‘Stress, strain, salt, wounds, hurt, tension and trauma.

I taste these like the palette only has sour, salt and bitter possibilities.

My heart pulsates with anguish. I’m fraught and tight, as if balancing on a tight rope –

But the tension is punctuated by the cry of a child – not any child, my child, one of my boys – I know we’ve been dispersed and death has ravaged so many, but I can hear one of mine.

I swing round to touch a child’s shoulder. It’s him – the youngest, the one who has taken up least space throughout his tiny life in his strong legs have always had to stride in the path cut by his brothers – but now he has my 100% focus.

His physical flesh – body and blues merges and marries in my wrapped arms around him –

I can now taste bitter and sweet and oh how sweet – I never realized the strength of my palette until now.

I’m suddenly plunged into realization of my luck – but what of the sister standing next to me – I hear her wail and cry – I sense there is no bittersweet for her – just rancid, sour, and no delight in savouring that.

My heart plunges into doubt, guilt and further pain. I have mine – but I cannot halve him. He must stay whole – and she has none.’

‘The sand is gritty and filled with ash. Where does the ash end and the sand begin? I don’t know anymore. Smoke, sky, sea – all are as one. And I am still here. I’m alive. But why? Why am I alive, a witness to the fall of a city, my city.

I see her, Hecuba, my queen and lady. She does not weep, is silent, yet her grief is raw. She mourns for her children, the lifeblood of the city. She mourns for her husband, but he is fortunate, the blessed. He died a warrior’s death; better a warrior’s death than survivor’s life.

What will become of us now? My father is long dead. My brother is now dead too. My home is no more, and all that is left is desolation, despair and more anger than the soul can bear.

The Greeks stroll across the beach with alarming ease, having lived on these sands for a decade. They eye us up like dogs seeking meat, like animals on heat. I’m suddenly grateful for my sagging breasts and barren womb. I never had children, and no Greek shall ever use me to have theirs. For that, at least, I can be thankful. But what use is it to be grateful for such small mercies? ‘Where are your gods,’ they ask us, ‘where are your gods now?’

I don’t know.

But I do know that they are not here. How could they be? They left us to fend for ourselves like rats in gutters, fleeing flaming streets with nothing as the belly of the damned horse split open and birthed a plague of soldiers.’

‘I sit feeling the rocks beneath me. I want to lie down, but it is too sandy to be comfortable. I want to immerse myself in the beautiful blue waves. My whole body itches with grief. I want to tear my skin apart and make myself one with the sea, a liquid rather than a solid – subsume this painful experience of loss and grief in the physical environment. Become something physical – I can hear dogs barking in the distance. They don’t know I can see the nothingness of the horizon, the straight blue lines of sky and ocean meeting and I wish that my life would not be such a mockery – of straight lines – the chaos within. The sand itches, the rocks are too hard, everything feels uncomfortable as I sit waiting for the feelings to go.

Around me are people watching their same children fighting/squabbling over some sheets then laughing as they roll around in the sands.

The sun beats down. Life continues in its lines of oblivion whilst I am trapped in the shape of my own blackened and destroyed city and my dead sons, lost to the fires of war. The sand, how I hate the sand. It seems like a trap keeping me in; whereas I used to admire its beauty, now it just mocks the once glorious nature of the destroyed city and keeps us down, stops us from hoping… Then a brown dog comes…’

‘I hurt. I miss my people. I miss their smile, their laughter, their voice. I’m not sure where my sons are now. I fear they are in a pile of bodies somewhere in a burnt-out shell of a house inside Troy. I hear voices, mostly women’s voices, shrieking, their grief rising up and mixing with the smoke that comes and finds us all the way to this barren beach, where we huddle together, waiting for our fate to be decided, our journey to start. My heart is broken – I remember my home, our home, its welcome smells, the space in the patio where we used to sit in the end of a hectic day, under the olive trees, near the lavender bush, watching the sun come down over the sea line. Now there is no colour. Just grey. Women are barely clothed, their tunics steeped into dark red – is that blood? Of a son? A father? A loved one?

Where am I heading? Will there ever be a home for me?’

‘There’s darkness, everything is fuzzy and I just can’t hear anything. Where do things go when they disappear? There’s no answer. I continue walking, I know I have to keep walking. Without shoes. Into the past. If only I could walk into the past. My feet are broken and I start to see. A bird. Many birds. And I hear the sea, the sound of the sea. That’s slower than my heartbeat. I might not be alive anymore; I have no way of knowing. I hear voices that sound or do not sound like human voices. A sheep is being slaughtered. That was in the past. I try to fly. I try to see everything. It’s raining, a heavy rain falls, an acidic rain that will not stop for 34 days. We’ve been told that. I remember that after the months of drought there will be rain and grass will grow and flowers. Blood is one of the best fertilizers. Blood and bones. I’m old and cannot go on. It will rain for 34 days, Then everything will be memory. A dog barks. An owl hoots. In the rain? Yes, in the rain. I find shelter in a cave. The beach will get flooded.’

