A Little Piece of Ground (14 page)

Hassan Aboudi came out of the kitchen at that moment and joined in the inquisition. The tempest intensified and raged unabated for what seemed to Karim to be hours. Farah, her dark eyes snapping with pleasurable curiosity, abandoned her game with Sireen and watched closely. Sireen tugged at Lamia's trouser leg, hating the sound of the loud voices and hoping to be picked up.

It wasn't until Jamal arrived, walking unawares into the eye of the storm, that things began to ease. He stood inside the door, listening, then stepped forward.

“It's all right, Mama. Karim was out with Joni. I saw them. They were just playing around.”

His parents' attention switched to him. The atmosphere cooled a little.

“With Joni? Why didn't he say so?”

Karim hunched a resentful shoulder.

“You didn't give me the chance to say a word.”

“Don't speak to your mother in that tone of voice,” snapped his father.

“If I were you,” Jamal said lightly, daring a little laugh, “I wouldn't say anything at all.”

His parents glared at him. Jamal spread out his hands placatingly.

“He's twelve, Baba. He's been in a fight, I bet. You won't get anything out of him. Why don't you send him off to have a shower? I can smell him from here. He's killing my appetite. What's it going to be, Mama? I thought I smelled meatballs.”

Karim took his cue and bolted for the bathroom. He stripped off his clothes and stood under the shower, amazed at Jamal's cool brilliance, and deeply grateful. The water, sluicing down his body, was washing out more than the grit and grime of an eventful day. The terror on the rooftop had left a jagged residue in his mind, a kind of wound, but when he stepped out of the shower and toweled himself dry he felt almost healed. He realized that he was starving and very tired.

He picked up the bundle of dirty clothes on the bathroom floor, ready to dump them into the basket by the washing machine, and then he hesitated. Next time he went to Hopper's ground he'd probably get just as dirty. He couldn't face a fight like this every day.

I'll take some old clothes over there that Mama won't miss, he thought, and hide them in the car.

The cleverness of the idea made him feel good. He wrapped a towel around himself, dropped his dirty clothes in the basket and went to his bedroom.

“I owe you for that, Jamal,” he said.

Jamal was writing something at the table. He didn't respond.

“I spoke to Joni,” Karim went on. “He's going to get that photo for you.”

Jamal whipped around.

“You didn't tell him why?”

“Course not.” Karim had anticipated this. “I told him it was for a project on young people in Ramallah. For school.”

“You're a good kid. Where were you this afternoon, anyway?”

Karim looked cautious.

“With Joni, like you said. You didn't actually see us?”

“No. It was a fair guess, though.”

Karim hesitated. He wanted to tell Jamal about Hopper's fake bomb and the helicopter on the roof. Jamal would have been full of admiration, he knew. On the other hand, there were limits to brotherly trust. Next time Jamal wanted to get even, he'd probably tell their parents everything.

“Supper's ready!” Lamia called out, resolving his dilemma.

Karim scrambled into a clean white T-shirt and the brothers went into the kitchen, sitting down side by side at the table in a mood of rare harmony.

It wasn't until the next afternoon that Karim was able to slip off again. His mother had gone to the university very early, expecting long hold-ups at the Israeli checkpoint on the road, but Hassan Aboudi seemed in no hurry to go out too. He spread his accounts out on the big table in the living room and pored over them, his forehead creased with worry.

“Is the shop still closed, Baba?” Karim asked timidly.

“Until later on this morning. I'll be getting a delivery in then. Come to think of it, since you've got nothing better to do, you can come down and help me. There's still a lot of cleaning up to do.”

Karim bit his lip, annoyed with himself.

In the end, though, he quite enjoyed helping out in the shop. The worst of the mess had been cleared up and the stock was beginning to look good again, the microwave ovens, irons, fans and blenders gleaming on the shelves. The delivery had miraculously arrived, in spite of all the expected obstacles, and Hassan Aboudi's black mood lifted for a while as he made room for the new items, unpacking one or two for display and stowing the remainder tidily at the back of the shop.

“You can hop along now, Karim,” he said at last. “No more fighting, OK?” And he actually squeezed Karim's shoulders in an understanding hug, which made Karim feel guilty, confused and affectionate all at the same time.

From under the counter, he retrieved the plastic bag containing the worn old clothes, which he had secreted there on his arrival, and tore off. It was so late that Joni must have been out of school for ages by now. He'd have been down at Hopper's ground for hours already.

When he arrived, breathless from having run all the way, he thought at first that the place was deserted. He looked around, disappointed, then heard murmuring coming from where the car was buried in the mound of rubble. Carefully, so as not to dirty the favorite faded jeans he was wearing, he wormed his way between the rubbish until he was looking in through the side of the car.

Joni was crouching inside it alone. He was dangling a strip of meat in front of one of the kittens, who was trying to snatch at it with outstretched paws. The mother, wary but unafraid, lay licking herself, reclining against the back seat in luxurious ease.

“They're so cool, these kittens,” Joni said, looking up briefly at Karim. “This one's the liveliest. I'm calling him Ginger. There's another one, a little one that's really weak. I've tried to feed her but she doesn't take it easily.”

Karim watched as Ginger hooked the strip of meat on the point of a sharp little claw, twitching it out of Joni's fingers. He shifted his weight, afraid of getting a cramp.

“I've got to change,” he said. “I brought some old clothes. Mama had a fit when she saw me last night.”

He wriggled back away from the car. Joni followed him.

“So did mine. You would have thought I'd committed some awful crime. Murder or something. Good idea to bring some old clothes. I wish I'd thought of it.”

