Voices:
- Facebook text (narrator, US accent)
- Young, working class, British white woman
- Young Afghan immigrant to the UK
A. What’s on your mind?
B. Today, seventy-three rats drowned in a sinking ship. Arabs. Africans: Muslims. A great day for Great Britain. Oh yeah. Because they’d have been heading our way, sure as eggs. Can’t blame them for that. It’s the benefits, the social housing - easy money. Like bait. Some of them have got family over here, friends. Word gets back: Come on in, Mohammed, Mustafa, Matey-Boy… The water’s lovely.
If I was Muslim, a so-called refugee, the council would give me money to get a place of my own, get out of this kid’s bedroom, away from the nag-nag parents, looking all sniffy at my clothes and tats and piercings.
Rolled over like a barrel, the telly said. Sixteen of them were kids. I don’t like that. I try to think of them as rats, but even then I see little pink, hairless babies, their eyes gummed shut.
Still, serves them right, the parents. Imagine sticking your kid on some rotting hulk or patched up bloody lilo, putting their lives in the hands of people traffickers. One thing worse than Muslims, it’s those evil sods. Probably Muslims too, mind.
I know it’s shite over there, the rat-holes that they’re trying to crawl out of: bastard dictators, wars, nutters cutting people’s heads off, floggings and that. But they have to learn there’s no room for them over here. No welcome. The government’s got that right. We’ve got way too many immigrants already. More mosques than churches being built, I can vouch for that.
And they’ll work for next to nothing, don’t know no better. Even the legal ones. Especially them. Poles and Bulgarians and other gobble-de-gob buggers from the poxy EU.
The telly said they all rushed to one side of this rust-bucket they were crammed into because they’d seen a rescue boat coming.
Ironic or what?
A. Man Drake, Tom Brum and 3 others like this. 1 comment: Straight-face
A. What’s on your mind?
C. ‘You must leave home.’
My mother told me that when I was only twelve years old. She was adamant: no future for me there. I’d either get shot by the rebels as a collaborator, or join the rebels and get killed by the British soldiers! There was no money, no work, and no more I could learn in school. I already knew more than the teacher, a boy not much older than me who had gone to the same school. He took over when our old teacher, Mr K, disappeared. They say the long beards took poor old Mr K, tortured him and cut out his eyes for teaching girls. Not just his eyes, I heard.
Anyway, he’d taught me pretty fine English, and so I could us it to learn more from the British soldiers. They weren’t supposed to talk to us in case we were suicide bombers or would lure them into an ambush. But we used to follow them on patrol around our little town, ask them about football teams, Manchester United, Liverpool, Chelsea… Usually they talked in the end, at least when nothing much bad had happened for a while. After a fire-fight or a car-bomb or when we heard one of them had been killed out on patrol in the hills, then we knew to keep our distance.
I knew a boy who got shot right outside his own house. He was chasing a rat, carrying a stick, and ran straight into a patrol. Bang! It was dark, they said, he shouldn’t have been out. Looked as if he had a gun. No-one’s fault. Sorry. And some extra rice rations and cooking oil. I saw his face. Shot through the eye, gaping, pink and wet, his mouth open as if he was about to shout a warning.
I left home the day after my thirteenth birthday.
No more eye stories. Promise.
A. 1 comment: Good!
A. What’s on your mind?...