The ringing was shrill. Ellen fought her way up from the bottom of an ocean of sleep. The noise split her apart. Her lungs ached. She struggled for a moment to remember where she was. In the hotel. She was safe. Then she remembered more. Frank. It might be news of Frank. She groped for the hotel phone and picked up the receiver.
‘Hello?’
‘Madam, you have a visitor.’
‘A what?’ She tried to open her eyes and squinted at the luminous numbers on the bedside clock. Two thirteen.
‘A girl. She is saying her name is Layla.’
Layla? ‘Can you send her up?’
‘I will escort her.’ The man’s voice was cold.
Ellen sat up in bed and groped for her dressing gown. Her head was thick with tiredness. She switched the light on and concentrated on waking up. After a few minutes, the doorbell sounded.
The man from reception was stern-faced, his uniform neatly pressed. Layla, beside him, looked like a street child. Her clothes were dishevelled, her face pinched.
‘Layla? What is it? What happened?’
Ellen stood to one side to let her come in. As Layla passed, she saw the girl’s back. The fabric of her kameez was shredded and stiff with blood. The skin beneath it shone raw. Layla took a few steps into the room, faltered, then brought her hands to her face as she burst into tears.
Chapter 25
There was ice and fire inside my head and sometimes I went cold and shivered and sometimes I burnt. If I moved even a little, there was so much of pain in my back that I wanted to cry out. I lay on my stomach on the bed in the Britisher’s room and the blankets were soft and warm and the bed was so gentle beneath me that I felt I was floating in the air, held up by giant hands.
The room was solid with darkness. It carried a smell of rich food and the hum of machines with, every now and again, a deep click. Sometimes I heard men’s footsteps come nearer and I hid my face but the feet always went past the door and faded away to nothing.
The journalist was asleep in the other bed. Her breathing was feathery. It made me think of our room at home in the compound and how, when I sometimes woke in the night, I listened to Marva’s and Mama’s steady breathing until I fell asleep again. Now that was all truly in the past and never to come again and I felt so alone without them that I could scarcely bear it.
When I closed my eyes, I saw the faces of the men who’d stared and jeered and felt again the force of the blows as Hamid Uncle, the brother of my own baba whose duty was to protect me, beat me in front of them all. My body was damaged and my pride also. After all I’d suffered, losing my mama and dear baba and being made prisoner by those men, Hamid Uncle had disgraced and humiliated me in public. It was a great injustice. If my baba had been alive, Hamid Uncle would never have done such wickedness.
I shook all over, even to think about it. I would not go back and submit to them and accept their justice. I would sooner never see my family again, Uncles and Aunties and cousins and all, if that was what Allah demanded. But Marva, my sister – I thought of her with anguish. She was everything I had in the world. How would I care for her now? I cried in silence so as not to wake the Britisher who slept so close.
When I woke up, it was daylight. Someone was moving about the room. I heard a thud as a door closed and then falling water. My mouth was dry and when I tried to move, my whole body ached as if my sore skin were breaking open afresh and sticking to the big borrowed kameez on my back. I whimpered and lay still.
The Britisher came back into the bedroom. She must have seen that my eyes were open because she bent down to look at me. The bandage on her forehead was crooked and there was a strand of damp hair on her cheek.
‘Chai?’ she said.
I bit the insides of my cheeks and shook my head.
‘That’s the bathroom.’ She pointed. ‘When you want to use the toilet or wash, just go ahead. You don’t have to ask.’
She moved about between the furniture. I could hear her picking things up and putting them down again. Finally she came back to me and said, ‘I might go down for breakfast. Do you want to eat anything?’
I shook my head.
‘Will you be all right if I leave you for half an hour?’
I nodded. The main door closed behind her with a sigh. I was alone. I sobbed loudly until the pillow was wet and my head ached.
