Free This Is Where I Am by Karen Campbell

registered?’
    ‘What?’ I hurried after him, before he was lost in the swirling, aimless ocean.
    ‘Is it your day?’ he shouted. ‘You got your ration card?’ As I caught up with him, he lifted a piece of cardboard, dangling from a string round his neck.
    ‘Yes. We just arrived here.’ I took my card from the pocket.
    ‘Best keep it round your neck. See – make a hole like this, then knot the string tight tight tight. You lose it, you starve.’
    ‘Won’t they give you another one?’
    ‘Who? UN? Ha!’
    ‘Yoo-en,’ I repeated. ‘Is that who the soldiers are?’
    ‘Some of them. Right – see there. That’s the ice house.’
    We had come to a kind of a marketplace. I hadn’t expected to see anything like this. There were even shops, like in the big town. Dirty, rough shops, but they had real walls of metal and mud. The old man pointed to a tin shed. ‘In there, ice. OK? You got any dollars? That one next to it is where you can change money.’
    ‘Dollars? No. I need dollars?’
    ‘It all helps. Especially if you lose your card.’
    There was so much to assimilate. But I was young, strong. I had survived. Even this decrepit man had managed. He’d come here, old and confused, and he’d found his way. In a week or two I’d be doing the same.
    ‘How long have you been here?’ I asked.
    ‘Sixteen years.’
    I laughed out loud at his joke. Then I saw it was not a joke. His tree-bark face, crumbling. He wiped his nose with the back of his hand, then poked me with the same knuckles. Snot on my shirt. Old-man snot, which I doubtless deserved.
    ‘You keep all your papers close, boy, you hear me? Then maybe you’ll get out of here. Every time they give you something official, a paper, a stamp, a name – you guard it like you guard your sister. Understand?’
    I felt my knees give under my weight. He wasn’t to know.
    ‘I don’t have a sister any more.’
    He’d touched me, twice now. He was the age of my grandfather and I just thought . . . I had thought in the shock of the moment that he should know. In giving him this knowledge, I’d be giving him trust. Trust and my ration card were the only commodities left.
    ‘Well, fucking guard your papers better than you guarded her, eh?’ He sniffed. A deep, long gurgle. ‘Right, we’re nearly there. Stay with me; watch what I do.’
    The momentum started to build, tramping feet growing more purposeful, arms swinging as the crowd I found myself within became a complex body, a giant, undulating centipede. You sensed that, at any given moment, if one of these many, many feet were to fail or trip or, worse, begin to run, then the whole beast would implode in a bloody, rampant burst and all thoughts of my sister were swept away as the crowd carried me towards a wooden building. It was no bigger than the schoolhouse I was taught in, and the walls were swathed in razor-wire, yet people were reaching to it, clinging like it was God inside. The soldiers separated us into two lines, men on one side, women on the other. Bright hijabs and quivering hands. A silence falling.
    ‘They let the females in first,’ whispered my companion. ‘They don’t push so much. You got a wife?’
    I nodded.
    ‘Send her next time.’
    I would never send Azira here. I watched the women shuffle forwards, holding up their cards. Their colours shining, wrapping their heads, concealing their arms, beautiful and garish in the midst of all that dust. The soldiers checked each card against lists they held. Sometimes, you saw a head-shake, heard a mournful keen as pleas were ignored and a weeping woman sent away. No one went after these rejects. Each queuing woman, each queuing man, gazing stoically ahead.
    ‘What’s wrong?’ I whispered.
    ‘Not on the list.’ The old man shrugged. ‘It happens.’
    ‘And what do you do then?’
    He spat. The man in front of us shifted his heels as the spittle hit the dust. ‘You make sure you’re on the list.’
    Once the queues had been