Odd Child Out Read online

  Nur opened his window to hear the birds better, but the sound of the latch startled them and they rose swiftly all at once, like a handful of sand thrown into the air.

  On the way to school Farah told Nur they couldn’t walk together because Farah had to be somewhere. “Don’t follow me,” he said.

  Nur kicked a stone as he walked, stuck with their half sister Fatima, who had a fear of stray dogs and peered cautiously around every corner in search of them.

  They heard the chanting a few minutes later.

  “We want to see our teachers, and we want to see them now!”

  Bigger boys and girls were gathered outside June 26 School in a large crowd. Farah was among them.

  The children formed a column and began to march from the school toward the center of town, fists pumping the air in time with their words. Some banged drums.

  “What are they doing?” Fatima asked.

  “The government put their teachers in prison,” Nur told her. “They want them to be set free.” He feels grand telling her this, because he’s heard the grown-ups talking about it. “The teachers have barristers from Mogadishu,” he added, even though he didn’t know what a barrister was.

  Fatima took Nur’s hand as the children marched past, and they followed, sucked in by the strangeness and the energy of the sight. Children from other schools joined as the march continued through the city, all their different-colored uniforms mingling.

  They walked past the tuberculosis hospital and didn’t stop until they reached the space in front of the National Security Court. Some of the children had picked up stones along the way.

  Nur and Fatima hung back, watching from a junction with a side street. They leaned against a shop wall, where pictures of the goods on sale were painted boldly.

  On the steps of the court, Nur could see soldiers wearing red berets, standing with their legs apart. The sun licked their hard-set faces and the barrels of their guns. The berets cast shadows over their eyes.

  More children arrived, packing the space, and the chanting grew louder. A portrait of the president hung on the front of the court building. In the morning air the children’s shirts looked bright, clean white.

  A red beret stepped forward with a megaphone and commanded the children to leave. Beside Nur, Fatima shrank back. “I want to go home,” she said. “Go then,” Nur told her. He was transfixed by the scene. As she scampered away, the sky above Nur exploded with noise.

  The red berets were firing their guns over the children’s heads.

  The shots were followed by thuds, a series of them. The children were throwing stones in return. They smashed the windows of the courthouse, and the soldiers took cover to avoid the flying splinters of glass. The gunfire ceased momentarily, like a breath held, before the red berets regrouped, aimed their guns directly into the mob of children, and fired.

  The crackling of gunfire froze Nur to the spot, but a hand grabbed his elbow from behind and pulled him roughly into the shop, where a man held him tightly behind the doorframe. “Stay still,” he commanded. Nur could feel their hearts beating.

  Outside, vehicles began to arrive, engines growling. The children who’d stood their ground scattered now, wild-eyed and fearful.

  “What’s happening?” A woman’s voice issued from behind the shop counter.

  “They’ve sent in the military,” the man told her. “Against children.”

  She beckoned to them from her hiding spot. “Bring the boy here.”

  Nur and the man scuttled across the floor of the shop like lizards, and the woman pulled Nur toward her, shielding him with her body. The sounds of shouting and running and gunfire persisted. The couple threw themselves flat, pulling Nur with them so all three were lying in a tangle of clothing, faces pressed onto the gritty floor among little spills of maize and rice and sugar.

  In the doorway, a silhouette appeared: a boy, in school uniform, about the same age as Nur’s brother.

  “Here!” Nur cried, reaching out toward him.

  “Come on!” the woman called. “Come on, boy!”

  He didn’t move quickly enough.

  There was another crack of gunfire and his body buckled, but it didn’t fall at first. He exhaled with a gasp. His hand went to his chest just before his knees gave way and he collapsed.

  The shots were still coming. Cans and bottles tumbled from the shelves above, punctured by bullets, their contents exploding. The boy landed on a sack of flour and his blood soaked into the burlap. Nur saw that the boy’s eyes were open, but he wasn’t living behind them any longer, and he saw that the boy’s blood was so eager to flee his body that it even ran from the corner of his gaping mouth.

