For the first time since she began speaking, Semira makes a movement, a slight shaking of the head, as if denying what was coming next.
So that’s when it happens. That’s when everything becomes confusing. I have got my earrings off, the bangle on my wrist, the thin necklace and my wedding ring. I’m not looking up. I haven’t been aware of the wailing in the distance and only take notice as the police car shoots around the corner and skids to a halt fifteen metres or so in front of the pickup. One moment we’re all frozen, caught like hares in a headlight, the next the police officers are out, guns drawn, barking out orders. And then the traffickers pull out their own pistols and open fire.
The words continue to flow and Nuala takes in the meaning, the raw facts, but it’s only afterwards, later that night alone in bed, that Semira’s words start to sink in, that she begins to understand what it must have felt like. She closes her eyes and takes herself back to the car park, to the pandemonium of fear and panic. Semira is caught in two minds, the desire to guard the younger children she is holding, and the desperate need to protect her older ones caught up in the fighting. Amidst the roar and screams of the men, the crack and hammer of gunfire, she’s dimly aware that the Egyptian next to her has fallen to her feet in a heap, that one of the traffickers at the pickup has been shot, that two officers are also down.
Across the courtyard, she sees that the third trafficker has pushed the two older children in front of him as a shield and is edging round the pickup, manoeuvring himself out of the two remaining officers’ line of fire. Meanwhile the lorry driver has stuck his head around the side of the truck and is screaming at the Bear to get into the vehicle, gesturing to him to get the back doors closed so they can be off. The Bear turns to Semira, waves his gun at her and growls a command to get herself inside with the younger children she is still holding. Semira can still see the trafficker hunched behind the pickup, her two older ones crouched down beside him as he lets off shot after shot at the remaining officers who have, by now, retreated to positions behind their own vehicle. She begins to scream.
She can no more get into the lorry voluntarily and leave behind her older children than split her own heart in two.
She looks into the Bear’s face praying that he’ll see sense but he’s in no mood to compromise. He whips his pistol across her cheek, punches her hard in the face, then pushes her into the back of the lorry. The younger children, too shocked to protest, scramble into the hold behind her. She has fallen to the floor, lies dazed, spitting tooth and blood. She looks out of the darkness of the lorry, her last few seconds of light for the next twelve hours. The trafficker behind the pickup is shooting at the officers. The Bear too is emptying his pistol, the officers are returning fire. Then there’s a roar, a flash of fire as the police car explodes in a ball of flame and smoke, a final glimpse of the huddled youngsters at the pickup, and the Bear swings the doors across her line of vision.
Kassa! She screams as the doors slam into place and the bolts are pulled across. Kassa! Gadissa!
She’s still screaming their names as the lorry pulls out with a shrieking of tyres and grinding of protesting gears.
***
Nothing has changed for Nuala, there’s no light at the end of the tunnel, no journey completed. But as she remembers Semira’s voice, the dyke is breached, the tears begin to flow. And she discovers, as the minutes pass, that the tears which began as a lament for her friend Semira, for the loss of her two children, soon begin to alter in nature, to become in time tears for her own loss. For Greg and the fifteen years of Nuala-and-Greg, the fifteen years Before the After. And with the tears comes not healing, and end to the meaninglessness, but at least a kind of recognition that henceforth Greg to her may be a memory of breadmaking, a half-finished sketch on the bathroom wall, a flashback of soggy walks in Shotover Park, a photo in her purse of him posing with Beth and Sammy on their Marmaris holiday. All this, but nothing more. Ever.
Epilogue
Dear Kassa You’ll never guess what happened today! The letter was waiting for me when I got back from class, brown manila with the familiar school postmark. I opened it, scanned the contents and let out a scream. The house was empty, so I screamed again, then put the kettle on for a steadying cup of tea.
It was Nuala who spotted the advertisement in the Oxford Times a fortnight ago. She circled it in red ink and left it open on my bed: Learning Support Assistant Required for East Oxford Primary School, it said. I had scanned the rest of the information as a froth of panic and excitement began to churn in my stomach. I had found Nuala in Sammy’s bedroom, piling Lego bricks back into his toy chest. When I showed her the advertisement, she smiled.
Well, it’s what you wanted, isn’t it? she told me. It sounds perfect.
But I’m not ready. My English is so bad. I don’t know anything.
Rubbish, she said. Your English is fine. You’re ready, Semira. As ready as you’ll ever be. And it’s Nuala who phoned for an application form, who helped me fill it in, supplied the reference.
And today, the letter. The offer of an interview. Nine thirty next Thursday. So soon! Nuala is the first home, just a half day on Wednesdays. I show her the letter and she lets out her own scream, even louder than mine. She insists on going down to the shop at the bottom of the road and returns with cakes and lemonade and sweets and crisps, a bottle of fizzy wine for herself, for me a carton of my favourite mango juice. Then the children arrive and she’s put some music on the CD player and the children are jumping up and down. Yanit and Beth are performing some complicated dance routine, Sammy is leaping about on the sofa and Abebe’s head is buried in a family-sized pack of cheese curls. The cork pops and Nuala slops the fizzy wine into her glass. I look around at the flushed faces, at the roomful of screaming, twisting, gyrating bodies, and I think, Maybe, just maybe, it’s going to be alright.
Divinity Road Page 29