The Good Sister

by Chris Morgan Jones

  ‘I have to finish it.’

  My father looks at me and I know he doesn’t understand, he just isn’t made for the rules here. But I am.

  I step into the doorway and the brother is there crouching down by his friend, and there’s something human and innocent about the way he’s leaning forward, fingers on the dead man’s wrist. I register this at the same moment that I pull the trigger. He falls away from me and the force sends me backwards and him across the floor, and then his eyes are on mine, his gun still in his hand, and I see what he sees: a black crow with a gun and her eyes showing. He’ll know a woman finished him. I fire again and he’s gone, I know it, his blood covers the wall behind him and I can’t look at it, the same sickness fills me and I turn away.

  ‘Let’s go.’

  No one’s coming for us. The other car must be empty, and all around I hear no noise. Shots are not unusual in this city.

  I try the brother’s car first, and find the keys in the ignition.

  We go. My father says he can drive, but he’s really slow and jerky and he has to sit bolt upright so his back doesn’t touch the chair. Pain is wracking his face but he’s strong, a fighter, a real one. More than I realized. I sit by him and direct him, staying on the edge of town. Coming at Borz’s house from the back.

  5

  Abraham has never driven anything like this: powerful, certain, sneeringly superior. Even on a good day he would have felt at odds with it and now it feels always just out of his control, as if any moment it might decide to go its own way. But it gives him something to concentrate on, and he needs it. The pain seems to hammer outwards from the core of him.

  Out here in the residential areas there are no shops and no lights besides those of the odd car that passes. Twice they meet bigger roads that lead into and out of the city, and twice they go straight on, hugging the rim of the place.

  Sofia anticipates his question; he isn’t ready yet to ask it himself.

  ‘We can’t leave yet. And I have to get something.’

  God how he wants to leave. To be in Egypt, in a cool house in the heat of the day, lying with Ester in the soft light coming through the orange curtains, Sofia asleep beside him in her crib.

  Hard to believe the same world can hold that heaven and this hell. He thought he was prepared, but it turns out hell is unimaginable to most human beings. They don’t have the material to work with. But Sofia was beginning to see it, just as she finally became fully part of it. From time to time Abraham looks across at his daughter, this young woman – barely a woman – who has killed a man and thinks, I owe my life to her.

  ‘Slow down,’ she says, peering into the darkness, and after another few hundred yards, ‘Here. I think this is it. Close enough.’

  Abraham cuts the engine and the headlights. All he can see is what appear to be houses across maybe a hundred yards of field or scrub. A row of houses, lit windows in just three of them. The clock on the dashboard says two in the morning.

  Sofia picks up her gun from the footwell and opens the door; the interior light comes on and instantly she reaches up to turn it off. As she leaves she tells Abraham to wait here, that she won’t be long, but the thought of losing her now, after all this, is a new kind of pain to him. He’d rather die with her than be left alone.

  ‘I’m coming.’

  ‘This will be easy. Wait here. You have a gun.’

  Abraham takes the gun – his gun – gets down from the cab and walks round to her side.

  ‘Tell me what you’re doing.’

  The moon is just a crescent and he can barely see her eyes, but determination radiates from her.

  ‘I have to pick someone up. Before we go.’

  ‘Where is this?’

  ‘You don’t recognize it?’

  Abraham shakes his head. He’s sure he’s never been here before, and the thought that he might be losing bits of his memory scares him.

  ‘Stay here. If you see anyone with a gun, shoot him. But you won’t.’

  ‘I’m coming with you.’

  ‘You can’t protect me here.’

  ‘We’re here together.’

  She relents, and sets off towards the houses. The terrain turns out to be much more broken than he had thought, rutted and rocky, and each time he misjudges a step the jolt sends pain to every part of his body. But he stays upright, and doesn’t drop too far behind Sofia, who manages to move through the night in her niqab with the gun across her back as if this is her natural state.

