Odd Child Out Read online

  “Come with me,” Fraser says when I’m done.

  I follow her out of the incident room and down a corridor to the office of Janie Green, our press officer.

  Fraser drops the paper on her desk and Janie looks up at her with an expression that’s admirably calm.

  “I’ve just seen it,” she says. “I was about to come and find you. It’s a shit storm. They gave me no warning in spite of my repeated attempts to speak to Emma Zhang and the editor today. I think they’ve got an agenda on this one.”

  “Who would publish a photograph like that?” Fraser says.

  “I know. That’s why I think there’s an agenda.”

  “What can we do?”

  “I think the horse has well and truly bolted, but I’ll do my very best to limit the damage.”

  On Janie’s desk there’s a photograph of three pink-cheeked young children, all with red ringlets identical to hers. I’m fairly sure they won’t be seeing much of their mother this evening.

  As we walk back to her office Fraser says, “Get that Somali boy to speak. He’s got the answers, so it’s time to stop pussyfooting around and put some pressure on him. If he is innocent or has just done something stupid, it’s his only hope of getting out of this relatively unscathed. The press are going to savage him if they get hold of his identity and find out that he’s clammed up.”

  “Should I see him tonight?”

  “No. It’s too late. First thing in the morning.”

  “And if he still won’t talk?”

  “Play hardball. Threaten him with arrest. You know what to do. We need his story. It’s the only way we can throw a bucket of water on this. And then pay a bloody visit to that bloody witness and give her a talking-to about getting cozy with the press. Threaten her with arrest, too, if you have to.”

  She pauses before opening the double doors that lead into the investigation room.

  “Get control of this, Jim.”

  “I will.”

  “How’s the other kid doing?”

  “Stable, but still critical.”

  “Stable’s something at least.”

  She slams opens the double doors and heads turn.

  “Don’t anybody bloody say the words Emma Zhang to me unless you want to lose your bloody job tonight,” she says as she marches between the desks.

  Her office door slams behind her and the window blinds shudder.

  When Sofia emerges from her bedroom, her assignment drafted, ears aching from the earbuds she embedded in them tightly to block out distractions, she finds her mother loading Abdi’s bedding into the washing machine.

  “He’s just got up!” Maryam tells her in a whisper. “He’s washing. He drank some tea.”

  “Did he say anything?” Sofia asks.

  “No! But he looked much better.”

  When Abdi emerges from the bathroom and flops onto the sofa, Sofia tries to act casual.

  “Abdi?” She takes a seat, too, but keeps her distance, wary of his reaction.

  He gives her some eye contact, but it makes her uneasy because his expression is still vacant.

  “Are you ready to talk?” she asks.

  No reply.

  Sofia knows from her training that time works differently for everyone. Some mothers find that words pour from them the instant they meet their babies, every one of them designed to express the sheer joy of the new feelings they’re experiencing. Others take minutes or even hours or days to find words. Sofia’s good at respecting the women’s processes, but even that hasn’t prepared her for the frustration she feels in the face of Abdi’s silence.

  “You should eat,” she tells him.

  She passes him a plate of sandwiches that Maryam has prepared for him. Abdi picks one up and takes a tiny bit, chewing as if it’s cardboard. From the bedroom they can hear the crack of the clean sheets as Maryam whips the folds out of them before letting them float down onto Abdi’s bed. When he swallows the bite of sandwich, Sofia feels like cheering, but she forces herself to remain calm. She’s worried that if she puts a foot wrong he might withdraw completely again.

  She desperately wants to ask about his conversation with Ed Sadler as well as the other events of Monday evening, but she doesn’t dare.

  “I got your stuff from Noah’s house,” she tells him instead.

  Another laborious swallow. His eyes rove across the room and eventually land on Sofia again, as if he’d forgotten she was there.

  Her patience is stretched as thin as possible.

  “Abdi,” she says, “you can talk to me, brother.”

  As if she’d flicked a switch, tears start to brim from his eyes, big fat tears, copious and unstoppable.

  She’s horrified, but the hopeful part of her also wonders if this means he’s ready to break his silence. She moves carefully toward him and takes his hand.

  From the bedroom doorway Maryam watches them. She feels exhausted to her very core by the weight of what she knows and what her children do not.

  For a moment she wonders if she should step into the room and take a seat between them, take each of their hands in her own and tell them the whole story—everything, from the very beginning. She won’t, though, because her instinct to protect her family is greater than any other.

  On the street below, Nur is parking his taxi. Even if he’d had the stamina to drive into the night, the sight of the front page of the Bristol Echo on the newsstand at the rail station would have sent him home. A copy of the paper sits on the passenger seat beside him.

  Nur climbs the stairs to the flat, feeling the usual stiffness in his lower back from the hours of driving. He wishes he could turn around and walk away.

  He feels proud of what his family has achieved in Bristol. That they live modestly does not concern him; that he has to work long hours to support them is hard but also satisfying. They live quietly and happily, their children are achieving everything they dreamed of. Until now.

