My Name Is Not Jacob Ramsay (7 page)

"When?" Rebecca asked.

"I don't know. Could be tomorrow. Sometime this week anyway."

"Is there any money in it for you?"

"Yeah, but I don't know how much. It all depends on what information I give them, I suppose. I'll find out more when I meet up with them," Michael replied.

"I'd like a Jamie Oliver book for my birthday," Rebecca randomly stated, as she reverted to watching the television.

"Which one? He has so many," Michael asked.

"Not the American one or the garden one. Something traditional."

"Does he have a traditional cook book?"

"He must do." She finished her wine and settled the glass down, lightly prodding the stem with her fingertips, pushing it away from the edge. She yawned, covering her mouth with the back of her hand.

"That was a mega yawn," Michael observed.

Rebecca grasped his face gently, kissed his nose, and released it again.

"And that was a warm, yawn hand on my face," he continued.

She grinned a beautiful smile.

"Oh, no," he said.

"What?" asked Rebecca, as she looked at his suddenly disappointed expression.

He quickly pulled up her top to expose her stomach, nestled his face into her belly button and blew a big, squidgy sounding raspberry, lasting four or five seconds. He covered her stomach up and exhaled.

"It's a condition. It comes and goes. It could have been worse," he said.

"Yeah, it could have been your belly. All fluffy and hairy," she yawned again, arching her neck slightly.

"Right, Monkey Pants. Shall we do bedtime?" Michael asked.

"Mm, I'm tired. Been a stressy day," she replied. "Race you to the bathroom."

Rebecca rolled off the sofa and conducted a trot-like walk to the bathroom.

Michael smiled, collected the TV remote control and zapped it onto Sky News.

The Sony television was an oversized beast of technology. Black and silver and as sturdy as an ox. A motionless, frozen, black and silver metal and plastic, electrical ox. Carrying that beast up to their flat was backbreaking hell. Michael's mind recounted that very day whenever he looked at that TV. He smiled. The memory exhausted him.

Rebecca had stood at the top of the carpeted stairs, looking on in a combined state of amazed horror and concern at a hunched Michael, with his claw-like hands practically becoming one with the side of the television set. His blue eyes had bulged at the weight, clearly evident upon his reddening, sweaty face. Michael remembered the shady Rastafarian man who'd assisted him from the car to the hallway, but gave up far too quickly. He was clearly deceived by the Rasta's bulky frame and glistening Reebok tracksuit and spotlessly clean Reebok Classics trainers. Obviously unqualified in the carrying of ridiculously heavy television sets. Michael set about, frantically out of breath, knocking on his new neighbours' doors. The only one to answer was none other than Gay Gary, an even slighter-framed and whiter-skinned man than Michael.

Gay Gary lived a floor below Rebecca and Michael and was extremely pleased to meet and assist his new neighbours, at least until he cast his eyes upon the mass of television blocking the communal hallway door.

Together Gay Gary and Michael had heaved the electronic bulk up four flights of carpeted stairs, through their front door, to their flat and up another set of stairs into their loft conversion, positioning it in the corner of the living area, where it had remained for a further four years.

A TV news report featured Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. There was a discussion on the terrorist groups that Iran supported, including Hezbollah and Lebanese Shiite militants, as well as Palestinian Islamic Jihad and Hamas.

An expert spoke on the various organisations and revealed some minor facts that stimulated Michael momentarily. He revealed the following: Hezbollah is Arabic and means "Party of God". Primarily based in Lebanon, they are a paramilitary Shi'a Islamist organisation. Some stated supporters of the late Lebanese Shiite resistance leader Sheikh Ragheb Harb to be the founders of Hezbollah. Ragheb Harb was killed by the Israelis on February 16th 1984. 

