One Secret Summer

by Lesley Lokko

  ‘What d’you think he means?’ Niela asked her father as she wound up the window again. ‘Run out? Run out of what?’

  Hassan shook his head helplessly, unable to answer. Niela repeated the directions to the driver, her heart sinking. For the past three days, the whole family had focused on getting to Hartishek, somehow imagining it to be the end of their journey. Now that they’d arrived, it was clear that this was only the beginning.

  A few hours later, they stumbled out of the UNHCR offices with a tent, a few blankets and a small parcel of food that was intended to last them the weekend. Hassan’s shoulders were slumped. The process had defeated him. The aid workers who staffed the various agencies that had been set up in Hartishek to deal with the thickening stream of desperate refugees seemed unable to distinguish between him, a prosperous, educated, middle-class Somali with a string of degrees and a successful business, and the nomads who wandered in off the Ogaden every day with their goats. They spoke to him as if he’d never held a fork or knife in his life, except perhaps in killing. His university degrees meant nothing to them – bought, most likely, one young girl’s expression implied. Again, it was Niela who stepped in to spare her father any further humiliation. She collected the blankets and food, found the way to the bare patch they’d been allocated in between what felt like a million other people and dispatched her brothers to find water. On instruction from Hassan, she paid off the driver out of the cash they’d brought with them and told him to return the truck to Mohammed Osman. She watched him drive back down the dusty road, biting down hard on the impulse to run after him and beg him to take her away – anywhere. Anywhere would be better than this.

  Their new neighbours, an extended family from south of Mogadishu, immediately offered what help they could. It took them a couple of hours to erect the tent. Niela and her brothers arranged the bedding and the few personal effects they’d managed to bring with them. By mid-afternoon, when the sun was finally beginning to lose its ferocious heat, the Adens had a new home. A tent, but still a home. It was hot and dusty and the constant noise surrounding them was deafening at times, but it was also a comfort of sorts. Here in the camp they were literally one family amongst thousands – but there was unexpected solace in the thought that they were all experiencing the same displacement and confusion together. No one here was spared. Doctors and lawyers rubbed shoulders and shared the ablution block with watchmen and taxi drivers – here they were all equally dispossessed. And, as Niela reminded her mother, at least they were safe. There were no marauding militia, no random gunmen, no gangs. The burly UN soldiers who patrolled the borders of the camp looked as though they meant business. Raageh and Korfa discussed their guns excitedly. They were still young enough to treat their escape from Somalia as an adventure, but there was something in her mother’s silence and the set of her father’s mouth that worried Niela. She had never seen her father – or her mother, for that matter – in that light. Without his pharmacies and the automatic deference his successful businesses afforded him, he seemed lost. It was painful and frightening to watch. Now that they’d finally arrived in Ethiopia, his task was to get the family from Hartishek to Addis Ababa and from there to Vienna, but Niela was already wondering if he had the necessary strength to continue their fight. Her uncle, Hassan’s younger brother Raageh, who lived in Vienna with his Austrian wife, was doing everything he could to secure their visas, but the bureaucratic processes by which Somalis were allowed to leave Ethiopia seemed insurmountable. It was only their first day, Niela thought, swallowing hard. Perhaps her father would recover from the shock in the next few days.

  As she lay awake that first night listening to the faint sound of her father’s worry beads being passed from finger to finger and the soft, shallow breaths of her mother, a feeling of terror stole over her. In the corner of the tent was a small transistor radio, a couple of cooking pots and two or three books her brothers had thought to snatch as they fled. Those objects, unwitting symbols of the life they’d left behind, were all they had to reassure themselves of where they’d come from, and, more importantly, Niela suddenly saw, what they were. Now, more than ever, they had to hold on to those things. If they didn’t, they would soon be lost.