  At some point, as they draw near, Abraham realizes where they are.

  He puts his hand on her shoulder, holds her back.

  ‘They’ll kill you. Leave him.’

  ‘I’m not here for Borz.’

  Sofia motions for him to stand by the back door and guard it. Somehow he understands her perfectly, and as he takes up his position she whispers that she’ll be two minutes, no more, and goes up the three or four steps to the house and then inside.

  From the moment I see the light I don’t like it. No one should be up now. But I will not turn back. I will not fail anyone else.

  For maybe a minute I wait in the passage between the kitchen and the garage and listen. Nothing, not a sound, not from the front where there will be two brothers standing guard, and not from the kitchen, even when I press my ear to the door.

  I open the door slowly, slowly, pressing down as evenly as I can on the handle and willing it not to creak. It leads into a laundry, and the door into the kitchen is open a crack. Hafa is there, at the head of the table, facing me, deep in her phone. In her dressing gown. Apparently it’s her turn in exile, but I don’t have time to wonder why.

  I can’t risk her speaking. As far as I know, the door from the kitchen to the rest of the house is open and the noise will go straight up those stairs to Borz. Paralysed, I go round and round the problem in my head, and in the end all I can do is step into the room with my finger to my lips.

  ‘I’ve come for Zarifa. Let me take her.’

  I whisper it as quietly as I can, and we look at each other, and there’s no love there, none at all. If she felt threatened by me before she hasn’t relaxed now the threat has gone. She doesn’t say anything, just keeps her eyes on mine, and I think we understand each other. I think. She’s tough, but that look has changed. If I was guessing I’d say she still hates me but not as much as she hates Borz.

  I don’t like to turn my back on her but I have no choice. From the kitchen I start across the hall, careful with every step, there’s just enough light from the kitchen to see by, and then I’m by Zarifa’s door and here I don’t hesitate, I go right in, take a step inside and whisper her name.

  Her breathing is loud, almost snoring. The room stinks of unchanged air and sweat and the things Borz does in here.

  ‘Zarifa.’

  She’s not waking. I close the door behind me and feel on the wall for the light switch.

  The room is tiny, and Borz is asleep on the single bed. I don’t see Zarifa at first, she’s lying on the floor in the gap between the bed and the far wall, and she doesn’t move. Borz does. Thick with sleep, eyes screwed up, he turns his head to me. I need a knife, a chisel, but all I have is this stupid gun and if I fire it the brothers will be in here in an instant and I’ll get us all killed. I should just switch the light off and go, run past Hafa into the night, but what kind of human being would I be then? I’ve made mistakes but I’ve never been a coward.

  I step back and point the gun at Borz, whose eyes are now awake, completely awake, and drilling right into the heart of me. Right now, just woken up, staring at a gun and the wife he’s planning to kill in the morning he shows nothing, total calm, like a lizard, like a stone.

  I have no idea how I’m going to do this.

  ‘Zarifa. Get up.’

  She’s awake, I doubt she’s slept, and she’s pulled herself into the corner, her arms round her knees.

  ‘We’re going.’

  I look at her quickly, show her she can trust
me, keep my gun on Borz’s heart.

  ‘Now. We’re going.’

  As I look back to Borz his hand swipes up and knocks the end of the gun away and then he’s up and as hard as I push at him I stand no chance, his hand’s on my throat and the other is ripping my gun away from me. He lifts me up off the ground by my neck and no breath will go in, I’m going to die here now, of course he will be the one, in this room, full of his stink, his own pit of hell. I won’t look at him. I won’t give him the pleasure.

  Two minutes go by. Abraham has no watch and he’s in no state to count but it’s been at least two minutes, maybe five now. In his hands and around his neck the gun weighs heavy. Such a simple thing to work, and so difficult to use.

  He steps inside the passage, listens, hears nothing. One of the two doors ahead of him is open; he steps through it and listens again, and now there’s noise, indistinct and far off, that he strains to catch.

