Far From My Father's House

by Jill McGivering

  A written commentary ran across the bottom of the screen: Home Minister condemns violence, blames opposition for illegal protest. Opposition leaders slam police, label action heavy-handed. Three thousand demonstrators, say police. An underestimate, she thought. Scores injured, organizers claim.

  Frank reappeared. ‘How’re you doing?’ He leant past her for his bag, a battered leather case thrown on its side. If someone had asked her what Frank smelt like, she would have thought them crazy. But now, as he bent close, a hint of his old, familiar smell caught her unawares, hit the pit of her stomach. Warm and floury, like crumbled biscuit, cut with a Christmassy spice. Aftershave, perhaps. She stared after him as he moved away without waiting for an answer, bag swinging from his hand.

  He was finishing off his day, hanging around the doorway of each small sub-office, asking questions, issuing instructions. She sat quietly, watching him, glad to be still and adjusting to the sight of him again.

  As he strode back to her, he winked and made her smile. ‘Come on, Ellie.’ He reached down and hoisted her to her feet. ‘Let’s get you home.

  The guesthouse where Ellen was staying was just outside Islamabad and a welcome escape from the city. It was early evening by the time Frank drove her through the gates. Upstairs, in her room, she showed him where she hid her bottles of gin and tonic, pointed him to the small fridge for ice, and let him fix the drinks. They sat outside to drink them, side by side on the first-floor terrace, warming themselves in the mellow gleam of the falling sun. She rocked her glass against her face, cooling her swollen skin.

  He slipped off his sandals and propped his feet on the rail. They were sunburnt, red with white stripes where the leather had been.

  She looked out past his toes to the tips of Islamabad’s tallest buildings, just visible in the natural basin below. The tiles on the domes of the mosques glittered in the dying light. It was peaceful here, removed. She glanced at Frank. His strong Roman nose was more prominent than she’d remembered, the chin now soft with flesh.

  ‘So . . . ’ She looked into her glass. ‘Still do-gooding?’

  ‘You mean, actually making a difference to people.’ His tone was bantering but she sensed bitterness. ‘As opposed to stirring up trouble.’

  She felt stung. ‘No fan of journalism then?’

  ‘Course I am. Huge.’

  They sat in silence for a moment. She didn’t know what to say, where to start. Her mind was weighted by exhaustion. When she closed her eyes, she saw stamping feet, bloody faces trapped in the crowd. She’d been lucky to get out. She thought of his hand, reaching for her.

  ‘How come you were there?’

  He didn’t answer for a minute, then threw back his head and laughed. It was a forced laugh, mirthless. ‘You’d like to think that, wouldn’t you? That I’ve been following you around the world, staking you out, waiting for a chance to save you.’

  She shook her head. ‘I didn’t—’

  He lifted his feet from the rail. For a moment, he seemed about to leave, then he rearranged his ankles and settled again, sipped his drink. ‘I was heading for the office, that’s all. Stopped to watch the fun. And there you were.’

  ‘There I was.’

  His voice was the same. Lush and chocolaty and lazy with American vowels. It had seemed so exotic to her when they were students.

  ‘You look just the same,’ he said. ‘Haven’t changed a bit.’

  She put her hand to her sore, battered face. ‘I’ve changed.’ He’d aged too.

  Another silence. They were awkward together, unable to find the natural rhythm of a conversation, and that saddened her.

  In the distance, a recording spluttered into life and the soulful notes of the call to prayer drifted across the fields. It seemed to carry the melancholy of the dying day. He too seemed pensive, listening to the gentle sweetness of the young man’s voice.

  When it ended, she tried again. ‘You were in Africa, weren’t you? I saw you interviewed. South Africa?’

  He nodded, stared into his drink. ‘Jo’burg for a while. Then Nairobi.’

  ‘All with the UN?’

  ‘Yep. Eighteen years.’

  She thought of FOOD 4 ALL’s cramped offices. It was clearly a small agency. Nothing like the UN. ‘What made you leave?’

