by Alex Day
They found the bus station after a long trudge through the baking streets and bought tickets for a city on the coast. From there they could get to one of the small towns where the sea crossings took place. They stocked up with water, bread, fruit, cheese and olives. Fatima didn’t want to take any meat, even cured or smoked, as they could not keep it cold and she was sure it would make them sick. The heat was intense and unrelenting. They were wandering in a foreign country with no documents, stateless, homeless and rootless. The relentless stress and worry, combined with the secret pregnancy, nauseated her constantly; the slightest whiff of bad food would surely finish her off.
The first bus they could get onto didn’t leave until late that evening. More waiting, during which time Fatima and Ehsan decided it was best if they pretended they were married. That was the safest way, because then, if one ‘parent’ got to Europe and the other didn’t, they would have the right, or at least the possibility, of being reunified. Without papers, no one could prove or disprove the fact of their matrimony.
‘Call Ehsan daddy, not uncle,’ Fatima instructed. She uttered a silent apology to Fayed, begging him to understand, to appreciate that the desperate situation they were in called for desperate measures. The girls stared, their eyes ringed purple with exhaustion, their faces white.
‘It’s another game,’ she explained, ‘like when we climbed that funny fence! We’re going to pretend that Uncle Ehsan is your dad, and Youssef is your brother.’
No one laughed. Marwa and Maryam nodded and Youssef emitted a strangled grunt. Fatima had no idea what that meant and no inclination to find out. The girls were so young, far too young to have any real comprehension of what was going on. Their total trust in their mother, in Fatima, was pitiful when she was so inadequate for the job. She wanted to take Marwa to a hospital to have her leg checked. It was so much better now, the swelling completely gone, but the gash itself was large and obvious. She would be badly scarred, that was for sure. Ehsan refused to countenance either the visit to a clinic or the time by which it would delay them.
‘The scar is there now, it’s too late to fix it, plus it will be expensive,’ he insisted, as if he had some medical know-how that Fatima didn’t. ‘We must press on.’
Fatima knew that Fayed would have insisted that she get proper care for Marwa. She was letting him down again. As if reading her mind, Ehsan grabbed her by the wrist.
‘You know that a good wife obeys her husband.’ His expression, up close as it was now, was terrifying, a leer that Fatima struggled to interpret.
‘And does what he says,’ added Ehsan.
Disgust caused Fatima’s stomach to churn as she recognised the look. It was one of barely-disguised lust. If it hadn’t been so horrific, it would be laughable that in her disgusting state she could arouse such an emotion in anyone. She dismissed it. Thank God Ehsan was not really her husband and never would be.
***
It was a long journey and despite the uncomfortable seats and constant snorting and spitting of phlegm by the man behind her, Fatima fell almost immediately into the drugged, profound sleep of utter fatigue. They had saved money by saying the twins were two and therefore didn’t need a ticket with the consequence that they didn’t get a seat. But even the dead weight of a child on her lap could not keep Fatima awake for any amount of time. Occasionally the girls asked for water or the toilet and she managed somehow to force herself to see to their needs before immediately falling back to sleep again.
Late the next day, the bus drew into the outskirts of a city. At the bus station, a small cluster of men split apart and drifted towards the vehicle as it came to a halt. They descended on Fatima and Ehsan as they clambered down the steps and into the sultry heat of a summer night. At first, Fatima wasn’t sure what they were saying and thought they were representatives of local hotels or guesthouses, drumming up trade by greeting new arrivals. But then it became clear that they were smugglers, too. Everyone was a smuggler now.
Despite the hours and hours of slumber, Fatima still felt weary beyond belief. One of the men had a sweet smile and less insistent tone than the others and she singled him out to tell them what he could do for them. This turned out to be transporting them to one of the small resorts further down the coast and arranging their passage across the sea to the nearest island.
Once he had outlined his offer, there was a pause.
‘There’s a camp about an hour’s walk away,’ he went on to say, with a dismissive shrug. ‘You must stay there if not come with me. On the streets – the police will pick up you.’