  Slowly, gun first, he heads towards the light, and finds himself in a kitchen – fitted, jarringly banal, it’s like walking back into his flat in London – and standing the other side of the white-topped table a woman in a dressing gown with a kitchen knife in her hand, the blade up and uncertainly in front of her. She’s walking towards the door into the house but as she sees Abraham she stops, fear in her face, and at the same moment there’s a thud from outside and a sort of cry. Abraham and the woman exchange looks and it’s clear from the confusion in her face that whatever’s happening she’s not part of it. Abraham drops the barrel of the gun, then makes for the door himself.

  He’s barely taken a step when Borz is there. Naked, giant, demonic, taking up almost the whole frame, a machine gun in one hand and Sofia by the neck in the other, her eyes half screwed shut in pain. By instinct, Abraham raises the gun but as if reflecting the action Borz calmly brings his gun across himself so that the barrel sticks into the soft flesh under Sofia’s chin. His eyes cut through Abraham; now they terrify him.

  Borz shakes his head like a weary parent bringing play to an end.

  ‘No more.’ His words are like rocks.

  Abraham can take no more. It feels like the end. From fatigue alone he keeps the gun on Borz, who circles round the other side of the table, pulling Sofia after him. He seems to be making for a phone on the counter. The other woman, the wife if that’s what she is, has let the knife drop to her side and is standing by the cooker looking dazed and out of place, barely even a witness. She glances at Abraham, up at Borz’s face, then down at the ground.

  ‘Now. Finish. Over.’

  Through her pain Sofia looks at Abraham and he knows what the look means. Kill him. Don’t worry about me. Put a stop to this man.

  But he can’t. Doesn’t even trust himself to shoot the right person, with a gun like this, in this tiny space, and so he lowers the barrel and accepts the death he’s been imagining: tomorrow, in the full sun, dressed in orange, beside and in the same instant as his daughter.

  Borz looks over his shoulder, pushes Sofia so that she stumbles into the table, and reaches for the phone behind him. As he places it to his ear the other wife brings her hand up, Abraham barely sees it, and the knife sinks into Borz’s side, up towards his heart; blood spurts from the wound down her arm and onto the table. Rage and shock twisting the thick pig skin of his face, the knife still stuck in him up to the handle, Borz swipes at the wife, his chest and belly suddenly rigid. The back of his hand cracks her cheek and she falls. Borz lifts the gun and brings his arm across but now he’s on his own, in the clear, just him and the gun, and Abraham, without thinking, fires. The first bullets puncture his chest like blots of red ink, and Abraham keeps his hand on the trigger until the torso is more blood than flesh and Borz’s face stops protesting and then stops altogether.

  Silence and gun smoke fill the room. Borz is propped against the cooker, eyes dead, mouth open, still supported by his massive frame. Sofia is the first to move.

  ‘Go!’ she says, to Abraham, who’s staring at Borz, ears ringing, eyes in shock. ‘Dad! Now!’

  Through his stupor Abraham can hear shouting and knocking somewhere outside, a commotion of voices. Sofia moves round the table, disappears through the door into the hall and reappears just a second later dragging a young girl behind her. A shot cracks the silence and the door frame splinters as she comes through it.

  ‘Go!’

  Abraham turns and starts to run. Behind him he hears his daughter.

  ‘Come with us.’

  ‘You killed him,’ says the wife. ‘Why should I run?’

  More shots. The three of them run across the yard, scramble into the darkness.

  6

  I’m in black, they can’t see me, not out here. As soon as I’m past the light coming from the house I’m safe, but Zarifa is wearing white and my father’s conspicuous enough. Bullets begin to tear past us, wailing above the brothers’ shouts. I’ve heard them when they’re just working each other up into a frenzy but this is different, they’re furious, and scared, because they were meant to be keeping Borz safe.