The room with the necessary had a hundred shiny surfaces which made pictures of me everywhere I looked. The borrowed salwar kameez was baggy and fell about me in loose folds. I turned to one side and then to the other. I had never seen all my body at one time, top to toe, and I seemed a very small person in all this splendour.
The taps gave a stream of cold water without any pumping but although I looked in the cupboards, there was no pail to fill so I cupped my hands and splashed the water about under my clothes until I was clean. Then I turned and lifted the flap of the kameez and looked at my poor back. When I cried, all the other Laylas screwed their eyes and cried too until their faces were swollen and blotchy.
When the Britisher came back, she brought the woman doctor from Marva’s ward and I wondered how she had come from the camp with such speed and why she would see me, just one girl, when the ward was filled with sick patients. She made me swallow pills and she put cool cream on my back.
A man came to the door and gave the Britisher a tray of food which she carried into the room and set on the table. She poured a cup of strange chai for me with cold milk. It wasn’t mixed and boiled, as is needsome for chai, and smelt most peculiar. I didn’t say. I just didn’t drink it.
The Britisher and the doctor talked together in low voices. I couldn’t understand them but sometimes the Britisher broke off and came to ask me a question. She spoke in a low, careful voice, the kind a man might use to soothe a rabid dog.
‘Can you tell us, please, Layla, who did this to you?’ She meant my sore back.
I said, ‘Hamid Uncle,’ which is the truth.
‘Why did he punish you?’
I said, ‘For being with strange men away from home and without my baba.’
Later she asked me, ‘Do you want to go back to your family, Layla?’
I said, ‘No. They might beat me again.’
She looked troubled. ‘What do you want to do?’
I said, ‘I don’t know,’ and closed my eyes and wouldn’t answer any more questions.
Finally the doctor left. The Britisher set the tray of food beside the bed so I could reach it. There was fruit, melon and banana and peach, cut open and peeled and in small mixed-up pieces, and round balls of bread. I didn’t have the appetite to eat.
The Britisher said, ‘You’re safe here, Layla.’ She looked sad. Then she sat down at the small table and started to work. She did this for a long time, sometimes frowning to herself and rubbing her temples.
The doctor’s cream made my back sting but it hurt a little less to move. I lay on my stomach and wondered about many things: how many days it would take before I stopped being in pain and what I would do from now on for food and shelter and why the Britisher lived in such a large house but only used one room.
I wondered if Marva was thinking about me and if she knew about my disgrace and I burnt to tell her why the judgement was not fair so she wouldn’t think ill of me. I thought about my baba and wondered if he’d seen bright, modern rooms like this in his travels. I ached to talk with him about it and knew that, for the rest of my life, whatever I did, I could never talk with him again.
Now that I had told the foreigners I would not go back to my family, I felt myself very much alone, as if a thick rope had been cut and I was floating downstream on a strong current with no idea where I was heading. I bit my lips not to cry.
Later the Britisher came over to speak to me. ‘Do you like kulfi?’
I looked at her and didn’t speak. I was twisting inside with worry about all the money I was already owing for the soft bed and the medicine and the cut-up fruit and the balls of bread and the bad chai a
nd now this talk of kulfi also which is generally not cheap.
She said, ‘Kulfi – do you know what it is?’ Of course I knew. Every child of five knows kulfi. When I still didn’t reply, she said, ‘Well, I’ll order some and we’ll see.’
I lifted my hand to stop her. ‘Please.’ My voice sounded weak. ‘I am not having money.’
She paused for a moment and I thought she was angry but then I saw she was just surprised. She said, ‘But I owe you money, Layla. I haven’t paid you for the translating you did for me.’
I breathed very deeply. That was true. I had done translating. I wanted to ask how much money I would have and how much food it would buy. Then I had a good idea. ‘Maybe you are needing more translating?’
She looked concerned and sat on the bed beside me. ‘Layla, I have to leave Pakistan soon to go back to England. I can’t take you with me. You know that, don’t you?’