His English was broken and his tone of voice had become accusatory. Perhaps the sweet smile had been an illusion.
‘Unless you have money for a hotel,’ he added, derisively.
They obviously no longer looked like that kind of refugee.
And it was true, they didn’t have money for a hotel. Each and every dollar had to be saved for what was absolutely essential and, in the height of summer, shelter did not fall into this category. After a quick discussion, Fatima and Ehsan agreed to pay the smuggler $50. He disappeared into the night, to get his van and fill up with petrol.
‘I’ll be back one hour,’ he told them.
Two hours later he had not shown up.
Youssef went crazy, kicking the plastic signs that advertised the different bus services, his fists clenched and his face taut with anger. All his pent-up fury, all the petty humiliations and deep betrayals were vented as Fatima and Ehsan looked helplessly on. They had nothing to offer in mitigation, no reassurances to bestow upon him.
By midnight, it was obvious the smuggler wasn’t coming back.
‘Let’s find somewhere to sleep,’ said Fatima, her voice barely audible from fatigue and despair.
‘What about the police? He said they’d pick us up from the streets.’ Youssef was frightened as well as incandescent.
‘He was full of bullshit.’ Ehsan spat the words out as if he were spitting in the smuggler’s face.
They set off, their little group rag-taggle and bowed, its spirit gone, heading in the vague direction of the refugee camp the smuggler had mentioned but with the intention of sleeping in the first suitable place they came across.
We are nothing more than a bunch of hobos, thought Fatima. It was impossible to imagine that they could ever escape this situation, rise phoenix-like from the ashes of their impoverishment. But they must, she and Ehsan at least, because if they both rose they could all rise together but if one fell, so surely would they all follow.
They didn’t get anywhere near the camp because they came upon a small area of flyblown grass, in the far corner of which was a child’s swing and rocking horse. Ehsan indicated towards a patch of ground underneath a sad looking, dusty leaved tree.
‘Here will do.’
They had bought a piece of tarpaulin and a few blankets at one of the stops en route to the coast and Ehsan unrolled these whilst Fatima took the girls to pee under some scrubby bushes. They were so tired that they fell asleep immediately after she had settled them under their thin covers. Youssef was still raging and had argued with Ehsan; he walked angrily to the swing and sat on it, staring at the worn brown earth beneath whilst he scuffed the toe of his shoe repeatedly back and forth.
‘Aren’t you going to go and talk to him?’ asked Fatima. She didn’t like them to be any distance apart from each other. It seemed as if the only safety there was, or would ever be, came from the five of them together, whatever their personal antipathies.
Ehsan sneered unattractively. ‘He’ll come back. He’s not brave enough to go it alone.’
Fatima despised Ehsan then for his disloyalty towards his son. Youssef was only thirteen, just his size made him look much older. But he was still a child, and he was scared. It was not wise to cross Ehsan, though, and challenge his treatment of his son; it would only enrage him and lead to more discord. Fatima could do nothing but stand by and watch and hope that the situation would right itself once tempers h
ad calmed. She made herself a space next to the girls and drifted into a fitful sleep.
The discomfort of being pressed against the ground, of an elbow pinching the skin of her arm, combined with a strange sound close to her ear, woke her. As she fuzzily came to, she felt something ripping at her clothes, at the secret pocket where she kept her money. Realising that she was being robbed, or worse, murdered, she struggled and opened her mouth to scream.
A hand slammed onto her face, crushing her skull against the hard earth beneath her, stifling her cries, its force threatening to break her neck. The back of her head ground against the stony soil and her ribs ached from the weight on top of her. Her belly, with the baby inside, was being squashed, the pressure making her gasp in pain. Fatima writhed and twisted and freed one arm with which she tried to fend off the attacker, thumping and punching wildly at him. But it was no use; he was far stronger than her and all her efforts to release his hold on her, to get him off her, were futile.
