One Secret Summer (5 page)

A few hours later, they stumbled out of the UNHCR offices with a tent, a few blankets and a small parcel of food that was
intended to last them the weekend. Hassan’s shoulders were slumped. The process had defeated him. The aid workers who staffed
the various agencies that had been set up in Hartishek to deal with the thickening stream of desperate refugees seemed unable
to distinguish between him, a prosperous, educated, middle-class Somali with a string of degrees and a successful business,
and the nomads who wandered in off the Ogaden every day with their goats. They spoke to him as if he’d never held a fork or
knife in his life, except perhaps in killing. His university degrees meant nothing to them – bought, most likely, one young
girl’s expression implied. Again, it was Niela who stepped in to spare her father any further humiliation. She collected the
blankets and food, found the way to the bare patch they’d been allocated in between what felt like a million other people
and dispatched her brothers to find water. On instruction from Hassan, she paid off the driver out of the cash they’d brought
with them and told him to return the truck to Mohammed Osman. She watched him drive back down the dusty road, biting down
hard on the impulse to run after him and beg him to take her away –
any
where. Anywhere would be better than this.

Their new neighbours, an extended family from south of Mogadishu, immediately offered what help they could. It took them a
couple of hours to erect the tent. Niela and her brothers arranged the bedding and the few personal effects they’d managed
to bring with them. By mid-afternoon, when the sun was
finally beginning to lose its ferocious heat, the Adens had a new home. A tent, but still a home. It was hot and dusty and
the constant noise surrounding them was deafening at times, but it was also a comfort of sorts. Here in the camp they were
literally one family amongst thousands – but there was unexpected solace in the thought that they were all experiencing the
same displacement and confusion together. No one here was spared. Doctors and lawyers rubbed shoulders and shared the ablution
block with watchmen and taxi drivers – here they were all equally dispossessed. And, as Niela reminded her mother, at least
they were safe. There were no marauding militia, no random gunmen, no gangs. The burly UN soldiers who patrolled the borders
of the camp looked as though they meant business. Raageh and Korfa discussed their guns excitedly. They were still young enough
to treat their escape from Somalia as an adventure, but there was something in her mother’s silence and the set of her father’s
mouth that worried Niela. She had never seen her father – or her mother, for that matter – in that light. Without his pharmacies
and the automatic deference his successful businesses afforded him, he seemed lost. It was painful and frightening to watch.
Now that they’d finally arrived in Ethiopia, his task was to get the family from Hartishek to Addis Ababa and from there to
Vienna, but Niela was already wondering if he had the necessary strength to continue their fight. Her uncle, Hassan’s younger
brother Raageh, who lived in Vienna with his Austrian wife, was doing everything he could to secure their visas, but the bureaucratic
processes by which Somalis were allowed to leave Ethiopia seemed insurmountable. It was only their first day, Niela thought,
swallowing hard. Perhaps her father would recover from the shock in the next few days.

As she lay awake that first night listening to the faint sound of her father’s worry beads being passed from finger to finger
and the soft, shallow breaths of her mother, a feeling of terror stole over her. In the corner of the tent was a small transistor
radio, a couple of cooking pots and two or three books her brothers had thought to snatch as they fled. Those objects, unwitting
symbols
of the life they’d left behind, were all they had to reassure themselves of where they’d come from, and, more importantly,
Niela suddenly saw, what they were. Now, more than ever, they had to hold on to those things. If they didn’t, they would soon
be lost.

But if there was terror at where they’d found themselves, there was also something else. In the first few days after their
arrival, cut off entirely from the routine of family, friends, school and work, they were free to roam around the vast, tented
camp city that stretched to the horizon. Niela’s mother began to insert herself into the community of veiled women who organised
the food in the camp, either for their individual families, or, more often, for the small clusters of neighbouring tents that
grouped themselves according to a whole set of criteria that Niela had hitherto never understood – language, class, relations,
extended families, tribal ties … anything that would bring some sense of order or community to the place they now called home.
After a week, Niela began to see that for all its ramshackle air, the camp was surprisingly well organised. Former shop-owners,
teachers, mechanics, builders and doctors were all trying to make for themselves a life that bore some marginal resemblance
to what they’d left behind. There were makeshift clinics and schools; barbers set up chairs under sheets of tarpaulin; enterprising
tailors operated pedal-driven sewing machines and women clubbed together to cook. Anything to avoid having to wait meekly
and helplessly for handouts. Some families profited – those that had been lucky or clever enough to understand that they would
be leaving Somalia for years rather than months and had thought to bring with them things that would really help: jewellery
and cash, which were infinitely more useful than food and clothes. Sadly Hassan had had no such foresight, but by the end
of their first week, it had somehow been established that his knowledge of medicines and drugs could usefully be traded for
other things – cigarettes, food and precious toiletries.