I didn’t know but I said yes. I wondered how soon she would leave, if it would be today or tomorrow, and where I would find a place to live afterwards. I looked down at the carpet. It was brown with white flecks and very thick.
‘I know you need help,’ she said. ‘I’m going to do what I can. You mustn’t worry.’ She reached out and patted my shoulder. Her eyes looked sore. The bandage had been removed from her forehead and the cut underneath was red and yellow and also white with cream. She looked past me to the wall at nothingness.
Finally she said, ‘It’s not easy for a young girl to work here. I understand that.’
I swallowed. All my life I wanted to be a boy and to work hard and make my baba proud. Now maybe I would work but my baba was not here to see and still I was only a girl. I looked again at her face and saw the weariness in it but also the kindness and gave thanks to Allah for sending her to help me.
I remembered what she said to me when we were prisoners together and she asked me whether I might travel and I repeated her words now. ‘It’s more difficult,’ I said.‘But not impossible.’
She laughed. Then she picked up the telephone and I heard her ask for two dishes of kulfi. Afterwards she looked at me hard until I became embarrassed and looked away. She said, ‘Tomorrow, if you’re feeling a bit better, I could take you to see your sister.’
Marva! I opened my eyes wide. I thought of everything I would tell her: about the beating but also about the Britisher and how I would work now and care for us both. I said, ‘May I keep my kulfi and take it to Marva?’
She looked confused. ‘Well, kulfi might be a bit difficult. It might melt. But we’ll definitely take her something special. What else would she like? Chocolate? Crisps? Sweets?’
‘Do I have enough money?’
She nodded. ‘I should think so.’
I saw from her eyes that this meant yes, I could take all these treats to Marva, and for the first time in a long time, I smiled.
Chapter 26
Ellen couldn’t sleep. She was frantic, thinking about Frank and wondering if he were still alive. She closed her eyes and saw him there, his face kind and teasing. She twisted round in bed and pushed her face into the pillow. There must be something she could do. All day, her nerves had been jangling. She’d jumped every time the phone rang, hoping it was the Americans with news. It never was. A development in thirty-six hours, the embassy official said. That was twenty-four hours ago. The night was worse than the day, the silence broken only by Layla’s steady breathing.
She lifted her head. The girl was sleeping heavily, lying on her front with her face twisted to one side. Ellen thought of her lacerated back and sighed. No wonder she didn’t want to go back to her family. Ellen turned over and looked out across the room. The darkness was broken only by a thin line of half-light where the curtains met.
Finally she gave up on sleep and started to grope her way along the bed, heading towards the bathroom. As she rounded the corner, she caught the edge of the table. A stack of things, protruding there, went flying. The bang as they crashed to the carpet was loud in the silence. She froze and listened. Layla’s breathing stayed even.
Ellen got down on her hands and knees and started feeling around for the fallen objects. Papers. A book. Two ballpoint pens. She put them back on the table, then ran splayed fingers further across the carpet and under the bed, retrieving other stray items. Another pen. Britta’s tube of antiseptic cream. She stretched a little further through the carpet fibres. A pair of scissors shone faint silver by the side of the bed. Beyond them, her fingers touched cardboard. The packet of antibiotics they were giving Layla. She got to her feet and eased her way past the table and round the chair towards the bathroom, moving more slowly and carefully now, a small step at a time.
In the bathroom, she switched on the over-mirror light and peered, narrow-eyed, at her reflection. She put the antibiotics down on the fake marble surround and leant into the mirror to look at the cut on her forehead. It wasn’t pretty but it was clean and starting to dry out. There must be something she could do. Mohammed Bul Gourn was wrong, he was simply wrong about Frank. The Americans would never persuade him of that. But someone needed to before it was too late. She picked up the antibiotics and sat down on the edge of the bath. Maybe it was already too late.
She turned the packet over in her hands, remembering those long desperate hours in the cell. On one side, Chinese characters, glossy and embossed. On the other, raised English lettering and the swirling security hologram, barely visible in the weak bathroom light.
