Odd Child Out

by Gilly MacMillan

  He didn’t deserve this, whatever Ed says.

  She sits down on Noah’s bed and thinks about the unfortunate incident at primary school. Noah reacted badly with that other child, it’s true, but he was under such exceptional stress.

  It was the head teacher’s attitude that Fiona hated.

  “We have to look at this from both sides,” she said, “and although Noah’s been gravely ill and all of our sympathies are with him, we can’t ignore the fact that he harmed another child.”

  “Why did you push him?” Fi had asked Noah that night, after they’d learned that the child had broken his collarbone in the fall caused by Noah.

  “He wasn’t my friend anymore.”

  The next day she decided to homeschool him. She couldn’t stand the thought that friendship issues would pile up on top of everything he had to go through with his treatment. It was too much for one kid to bear.

  “He’ll probably be fine” was Ed’s view. “He’ll settle back in really quickly. Are you sure it’s not you that’s finding it very difficult, more than Noah, maybe? That would be understandable.”

  Fiona hated being called out on that. It always was Ed’s way to breeze in, just off a plane, the smell of travel and other women hanging off him, and openly judge her like that. He had no idea what it was like during the hard yards of Noah’s treatment, his education, his everything.

  Fiona doesn’t touch anything in Noah’s room. She wants to keep every single thing in there, even the rumples in the bedding, just how Noah left it.

  Woodley and I are standing outside a property on an aspirational housing estate that I estimate is ten years old. It’s a small house. The developer of the estate has mixed property styles and sizes in an ill-conceived and ill-executed attempt to create a village feel.

  The door’s freshly painted and the front garden’s aggressively well tended. A small red car sits on the driveway. It’s polished to a shine.

  We’re at the address where Jason Wright and his wife are registered as owner-occupiers.

  “Somebody doesn’t mind dusting, then,” Woodley says. The windowsill of the front room has been used as a display area for china figurines of wedding-cake princesses in dresses with more crevasses and folds than a glacier.

  The woman who opens the door is small and neat, wearing a housecoat and slippers with a heel and an explosion of fluff on the toe.

  “Rita Wright?” I ask. “We’re hoping to speak to your husband.”

  “He’s out.”

  We didn’t call ahead because we wanted to surprise him, but I wonder if somebody’s told him we were asking questions at the garage.

  “When will be he back?”

  “I’m not sure. Could be ages.”

  “Do you mind if we come in anyway? It would be very helpful if you could answer one or two questions for us.”

  She examines our IDs hawkishly before beckoning us in. She asks us to remove our shoes and leads us to a tiny conservatory at the back of the house with a view of a paved yard that contains a painted shed and a washing line where cleaning rags are neatly pegged. Beyond it, there’s a patch of lawn.

  “I’d like to ask about Jason’s employment,” I say.

  “He doesn’t work. He’s on disability benefits. His back’s knackered.”

  “When did that happen?”

  “About six years ago. He had an accident at work.”

  “Where did he work?”

  “Worked for the council. Housing officer.”

  “So how did he hurt his back?”

  “Lifting boxes, wasn’t it? He ruptured a disk.”

  Rita Wright gnaws at a fingernail between answers, leaving flecks of red polish on her teeth.

  “So he doesn’t work at all now?”

  She shakes her head.

  Outside, the patio stones are becoming speckled with rain. In the corner of the yard I see a large dog turd.

  “I don’t think I can help you much more than that,” Rita Wright says. “If you don’t mind, I’d like to get my washing in.”

  She wants to be rid of us, and I’m willing to oblige her because I’ve had a thought.

  “You’ve been very helpful indeed,” I say, standing with her. “We’ll call back later to see if Jason’s here.”

  “You could ring ahead next time,” she says.

  “We’ll do that, thank you.”

  She hovers around us as we put our shoes back on in the hallway.

  “We’ll see ourselves out, Mrs. Wright,” Woodley tells her. “You get that washing in.”