To her surprise, Niela’s gift for languages and the written
word was equally useful. She was able to help a few of their neighbours who could neither read nor write to compose letters
to the various agencies in charge of refugees, make appeals, push for one commodity or another and generally move their precariously
slow cases forward. It didn’t take much, she noticed with a growing sense of awe, to swap one existence for another. In Mogadishu,
where she’d lived all her life, she’d been a normal, regular high school student with relatively liberal parents and a nice
comfortable home. Three meals on the table every day and clean clothes folded away neatly in the chest of drawers that stood
in the corner of her bedroom. She’d had posters on her wall of pop stars and actors, and the pretty lace coverlet that was
spread carefully across her bed every morning by one or other of the maids in the house had come from a shop in Paris. Twice
a week there were fresh flowers on her dressing table and on Friday nights, she and her friends watched the latest videos
brought over from England and America. Sometimes her mother made them popcorn. But that was then. In less than a month, the
world she’d grown up in had changed. Her two best friends – Sally-Anne Parkinson and Helga Neustrop, daughters of the Australian
and Danish ambassadors respectively – disappeared with their diplomat parents as soon as the fighting broke out and she hadn’t
heard from them since. The International School had closed its doors; the few Somali students who attended it had long since
fled. There was nothing left of that life now. Nothing at all. At some point in their flight from the capital they’d stepped
across an invisible line where everything they’d ever known had been traded for a tent, a few blankets and a collection of
memories, which, if they were to survive, they’d do best to forget.

JULIA

Oxford, October 1991

It took Julia a second to work out that the hands on her alarm clock were pointing to 9, not 7. It was quarter to nine! She
leapt out of bed, stubbing her toe on the edge of her desk as she fumbled for her glasses. Quarter to
nine
? She grabbed her dressing gown from the back of the door and stumbled down the corridor. Her first tutorial was at 9 a.m.
She’d overslept. Oh, God.

Fifteen minutes later, her mouth still tasting of toothpaste, her hair hurriedly brushed and shoved into a ponytail and a
sweater thrown over the T-shirt she’d been sleeping in, she ran out the front door, trying to remember where the Faculty of
Law was and, even more importantly, how to get there. Room C/2/4. Where the hell was C/2/4? Was there a floor marked ‘C’?
Was it on the second or fourth floor? She ran from one floor to the other and down one corridor after another, growing increasingly
desperate. It was almost quarter to ten by the time she finally located it. She stood outside the door for a few minutes,
hastily trying to compose herself. She scraped back the tendrils of hair that had come loose, wishing she’d thought to look
in the mirror before leaving her room … too late. She opened the door cautiously and entered the small seminar room. Six pairs
of eyes swivelled round to meet hers. She looked at the ground and slid into the nearest seat. Her cheeks felt as though they
were on fire.

‘Ah, Miss Burrows, I take it?’ The elderly professor sitting at the front of the class looked at her from behind his glasses.
‘Seminars start at nine a.m. on the dot. Difficult, I know, but there we have it. Now, where were we … ?’

‘I’m sorry, sir. It won’t happen again. I … I got a little bit lost trying to find the room.’

‘Lost? Again?’ A low murmur, meant for her ears only, came
to her from the man sitting to her left. She felt her face turn an even deeper shade of red. There was no mistaking the voice.
Him.
Again?

