Alias

by Tracy Alexander

  6

  I wanted to wear black and wail. I wanted the school to have a special assembly, like when our English teacher died. I wanted there to be a mountain of plastic-wrapped flowers outside our door. I wanted sympathy cards to pour through the letterbox like Harry Potter’s invitations to wizard school. I wanted my dad to chain himself to some railings somewhere, not toddle off to work. I wanted to find someone who felt like I did. I wanted Hugo to make me feel better, not worse.

  ‘Come on, Samiya, give it a rest,’ he said.

  ‘It’s only been six days. Don’t you have any idea how upsetting this is?’

  ‘Not really,’ he said.

  We were in Buckingham, eating toasted teacakes in the café. Or at least, he was eating – I was talking.

  ‘No one will even acknowledge there’s been a wrongdoing. Yet it’s clearly a war crime. Someone should be arrested and tried in The Hague.’

  ‘And hanged,’ said Hugo, tilting his head sideways to demonstrate.

  ‘I read a blog by someone whose uncle’s whole village in Waziristan was razed to the ground with no apology, not a squeak in compensation —’

  ‘That reliable source of information – the blog.’

  I ignored him.

  ‘There are internationally agreed rules about the use of biological, chemical and nuclear weapons, but not drones. I’ve written an email and a letter to the Prime Minister and our MP – he’s a Tory – asking why that is.’

  I watched him eat the last mouthful of my teacake.

  ‘Good luck with that, Samiya. Got to go.’

  I left too, but didn’t go home. At home, Mum would be making tea and then Dad would come in from football training and everything would carry on as normal. That was their way of coping, but not mine. Instead, I walked. Ending up in the next village. I went round the back of the church to the graveyard, sat on a headstone and cried.

  The vicar saw me from the window of his kitchen, he said, and came to see if I was all right.

  ‘You can tell me to go away if you like.’

  I shrugged. I didn’t want the God squad hassling me, but, for once, being on my own wasn’t working either.

  ‘What’s the point?’ I said.

  ‘It’s not always clear,’ he said. He was wearing cords and a checked shirt, and had a tanned face. More like a landscape gardener than a Bible-basher.

  ‘If there was any justice in the world, bad things would get punished and good things rewarded,’ I said.

  ‘That does happen,’ he said, ‘but not in every instance.’

  ‘Someone killed my grandma and my cousin,’ I said. ‘A pilot, flying a drone. He fired a missile at them.’ The vicar didn’t say anything, so I carried on. ‘The video on a drone’s really basic – not clear enough to spot whether something’s a weapon or … a spade – and it’s usually too far away anyway. You can probably tell if someone’s white or brown, but you wouldn’t be able to say whether it was Osama or Obama. A direct hit incinerates you. If you’re further away, it might do something like blow your legs off, so you bleed to death slowly. I don’t know how my relatives died. No one does.’

  ‘I’m very sorry.’

  ‘Is that all you can think of to say?’

  ‘No. But it’s all I dare say at the moment, because I can see you’re upset.’

  He was quite likeable. At least he didn’t say she is at peace or the Lord has her in his warm embrace. So I told the story, in full. He listened, nodding every so often, and then gave me a lift home.

  ‘Thank you,’ I said, and I meant it. He’d been a lot kinder than almost everyone else.

  ‘My sympathies to your family,’ he said as I got out. And then he blew it.

  ‘Your grandmother and your cousin – they are both at peace now.’

  Total and utter rot. They weren’t at peace. They were in bits.

  7

  It was like being in one of those dreams where you need to catch a train but no one will tell you where the station is and when you eventually get to the station the doors of the train are all locked and when you ask the conductor he speaks a language you’ve never heard so you bang on the windows but no one can hear you. Except in a dream you get to wake up.