‘The orange sun beams as I sit on the beach looking at the water dancing in light. The light… It’s dark but then shadows of my face appear in the water as my tears drop and continue dropping. The children run into the sea, unaware that it’s filled with the tears of my fellow Trojan women, who were once so hopeful and now so hopeless.

Beyond the sea, I see land. Let me land. When I land, I feel grounded but then the ground sweeps from beneath my feet. When there is ground, there is balance. I feel no balance here – no land, no balance, and no ground. Beyond the borders, I see remnants of my blood – what is my blood? What worth does my blood have when it has been shed a thousand times over. To have the innocent mind of a child once more, where memories are a vivid distortion of what really was.

Diaspora… the history and root of a diaspora. To be Trojan… to be fearless. Yet I am besieged with fear. To wish and pray for my fear to be erased, as my blood has been. I am stuck… both mentally and physically. What is land? What are borders? The geography of these borders mean nothing when the moral borders have been violated.

I am on a cycle – a woman’s cycle. Not a vicious cycle? Vicious. These borders are vicious. The blood that has been shed is vicious. To see the love I once felt, no longer be felt. To hear the fear I seldom had, beating in my ears and shine in the ocean.’

‘When asked to surmount the insurmountable, you might consider yourself with a determination to do so. You might find it in your disposition to defy the gods or scream obscenities to the stars or trail, tail between knocking knees, towards your cares again. In some cases, some very specific ones, you are left in pure, unfettered rot. Determination is consumed by that soft, sunken land in which Hades rules.

Rot, much like hope of love, is as careful in its tangible form. She picks careful places in which to lie. In your heart, your city, your corpse or the bed of Paris. Now she shifts, careful, underfoot in the shift and glitter of sun-roasted sand.

There is nothing careful in our herded shape. The grapple and gauze of your vision is pulled quickly beneath the waves of apprehensive sighs, lost wailings and too late mourning. You cannot tell from which chapped or broken mouth such sounds crawl. You cannot look over for a specific set of chattering teeth. It seems as if all the world cries out in discontented harmony. No one hand pulls at the sleeve of your chiton. No one leg is knocking against the back of yours. No one arm is slung about your waist in supplication. Careful is not a known thing here. Not in the collective pain of your people.

For what you cannot see, not hear or feel, you are acutely aware of, the char left to linger, risen high from a past you have already lost. And whilst Zephyr carries up the rot of your kindred, so too does he let the dove guide his charge. She floats, careful, wing beats abreast shimmering smoke plumes. Towards the west she flies, lost to Zephyr in gesture of your journey to come

‘It’s morning, just before morning, and the sand is cool. I can smell everything. It smells like burning, like blood, like too many bodies in a small space. The air is cool and light against my skin and I allow it to wash over me, to cleanse me, filtering through my lungs and over my skin.

I can hear screaming – it’s not far away – the screams, prolonged screams, of a woman. She is howling. I breathe in the air, and still she screams, until suddenly she doesn’t.

I don’t feel real, I don’t feel like I’m here at all. The screams, the ash, the blood – surely, none of it is real. I want to float away – high, high above the destruction, out and over the sea, until this sick city, this pile of smouldering rocks, is just a small dot. Insignificant on the horizon. And I am insignificant too – no one notices I’ve gone, as I float through the air. I’m just gone.

That’s where I’d like to be. Gone.

But I’m not gone, I can still feel the cool sand between my toes. And that’s when I realise, I’ve got no shoes.’

A dark pool sea, unbroken by light, a reddened glow burnishing its surface. A tang of bitter smoke pinpricking the nostrils and that near deathly silent screaming emanating from the still souls surrounding her. It seemed endlessly distant, eternal, unending. There were no words, no noise, no limits. It seemed her heart was the only thing moving, the repetitive low breathing the only perceptible sound. Her thoughts drift aimlessly between a recent unchangeable past and an unknown future. She thought of a large bear rearing up on its hind legs. An omen? A flight of fantasy, the bear appeared to be speaking but the words were indistinguishable.

