11 Evie

11

The MRI machine looks like one of those space pods where astronauts go to cryosleep when they're travelling to distant galaxies. It is a long metal tube with a narrow tray that slides inside. I can't wear my ear studs or rings or other jewellery.

‘We have to strap your head down to hold it still,' says the technician, a black guy with cornrows in his hair. ‘Otherwise, the images will be blurry.'

‘Nobody likes a fuzzy photograph,' I say, making a joke, because I'm nervous. He doesn't crack a smile.

‘These headphones will dampen the noise,' he says, as he slides them over my ears. ‘We can play you some music. Any requests?' I can't think of a single song. He opens my fingers, giving me a buzzer. ‘If you start to panic or feel unwell, press the button and we'll stop the scan.'

Once I'm strapped down, staring at the ceiling, the technician leaves and the tray begins to move, sliding backwards into the machine. The noise begins – a thumping sound that seems to pass right through me.

I wonder if an MRI scan can tell them what I'm thinking. What if I imagined the filthiest sex act? Would it light up some part of my brain? I don't like that idea so I try not to think of sex, which is exactly what I do. Shit! I try to concentrate on something else. Anything but sex. I begin counting down from a thousand. Eventually, I grow used to the sound, which is hypnotic, like an Albanian chant without the harmonies.

My thoughts wander and I'm a child again, smelling fried green sweet peppers stuffed with feta. Warm cornbread. Sage and lavender. Diesel fumes. Paraffin stoves. Melting wax. My mother's perfume.

Our village was surrounded by mountains and lakes, and streams that tumbled over rocks and created rivers that ran to the sea. The buildings clung to the hillsides and rose from the wildflowers like ancient ruins. I don't know if our cottage is still there. Another family probably lives there now, paying rent to Mr Berisha. I carved my initials into the walnut tree outside my bedroom window. And we marked my height on a door frame in the kitchen, a new notch for every year, next to a spot on the wall where Mama threw a saucepan at a mouse. She missed.

What other evidence might remain? Perhaps, in some dusty local government building, there will be a record of my birth, my parents' names on a piece of paper. A signature. A stamp. Does that make it my country? My home?

When I was growing up, people cared about where you came from. Your family. Your history. People were either good or bad. Clean or stained. Trustworthy or suspicious. My mother was an only child. My father was one of four. He was named after his grandfather, who he never met, which means neither did I, but there were stories about him, passed down from one generation to the next.

As a child, I never had a day when I went hungry, or a night when I felt lonely. Agnesa lay next to me, or Aunt Polina. Mama and Papa were in the next room. Even the sound of water in the pipes or ice forming on the windows or Papa snoring made me feel safe.

I was an eavesdropper, a listener at doorways and at the top of the stairs. Sometimes, when my parents were entertaining downstairs, I would fall asleep lying on the landing listening to the murmur of the conversation and laughter. Papa would find me and carry me to bed, kissing my forehead as he set my head on the pillow.

When I was small, I loved to watch him cook. He hoisted me onto the kitchen bench beside the stove and I helped him rub pieces of meat with salt and preserved lemon, before he added spices and sealed meat inside a clay pot, which he half buried in glowing coals. Those same hands could carve up a carcass and saw wood and hammer nails but were also capable of the most graceful of gestures and the gentlest hugs and unbearable tickles. They could toss me high in the air and catch me under my arms and toss me even higher. From way up there above his head, I looked down at his wide, crooked smile, his cleft chin, his trimmed moustache, and his dark brown eyes, and I understood love.

Papa taught me how to fish and how to find worms and how to put them on a hook. He showed me how to make him tea and choose the best apples and propagate plants and graft one branch of a fruit tree on to another.

Memories like this catch in my throat, but at the same time, I know they're beginning to fade. I sometimes struggle to remember his smell and the feel of his unshaven cheek against mine and the silly song that he sang about a billy goat. I wish Agnesa were here. We could help each other remember and talk about the things that I can't discuss with Cyrus. Girl stuff.

Agnesa began as my orbiting moon, but became more like a comet, flashing across the sky, dashing in and out of the house, changing her clothes, grabbing something to eat, barely pausing to say hello or goodbye. She had friends. Hobbies. Admirers. I was an afterthought; a nagging, needy little sister, who wanted to be included and complained to Mama if I was left out.

The cottage only had two bedrooms, which meant that Agnesa and I shared a double bed, which annoyed her. We also took turns in the same water at bath-time, although Agnesa insisted on going first when the water was warmest because she accused me of peeing in the tub, which is probably true, but I still thought it unfair.

I didn't realise we were poor, because everybody we knew was the same, except for our landlord, Mr Berisha, who owned a restaurant and a timber yard and lots of houses. He had five children, but only one son, Erjon, who was three years older than Agnesa, but in the same class at school because he had an IQ just above room temperature.

Being older, he was bigger and stronger than the other boys and liked to throw his weight and money around. He always had chocolate bars and soft drinks and American sneakers and Levi's 501s, which none of us could afford. One of his favourite games was to open a bottle of Coca-Cola, take a sip, and leave it sitting in the middle of the road on a corner where the lumber trucks would release their brakes and accelerate after a long descent down the mountain. Boys would take up the challenge, dashing out from the trees and seizing their prize. Truck horns blasted, brakes screamed, and tyres left trails of rubber on the tarmacked road. Some drivers, pale-faced and trembling, would pull over further down the mountain, swing out of their cabs and yell curses, shaking their fists at the boys, who vanished like water soaking into the ground.

Until the day that Fisnik Sopa, aged thirteen, hesitated as he left the trees. Maybe because of his spectacles, or the scoliosis that bent his spine, or his unusually red hair, Fisnik was always a step behind where he should have been or wanted to be. And as he snatched up the soft drink bottle, grinning in triumph, the lumber truck bore down on him with locked brakes and smoking tyres.

Fisnik turned. Almost there. Almost safe. But the truck clipped his back heel, and he disappeared beneath the wheels. Bump. Bump. Bump. A red stain covered the road beside a shattered bottle and his crumpled body. Later, when the police came knocking, asking questions, nobody mentioned Erjon or the Coca-Cola or the dare.