Refuge

by Jackie French

  Women, he thought. This is a city of women.

  He glanced at Jamila. She grinned. ‘There are no men to be afraid of here. No father or uncles to obey.’

  ‘No men at all?’

  Jamila shook her head.

  ‘You’ve never asked Billy here? Or David?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Don’t you think you can trust them?’

  ‘Of course I can trust them! David is one of the best people I have ever met. He took my poem and made it music!’ Jamila stopped and looked at the ground, as though realising what she had just said. ‘Yes,’ she whispered. ‘I can trust them. I trust you too.’ She nodded, to herself as much as to him. ‘One day I’ll ask them here.’

  They walked on together. Up on a green hill above the houses girls flew kites, as bright as their scarves. At last they paused before the building with tall spires. Jamila led the way up white marble stairs.

  Faris expected a big hall, like the theatre where David played. But instead they were in a small foyer, with an ordinary door at the other end.

  Jamila opened it. Faris followed her inside.

  It was a classroom, but not like any he had seen.

  The room was long. Rich rugs hung from white walls, in between shelf after shelf of books. The floor was covered in rugs, but also cushions, silky and rounded and comfortable looking, and on the cushions were girls, happy girls in bright dresses and brighter headscarves, each with books or slates in their hands.

  At the far end of the room was a blackboard, and by the blackboard was a teacher, a tall woman with a headscarf just like Jamila’s, and lines of laughter around her eyes. She smiled as Faris and Jamila slid into seats at the back.

  ‘Today,’ said the teacher, ‘we will learn about the most important number of all. It is zero. Can anyone tell me why we call it “zero”?’

  Jamila put up her hand. ‘The great Arabian mathematician Mohammed ibn-Musa al-Khwarizmi called it “sifr”. All other nations took the name. He was the first to use zero in equations. “Algorithms” are called after him, but people mispronounce his name just as they mispronounced “sifr”.’

  ‘Correct.’ The teacher looked at her approvingly. ‘It is so easy to make a mistake when you are remembering lessons from long ago. It is as easy to say that “sifr” is “zero” as it is to say girls should not study mathematics.’

  The girls all laughed, as though saying ‘girls shouldn’t study mathematics’ was the funniest joke they’d ever heard.

  The teacher grinned. ‘Now who can tell me three different ways to use a zero?’

  Faris knew the answer. He’d known about Mohammed ibn-Musa al-Khwarizmi too. But he waited as Jamila put up her hand, as her grandmother — for surely this teacher was the grandmother Jamila had known when she was a little girl — nodded at Jamila to tell the class. This was Jamila’s world, her city of women.

  Jadda would like this teacher, he thought. He wished that they could meet. Maybe if he thought hard enough, if Jamila did too …

  No. Even if the two women came together in his imagination, they couldn’t really meet. Jamila’s grandmother was dead; his own was lost in what had become a never-ending moment as he waited for the wave to crash down.

  For a second he almost felt the coldness of the sea again. Then he was back, in the white-walled classroom, in Jamila’s city of women.

  Darkness rested like a cashmere blanket on the marble-walled city as he and Jamila walked back towards the beach. They stopped by the sand hill. ‘I’ll go home from here,’ said Jamila. ‘My mother will be waiting.’

  Faris hesitated. ‘Jamila … you said David gave you music for your poem. Is that the song you sing, down on the beach?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I’ve heard him play it. It sounds … it feels almost like my story. Hatred and loss …’

  ‘It isn’t your song. It’s mine. I wrote it for my grandmother. It is a song for women. Not men.’

  ‘But David plays it. Please — would you sing it for me now?’

  He could see when trust edged out the last hesitation from her heart.

  Her voice was small and sweet.

  ‘I am a woman, I’m easy to kill,

  A gun in the face or a rape for the thrill.

  I am a woman, and I’ll never die,

  Steal my lips and you’ll still hear my cry.

  Words that are whispered, from mother to child,

  I am a woman. We all are mankind.’

  The wind from the sea seemed to sing the last words again. Faris felt tears prickle. ‘Jamila?’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Your song. It is a song for men too. For everyone who is hated. We all are mankind.’

