Odd Child Out: A Novel

by Gilly MacMillan

  Sofia takes pancakes to Abdi and sits with him. “Abdi, can you talk to me? It’s just me. You can tell me what happened. I promise I’ll keep it to myself if that’s what you want. Come on, Abdi.”

  He doesn’t reply, even when she waves the pancakes under his nose and tells him he’ll feel better if he eats. The pancakes go cold on the plate on his desk and the hot tea Sofia brought with them goes undrunk. She loses heart and joins her mum.

  Maryam has switched on the television and is staring at it. Sofia understands that her mother doesn’t want to talk, so she goes to bed early, long before her father gets home.

  They’re in limbo, waiting for Abdi to speak. It’s all that matters. The waiting is disorienting and frightening.

  Waking in the night, she checks the iPad. It’s charged.

  She taps and scrolls, and at first she’s part disappointed and part relieved because there doesn’t seem to be anything on it that could give offer her a clue as to what’s happened.

  That’s when she notices the sound file. It’s the only one in a voice memo app. It’s dated from late yesterday evening.

  Sofia taps the play button and watches as a thin red line tracks across the screen under an audio graphic.

  At first there’s silence, but a second or two later, Sofia hears a familiar voice.

  “Where do you want me to start?” It’s a man’s voice and it sounds slurred and slow, like a drunken storyteller.

  “What was it like being at the camp?”

  Sofia recognizes both voices. The first is Ed Sadler; the second, her brother, Abdi. Hearing his recorded voice startles her.

  “Harshek,” says Ed Sadler. He can hardly get the word out. He laughs and tries again. “Har-ti-sheik. I went to Hartisheik camp back in 1999. Nineteen ninety-nine was one of my first trips I made with Dan, or was it 1998? First or second, not sure, but anyway, 1999 was good because Fi came to meet me in Addis Ababa when I had some R&R and we went to visit those underground church things, you know? The early Christian churches?”

  “How did you find conditions in the camp?” Abdi sounds very earnest, as if he’s aspiring to be a serious correspondent.

  “Bad, very bad, so bad.” He’s snapping in and out of sounding very drunk and very sober. “They didn’t want the outside world to see what it was like in the camps, so visits were controlled. They did that to stop word getting out about what was happening to those people in Somalia. But you know, I’m so glad I persisted, and then Dan gave me my break. These are the sort of things you have to do and connections you have to make to get stories.”

  “How long were you in the camp?” Abdi’s voice sounds small but very serious.

  “Just two days. I made two visits on two days. It was amazing. Amazing people. So much tragedy, but so much humanity, too. I’d been in Somalia proper the previous year, front line, you know—flak jacket, helmet, the works, in the thick of it, bullets flying everywhere, very Black Hawk Down—so going to the camp was a continuation of that story, showing the place where people went when they’d fled that horror.”

  “What was the worst thing about the visit?” Abdi says.

  “The sadness, the hunger, thirst, malnutrition . . . the lack of hope.”

  “And the best?”

  “Well, you know, I was thinking when I was hanging the exhibition that the day of that football match was a great day. We were due to leave that evening, but the aid workers had hooked up a TV screen outside their office to show the Champions League Final. Manchester United versus Bayern Munich, a huge match, so we stayed to watch it. Amazing atmosphere, all the men gathered around the screen. Incredible sense of camaraderie.”

  Ed Sadler breaks off into a big yawn. “Apologies, but I think I’m going to have to turn in. Few too many.”

  “You took a photograph of the men watching the game,” Abdi says. “I saw it at the gallery.”

  “You’re right, I did.”

  “What’s wrong with that man’s mouth?”

  “The man with all the teeth sticking out?”

  “Yes.”

  “He has a cleft palate. It’s quite a common birth defect, and if you were born with it here, it would get operated on within days or weeks. That doesn’t happen in Somalia, especially if you’re from a rural community. There are very few facilities, and even if you can access one, you probably can’t afford to pay for the operation.”