  He replied as if he hadn’t heard the question. ‘I’ve read your reports, you know, in NewsWorld. Over the years.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Course.’ He grinned. ‘Afghanistan. Iraq. Beirut. You sure pick ’em.’

  The screen door downstairs opened and slapped shut. The garden boy appeared. He connected the hose and started to water the flowerbeds, aiming the flow with languid movements. The soil blackened as the water pooled, bubbled and sank.

  Frank lifted his glass and drank down his gin and tonic. No wedding ring. Still, that didn’t mean anything. Not all married men wore them. He probably had a wife back in the US. And a bunch of all-American kids. She thought of the ring she was wearing, her mother’s wedding ring, and wondered if he’d noticed.

  He said, ‘How long’re you out here?’

  ‘Another few days maybe.’ She shrugged. ‘I’ve been covering the protests. But they get repetitive. I need something new.’

  ‘Like what?’ His teeth gleamed in a half-smile in the dusk as if he knew full well.

  ‘Like this government offensive everyone’s talking about. Against the Taliban.’

  ‘Ah.’ He sounded pleased.

  She could sense that he knew something and was quietly enjoying the advantage it gave him. She pushed a little further. ‘They keep saying it’s imminent. But they’re taking their time.’

  She cupped her drink, listened to the creak of ice in her glass. He seemed to be thinking. Down below, the boy was moving steadily across the garden, trailing a dripping hose. A bird, compact and brown, darted past him and perched on the gate. It cocked its head, watching the boy, then took off again, skimming low across the darkening lawn.

  ‘I think there’s a nest.’ She pointed to a puff of bush hanging down from the wall. ‘I hear chirping. In the morning.’

  He shifted on his chair, restless. ‘Off the record?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘The offensive’s started. They’re trying to keep it quiet.’

  She turned her head a fraction to look at him, keen with interest.

  ‘People are streaming down from the mountains in their thousands,’ he said. ‘Tens of thousands.’

  ‘Are the troops in yet?’

  ‘Just heading in. You heard there were air strikes? Now they need boots on the ground.’

  She nodded. It made sense. ‘They took their time.’

  He grimaced. ‘Fighting your own people? Never an easy call.’

  Tinny music sounded, distant at first, then closer. An ice-cream hawker, blasting a mechanical tune. The garden boy paused, lifted his head. Water splashed from the end of the hose onto the grass at his feet.

  Finally the ice-cream hawker pedalled into view on his bicycle, a large plastic box fixed to the front of his bike. His sweat painted a black circle on his shirt where it stuck to his back. He turned down the lane opposite and the spell broke. The garden boy shifted, tugged at the hose and moved on to the last flowerbed.

  ‘Have you set up relief camps?’

  ‘Just one so far. Near Peshawar.’ He rattled the final shards of ice in his glass and tipped back his head to drink. His throat made a long, white stretch. ‘We’re trucking in relief as fast as we can but the lines keep growing.’

  He turned and looked her full in the face. His expression was serious. She couldn’t tell if he were thinking about the refugees or about her, about the past. It was all such a long time ago. Somewhere below, the cook was banging pots and pans and calling to the boy. The smell of frying onions and garlic rose from the kitchen.

  Frank looked at his watch and shook himself back into motion. He lifted his feet off the rail, downed the last of his drink and pushed his f
eet into his sandals. When he spoke again his tone was business-like.

  ‘I’m heading down there tomorrow. Come if you want.’ He nodded at her swollen face. ‘If you feel up to it.’

  She didn’t hesitate. ‘I will. Thanks.’

  He left abruptly. She watched from the terrace as he crossed to his car. The guard ran out to open the gates. Frank raised a hand to her through the car window, then backed and disappeared in a fading echo of engine.

  She felt suddenly drained. Her head ached. The sun had almost set, casting a red mantle over the jagged line of the mountains. Male shouts swam through the darkness from a nearby patch of waste ground. Young men were struggling to play cricket in the gloom, their shirts barely visible.

  She should go inside and file a piece to London on the protest, the violence. Her limbs were leaden. She should call Phil, her editor, and tell him about the trip to the camp. She should pack, ready to leave.

