Out of It (13 page)

Rashid walked behind Khalil, close to the wall, avoiding the slow run of liquid through the middle of the street. Wild grasses sprouted around the edges of the puddles. The chemical smell of burnt rubbish came and went. The houses were all the same on this stretch: two rooms, a bathroom and a kitchen. Boxy squares of concrete with roofs of corrugated iron held down with breezeblocks and bricks. Occasionally one had a tiled floor, otherwise it was just sand on the ground and cables and wires strung across the ceiling.

A metal door to a house stood open. The inside walls were painted in the patterns of the mosques of Granada. Beige rugs, their corners folded with precision, covered mattresses on the floor. The floor tiles had just been mopped. A large engraved copper plate was propped up on foldable wooden legs, Bedouin-style. A girl sitting on a mattress drawing stuck out her tongue at Rashid as he passed.

Rashid started formulating a question about place, belonging and his role in all this as he walked, contemplating whether it was worth asking Khalil and if he would know the answer. He wondered whether he owed it to Khalil’s mother to talk to Khalil about leaving, but there would be significant fallout if he did. It would be no less than treacherous, no more than self-interest, as on some levels the idea of having Khalil with him in London was an amazing possibility, on other levels it was the carting of all of
this
over there with him, when London was the opportunity to reinvent himself. Would that be such a bad thing for him to do, to have a break from this for a while, to come back revived? He wondered what Khalil thought. He thought he should drink cocktails before visiting the Centre more often. It took the edge off things.

‘Khalil,’ Rashid started, but Khalil was calling out to a man walking towards them. The man was not looking up. Khalil called out his name again.

‘Ah!’ The man finally stopped and smoothed his beard down several times. ‘Khalil Helou. Greetings. What brings you here?’

‘We’re just going to check on the Centre.’

‘You don’t know?’ The man looked awestruck at the ignorance before him.

‘Know what?’ Khalil asked, hiding the irritation and anxiety that Rashid could nonetheless see. The man’s hands expanded outwards from his thumbs. ‘Nothing. Nothing. God be with you.’

‘And with you,’ Khalil replied, although the man had already gone.

‘Who’s that?’ Rashid asked, hoping to find something to discredit the man as a source of alarmist statements.

‘You know that boy who comes to the Centre who’s a computer whizz? The one who can hack? That’s his father.’

‘Religious?’

‘Who isn’t?’

‘That’s what Iman says.’

They stopped and said nothing more because by then they had seen the Centre and there was nothing else to say.

The destruction ran right up to its doors: graffiti, bullet holes and gutted buildings. The door to the Centre had been blown out into a rubble-filled cavity. A tetchy-looking cat sprinted down the stairs and out of the entrance.

It was worse inside than they could have imagined. The smell was overwhelming. The afternoon heat was invigorating every stinking molecule in the room. It was hard to breathe. A pinboard covered with children’s paintings had been removed from the wall and shat upon. Computer screens were smashed; wires had been cut; the drawers of the filing cabinet had been emptied and thrown to the floor. Everything left in the room was sprayed with paint, pissed on, scribbled over. All the documents had gone and the computer disks removed. Khalil examined the backs of the computers.

‘They took the hard drives.’

‘And Jamal?
Shit.
They must’ve taken him.’ Khalil walked around. ‘We have to find out where. That’s what I have to do first.’

‘We don’t know that for sure.’ Rashid’s chest felt as though it had a thin plastic sheet wrapped around it that was being tightened twist by twist with a tourniquet. ‘Why would they take him? He’s just a volunteer.’

Khalil kicked against the wall leaving a newer, fainter mark than the others. ‘It’s my fault. I should’ve taken the risks more seriously. I know they’ve taken him. I can feel it. It’s my fault.
Fuck.
And he’s getting married.’ Khalil crouched down with his back against the wall, his head on his knees.
Fuck
.

Rashid tried to move into his friend’s space. Khalil’s ponytail was not silly. There was nothing silly about Khalil.

