Out of It

by Selma Dabbagh

  When the van stopped and his feet had stationary ground under them again, they took him inside the station and removed all the contents from his pockets and placed them in see-through plastic bags. A man behind a high desk recorded it all and read out the list to Rashid, who did not hear anything.

  A more senior-looking officer saw Rashid’s name on the form, and looked at the custody sergeant behind the desk and said, ‘That’s who he says he is, is it?’

  ‘Same on his student ID, sir.’ The sergeant was a pointy-nosed little man with an air of diligence and mischief.

  ‘Get one of those made in five minutes,’ the senior officer replied. ‘Take him down and we’ll look at what we’ve got on him.’

  He was allowed one phone call and he wasted it trying to call Lisa. Her phone was off. He left a polite but desperate message for her. Even if she wasn’t his girlfriend, as she had seemed to want to stress was the case, she would still help him out of this, wouldn’t she?

  The room he was put in was about one and a half metres by two and had two plastic-covered mattresses at knee height at either side of it. There were no windows, only a small sliding opening on the door. The door was thick and covered with bolts. The cell smelt of piss, old smoke and sick men. There was something final about the smell.

  ‘Get me a lawyer,’ Rashid shouted through the grill. ‘I should be able to see a lawyer.’

  He kicked at the door until a very large officer came up to his peephole and looked in on him. Rashid promptly shut up.

  ‘Better get him the duty,’ he could hear someone say down the hall and he was sure he could make out the words, ‘Bit of a fuck up.’ Bit of a fuck up? Of course it was a bit of a fuck up. He had known that all along.

  Rashid wanted to remember all of this, to mentally document it. He wanted to ensure that any tale told later to Khalil, for example, would be detailed enough. Now that he thought he had confirmation of what he had already known (a bit of a fuck up) he was able, for a while, to contemplate the cell with detachment. There was something almost desirable about the drama of the situation. It was so familiar to him from films and TV that to find himself in it gave him the sense that his life had taken on a dramatic purpose, that he had actually (finally) reached the level of being able to not just feature but to star in a narrative of some interest. This voice was convinced, no it just knew, that it was a mistake that Rashid had been arrested. It was an aberration. The chatty story-telling voice in his head would not contemplate any other alternative as to do so would deflect from the entertainment value of its own mission.

  He continued to feed this perkily amused narrator in his head. It made him feel better and he was sure after the fuck up comment that his sense of this was the right one. He provided the narrative with details of graffiti from the walls, counted the cigarette burns in the thick mattress covers and touched the shiny hardwearing surfaces of the cell. He had sat back against the wall that was far too cold for a hot day, his feet on the mattress, waiting for Lisa, waiting for his lawyer, waiting for the policeman to come down the corridor and tell him that they were very sorry sir, but they had made a bit of a mistake. They just needed to clarify that there was a bit of a fuck up, sir. Do apologise.

  Rashid resolved that he would be very gracious to the officer when he came.

  Chapter 37

  Iman was avoiding Charles. Although most of what had passed between them had been no worse in terms of embarrassment than border strip searches and medical examinations, the memory of the shudder that had run through him when the act had culminated, as though he had released a great sneeze into her (a liquid sneeze that had actually spread wet and warm onto the sheet under her) was hard to deal with.

  ‘What are you looking so pained for?’ Khalil asked Iman. ‘Squeezing your phone won’t turn it off. There’s a button for that.’ Khalil had thought he had lost Iman too as the long, low light of evening had come in and the blocks of elongated building shadow were joining together. Eva had become ensconsed with the direct action group, Rashid had never materialised and Iman was in a daze.

  In the half-light the square looked as though it had been rolled upon by the demonstrators; it was strewn with miniature flags, crushed paper cups and abandoned flyers. The lines of police had broken into ambling groups, boarded on to multiple vans, and dispersed.

  ‘No sign?’ Iman asked.

  ‘None. I don’t get it. He sounded so keen to meet; I didn’t think he would just go off. Did you ask Lisa?’

