I stood there in the witness box, silenced by the plausible completeness of this story, and I giggled. I smiled and giggled. I could not find a single word of response. The barrister had sounded exactly like a lawyer on TV. The whole construction was so separate from reality, and so perfectly made, and so much more likely than my life, that I did not know any way to approach it or prize it open. I giggled, a silly Goan-Arab-Portugese girl from Zanzibar, so out of place that it was a surprise to me that I did not simply vanish and reappear somewhere more appropriate.
“Well, I see you find this amusing, Miss D’Souza. The fact is, Miss D’Souza, that you have nothing to say in response because it is the simple truth.”
*
When they moved me from Holloway Prison in London to Cookham Wood in Kent, I went back to Africa. The other women were mostly African, the majority from Nigeria. They were usually small businesswomen, assertive, intelligent and warm, who had been chosen as drug couriers because they were poor but stylish enough to belong on an international flight. They were all innocent, to hear them. They had been misinformed about British law. They had been forced into the trip by moneylenders who threatened their families if they did not go. They had been tricked into carrying the luggage of friends. They had not got further than Heathrow or Gatwick.
For a year I fled, whenever able, into a wilful, corrupted sleep. When I came to, it was to a louder, clearer version of the same looped tape of anger. How the British had treated me. How none of my influential friends had come forward to help. Even how Benji was not there when I needed him, and how his foolishness had made things so much worse. I was angry at everyone and angry at myself, my stupidity. The unpleasantness of spending wakefulness with this despairing, useless anger, drove me back to sleep. I had lost everything and I could not imagine the hopeful effort of ever creating anything again. They told me I would serve the full eight years because illegal immigrants cannot have time off for good behaviour. There would be no home visit releases for me near the end of my sentence. And at the end of the eight years I would be immediately deported to Tanzania to face, at the very least, a return to my original imprisonment on Zanzibar. Back where I started, empty-handed, humiliated. If I was unlucky the Tanzanian government would try me for drug dealing a second time, with the guilty verdict certain. I would have been happy not to wake at all from my sleep. I was so close to being nothing that to slip away to death would have been no great event.
Gabrielle and Geoffrey were my visitors and they looked so concerned for me that I tried to seem a little better. Inside, Bintu, my cellmate, an overweight Nigerian who liked sleep nearly as much as I did, was my protector. Because of her I was never beaten by the more violent prisoners. Bintu’s attitude to sleep was different from mine. She explained it: “I like my sleep. I like to be deep asleep with dreams I cannot remember. And I like to be half asleep when I cannot tell what is dream and what is life. Sometimes I can lie down and just think of nothing at all. Sometimes I can dream whole days of my life at home and it is as if I was still there.” To Bintu sleep was a recreation that required skills and connoiseurship for its full enjoyment. While we were together, before I was given a room of my own, her calm and happy sleep began to seep into the black negation of mine and lighten it.
I considered the solace of religion, of the little bit of wisdom there, but retained self-respect enough to see that what I had dismissed when my mind was sharp could not be decently adopted when it was blunted by sorrow. Wishing to rid myself of the corrosion of anger, I looked to see if my punishment might be deserved in some larger sense, above the squalid detail of my case. I wondered if I had taken too light a view of what might be taken from a life without the payment of a price. I had lived with a man without marriage. My parents had died for something similar. I had not paid taxes, a dishonesty that had contributed to my punishment. But here I was fierce in my defence, indignant still at the way a world created seamless was divided up by the powers-that-be to catch out those of us who did not fit, and brand us as illegal. My crime, perhaps, was simply to have turned my back on a family, a community and a country, and my punishment was earned by that treachery. Or maybe guilt by association is a sort of justice, and the fact was that my associates had not been entirely honest. Well, actually, they were criminals on an global scale, albeit the useful white collar kind, not generally brought to account. Well, actually, their business was sometimes lethal. Well, actually, I had become one of them.
It took me time to separate this out and see myself as blameless in my case, a woman helping a wronged friend, wrongly accused by criminal police. Then, allowing that my suffering was because the world
