Odd Child Out

by Gilly MacMillan

  Maryam is also thinking about the Welcome Center as she sits beside Nur in the taxi and they drive circuits around their neighborhood and beyond.

  In the moment before she fainted, she saw a ghost from her past, a version of a face not seen in the flesh for a very long time, but a regular visitor to her nightmares.

  Nur takes a turn toward the train station and the Feeder Canal.

  “I want to see where they were,” he says.

  Maryam makes no reply.

  As the taxi moves past the shopping mall where Sofia and her friends love to hang out, Maryam glances at Nur. He’s concentrating on the traffic. He’s a good driver, very careful. How she loves him.

  He calls Bristol a new beginning—it makes the children laugh that he’s been calling it that for fifteen years now—but no matter how often he says it, for Maryam it feels different here. She thinks of Bristol as the place where she waits for the end, for the circle to close, because too many of the things that happened in Somalia and in the camp still sit stubbornly in her memory like unanswered questions.

  If Abdi is gone or guilty of something terrible, she knows that it will break her husband.

  She thinks of the man she saw at the refugee center. Of the moment her legs buckled. She thinks of her missing son and of what he might have done or be planning to do. She knows there’s a connection between all things. How could there not be?

  As Nur takes the turn onto Feeder Road, her fingers move to touch a scar on her forearm.

  Ed Sadler answers the door, looking as haggard and disoriented as I would expect.

  We follow him inside. This time he takes us through the hallway into the kitchen, a spacious room that runs across the back of the house. A wall of glass displays the garden like a panorama.

  Fiona Sadler sits at the kitchen table. She wears a pale pink sweater, and looks about as vulnerable as it’s possible to look.

  “I’m so very sorry for your loss,” I say.

  The look she gives me is hard to return.

  “Has that boy talked yet?” she says. She spits the words out like bitter pips.

  “Fi.” Ed Sadler moves to stand behind her, hands on her shoulders, massaging them.

  “Do you know what, Detective, we’ve been cheated,” she says. “We were always playing for time, ever since Noah’s diagnosis. How does it happen that we only just discovered that he had months to live, if we were lucky, and now we’ve been robbed of that. Cheated.”

  It’s the same message she delivered in the hospital, but this time she’s not holding back. The filters have been removed and she’s very angry. She lays clenched fists on the table in front of her. Her knuckles have a pearly shine.

  “I’m afraid I need to talk to you about something difficult.” I keep my tone even, because I can’t sugarcoat this too much, however much sympathy I feel. Abdi Mahad’s reputation and possibly his safety are at stake now more than ever, and my duty has to be to him, too.

  They look at me as if they cannot believe there’s anything else I can possibly throw at them.

  “Did either of you see yesterday’s Bristol Echo?”

  Both shake their heads. I console myself that it’s better if this comes from me, at least. It means we can attempt to inform and control their response, rather than risk their finding out by themselves and potentially doing something reckless.

  “I’m very sorry to say that they ran an article on the front page that featured a photograph of Noah in intensive care.”

  Fi Sadler begins to weep.

  “It looks as if it was taken candidly, so we’ll be interviewing hospital staff. Do you have any idea who might have snatched a photograph of Noah?”

  “No.” The word is little more than a whisper.

  “I’m sorry. I understand this is very painful for you. The article also pointed to a racial attack, which we can’t speculate about until we have some firm evidence. I understand that once you’ve thought about this, you might feel tempted to speak to the press in order to put your own version of the story across, but we strongly recommend that you have no contact with them at all. I can’t stress how important this is while the investigation’s ongoing.”

  “Do they know Noah’s dead?” Fiona asks.

  “No. Not yet. And I’d like to keep it that way for as long as we can so we can get on with our work without being in the public eye. We can’t withhold that information forever, but I’d also like to give you both the privacy to grieve without press attention for as long as I’m able to.”

  “How have they got the right to publish a photograph of our son?” Fiona says. “How do they justify that? It’s disgusting.”

  “Well, whether they have the right to or not is certainly something we’ll be looking into, and if there’s an offense there, you can be sure we’ll be looking to charge somebody.”

  “Does that boy know that Noah is dead?”

  “Abdi has, unfortunately, gone missing.”

  She stares at me, as if this is one too many pieces of information for her to absorb, and it probably is. Ed Sadler turns his back and looks out of the window. His shoulders shake.

  She says, “Abdi’s responsible for this, I know he is.”

  He swings around.

  “Fi! You don’t know that! Stop talking like that.”

  But any scraps of rationality she may have been hanging on to previously have been obliterated by grief: “Abdi was healthy. He should have protected Noah. How could he have let this happen? Noah would never have been able to walk that far or climb a fence on his own. He must have had help. Abdi has to take responsibility for this. Why has he disappeared if he’s not responsible in some way?”

  “You don’t mean that.”

  “Don’t I?”

  Her eyes are bloodshot and her face is slick with tears.

  I stand up. It’s time we left.

  “Please phone me if you think of anything else that we should know about the boys or about Monday night. Feel free to contact me at any time. My mobile number’s on here.”