  In a moment.

  The ice in her drink slowly melted. She’d always thought of Frank as a young man, the way he used to be. Passionate and funny and slightly wild. This middle-aged creature, this raised ghost, was a shock. She was pleased, of course. But it was also unsettling, a reminder of the past and the path she might have taken.

  The small boy who tended the neighbour’s goats was trailing back through the scrub, slapping at the goats’ hindquarters with a switch as they shoved and clambered and jostled in a tinkle of bells.

  Across the path, an elderly man came shuffling out of his house and onto the veranda. He was dressed in white cotton, his feet bare. He settled himself heavily into a chair.

  In the garden, insects were gathering in black clouds. Somewhere out in the wildness, beyond the guesthouse walls, cicadas tuned up and began to sing.

  Chapter 3

  After I saw the three strangers near the mosque and tore down their notice to keep for myself, everything went quiet. No one spoke of these strange new rules. Most of the men had beards anyway, even my Saeed who is only sixteen but already a man and adores me besides. Apart from fetching water and working in the fields and buying provisions and going to school, women and girls like me don’t have many places to go, even without it being forbidden. I kept the paper secretly under my mattress and only looked at it when I was alone. I knew the words by heart. When I whispered their name to myself: Faithful Soldiers of Islam, it seemed full of danger and also adventure and I imagined some excitement which might finally stir up my boring life in the village.

  Then Baba said we should all go for a family picnic before the weather got too hot. It was already late May and even in the village the days were getting sticky. Higher up the mountain, there was a good place for picnicking. The grass was lush and springy alongside the stream, which came tumbling down from the peak. There was an old gnarled tree, even older than Baba and his father before him and his father before that. Baba used to tell how his parents took him there when he was a boy, along with all the Uncles who were also boys and even the blood Aunties who were still young girls like me and not yet married off to men in other villages.

  Mama had been sickly since Ramadan last year. Baba instructed her not to fast. No one told me why but I knew because I’d seen it all before. She was sweaty and pale and moaned on her cot at night. I could tell she was dreaming about a new baby crying to be born and worrying that this baby, like so many of her others, apart from me and my big sister, Marva, would die before it ever saw day. All those months later, her stomach was as big and hard as a watermelon and to my mind that was the real reason Baba planned the day out, to lift her spirits.

  The morning of the picnic, Marva was ill with fever and knife pains in her legs. Mama sat with her arms wrapped round her, her fat belly bumping them apart, and the two of them whimpered and sighed. I set to work massaging Marva’s legs until the pains eased and then I helped the Aunties to prepare the eatables, with fresh bread and tomatoes and all manner of chopped salads and a basket of first season plums and apples which I’d helped to pick from the orchard just the day before.

  I am thirteen now but even when I was very young, I was forced to be responsible for Mama and my big sister both. Sometimes I feel that Baba and I are the real parents and my mama is just another girl, like Marva, and they both need looking after. As Allah has chosen, that’s the sort of family I have. Mama is sweet and gentle, it’s true. Marva says Mama was once so lovely to behold that when she went walking, birds fell out of the trees dead at her feet on account of craning to get a closer look.

  But Mama lacks spirit. All those dead babies, one after another, have sucked her dry and left her as brittle as a dead reed and plagued by nerves, and even a rush of wind is enough to knock her right over and start her crying about some small thing or other. The Aunties say some women are born with character and some are born with beauty but very few have both. My mama was doled beauty.

  Jamila Auntie is the other way about, plain but strong. She’s Baba’s first wife and Baba only married her because he hadn’t yet found Mama and as soon as he did, he took Mama as his new wife and forgot Jamila Auntie altogether.

  As for my sister, Marva, she has an affliction. It is the wish of Allah for her to have withered legs on account of an illness she had as a little girl, even before I was born. I’ve told Baba that I don’t understand why Allah would want her to be stuck all day every day in our compound, pulling herself about on her belly like a snake, but he tuts and says, ‘Hush, Layla, don’t question the will of Allah. It is not for us to know everything and sometimes there are things we don’t understand but must nonetheless accept.’

