“I would say that the boys had things in common, shared interests and hobbies, and they enjoyed each other’s company for the most part, but I would also say that there might have been a fundamental clash of cultures at the heart of their relationship.”
“Can you give us an example?”
Fiona Sadler begins to tear up, fighting it every step of the way. It’s a live meltdown: television gold. “No. Not really, no. Actually, I’m not sure that’s what I want to say.”
The newsreader offers her a tissue.
“But would it be true to say that you feel this clash of cultures might have led this boy to harm your son?”
“I’m just saying that you don’t know who people are. You don’t always understand them.” She begins to cry, and the newsreader turns to Emma, who manages to talk while rubbing Fiona Sadler’s back ostentatiously.
Please salvage this, I think, please.
“Perhaps you could answer this for us, Emma Zhang. You feel a crime may have been committed here, don’t you, and that the police aren’t doing their job properly?”
“I do. I think that political correctness hampers us. This is a sensitive case, involving minors, but I wonder if it’s being pursued as assiduously as it might be because the boy in question is a Somali immigrant.”
“And you say this as somebody who considers themselves a minority?”
“I’m half Chinese and half English, so I think I can talk from both sides of the fence.”
I wonder how she can stoop so low. I’m not sure she has a single thing in common with Abdi Mahad’s family.
“So you think a kind of reverse prejudice might be taking place?”
“It’s a possibility.”
“But why do you think that this boy might have hurt Noah?”
Fiona Sadler doesn’t respond. She’s weeping, and she looks as if she doesn’t want to be there any longer. The camera closes in on Emma, who’s ready to seize her moment.
“This is speculation, but I wonder if it could have been some kind of initiation.”
“What kind of initiation?”
“I don’t know. Maybe for membership in a group, to show that he would be capable of perpetrating a bigger act.”
“An act of terror?”
“Why not?”
“Isn’t that rather speculative?” Even the newsreader looks shocked at how far Emma’s pushed this. Fiona Sadler is aghast.
My phone rings again. This time I answer it.
“Did I say toxic?” It’s Fraser. “I meant something worse, but frankly I’m struggling to think of the words just now.”
“I don’t know what to say. I had no idea about this.”
“I need to talk to Janie about how we handle this. I’ll speak to you first thing in the morning.”
She hangs up, and I can’t shake the feeling that she’s cutting me out of whatever’s going to happen next.
When the doorbell to my flat rings, Becky says, “I’ll get it.”
She speaks quietly into the buzzer and then calls, “I’m going out for a bit.”
“Who with?”
She stops with her hand on the door handle.
“Who with, Becky?”
“That’s none of your business. What’s got into you?”
“Are you meeting the man who hurt you?”
She leaves, slamming the door behind her, but I follow. We clatter down the stairs together and I arrive at the front door before she does.
Outside, standing on the top of the steps, is a man with longish hair and a bunch of red roses.
That’s all I register before I swing my fist into his midriff.
Maryam’s sipping tea in her friend Amina’s kitchen when she notices Fiona Sadler on the TV. Nur’s out searching for Abdi again, and Maryam’s left the flat to try to clear her head. She’s determined that Sofia must not know about Abdi, but she doesn’t trust herself to hold it together around her daughter tonight.
Maryam and Amina watch the interview in horror. Amina has no choice but to translate the bits that Maryam doesn’t understand. She feels dirtied by the ugly words she has to pass on.
“I need to go home,” Maryam says.
“I’ll come with you.”
“No.”
Maryam hurries through Easton, trying to reach Nur by phone as she goes, but he’s not answering. She sees that Sofia’s tried to call her. She’s rushed away from Amina because instinct told her that she must be home, to support her daughter in the aftermath of the TV interview, but she’s suddenly overwhelmed by the terrible burden of continuing to try and protect Sofia from all of this, and she doesn’t know if she can do it any longer.
Maryam stops in the street and sits down on a low wall. Her handbag slips to her feet.
It’s time, she thinks. Time to tell everything. To protect Abdi.
A passing young man asks her if she’s all right and she says, “Please could you help me to Stapleton Road.” At her request he walks her to a taxi rank on Stapleton Road and sees her into a car. She asks the driver to take her to the police station.
“Which one?” he asks. Behind him, neon lights in a shop front advertise money shipping services, and reflected in the taxi’s side mirror a bus approaches, its headlights dazzling her momentarily. The car stereo is tuned to a lively Asian music station and there’s a stink of air freshener in the car. Maryam finds it overwhelming. She doesn’t know which police station. It never occurred to her that there might be a choice. She repeats, “Police station, please.” The driver meets her eye briefly in the rearview mirror and swings out into the traffic.
“Okay, lady,” he says.
Maryam sits with her back straight as a rod, clutching the armrest as he swings too fast around the corners and joins the dual carriageway alongside which a handful of tower blocks make rectangular silhouettes against the black-orange sky. She thinks of all the lives stacked up on top of one another inside them, all the love and all the ugly.