  I lay my card down on the table, beside a messy stack of flyers advertising an exhibition by Ed Sadler.

  He follows my gaze. “That’s where we were on Monday night. It was the opening. The boys came with us.”

  I pick one up.

  “I wish we’d never let Abdi come on Monday.” Fi Sadler’s not finished with the recriminations. Her voice rises in volume. “It should have been our family. Just us!”

  “I’ll show you out, Detectives.” Ed Sadler walks to the door.

  Outside the sharp air is welcome. I feel as if I can breathe.

  On the doorstep, I take advantage of having Ed Sadler on his own.

  “We spoke with Noah’s therapist at the hospital. He couldn’t tell us anything that Noah discussed with him, but he did say that he had been able to share details of some of the conversations he and Noah had with you. Is that right?”

  “Not with me, with Fiona. You’ll have to ask her, but maybe not today.”

  “The therapist mentioned one specific thing that Noah wanted to share with you, but not with your wife. Do you have any recollection of that?”

  He hesitates. I feel bad about putting him through this now, but I don’t think the next few days are going to get any easier for this couple, so I want to take my chance.

  “There was a thing he emailed me about, I can’t remember when, maybe last year. It was when I was abroad, I think. It seemed trivial to me, if I’m honest. I didn’t pay it too much attention. It was about an essay that Noah helped Abdi with.”

  “In what way?”

  The sound of Fiona Sadler calling him makes him glance over his shoulder.

  “I’ll be there in a minute!” he shouts, and then to us, “Wait here.” He pounds up the stairs.

  Woodley and I cool our heels on the doorstep for a few minutes before he reappears. He’s holding a couple of journals.

  “These are Noah’s therapy notebooks. I think pretty much everything he
discussed with the therapist is in here, but I warn you, they make pretty boring reading. And please don’t tell Fi I’ve given them to you. Noah didn’t want her to see them. I think he feared she would pore over them and wind herself up even more. She was bad enough when the therapist reported verbally. Noah and I would have built a bonfire and burnt them if we could, but the therapist insisted we keep them, so I’ve kept them hidden in my office at Noah’s request. He felt ashamed of them. Seems stupid now, to worry about small stuff like that.”

  “We’ll be sure to return them.”

  “I don’t care if I never see them again. It’s not what I want to remember about him.”

  He glances over his shoulder in response to another call from Fiona. “Anyway, the thing Noah’s therapist told me, it’s in there somewhere. I wouldn’t put too much store in it, though. It’s just typical boy stuff. I got up to far worse at their age.”

  “Thank you.”

  As he closes the front door and returns to his wife, I wonder if their relationship will survive this or if they’ll tear each other apart.

  Sofia knows there’s no way she can concentrate on her course today. She decides to visit the gallery. She wants to see Ed Sadler’s exhibition for herself, and look for the photograph that Abdi mentioned in the recording. She’s pretty sure neither Ed nor Fiona will be there, not under the circumstances, so she won’t have to face them.

  She makes her way to Montpelier on the train. It’s only two stops. She could easily walk it, but she’s anxious about walking through unfamiliar areas in the city. Her hijab attracts more attention than she’d like. She feels safer on the train, especially in the aftermath of the rioting.

  She gets a window seat and watches the familiar landscape slip past: council estates and a few lonely high-rises give way to rows and rows of Victorian terraces, some industrial sites, and community gardens that patchwork a steep hillside. Montpelier is home to rows of Georgian houses, many painted in pastel colors, others their original golden stone. Only about half of them are well cared for. On the others the stone looks weather-beaten and stained. Rogue weeds grow from gaps in slate rooftops and graffiti tags lurk in corners.

  She walks to Cheltenham Road from Montpelier station and heads down the road toward Stokes Croft.

  Sofia loves this area. It has an artsy vibe, cafés and street life, a mix of people.

  The buildings beyond the railway arches on Cheltenham Road belong to the graffiti artists. Somebody sleeps on a cold stoop under a filthy sleeping bag, and a man with pinprick pupils paces the street, castigating everybody and nobody. Sofia crosses the road to avoid him, and keeps her head down to avoid a conversation with the sociable drunks gathered on a tiny triangular piece of grass that’s sandwiched between a road junction and the blind end of a redbrick building.

  The People’s Republic of Stokes Croft, proclaims a large painting on the wall. It’s not a no-go area, though. Hipster cafés and bars fill the gaps between strip clubs, charity shops, and restaurants serving food from every corner of the earth, and the shell of a multistory abandoned building looms behind the shop fronts, every single surface, seemingly impossibly, covered in graffiti. Behind it the Salvation Army is building a new headquarters. A crane looms, and cars are backed up behind temporary traffic lights.

  A few hundred yards down the road, Sofia’s sense of unease intensifies when she catches sight of the gallery.

  EDWARD SADLER: TRAVELS WITH REFUGEES has been smartly printed in white letters on the inside of the glass.

  Sofia crosses the road. She barely checks for traffic.

  She looks at a large photograph in the window. It’s of a boy who has a dead hammerhead shark slung over his shoulders.

  When she enters the gallery, a girl stands up from behind a desk at the back of the room. She has long tresses of blond hair tied up in a way that looks designed to be untidy. She wears a leather skirt and a roll-neck top.