  But if there was terror at where they’d found themselves, there was also something else. In the first few days after their arrival, cut off entirely from the routine of family, friends, school and work, they were free to roam around the vast, tented camp city that stretched to the horizon. Niela’s mother began to insert herself into the community of veiled women who organised the food in the camp, either for their individual families, or, more often, for the small clusters of neighbouring tents that grouped themselves according to a whole set of criteria that Niela had hitherto never understood – language, class, relations, extended families, tribal ties … anything that would bring some sense of order or community to the place they now called home. After a week, Niela began to see that for all its ramshackle air, the camp was surprisingly well organised. Former shop-owners, teachers, mechanics, builders and doctors were all trying to make for themselves a life that bore some marginal resemblance to what they’d left behind. There were makeshift clinics and schools; barbers set up chairs under sheets of tarpaulin; enterprising tailors operated pedal-driven sewing machines and women clubbed together to cook. Anything to avoid having to wait meekly and helplessly for handouts. Some families profited – those that had been lucky or clever enough to understand that they would be leaving Somalia for years rather than months and had thought to bring with them things that would really help: jewellery and cash, which were infinitely more useful than food and clothes. Sadly Hassan had had no such foresight, but by the end of their first week, it had somehow been established that his knowledge of medicines and drugs could usefully be traded for other things – cigarettes, food and precious toiletries.

  To her surprise, Niela’s gift for languages and the written word was equally useful. She was able to help a few of their neighbours who could neither read nor write to compose letters to the various agencies in charge of refugees, make appeals, push for one commodity or another and generally move their precariously slow cases forward. It didn’t take much, she noticed with a growing sense of awe, to swap one existence for another. In Mogadishu, where she’d lived all her life, she’d been a normal, regular high school student with relatively liberal parents and a nice comfortable home. Three meals on the table every day and clean clothes folded away neatly in the chest of drawers that stood in the corner of her bedroom. She’d had posters on her wall of pop stars and actors, and the pretty lace coverlet that was spread carefully across her bed every morning by one or other of the maids in the house had come from a shop in Paris. Twice a week there were fresh flowers on her dressing table and on Friday nights, she and her friends watched the latest videos brought over from England and America. Sometimes her mother made them popcorn. But that was then. In less than a month, the world she’d grown up in had changed. Her two best friends – Sally-Anne Parkinson and Helga Neustrop, daughters of the Australian and Danish ambassadors respectively – disappeared with their diplomat parents as soon as the fighting broke out and she hadn’t heard from them since. The International School had closed its doors; the few Somali students who attended it had long since fled. There was nothing left of that life now. Nothing at all. At some point in their flight from the capital they’d stepped across an invisible line where everything they’d ever known had been traded for a tent, a few blankets and a collection of memories, which, if they were to survive, they’d do best to forget.

  7

  JULIA

  Oxford, October 1991

  It took Julia a second to work out that the hands on her alarm clock were pointing to 9, not 7. It was quarter to nine! She leapt out of bed, stubbing her toe on the edge of her desk as she fumbled for her glasses. Quarter to nine? She grabbed her dressing gown from the back of the door and stumbled down the corridor. Her first tutorial was at 9 a.m. She’d overslept.
Oh, God.

  Fifteen minutes later, her mouth still tasting of toothpaste, her hair hurriedly brushed and shoved into a ponytail and a sweater thrown over the T-shirt she’d been sleeping in, she ran out the front door, trying to remember where the Faculty of Law was and, even more importantly, how to get there. Room C/2/4. Where the hell was C/2/4? Was there a floor marked ‘C’? Was it on the second or fourth floor? She ran from one floor to the other and down one corridor after another, growing increasingly desperate. It was almost quarter to ten by the time she finally located it. She stood outside the door for a few minutes, hastily trying to compose herself. She scraped back the tendrils of hair that had come loose, wishing she’d thought to look in the mirror before leaving her room … too late. She opened the door cautiously and entered the small seminar room. Six pairs of eyes swivelled round to meet hers. She looked at the ground and slid into the nearest seat. Her cheeks felt as though they were on fire.

  ‘Ah, Miss Burrows, I take it?’ The elderly professor sitting at the front of the class looked at her from behind his glasses. ‘Seminars start at nine a.m. on the dot. Difficult, I know, but there we have it. Now, where were we … ?’

