner of her road. She’d only been a few times but already the owner knew her face and asked her questions like, ‘No avocados today? How about mangoes? I have perfect mangoes, you don’t like them?’ and, the week before, ‘Where are you from?’

  She picked up a basket outside the front of Tesco and dipped into the shop. She had exactly £4.73 left in her purse so had to make her selection carefully. The money needed to last until the end of the week and it was only Wednesday. Reluctantly she made her way towards the canned goods aisle and selected a tin of economy beans and some corn. Next, she found a loaf of bread that had been reduced in price because it was already at its sell-by date, and tore three bananas from a bigger bunch. Longingly she eyed the avocados but here such fruits were exotic and expensive. Emily picked up a small, hard one and quickly slipped it into her coat pocket. At the counter the cashier greeted her politely but without recognition, and Emily smiled.
Rubbing the bunch of carriers between her fingers to separate them, she packed her few items into two bags so that the heavy tins could be divided and she could prevent the plastic handles from carving out valleys in her thin arms on the walk home. She always carried bags over her arms instead of in her hands. When she used to go shopping with Auntie, they would walk home with fifteen bags between them, and Emily would carry ten of them, each one balanced carefully an inch or two away from the next, all the way up her scrawny forearms, the skin pinching together as if she, like the avocados they’d bought, was being tested for ripeness. That was at the very beginning when she was grateful to Auntie for coming to her rescue, and naïve still to the reality that real rescue wasn’t possible simply by escaping a place. Memories weren’t rooted in the soil.

  Emily realised now that Auntie had loved her then. She hadn’t been able to feel it at the time but identified it later, like so many things, in its loss. They had done well to put up with her really. They managed it for three years and she knew even as it was happening that the screaming and the silences and the disappearances would one day amount to a final straw. Gradually, Auntie began to raise her voice at her, and Uncle hit her once. Which made everything worse. She wasn’t surprised when they told her to leave. She told herself she felt safer that way anyway: alone, and running.

  A white van was parked in front of the entrance to Emily’s building. As she rounded the corner, she studied the men bounding in and out of it, unloading boxes. In Africa, they would be surrounded by people: newcomers were objects of curiosity to be scrutinised and assessed. He who has travelled alone, can tell what he wants, went the proverb, one of many that even after so many years, Emily was unable to rid from her mind. But the proverb held a truth, and it had felt natural for her, in another time, in a place that no longer existed, for strangers’ stories to be tested and repeated, inquiries encouraged, questions asked. Emily shifted her shopping bags higher up her arms and walked past the van without a word.

  The lift was broken again so she climbed the stairs, trying not to breathe in too deeply the stench of urine and beer. It amazed her still that a flat had been found for her so quickly, had been given so freely, by a nation who barely looked at each other in the street. Auntie had explained to her once about welfare, about asylum, about how she and Uncle had claimed both before the day came that with a job, and a passport, they needed neither. She’d told this story with pride, gratified by the distance they’d travelled, and though it wasn’t due to a similar sense of aspiration, Emily always remembered this, and didn’t mind sometimes having to hold her breath on the stairs. By the time she reached the fifth floor however she was gasping. Stopping at the end of the corridor, Emily rebalanced the shopping bags and dug into her handbag for her key. She always did this - stopped, prepared, felt the consoling piece of metal in her palm. An instrument of safety. Of power.

  Emily looked up. A little way down the corridor, the door of the flat next to hers was ajar, a box propping it open, male voices inside. Emily had only ever seen the flat’s occupant once, but she knew it to be a tiny, hunched-over old woman who seemed not to have any visitors and made noise only when her kettle occasionally whistled. Probably, Emily considered, the woman had died, because it was plain that the foreign voices she heard now were those of the men from the van, who it appeared were moving in. Emily wondered, briefly, how long the woman had laid dead next to her, whether her decomposing body had started to smell, who had found her; but then she heard footsteps on the stairs and quickly covered the last few feet of the corridor to her door, locking it carefully behind her.

  The room was minute, the only windows facing directly onto a small courtyard with buildings so closely crammed around its edges and to such heights that it barely let in the light. Emily breathed deeply. She liked it this way. Rat-like. It was useful to be so far removed from the illumination of light, the transparency of sunlit days. Quietly, she unloaded her shopping, slipping the stolen avocado out of her pocket and onto the countertop to ripen, and placed a slice of bread into the toaster. She knew she shouldn’t really eat the beans that night, but she was hungry so dug around under the sink for her solitary pan and, with a knife, pried open the tin before sense could change her mind. The dark red contents gushed with satisfying, hearty thickness into the pot. As it heated she opened the tap and let the water run until it was cold, then held a tall glass under it, allowing it to overflow, still finding pleasure, and promise, in this small excess.