  I emailed the Prime Minister again, copied to the Minister of State for the Armed Forces, and when I got no joy, I tried the US President, several senators who had denounced the drone wars and the Chief of Staff of the US Army, asking for information about the military operation. In return I received two condolence notes. Big deal. I made an appointment to see my MP, who was short (in height) and short with me. You could tell from the cracks in the skin of his fingertips that he was a gardener, but when I tried to suggest he had something in common with my grandma he was quick to close down the small talk, repeating, ‘The American Military insist the strike was based on intelligence that a known insurgent was in the area.’ I asked for the name of the known insurgent. Classified.

  I made a file of all missile attacks involving civilians, collecting names and dates, comparing the reports of each incident and plotting the locations using a mapping app. I kept a tally of deaths.

  I bookmarked anti-drone bloggers and joined all the human rights groups that had drones on their agenda.

  But none of these things changed anything. There was no acknowledgement, no explanation, no apology.

  There was hardly any acknowledgement at home either. I could tell that Mum and Dad talked about it on their own – I’d find them standing close together, glassy-eyed, connected somehow – but when we were together the only one who mentioned the elephant in the room was me.

  I had the best conversations about my ‘truth and reconciliation’ mission with Lucy, but she was often wrapped up, literally, with Jake. I could hardly blame her for not dropping everything in my hour of need, given the way I’d pretty much dropped her for Hugo. He was useless, declaring the whole subject ‘boring’. Dullness was a sin in his book.

  Everyone else at school found it hard to know what to say – having your Yemeni relatives murdered by the US Military was Awkward, capital A, given that America was our ally and the home of Nike and Converse, and Yemen was full of men in dresses – so they mostly said nothing.

  Although behind my back it was a different story.

  I was in the corridor outside the sixth-form common room – three and a half weeks after the drone strike – when I heard Hugo say, ‘I’d put money on Samiya’s granny being the head of a terrorist cell.’

  I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. Or what he said next.

  ‘I have it on good authority that “in the fields” is a euphemism for “jihadi training camp”.’

  There was tentative laughter, which stopped dead as I walked in.

  ‘What was that you were saying?’ I asked. I was calm, but inside the rage that had been there since what the Americans called ‘collateral damage’ but I called murder, was white hot.

  ‘We were just having a joke, Samiya.’

  ‘You’ll have to help me, Hugo. I can’t see the funny side.’

  He was ever so slightly thrown – a rare thing.

  But his response, slow in coming, was far from apologetic.

  ‘I’m sorry, truly I am, but face it – who does most of the blowing up?’ He paused for effect, hands outstretched to imply trust. ‘Americans … or Muslims?’

  ‘You wouldn’t be confusing jihadis with Muslims, would you?’ I said. ‘Because only a very ignorant person would do that.’

  The whole common room piled in, suddenly sure which side they were on.

  ‘Suicide bombers are no more representative of Islam than the IRA are of Catholicism,’ said Niamh.

  ‘Xenophobic crap,’ said Tom.

  ‘It’s your kind of attitude that starts wars,’ said Caitlin.

  ‘You’re confusing faith with fanaticism,’ said Ollie, which was a nice bit of alliteration.

  At one point, Hugo tried to defend his statement.

  ‘Yemen is ri
fe with terrorists. I’m sure Samiya’s grandma wasn’t one, but half the village undoubtedly was.’

  He was showing the side of his character better kept in the shadows. The side that would do whatever it took to get a rise from the audience. Even if it meant hurting someone he was close to …

  Gradually the room emptied, leaving just the twins and me.

  ‘No hard feelings,’ said Hugo. ‘Good to get everyone wound up every so often. And they were all rooting for the Mohammeds …’

  He smiled at his own wit.

  I smiled too, as though agreeing, took my hand back and slapped him so hard his head spun round. Juliette rushed to his side.

  ‘Stay away from us,’ she said.

  ‘My pleasure,’ I said. I walked off, normal pace, head high, broken inside.