  The rain’s worsened quickly. It’s pelting down. Woodley and I jog across the road.

  “I’ll bet Wright’s out walking the dog,” I say when we’re both in the car. “He won’t last long in this.”

  We move the car a distance from the house so Rita Wright won’t be able to see it, but we have a view of anybody arriving at the property.

  Woodley pulls a piece of laminated card from his pocket.

  “Look what I found on the floor by the door.”

  He hands it to me. PLEASE DON’T RING THE DOORBELL BETWEEN 9 A.M. AND 5 P.M., it says, and provides a number to text instead.

  “Only somebody who works night shifts would have that.”

  On the back of it there’s a worn nub of blue tack where it could have been fixed to the door.

  “He’s been claiming benefits and working on the sly.”

  We don’t have to wait long for the man himself.

  “She must have phoned him as soon as we left,” Woodley says as a man appears at the far end of the street, hunched against the rain, holding two big German shepherd dogs on leads.

  “They don’t look like the kind of dogs you’d choose if you had a back injury,” Woodley says.

  We get out of the car to intercept Wright. As we approach, he notices us. From the way he pauses, it’s obvious that he considers taking off but thinks better of it. When we’re still a good few meters away from him, the dogs start to bark. He settles them with a command. Rain drips off the peak of his cap. He’s wearing a raincoat but underneath it only lightweight trainers and sweatpants. Both are soaked through. It’s pretty obvious he went out in a hurry.

  “You’d better come in, then,” he says. “Let me get the dogs settled first.”

  He lets himself into the backyard via a side gate and we follow him through. The dogs have lost interest in us now, and we watch as he puts them into a large wooden kennel in the side return, where they shake thoroughly.

  “Not house dogs, then?” Woodley asks.

  Jason Wright can’t resist showing off. “They’re specialist dogs. Bred and trained in Germany. They’re not supposed to live inside.”

  “Security dogs?”

  “Yeah. My wife suffers from nerves.”

  “On this estate?” Woodley asks, and he’s right to. The only crime we’ve had a whiff of here is bad architecture. Everything else looks shipshape.

  “You can’t be too careful, Officer.” He’s got a good poker face, I’ll give him that, because what he’s saying is nonsense, especially given that Mrs. Wright’s demeanor was distinctly steely. No nerves detectable there.

  “Bella!”

  One of the dogs stops drinking at the sound of his voice and comes to the wire fence. She’s athletic and bright-eyed. Her ears and snout look like black velvet.

  The other dog watches, its head on its paws. The inside of the pen is as immaculate as the house.

  “She’s been poorly this one, haven’t you, Bella?”

  His voice has gone gooey, and at the sound of her name the dog’s tail wags, but she holds herself very still.

  “Good as gold, they are, but if you give them the command they’ll defend you.”

  He digs in his pocket and then offers Bella a treat through the wire. The other dog gets up and approaches.

  I don’t give Wright any warning. I take two handfuls of his wet coat in my fists and push him back against the wire surrounding the dogs’ pen
. I don’t push him hard, but the noise is jarring.

  The dogs’ reaction is instant. Both of them hurl themselves against the other side of the wire, teeth and gums bared, snarling and barking. I have no doubt their jaws would be closing around my arm or even my neck if they could get to me. I let go of Jason Wright.

  “What the fuck are you doing?” he says. “Jesus!”

  The dogs are still going crazy.

  “Bella! Roger!” he shouts, and they back off, but reluctantly, the male dog baring his teeth.

  “I think we need to have a word inside, Mr. Wright,” I say.

  If these dogs are just in use to guard this house, I’ll eat my hat. I strongly suspect Wright was at the scrapyard on Monday night and had one or both of them with him. I think it’s him we heard on the recording, giving a command to the dog called Roger, and I want to know exactly what went on.

  When Sofia goes into her bedroom to lie down, to check Facebook, and to try to consider what else she can do to find her brother, Maryam sits in the darkness of the room next door.

