Petros pulled a brown paper bag out of his pocket and handed it to Lou. He’d sketched a face in pencil across the front. Lou’s eyes and mind, her whole body, felt clear for the first time in days, her heart lighter.
‘It is you,’ he said, pointing at the picture. ‘Back in Greece, I painted portraits of tourists to earn money,’ he said. ‘That is how I met my wife. She was British, like you.’
Lou wondered whether Petros charmed all the old women at Forget Me Not. When she wasn’t swearing at those Angry Birds, Mrs Sharp was beautiful in her way, high cheekbones, and behind her make-up Mrs Swift had a sweet face.
Lou dipped her hand into the paper bag and pulled out a golden square of fudge.
‘Maybe little Milo will like them too?’
Lou smiled. Dear Milo, her little man. She had noticed how his eyes would cloud over when he found Petros sitting in her room.
She closed her eyes and let the buttery cube melt on her tongue, the grain of the sugar, the pull at her teeth.
Petros knelt in front of her, his knees clicking. ‘You need to eat, Louisa – all bones.’ He lifted her wrist. The touch of a man’s fingers against her skin, close to her veins.
And then, her body reacting to an impulse she thought had left her long ago: she leant forward and kissed him on the cheek.
He touched the place of the kiss.
She looked at him sitting in front of her in his frayed yellow cap. Did he have any family left? Anyone to visit an old man, to bring him grapes and flowers and kisses?
The door flew open, a white shadow swept in.
Petros leapt to his feet.
When Nurse Thornhill saw him, her mouth stretched into a smile. ‘Oh, Mr Spiteri, I didn’t see you there.’
Why was it that Nurse Thornhill was nicer to Petros than to the rest of them? Was it because he was a man? Lou had seen them exchange glances. Heard them whispering in the corridor outside her room. And why, if she was so nice to him, did he look scared, in the same way that a little boy might get scared of a fierce teacher at school?
She came and placed a hand on Petros’s arm and steered him towards the door. ‘Time to go back to your room, Mr Spiteri, you need your rest.’
When Petros left, Nurse Thornhill’s smile fell. She ripped the masking tape off the grouting at the window.
‘We don’t allow bedroom visits between members of the opposite sex.’
One man, eight women and she’d thought up a rule to keep them apart.
Nurse Thornhill walked over to the table and peered down into the box of pills that Milo had brought in for her.
‘Where are your pills for the rest of the week?’
Lou looked down. Each day held her small white pill and her pink pill. She didn’t understand what Nurse Thornhill was asking.
‘Have you been interfering with your medication, Mrs Moon?’
Gran shook her head.
She shook her head. ‘Lying is not a wise strategy, Mrs Moon. You need to let us do our jobs.’ Her eyes scanned the coffee table again. She wrinkled her nose, picked up the paper bag, peered inside, scrunched it closed and shoved it into her white pocket. She’d already taken away the tea and the shortbread.
‘You know one of the greatest causes of disruption, Mrs Moon?’
Lou didn’t answer.
‘I’ve told you before, Mrs Moon: one of the greatest causes of disruption is patients eating inappropriate food.’
Nurse Thornhill switched off the light and shut the door behind her.
23
TRIPI
At dawn on Monday morning, Tripi washed his hands and his feet and took his sleeping bag into the back garden.
Hamlet trotted behind him, sunk his round body into the frosty grass and snuffled at the earth.
Bending forward, Tripi pressed his palms to the ground and took a breath.
‘You’re not doing it right.’ Milo squeezed through the gap in the fence, walked across the grass and stood above Tripi. He carried a pink bundle under his arm.
Tripi closed his eyes and whispered: I am sorry, Allah, you must forgive me. He knew that Allah must like this little boy, though, so earnest and faithful.
Tripi had decided to give Allah some proper time, to thank Him for the house and the job and let Him know that he could now focus all his divine energies on finding Ayishah.
‘Milo, my friend.’ Tripi stood up, two damp patches on his knees.
Milo put down his schoolbag. ‘I’ll show you.’ He kicked off his school shoes and unfurled the pink roll. ‘I brought this for your exercises.’ He stepped onto the mat, folded his hands into prayer position, raised his arms above his head and bent over into a Downward Dog.
Hamlet got up onto his stubby legs, ran under Milo’s legs and squealed.
Tripi laughed.
‘What’s funny?’ Milo stood up, his face red.
‘I’m not doing exercises.’
‘Well, what are you doing, then?’
‘I’m praying.’
‘On an sleeping bag?’
‘It should be a prayer mat, but it is all I have.’
‘Are you praying to Jesus?’ Milo picked up his bag. ‘Everyone’s praying to Baby Jesus at the moment.’ He rolled his eyes. ‘They think it’ll get them more presents.’
Tripi smiled. ‘I pray to Allah.’