She was going to die, leaving the twins abandoned and defenceless, and there was nothing she could do about it.
NINETEEN
Edie
Edie put her phone back in her pocket and tried to listen to the customer’s order. She had been reading Laura’s text again, as if she hadn’t already read and re-read it a hundred, a thousand times. She was tormented by all the unanswered questions that it raised. Why? Where? What? Why had Laura gone, where was she now, what had happened for her to change her plans to stay awhile? In the end, she had sent a text in reply to Laura’s, on the assumption that the phone’s owner must surely know something about her sister if he or she had let her use it. But her message received no reply. She had called the number but it rang out, ending in an incomprehensible message in a language she couldn’t understand.
As Edie went through the motions of her job the puzzlement ate away at her like a plague of voracious locusts.
The evening bar shift was monotonous as usual. To make it even worse, Vlad was there, poking his nose into everything, critically observing how Edie addressed the customers and served the drinks. It was one in the morning before the bar emptied out and the last drinkers padded away into the olive grove. Cloud had come over and Stefan predicted a storm; one of the electric storms that came when the heat was too intense and sent shocks of lightning radiating over the mountains. It would rain up high, he said, but the rain rarely came to the bay and the coast in summer time. The temperature had soared so high that day that a downfall to soak the parched ground and dampen the heat would be welcome.
Edie remembered summer days at home in Brighton, when she and Laura would wake early and go outside to tiptoe through the dew, delighting in the sensation of the moisture squidging up between their toes whilst the grass tickled their feet. They would play on their swings, pretending that they were on a flying carpet upon which, if only they could get high enough, they would be able to travel the world. Soaring up and up, they would shriek with laughter as the swing supports thumped in and out of the ground, constantly threatening to teeter over and bring them crashing to the floor. So that he would not be left out, their father had hung a seat in the shape of a horse from a nearby tree branch for James. It took him years to learn how to swing himself and so he would patiently watch the twins, waiting for one of them to relent and get off to push him. It was nearly always Edie who did so. She loved her baby brother almost as much as her twin sister.
In her room, Edie lay on her bed and stared at the pine-clad ceiling. She picked up her phone and read Laura’s text once again. She turned onto her stomach and let the pillow absorb the tears that ran from her eyes. She was tired and she didn’t know what to do and there was no one to ask and no one to help. Even Vuk, who had been falling in and out of grace, was gone again. At that moment, another plan that she’d had in mind for a while but done nothing about became of sudden and paramount importance.
After completing her cleaning rota the next morning, and making sure her phone was securely pushed deep into her pocket, she put on her helmet. She dragged the scooter out of the oleander bush and put the key in the ignition. Nothing. After trying several more times with increasing impatience, Edie dismounted, angrily kicked the front tyre and tore the helmet back off again.
Fuck! Fuck, fuck, fuck. She stormed off down to the office. Perhaps Ivana could be persuaded to conjure forth a little of the milk of human kindness and shout Edie a taxi. But that turned out not to be necessary for as she passed the road towards the exit gate, a cloud of dust heralded Zayn in the pick-up truck. Waving her arms frantically in the air she stepped dangerously into the road and flagged him down. He slammed on the brakes, causing them to let out an agonising whine.
‘I need a lift to town,’ Edie announced as she climbed into the cab. She decided to overlook how he had left it until the last minute to stop for her. Everyone seemed stressed right now; everyone except Vuk, anyway.
As if to confirm this, Zayn’s normally lachrymose face bore an even more woebegone expression than usual today, his eyelids drooped over weary, bloodshot eyes, his smile when he greeted her strained.
‘I’m going to the phone shop to try to trace the text,’ said Edie. ‘–You know, the one that arrived when you were with me – to see if they can tell me who owns the number. I need to speak to her for myself, put my mind at rest. And then I’m going back to the police. Somebody must know something and they should be made to talk!’
