It’s difficult getting used to British manners – I can understand the Moroccan man’s confusion. Apparently queuing is important here. People actually form a single line in a shop. It’s advisable to take your place in the queue and not try to push your way to the front, as this usually pisses people off! This is what the woman in Tesco told me last week. But I don’t like their queues, their order, their neat little gardens and neat little porches and their bay windows that glow at night with the flickering of their TVs. It all reminds me that these people have never seen war. It reminds me that back home there is no one watching TV in their living room or on their veranda and it makes me think of everything that’s been destroyed.
I ask for directions to the GP surgery and find it on a hill on one of the side streets leading up from the sea. The place is full of children with colds. A mother is holding a tissue to her son’s face and telling him to blow his nose. Some children play with toys on a mat in the corner of the room. The adults read magazines or watch the monitor, waiting for their names to come up.
I stand in the queue at the receptionist’s desk. There are five people in front of me. There is a yellow line on the floor with the words: ‘Queue behind this line.’
The woman at the front is handing the receptionist a urine sample. The receptionist pulls a pair of red-framed glasses out of a mass of tiny curls. She inspects the container, types something in the system, seals the jar of urine into a cellophane bag and calls out, ‘Next!’
It takes about fifteen minutes for me to get to the front and I have the asylum letter ready. When I put it on the desk, she lowers her glasses onto her nose and reads it through.
‘We can’t register you,’ she says.
‘Why not?’
‘Because the asylum letter doesn’t have an address.’
‘Why do you need an address?’
‘In order to register you, we need to see an address.’
‘I can tell you the address.’
‘It needs to be on your letter. Please come back when you have all the correct documentation.’
‘But my wife needs to see a doctor.’
‘I’m sorry, sir.’ she says. ‘That’s our policy.’
‘But the NHS guidelines clearly say that a practice cannot refuse a patient because they do not have identification or proof of address.’
‘I’m sorry, sir,’ she says, putting her glasses back into her curls, her mouth a tight line, ‘that’s our policy.’
The woman behind me tuts politely. The receptionist pushes the papers apologetically towards me. I stand there looking at them, and in that moment something crushes me. It’s just a piece of paper. It’s just a receptionist in a doctor’s surgery. But the sounds of chattering, people moving around me, phones ringing from the cubicles behind the desk, children laughing … I hear the sound of a bomb ripping through the sky, glass shattering …
‘Are you OK, sir?’
I look up. There is a flash and a crashing sound. I kneel down and cover my ears. I feel a hand on my back, then there is water.
‘I really am sorry, sir.’ the receptionist says, once I’ve stood up and drunk the water, ‘There’s nothing I can do. Could you get the correct paperwork together and come back?’
I follow the road that twists away from the sea, with its row of identical brown-bricked houses side by side, and I head back to the B&B.
I find Afra on our bed again, now with some of the blossoms in her hands. I kneel down in front of her and look into her eyes.
‘I want to lie down with you,’ she says, and what she means is, ‘I love you. Please hold me.’ There is an expression on her face I recognise from years ago, and it makes my sadness feel like something palpable, like a pulse, but it makes me afraid too, afraid of fate and chance, and hurt and harm, of the randomness of pain, how life can take everything from you all at once. Although it’s only early afternoon I lie down next to her on the bed and I let her put her arm around me and press her palm onto my chest, but I won’t touch her. She tries to hold my hand and I edge it away. My hands belong to another time, when loving my wife