‘Come back to our place, Khalil. Talk to Sabri. He’ll know what we can do to find out where he is. Don’t stay here.’

Khalil looked up from his hands. ‘Raed and Jamal in the same day. One killed, the other taken. And the Centre? Three years’ work and look at it.’

Something had attracted Khalil’s attention; he got up and walked over to the other side of the room where a small line of army graffiti, ‘
Feeling fucked now?’
was scrawled in red marker pen across the newly painted wall.

Khalil laughed out loud at the communication from the departed forces of destruction that had trashed his Centre. ‘See that?
Feeling fucked now?
That’s excellent. Ha!
’

‘How is it excellent?’ Rashid’s skin was telling him that the army could be waiting to come back and get them too. The skin on his face felt really tight.

‘It’s excellent. It’
s excellent
.’ When excited, Khalil’s voice had a tendency to squeak slightly. ‘If this poxy little Centre really disturbs them that much, it has to be good. It must be worthwhile. It means that what we are doing is annoying them, even if it is just an irritation factor. It’s important. It’s something. Just to bug them. Get under their skin. This,’ he said, tapping at the writing on the wall, ‘is a victory.’ He stood back and smiled at it again. ‘I will put a frame around it.’ He glanced up at Rashid. ‘You think Sabri can help us to find out where Jamal is?’

He walked around the room as he spoke, moving whiteboards against the walls, straightening chairs. He went into the kitchen and emerged with a broom.

‘You want to start clearing up now?’ Rashid asked. ‘Right now? I thought you were going to find out about Jamal? Don’t you think we should leave?’ The stink of the place seemed to be coating itself around the sides of Rashid’s mouth.

‘Sure. Yes. I just wanted to show you that this is all very superficial. We can clear it up in no time. See? We did a full backup only last month. Of course it’ll be a bit harder getting that data for Lisa, but not a total disaster. And the computers are just money. We’ll get the funding, see? Nothing to worry about, minor setback, that’s all.’

Khalil was brushing splintered glass into a small heap in the corner of the room, making the broom stop along the edges of a tile so that the lines of grouting delineated the pile of glass. Rashid put his hand around Khalil’s back.

‘Let’s go now. Let’s leave it for now. We’ll clear this up tomorrow. Iman will come and we’ll organise some volunteers. And gloves. We need gloves. You’re right, a lot of it is superficial. A bit of paint and it’ll be fine. But right now it really stinks.’ Rashid coughed.

‘I know. I know.’ Khalil kicked at a broken CD case on the floor.

‘Just leave it for now, OK? Let’s go and see Sabri and find out how we can sort things out for Jamal at least.’

Half of Khalil’s face was covered with the bent palm of his hand, in a gesture that was partly down to stress, partly to block the smell. The eyes that looked up at Rashid from over the hand expressed more affection than Rashid had felt in a very long time.

Chapter 15

Two pairs of feet stuck out of one of the larger tents in the wasteland around the Mujahed home. The man’s feet still had shoes on, shoes that had been transformed into morose moulds of over-stretched leather, and the woman’s feet were knubbly and wide. The woman was wearing men’s socks with panels of pale leg flesh visible above them. The two pairs of feet were locked around each other’s ankles.

Lisa!
Rashid ached at the tenderness of the connected feet.
Lisa!
Lisa!

‘Watch it.’ Khalil pulled Rashid back as he nearly walked into one of the zigzag metal joists that had been left sticking up out of the ground.

The group of fighters were by the gate of Rashid’s house. The tall man from the café who Rashid liked to think looked like him, their apparent leader, had managed to overtake the fat fighter with the pocked face and thick moustache who had told most of the jokes. They were approaching the Mujahed building purposefully as though they were about to claim ownership of it.
They should take it,
Rashid thought wildly
. I’m leaving. They can have the house, and Mama, and Sabri.