  She looked at him without speaking. ‘Maybe that is why David could give it music,’ she said at last. ‘Good night, Faris. And thank you.’

  ‘What for?’

  ‘For showing me that a man can walk in the city of women. You, David, Billy, perhaps even my father, and other men too. I wrote the words, but I didn’t understand them. We share more than divides us.’

  She vanished into the dark. Faris waited a minute, in case she came back, then walked up the sand hill and turned to go home.

  CHAPTER 14

  He drank in each detail every day now. Every hug from Jadda, the bright Jadda with laughing eyes he had recreated from so long before. The softness of his bed at night, the safe bed where no men with clubs and pistols would drag you from your sleep.

  He breathed in the beauty of the beach. He looked at his friends too. Because they were friends: little Nikko, strong Jamila, Billy, who he had thought a bully, but who was trying his best to defend them all. Susannah, who held their memories for them until they were needed, who held their pain till one day they could bear it again. Over near the far cliff Mudurra sat with Juhi, carving out fish hooks from the flat pink shells.

  On the day Faris stepped through that driftwood door he would lose them all. Never see Susannah’s small, fierce face. Probably never see a fish hook carved from shell either. They would be separated by time, as well as space. If they survived at all.

  If only I could step back through the doorway if I needed to, he thought. If only whenever you thought, I can’t do this, you could just step back through and play on the beach, till you had gathered your strength again.

  Yet in his heart he knew that this was a gift that could be given only once. Perhaps, when you had stepped through, you had no need for the doorway, for by then you would have truly chosen real life.

  Even the game was precious now. Somehow every time you threw a ball to someone and every time they caught it or threw it to you, a small thread was made between the players.

  The game had been fun this morning. It was always fun. Jamila had brought down lamb on skewers at midday, with chunks of fat in between the meat that spat and hissed as it cooked over Mudurra’s fire, and flat bread, still warm from the oven. There were jugs of pomegranate juice, chilled with snow, bowls of apricots, big floury ones and tiny ones that spurted juice when you bit into them, and tiny yellow grapes and a bowl of pistachio nuts. The grape seeds floated when a laughing Nikko spat them into the sea.

  Susannah and Jamila gathered up the bowls as the others began to play again. Faris held the ball, hot from the sand, in his hands, and wondered who to throw it to. David, he thought.

  But David stared at the waves.

  ‘David!’ Faris called impatiently.

  David shook his head. ‘Look!’

  Something thrashed in the water between the beach and the rocks. For a moment Faris wondered if it was a shark, or a giant fish. Then a dark head gasped for air. It vanished below the waves.

  Faris glanced at the others. But we are all here, he thought, safe on the beach. Susannah was desperately counting them all.

  ‘Who’s out there?’ he demanded breathlessly.

  ‘I don’t know!’ Susannah’s voice didn’t quite hide her fear. ‘No one ever arrives from the sea! They come over the s
and hill, like you did.’

  The waves splashed about Faris’s ankles. Without realising it, they had all run down into the water. He stopped as the waves broke about his knees. He saw the others stop too.

  Mudurra was the only one of them who could swim — even Juhi only splashed in the shallows. The young man strode further out, into the sea. He dived down into the waves. Only his dark head and arms were visible, swimming out towards the place where the figure had vanished.

  ‘Help him!’ Juhi looked pleadingly at the others. ‘He’s going to his death out there.’

  ‘How can we help?’ asked Faris, as Billy said, ‘He can swim, can’t he?’ Faris had never heard Billy’s voice sound uncertain before.

  ‘Not against the current out there! Not near the rocks!’

  ‘She’s right. Mudurra says the current is deadly. He tried to swim against it before you came. He nearly died. He says the next time it will kill him.’ Suddenly Faris felt it was hard to breathe. It was as though he too was underwater, like the stranger out at sea, as though the wave had crashed over him already.

  He couldn’t let the stranger suffer like that. He couldn’t let Mudurra be swept out to whatever strange ocean lay beyond their guarding rocks. But how could they help him, and help whoever was struggling in the water, if they couldn’t swim?