  ‘I’m sorry, sir. It won’t happen again. I … I got a little bit lost trying to find the room.’

  ‘Lost? Again?’ A low murmur, meant for her ears only, came to her from the man sitting to her left. She felt her face turn an even deeper shade of red. There was no mistaking the voice. Him. Again?

  For the next half an hour, she concentrated fiercely on following the professor’s low, soft voice, ignoring the quivering panic that kept rising in her as the morning unfolded and she realised her grasp of jurisprudence was even shakier than she’d feared. At Nottingham she’d always been amongst the top four or five students in her year; here at Oxford, she understood immediately, things would be different. Aristotle’s Golden Mean; Aquinas and Hobbes; Dworkin and analytic jurisprudence … the phrases flew out of the professor’s mouth and seemed perfectly comprehensible to everyone else in the seminar room except her. She struggled to keep up, noticing out of the corner of her eye that she was the only one writing practically everything down – everyone else sat upright and alert, nodding every now and then, jotting down a word here, a name there … no one seemed to be drowning in a sea of information as she was. ‘In short,’ Professor Munro said, getting up and lighting his pipe as a way of making his point, ‘anything that concerns the way a society is organised is political.’ Julia’s hand stopped mid-sentence and a ripple of pain ran up and down her spine. Anything that concerns the way a society is organised is political, Julia. It could have been her father speaking to her. In a flash she was fourteen years old again, standing next to him in his shed at the bottom of the garden, helping him stuff envelopes for the by-election amidst the smell of ink and printer’s chemicals that never quite left his hands. Mike Burrows was a printer and a trade unionist at the Newcastle Herald, just like his father; a stout, fiercely independent man with a strong social conscience and the intellectual fervour of the self-taught. He was fiercely ambitious – the opportunities that were open to Julia’s generation hadn’t been available to him, and Julia had grown up somehow knowing that there was a future ‘out there’ that would be different for her. But it was more than that. Mike was different from most of the men who lived in the streets around them. There was something about him that kept people at arm’s length. They came him for advice or support, not for a drink or a game of cards. At least once a month there was someone whose life came spiralling out of one of the neighbouring houses and whose children ran in fear of what they’d seen. Hanging around the living room listening to their talk, rubbing a foot surreptitiously against her shin, Julia caught a glimpse of something she’d never seen in her own home – a husband who beat his wife; a man who came home drunk every night; a man who was going to lose his job. Mike was asked to ‘speak’ to them. One day there was a woman Julia recognised as Mrs Glenby from the other side of Elswick Road. Her daughter, Winifred, was in Julia’s class. The snivelling, fear-distorted face was of the kind she’d never seen in her own home. The image burned in her mind’s eye for months afterwards.

  Although Sheila, Julia’s mother, had never had a career of her own, she was just as ambitious for Julia. Together they went to the local library every Saturday with a list of books they’d selected that week and handed it over to the librarian. They read together in the evenings whilst the radio was on in the background – classics for Julia and a Catherine Cookson or the occasional Agatha Christie for Sheila. Mike didn’t hold with watching TV every night. The soft tones of Radio 4 were the backdrop of Julia’s teenage years.

  And then one day everything changed. It was a Friday evening, six weeks before Julia’s O level exams. Mike and Sheila were driving back from their weekly grocery shop. Witnesses said the small red van had come up Park Close at a ridiculous speed. There was a sudden, deafening screech of brakes as it rounded the bend and then the driver lost control of the vehicle. He was drunk. The van skidded across the intersection on the wrong side of the road and ploughed headlong straight into them. Mike was crushed against the steering wheel. He died almost immediately. Sheila was rushed in a shrieking ambulance to the nearest hospital but it was too late. She died an hour later. Julia was still at school when it happened. It took over an hour for the message to reach her. By the time she and her grandmother arrived at the hospital, they were both gone and Julia’s entire world was turned upside down.