  ‘She left with the VIPs before I had a chance to talk to her.’

  ‘Some of the guys who came down here from Leeds want to get together for a bit.’ Khalil indicated a group of men with banners declaring: Muslims Against the Occupation. ‘I’ll come over to your place later if that’s OK? I left my bags there.’

  ‘That’s fine,’ Iman said. ‘I’ll be there, or at least Eva will be. She never normally goes out. She’s got her finals coming up. I’m amazed she came to this, to be honest. She’s been studying through the night for weeks now.’

  ‘You’re going out?’ Khalil looked dejectedly at Iman. She had not really decided what she was going to do; she just really didn’t feel like going home. ‘We need to catch up. We haven’t even talked about the Gulf or anything. How’s your father?’

  ‘Baba now wears square-tipped shoes made of imitation snake skin. Yours? Is he still into lemon-yellow ties?’ Iman asked.

  ‘More of a lime green at the moment, but yes, he’s the same.’

  ‘I need to find Rashid.’

  ‘Bastard.’

  Iman and Khalil did not hug when Khalil left because Rashid was not there, that was their unspoken rule on it. Iman watched Khalil approach the group who were waiting for him. As he came close to them these brothers (for she was sure that was that they would call him) reached out to place their palms on his back as though it was the side of a holy stone.

  The drawn-out, muggy weather felt like it was working on something, storing it to burst. The demonstrators had almost all dispersed. Iman wanted to go before the tourists moved in around her with their pointlessness, which she feared might be contagious. She found herself heading towards the river, down the street where Ayyoubi had disappeared. The side street fanned out into a small square, with its embellished greenery and a handful of wooden benches.

  As she walked down the side street, Ziyyad Ayyoubi stepped out from behind a bush. She nearly laughed at the shock and absurdity of his appearance. It was nuts for him to pop out like that. Had he been hiding behind a rose bush? Behind him a mass of yellow green laurel leaves pushed up against the railings. There were rosebushes too and Ayyoubi appeared surrounded by a profusion of petals and lusciousness. The air hung heavy with the rain to come and the scent of blooms. It was all so different from the last time they had met. But he was the same: the same jacket, the same stance, and the same look of intense interest in her. This time he was not carrying a gun, but she felt she could see it on him anyway.

  ‘Miss Iman,’ he stepped towards her, and she smiled awkwardly as though she had been caught out doing something wrong, skiving in exile possibly. She realised that when he was close to her he had the not unpleasant effect of making her feel small. She could not say his name back to him in return. Since they had first met she had found herself addressing so many explanations to a spirit of him that his name – Ziyyad Ayyoubi – had become both irrelevant and far too powerful at the same time. It seemed almost degrading to reduce the sense of him to something so limited and arbitrary.

  They were noticeable standing there. Everything and everyone she felt, must have stopped to observe them, the solemnity of them, the profundity of them being in the same space. It was remarkable. It had happened. They had done it. They were there. Together.

  They stood as though they were waiting for someone or expecting something. He was smiling as though she had brought him news of great importance that would affect them both.

  ‘I’m looking for my brother.’ She wa
nted to dislodge his expectation although she needed it at the same time.

  ‘I hoped you might be here.’

  ‘You haven’t seen him?’

  ‘Your brother? No, I haven’t. But someone mistook me for him. An English guy wearing black.’

  ‘I think I should look around the square again.’ It was too heavy between them. She was not even listening to what he was saying. Was he saying anything? Something was definitely being communicated to her. She was concentrating only on his movements and the way he said things.

  ‘Yes.’ He shrugged but otherwise didn’t move.

  Perhaps she had got him wrong. He seemed scared of something now, moving back into the bushes and the trees, away from the thin traffic of people. She had imagined telling him that he was right and that she had made a mistake on that day and had been stupid. She had already apologised to Eva, she might as well apologise to him as well. Have a day of apologies. Get it all over with in one go. Perhaps she should thank him for pulling her back like that from the explosion. You saved my life. Ha! She had gone as far as to think of apologising for the way she had addressed him then and afterwards, but now he was there looking so daunted by her (he kept looking away to the side) she didn’t feel that he deserved the apology for some reason. She almost wanted to insult him or to tell him to sort himself out somehow, to make him more of what she had wanted him to be.