  Baba wears wire-rimmed spectacles and uses words like ‘nonetheless’ and ‘whatsoever’ because he is a man of learning. He teaches me everything, just as if I were a boy. He says that when the boys in the village shout after me in the street and call Marva names, like ‘crazy cripple’ and ‘freak of nature’, I must bear it with dignity and I must not shout back, even if I think of smart things to say, and I must not pick up sharp stones and throw them at their heads. That, he says, is not any way for a girl to comport herself.

  Baba and the Uncles harnessed the donkey and loaded up the cart and Mama and the Aunties, carrying the youngest cousins, all climbed onto the back and sat, their legs hanging over the edge, as the donkey strained and pulled and complained until finally the struts creaked and the wheels turned and we all set slowly off up the steep hillside towards the stream. Girls like me and boys and men like Baba walked along behind.

  The mountainside was still, the sky streaked with white cloud. The sun was hiding behind the rocky edge of the mountain, waiting to jump out and surprise us as we climbed further up. The boys ran ahead, whooping and playing chase and the girls walked in wavy clusters, holding each other’s hands and giggling into each other’s ears. I walked near Baba. The light breeze dusted off my skin and kept me cool and fingered the scarf around my face. With Jamila Auntie and Baba and the Uncles and their wives, the Aunties, and all the cousins coming and going, there were too many of us crammed into that compound and, despite its size, it was very shouty and bothersome to a young girl like me, who wanted a little peace and quiet sometimes, but was always shut up in the sweat and clamour of all those people.

  After we reached the place and finished our picnic, the Aunties sat bunched underneath the twisted tree, gossiping, and the older boys took off their sandals and waded in the stream, splashing rocks about, building a dam or some such and the toddlers, nearby on the flat grassy bank, tried to throw pebbles into the clear water and barely made a ripple, their judgement was so poor. Baba and the Uncles stood together by the water’s edge, looking up and down the stream and talking in low voices. I sat propped up against Mama, plucking at the tufts of grass under the tree and wondering, not for the first time, why other girls of my age were so silly and boys so stupid.

  The strangers appeared suddenly as dark shapes against the rocks. They climbed sideways down the steep mountain towards us. Baba and the Uncles stiffen
ed and turned to watch. The knowledge of their arrival moved through the Aunties, one by one, and they too turned to look and fell silent. Some pulled at their headscarves to cover their faces and others called to their children to come here, quickly. Mama tensed at my side.

  There were four of them, all dressed like the other men I’d seen, in flowing black kameezes with rough woollen hats and thick beards. They looked full of purpose, closing the distance between us with sure strides. The sunlight flashed on long-nosed guns at their sides.

  The men descended to the flat bank of the stream. Baba and the Uncles stepped forwards and greeted them politely, putting their hands on their hearts: Salaam Alaikum. Three of the men were young, strong boys with loose limbs and jaunty muscles. The fourth man was older. He turned and looked across at the girls and women as we shrank together under the tree. I knew him at once from his crooked nose. He was the same man who had brought the notices and ordered the men to nail them to our trees. His eyes were hard as if they had seen many terrible things.

  The men spoke in low voices. Hamid Uncle, the head of the family, spoke first and then the stranger and then Hamid Uncle again. Mama’s leg, pressed against mine, was shaking. The men were still speaking, back and forth, and, although I couldn’t make out the words, I heard the threat in the stranger’s voice. The three young men standing around him cocked their guns and raised them as if they were planning to fire. One of the Aunties let out half a cry, then strangled it dead.

  The stranger spoke again and, as he did so, one of the young men swung around and aimed his gun at the donkey, which was tearing up grass beside the stream, the only creature in our party unaware of the danger. A crack. The donkey crumpled, rolling its head sideways with surprised eyes, its ears flapping. Blood spurted from its side. It gave a high-pitched scream. After a moment, the scream faded and the donkey crashed onto its side and lay, shuddering. Its blood made a dark stain on the grass. The silence which followed was full of the memory of the scream. It was only broken when the young men laughed and the fourth man turned and scolded them until they too were silent.