  Nur began to scream. It felt as if he had only just stopped when he heard news that evening that his brother, Farah, had lost his life to the guns, too.

  After that, Nur hated to be in Hargeisa.

  The police didn’t just take the life of his brother, they took his father, too. He was arrested one night by three men who knocked politely at the door at two in the morning. Nur’s mother screamed as they marched him to their Land Rover. One of the soldiers returned to the house and drove the end of his rifle into her stomach.

  The charge against Nur’s father was never clear. Nur’s mother took food to the prison for him every day for weeks until a guard took pity on her and explained that her husband had died many days ago. “Of illness,” the guard said.

  Nur’s father had been healthy when he was arrested.

  The two widows bereaved by Nur’s father’s death pooled their resources and made covert arrangements for transport the next day. The second wife had cousins in Yemen, so she traveled to the coast with Fatima. Nur’s mother went north, toward Djibouti, in the hope that relatives could help her settle there.

  Nur traveled with her and his baby brother, and on the way, in the back of the car, his mother told her sons stories about their father. She told them how he was an intelligent man and a good man, and Nur made a silent vow that he would try to be the same.

  Somebody hammers on the window of his cab. A businessman. Nur rolls the window down. He’s parked outside Temple Meads station.

  “I’m not working,” he says.

  “Then why the fuck are you parked here?”

  “The queue for the taxi rank is over there.”

  Once the businessman has gone, Nur walks along the row of waiting taxis at the rank and stops at the driver’s-side window of each one. He asks his colleagues to look out for Abdi. He hands each of them a photograph of the boy. To a man, they promise to help.

  Fiona Sadler’s been prepared for many years for the fact that her son Noah might die. She’s a person who likes to try to face up to things. On the sly, she’s even read books about bereavement.

  The books didn’t prepare her for how it feels, though. She knows that the first stage of grief is denial, but she hadn’t expected her sense of injustice to be so crushingly strong. She feels robbed of her child. She wants somebody to pay for what’s happened, and she’s never felt so lonely, even in all the years when she had to care for Noah by herself because Ed was away.

  She bitterly resents the fact that Abdi Mahad was the last person to be with Noah. After everything, Fiona can’t stand the thought that Noah’s last moments of consciousness didn’t belong to her. The thought eats away at her.

  Until now Fiona’s always felt guilty that she didn’t like Abdi. She’s examined her motives for disliking him over and over again, because she knows that Abdi’s a nice boy. He gives every appearance of being nice, anyhow. But she resented the spell he cast on her son, the way that Noah seemed almost obsessed with the friendship and clung to it as if it were a lifeline. She resented the fact that Abdi was healthy, too, that he was able to come and go at the hospital, perching on the end of Noah’s bed, all alert, all clever, while her son winced, and her fingers curled as she witnessed how much pain he put himself through to be better able to talk to his friend.

  She’s not so f
oolish that she wasn’t aware of these emotions, and she was afraid to admit them to Ed, because he would have had no tolerance for them.

  Her awareness didn’t erase the feelings, though. Far from it. They were deeply felt but furtive, and because of that, they were never debated or hung out to air, so they grew stronger.

  She lies in bed and stares out of the window. She returns time and time again to the same idea: If Noah hadn’t been friendly with Abdi, this wouldn’t have happened.

  Noah came to harm because of Abdi.

  The house is cold and she’s burrowed almost entirely under her bed linen. Her hair is greasy. She can’t be bothered to shower. She feels as empty as a husk.

  Through the window, she can see clouds hanging motionless, in layers of pale yellow and gray blue. One band glows paler than the rest, so bright it makes her blink. They’re spring clouds. It feels impossible to Fiona that it can remain a season of growth and new life outside, when her whole world has petrified.

  On her bedside table, the landline starts to ring.

  She stares at it, wondering that she never noticed before how piercing the sound it makes is. Then she reaches for it.

