Read Online This Is Where I Am by Karen Campbell - Free Book Online Page A

seemed to encapsulate all her great excitement . . . And then I seen that boy off River City. You know the shell-suit one? I tell you, I was fair beside myself . Yes. To find a fire that needed no wood or flame, kept ever-ready in a home that needed no building. My mother would have been fair beside herself. I lift the picture frame that sits on the shelf, wish beyond almost anything that my family’s faces were inside it.
    On the way out of the museum, Deborah had asked me to wait in the foyer. ‘Foyer’ – I didn’t know that word. She told me it was the hall between the basement and the grass outside, and that it was French. ‘Sometimes we use foreign words like everyday words.’
    ‘I do that all the time,’ I said. She liked that. She laughed. A real laugh, with eyes and belly, not simply mouth, then told me she’d be ‘two ticks’. I stood and read the walls; there were bricks with people’s names on them. When Deborah came back, she was carrying a thin white paper bag. ‘Here.’ She handed the bag to me. ‘I put my home number on the back, so you’ve got that as well as my mobile. I know the Refugee folk said we should only exchange mobiles at first, but to be honest, I’m pretty rubbish with them. I always leave it in the bottom of my bag, or forget to switch it on . . . It’s just that, well . . . if I’m going to help with Rebecca, we should . . . I wouldn’t want to miss a call if you needed me, you know?’
    Inside the bag was a piece of card with numbers on.
    ‘Thank you.’
    ‘Turn it over.’
    On the other side was a picture. It was the painting we had seen of Our Lord, hanging in the bluest skies.
    ‘It’s the –’
    ‘Dali,’ I said. ‘I know. Thank you.’
    I’ve put the picture in this frame. Rebecca made it at Sunday School. The children collected strips of wood from the fruit ices they like to suck, then glued them together and painted them. Rebecca painted her frame in bright stripes of yellow and blue. Along the top, once the paint had dried, someone (I suspect the Sunday School teacher, because it was very neat) had written in black ink: ‘Thank you for . . .’ and then, at the bottom of the frame, Rebecca had written ‘Aabo’. Before I put the Christ inside the frame, I copied Deborah’s number into my phone. Her mobile number starts with ‘M’ for mentor, but I gave this one her name. Deborah . It jumps to the top of my list. I know no one here with names who start A, B or C – except Mrs Coutts, and I’m positive she has no mobile.
    As we passed outside, Deborah had asked me where the camp was, and how long had I been there? She said So before her straggly question, as if it was a final thing, and that she had been waiting to ask it from the start. Immediately, I shrank from answering. Wished I had never said a word to her, I should have refused to tell her anything at all except ‘my life is here now thank you’. But that would have been rude. And I’d already embarrassed her . . . And I had agreed to this whole – No. I had reached out gladly, to the false creation of a ‘friend’. And friendship means to give something of yourself. Just something, a piece no bigger than a little picture.
    I return the frame to its shelf, go into the kitchen.
    I had known there would be this necessary exchange, but I wasn’t prepared for it. Stupid. Of course I must revisit the camp. But it’s so hard to sift the silt, to make bright fragments of sense and clarity from the mass and mess of those days and years. You forget deliberately how the purpose of your coming, the focus of your search, the transitory – necessary – nature of your stay eked out to weeks, then months, then years of sloth. Of hope and future seeping out and sinking through the dust. To remember means to search for landmarks, for anchors in the grinding endless time that yawns and weeps itself to sleep and yawns some more. So all of your time there merges until there are only two fixed points –