For the next half an hour, she concentrated fiercely on following the professor’s low, soft voice, ignoring the quivering
panic that kept rising in her as the morning unfolded and she realised her grasp of jurisprudence was even shakier than she’d
feared. At Nottingham she’d always been amongst the top four or five students in her year; here at Oxford, she understood
immediately, things would be different. Aristotle’s Golden Mean; Aquinas and Hobbes; Dworkin and analytic jurisprudence …
the phrases flew out of the professor’s mouth and seemed perfectly comprehensible to everyone else in the seminar room except
her. She struggled to keep up, noticing out of the corner of her eye that she was the only one writing practically everything
down – everyone else sat upright and alert, nodding every now and then, jotting down a word here, a name there … no one seemed
to be drowning in a sea of information as she was. ‘In short,’ Professor Munro said, getting up and lighting his pipe as a
way of making his point, ‘anything that concerns the way a society is organised is political.’ Julia’s hand stopped mid-sentence
and a ripple of pain ran up and down her spine.
Anything that concerns the way a society is organised is political, Julia
. It could have been her father speaking to her. In a flash she was fourteen years old again, standing next to him in his
shed at the bottom of the garden, helping him stuff envelopes for the by-election amidst the smell of ink and printer’s chemicals
that never quite left his hands. Mike Burrows was a printer and a trade unionist at the
Newcastle Herald
, just like his father; a stout, fiercely independent man with a strong social conscience and the intellectual fervour of
the self-taught. He was fiercely ambitious – the opportunities that were open to Julia’s generation hadn’t been available
to him, and Julia had grown up somehow knowing that there was a future ‘out there’ that would be different for her. But it
was more than that. Mike was different from most of the men who lived in the streets around them. There was something
about him that kept people at arm’s length. They came him for advice or support, not for a drink or a game of cards. At least
once a month there was someone whose life came spiralling out of one of the neighbouring houses and whose children ran in
fear of what they’d seen. Hanging around the living room listening to their talk, rubbing a foot surreptitiously against her
shin, Julia caught a glimpse of something she’d never seen in her own home – a husband who beat his wife; a man who came home
drunk every night; a man who was going to lose his job. Mike was asked to ‘speak’ to them. One day there was a woman Julia
recognised as Mrs Glenby from the other side of Elswick Road. Her daughter, Winifred, was in Julia’s class. The snivelling,
fear-distorted face was of the kind she’d never seen in her own home. The image burned in her mind’s eye for months afterwards.

Although Sheila, Julia’s mother, had never had a career of her own, she was just as ambitious for Julia. Together they went
to the local library every Saturday with a list of books they’d selected that week and handed it over to the librarian. They
read together in the evenings whilst the radio was on in the background – classics for Julia and a Catherine Cookson or the
occasional Agatha Christie for Sheila. Mike didn’t hold with watching TV every night. The soft tones of Radio 4 were the backdrop
of Julia’s teenage years.

And then one day everything changed. It was a Friday evening, six weeks before Julia’s O level exams. Mike and Sheila were
driving back from their weekly grocery shop. Witnesses said the small red van had come up Park Close at a ridiculous speed.
There was a sudden, deafening screech of brakes as it rounded the bend and then the driver lost control of the vehicle. He
was drunk. The van skidded across the intersection on the wrong side of the road and ploughed headlong straight into them.
Mike was crushed against the steering wheel. He died almost immediately. Sheila was rushed in a shrieking ambulance to the
nearest hospital but it was too late. She died an hour later. Julia was still at school when it happened. It took over an
hour for the message to reach her. By the time she and her
grandmother arrived at the hospital, they were both gone and Julia’s entire world was turned upside down.

She struggled to breathe, sitting amongst all the intelligently nodding heads, none of whom had any idea what Professor Munro’s
words had brought on. The tightness in her chest made it impossible to write. She set her pen down quietly and turned her
head to look out of the window. Through the thin veil of tears she could just make out the tops of the trees lining the Cherwell
River and the rise of Headington Hill beyond. She sat very still for a few moments, waiting for her heartbeat to return to
normal and for the world to right itself again. She could feel her neighbour’s eyes on her but she simply didn’t have the
strength to do anything other than studiously ignore him. It was in moments like these that the weight of how differently
her life had turned out to most people she knew hit her with all the force of a speeding truck. She closed her eyes briefly
again at the inappropriateness of the metaphor she’d unwittingly chosen.