  The call screening shows an unknown number.

  Fiona answers because she wants the chance to make somebody else’s life hell, to hurt a stranger because she herself is hurting. “How dare you cold-call me when my son died yesterday?” she imagines herself saying. “How could you?” It will be a small and random hurt she inflicts, but it will make her feel better.

  “Yes.” Fiona’s voice croaks when she speaks, surprising her. It’s not the strident, self-righteous tone she was imagining herself using.

  “Mrs. Sadler? This is Emma Zhang. I’m a journalist for the Bristol Echo. I spoke to your husband the other day at the hospital, and I wrote a short article about the case. I was wondering if you would care to talk to me a little more about what’s happened to your son, Noah? I believe he may have been the victim of a crime and I’m keen to help you get the justice he deserves. How is he doing?”

  Oh! Fiona thinks. She doesn’t know he died.

  Downstairs Ed Sadler is roused from a heavy, nightmare-ridden sleep by the ringing of the landline. He’s stretched out on the sofa in his study, stiff and uncomfortable. Cold. He’s still wearing yesterday’s clothes.

  It was hard to be near Fiona last night. He’s always suspected that it would be like this when Noah finally died, that they would deal with it separately, just as they’ve dealt with the illness itself. He feels scraped out, nauseated, and disoriented, as if time isn’t behaving normally, but warping around him, emphasizing the fact that where he once had a son, there’s now a void.

  Another part of him feels relief, though he’d never admit that to anybody.

  He found it unbearably difficult to watch his son go through treatment. He feared more than anything else that the cancer would drag Noah to his death slowly and painfully. He knew he couldn’t stand to watch the tubes being removed from his son’s body when the time came to let him go; he couldn’t count the breaths that would be so painful for Noah to take in his last days and hours. He couldn’t swab his parched lips.

  Ed lost his mother to cancer, so he knows how it goes at the end. They have at least been spared that. He knows he can’t say this to Fiona, though.

  She’s always been touchy with him when they discuss Noah, and quick to accuse him of not suffering as much as she has as the illness progressed. It’s not true, it’s just that Ed internalizes his pain rather than displays it. It means it sometimes emerges in flashes of anger or reckless behavior, often on location. But he knows that Fiona wanted to see him hurt more right in front of her eyes, so she could be sure that the depth of his response matched her own, and that she wasn’t suffering alone.

  He never could do it, though. It felt more important to be strong in front of Noah, to bring some lightness to the boy’s life, until the next time Ed packed his bag and set off for the airport.

  He groans softly as he maneuvers himself into a sitting position.

  The bureaucracy of death looms. There will be things they have to do, a funeral to arrange. He stands, opens the shutters, and squints into the wash of tepid morning light, and he, too, notices the stripes the clouds have made in the sky.

  When he turns away from the window, he sees the papers on his office table that relate to Hartisheik refugee camp.

  Once again, his mind fights its way back through the past few days, until he reaches the evening of his private viewing and the conversation he had with Abdi late that night.

  He was home, he was drunk, and he was sitting in his office at the end of the most bittersweet night of his life. Abdi knocked on the door.

  “Mr. Sadler?”

  “Come on in!” Ed had been glad to see somebody. He wasn’t quite ready to let go of the night yet. He’d been disappointed to find all the lights out in the house when he got home, even though it wasn’t very late.

  He poured himself a nightcap.

  “Do you want one?” he asked Abdi.

  “No, thank you.” The boy was embarrassed. Always such a modest, polite boy.

  “Sorry! I forgot. You’re Muslim.”

  “I’m too young, Mr. Sadler.”

  “Too young. Of course. Though at your age I’d already drunk my fair share of beers.”

  Ed winces at the memory of his insensitivity. Did he really say that? He has a very bad habit of losing polite filters when he’s had a beer or two. He’s got into more than one or two fights at hotel bars around the world as a result. But he’s also managed to bed one or two women he wouldn’t have dared to proposition otherwise.