“I'm going to leave them here. Hide them in the car.”

Joni nodded.

“Cool. I'll do that too.”

“Where's Hopper?”

“I don't know. He didn't come.”

Karim looked around, needing a place to change. It wasn't hard to find one. The mountains of rubble along the edge of Hopper's ground had plenty of angles where he could hide without a risk of being seen. He emerged a moment later in a faded old T-shirt and some old combat trousers of Jamal's that he knew would never be missed. Joni was pulling something out of his schoolbag.

“What's that?” asked Karim.

“A photo. Of my sister. Like you wanted.”

He sounded doubtful.

“Here, let's see.”

Karim took the photo out of Joni's unwilling hand and burst out laughing.

“You've got to be joking!”

The photo was a soft-focus studio shot. Violette was posed against a rose-covered arch. Her head was tilted to one side and her cheek was resting on her hand. She was gazing soulfully into the camera. It was perfect, exactly the sort of romantic garbage that Jamal would probably love, except for one thing. Someone had scribbled a mustache on Violette's upper lip and drawn a crude pair of glasses around her eyes.

“I thought it would be super-easy,” Joni said. “Like I told you, there are millions of pictures of Violette. The only thing was, I'd forgotten that she and her stupid friends have this craze for albums. They stick everything into them. I hunted high and low, I promise you, and this photo was the only one not in an album that I could find, except for all the framed ones Mama's stuck around the apartment, and I could hardly take one of those, could I?”

“Who did the glasses and stuff?”

“Me.” Joni looked embarrassed. “It was months ago. I was mad, and I just grabbed a marker and did it.”

“It's a marker then, not a ball point pen?” Karim held the photo up to his eyes and scrutinized it closely.

“Yes.”

“Well, it might rub off. Marker doesn't stick well on this shiny paper. He sat down on a stone, put Joni's bag on his knee and rested the photo on it. Then he licked his finger and began to rub at the mustache.

“You're rubbing out the picture,” said Joni, staring critically over his shoulder.

“Only a bit. It's coming off, look.”

He held the photo up. There was a slightly odd look now to Violette's mouth, a black shadow on her upper lip, as if she was a man who hadn't shaved for a while, but it was definitely an improvement.

Karim began to work on the glasses. Joni, in the first flush of his rage, had pressed harder here. The black marks were coming away, but more of the photo was too. Violette now looked a little owl-like, with grey rings and white rub marks circling her eyes. The effect was odd, though it was hard to say quite why.

“We could touch it up a bit maybe, to get the color right,” said Joni, reaching into his bag. He pulled out his pencil case and gave it to Karim.

Karim selected a cream-colored crayon and began to work over the erased areas. His tongue, flickering at the corner of his mouth, showed his concentration. He finished at last, and held the photo up for Joni's approval.

“If you hold it away, and half shut your eyes,” said Joni, “it sort of looks OK.”

Karim nodded.

“It's a photo anyway. It's obviously Violette. What more does the fool want? Thanks a million, Joni. You've saved my life. I can get Lineman back now.”

Footsteps made them turn. Hopper was coming towards them.

“Hi,” he said shortly.

“Hello,” said Karim. He nearly added, “Where have you been?” but Hopper's face was closed and set, repelling curiosity.

“Aren't we going to get started?” Hopper said, looking at the others disapprovingly, as if he'd expected transformations to have taken place by now.

“Doing what?” asked Joni.

Hopper didn't answer. He stood tensely with his arms crossed, looking around. The others, bereft of ideas, waited.

“We should make our base safer, hide it more,” Hopper said at last. “This way they'd find it easily if they came to look for us.”

“Conceal the entrance, you mean?” said Karim.

He was looking at an old oil drum as he spoke. He walked across to it and peered inside. It was half filled with earth and stones. He pushed at it, but it didn't move.

“Come and help me, you two,” he called over his shoulder. “We can roll it if we tip it over.”

They heaved the drum onto its side and rolled it towards the car.

“If we get it upright again,” said Karim, “we could bank stuff around it and get a whole lot more things, and make a sort of passageway, with a kink in it, running up to the place where you crawl into the car. You'd only see how to get in if you came right up and looked closely.”

Joni's mind was leaping ahead.

“We need a few more drums. Two or three at least.”

“Not in a row, though,” objected Karim. “They'd look too obvious.”

He was already bounding over to another oil drum that was lying on its side, half buried under loose earth. He was pulling at the top of it, trying to shift it. The others went to help him. They tugged at it, and showers of dust and small stones spattered them as the oil drum suddenly came free, then they arranged it artistically to hide the entrance to the car.

“That's so good,” Joni said. “We just need one more—”

“Not now,” said Karim impatiently. “Where's the ball? Let's play.”

Hopper picked up Joni's wrist to look at his watch.

“I can't stay long. I'll have to go in a minute.”

“Why?” Joni sounded disappointed.

“My mother needs me,” Hopper said awkwardly.

The other two said nothing.

“She went to Jerusalem today,” Hopper said, “to visit my brother Salim.”

“What's he doing in Jerusalem?” asked Joni.

“He's in prison. In al-Muskobiya.”

Karim shuddered. Everyone knew of the tortures inflicted on Palestinian prisoners in the notorious Israeli prison.

“When did they take him?” asked Joni.

“A month ago.” Hopper took a deep breath. “Me and Salim were at a checkpoint. This soldier, a woman, she told Salim to show his ID. It was pouring and the ground was all wet and muddy. Anyway, he gave his card to her and she just held it out and dropped it in the mud. Then she told him to pick it up.”