‘Like a tattoo on my heart’: Michael’s story of indefinite detention as told to Natasha Brown

PA

“Your life is going to change” the ophthalmologist told me.

I was at John Radcliffe Hospital in Oxford, the eye casualty clinic. An urgent appointment.

“You are not going to be able to live a normal life,” she explained. “You’ve lost 65 percent of your vision, and that’s likely to worsen in the next few years.

“There’s nothing I can do,” she said. “If I had seen you earlier…”

I was arrested in 2016 and taken to a Detention Centre. I’d never been arrested before. Never been involved with the police in my life. When I arrived at the detention centre, I was still in handcuffs. They ‘processed’ me and took my fingerprints. When I was let into the courtyard of the detention centre, I looked up the fence. It was so high. It stretched all around. My heart jumped into my stomach. I realised then that this was a prison, it was really a prison.

Would I ever leave this place?

While I was there, my vision began to deteriorate. There’s what they call your “monthly progress reports”. I couldn’t read those, the text was too small. I started bumping into things because I couldn’t see properly. Even the immigration detention centre officers noticed it. I was booked in to see a doctor at the detention centre. I waited weeks, months, to see a doctor.

But when it was time for me to see the doctor, I was moved to a new detention centre. And at the new centre, I was at the back of the appointments queue again. All the time, they told me, “You are on the list to see a doctor”. Months passed. It was getting worse. I started having blurry visions, flashing lights. One morning, at about eight or nine o’clock, they finally told me they’d called an ambulance. The ambulance didn’t arrive until that night. I was put into handcuffs and taken to the hospital. In the ambulance, I sat between three detention officers. They were talking among themselves. Probably to scare me.

They began to talk about what they’d done to other detainees, how they beat up a Turkish boy who was about to be deported. They boasted of how they had dislocated his shoulders, saying that he must be deformed in Turkey now. They said a lot of horrific things.

I have to hope that they just said it to scare me, because I can never imagine human beings being so — so monstrous. I can’t describe the words they used to glorify it. Those were words of hatred. At the hospital, the doctor said that she was a general practitioner, not an optician. She recommended that I should be taken back to the detention centre. And so they took me back.

You are in fear. You are in constant fear. You’re in your room, next thing, there’s shouting: Bang up! Bang up! Bang up! The officers start to lock everybody up. You hear screaming.

They’re dragging someone off to the plane. You don’t know when it’s going to be your turn, when they are going to come for you and drag you to the plane. You’re in a constant hypertensive state.

I was taken to a detention centre in another part of the country. They had a library there! When you’re in detention, you’re looking for distractions. You have nothing, there’s nothing to do there. But I couldn’t borrow books because I couldn’t see properly. That’s where I met Anna. Anna found out that I had a vision problem, and she provided me with a magnifying glass. She enabled me to read, to take my mind away.

I was moved again. This time to a centre near Gatwick Airport. There, I met some wonderful immigration detention officers. They recognised that I had a problem. There’s one I’ll never forget. She came to see me. She sat down with me in my room to talk about how she could help me. She arranged for the welfare team to speak with me about what they can do. They put me in a room on the ground floor and gave me equipment to shower in my room, so I wouldn’t have to go upstairs to the general shower.

I was going to be moved again, to another detention centre. The move would be difficult for me because of my vision loss: when I’m not familiar with the environment, I find it very difficult to navigate. I didn’t have a mobility cane then. The officer supporting me opposed the move, and I was able to remain in the same Detention Centre until my bail hearing. The Home Office argued against my bail. But at the hearing, after the judge reviewed my condition and my medical records, I was released on compassionate grounds. Once I was released, the family I was staying with arranged a GP appointment for me. The doctor performed some tests, then he immediately called an ambulance to take me to the hospital. I spent two or three nights at the John Radcliffe Hospital, and they arranged an urgent appointment with an ophthalmologist. I was told how my life would change.

Today, I have my resident permit card. It seems over.

But there’s a fear of the system inside of me now. That kind of fear remains within you. If you get a tattoo on your skin, it’s there for life. That’s what my experience of detention is. It’s like a tattoo on my heart. It can’t be erased. You’d have to tear me up, dissect my skin, before you could erase it. That’s the way it is in my heart. It’s lost.

It’s lost.

But what can I do?

Natasha Brown is a British novelist. She is the author of Assembly and Universality. The full version of ‘The Patient’s Tale’ first appeared in Refugee Tales Volume V.