‘Allah? Isn’t he a Muslim?’
Tripi laughed. ‘I hope so.’
‘You’re a Muslim too, then?’
‘Yes, if Allah still wants me – I haven’t been keeping up my practices very well.’
Milo picked up Hamlet. ‘I’ve got school in an hour but I wanted to come and see how Hamlet was doing.’
Tripi rolled up the exercise mat and handed it to Milo.
‘You can have it – Mum’s stopped doing her yoga.’
‘It belongs to your mother?’
‘She won’t miss it.’
Milo, Tripi and Hamlet walked across the wet grass to the back door of the pink house.
‘You’ve made it nice,’ said Milo, putting Hamlet down and looking around the lounge.
‘One day, I will have a house and a wife,’ said Tripi. ‘Like MailOrderBrideMan.’ He looked at a photo of the large man standing with the beautiful woman on the beach.
‘Do you have a girlfriend?’
Tripi shook his head. ‘Not yet.’ He thought about the woman he’d met outside Forget Me Not, how sad she’d looked and how he’d wanted to take her in out of the rain.
‘I could help you,’ said Milo.
‘You could?’
‘There are loads of dating sites on the internet. I could build you a profile.’
‘I do not think that I will find a Muslim woman on the internet, Milo. But thank you.’ Tripi chuckled. Before the power lines went down, it was the same in Syria, the internet was God: you typed a wish into the Google tab and it came up with an answer.
‘You can do searches,’ said Milo. ‘Like eye colour and hair colour and age. I’m sure there’s a box for types of religions.’
‘I’m a bit old-fashioned, Milo – I believe I’ll find my wife walking down the street.’
‘Really?’
‘Like, what do you call it? A coincidence. And my sister would have to like her.’
‘You have a sister?’
Tripi nodded. ‘She is a few years older than you, I think.’
‘I’m nine. I’ll be ten on Christmas day.’
‘Ayishah’s twelve.’
She’d had her birthday in October, on her own. Tripi swallowed hard. ‘She’s coming soon, so you’ll get to meet her.’
‘Where is she?’
‘Somewhere in Syria. Or near Syria.’
Milo’s eyes widened. ‘You don’t know?’
Tripi shook his head. He had looked for her for over two months before ducking under the barbed wire separating Syria and Turkey and heading for England. From England it would be easier to find her, he thought, to ask the authorities for help. In
Syria, no one listened. The explosions and the gunfire had made people deaf. And maybe she had found a way out, maybe she was in England already. Miracles happen every day, Ayishah used to say. But only if you believe in them. So as he travelled through Turkey, then Greece, then Italy and France, all the way to Buckingham Palace, he had tried to believe, for her.
‘Why isn’t she here, with you?’ asked Milo.
‘Well…’ Tripi regretted having mentioned Ayishah. He trusted this little boy but children sometimes say things without thinking.
‘We got separated when we were coming to England.’
‘Did she miss the plane?’
‘In a way, yes.’
‘So do your parents live here, then?’
Tripi shook his head. ‘We don’t have parents any more.’
‘What happened?’
‘They had to leave us.’
Two years before Tripi and Ayishah headed for the Turkish border, when the fighting started, their parents fled, promising to find a safe place for the family. They never came back.
‘Are they Muslims too?’
‘My mother was a Sunni Muslim and my father an Alawi Muslim,’ said Tripi. And that was what made them flee. The state saw their marriage as a betrayal of their faith, as did the insurgents.
‘So what kind of Muslim are you?’
‘A bit of both, like Ayishah, which is why we had to leave. In Syria, the Sunnis and the Alawis are at war against each other and we were on the wrong side twice over.’
‘At school, Mrs Harris taught us that that Muslims hated the Americans and that Americans hated the Muslims. But she didn’t say anything about Muslims hating Muslims.’
‘Muslims hate Muslims more than they do Americans. There are big problems in my country now, a civil war. It has been worse this past year, eleven thousand people have been killed. That is why Ayishah and I fled from our homeland.’
‘Eleven thousand people. That’s the same as if everyone in Slipton died, and then some. The whole town, dead, like a zombie attack.’
Tripi watched Milo’s eyes darken like a cloud over the sea, as the thought sunk into the little boy’s imagination. Perhaps he should not have told him about this.
‘A bit like that, yes.’
‘So why did you come to England?’
‘Well, my sister, she wanted to meet The Queen.’
Milo laughed. ‘The Queen? You can’t just meet the Queen.’
‘Well, Ayishah was sure that The Queen would see her. And I wanted to live on an island.’
Tripi was tired of having borders on all sides. Jordan, Iraq, Lebanon, Israel. Even the Mediterranean Sea felt like it belonged to someone else. Squashed like a sardine? Wasn’t that one of the phrases that Ayishah had brought back from school? Syria was squashed like a sardine and Tripi no longer wanted to be squashed.
