The Wild Inside: Michelle Cotter

Congratulations to the winner of our 2020 Wild Inside Writing Competition Over-18s Prose category: Michelle Cotter

Samia and Begonias

Samia comes online at 10am. From my cluttered spare room, between the ironing board, exercise bike and my small desk, I teach her English. She is framed in the pale green of her bare walls as if sitting for a portrait. We have never met, yet she is familiar. I wake, I run, shower, grind beans for coffee, let it settle in the cafetiere and we flicker into each other's presence. I wonder how I sound to her. My English, like hers, is accented. My consonants are the glacially eroded hills of my childhood. My vowels are the stretching Atlantic horizons of the beaches where my father taught my sister and I to swim. Does she hear my voice and imagine another country?

I am from Ireland, originally. I tell her. Samia is from Syria. I try to imagine her country in nouns rather than verbs. Tell me what is beautiful in your country. I visualise forests of terebinth and cedar, wide monoclines of rose-coloured sandstone; jasmine. Samia is a teacher too - biology.

I tilt my screen to show her the pots on my windowsill where I am incubating begonia bulbs, waiting for the first green protrusions, but nothing has disturbed the surface of the soil. Samia's windows, she tells me, face only other windows. No Glasgow Green. No River Clyde. No signature of place.

In February she came here with her five-year-old son. The agency I volunteer for have housed her in a one-bedroomed flat on the Southside. I ask her about her home but not her journey. Outside in the world the pandemic is rampant but Samia is patient. Her husband and older son will come when it is safe - inshallah. For now we are in lockdown. Grounded.

In our lessons I teach her grammar and vocabulary to tick boxes. How long have you been? Is it your intention to? Application process. Residency (noun). Entitled (adjective) plus preposition to. She says: Tell me about the mountains.

At night I sit sifting through images. In every thumbnail I expand a longing flowers; the heat haze rising over the shoulder of Sgurr Fhada where I drank from the the burn; descending from a forest crystallised in ice to Lochan Uaine; lying in the heather in Caire Uaigneach; the corrie of loneliness, watching the sky darkening over the back of Blaven. Experiences I've never had the language for - I gather them up and give them to her.

Write.

Someday I will feel fresh rain on the mountains 
Someday my son's hands will touch snow
Now the wide blue sky is far away
I lie in the corrie of loneliness
The mountains wait
And in my heart is hope.

Our lesson over, I close the screen and take my coffee cup from where I've left it on the windowsill. There, in one of my begonia pots, a thin green fin has edged out of the darkness.

• Readers of Wild Inside were invited to submit poetry or prose on the subject of 'the wild inside'. The competition was judged by renowned nature writer, Linda Cracknell who said of Ann Dunn's winning poem for the Over-18s Prose category: "In lovely spare language, three worlds are evoked in this piece and connected together in a kind of trust in the future – the inner lockdown life, past mountain experiences and the imagined world of a Syrian refugee."
• Read the other winning entries for our Wild Inside Writing Competition 2020.