Michael yawned and stood up from the sofa. He turned off the television and closed his Mac Book down. On his way to the fridge freezer, he opened the door and fumbled inside the lower drawer to retrieve an orange plastic Sainsbury's carrier bag, placing it upon the side. Michael filled the kettle and switched off the light, making his way into the bathroom where he stared at his reflection. He tweezed out an in-growing hair from his neck, just below his jaw line. The metal point of the tweezers scrolled over his delicate skin gently, but drew blood. His thumb smeared the blood down his neck. Michael continued to lightly scrape the tip of his instrument over and over until he caught his prize; hooking the black hair from under his skin. It dangled like a piece of cotton thread. Michael pinched his thumb and forefinger and pulled the hair tight, slowly dragging it from within its blood-filled comfort zone of a home. Michael inspected the hair held in the metallic clasp of the tweezers. He was somewhat proud as he eyed it, like a fisherman and their grand catch of the day. Beauty! He looked into the mirror at his messy, bloodstained face. A reddish brown streak of faint dried blood was smeared from his jaw and down one side of his neck.

Nasif Farah was of the Hazara people of Afghanistan. He made up the trio of Afghani students sitting, as they regularly did, against the far wall of the kitchen at Michael's workplace. His shoulders were rounded and his face thin, humbled and pained. His eyes told tales of trauma and a lifetime of serving others. Nasif sat by the water cooler and handed his fellow Afghan students - Abdul Rah-Maan and the streetwise and very tall Rabee - a plastic cup of cold water each.

They took it and sipped the water. Like a servant, Nasif sat. He stood up when Michael entered the room and cast his eyes upon the only three students in the room.

Michael smiled and greeted each Afghani as he did without fail every morning. Nasif always held Michael's hands with both of his own and in his extremely poor, not even broken, English, he managed a "Goo-man." Whether this was "good man" or "good morning" remained uncertain to Michael, however, to him, it was a pleasantry nonetheless. He looked into Nasif's sad eyes that so wanted to be filled with hope.

Nasif had been a student here for over a year. He was too vulnerable to be simply transferred to a mainstream school. He wouldn't have coped with their curriculum. He looked like a withered old man. Wrinkled and beaten by the weather, and goodness knows what else. The team had deliberately kept him for as long as they could. To protect him. To give him life skills. To give him love. His first word to Michael had been simply "America?" As if it were a question.

Michael told him that he was safe, though "America" was uttered continuously until Michael led Nasif to a map and pointed to the United Kingdom and said, "England. This is England." Nasif frowned and hugged Michael, wrapping his thin, scarecrow-like arms around Michael's own slight frame.

Helmand Province in Afghanistan was where Nasif grew up. Due to his fellow Afghani students not fully understanding the Dari language Nasif spoke, it was unclear through the various translations whether Nasif was born mentally retarded or had been psychologically scarred in the war-torn country he had fled from.

Michael wondered about this and then his mind raced onto whether him even thinking the term "mentally retarded" was politically correct or not, as the PC Brigade were forever changing once suitably accepted phrases. Mentally challenged / developmentally challenged / Mentally Handicapped / Learning Disability, or even Cognitively Impaired. That's a good one too. To put it in the simplest of terms, Nasif Farah was a very slow thinker, but was incredibly reliable in the physical sense. Nasif had been an assistant to a cigarette seller on the streets of Helmand and also Kabul; a looked-down-upon Hazara who had suffered torment at every step of his life, in every town and country.

During an art session, Michael noticed Nasif was drawing eggs with feet and expressionless faces dotted around what looked like a hilly landscape. The task was for students to do their own version of Mondrian's Broadway Boogie Woogie. A colourful account of Manhattan on a grid, so titled because of Mondrian's love of the Boogie Woogie dance.

Nasif had never touched a pencil before coming to England, let alone attended an art class or even school, so allowing him free run in class was acceptable and interesting for both staff and student.

"Maybe he's drawing children," suggested Helen.

"Ah, yes. Maybe," replied Michael, as they both stood near Nasif, who was pressing his pencil down hard upon the white cartridge paper. "Actually, there's a test, the Goodenough test. I think it's the Goodenough 'draw a man test' or something," Michael said, impressing and intriguing Helen. "I'm pretty sure it assesses a person's intelligence levels when they're asked to draw a man just by using a pencil and piece of paper. You get points on how accurately the man is drawn."

Helen nodded her head, thinking. "So we can assess Nasif's levels using this method, d'you think?"

"Maybe. I suppose," shrugged Michael.

