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.