  “Did you talk to the people in the photo?”

  “Not him, that’s for sure! I had to snatch that shot. He was a man who wouldn’t have wanted his picture taken. He was in a group of new arrivals and the aid workers suspected they were troublemakers. You can imagine that, right? That not everybody who arrives in the camps is a victim of the war. They said that he’d been part of a group who were responsible for many atrocities back in Somalia. It wasn’t too difficult for men like him to slip in and out of the camps and across borders. Nobody had papers, and desperate people were arriving every day in huge numbers.”

  “So you didn’t learn their names?” Abdi asks.

  “His nickname was Farurey. It means lip or harelip, or something like that. It refers to his lip. I never knew his real name, I don’t know if anybody did, and I don’t know the other men. It was so long ago. I only remember him because people talked about him. Anyway, I can barely remember my own name tonight! Bedtime? You should go up and I need to get a glass of water.”

  “I tried to print something upstairs, and I think Noah’s computer sent it down here. Do you have it?”

  “Let’s see. Have a look, but I think we ran out of paper. You might have to wait until the morning. Bedtime, Abdi, my mate. Come on. I don’t know about you, but I’m on my last legs. I’m getting too old for this.”

  The recording ends.

  The nurses change shift, and my parents’ voices get slower and lower, and stretch into yawns.

  Sometime after Dad leaves, I hear Mum struggling with the big chair that converts into a bed. By the end of a long stay in the hospital, I wonder sometimes if her body will have been permanently bent into the shape of the hospital furniture.

  Once Abdi asked me what I thought my family life would be like if I hadn’t got ill. It was hard to answer the question, because when your family’s one way, you can’t imagine how it can be any different. I tried to remember what it was like before my diagnosis, and that gave me my answer: “Normal.”

  Abdi said, “There’s no such thing as ‘normal.’”

  “You know what I mean.”

  We’d just started going to philosophy club, so Abdi was obsessed with dissecting the meaning behind everything we said, looking behind words and phrases, asking questions all the time. I thought it was a bit pretentious at the time, but since The Talk with Dr. Sasha, it’s probably fair to say I’ve been a bit like that myself.

  Noah’s Bucket List Item No. 4: Be normal (or as normal as possible).

  Dad’s private view at the gallery was a chance for us to be the family we might have been without my illness.

  My mum looked beautiful. She got her hair and her nails done, wore a new dress, and stood tall. Dad took a family selfie and installed it as the wallpaper on his phone.

  “A very proud night,” he said when he showed it to us. It made me very glad I hadn’t let them cancel the party when we got the news.

  Mum drove us to the gallery, which was in Stokes Croft. Usually she puts the central locking on if we pull up at a red light in that neighborhood, because she says it can be “edgy.” It’s a description that makes Dad laugh. She was iffy about the location when Dad first told her about it, but he said, “It’s a satellite space for the Arnolfini Gallery; it’s very prestigious. Frankly, I wouldn’t want to show anywhere else except London.”

  Abdi was already there when we arrived, standing at the door waiting for us.

  “You look really nice,” I said.

  “My mum got me a new shirt,” he said. It was dark blue and a little bit shiny.

  I put my arm
around him when we walked in, even though it was a bit difficult because he’s grown so much taller than me lately. I didn’t care, though, because I wanted everybody to see that he was my best friend.

  Just inside the gallery a small notice was displayed on a board:

  WARNING: This exhibition contains images from war and disaster zones.

  Some visitors may find it distressing.

  Mum had wobbled about Abdi and me coming for that reason, but Dad saved the day.

  “The boys are fifteen,” he said to her. “They have to grow up sometime.”

  Too right.

  Noah’s Bucket List Item No. 5: Watch an 18 certificate film. (Dad says me and him are going to watch Alien together, even if Mum has a hissy fit. He says it’s incredible.)

  The gallery was packed with people, so much so that it was hard for us to see the photographs properly, but people were talking about them.