A flash of fear that was visceral crossed Zayn’s face. He crashed the gears and narrowly avoided colliding with a mother pushing a baby in a stroller. Edie stared at him, watching a cloud of anxiety settle upon his shoulders as he revved the engine and forced the pick-up to its top speed. His eyes were fixed on the road ahead, to the steep hill they were currently ascending.
‘Zayn, do you know where Laura is?’ Edie asked, doggedly. ‘Are you protecting someone who’s involved?’ She added this last because poor Zayn couldn’t possibly be the instigator of any nefarious plan; he simply didn’t have it in him.
There was a long pause before Zayn replied. ‘I know nothing about Laura. Nothing at all. I will help you any way that I can to find your sister. There is nothing more important than family, than a sister.’
His words carried a weight of history about them, as if there was more, much more, to say on the subject. But he didn’t elaborate and Edie didn’t ask. She believed him when he said he had no idea what had happened to Laura.
‘I’m just not sure that the police have any interest in assisting you,’ cautioned Zayn. ‘And their involvement could cause trouble for everybody.’
Now he was being melodramatic. Edie decided to ignore him. If she listened to other people’s opinions nothing would get done.
The rest of the journey passed in silence.
The visit to the phone shop did nothing to allay or explain Edie’s fears. The guy there was as helpful as he could be. He confirmed that the number was a Greek one and the message when the calls rang out was from Greek Telecom. But more than that he could not say. It was perfectly possible for Laura to have got to Greece in the time between last seeing Edie and sending the text; the country was hardly far away. And if Edie went to Greece to try to find her – well, the idea was nonsensical. She had no clue as to where to start looking; Laura could have headed for the mainland, for Athens or Halkidiki, but she also could be on one of the islands and there were scores of them. Forget needle in a haystack, this would be pinhead in an entire threshing mill.
A wave of exhaustion flooded over Edie as she sat in the air-conditioned shop. She was tired of worrying about Laura, wished it was not her responsibility. She tried to tell herself what others had told her – that Laura was a grown-up now and could take care of herself. She tried to tell herself what any well-wisher might say, that it wasn’t fair of Laura to be putting this weight of anxiety onto Edie; that she needed to prioritise herself.
But nobody knew all the reasons that Edie had come here on her own, probably not even Edie hersel
f, or at least she would have found it hard to articulate them. It was something about the fact that, for all she couldn’t bear to be parted from her sister she had also needed to get away from her, to be independent of the twin who, naturally and undisputedly, dominated. And now she felt that those feelings had somehow brought bad karma; Laura’s disappearance was a direct consequence of, and punishment for, Edie’s subconscious desire to have her sister but not have her. Whatever. The deep foreboding that sat deep in her gut was not to be shifted, however much she analysed and over-analysed.
Her visit to the police station was as perfunctory as she had thought it would be. They took details of the message and the phone number to put in the file they assured Edie they were keeping of Laura – though she wasn’t convinced such a file actually existed – and informed her that they had no reason to ask for the phone records to be made available to them so that they could check ownership of the Greek number. Edie’s suggestion that they check immigration records to see if Laura’s passport was recorded, to check an exit date for her leaving the country, also met with short shrift. They needed evidence of a crime to do that kind of thing, and there was none.
Bloody evidence of a bloody crime. Those two words, ‘evidence’ and ‘crime’, had become the ones Edie hated most in the world.
Zayn had numerous errands to do in town and Edie would be late back for work if she waited for him to do them. Disentangling herself from the cruise ship crowds, she headed for the roundabout where the road led out of town and back towards the resort on its isolated peninsula. Hitch-hiking was alive and well here which Edie thought was both quaint and a bit sad. Her mother had told her about the custom that, in her youth, had been widespread in England too, but was now almost unheard of. Stranger danger, a wealthier society and the proliferation of private cars had put paid to that. But in this country, where most people could not afford to own a vehicle, hitching a ride was taken for granted and those who had space in their cars stopped for them. The only problem was that, at this time of year, the majority of those on the road were tourists who tended to totally ignore the hitchers.