‘Where is he?’ asked Iman.
‘He’s just getting his stuff together. He’ll be here any minute.’ Annabelle looked disgruntled.
‘What do you mean that it might affect his immigration status?’ asked Khalil. ‘He needs to be here until September for his course.’
‘Like I said, I don’t know, but he might need to go home sooner than that.’
‘But he’s on a scholarship,’ Iman said.
‘Like I said, it’s not my area. Here.’ She handed over a card. ‘Give the immigration section at my firm a call in the morning, all right? They might be able to help him out although I doubt whether he’ll get Legal Aid. Right. I’m off now.’
‘You don’t need to wait for him to come up?’ Iman asked, taking on Lisa’s interrogative role now that Lisa had fallen silent.
‘He’ll be up any second, and I’ve got a GBH down south now.’ She stood in front of them.
‘Well, thank you.’ Khalil stood up before Iman did; he realised that that was what this vast woman seemed to want from him. The rep nodded before leaving the premises.
‘Drugs!’ Lisa was muttering, disgusted. ‘If I had known it was just some hash that he was in here for…’
Khalil was turning the card over, looking at the name of the immigration solicitor when Rashid arrived. Rashid only seemed to see one of them. ‘Lisa!’ he cried. She stood up as Rashid came towards them.
‘You all right, then?’ Iman asked Rashid.
‘Sure,’ said Rashid, still looking pleased by the sight of Lisa, who now held her laptop bag to the side of her body.
‘I didn’t think you’d come.’ He walked closer to her and held her arms. ‘You know, Lisa, down there, in that cell. It was so… I felt so, you know, lonely, and I was thinking… I’ve been so stupid. I’ve really missed you. I didn’t think you’d come—’
‘I probably wouldn’t have come if I had known it was just for some minor dope charge.’
Rashid was holding some of the bits and pieces from his pocket in a see-through plastic bag that dangled against Lisa’s upper arm.
‘What did you say?’ Rashid dropped his hold on Lisa’s arms.
‘I said I wouldn’t have come down here if I knew that it was just about some hash that you had on you. I thought you had been arrested for some terrorism offence or something. I was at dinner with Lord C. and I rushed off. I told them all that it was really serious and now it turns out it’s just some caution for a piece of dope.’
A look was building up in Rashid’s face that made Iman want to pull Lisa – even Lisa – away from him.
‘You’re disappointed, is that it? Disappointed? What is it that you wanted me to do, exactly?’ Rashid started out with not a small amount of malice in his voice. ‘Blow up Buckingham Palace? Would that get your attention? Is that what you want? Strap myself to some explosives? Is that it? What do you want from me?’ Rashid’s voice was raised now.
‘All right. All right. You lot. Move it outside. No domestics in here. Out you go.’ The policewoman was standing by the door, holding it wide and ushering them out. ‘That’s it then for tonight and leave Buckingham Palace out of it and all.’
The rain had stopped, but it was cold and the wind had picked up. Outside they were no longer performing for anyone, nor were they enclosed and the tension momentarily seemed to drop away. But Rashid’s fury was still with him and his English crumbled with the strain of it.
‘Do you know, I’ve had it with you.’ His accent became stronger and as his pronounciation weakened Lisa became more resolute. She stood with her bag over her shoulder, her arms across her chest, her jacket puffed out under it. The manifest effect of her stance was one of rebuttal and indignation.
‘I don’t have time for this, OK, Rashid?’ Lisa retorted. ‘I’ve been sitting here waiting for over an hour. I thought you really were in trouble and I thought I could help, but you’re not, so there’s no point in me hanging around. I’m off, all right?’
To Rashid it felt as though the wind isolated him on the street. It seemed to require him to shout, as though he was on a stage and it was a crowd not the wind that roared past his ears.
‘Of course you don’t have time for this. You only have time for the brown and the destitute – victim types, isn’t it? You do what? The politically repressed only? I don’t know why it took me so long to see it.’