  I’m faster than the others, and I stop to let them catch up, make sure they’re okay, watch to see who is behind us. Zarifa has no shoes but she’s light and she moves okay across the broken ground. I can make out one brother standing in the back doorway, flashes of fire coming from his gun, it’s difficult to tell but I’m guessing he can’t see any of us now. He’s not coming after us, he’s just standing there. My poor father is stumbling so much, it seems wrong to see him struggle with his weakness in the same moment that he has finally been proved strong. What he needs is rest, and peace, and here in the night I vow to give it to him.

  But not yet. We have so far to go.

  The 4x4 is maybe four hundred metres from the house and we’re closing on it when I hear a car’s engine off to our right and in a moment the light from its headlamps shows past the last house in the row. Then it appears, beams cutting through the night, skidding in the dust and fishtailing towards the 4x4. I think I see a brother leaning out of the window, sitting on the sill like they do, gun in hand.

  We’ll never make it. By the time we get to the car and open the doors and get the engine started, even if Dad wasn’t in this state, they’ll have torn us all in two.

  ‘Stop!’

  I hold out an arm and pull them both round.

  ‘Follow me.’

  I hope to God I can find it again. I’m sure I saw it as we crossed this ground to the house, but there’s so little light, and what there is isn’t where I need it. For a moment I think I’ve missed it and my heart sinks because any moment we’re going to be picked up by the headlights and then we’re gone. The ground is so broken it could be anywhere. But then in the darkness I see a patch that’s darker and I can feel fresh adrenaline pumping through me, I didn’t know I had any left.

  ‘Here. Down there.’

  Zarifa goes first, I help her down. My father takes a moment because he’s still in pain, I can see it in every movement, but I have to hurry him, get in, hurry, we’ve got to go. I jump down and push them both towards the deep darkness.

  Soon none of us can see a thing. Not each other, not a hand in front of our face. The tunnel is maybe four feet high so even I have to crouch.

  ‘Move down. Quickly.’

  Together we claw our way a few feet further inside and then I shh them and we all stop. When I look back the entrance is a grey disc and it grows brighter and darker as the car sweeps its lights across the ground. It’s so rough up there they may not see it, I pray they don’t. I can tell that in the darkness we’re all praying for the same thing. As if from a mile away I hear shouts, muted by the earth, and a door slamming, and two shots, one right after another, like they think they’ve seen someone. Then more shouting, and the engine revs and I can feel the vibrations through the ground as the car races away.

  For maybe a full two minutes we sit and listen and breathe. When I whisper, it’s so quiet I can barely hear it myself.

  ‘We need the
car. But they may have left someone there.’

  Above us I can hear airstrikes somewhere across the city, not so far away, the walls of earth shake. Suddenly I’m exhausted, and I just want to stay here in the dark until it’s safe to go out. Wait until the khilafa is built and the men who built it gone. Wait forever.

  ‘Where does this go?’

  I tell him I don’t know. It runs parallel to Borz’s street, and most of these tunnels are round the perimeter of the city where they’re easy to dig, like a ring road round Raqqa. But I have no idea where this one comes out, and we need to get right across town.

  ‘Do you know what time it is?’

  ‘The clock in the car said two when we arrived.’

  The sun comes up at seven. It could be five miles round the outside, it could be more. But if we try to go through town we’ll be dead. Even if we weren’t on the run we’d be dead, a woman with no veil and a gun on her back, and a Yazidi girl, and an Egyptian who’s limping and in pain. I could brave it, make out the others are my prisoners, march them at gunpoint, but by now the brothers may have raised the alarm. But then I wouldn’t want to be the one to tell an officer that Borz was dead before I’d found and killed the people who killed him. And no one uses the tunnels at night.

  ‘Come on.’

  I squeeze past the others so that I can lead from the front. I take the gun from my father, then I feel for my shoes in the dark, pull them off and reach out to Zarifa.

  ‘It’s okay,’ I tell her, and together we manage to put them on her feet.