  I couldn’t stay at school after such a public betrayal, but didn’t want to go home. So I wandered down the road to town. I passed the bus stop just as the X60 was pulling up, on its way to Aylesbury. I hadn’t been there since our class went on a trip to the mosque. I wasn’t a Muslim, but everyone in my dad’s village was. I turned round and joined the queue to get on.

  8

  I didn’t need to ask the way, just had to keep an eye on the tall white minaret.

  As I got nearer, I began to wonder quite what I was going to do when I got there. I couldn’t talk to anyone religious wearing a short, tight black skirt with the slit ripped … But I carried on anyway.

  There was an indecipherable hum coming from inside the mosque, but the street was quiet. I sat on a wall opposite and waited, trying to remember the names of the five prayer times – Fajr, Zuhr, Asr, Maghrib, Isha.

  Although Dad grew up a Muslim, he left it behind when he came to England. I wondered whether, if he’d kept his faith, I’d have shown more interest, begged to visit his family, had a different life …

  The hordes of men pouring out of the mosque interrupted my thoughts. They were a mixed bunch, some walking briskly as though they were late, some dawdling. Lots were wearing normal western clothes, but plenty had on thobes. There were hats and bare heads, crew-cuts and huge bushy beards. Women followed, some hijabed, some in abayas, but no one with their whole face covered in a niqab. The babble, much of it in a language I couldn’t understand, reminded me of being in Dad’s village. It was, at the same time, comforting and distressing. As they trooped past, I tried not to notice the girl with the white hijab who walked a bit like Lamyah, or the old ladies, swathed in black.

  The idea that I might find some kind of answer in a religion I didn’t believe in slipped away. The deaths had nothing to do with faith. And everything to do with the Americans’ so-called ‘Kill List’ of militants they wanted to assassinate. Anyone who got in the way was fair game.

  As the crowd thinned, leaving only a couple of stragglers, the muddle in my head started to clear too. Being angry, hating Hugo, the exasperation with my parents – all those feelings weren’t helping. I needed to use logic – a far more useful tool than rage or hurt – to find a way to move on.

  Hugo’s words weren’t important – he was being deliberately provocative (and despicable and damaged) – but what lay behind them was. I knew that the Americans had fired at the wrong target, but the world wasn’t so sure. There was a cloud of suspicion, fuelled by the constant talk of Yemen being a hotbed for jihadis. If I could find out who the airstrike had intended to obliterate that day, I could prove that the pilot had made an error and demand an apology. Unlike most of the victims’ families, I wasn’t living in a hillside village without a way to make myself heard. I was educated. I was British. And thanks to social media and the internet, I had access to everyone and everything. My personal story could propel the issue of civilian deaths onto the front page. I remembered telling Dad – a few days after the drone strike, when I was still hoping he might take a stand – that the United Nations had declared the level of civilian casualties as a result of drone strikes ‘both too high and not transparent enough’. I needed to be part of that growing indignation. I needed to stoke the fire. It was time to stop asking for help, and help myself.

  And Hugo … I wouldn’t make that mistake again. I’d let my infatuation with him obscure what was in front of me all along. Hugo had never cared about me. I amused him, and I guess he fancied me. End of.

  Walking back to the bus stop, I felt a bit better. More grounded. I had a sense that I’d been like a runaway kite, tossed about by gusts, only just managing not to crash, but now my string was tethered, snagged on a branch, leaving me slightly less vulnerable to the changes of the wind.

  9

  I tweeted every day – pasting links to reports of airstrikes and asking the US and British governments for answers – and replied to any #drones tweets. My followers steadily grew in number (TFTF @voucherworld and @temptingtoys). I wrote blogs trying all sorts of angles, from an open letter to Obama to a description of my trip to Yemen and the aftermath. I shared other bloggers’ posts and they shared mine. I peppered Facebook with drone-related statuses, which got Likes – although not as many as the cat that could play the piano. I started an online petition, which a sympathetic hacker I came across in a chatroom kindly populated with signatures. Letters to the newspapers, comments on other people’s articles – you name it, I did it.

