The only things of any worth are invisible

My child eats. Watching me against, the whisper of his teeth skinning the flesh. It always reminds me of a lesson I taught at that dirty hospital where babies and grandfathers, mothers and brothers died and their families wailed during our cigarette breaks.

The doctor had sunrise skin and hair that fell like foliage over pale green eyes. And I was engaging as he asked me in, starched coat, fat wife caught in a picture frame by his desk, children’s bulbous eyes, and inquired how he could transfer a few thousand dollars to the US. I said I’d do it for him, but I’m not the useful kind of expat anymore. My bank account is empty and I can’t fill it here. People with empty bank accounts echo through the immigration system as if they didn’t even exist. People with empty bank accounts are not welcome at borders.

He struggled through the cobwebs of Syrian foreign policy. Speculating as to why, we, two graduates of the West’s premiere Universities, couldn’t transfer money abroad. Visa and American express boycotted Syria because their oil pipe lines fulfilled the whim of Iran instead of the US. They said it was because of Rafik Hariri’s assassination- but who cares for a Lebanese president? In the grand scale of things. Hizbullah has one tendon in the shadowed glance of someone other than the US’s venom. So Syrian banks obliged and left HSBC to beckon over the Bekka valley. The mercantile class could inflate the housing market, invest abroad with suit cases or gold, they’d stay put.

The surgery degree didn’t demystify this. It reminds me of the lesson in which I gave my students a picture of a mother staring delicately into the distance of a book, with her child eating a neatly cut sandwich by her side. The male answer from the back of the classroom, unattended by a customary glint or wink or reserve that it might deserve in other parts of the world, was ‘bad mother, ignoring her child’. Fact solidified.

Split second and we are in a pine dining hall of a London gallery. Ears normally otherwise engaged have allowed inside the customary tirade on the detachment of the Syrian from a sense of shared fate for his country. Inside their window of attention. Ravenous, but so hard to muster. There was, after all, an open discussion panel on the topic on Sky last night. And Simon Schama bellowed that he ‘knew’ the ‘Free Syrian Army’ ‘They’re Sunni. Or Shia. Well they’re not Alawi’. People do more research into newts.

And I have bustled my son into his pram and we’ve pushed ourselves onto the westbound bus. The smog is adorning the arch of its hood with burble pearls. He is playing catch with the woman with the rocket covered jacket and lip piercing who sits next to us. I think she is Polish. She laughs instead of speaking. Maybe she deems words irrelevant. His dancing eyes can see so much clearer without the pitfalls of sentences.

Two ticket inspectors board the bus and sit languidly against the door frame for a few minutes. The dialogue begins for us, the bystanders, their spectators, only after it has already begun for her. The woman with the almond eyes, cut white in fear. Hair pulled almost completely over and back- hidden like a bowl of fruit underneath a tea cloth. Knees pulled up and almost touching beneath the billow of her skirt. As we can all see, she has not the attire of someone from these climes, and unlike a tourist, she hasn’t bought anything to shield her. The bag that contains too little is faded plastic, it accompanies her into the haunted belly of the town- deserted on a Sunday evening. Regurgitating in readiness to take berth of the influx it will receive as dawn breaks. A tescos shopping bag carefully tied shut to contain the other side of her load. She might know.

He is speaking to her with every syllable and she answers with careful words, sentences that breath smooth underneath the shade of customary frustration, a calm anger that broths up, as she meets endless obstacles. He has picked the lowest part of the lace. Is he somewhere confident that she is lost enough not to have a comrade amongst strangers?

That she belongs to no recognisable clan here?  

That she has no guardian leaning ready to lend pity to a woman from Zimbabwe. Her English is perfect, her breath full of suffering, her eyes flat, composed, used to greed, used to tumult.

The other black men on the bus seem un ignited. They raise a fuss with the ticket inspectors for cutting into their journey back from work. (Yes, it’s the poor who must count the corners of their wages, must budget in their miles and zones and conclude the Ilford to Oxford Circus will save them extra credit on their gas card, a pot of noddles, a fish. They don’t get the tube).

You think, this society is dividing. Or was it rotten far before? You just never bothered to notice. And four eyes know better than two. He is demanding twenty five quid. Which she clearly cannot find amongst the smudged ink letter, folded, with the address of her contact here, who did or didn’t exist. He is snarling at all objections, at the man who is pissed off the bus has been stopped for her interminable interrogation. At me for telling him how to do his job, when, baby peering at him from my hip, I tell him that she doesn’t have £25. Can’t she pay the £2.30 you have to give the driver when your Oyster Card’s run out? No, his sullen pout answers. ‘It doesn’t work like that’.

His colleague wants to hit the black man who is grumbling as he files out (everyone has to get off the bus except me, I’m allowed to wait in the warmth, while the next one comes).