‘How dare you? How dare you?’ Lisa started. ‘After all I’ve done! And you! You’re just… so ungrateful!’ she screamed. ‘The lot of you!’
Khalil and Iman had formed a wall next to Rashid and they watched her walk off. Khalil put his arm around Rashid’s shoulders and Iman came up close to him.
‘You really gave it to her.’
‘He really did,’ said Khalil.
‘Oh, leave me alone. I’m sick of this, all of this. I don’t want to be politically engaged, OK? I don’t want it. I’m not like you two, or Mama or Sabri or even Baba; I just want out. All right? Out of the whole damn shit. Did you see that? That… that bitch would have been happier to have me locked up on some trumped-up charge for the next twenty years. Then she really would have loved me.’
‘Come on, Rashid, come on. I haven’t seen you for months. Let’s go and just, I don’t know, spend time together. I missed you ya zalame, really.’
‘I’m not in the mood; just leave me alone. I have nothing to say on any of the things you want to talk about. Leave me out of it, all right?’
And with that Rashid walked off into the darkness, fishing his cigarettes out of his plastic bag of belongings, lighting one by a streetlight and letting the smoke get whisked away up into the sky above him.
PART V
THE GAZAN SEA
Two months later
Chapter 41
Gloria was dead and his mother had killed her. Each time Rashid looked at the burnt-out oily-looking stump of his marijuana plant he cursed his mother. And he could not stop looking at it. The stump meant one thing and one thing only. His mother didn’t care for him. Not one bit. He didn’t give a shit whether she was a hijacking legend or not. She managed to look after every other tree, plant, root or vegetable in the vicinity of their apartment, but his cherished Gloria had been neglected and had died from that neglect. It was unforgivable. There were even yellowed cigarette butts, squeezed flat by desperate fingers, sticking out of the soil. He swore at her unconvincingly in his mind. He heard her voice and the scrape of the metal outdoor table being brought around the edge of the house, as it was every morning, and could not swear at her any more. All he really wanted was for her to ask him how he was, but who would admit to that?
‘Asleep, of course,’ he could hear her saying. He was surprised that Sabri had so much as asked. Rashid looked around the room from where he lay. His most precious belongings, including branches of Gloria’s remains (it would not have taken much, just a bit of water, a bit of sun, a bit of love), were arrayed on the floor around him in black plastic bags that blocked his way as he tried to move around, rustling and crunching horribly when he lost his footing. He had already crushed four CD cases that way and there were wires everywhere, coming out of his computer and his stereo. He had not been able to get his computer up and running yet, because his desk for some (unconvincing) reason had been left upstairs. Another lie. In place of where his desk should have been was a new freezer, still wrapped in plastic, which belonged to one of the families camped upstairs in their old apartment; it would be stored there, he was told, until such a time as their house was rebuilt.
If it were ever rebuilt. The building work kept slumping with the cuts in the concrete supply. And at the amount it cost, his mother kept saying, you would think that it was ground out of diamonds. He would be gone before the freezer was.
And there was that boy, too, Sabri’s little prodigy, Wael, the middle grandson of Abu Omar. The boy was so principled, so dedicated to the cause that he had refused to leave with his family and had been taken in by Sabri who had decided, in h
is great benevolence, out of the largesse of his omnipotent magnanimity, on a de facto adoption of the little shit. The squit of a boy must have had at least six stomachs, the amount his mother cooked for him. ‘We’d developed a relationship over the years,’ Sabri had said of the boy, ‘an understanding.’ What understanding? Rashid wondered. Sabri had barely gone downstairs. Did they communicate out of the window? ‘He’s the same age that Naji would have been,’ Sabri kept saying. But that didn’t matter either to Rashid, because it was irrelevant crap. The Strip was full of boys of the age that Naji would have been. It was bursting at the seams with them: an unbalanced demographic disaster. What did Sabri need this boy for? To snoop on him probably, Rashid thought. He had spotted the boy down by the disused playground the last time he had gone out to score. ‘Greetings, Ammo Rashid,’ the little bugger had said when he realised that Rashid had seen him. At least they had the decency to put the kid upstairs and give Rashid a room on their floor. A room with a bubble-wrapped freezer in the middle of it, but a room no less. He should count himself lucky.