‘Does she look like you?’ asked Milo.
Tripi nodded. ‘Yes, but more beautiful, and she has smaller feet.’ He held up each foot in turn and laughed. Then he pulled out his photograph of Ayishah. The pale blue pinafore, the navy shirt, the orange scarf that looked like a tie – she loved that.
Milo took the photograph and peered closely. ‘They show Syria on the news a lot.’
‘Yes, people like to hear about war.’
‘Maybe someone could spot her on the telly.’
Tripi had thought of this. But what could he do? Sit in front of the television all day and all night in the hope that, for a second, the camera might pick up the face of a twelve-year-old girl?
‘Can I borrow the picture?’
‘I don’t know, Milo.’
‘I’ll get it back to you really quickly. I’ve got an idea for how we can look for Ayishah.’
This little boy, always coming up with ideas, like Ayishah. He nodded and handed over the photograph and then he looked at Milo and waited for the boy’s eyes to settle on his.
‘Milo? You will not speak too much of what I have told you.’
‘The story about everyone dying in your town?’
‘Yes. And the other things too, especially not to Nurse Thornhill.’
‘Okay. We can trade, I’ve got a secret to tell you too.’
Milo crouched down, zipped open his school bag, pulled out a pack of photographs and held them out to Tripi.
‘I’ve got pictures, but they’re not nice ones like of your sister.’
Tripi took the photos and brought them over to the window. And then he dropped them.
‘What is it?’ Milo came over and picked them up.
‘Milo, where did you get these?’
‘That’s what I was going to tell you, I found them in Gran’s room.’
‘You found photographs of naked women in Mrs Moon’s room?’
‘Yes, in her room at home, but they’re not Gran’s, they’re Al’s. The guy who’s moved in – here.’ He held out the photos again. ‘This means he’s bad, right?’
Tripi turned away. ‘I can’t look at these, Milo.’
‘Why not?’
‘Allah wouldn’t like it.’ Tripi tried to block out the image of the woman kneeling with her bosom pushed forward.
‘Oh.’
‘A lot of young men have photos of naked women – I do not think it is unusual, Milo.’
‘No, they don’t.’ Milo flipped through the photographs. ‘They have dirty magazines, like on the top shelf in Mr Gupta’s shop. These are actual photos, which means that maybe he took them. He looks like the kind of guy who’d take dirty photos.’
Tripi noticed words written on the back of one of the photos. He reached for it, careful not to turn it over. A date, a time, a location and a name. He took another photo and it was the same, they were all labelled.
‘Where exactly did you find these, Milo?’
‘In Al’s book. I found out that he smoked too and that he doesn’t take his shoes off when he comes into the house. When I show these to Mum, she’s going to have to kick him out, isn’t she?’
Milo smiled. He had a gap in his bottom teeth, which made Tripi’s chest tighten. He’d kept some of Ayishah’s milk teeth, five baby stones rattling around in a matchbox at the bottom of his backpack.
‘I don’t think these photos are for…’ Tripi looked at Milo, nine years old. Did he know about these things? Tripi sighed. ‘I don’t think the man has these photos for his pleasure.’
‘Well, why does he have them, then?’ The boy’s face fell into a frown.
‘I don’t know, Milo, it looks like he’s doing some research. Is he a policeman?’
‘A policeman? No, of course not.’ Milo grabbed the photos out of Tripi’s hands and shoved them back into his school bag. ‘If he doesn’t leave soon, I’m coming to stay with you,’ he said. ‘You’ve got plenty of room here.’
‘You really want Mrs Moon to come home, don’t you, Milo?’
Milo nodded.
‘And you think she wants to come home too?’
‘Of course she wants to come home – wouldn’t you if you lived in that horrible place?’
Tripi thought about the food and the cold and the snappy snappy voice of Nurse Thornhill and how she held onto the old people’s arms so tight that she left white marks on their skin. And how, in the Syria he grew up in, old people got to stay in their homes with their families.
Milo picked Hamlet up again and kissed each of his ears in turn. ‘Hamlet misses Gran too, don’t you?’ Milo brought his watch up to his eyes. ‘I want to see Gran before school,’ he said. ‘I’m going to bring her Hamlet.’
Tripi thought of what Nurse Thornhill’s face would do if she found a pig in Mrs Moon’s room.
Then Milo looked up at Tripi, his eyes so concentrated it hurt to look back at him.
‘Will you help me, then? To get Gran back?’
Tripi thought about how much he needed to keep this job – the last thing he should do was to upset Nurse Thornhill. But then he looked again at the boy’s determined eyes and thought of Ayishah.
‘I will try, Milo,’ he said. ‘I will try.’
24
MILO
What Milo Saw Page 10