Chris Cleave Ebook Boxed Set by Chris Cleave

hand on the back of my neck. I ground the toe of my boot into the ground and Yevette looked at the girl with the documents.
    “How yu know dis, darlin?”
    The girl shrugged and she pointed at the documents in her see-through plastic bag.
    “I have seen things. I know about people.”
    “So how come yu so quiet, if yu know so dam much?”
    The girl shrugged again. Yevette stared at her.
    “What dey call yu anyway, darlin?”
    “I do not tell people my name. This way it is safer.”
    Yevette rolled her eyes.
    “Bet you don’t give de boys your phone number, neither.”
    The girl with the documents, she stared at Yevette. Then she spat on the ground. She was trembling.
    “You don’t know anything,” she said. “If you knew one thing about this life you would not think it was so funny.”
    Yevette put her hands on her hips. She shook her head slowly.
    “Darlin,” she said. “Life did take its gifts back from yu and me in de diffren order, dat’s all. Truth to tell, funny is all me got lef wid. An yu, darlin, all yu got lef is paperwork.”
    They stopped then, because the taxi was pulling up. It stopped just in front of us. The side window was open and there was music blasting out. I will tell you what that music was. It was a song called “We Are the Champions” by a British music band called Queen. This is why I knew the song: it is because one of the officers in the immigration detention center, he liked the band very much. He used to bring his stereo and play the music to us when we were locked in our cells. If you danced and swayed to show you liked the music, he would bring you extra food. One time he showed me a picture of the band. It was the picture from the CD box. One of the musicians in the picture, he had a lot of hair. It was black with tight curls and it sat on the top of his head like a heavy weight and it went right down the back of his neck to his shoulders. I understand
fashion
in your language, but this hair did not look like fashion, I am telling you, it looked like a punishment.
    One of the other detention officers came past while we were looking at the picture on the CD box, and he pointed to the musician with all that hair and he said,
What a cock.
I remember that I was very pleased, because I was still learning to really speak yourlanguage back then, and I was just beginning to understand that one word can have two meanings. I understood this word straightaway. I could see that
cock
referred to the musician’s hair. It was like a cockerel’s comb, you see. So a
cock
was a cockerel, and it was also a man with that kind of hair.
    I am telling you this because the taxi driver had
exactly
that kind of hair.
    When the taxi stopped outside the main gate of the detention center, the driver did not get out of his seat. He looked at us through the open window. He was a thin white man and he was wearing sunglasses with dark green lenses and shiny gold frames. The girl in the yellow sari, she was amazed by the taxi car. I think she was like me and she had never seen such a big and new and shining white car. She walked all around it and stroked her hands across its surfaces and she said,
Mmmm.
She was still holding the empty see-through bag. She took one hand off the bag and traced the letters on the back of the car with her finger. She spoke their names very slowly and carefully, the way she had learned them in the detention center. She said,
F … O … R … D … hmm! Fod!
When she got to the front of the car, she looked at the headlights, and she blinked. She put her head on one side, and then she put it straight again, and she looked the car in the eyes and giggled. The taxi driver watched her all this time. Then he turned back to the rest of us girls and the expression on his face was like a man who has just realized he has swallowed a hand grenade because he thought it was a plum.
    “Your friend’s not right in the head,” he said.
    Yevette poked me in the stomach with her elbow.
    “Yu