The police station the driver takes her to is the local one, a redbrick building on an island of tarmac by a busy intersection, near the place where her neighborhood meets the city center proper. She pays him with the small amount of cash she has and wonders how she’ll get home if she can’t get hold of Nur. She wonders if her driver knows Nur, but she’s too shy to ask.
Inside the station, Maryam is intimidated by the reception area, but she steels herself and approaches the desk.
In her head, she knows exactly what she wants to say, but as soon as she tries to speak to the officer at the desk, the words become muddled and she finds herself blurting out two- or three-word phrases that make the officer’s brow crinkle.
“Say that again for me, darling,” the officer says once Maryam has fallen silent, She’s a middle-aged woman with a pencil behind her ear and a coffee stain on her shirt that’s wet where she’s tried to wash it out.
Maryam tries, gasping for the right words, but not finding them, like a fish drowning in oxygen.
“Your son is gone, but he’s on the telly?” the officer repeats very slowly.
“Please. Help us,” is all Maryam manages in response, and she begins to weep, defeated, as ever, by her foreignness.
“Take a seat, darling, let’s see if we can get a translator here, shall we?”
The officer emerges from behind the desk and settles Maryam on a hard wooden bench that’s designed to discourage comfort. She offers Maryam a cup of water.
“Where are you from? What’s your language?” she asks.
“Somalia,” Maryam replies.
Maryam sits and stares at her toes against the beige linoleum floor. She looks up at the ceiling where textured white tiles are interspersed with smooth rectangular light panels.
She checks her phone and sees that the battery’s run down to red.
Her stomach begins to complain and she realizes she can’t remember when she last ate something.
After half an hour the officer calls out to her. “Sorry, love, we�
��re working on it, but it’s a busy night.” Maryam nods.
She wants to say, “You must find my son. He’s missing because his life fell apart on Monday night when he discovered that he was the child of a rapist and a war criminal, and a terrible thing happened to his friend. He’s alone and seeking out a man who will hurt him.”
When she realized she was pregnant, weeks after the assault, Maryam hoped that she would miscarry the child. She’d lost three babies to miscarriage or stillbirth by then, but this one was strong. As her belly thickened, so did her sense that this child would not die. She feared the baby. She had been forced to look into the mocking, sadistic face of its father and she was afraid of what it could become.
When Nur returned from Eastleigh she dreaded the moment when he would discover her secret.
It didn’t take long.
That night, after Sofia was asleep, and the kerosene lamp was extinguished, its smoke dispersed, he began to explore her body, and she stopped him and whispered her story to him and knew that he might leave and never return, leaving her only with her shame and mouths to feed. Other men had done this, their pride too great to stay with a woman who had been defiled by another man.
Nur placed his hands on her taut belly as if trying to get a sense of the baby. They stayed like that for a long time, both very afraid.
By morning he’d made a decision. “We’ll leave here,” he said, “before you have the baby. We have nearly enough money.”
“Where will we go?”
“Europe. If the baby lives, I’ll raise them as my son or daughter. Nobody will know any different.”
Nur promised her that they would make a home that was safe for both children, and that Abdi would never know whose blood ran in his veins. England, he promised her, would offer them a refuge.
Nur never mentioned the shame, but she knew he was trying to protect her from that as well. If people had known, some of them would have shunned her and Abdi both. The children born of rape were called terrible things; their mothers, too.
Maryam kept her bump covered so the eagle eyes of her friends couldn’t judge its size, but she admitted to the pregnancy.
In the police station, she takes a sip of her water. One and a half hours have now passed since she arrived. Her phone is dead.
A man bursts through the doors into reception. His face is covered in blood. Dark drops of it land on the linoleum. He reeks of alcohol. He walks up to the desk and tries to explain that he was attacked, but he’s too drunk to get his story straight. Maryam understands that he’s not any more articulate than she was.
The desk officer calls for backup, and in the chaos Maryam slips away. She’s lost her nerve.
She starts to walk home in the rain. She feels frightened by her own shadow.
Fiona Sadler watches as Emma Zhang shakes the hand of the TV anchor, and they exchange smiles.
Somebody touches Fiona’s shoulder and asks if they can help her take her microphone off and she lets them dig around her clothing and draw out the wire. She experiences all of this as if she’s not really present. She has a sense that she was carried somewhere on a tide of anger and now she’s washed up in a place where she doesn’t want to be.
In the car on the way home she puts as much distance between herself and Emma as possible and stares out of the windows, whose tinted glass casts a pall on the city. She doesn’t respond to Emma, whose mood is adrenaline-pumped, and her attempts to chat are amped up and self-congratulatory. It reminds Fiona of Ed when he’s telling stories about his work. It’s the thrill of the kill.
When they reach her house, she gets out of the car before it’s completely stopped and stumbles but doesn’t look back. Inside, she retches in the hallway; the grotesque sound of it feels like a rebuke.
She crawls into bed. She feels utter mortification. She thinks, What have I done?
Ed Sadler is sitting in an airport lounge. When he passed through security, he found that a copy of one of his photographs had printed out along with his boarding pass. He looked at it for a while, remembering Abdi asking about it, before putting it in a bin.