  When Nur gets home, he unlocks the door, clicks on the light, and finds Maryam has been sitting alone in the dark.

  She holds her finger to her lips. “Sofia’s sleeping.”

  He sits down beside her and she takes his hand. They love each other very much and have since the day they met at the camp, both working at the school there. They’ve had their differences, of course, over the years, but they’ve come so far together that the bond they share is very strong.

  “I gave out all the photographs,” he tells her. “Everybody says they’ll look out for Abdi.”

  He’s saying that to fill the silence. He can tell she has something she wants to say.

  Earlier, she looked in on her daughter and saw that Sofia was asleep on her bed. Sofia’s phone was lying out on her desk and Maryam took it. She knows her daughter’s pin code, so it was easy enough to access the photograph that Sofia took earlier.

  Maryam shows it to Nur.

  “Sofia says she thinks that Abdi got obsessed with this photograph when he went to Ed Sadler’s exhibition,” she tells him. “You see it’s the one he was talking about in the recording.”

  Nur sees a scene from Hartisheik Camp. He sees a few faces he recognizes among the men and boys. He sees the man who was known as Farurey because of his damaged lip, and he sees the football game that’s on the television: red shirts versus burgundy and white shirts. Without looking any closer he knows exactly when this was, and which match they’re watching.

  “Abdi knows,” Maryam says. They’ve failed to protect their deepest secret.

  Nur was living in the Eastleigh district of Nairobi in 1999, the year Manchester United played Bayern Munich in a historic final. The night of the Champions League match was one of the few occasions he risked arrest by the Kenyan police by venturing out of his accommodation to join a crowd watching the game at an open-air screening. He’d been overjoyed to have some time off.

  The distance from his family gnawed at him every day, but he was there to make money so they could get away from the camp, where Maryam was becoming more and more withdrawn and depressed, and the prospects for his children’s education were pathetic. Nur wanted to rejoin them but knew he had to be strong and keep to his goal. He was just over halfway through a six-month trip. He was sleeping on a mattress in a room he had to share with seven other men.

  That night, watching the football match was his treat: a rare few hours of pleasure. He was a Manchester United fan. The game and its noise and excitement totally absorbed him for the whole ninety-three minutes. He remembers the red flares the fans lit pitch-side, the delight of the Manchester players that verged on ecstatic when they stole the game in the last three minutes, and the desolation of the Munich team, who lay flat on the grass, disbelieving the result.

  The guilt that he enjoyed himself on that night when his wife suffered so much still feels like a pinch in his heart.

  Maryam says, “I don’t want Sofia to know.”

  “Nobody has to know.”

  “We have to tell the police.”

  “Why?”

  “Because Abdi’s looking for this man. He knows he’s here in Bristol. He saw him at the Welcome Center and must have overheard us talking about him that night. If he recognized him in the photograph”—she stabs at the face of the man with the split lip—“he could have put it all together because the football match gave him the date. It wouldn’t have been too hard to work it out.”

  “He can’t have,” Nur says, but as he says it, he’s thinking about how hard it is to keep secrets, especially one this big.

  “He can. He saw me faint. He’s perceptive, he’s clever, he’s everything we wanted him to be.”

  “Don’t worry at your scar,” Nur tells her. Gently he pulls her hand away from her arm. She’s been known to pick at it until it bleeds.

  “Whatever happened at the canal, it’s worse now. Abdi isn’t safe,” Maryam says.

  She’s assaulted by the memory of the man with the gashed lip from that night. She grips Nur’s hand and tries to eradicate it, but the slap of that man’s flesh on hers is something she’s never been able to forget.

  Maryam was helping a friend that night. Her friend was sick, and her son had sneaked out to watch the football game against her instructions. Her friend was furious but also afraid. Boys who ran loose at night in the camp were unsafe. They should be at home in the shelter, where they could study. Many of the women Maryam knew guarded the kerosene supplies like tigresses to ensure that there was enough light for their children to do homework after dark. Nobody wanted their kids to be roaming the camp, mixing with anybody. Many of them still held out hope for the future, in spite of everything. But the promise of a football game screened in public had driven the boys a bit crazy.