The bus driver lets me on all the time without a fare. A white girl with a baby is very different to a poor, thin, African woman, with a customary reserve. Surely Boris Johnson’s policy of ‘ethnic minority representation’ absolves of racism the Bangladeshis, Indians and Pakistanis who drive the buses and interrogate this woman.

I’m back in Syria again as she says she’s ‘on hoilday’- and he tells her the postcode she’s given him ‘isn’t correct’. What does he mean by that? Has he got a radio gadget, a smart phone? A contact in London’s A-Z headquarters? These guys only work on Sundays- when the poor fill the buses- I remember from my adolescence- before overdrafts, before student loans- before work for firms with fluctuating moral grounds.

I’m back on the micro. Which all of society stoops into- and are almost gone. Ramshackle guzzlers of diesel – I heard people say. But I loved the pulse at which they flew you from the heart to the kidney of that concrete city.

Their lime green competitors – bought by the government on the cheap from China – brought that London confine in their neon light- cooked your soles on winter days without warming your feet. Churned your stomach as you sat next to the night. They’re stuffed full of Shabiha now. Transporting from location to location men with hand guns who have no use for disguise.

I had come on in a hurry. It was one of those months when we had no money. I was, of course, dressed affably. The golden haired foreigner- in my long sleeved cat T shirt- tight jeans-covering, in careful calculation- only the parts I must to pass without focus in the remits of the general gaze of one’s elders there. Enough so that most people didn’t whisper, but one or two would try their luck. Otherwise, as is normal for a girl in Syria, I was obsessed with my appearance and even went to salons to get my eyebrows plucked – a far cry from my mirrorless existence in the UK- which laxed too, in Amman. But in Damascus, every second matters- and you are there in public- how can I explain it? The one on your right side and the other on your left- and the one planted opposite you- really exists. They are all part of a framework that extends into the very innards of yourself. In gradation rather than by crossing thresholds.

It came for the customary raising of hands to pass our well stowed coins over to the young, suave driver. With his glass of tea shaking under the pulsating motor- his tight T-shirt, his fine shaving, his nice smell (but girls don’t sit next to the driver). And I hadn’t taken my last hundred out. It wasn’t there, greenly folded in my pocket against my thigh. The fare was a tenth of it, about 13p. I told the bus. There is no privacy in a micro. Everything is for everyone’s ears. Like tea or food, it would be rude not to share it. A man looked with fatherly worry over at me, and bustled a note into the driver’s hand. Then pressed two hundred into mine. With a tut at my objection, he turned ahead and looked at the passing scene on the hill- Malki – near the lion’s compound.

‘But I have money at home’ I said, holding the note back out to him. He raised his eyebrows, which, to Levantine Arabs means ‘forget about it’.

‘I want to pay you back’ I prodded.

How often had a taxi driver told me in all earnestness ‘You are like my daughter, I’m afraid for you like I would be her’, that as I stepped out to my ‘director’s’ job at the language centre.

‘Ok’ he said, as he clambered out, ‘I’m Abu Ahmed- just ask for me – at that house’

We flashed past it. ‘Which one?’

‘The third one along’

So, he watered the flowers, fixed the fences, drank tea or coffee. Gossiped with the other guards here. Washed the windows, polished the cars. For those who lived in the lion’s shadow.

I never went back. I didn’t have money for another two weeks, and when I did, I never stopped off in Malki.

Malki is the place they said a big Israeli bomb fell in the 1970s and shattered buildings and killed families. They don’t say that a lot. They kill the families now.

Malki is where the rich live and where ‘they’ eventually told me I shouldn’t live anymore- because it was too close to the animal cage.

And I’m back in London- and the woman is skimming the cracks between the seats for an old discarded ticket – and the man is telling her they’ll just have to wait for the £25, and she’s asking if she can’t just get off the bus. And he’s saying no. And I say ‘she’s on holiday’. With a plea. And he says ‘Yes, and if I went on holiday, I’d have to pay for a ticket too’ though he didn’t get that far, he wasn’t the type to actually finish his sentences, he didn’t regard interlocution with strangers as important enough. And I knew she’d be in Yarlswood soon- and thought about jumping off and looking for a cashpoint so I could pay the fine for her. But rethought, my own sense of selfish righteousness intervened. I have to support my son and my husband who’s not even allowed to sit on one of these buses. I thought maybe I didn’t really know what was going on.

And as I boarded the next bus and a bunch of well dressed Korean tourists held out bank notes to Nejjie (he refused) and a coin (which he gave back) then a chocolate (which he loved, but I took away from him with some kind of false promise for their eyes that he’d have it after ‘dinner’). I wished I had paid. It could have stopped her being taken to Yarlswood by the end of the night. Maybe. And I went back wondering why, in Syria people still protected the weak. While in London, we have lost all capacity to do so.