  When it was ready, Emily carried her meal over to the cushion in front of the TV. In a moment of charity – or pity, or guilt – Auntie had let her take it with her from the room she’d once slept in, along with the clothes Auntie had paid for over the years, and a wad of ten pound notes folded together and pressed into Emily’s hand with a look of exhaustion at the door. Now the TV was Emily’s biggest distraction from the dismal reality of everything else, and the floor in front of it had become a place from which she could watch laughter, glamour, optimism, frivolity, extravagance, romance, hope, dreams, success. She wished sometimes that she could be one of the happy people inside the screen, or even one of the girls who worked in the café around the corner that sat outside on their cigarette breaks, making jokes and throwing back their heads, light beaming from their eyes. There was a time when she would have given anything for that brightness, that spark, but the darkness that filled her seemed impossible to escape. Her anger was impossible to escape. Misery was impossible to escape. And for the most part, she no longer tried to.

  Footsteps hurried past her door then returned a moment later, doubled and slower. Emily placed the remnants of her meal on the ground in front of her, turned off the TV, and slid from her cushion onto the floor. Lying flat she could make out the large, trainer-clad feet of one man walking backwards, and the sandals of another moving forwards opposite him. They were carrying something. The one wearing sandals was dark-skinned, though not as dark as Emily, and the wiry hair on his toes sprouted wildly, impervious to suggestions from the sandal straps of where they should lie. He called out to the other man in front of him and both pairs of feet stopped. Emily remained flat on the floor and listened to the muffled muttering between them in a language that wasn’t English and that she didn’t understand, then after a while the feet moved again, and disappeared from sight.

  Emily began to weep.

  It crept up on her slowly sometimes, and then there was time to make a cup of sugary tea, run a bath, or find some distraction on TV, but other times it hit her like this, abruptly. Angrily she hit back at the hot tears streaking down her face, but they only ran harder from her nose in polluted floods. She hugged her knees to her chest and forced herself to sit up, but then her mind wandered beneath the sink to the razor blade she had attempted to hide there, underneath toilet roll and toothpaste. The scar below her fringe throbbed, dizzying her. Her stomach tightened and contracted. Afraid that she might be sick she turned further onto her side, but couldn’t muster the energy to reach the toilet, or even the bin in the corner of the room. All she could do was remain low on the ground, clinging to the hard, worn, reassuring carpet, until it was over.

  When finally it was, Emily dragged herself back onto the cushion in front of the TV. The last beans on her plate were cold now and sickened her. She felt weak and listless. Her throat was dry and her head pumped after crying for so long, but she couldn’t be bothered to refill her glass at the sink. She switched on the TV. A nature programme investigating the life of insects filled the screen and she changed the channel quickly. Now Jeremy Kyle appeared in front of her, arbitrating the trivial, meaningless, wonderful disputes that were enough to drive the families on the show apart. Emily curled her body inwards, hugged her knees to her chest again and rested her head on the cushion. When her eyes closed she was in a field of sweet potatoes, in a shallow dirt valley between the straight lines of crops, her face crouched next to the soil, her breath unsteady and unreliable, caterpillars taunting her from underneath the leaves
.

  She opened her eyes.

  Another blink and there were voices screaming her name, shouts raised to a gruesome, fever pitch in exuberant anticipation of finding her. Darkness was in her mouth, dry, soil-smelling darkness. It scratched her eyes and covered them.

  She blinked again. Her view cleared and suddenly, in the distance, she spotted her mother. Emily scrambled up. She ran towards her, fast, faster, her legs and arms flooding with acid, but somehow, the distance seemed only to grow. She shouted, but no sound came out. She waved, but her movements were slow and minuscule. She ran. But with every metre she covered, her mother fell further away, and the more she ran, the more pain filled the older woman’s eyes, until finally Emily stopped and saw that her mother, on her unreachable plane, was undressed, and unhelped and unflinching.

  Emily opened her eyes once more.

  Her mother was gone.

  Jeremy Kyle screamed on in comfort.

  Chapter

  Two

  She stares sometimes into the mirror. Minutes pass, she imagines. It might be seconds. Or hours. Sometimes she pulls faces at the glass, horrible faces, contorting her features into vile versions of themselves, making a beast of beauty. She has been told that she’s beautiful. Luke tells her often. He brushes her wispy blonde hair behind her ear, tidying her, and touches a thumb to her lips, closing them, and tells her softly. Charlie used to whisper it hotly into her ear while fucking her from behind. He used other words – beautiful was not his domain – but somehow he seemed to mean them, and made her believe them, and excited her senses. She turns her lips inside out and scrunches up her nose and crosses her eyes and tries to see it still, beauty, shining from the inside out. She cannot. She says her name as though to summon it: Vera, Vera, Vera. She cannot answer. She calls again. Vera.