He gets another text. This time it’s from a friend telling him that they’ve just seen Fiona on TV. He battles with slow Wi-Fi but manages to watch the footage. It horrifies him. As it finishes, his flight is called. He gathers up his bag and thinks, I should have stayed with her.
Every step he takes toward the gate feels more wrong than the last, but he continues nevertheless. There’s no seating when he arrives, so he’s standing looking out over the airfield when his phone rings.
It’s Sofia Mahad’s number. Ed is tempted to ignore her call, but he knows his family isn’t the only one suffering here.
“Hello, Sofia,” he says.
Outside the window everything is lit up in the darkness. Ed can see lights on the runways, the planes and the busy service vehicles. They remind him of a hundred other trips, and lure him to somewhere, anywhere else.
“I’m so sorry,” he tells Sofia. “Fiona’s suffering very badly. I think she’s made a mistake. Her judgment isn’t what it should be at this moment, as I’m sure you’ll understand. It’s very difficult . . .”
He expects to get an earful from her, but Sofia’s not calling about the interview. There’s something else on her mind.
“Please, can you tell me exactly what Abdi asked you about when you talked about Hartisheik Camp? The night of the accident?”
Ed’s plane is beginning to board. He can hear his seat number being called.
“Sofia, I’m so sorry, can I call you back in a couple of hours? I promise I will, it’s just that I’m at the airport, and didn’t Abdi record our conversation anyway?”
“Please,” she says, “I need to hear it from you. In case he recorded only part of your conversation. I don’t think Abdi ran away because of Noah. Something else is happening, and I’m sure it’s to do with the photograph. He sent us a message on Facebook and I’m scared he’s not coming home. I’m so scared.”
He might have hung up if Sofia had been confrontational, but she sounds so very vulnerable, and he hasn’t the heart to tell her no. Part of him knows that on this occasion he probably can’t walk away from everything quite as easily as he’s done in the past. He thinks of the photo he put in the bin earlier. You can destroy a single copy of something, he thinks, but nowadays the life of an image never ends there.
“One minute.”
Ed approaches the check-in desk and tells the stewardess that he won’t be boarding the flight and that he didn’t check in a bag. He hands her his boarding card, puts his passport in his pocket, and sits down on one of the many vacated chairs.
“Sofia?” he says.
“I’m here.”
“Abdi asked me about a man.”
The conversation comes back to him in more detail than before. Sofia’s distress has jolted his memory.
“A man with a cleft palate?” she asks.
“Yes. Abdi was very curious about him. I told him everything I knew, which is that this man was known to be very dangerous. He was newly arrived in the camp at the time, and some of the families reported that they knew he’d previously been involved in some atrocities. That he was a militia soldier disguising himself as a refugee. He wasn’t the only one.”
“Did Abdi say why he wanted to know?”
“No, I don’t think he did.” Ed’s pretty sure of this. “I just assumed it was his natural curiosity. You know, he wanted to know about everything, didn’t he? I assumed the exhibition had piqued his curiosity.”
Ed is suddenly aware as he says the words of how arrogant he must sound and how he’s been looking at this the wrong way.
“This isn’t about me, is it?” he says to Sofia. “It’s about what Abdi saw. Is there anything I can do? To help?”
“Just tell me if you remember anything else at all.”
“There is one thing.” Another detail has come back to him. “I told Abdi that I thought I’d seen this man in Br
istol.”
Sofia is silent for a few moments before saying, “How?”
Ed misunderstands her. “If he was in Hartisheik at any point, it’s not surprising he could have come here. Bristol’s one of the destinations in the UK that many refugees make their way to from Hartisheik.”
“I mean, how did you see him? Where?”
“I was at the climbing center with a mate, just last week. When we left, I saw a man who looked the image of him coming out of one of the houses opposite. Might have been mistaken, but I’d been looking at the photo for the exhibition, so his face was fresh in my mind.”
“For real?”
“Absolutely for real.”
He hears a doorbell ring where she is, an exchange of voices.
“Sofia?” he asks.
“I have to go,” she says.
She hangs up and Ed picks up his pace as he leaves the airport, only pausing to text Fiona to say he’s on his way home.
Becky screams at me to get back in the house and sinks down beside her boyfriend. I pull her off him and drag him up onto his feet. The stink of his aftershave is an insult.
“If you ever lay a finger on my sister again I’ll make sure you go down for a very long time, or I’ll come and deal with you myself. Do you understand?”
He nods.
“Say it.”
“I understand.” The coward can’t meet my eye. The impulse to keep beating up on him is frighteningly strong, but after a few seconds in which I’m breathing into his face, watching the flicker of his cowardice in a muscle on his cheek, I shove him backward. Not as hard as I’d like to.
He scuttles away, arms wrapped around his belly where I hit him. The roses are scattered across the pavement.
Becky takes off down the street after him, and I call out after her.
“Fuck off!” she shouts.
I watch her go. I hope I’ve made my point. I’ve got a feeling it’s not going to be that easy, though.
Upstairs, I splash water on my face in the bathroom and avoid looking at my reflection in the mirror, in case I’m reminded of my father.
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