  “Jaw-dropping . . . beautiful . . . The focus falls away at just the right point . . . He really does have an extraordinary eye.”

  Me and Abdi had the job of helping to pass food around. Dad promised us a “very decent” hourly wage in return.

  Noah’s Bucket List Item No. 6: Have a job (yes, a few hours of paid employment counts).

  We carried big silver platters around the room as it filled up even more, and offered the guests a choice of posh bits of food. Lots of people told me I’d grown (I hadn’t much lately) and that I looked well (I really didn’t—go figure), but it was very nice all the same. Me and Abdi made a good team.

  After a while, the room got so crowded that we had to abandon our platters, and somebody opened the door to let some cold air in.

  Dad got on a chair and made a speech, and I liked it when we saluted each other at the end.

  At about nine o’clock people began to leave and Mum and Dad stood at the door, saying goodbye, kissing everybody and shaking hands. Me and Abdi stood with them.

  “Shall we go?” Mum said when the last people had left. She yawned. “Your dad’s going to get a beer with some friends.”

  Outside on the pavement three of Dad’s friends were standing in a huddle, two of them smoking, and all of them laughing loudly.

  “I won’t go if you don’t want me to,” Dad said.

  “It’s fine.” I hugged him super tightly, making sure to hold on for a long time, and I said, “I’m so proud of you, Dad.”

  “Thanks, mate,” he said. We held the hug for ages.

  Noah’s Bucket List Item No. 7: Make sure people know how important they are to you.

  We waved Dad off and I said to Mum, “Can we just look at the photographs before we go? Really quickly?” It was the first chance I’d had to see them properly, now that the gallery was empty.

  “It’s very late.”

  “Please?”

  “Five minutes. They’re waiting to close up.” Well, she wasn’t really going to argue with me, was she?

  Abdi and I took a look around. The gallery was a neat rectangular space with photographs covering the walls. Some of them had been blown up very large, but others were smaller and hung in groups. All the photographs were good. Some of them were very shocking. I wanted to make sure I looked at each and every one of them.

  The photographs were from different areas of the world, and by far the biggest was a section with the heading HORN OF AFRICA. The first photograph in that section was of a baby crouched naked in the road outside a destroyed house. She had sand on her face and eyelids. In another, a very old woman was propped against a tree, leaning her head back against the trunk. Her eyes were open. She was alive, but probably not for long. A long trail of families walked past her, all of them loaded with possessions. It made me shudder, the sight of her waiting for death.

  Another picture was a close-up of a mother and her baby. The baby’s belly was swollen huge. The mother looked straight into the camera, over the baby’s head. Both their eyes were dull and yellowy. It was the loneliest picture I’ve ever seen.

  The other photographs were just as shocking.

  There was a man lying in the middle of the street, dead and covered in blood. A boy with a gun in his hand was picking through the man’s pockets.

  There was a body hanging from a post, head slumped to one side, hands and feet limp. Behind it was a mural on the side of a shop showing cigarettes and sodas and toothpaste and other things for sale.

  The worst was a photograph of somebody’s feet beaten to a pulp, with a fly resting on one of the toes. It was a horrible, sick-making picture, but the lighting in it was strangely beautiful. I could see my dad’s skill.

  Others weren’t so bad. I liked one that was a panorama showing domed tents in a desert, hundreds or thousands of them. Behind them, above a ridge, a sandstorm was rising, and in the front of the picture, bits of plastic rubbish caught on a thorny bush were being blown horizontal by the wind.

  There was also a picture of a group of men and boys watching a football game on TV. They were outside, in front of a big screen, the men sitting on plastic chairs and the boys filling the gaps between and in front of them. Somebody must have just scored a goal, because the men and boys were frozen in celebration, some with arms pumping the air, others with mouths open. Only one man wasn’t looking at the game but to the side, somewhere near the camera but not quite at it. He was sitting in a yellow plastic chair and his expression was really cold, even though his face was sweaty. He had no top lip, it looked like it was slashed open down the middle, and his teeth were growing through it at all crazy angles. He was scary.