  It felt better to have a purpose, but did nothing for my relationship with Mum and Dad. I knew Dad was devastated, but the way he calmly carried on with the same life we’d had before the disaster was hard to fathom.

  ‘We can’t bring them back, Samiya,’ was his standard line.

  I wasn’t asking him to fly to the White House, but he could have started an action group, gone on a march, put a poster in the flipping window …

  Sometimes, I felt like a stranger in my own family. People at school were starting to talk about universities – for me, it couldn’t come soon enough.

  When doubt that I could change anything overwhelmed me, I’d take out my most precious photo. Three grins – me, Lamyah and Jaddah. It was too cruel. Jaddah was old by Yemeni standards, but Lamyah was my age. She could have been a neurosurgeon, or worked for the United Nations … We could have gone to Harvard together …

  It was better not to dwell on what could have been.

  In between making a noise on social media, I spent more and more time in chatrooms. OK, they’re full of lunatics, but the way I saw things, it was lunacy to ignore murder. My family were the mad ones. I was sane.

  I chatted to hackers, psychos, Jedis, Christians, fruitarians … Seriously, I mouthed off to everyone, looking for a way to hold the US to account. It was time-consuming, but I kept up with schoolwork – I had no intention of going to a second-rate university. What went by the wayside was gaming, although I occasionally shot folks on Call of Duty for a bit of R&R.

  Sayge first appeared on a dull day in January, the day before the new term. I was looking forward to going back to school, because Christmas had been suffocating. All fake cheeriness. Lucy had been skiing in the Alps with Jake’s family, so I’d been pretty solitary, not that I minded that – it was the stream of jolly visitors that had grated. I’d have preferred to ignore Christmas, out of respect for the two members of our family who would never celebrate anything again.

  I was trawling through the usual sites when Reuters broke the news of an airstrike in Pakistan that had killed a family of five. I wrote:

  wonder what the coverage would be like if an American family of five had been slaughtered

  – because you can say anything you like on the internet.

  Sayge typed:

  be more careful about what you say or use another name

  I don’t care – I haven’t done anything wrong – I replied.

  not yet – he typed.

  I’m the victim – not the aggressor

  explain

  I did. Pointing out that it was because I was the granddaughter and cousin of two dead Yemenis that I was there, so why hide my name?

  After
that, he started to pop up everywhere.

  Sayge had no clear political or religious agenda. But he seemed keen on trouble. And keen on chatting to me. He said change was only brought about by force, quoting someone called Frederick Douglass a lot –

  you can’t have the ocean without the roar

  you can’t have the crops without ploughing

  I looked him up online.

  He was an escaped slave who became a campaigner, committed to using words not violence, until he reluctantly realised that ‘agitation’, as he called it, was a necessity because people with power never hand it over willingly. Some people call him the father of the civil rights movement, but back then he was a scary black guy upsetting all the white landowners.

  The more my pleas on social media went unanswered, the more what Sayge had to say made sense. He had example after example of good people who’d done bad things for good reasons:

  Mandela tried the courts but it didn’t work – the ANC bombed their way to power

  even the suffragettes – nice ladies in long skirts – became arsonists and bombers because no one would listen

  I knew that feeling.

  Sayge had a knack of hitting on exactly what was on my mind. The more we chatted, the more I liked him. He was my alter ego.

  10

  I went in search of Sayge after school one particularly bad Monday.

  It started with some army chap on the radio being all gung-ho about a successful British missile strike that was targeting militants but probably killed all sorts of law-abiding bakers, tailors and candlestick-makers. The interviewer didn’t make him define ‘success’. I tweeted to that effect, with a link to the BBC. Then, joy of joy, first period was maths with the twins, neither of whom I’d spoken to since the slap. Our teacher, Mrs Abrahms, asked Hugo and I to stay behind.

  ‘I need some help with the Junior Mentoring Club and was hoping you two might do it. Tuesday lunchtimes. What do you think?’