  ‘A boat,’ said Billy, his voice still wobbly. ‘We need to fetch a boat.’

  ‘Where from?’ demanded Faris. ‘Do you have a boat?’

  Billy shook his head. Of course not, thought Faris, staring out at the strange figure still struggling in the water, at Mudurra’s dark head moving towards what he must know would only be a temporary rescue, till both he and the stranger in the water were swept out to sea. There are no boats in the worlds we have created. Boats mean fear for us, not safety.

  ‘A bridge.’ Faris heard his own voice speak almost before he thought the words. He looked at the others impatiently. ‘We can put a plank or a ladder across from the cliff to the first rock, and then from the first rock to the second. Then as they are swept out to the rocks, we reach down and grab them.’

  It was so easy to say. But would it work? It has to work, he thought.

  ‘I can get a ladder from home —’ began Billy.

  ‘No!’ Would a ladder from an imaginary world work on the beach? Nor was there time to fetch one.

  Faris gazed frantically along the sand. But there was nothing that could make a bridge, just the small bits of driftwood, fit only for a fire, the seaweed, the basket and juice jugs from their lunch …

  Out among the waves Mudurra had reached the spot where the swimmer had vanished. His head ducked below the water. Juhi began to wade further out towards him. Susannah held her back. ‘No! You aren’t strong enough!’

  ‘I have to!’

  ‘Then Mudurra would have to rescue you too!’ said Billy.

  Jamila turned to Susannah. ‘We have to use the wood from the doorway.’

  ‘No!’ Susannah’s face was white under her freckles.

  ‘They’re the only long pieces of wood on the beach.’

  ‘We can put the doorway back together again.’ Faris didn’t know if they could. But it was their only hope of rescuing the two struggling swimmers.

  Out in the froth of water Mudurra’s face popped up again. He gasped, then sank.

  Suddenly Susannah gave a small savage nod. She began to run. The others ran with her. David reached the doorway first. He pulled at one half of the giant driftwood arch, heedless of splinters in his long white musician’s fingers.

  The doorframe didn’t move.

  Faris grabbed it too. Hands covered his — white, brown, olive, freckled …

  ‘On the count of three!’ yelled Billy. ‘One, two, three.’

  They pushed. The wood shifted slightly.

  Faris shot a desperate glance out to the bay. ‘He’s surfaced!’ as Mudurra’s face emerged again. This time he held what looked to be a shapeless bundle of grey clothes.

  ‘Push!’ screamed Juhi, her small hands making no difference to the wood of the doorway.

  ‘All together!’ Billy took command. ‘One. Two. Three!’

  And suddenly the doorway fell, so easily, so simply, that it seemed impossible that this had ever been anything more than two hunks of driftwood with a skin flapping between.

  But there was no time to think about that now. Faris and Billy heaved the first hunk of driftwood between them, while Jamila and David lifted the other, leaving the skin where it had fallen. For a few seconds Nikko tried to help, but it was obvious that he was just getting in the way.

  Faris was dimly aware of Susannah sitting Nikko on the sand, telling him to wait, to be a good wee boyo; out in the water Mudurra struggled to keep the stranger’s face turned up to the air, his strong body already being swept towards the rocks.

  ‘Hurry!’ shrieked Juhi.

  ‘I will pray to St Kangarou.’ Nikko sounded like he was trying not to cry.

  ‘Pray to God for all of us,’ said Susannah, as Juhi ran around to the cliff and scrambled over the rocks, then held out her arms to take the first bit of bridging wood.

  Would the length of driftwood be long enough to reach to the first rock? It has to be! thought Faris. No time for any other plan now.

  He and Juhi thrust the wood towards the first rock. Billy and David steadied it behind. For a heart-stopping second he was sure it would be too short. Then the end met the rock.

  ‘Now to carry the other one out there,’ panted Billy. He glanced doubtfully down at the ancient driftwood. ‘Dunno how much weight it’ll hold.’

  ‘Then I’ll be the one going across it first.’ Before they could stop her, Susannah had run onto the driftwood bridge, as though the thin wood was a broad and sturdy staircase.