  ‘He was with me and then he was gone. I don’t know where.’ She looked up and down the street and into the square. He made to speak but stopped and gestured something to explain his inability to do so. ‘I need to look for my brother.’ She turned self-consciously. She had hardly taken a step when he grabbed out at her as though she was a wallet falling over the side of a boat.

  ‘I needed to see you. I was hoping you would be here, in London. I needed to see you. I wanted to explain about Abu Omar and to find out whether you knew… Has your brother said anything to you? Did he tell you the history?’

  ‘About Abu Omar? Why would Rashid know anything?’

  ‘No, not Rashid. Sabri.’

  The low evening light passing between buildings was straight in her eyes. He became a fuzzy-edged form in front of it.

  ‘I’m looking for Rashid.’

  ‘I know, and you’ll find him. He must have gone off. Leave him for now. He’ll turn up.’

  A couple walked past them laughing, the woman saying something with an air of contempt. Iman could not make out what it was.

  ‘What about Sabri?’

  ‘Let’s go somewhere else.’ When he smiled she could see he had a tooth missing on the right-hand side, towards the back. She could see now, gathered around his eyes and mouth and streaked across his forehead, evidence that he was much older than Rashid and herself. They could be as much as a generation apart, but the similarity to Rashid was definitely there. He looked down the street away from the square. ‘I don’t really want to stay here.’ He checked around him. ‘There’s a place that I’d like you to see. There are things that you need to know.’

  Above them something had ruptured in the sky and lightning cracked behind them.

  ‘We could go to this place. This way.’ He started to guide her then he paused. ‘I need to explain a couple of things,’ he said, stopping so unexpectedly that a woman behind them rammed her pushchair into the back of his legs. ‘Watch it, will you?’

  He guided her along until they were on a broad street with glass ball lamps, fluttering leaves and plane trees with mottled barks.

  ‘There it is.’ Ziyyad nodded towards a white hotel that sat huge and luminous on the darkening road, a bulk of iced bullion sprinkled with a thousand and one lights.

  ‘You want to go to that place? That hotel?’ Iman recognised its name from a novel she had read at school. It belonged to a world of feathered women and men with slicked-back hair who sliced up the Arab world with sharp pencils after dinner. ‘We can’t go in there.’ She stepped backwards as though pre-empting a push by one of the liveried doormen.

  Ziyyad ignored her. He took Iman through the lobby, walking just as he did on the Gaza streets, and did not seem to notice the cloaks of scruffiness that fell over them as soon as they entered the hotel. Tacked on to the back of the building was the bar that he wanted her to see, a glass and wrought-iron structure with mirrored walls and chandeliers. Glass bottles replicated themselves in a glittering cabinet at the back of the bar.

  ‘Here,’ Ziyyad said proudly. ‘What do you think?’

  Garish, thought Iman. It’s been made to look cheap when it isn’t.

  ‘How did you find this place?’ she asked.

  ‘They wanted me to stay here,’ he spoke as though it explained everything but when he looked at her he could see that it didn’t. ‘The Authority. They made a reservation here, but when I saw the place I knew I could not take it. I don’t want them to be able to say that I accepted any favours. Any privileges.’

  They stood at the doorway to the bar. Across the lobby four men with balding heads and ill-fitting suits had just arrived. Ziyyad stared intently at them. He did not move until the men did.

  ‘I have enemies.’

  ‘We all do,’ Iman replied.

  ‘And they all pretend to be your friends.’

  ‘Not all of them.’

  ‘Maybe not. But mine are out to get me. Come.’ He tried to adopt a different persona, a new smile for a new place. The bar glittered at them, ostentatious and uncared for. The hotel was not theirs, but she did not know whose it was. It could, she supposed, be theirs for an evening if they wanted it to.

