I didn’t answer. I knew that you should never wake a person who is sleepwalking, in case they should die from shock. I left her there to walk around in her nightmare.
I heard the laughter again, shrill and abrupt, cutting through the sleep sounds. In one of the classrooms above, someone was snoring; in another a child was crying. I followed the laughter down the stairs and out into the courtyard, and was shocked to find so many people still awake. It must have been 2 o’clock in the morning. The first thing I saw was a huddle of boys and girls in a corner on wooden chairs beneath a climbing-wall. They were passing around a paper bag, inhaling some substance from it.
One of the girls glanced at me, held my gaze for a moment. Something was wrong with her, her pupils dilated so that her eyes were almost black. Nearby, two men were sitting on the ground with their backs against the wall, smoking. On the platform, which must have once been used as a stage, two boys were kicking a ball beneath the only floodlight. At the entrance of the courtyard, three men were having a heated discussion; they were speaking a different type of Arabic and had much darker skin. One of them pushed the other’s shoulder, and another man came over and separated them, raised his voice and then slid the bolts of the entrance, pushing open the heavy door, and the three left.
When the door was closed again – its metallic sound which reverberated around the courtyard had died – I was left facing a huge blue heart painted across the double panels, outlined on both sides with red wings. The top of the heart was flat, and there was an island and a palm tree and a yellow sun rising out of it. On the cool green background of the old school walls, the heart almost pulsated in the flickering floodlight.
And from behind me, again, the sound of laughter. I turned away from the heart. At the far end of the courtyard, on the only deckchair, beneath a line of washing, was the laughing woman.
She was a young black woman with cornrows gathered into a high ponytail. As I walked towards her I noticed that her breasts were leaking milk into her white top. She caught my eye and self-consciously folded her arms across her chest.
‘Is because they took her,’ she said in English.
‘They took who?’
She didn’t answer at first. Her eyes darted around.
‘I no live here. I come here at night sometimes to be safe.’
I sat down on the ground beside her. She turned to me and showed me her arm. There were dozens of tiny round wounds.
‘It’s my blood,’ she said. ‘They poisoned it.’
‘Who did?’
‘I was staying in a room, and then he try to kill me. He got my head and bash it on the floor. And I lost my breath. My breath it stop then, and I didn’t get it back. I have no breath in me now. I am dead.’
And yet her eyes were full of life.
‘I want to go to Germany mostly. Or to Denmark,’ she went on. ‘I need to leave here. Is not easy because Macedonia has shut border. Athens is the heart. Everyone comes here on the way to wherever. Peoples are get stuck here.’ She seemed more troubled now, a deep frown between her brows. ‘This the place where people die slowly, inside. One by one, people die.’
I was beginning to feel nauseated. I wished I had never approached this woman with the leaking breasts and poisoned blood.
The boys who were playing football had gone now so the place was quieter and the floodlight shone down onto an empty stage. The two men were still smoking, but the kids on the chairs had dispersed. There were only two boys left and they were both looking at their phones, their faces lit up.
‘They tell me I need to drink a lot of water, for my blood, but I’m a dead.’ She pinched her skin now. ‘I am like meat. You know, raw meat? Like a dead meat. I am being eaten.’ She pinched her arm and showed me the scars again. I had no idea what to say to any of this. I was glad that her laughter had stopped, for a while at least. But soon the silence was worse.
‘Where do you live?’ I said.
‘At the park. But sometimes I come here, safer here, and there is less wind, because at the park we are high up, next to the gods.’
‘How come you know English so well?’
‘My mother taught me.’
‘Where are you from?’
Instead of answering, she got up suddenly, saying, ‘Is time to go. I need to go now,’ and I watched her as she unbolted the door and pushed it open, breaking the blue heart. And when the door closed, there was so much quiet. The two boys had gone now and only the two men remained, leaning against the wall, still smoking, and through the classroom windows I could hear the sounds of children crying: a baby and an older child.