The weather was perfect, but useless to him in all its perfection. It was far better if it was all lousy. He registered the sounds of his mother wheeling Sabri into the garden along the path. A tray outside clattered with its pot and saucer on it. The smell of coffee came into Rashid’s room with the jasmine garden air.
Rashid’s visa (he could not be bothered to check it was in his passport; he knew it was there) was to Canada and for resettlement (a term that annoyed him, with its presumption that he had been settled in the first place). It was, according to everyone and their mother, exceptional, thrilling and amazing that Rashid had managed to get the visa, but nothing about it thrilled or amazed Rashid, nor did he feel remotely exceptional. When he was out, in London, he had had no choice but to return. Now that he was back, he had no choice but to leave. And so it was.
‘…that Mahmoudi boy,’ he could hear his mother whispering, ‘…known informer…’ but the breeze rustling in the bougainvillea made him miss whatever acidic response it was that Sabri offered back. It didn’t matter; he knew they were still talking about him. He was a fish swimming in a bowl with a crowd of people gawping at him while tapping on the glass. Everything he did was seen, watched, and reported on. There was no getting away from it. He should tell his mother. He looked across at his plant’s blackened stem and could not quite curse her, not with her so close and audible. But she should know that had she bothered to look after his plant he would not have needed to go and seek out the services of Ahmed Mahmoudi. That was their doing, their neglect. The breakfast conversation was back to reports of new checkpoints, the extent of the closure, of dwindling fuel supplies, the fighting with the Islamist groups. The usual stuff.
Iman had come back the day before. Although she had been away for months, all they had been interested in, as far as Rashid could tell, was her experience at the borders. ‘Tell me,’ their mother had asked, several times over, ‘it was the bearded man who went through the papers not the woman with short hair?’
Rashid had waited for Iman’s return, counted the days, expecting it to lift him out of the place where he had fallen, but her flushed excitement (he could not believe it was just about being back; something had happened to her in London, he was sure of it) had left him exactly where he had been, if not further down. When he had asked her why she had come back, as she could have stayed longer in London if she had wanted to, she had replied, ‘But I don’t exist there,’ laughing as though that was incredibly obvious, too. How could you even ask, Rashid? was her look.
His father had cut him off as well. As soon as he heard what Rashid had got the police caution for, he’d spluttered fury down the phone. Drugs? Drugs? I send the boy to London for drugs? And stopped Rashid’s allowance. With immediate effect, you hear? Nothing more from me! Iman had given him a little money, enough to pay Ahmed Mahmoudi this time, but after that he had no idea. No idea at all. He could not believe he was expected to stay in Gaza broke and sober. There could not be a worse reality that he could think of. Stoned, it was almost manageable. Sober, it was a nightmare of hideous proportions.
‘Rashid?’ Iman tapped at the door before she entered stepping over the bags, balancing a glass of tea on its saucer. He moved his legs to make space for her on the end of his bed and conducted his side of the conversation in silence for as long as he could.
‘Mama says that they closed Sindibad’s?’
[nod]
‘Are you going to carry on at the Centre with Khalil?’
[shrug]
‘Are you really going to Canada?’
[nod]
‘But what will you do there?’
[shrug]
Iman rubbed her feet against the printed synthetic blanket and traced her big toe along the brown line of a rose petal print until Rashid spoke.
‘Mama thinks I’d be better off in prison,’ he said, clearing his throat. ‘Do you think so, too? It seems that the women around me want me locked up. Nothing according to them would do me better than a stint in jail.’ He blew at his tea, but it was too hot and made his eyes water.
‘Forget Lisa. Forget her, Rashid. And of course Mama doesn’t want you to go to prison.’