She stopped. Her heart was suddenly large in her chest, her breath shallow. She angled the front of the packet in the light, tipping the cardboard backwards and forwards. Panic twisted in her stomach. Her head was aching but she was suddenly sharply awake. A memory came to her. An image of the same dull packets inside the medical tent when she had rifled through them at the start of the riot. The whole layer had been almost invisible in the darkness as she pulled them aside and searched underneath for stolen goods.
Then a second memory. A memory of the gleam and shine of the hologram on her own packet as she held it in her hands in the half-light of the cell as Layla lay, hot and feverish, on the ground beside her. She sat rigid for some time in the silence, barely able to breathe, her body trembling and the packet of antibiotics sitting, dark and dull, in her hand.
She banged on the door for a long time. The corridor was deserted and flushed with a pasty yellow light. She imagined people in nearby rooms, trying to sleep and knocked from their dreams by the hammering. Maybe it was the wrong room. She stared again at the number on the door. Maybe Britta used earplugs. Maybe she’d woken up but wouldn’t come to the door.
She heard a movement inside. Britta might be angry. It wasn’t yet one o’clock. She must have been fast asleep. If it were the wrong room, some other guest would be furious. She took a deep breath as the chain rattled and the door finally opened. Britta stood there in a creased nightshirt which reached almost to her knees. It looked much washed. The faded remains of a smiling cartoon cat were just visible across her chest. She was staring into the corridor through bleary, sleepy eyes.
‘Ellen?’
She pushed past Britta into the room. It was dark, warm and stale with breathing. The double bed was a mess of tangled sheets and rumpled duvet.
‘I’ll make coffee.’ Ellen picked up the kettle and took it into the bathroom. The sink’s fake marble surround was crowded with Danish tubes and bottles, cleansing creams, moisturizers and perfumes. Britta had dumped the contents of her pockets here too, her keys, some scraps of paper and a heap of notes and coins.
When she got back, Britta was sitting on the edge of the bed, looking dazed.
‘Isn’t it a little late?’ Britta ran a hand through her hair. It stuck out in clumps.
‘I’m sorry.’ Ellen reached for a light switch and clicked it on.
Britta screwed up her face against the brightness.
‘I’ve got to talk to you.’ Ellen picked up a cardigan from the chair and tossed it into Britta’s lap.
Ellen made them both coffee and they sat on either side of the table. It was strewn with papers, Britta’s laptop in the middle. The sign of another late night working on the accounts.
‘I know why people are dying.’
Britta looked up, her eyes suddenly keen. ‘What do you mean?’
‘The antibiotics. They’re fakes.’ Ellen dropped the packet on the pile of papers between them. ‘You see the hologram.’ Ellen prodded it with her finger, moving it back and forth in the light. ‘It’s supposed to shine.’
‘That could be anything.’ Britta shook her head. ‘You can’t assume—’
‘It’s a real telltale. A dud hologram.’
Britta sat silently, stunned. She stared with dull eyes at the packet. ‘Who’d do that?’
‘Anyone. Gangs. Criminals.’ Ellen was trembling. She tried to keep her voice level. She was sure she was right. It explained everything. The fact patients kept failing to respond to treatment. The high death rate in the clinic.
‘Why?’
‘The same reason they fake designer handbags and pirate DVDs. For money, that’s why. Only bad handbags don’t kill people.’
Britta winced. She turned her head away. Ellen sat quietly for a moment, watching her. Britta had suffered so much distress, worrying about her patients and working ever longer hours, unable to understand why she couldn’t cure them. Of course she wouldn’t believe it. She needed time.
‘I’m so sorry, Britta.’
Britta’s mouth was tight. She looked away and didn’t answer.
Ellen rested her forearms on the table.
‘It’s not your fault. Fakes are big business.’ She picked up the packet and tilted it in the light, studying the hologram. ‘They’re very sophisticated. They fool everyone.’
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