He was correct. In fact, the method was created by Florence Laura Goodenough in 1926. Florence was an American pioneer in child psychology, and wrote the acclaimed books Measurement of Intelligence by Drawings and, in 1933, Handbook of Child Psychology. The method, previously known as the 'Goodenough Draw-A-Man Test' is today called the 'Goodenough-Harris Draw-A-Person Test.'

"You get points for various elements such as arms, legs, head, fingers, eyes, that kind of thing, and those points equal a person's mental age I believe," Michael said, as he and Helen lowered their eyes to Nasif's first ever drawing.

"We should call it 'Egg Men on a Hill'," smirked Michael.

Helen chuckled.

Nasif looked up at them as together they raised their thumbs in approval. Nasif scowled and shook his head. "Bad. Very bad," he said, impressing both Helen and Michael with this addition of two words to his English vocabulary.

"No, it's good. Good work, Nasif," Michael noted, gently patting him upon the back.

Helen raised her eyebrows and stepped to the door.

"I'm going to look up the Goodenough test thing. Good work on that, Mike," she nodded.

The Goodenough Test didn't do justice to Nasif in the study and accuracy of his mental age. Helen and Michael were wrong in thinking Nasif might possibly have had the mental age of a four or five year old just because he was drawing people resembling eggs with legs, or eggs on sticks, scattered around yellow and brown hills with small, red rocks. In fact, his drawing was an accurate depiction of the Afghan terrain where he once lived.

The egg people were real people. The egg shapes were their bodies, which had either two legs, one leg or no legs, along with two arms, one arm or no arms, as well as each having no head. Why didn't they have a head? It was because the red rocks on the yellow brown hills and on the ground were the heads. It was the aftermath of an air-strike by foreign forces, raining their bombs down upon Nasif's hometown, killing, maiming and blowing apart literally all of his friends and family. The scattered arms and legs, severed heads and the walking, hopping dying and dead surrounded Nasif as he returned to his home from selling cigarettes that day. His village, his home, had been obliterated.

Was Nasif Farah mentally challenged, developmentally challenged, learning impaired or simply disabled before the air-strike? Or had the slaughter of innocent farmers, women and children caused this trauma to the harmless, blameless and once pure mind of Nasif Farah? Maybe something else contributed to the Nasif Farah who Michael saw before him. For Nasif, it was a year long journey from Afghanistan through Iran, Syria, Egypt, Libya, Algeria, Morocco, Spain and France in order to reach England. How many lorries Nasif Farah had travelled inside before he arrived in the French town of Calais was uncertain. Even he couldn't recall exactly how many. What was certain and clearly evident to Michael was that Nasif Farah showed every sign that he had been abused. Physically, mentally and sexually.

Nasif Farah was scarred.

The squeal of a metal door howled like a distressed animal in the indigo night sky. The door was large and caught the moonlight in its sheer metal, shiny side.

A number of feet lined up and trod upon the dusty, stony ground before stepping up onto a horizontal metal plate. Some feet seemed to levitate into darkness.

The feet, some bare, some in running shoes, some in sandals, were all male and tanned in colour. Dirty and dusty with cuts and sores. The feet were Afghani feet. At the ankles were traditional Afghani clothing. The shalwar kameez, the dress tunic worn by men and women. Pyjama-like trousers. Wide and baggy. Some wore jogging pants and t-shirts.

The men climbed up into an awaiting truck. Some were yanked upwards, disappearing into a black hole. A portal to another time and hopefully a safer time.

The thin, wiry Nasif Farah in his pale coloured shalwar kameez and black leather sandals, was pulled up with a jerking motion by a larger, heftier Afghani man, dressed in similar garb.

The grip on Nasif's hand was tight and strong.

His look into Nasif's eyes was equally tight and equally strong.

Nasif smiled and looked behind him. A second-long glimpse of his homeland, Afghanistan. He took it all in.

The beautiful jagged mountains.

The bright and full moon.

The chilled night air.

Gone in an instant.

The door to the truck slammed shut leaving nothing but pitch black and shuffling feet and then the vehicle's engine started up.