  Maryam left Sofia sleeping in her friend’s shelter with her friend and walked up a long straight path to the area where the aid workers sometimes relaxed.

  On that night they’d set up a TV so anybody who wanted to could watch the football game, but when Maryam got there, the game was over and the boy she was seeking was nowhere to be seen. The aid workers were climbing into trucks for the drive home, jolly and laughing. She wondered if the boy had gone to the hut of another family friend. She set off there but got confused. She was disoriented by the darkness. Some of the shelters glowed with torch- or lamplight, but most were dark.

  She realized she was lost when she found herself at the outskirts of the camp, where the women gathered firewood in groups for protection. She extinguished her lamp, afraid that it would draw unwelcome attention to her, but it was too late.

  There were men. Three of them, but only one had a wide gash on his upper lip. Two of them manhandled her out into the deep darkness, away from the camp where nobody could hear her or help her. Her heels dragged in the dirt as they pulled her, and all the way she watched the man who followed them, saw his deformed face and the way he walked so casually and pointed his torch ahead of them, indicating where he wanted them to take her, running the beam over her body once they got there.

  His deformity meant that his speech was slurred. She’s never forgotten that, either, the distinctive sound of him.

  When the rape was over, Maryam cowered in the darkness alone as the men picked their way back to the camp across the desert, and she heard their laughter. She pulled her clothing back around her and lay there because the fear of the pain and of the rest of her life was greater than her fear of scorpions or hyenas.

  She felt the warmth of blood between her legs and on her arm, where he cut her with his knife. That wound would become infected before it healed, leaving an ugly scar.

  Even after everything she’d endured already, that was the night that her life became defined by shame, and it was the night that Abdi was conceived.

  Ed takes a call from the hospital confirming that Noah’s death has been referred to the coroner for a postmortem.

  The expectatio
n, the doctor on the phone tells him, is that this will take place over the next few days and then the body will be released for the funeral, but Ed and Fiona will have to be in touch with the coroner’s office to confirm this.

  The thought of a postmortem sickens Ed. What he would most like, after years of medical intervention, is for them to leave Noah alone.

  When he tells Fiona, she barely reacts. She went to bed after their argument, and she’s still there, gray-faced.

  “Shall we talk about the funeral?” he asks.

  “No.”

  Ed knows what Noah wanted; they talked about it the same night they discussed his bucket list, and Ed wrote notes.

  Noah knew more about funerals than Ed would have thought healthy in any other circumstances. He wanted a certain drawing on the cover of the order of service, and he wanted it to be nondenominational. He had three pieces of music in mind, one that Fi liked, one that Ed liked, and one that was his own favorite. There would also be a reading from The Little Prince that Noah chose, and he wanted each of his parents to select another.

  “I don’t mind who reads them, though it would be nice if Abdi did one.”

  Ed wondered how the hell he had managed to leave it until his son was in the last months of his life to have a conversation with him that was so adult.

  He couldn’t restrain himself from resenting Fiona for that. She kept our son from me, he thought. Her levels of anxiety around Noah were so high that she drove me away from him. I thought of him as a patient more often than not. I didn’t get to know him as well as I could have.

  “I’m going to cancel my exhibition,” he said to Noah in the days after the final talk.

  “No! I want to go to it and to the party. I’ve got months, Dad, not days. We need to do good things.”

  “Good things?”

  “Well, it would be stupid to do bad things. I want to see your exhibition.”

  Ed broke down then.

  Noah wasn’t the first dying child he’d seen, but this was the first time he could truly empathize with the parents of those little souls and their families that he’d met and photographed abroad. The way Noah was that evening shattered the barriers Ed had erected to keep himself sane in the face of what he’d seen.