The sand is cold and wet beneath her legs, she is sprawled out, exhausted, her face covered in soot from last night’s fires. Everything is gone, her home, her bed, her kitchen, her herbs, her

flowers, her paintings, her memories. She cannot bear to think about them, the son and husband; her daughter lies on her lap, her long, thick honey coloured hair matted and sticky with sweat. The night before she had thrown her children on the bed and ordered them not to come out; the deaths at least had been quick – efficient these Greeks – one thrust of a sword, no time to beg. She had wrapped her shirt around her daughter’s head so she would not see. Now the pit in her stomach, the queasy sensation of fear of the unknown, the injustice of and sense of having been abandoned by the gods, just like a sock; as she looks out at the water, the greasy line of the sea, thick and matted with weeds like her daughter’s hair, sensing a feeling, the bile rises in her throat, but no tears have come, around her the women are all silent, and in the distance, those ugly, battle-hardened men, walking in columns like ants back and forth across the beach, now so anxious to leave and they are turned into objects – pieces of wood to be attached on deck. Not even animals.

The base of the kettle baking in a small brown kitchen – immaculately kept, coffee pots, knives in knife rack – the casserole dish orange, blue and pink, arranged for all the casseroles – she liked cooking stews. They spread like the smell of home through the small apartment in South London.

She sipped her tea.

The meats and vegetables of her forgotten fading city. She liked the city that had welcomed her with its double decker buses, busy streets, libraries, cafes and brightly lit shops and she even liked the way the earth was swaddled in concrete – that way she was protected from it reaching its tentacles up from the raw earth, the coffin, and pulling her back into that time of such emotion, loss, the maw of death, the death knell. She avoided churches, the bells reminded her and she sought out those busy masses of city life – to be surrounded by hubbub actually helped her in her act of forgetting and by forgetting she could begin healing. It was curiously through not being known that she had managed to survive. No one knew her, no one knew her name or what she had been, to them she had just arrived and she was just who she was.

Effenza with her brightly coloured scarf, cooking casseroles and the cheese pie for the local women’s shelter and throwing her head back and laughing, laughing.

‘And now I sip and taste my tea, it has no sugar but is sweet, sweet from the milk. Milk, that you wanted once. In the mother – the cow, robbed of her child, with no chance.

The losses have brought me so much closer to the edges of feeling, no, seeing, hearing, listening, touching, noticing.

Noticing what?

The gaps. The vulnerabilities, like the struggle of another mother.

I don’t deny I’m full of calmness, like the tough and hardened skin on my feet, but I know I can peel back the skin to get to the heart of purpose and passion.

My loss – my grief has also in such a strange way gifted me something in my life now, something that cannot be taken away while I live.

But still so much fear to yet rub away as memories learn scars, traumas, residues that haunt like the memories of a fire or flood.

But I have the power to manage that – I did not when I was robbed of those lives I loved when stranded on the beach.

How do I manage, I can’t say. I yet hold the beauty around me, but I know it’s there, I feel warmth, I recognize an open heart, I equally understand the hostility of others who have not lost as I have.’

‘A Somalian woman on the bus – her phone tucked into her headscarf, flat against her ear. She spits out her words, guttural, liquid, dynamic, extraordinary. Her hands are occupied and full of shopping bags, children, a buggy.

She is far from everything that made her. Her city or village, her mother. Little Somalia in Camden Town.

Boys are knifed on our streets. Two on my road. There is a shrine to one of them on the railway bridge – a splashy graffiti portrait. People leave flowers, marker pens, badges. On Christmas Day I see a young man standing there, alone, with two cans of beer. One he drinks. The other he opens and leaves under the portrait. What, I wonder, was his mother doing when he was stabbed? Talking on her phone to her mother in Mogadishu? Bathing her baby? Watching Strictly?

Charliee phones from uni. “Mum, two boys died in K.T. last night – it’s on the news. One on Grafton Road. I knew him. And I knew his killer. We were all in the same football team at William Ellis.”

Later, in the local paper, I read that for one of the mourning mothers it was her second boy stabbed to death in 3 years. I wonder what she says when she calls home?’

‘The afternoon passed easily with Nia around. I met her in the welcome centre eight years ago. I remember vividly the moment I walked into the busy room. There was light and laughter and love in there – a stark contrast to the rain and cold of that late February afternoon. Nia approached me – hugged me and offered me chocolate. It was the beginning of a life saving, life warming friendship. We meet each other every week – always a space of safety and care – no matter how busy our lives may be. I’m a teacher now. Our school often welcomes new arrivals, little ones with a confused look, worried eyes, and a mouth set on a sad smile. I look out for these little ones. I need to make sure they’re okay – that they know someone looks out for them.’

‘It did rain for 34 days and it stopped as suddenly as it had started. I can see now. Now, in years later. We’ve travelled fast, we’ve travelled far, we started to rebuild. Build the future, remember a past that was not the past. How did I survive 34 days in darkness? I just did. I knew it would end. The hardest was the light, the light that blinded. We avoid talking about the past, we do not ask questions, we’ve all changed our names, we’ve burned them, let them go, we adopted the now the present, we will not go back. Life is better now. Life is worse. Who knows? I haven’t met anyone I knew and no one knows me. I do remember the first light, the sound of the rain stopping. The sound of footsteps, I don’t remember fear. I don’t remember where I went next. I am on a ship that went faster than any ship I’ve ever been on. I landed at the other end of the world, the edge where everyone was a stranger. We started to form groups, we spoke a language that might not have existed before. We did not ask questions. These were only settlements. Everything was so clear, as if we were living out a book of instructions.’