  Abdi looked at it with me.

  “Come on, boys!” Mum said. “Time to go.”

  I was ready. I felt weak. The photographs were stressful and my adrenaline and good feelings were ebbing away. Abdi didn’t seem to hear her. I tugged his arm.

  “Come on.”

  He couldn’t take his eyes off the photo. I knew Horn of Africa means Somalia, and that’s where Abdi’s family is from, but I didn’t know what it was about this photo that was so interesting that it would put him in a trance.

  “Abdi!”

  He took out his phone and took a picture of the photograph.

  “Okay,” he said once he’d checked it. He came with me, but he kept glancing at the photograph as he put his coat on, and he turned around to try to look at it one last time when we walked to the car.

  “You’re very quiet, both of you,” Mum said as she drove us home.

  “Tired,” I said, and that seemed to satisfy her. She put on the radio.

  I didn’t know why Abdi was so quiet. It wasn’t like him. Maybe he was tired, too. I was happy to let him rest, because we had our plan for later.

  I looked out of the window of the car as we drove home, and I wondered whether Dad had helped those people after he took photos of them.

  Edward and Fiona Sadler’s house is very tall. On a Georgian square in Clifton Village where most of the buildings are divided into flats, they have a house to themselves. The exterior is exceptionally well-maintained. The Bath stone is clean and golden and the glass in the windows gleams. In the center of the square is a locked communal garden where lush greenery is contained by decorative black wrought-iron railings.

  “Bloody hell,” Woodley mutters.

  We make our way up the tiled path to the front door. In the beds along the path the daffodil plants that have already flowered have been neatly tied up and the shiny nubs of emerging tulips are pushing up through the soil. On either side of the front door, dark pink cyclamen bloom in large pots, and ivy spills from their edges.

  I ring the bell. The chime is distant.

  When Edward Sadler opens the door, he looks rough as hell. He’s a tall man, about my height and broad-shouldered.

  The first thing he does after offering us a seat in a sitting room that’s plush and formal is break down, elbows on knees, head cupped in his hands, fingers slick with tears.

  Woodley and I wait for him to get control of himself before I off
er my condolences regarding Noah’s prognosis. It doesn’t sound any less stilted than when I said the same words to Fiona Sadler.

  He nods an acknowledgment, but he’s got something else on his mind: “I tied one on last night. I keep thinking about how if I hadn’t, things might have been different.”

  Dodging the self-pity—the “if only” lament of the victims or their loved ones on almost every case I’ve ever worked on; predictable, understandable, but not helpful—I ease him gently into the questioning.

  “Can you tell us a little bit about Noah?”

  “He’s very clever, like my wife.” His mouth twitches. It’s almost a smile. I suspect this is a joke he’s told before: self-deprecation as a tool to make other people relax around him. It dilutes his alpha-male presentation.

  “We had Noah when we were very young. We hadn’t been together for very long at all. I was just starting out on my career and Fi was studying printmaking. She was—is—a very talented artist. We fell for each other hard, straightaway, and we started going out. I was beginning to do a fair bit of traveling, but she would come and join me when she could because she had all these long holidays. It was fun, really fun. Those were good times. We didn’t plan to get pregnant, but we were happy when it happened, once we got over the shock. We settled in Bristol so Fi could be near her parents, and we were lucky enough to have the money to buy a house, from her side of the family, so we settled down here happily enough. Fi set up a studio in the garden. Things were going well with my work, so I was starting to travel more and more, and she couldn’t come with me anymore, but she had help from her parents when I was away. We managed. We felt lucky. And Noah made it easy. He was a top baby. A really sunny little boy.”

  I sense an until, and that their life together is defined by a before and an after. I don’t interrupt him. If a witness starts to talk, you let them, and you listen hard.