  When he opens the door to the flat, he’s so upset that he doesn’t remember to check whether Abdi is out of bed. He takes the newspaper into the kitchen, where he finds his wife and daughter and holds it up so they can see the front page.

  “They’re saying it’s a hate crime,” he says. “They’re accusing Abdi.”

  He doesn’t notice Abdi standing in the doorway behind him, until he follows Maryam’s gaze and turns around. Abdi hears what his father says, and sees the headline and the photograph of his friend on the front page.

  He turns his back to them. His knees buckle a little as he does, but he carries on walking away. He enters his bedroom and shuts the door behind him. They hear the key turning in the lock.

  Nur is devastated that he’s been so careless.

  Abdi’s door remains locked shut, no matter how hard they pound on it. Only when Nur threatens to break it down does Abdi unlock it, but he returns to his bed after he’s done so, as unresponsive as before.

  Sofia goes to bed hollow-hearted and afraid, feeling simultaneously as if the walls of the flat are closing in on her while her family members are unstoppably moving away from each other, like an exploding graphic on screen, the component parts heading out into the universe in a multitude of different directions.

  Nur and Maryam go through the familiar motion of pulling out their sofa bed and settling onto it. She lies rigid on her back, eyes open. She hears Nur fall asleep swiftly and knows that he won’t move until morning.

  She pulls back the blanket and creeps out of bed. She retrieves her most treasured possession from the shelves in the corner of the room: a small, battered tin box containing photographs from her childhood.

  She takes the box into the kitchen and perches on a stool at the counter. She turns on a light and removes the photographs from the box carefully. There are only two.

  The first is a photograph of her at school, one in a row of nine children sitting on a bench against a pale gray wall. It’s an informal picture. The girls wear lace-up blue shoes, white socks, blue skirts, whit
e shirts. Matching sky blue scarves are draped over their shoulders and tied at the front with toggles, and the final touch is a white headband holding each girl’s hair back from her forehead. Maryam remembers how much she loved that uniform. The boys in the photo are dressed to match in blue shorts. They sit with their arms draped around one another’s shoulders.

  Maryam finds it bittersweet to look at the little faces of each of her classmates in turn: their easy smiles, some looking at the camera, some chatting to one another, long healthy limbs and bright mischievous eyes.

  She remembers that it was okay for women not to wear the hijab during her childhood. The pressure to cover up came later, in the camps, when some clerics made it their business to preach that the civil war was a punishment from Allah for disobedience, and people took to a more extreme form of Islam through fear.

  Maryam knows that she romanticizes her early childhood. It wasn’t perfect, and her parents bickered about money and their children’s education and all the usual family stuff, but in her head it remains a time of incomparable innocence, before civil war carved Somalia up into warring territories, as effectively as the sharpest butcher’s knife makes short work of a carcass.

  The second photograph is of the entrance to her childhood home: a white wall punctuated by a doorway painted bright blue, clouds of bougainvillea in bloom around it. She remembers her father picking a sprig of those magenta petals for her mother when he came home from work each night, presenting it to her in the kitchen.

  She remembers her mother resting in the evening while her father read out loud to her. Her mother would listen, rapt, too tired to change out of her nurse’s uniform, her bare feet tucked up under her, her hair cut short so it framed her face in soft curls, lamplight glancing off the side of her face.

  Every time she looks at the photograph of her childhood home, Maryam wishes her parents were in it, or one of her siblings. She has to use her memory to keep them alive, and she hates that, because she struggles to remember the finer details of their faces.

  Maryam witnessed the death of her younger sister. Their family stuck it out in the city of Hargeisa through the escalation of police and military presence, curfews, curtailments of freedom, and then random arrests and executions that resulted from the government turning against the north of Somalia.

  They stayed in their beloved home to the bitter end. It was partly a stubborn show of support for the people around them who were also hanging on, and partly a sort of vigil for friends and family who had been snatched from their homes and imprisoned and tortured, or simply made to disappear. For years before they left, Maryam’s family members feared for their lives.

  The day they gave up was the day that planes darkened the sky above Hargeisa and set about bombing it until it was destroyed. They left the city with the other remaining families that day, lines of them making their way out, using any available route.

  From the air, it was easy to spot the columns of people fleeing. The pilots were ordered to hold on to some ammunition after bombarding the city itself and to drop it on those families. They were instructed to return to Hargeisa airport to refuel and rearm their planes after that.

  Maryam remembers her mother pulling them into a maize field as the drone of engines filled the air above them. She screamed at them to crouch down and hide as the black dot in the sky above them grew larger and took on the shape of an aircraft. It was chaos. Maryam dove between the plants, and when she caught her breath and looked back, she saw her sister still in the road, alone, turning, confused, looking for them, for anybody.

  “Halima!” she called. “Here!”

  Halima heard her and began to run toward them, but behind her the plane loomed larger, its shadow only yards away now, its ammunition strafing the road behind it, sending clods of red earth up in a neat, efficient line of destruction that hit other stragglers first, but then caught up with Halima and felled her instantly.

  They had to leave her there.