Rashid was trying to decide whether they should have Iman as well (he could never quite decide whose camp she was in) when Khalil said, ‘They’ve got Iman too.’ Rashid looked behind the group and saw her straggling along, following the path of the fighters. She was hanging back, trailing a fair way behind them. As they came closer to her, Rashid noticed that she looked abject and spooked. She did not seem to see Khalil and Rashid when they arrived, or at least if she saw them, she did not appear to recognise them at all.

Two fighters moved around the back of the building, another banged on their neighbour Abu Omar’s door. On seeing Khalil and Rashid, the leader threw back his arm,
Stay next to the wall!
Rashid did so, briefly, before stepping forwards to see Abu Omar open the door with the look of a man watching his life belongings being washed away in a flood. His shoulders and back fell a little. He didn’t ask anything. The large fighter with the moustache pulled Abu Omar out of the doorway. It was completely unnecessary; he would have come out anyway.

Abu Omar turned his head towards the inside of his apartment where a tricycle stood in the corridor and members of his family were visible at the door’s edge. He took in his breath and blinked at this group of visitors. On seeing Rashid, he opened his hands to the sky as if to let fly some explanation that he had held captive between them.

‘You, Khaled Mustafa Hiya,’ the leader read out Abu Omar’s full name from the document that had been handed to him, ‘are found to have collaborated with the enemy.’

Iman had moved around to stand closer to Khalil and Rashid, and Rashid suddenly felt her clutch at him. He dropped one of the torn bags of vegetables he had picked up for his mother and courgettes rolled on to the ground by his feet. Abu Omar opened his mouth and spoke to the air like a fish out of water. He still wore that morning’s pressed trousers but his shirt had gone and his vest was stringy; it could not make the distance over the mound of belly. A sad lip of fat pouted over his belt.

There was a raising of guns and the sound of metal being guided into place. Iman’s nails broke through Rashid’s skin. The fighter with the heavy moustache was up against Abu Omar, so close that they must have smelt each other’s breath. Their leader stepped forwards. ‘Not here. Bring him with us.’ The other fighter pushed hard into Abu Omar before pulling away so that their captive’s hands could be tied up with rope as the indictment was nailed to the doorframe.

The leader turned to his audience. ‘Ziyyad Ayyoubi, from the Patriotic Guard,’ he was saying, holding out his hand, when the door to Abu Omar’s apartment opened and the smallest boy rushed out towards his grandfather. He was met with a row of guns lined up at his head.

‘Jiddo!’
the boy cried out at the back of the figure who was not turning to face him.
‘Jiddo!’
Grandpa.

Rashid shoved past Abu Omar and pushed the boy back into his family – they had formed a wall of cheap cloth and soft flesh at the doorway of the apartment – and closed the door on them.

‘What has he done?’ Rashid asked the leader. ‘Mr Ayyoubi, what has he done?’

‘More than enough. I am not entitled to say more than that at this stage but we have evidence—’

‘Evidence!’ Iman spat.

‘Evidence that he has played a significant role in attacks on our resistance.’ Ziyyad glanced superciliously at Iman. ‘Attacks on our resistance and on us.’ He looked away now at the tents and up at their apartment above.

‘And his family?’ Rashid continued. ‘What will happen to them?’

‘If he was
senior
enough,’ Ziyyad said, ‘which we believe that he was, then the chances are that they will take the family in.’ He nodded in the direction of the border.

‘They? You don’t mean the Is—’ Rashid looked at Ziyyad again and towards the fence. ‘Seriously?’

‘Again, we would like to stress that we are sorry for the disturbance.
Tsharafna.
It was an honour to have met.’

‘
Tsharafna.
An honour,’ Rashid and Khalil murmured, caught out by the man’s formality.

‘And now you must excuse me.’ Ziyyad gestured to his men. He waited for Iman to raise her face so that he could nod in her direction before he bowed his head and lead his men and their captive away.

There was no sound behind the door to Abu Omar’s flat. Rashid imagined them still standing behind it in a row as though waiting to either be photographed or shot, and then behind them, on their coffee table, he saw the tissues rustling in the breeze from the overhead fan next to the crystal bowls that held the multi-coloured sugar almonds for guests.