  It wasn’t until they approached the table that she realised how closely they had been standing and walking together since they met on the side street. She hadn’t consciously intended to, but it was as if she was compelled to step into his steps, to keep the space around the two of them tight, contained. They sat at a table and it seemed extraordinary to her to do so with him. She half-expected the weirdness of it to be picked up by the other people in there, but the drunken businessmen ‘I told him no more than three mill and he went ahead with six,’ and disconsolate tourist families ‘We can do the Aquarium after the show, or shall we just go back to Oxford Street?’ were unable to see it.

  ‘Your family are well?’ He finally broke into the silence.

  ‘My family? They’re fine.’ She almost said, and yours? and then couldn’t think of anything else as she realised how bad it would have been had she done so. ‘I saw the end of your talk,’ she said. ‘I arrived in the square as you ended.’

  ‘I need to explain that.’ There was a goofiness to his closed-lipped smile. It didn’t match the tunnelling that went on behind his eyes, as though something somewhere had been cast adrift.

  He ordered her a fruit cocktail as she couldn’t be bothered with the menu, and tea for himself. When her drink arrived she found herself contemplating the straw that stood erect at the centre of the layer of paper umbrellas, cherries and chopped pineapple on the drink’s surface.

  ‘What do you need to explain?’

  ‘I had an episode back there when I was giving my talk. I’m OK now, but I have these moments… crowds, blood. I’m phobic, apparently. It’s been a long time since it last happened. I was fine when I was speaking, because I was looking up so I could not see the people. And then I had this strong desire to look down. And suddenly all these faces around me, waiting.’ He grimaced. ‘It’s over now.’

  ‘You’ve always had this?’

  ‘Since I was a child. It was when my parents—’

  ‘My father knew your parents.’

  ‘Really?’ He brightened momentarily. ‘Where? Beirut, I suppose.’

  ‘They read too much for his liking.’

  ‘Read, talked and partied is what I remember.’ Again, the missing tooth at the back of his mouth. A line of vein across his temple that one could trace along with a fingertip. ‘Listen, Iman, I need to explain about that day, about Abu Omar—’

  ‘Abu Omar?’ Iman ha
dn’t wanted him to raise their former neighbour or anything about that day again.

  She would have rather let Abu Omar slip for a moment as they sat in that glassy place. The closeness and the strangeness of where they came from wrapped around them like a thick rug, but she didn’t want it between them. She was fed up with voicing her views, giving her position. His shoulders were beautiful. There was rain coming down on the glass roof above them. She put the cherries into her mouth and tried to discreetly remove the stones with a cupped hand and he looked at her as though her doing this was curious and charming. He concentrated so much on her wrist that she became quite self-conscious about it. She found herself looking at it as though it was something quite new. She didn’t want to have Abu Omar and his sorrowful gut brought into the uniqueness of being there.

  ‘What about Abu Omar?’ she asked dutifully.

  ‘He was instrumental…’ Ziyyad started. ‘We have proof that he was instrumental—’

  But her phone rang and it was Khalil telling her about Rashid and she didn’t get to hear any more than that.

  Chapter 38

  The corridor outside Rashid’s cell was filled with the anger of drunks. A woman’s high heels dragged backwards down it. You fucking waankerrs…

  It was remembering that he had left his window slightly open that morning that made Rashid feel a plunging sense of absence and desperation at being in the cell. In his room, it would be dark now. The sheets on the bed would be cold and the computer would be blipping to itself as the messages piled up on to its screen. There would be an orange light from the street. It was those transformative hours of the evening as night came about that he relished most in that room.

  It was all there waiting for him. But he would not be going back, maybe not tonight, maybe not ever. He would become just another story of a detention, a deportation, a rendition: another story of injustice and illegality to be deleted as junk. That was how it was to end for him, on a piss-stinking mattress in an underground cell of a London police station with hookers and drunks. If he had known that this was how it would end. If he had known.