‘Yes. What have I said yes to?

I have said yes to hope. I have said yes to renewal. I have said yes to freedom. I have said yes to the breaker of chains. I have said yes to totality. I have said yes to unfamiliarity. I have said yes to saying yes.

No. What I said no to?

I have said no to being stuck. Being stuck in knowing who I am and what I will come with. I have said no to barbarity. I have said no to blocking my own blessings. I have said no to prisoners or my brain – my heart and my lungs. I want to feel and want to breathe at my own pace.

Yes and no. Borders and boundaries of my own. My choices. My decisions. My freedom. My ability.

I am sat in a desert with the exact orange sun – burnt, rustic, and somewhat Scorsese-like – beaming and yet setting into what are dunes filled with a history of their own. The dunes are speaking to me, but not murmuring incoherently as the waves did. Thy whisper in assonance – they whisper in “yessss.” I see God. I see the way God played chess with all of the events in my life that have shaped me.

I see the footsteps in the desert sand, where they begin and where they stop. They stopped about 300 miles from where I am sat now. Why? Because it wasn’t me walking. It was God walking me. Carrying me. Carrying the weight of the pain which no longer weighs down.

I said yes.’

‘I watch the kids in the park and a lump appears in my throat. At times like this, I think of Hecuba, how her grandson was hurled from the battlements and cracked like an egg. Any one of these boys could have been Astyanax. And now I’m weeping, wondering how many of these boys will grow up to become another Agamemnon. How many were fathered by him?

It makes me sick/ How could anyone look at these children and see monsters, see blood? But I can’t help it. Try as I might, Troy will never leave me. I may be in a park, the sun may be shining despite the cold wind, yet I am not here. I am still on that beach, can still hear foreign tongues dictating my future.

I am alive. I must remind myself daily that I am alive. But free? Never. The past is a burden that I must carry, one that I bear alone. For who will remember them if I don’t? And what will happen to their memory when I am gone?

Do the boys and girls here know they play on a battleground? That they swing over graves and slide over corpses of the fallen and forgotten? Do they know their parents were once animals, drinking blood like Death herself?

No. They don’t know. Should they? Should I tell them the truth? That the quiet old woman feeding the pigeons does so because they are the same pigeons from her homeland? The only things you can be certain of in life are death and pigeons, the harbingers of normality, the false sense of security that everything will be alright, that everything is okay.’

‘It’s been quite hard to be hopeful, since that time I haven’t really felt helpful very much.

But I guess there have been glimpses of hope, like flashing beams of light. Just in the everyday stuff. Like when I knead dough to make bread and I can feel it puff beneath my fingers, sticking around my knuckles. Or the smell of olive oil as it is simmering away on the stove. Sometimes, I sit in the park and I listen to the birds, feel the winter sun on my face and I suppose I feel hopeful. Or at least grateful. Sometimes.

I value my own space now and keep it all to myself. Greedily, I lock myself in and I shut out the world. I turn up the heating, I put on a clean pair of socks, I flick the kettle on. I’m grateful for these things, for the life I’ve been able to cobble together. Is gratitude the same as hope?

I’m not sure it is, but that’s what I feel; grateful for the small luxuries of my life. Even if I’m alone, even if I’ve lost it all. I find solace in those small things and I cling to them. No one can take them from me, no one can take me from me.

So, I suppose I am hopeful – I hope to keep the sanctuary I’ve created for my space. Because it’s mine.’

She is wandering down by the river. For a long time she could not go near water. Her best friend invited her on this walk but she asked her to turn away – sea, rivers, ponds – any large body of water to her had been a menace, an enemy – a reminder of how in one moment you could be swallowed up as if you were a sinking feather, how quickly you could go under – how indifferent the world was to your loss. But over time this new earth had spoken to her about its offerings, its sky, its clouds, its trees, its flowers. She had not known their names, the small yellow flowers that came up in the grass that signal spring, but she cared still, read them like letters. They were selected through millennia to the yellow flowers of her lost garden. The earth is one earth, a voice in her ear whispered – this sky is your sky, this tree your sister’s. Long before she understood the harsh barbarian tongue of the people who looked through her, she learned to speak this new earth, learned to recognise this new moon as her old moon. And so, one day, when she had found herself on the street leading to the river, she was able to go forward, to look down at the swiftly changing patterns of waves and thought, this water will go out into the sea, will mingle with all the world’s waters. She became a tidal person and learned to let go of the land she lost.