  She struggled to breathe, sitting amongst all the intelligently nodding heads, none of whom had any idea what Professor Munro’s words had brought on. The tightness in her chest made it impossible to write. She set her pen down quietly and turned her head to look out of the window. Through the thin veil of tears she could just make out the tops of the trees lining the Cherwell River and the rise of Headington Hill beyond. She sat very still for a few moments, waiting for her heartbeat to return to normal and for the world to right itself again. She could feel her neighbour’s eyes on her but she simply didn’t have the strength to do anything other than studiously ignore him. It was in moments like these that the weight of how differently her life had turned out to most people she knew hit her with all the force of a speeding truck. She closed her eyes briefly again at the inappropriateness of the metaphor she’d unwittingly chosen.

  ‘Bad luck losing your way like that on your first day.’ Someone spoke to her as they made their way out of the seminar room an hour later.

  Julia turned. It was the tall, thin young man with a prominent Adam’s apple whom she’d noticed sitting at the front of the class. She looked at him warily. ‘Should’ve looked it up on the map last night,’ she said tightly. ‘My own bloody fault.’

  ‘Oh, I wouldn’t worry about it,’ he said airily, quickly. ‘Everyone misses something in the first couple of weeks. I’m Dominic, by the way.’ He held out a hand. ‘But do call me Dom.’

  Julia hesitated. The five other students in the class had rushed ahead, chatting excitedly. They all seemed to know one another, although she couldn’t understand how that was possible. They’d been at Oxford less than a weekend. No one had even bothered glancing her way, except for that awful pompous bloke she’d met the night before, and then it was only to say something sarcastic, so why did this Dominic – Dom – seem to want to have anything to do with her? But her manners got the better of her and she reluctantly held out her hand. ‘I’m Julia.’

  ‘I know. Munro called out the names this morning and you were the only one not there.’

  ‘Oh, go on … rub in it, why don’t you?’ Julia asked sharply and then regretted it as soon as she’d spoken. She was being defensive, as usual. There was just the faintest possibility he was only trying to be kind.

  Dom’s eyebrows rose in mild protest. ‘I wasn’t. I was just intrigued as to who you might be, that’s all. I know most of the others on the course. We were all undergrads together,’ he said, pointing to the group of students ahead
of them. ‘Except Keeler, of course. He’s a bit older but his younger brother was in my class at school.’

  ‘Who’s Keeler?’

  ‘Aaron. The blonde guy. Sitting next to you. The one you kept throwing hateful glances at.’

  Julia flushed crimson. ‘He … he was rude. About me being late,’ she said weakly. ‘He’s just so … so bloody arrogant.’

  ‘Ah, yes. Well, comes with the territory. Good looks, famous mother, place at Oxford practically guaranteed … I’d probably be just as pompous. He takes a bit of getting used to but he’s all right really, underneath it all. I blame his mother, personally.’ Julia looked up at him again. There was something odd about his cheery voice. Was he envious, perhaps? She couldn’t yet tell. And who was Keeler’s mother?

  ‘Who’s his mother?’ she asked.

  ‘Diana Pryce. Can’t you tell?’

  Julia looked at him incredulously. Diana Pryce? Diana Pryce was that man’s mother? She remembered the day she’d first seen Diana Pryce on television. She was a lawyer, a QC, if Julia’s memory served her right. She’d campaigned for the release of two hunger-striking Irish political prisoners for years without a glimmer of hope, and then all of a sudden, in a flurry of publicity, their convictions had been overturned. She’d watched the proceedings every night for a week, sitting beside her father. ‘Damn fine woman that,’ Mike had said admiringly. ‘She never gave up. That’s something to be proud of, Julia. Never give up.’ Julia remembered staring at the fuzzy image of an immaculately dressed woman in high heels holding tightly on to the arm of one of the prisoners, whose emaciated face bore the dazed look of someone whose life had been turned upside down. She shook her head disbelievingly. Diana Pryce was Aaron Keeler’s mother? ‘I’d never have guessed,’ she said faintly.