  Maryam puts her photographs back in the box and stashes it away carefully. She returns to bed, the memories still making her heart pound, but she’s used to that. Like her husband and daughter, she falls asleep heavily and has dreams that are vivid and nightmarish.

  Abdi waits patiently until everything is completely quiet in the flat, and then, for the second time that week, he dresses in the middle of the night and slips out of the house and into the night.

  Nur wakes up to use the bathroom at four A.M.

  On his way back to bed he looks in on Abdi and discovers that he’s missing.

  The family works out that Abdi probably went out in jeans, a T-shirt, a hoodie, and some trainers. They think he probably took his wallet, which usually contains only a library card and at most a small amount of cash, but so far as they can tell he has nothing else with him.

  Maryam loses her usual control and becomes hysterical. Nur scoops her into his arms and holds her as tightly as he can without hurting her.

  I’m hearing hospital sounds less and less. Somehow I don’t seem to be present in the room as much as I was, and when I am, it’s more difficult to try to work out what’s happening.

  I mistake the squeaking of the nurses’ shoes for a mouse in the corner of my room. I know it’s my mind playing tricks on me, but I can see the mouse’s face really clearly: its twitching nose, arching white whiskers, pink pinhead eyes.

  My parents’ voices distort around me. I want to feel the pressure of their hands on mine, but there’s no sensation there at all. The heat of the infection burns all over me. I feel thirsty and sick, and I want to tell somebody so they can help me, but I can’t.

  I’m desperate to stay in the room with my parents, desperate to keep a grip on reality, but the memories of Monday night play incessantly.

  When I got across the bridge, my heart sank, because I could see that there was no way into the yard where the heaps of metal were piled. A tall chain link fence was between me and what I wanted. I felt tears sting my eyes. Everything was so frustrating.

  Abdi was on the bridge. “I want to get in there,” I said. “It’s the only thing I want. It’s just that one thing.”

  I rattled the fence.

  “Stop,” he said. “Please. Stop. Doing. This. I can’t stand it anymore. You’re going to end up getting really sick, and we don’t have a phone to get help. What am I going to do if that happens? Tell me!”

  “It’s just one last thing.”

  “Do you ever think about anybody else apart from yourself?”

  “I help other people,” I said.

  “Do you? Have you asked me how I am tonight?”

  “You’re with me.”

  “So?”

  “I’m your friend,” I said. “I help you.”

  “How do you help me? Did you ask me if I wanted to end up here in the freezing cold while you do stupid things? Do you ever really ask me if I want to do anything, or do you just emotionally blackmail me?”

  “I asked you to the party at the gallery! And this is for you as well as me.”

  Or at least I’d thought it was, but now I felt confused. It was too late to give up, though. I’d come too far.

  He was beside me now, and mist from our breath mingled as we stood face-to-face. He took my arm.

  “Come back with me.”

  “No.” I said. “Let go!”

  He dropped my arm. I was surprised to see that he was crying.

  “I’m dying,” I said. “I’m going to die.”

  He stared at me. “How should I believe you?”

  “Because it’s true. It’s happening.”

  “I’m sick of you using your illness to manipulate me.”

  “I’m not, I promise I’m not.”

  “Oh, come on. It’s what you do. You’ve done it before so many times. You always need me to help you whenever I’m about to do something with one of the other kids at school. I know you do that on purpose, and I try to be a good friend to you, but think about what it’s like for me whe
n you’re in hospital for ages. I have to be able to make other friends, too. It doesn’t mean I’m not your friend, I’m just not exclusively your friend. The minute I try to spend time with anybody else, you need me to go with you to the nurse’s office, and it’s always me. You don’t need to be so possessive. You can’t own me. I can have more than one friend, and anyway, it’s so pointless because I like you. I would be your friend every day anyway.”

  The accusations hurt, and I knew that was because they’re true, but so was what I was telling him.

  “I’m not lying.”

  “Oh my god, you never stop! Are you even listening to me? Do you know what, I’ll tell you something else: You’re not going to want me now anyway. Everything is different. You just don’t realize it yet because you’re not actually interested in me, just what I can do for you, so let’s go home and then I’ll get out of your life forever.”

  “I do want you.” I didn’t know what he was talking about.

  “You’re unbelievably selfish.”

  “I do want you, Abdi!” I yelled it because I meant it so much, but he turned away.

  I grabbed the fence and willed the final bits of strength from my pathetic body. I started to climb, trying to ignore the painful bite of the cold metal on my fingers, willing the muscles in my arms and legs to work. The fence shook loudly as I climbed, metallic clanging reverberating all along it.

  “Oh, no, Noah, no!” Abdi shouted.

  I kept climbing. At the top of the fence I clung to the post.

  I looked down at him and I laughed, from the surprise of having made it all the way to the top. It felt awesome to be up there. I could see all across the scrapyard and down the canal. Abdi’s face looked so angry and upset, but I didn’t care.

  “Come on!” I said to him. “It’s amazing.”

  The top of the fence was unstable, so I had to cling to the post as I got my legs over it.

  “Get down! Noah!” The mist from his breath was like a puff of smoke. He shook the fence.

  “Come on! I dare you,” I shouted.