  He shakes his head. That’s a terrible thought to have on this day of all days. What’s wrong with him?

  Ed remembers that Abdi sat down beside him and asked him about Hartisheik camp and what it was like there. He remembers that he showed Abdi all the paperwork and the map he had in his files.

  So it wasn’t much, then, the conversation, Ed thinks. Just a chat, stimulated by what Abdi had seen in the exhibition. Of course the boy was bound to be interested. It was his heritage, after all.

  Nothing else about the conversation comes back to Ed, although he has a niggling feeling there’s something he’s not remembering. He shrugs it off quickly, though. The past few days have been mind-blowingly difficult, he tells himself. It’s nothing.

  Ed just hopes he didn’t tell the boy how shit-scared he felt most of the time he was there. How he dreaded the thought of being kidnapped. Couldn’t wait to get back to Addis Ababa.

  From upstairs, he can hear her voice. She must have answered that phone call.

  He’s about to go to her when he finds he can’t face it. He sinks back down onto the sofa.

  “Noah!” he says, and his voice cracks.

  It’s a long time before he’s able to stop sobbing. The feeling of missing his child is like hearing a shrill, high note on a violin that’s never going to stop.

  News first thing in the morning is that Noah Sadler’s computer has thrown up some interesting Internet search history results from late on Monday night, during the hours we believe that he and Abdi were at home after the exhibition opening and before they left the house.

  One of the tech team talks Woodley and me through their findings.

  “We obviously don’t know for certain which of the boys used this computer on Monday night, because it’s not password protected, so it could have been anybody in the house,” he says. “But we can have a good guess from the results. There’s a little bit of Internet activity from earlier in the day on Monday. It’s fairly typical of all the other days that we looked at in the week preceding, so I think it’s safe to assume that this usage is Noah Sadler’s. On Monday afternoon he looked up images of Pero’s Bridge, and Google Maps of Bristol city center, and then he looked up the film Alien on IMDb, which he’d done before, and followed the links to some of the cast and articles about it. That activity ceases at five P.M.,
and the next time somebody uses the computer to go online is at eleven thirty that night. At that time somebody logs on to Abdi Mahad’s personal email account and downloads a photograph.”

  “So we think it was Abdi?”

  “Unless Noah Sadler knew how to log on to his account.”

  “Do we have access to those emails?”

  “Not yet. We’re working on the password. But we can see that Abdi or somebody else accessed them, downloaded this picture, and sent it to print. He logged off after that.”

  “There was a printer in Noah’s room,” Woodley says, “but nothing in it.”

  “The computer’s linked to two printers,” the tech officer says, “so it could have gone to another location. A home office, maybe?”

  “Do you know what the photograph was of?” I ask.

  “Here.”

  The tech officer extracts an A4-sized image from a document folder and hands it to me. The photograph is of a group of men and boys gathered around a television watching a football match. They look African. It’s got to be the photograph that Abdi was asking Ed Sadler about in the audio recording.

  I hand it to Woodley.

  “What else does this person look at online?”

  “They look at Ed Sadler’s website: every page and every photograph. It’s very thorough.”

  “Is that photograph on the site?”

  “No. And it looks to be a photograph of a photograph, as if it was taken with a phone.”

  “Abdi might have snapped it at the exhibition,” Woodley says.

  That’s what I’m thinking, but I’m trying to be cautious and methodical, too. “If we assume it was Abdi who downloaded it, that is.”

  “It’s got to be. Why would Noah Sadler be looking at his dad’s website or going on Abdi’s personal email?”

  Woodley sounds frustrated with me, and I might feel the same, if I were him, but I don’t want to make assumptions that might blind us to a different version of events.

  Even so, I’m getting a feeling that’s part excitement and part unease. We’re finally starting to put together pieces. The only problem is that so far they seem to be for the wrong puzzle, because I can’t yet see how any of this relates to the boys’ movements on Monday night.