‘I just heard her saying it to Sabri, that it was an experience I would have gained from, like he did, like Jamal, that fieldworker, is currently gaining from – well, according to her at least.’ He slurped noisily. ‘But, you know, I’m not that sure that being tied up and shoved into a cupboard with a sack over my head would further my self-improvement.’ He slurped again. ‘Thanks for the tea, habibti.’
‘What will you do in Canada?’ Iman asked after they had stared up at the ceiling for a while following the banging and pattering of children’s feet above them. They were a strange breed of children up there, Rashid thought. They all seemed to run on the heels of their feet.
‘Work,’ he shrugged again. ‘Work.’ He straightened himself out against the wall and hoped that she would not ask what he would work as because all he could think of, even on a good day, was of packing bags in a supermarket. In his envisioned life in Canada he wore a large black puffer jacket, even when he tried to see himself eating breakfast or sleeping. He saw himself living in a room in an apartment building composed of stacked columns of such rooms, where the neighbours would hide behind their doors when he went in or out so that they would not have to speak to him and where the nights were full of the muffled screams of sex, drink and battery. The puffer jacket that he wore in this future life got larger and larger with time, until he was swollen like a blimp bumbling along a deserted snowy street of an anonymous North American city, his head protruding dark and oily like Gloria’s stump.
‘I found out about Mama and Baba,’ Iman whispered. ‘Sabri told me.’
‘Did he?’ Rashid didn’t look up at Iman who was keen to register some interest from him. ‘Did Mama talk about her past with you, too? Because no one’s mentioned anything to me.’
‘No, no,’ Iman continued. ‘But they’re connected, the two things: Mama’s activities, the hijacking,’ Iman was almost breathless with excitement, ‘and the divorce.’
‘I see.’ Rashid tried to appear as though he was far more interested in the bougainvillea leaves that were making intricate patterns of shade and sparkle on the wall in front of him.
‘Don’t pretend you’re not interested, because I know you are. Besides, it’s a great story and I can’t tell anyone else so you can at least act like you’re listening.’
‘Sure.’ When Iman had sat on the blanket Rashid’s toes had been under the edge of her leg. She had not moved and he didn’t want her to.
‘Baba apparently didn’t even know that she was in the Front. They’ve gone, right?’ She whispered nodding at the window to which Rashid shrugged so she carried on whispering. ‘When Sabri was a baby she left him with Baba in Beirut, saying that she had to visit a sick aunt in Jordan, and came back two weeks later with her face all bandaged u
p and wearing a brace on her teeth. She told him that she had fallen and had an operation. You see, the Front’s hijackings, her hijackings, had put Baba’s party into a total spin. They had not been told that they were going to happen so Baba was really busy with his party in meetings trying to sort things out.’
Rashid was listening but trying hard not to show how keenly he was doing so. He was never told anything. There were still murmurs coming from outside, the sounds of a tray being cleared away.
‘When the bandages come off she’s got a different nose and without the braces her teeth are straight; the gap’s gone. When he asks about this she says something about it being part of the operation. He doesn’t really query her. Are you listening to this, Rashid?’
Rashid had finished his tea and was watching the last brown drop of it dribble down the edge of the glass on to the saucer as he held it upside down. He looked up at her, giving her enough for her to carry on.
‘Apparently around that time there is a lot of discussion within the party about The Sparrow and the hijacking operations and at one conference Baba stands up and declares to the whole conference that the Front really does need to let the key people within the Outside Leadership know when they are about to carry out an operation.
‘Then he says, “The Sparrow can’t just go off and do these things and catch us all unprepared,” and the conference goes silent. Everyone. Then someone quips in and says, “I know. It’s like not knowing what your wife is up to when your back’s turned!” and they all roar with laughter at this. Baba laughs too but, you know, Baba doesn’t think there’s anything to it, although he doesn’t understand why they find it quite so funny.’
Iman pauses. There’s the sound of a collared dove outside tooting out a morse-like message, to-to-toooot-to to-toooot.
‘When did he find out, then?’ Rashid asked, pulling at a twist of blanket fringe.
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