The flame of a cheap plastic, disposable cigarette lighter flared up and flickered in the darkness. The tiny light captured several gasps and faces huddled in corners and along the sides.

With his knees held tight to his chest and eyes wide like a frightened dog on Fireworks Night, Nasif Farah looked at the big Afghani man holding the lighter.

He beckoned him over with the quick wag of his forefinger, threateningly.

Nasif's eyes glazed over.

The flame danced as it reflected in his pupils.

Other men, each in their late teens and early twenties, formed fearful faces.

"Hazara," said the big man to the Hazara Nasif Farah.

The Hazara were reviled by other races in the country. Blamed for apparent suicide bombing attacks on Coalition Forces and Afghan people, they were easy targets in a game of propaganda.

The Taliban took control of the city of Mazar-i-Sharif. It had been a massacre of thousands of Hazara people. Mullah Manan Niazi was the new Taliban governor and vowed to kill every Hazara.

"Hazaras are kuffar. They are not Muslim. They are Shia. They are Infidels," said Mullah Manan Niazi in a speech he made in one of the many mosques he visited.

Hazara were for female rights. They even had an equal number of female students in the country, engendering further hatred in the Taliban.

Afghan President, Hamid Karzai, was bringing Taliban members into his government, rapidly changing laws, leading them down the path towards getting rid of human rights, making it even more difficult for the Hazara people to live at all, let alone live a normal life.

A tracksuit-wearing Nasif Farah, inside that truck full of Afghan and also Iranian men, was en route to Calais, the town that had acquired the nickname of 'the Jungle'. He had travelled thousands of miles and was thinner than ever. His expression was trance-like as several flames from cigarette lighters jerked this way and that.

The big Afghan man pulled up a pair of dirty white underpants over his hairy backside and buckled a belt to a pair of blue jeans.

The other men inside tried their hardest not to look at him.

A tear rolled down Nasif's cheek.

There were close to a thousand people inside the camp, based on the outskirts of Calais. It was all due to the closure of the Red Cross Reception Centre in nearby Sangatte.

Authorities in France and the UK had hoped that the removal of the centre would decrease the number of migrants determined to cross into England. They couldn't have been more wrong.

It was Nicolas Sarkozy, the then Interior Minister, who closed the camp.

A single tap on the roadside gave the mainly Afghan men drinking water. Rows of blue and grey tarpaulin sheets flapped in the wind. Dirty bodies infected the air. Their clothes were stained by goodness knows what and the stench of desperation was ever-present. Makeshift toilets had been constructed out of wood and plastic. Five or six men shared tent-like structures, assembled from cardboard and corrugated iron sheets and tarpaulin. Blue light from the plastic sheeting above shone down on Nasif Farah as he knelt on a piece of carpet, with several other men, praying to a God who would hopefully listen to them. It cost each of them hundreds and more often thousands of dollars just to get to this stage of their journey to the UK. How on Earth could the recently-orphaned son of a peasant farmer from Afghanistan have paid his way through all those countries in order to reach the goal of safety in the United Kingdom? Nasif Farah had been there for six months.

An Eastern European truck left the port of Dover and rumbled towards the A2 road of southern England. An ancient Celtic route that the Romans developed further still, with Anglo-Saxons calling it Wæcelinga Stræt. It was renamed into modern English as Watling Street and simply meant "a paved road". Britons used this as the main route between Canterbury and St Albans.

The Romans paved the track, using it as their gateway from London to Dover.

The Polish driver of the truck frowned when he heard a loud thumping noise from within the trailer. He slowed his vehicle down, pulled it over to the hard shoulder and clambered out of his cab, rounding to the rear.

The metal strip security seal had been bent and twisted. It was broken, and the additional metal cable which should have hooked into a fixed U-shaped loop had been cut.

The driver tightened his face, disappointed and disheartened. He reached up and opened the rear doors, like it had happened to him before; like it happened to him often.

A casually-dressed North African man leapt out the back, followed by several Iranian men, each nodding their head to the driver.

The driver retrieved a cigarette from a pack of L&Ms and placed it between his lips. He delved into his jean pocket and pulled a Zippo lighter, looking up to see Nasif Farah awkwardly making his way out of the truck.