  The wind pushed and pulled at her long dress, almost unbalancing her. She leaped towards the rock, as though in challenge to the elements.

  She was across.

  ‘Pass the other over to me!’ she yelled. But Juhi and Jamila were already heaving the wood across the gap. Susannah grabbed it, then managed to push it onto the second rock.

  ‘If it will take Susannah, it will take me,’ said Jamila. She stepped like a tightrope walker onto the driftwood, her arms out to balance her. Juhi waited till she was across, then followed her.

  Faris glanced at Billy and David. They were heavier than the girls, especially Billy. Should they risk the driftwood breaking?

  ‘If one bit o’ wood breaks, they can use the other,’ said Billy shortly. ‘Them girls don’t have the strength to pull Mudurra up by themselves.’

  If the driftwood broke under them, they might drown. But there was no time to weigh the risk.

  One by one the boys edged across to the closest rock, first Faris, then David. The girls had already crossed to the second. Faris held his breath as Billy came last, cautiously, foot by foot. But the driftwood didn’t break.

  The rock felt cold under Faris’s feet. It should be warm from the sun, like the sand, he thought. Somehow he knew the water would be cold too.

  It was easier crossing the second bridge. The six of them clustered together, on the second rock. It was as level as it had seemed from the beach, as if it had been carved. They were about two metres higher than the surging water below. The beach and tiny Nikko looked strangely distant, as though they had travelled much further than a few minutes’ run.

  Faris looked down into the water. Mudurra had seen them. He was trying to swim towards their rock as the current swept him out, dragging the limp figure of the stranger with him.

  Closer, closer … Faris could see both faces now: Mudurra’s grim; the other a girl with dark skin, black hair and a bulk of grey wet clothes.

  Juhi kneeled down and stretched out her arms. She gave a cry. ‘We’re too high up! He won’t be able to reach us!’

  ‘Maybe Billy can lean right down …’ began Faris.

  ‘I still won’t be able to grab him,’ said Billy. ‘Not from up he
re. We need a rope.’

  ‘We don’t have one!’

  Billy gave a short hard grin. ‘Who says?’ He tore at the buttons of his shirt. ‘Here, take your shirt off. An’ you too,’ he said to David, already tying the sleeves of his shirt to Faris’s.

  Would the shirts be long enough? Would Mudurra have the strength to grab them, carrying his limp burden too? Could a rope of shirts hold to pull them upwards?

  Mudurra no longer struggled against the current, but was letting it take him, using what was left of his strength to keep the girl’s face out of the water. A few more minutes and they would be between the rocks.

  Find something that floats, said a whisper in his mind. It was Jadda’s voice — the grey Jadda, the Jadda on the grey boat.

  The water bladders. Faris remembered how Nikko had blown them up, how they had popped.

  Even as he thought it, he was running, scrambling across the two driftwood bridges, leaping the rocks, along the beach, back to the fire and the remnants of their meal. Now and then he risked a second’s glance. Mudurra was close to the rocks now, the girl still in his arms, the others crowded on the second rock, their yells of encouragement almost lost in the wind.

  We have been children playing on a beach, he thought, even as his hands busied themselves emptying the bladders, blowing them up, tying them together with Mudurra’s plaited string. But now we are no longer lost children. We are the rescuers …

  Perhaps.

  He ran back, pushing his feet into the wet sand, urging his body harder than he ever had before.

  Faster! Faster! The bladders bounced behind him. The sun and sea wind burned his body. He had never gone bare-chested outdoors before.

  Faris hesitated only briefly at the driftwood bridge, then wobbled his way across it. He had walked up paths as narrow. No reason to step sideways now, slip into the dark deep water, be swept out, swept under, lost in the dark wave.

  The first rock was cold again under his feet. He balanced his way over the next bridge. Jamila reached out a hand to guide him, then he was among the others.

  He looked down. Was he too late?

  Mudurra was almost at the rock, his eyes fixed, determined, his mouth gasping for air, swimming like a frog, kicking out with both legs, balanced on the water. The girl was a froth of grey clothes and black seaweed …