  “Can I help you?”

  “I’m just looking.”

  “If you’re interested in buying, I have a price list and an explanation of the works written by the photographer. Not all of them are for sale. Enjoy! They’re very real.”

  Sofia needs to take only a cursory glance around the room to experience an even tighter clutch of fear.

  The images from the refugee camp speak to her instantly, evoking sensory memories: smells, sensations, noises, and voices from the camp all fight for her attention.

  She examines the photographs of Somalia, and these have a different effect on her, because she’s never been there. If she googles Somalia, she sees many pictures like these. They’re often images of violence, hardship, and destruction. And if not that, they show camels, or nomads posed decoratively in the desert, or some other cliché of Africa.

  What’s missing, and this is true of Ed Sadler’s photographs as well, are ordinary lives. The photographs here are extreme. They’re focused on shocking things. They tell a story that’s incomplete and sensationalist.

  Where are the mothers and daughters, fathers and sons, and brothers and sisters who are the living, breathing heart of these places, because they’re not violent, because they wish only for things to be improved? Sofia can answer her own question even before she’s posed it: Ordinary stories are boring. They won’t sell papers or encourage donations.

  She misses the ordinary folk, though, in this room that depicts horror. She misses their warmth and courage and the boredom they went through and the small things they did every day to try to survive. Her parents were those people, and so were many of their friends and neighbors in the camp. The unsensational things they did are, in Sofia’s mind, the true acts of heroism.

  In contrast, she finds these photographs to be heartless and part of the problem, but she shakes herself out of these thoughts. They’re not why she’s here.

  In the middle of one wall she sees what she’s looking for: an image from the camp of men watching football. It’s the photograph Abdi asked about in the recording.

  She sees the man he mentioned. He’s right in the middle of the picture, the only face turned toward the camera, though he’s not looking directly into it. This is a candid shot. His uncorrected cleft palate is a shocking deformity.

  She looks hard at the picture, but finds no other clue as to why this one in particular caught Abdi’s attention. She wonders if she should ask her parents. She uses her phone to take a picture of the photograph.

  The gallery girl approaches her, startling Sofia when she says, too brightly, “That’s one of my favorite images, too. What do you think of the show as a whole?”

  “Horrific,” Sofia says. Hearing her own voice as she articulates what she’s really feeling unexpectedly brings her close to tears.

  “But so necessary, don’t you think?”

  “No. Just horrific.”

  “They’re shocking at first sight, yes, but if you think of the meta-meaning—”

  Sofia speaks quietly, but very firmly. “There is no meta-meaning. These photographs glamorize and sensationalize suffering.”

  “He’s not selling the shocking ones.”

  Sofia doesn’t dignify that with an answer.

  When she steps out onto the pavement she takes a few deep breaths to steady herself and quell a feeling of nausea. She can only imagine how Abdi must have felt, being at a party to celebrate pictures like those.

  Back at HQ, I read Noah Sadler’s therapy journals while I wait for Fraser to finish a meeting.

  I feel as if I’m starting to chafe against the short leash she has me on, what with the twice-daily briefings she’s asked for, but as it’s only my third day back at work, I don’t think I have any choice but to suck it up for now.

  I try to suppress my fatigue as I read. My lack of sleep is catching up with me, and the journals are, as Ed Sadler warned me, pretty boring.

  In the first few journals—which are actually just slim school exercise books, labeled by year—the handwriting is immature. They contain dated l
ists of the topics that Noah and his therapist discussed, and nothing more. The earliest of these journals must have been started when Noah was only about eleven years old, so I’m not at all surprised that they’re so bare.

  I can’t help thinking what a sad catalogue of subjects the books contain, though. A typical entry reads: “Talked about chemo, friendships, school.”

  It’s not until I get to the fifth book, the most recent, that things get more interesting as Noah begins to add personal comment to his entries. Mostly they’re all variations on a theme:

  “School friendships: hard work, sometimes lonely, work on asking people how they feel.”

  Here and there he adds something a bit more personal: “Need to try not to think of Imran as a threat. Think about friendship circles.”

  The only place he goes into more detail is in one very recent entry, where it seems to me that a sense of injustice might have provoked him into writing more.

  “School friendships: talked about getting Imran to write the essay for Abdi, and all the fuss that happened after. Don’t see why it should be a problem. Imran was desperate for GTA5 and he got it for £20 in the end, from one of the sixth formers he knows in badminton club, so everybody’s happy. A never got the blame in the end. Told Dad, who thought it was a good deed!”

  The entry is a bit of an anomaly in terms of the amount of detail he provides. I flick ahead in the journal. He writes some fuller entries later on, but none of them piques my interest like this one. I show it to Woodley.

  “GTA5 is Grand Theft Auto, the computer game,” he says. “It’s very much an 18 certificate.”

  I reread the passage. “So am I right in thinking this sounds as if Noah and Abdi bought an essay from Imran for twenty pounds, because Abdi needed it, and Imran was happy to make the deal because he spent the money on a copy of Grand Theft Auto, which is a computer game?”