Odd Child Out Read online

  Abdi takes himself straight to bed. He still hasn’t uttered a word.

  Sofia, Maryam, and Nur have decided that the best thing to do is let him sleep, in the hope that it will help him get through his shock. Even so, for the next couple of hours, Sofia can’t stop checking on him. She reminds herself of the anxious first-time mothers she helps at the hospital.

  For a while she sits beside him in a silent vigil, a textbook beside her that she can’t concentrate on, but the sight of his immobile body gets to her. She fidgets, and her head snaps up sharply when her father appears in the doorway, blocking the light. He peers into the room.

  Sofia loves her father deeply and knows every inch of his silhouette like the back of her own hand. She’s noticed a stoop in his shoulders lately, which is new, and makes her feel a little pang of sadness.

  “Sofia,” he whispers, “can you phone Fiona Sadler? We want to ask how Noah is.”

  Fiona Sadler is Noah’s mum, and Sofia doesn’t like her. There’s nothing specific Fiona’s said or done that Sofia could give as a reason for this if somebody asked; it’s more that she doesn’t seem to be a warm person. Sofia finds her prickly and difficult to talk to.

  “Do you think we should?” she asks. “They’re probably at the hospital.”

  It’s a poor attempt to put off making the call, because she knows that if they’re asking, her parents will have already decided. They’ve asked her because she’s always been the one to call the Sadlers. When Noah and Abdi were younger, Maryam could never phone to make arrangements for play-dates because her English wasn’t good enough, so it fell to Sofia. Nur has better English, but he’s not fluent like his children.

  It’s a language barrier that’s given Sofia and Abdi plenty of opportunities for mischief over the years, just like the children of fellow immigrants they know.

  Sofia dials the number, secretly praying that nobody will pick up. Her shyness makes phone calls a bit of an ordeal generally, but today her sixth sense tells her that making this particular call is also a bad idea.

  After just enough rings that she’s hopeful voice mail will pick up, there’s a breathy “Hello?”

  “Mrs. Sadler? It’s Sofia, Abdi’s sister. I’m so sorry to bother you, but we were wondering how Noah is.”

  She feels as if she’s got wedges of lemon in her mouth.

  At the other end of the line, Fi Sadler makes a sound like a gasp and then moans, long and low, and Sofia feels the sound echo at the very core of herself. She’s drenched in something that feels like shame as she realizes that she was right: It was entirely the wrong thing to do to make this call. Whatever’s happened to Noah is very bad.

  She turns her back on her parents.

  “I’m so sorry . . .” she starts to say, but another voice comes on the line.

  “Who is this?”

  “Mr. Sadler? It’s Sofia Mahad. I’m so sorry, we were just wondering how Noah is doing, but I shouldn’t have called.”

  “Sofia.” It sounds like a sigh. “Fi’s not up to talking. We had a very tricky moment with Noah, but he’s stable again. They’ve put him in an induced coma because he banged his head when he was in the water. That’s all I can tell you.”

  Sofia, feeling out of her depth by about twenty thousand leagues, can only think of very formal words to say: “Please know that we are thinking of him and praying for him and for your family.”

  “Thank you,” and then, just as she thinks she’s going to get away, he asks, “How’s Abdi?”

  Silent, she thinks, but apparently physically fine. It feels wrong to say that when Noah’s situation sounds so desperate.

  “He’s very traumatized. He’s home, but he’s in shock. He’s sleeping.”

  “We were wondering . . . did Abdi say what happened? The police told us that he wouldn’t talk to them.”

  Sofia wonders if she’s imagining the slightly accusatory tone in his voice. She’s uncertain enough that she replies very carefully.

  “It’s because of the shock. He can’t talk right now, but he will when he wakes up, I’m sure.”

  There’s a silence on the line that feels a fraction too long to Sofia, but she second-guesses herself as soon as she has that thought, and tells herself it’s her own paranoia.

  Just three nights ago Abdi struck a strong-man pose in front of the TV.

  “Black and Muslim,” he said, flexing his muscles, moving this way and that to show them off, laughing at himself as he did. He was modeling a new T-shirt.

  Sofia laughed, because Abdi was good at making fun of himself, but the smile died on her lips quickly, because references to her family’s race, creed, or religion give oxygen to a fear that burns in her day in, day out. She can’t ever shrug off the idea that any one of those labels is a reason for some people in Britain to hate her, and she finds that very painful to live with.

  On the phone, Ed Sadler’s talking again, “Do you have any idea why the boys were down by Feeder Canal? We can’t understand it.”

  “No. We don’t know.”

  “We just can’t think why they would go there. To a scrapyard, apparently?”

  “We don’t know either.”

  “Do you think they were heading to your home? Or somewhere in your neighborhood?”

  Sofia considers this, but Feeder Road isn’t on any route she’d take from Clifton to Easton, though she’s aware that her sense of direction isn’t great.

  “No, I’m sorry, I don’t think so. We thought they would be with you all night. Abdi was looking forward to it.”

  She regrets those words as soon as she’s said them, in case they sound accusatory, but Ed Sadler’s distracted.

  “I’m sorry, Sofia, I have to go. The doctor’s here.”

  The line goes dead before she’s able to say goodbye.

  When she turns around her parents’ faces are so eager for the news to be good that she downplays Noah’s condition.

  “He’s stable” is all she says.

  “Was it Fiona Sadler?” Unable to communicate effectively with Fiona herself, Maryam has always been very curious about this woman.

  “No, it was Ed.”

  Nur stands up. The tension’s so great he can’t sit still. He says a silent prayer for Noah, for both boys. It takes him a second to hear that Sofia’s asking him a question.

  “Where’s Feeder Canal, exactly?”

  “Behind Temple Meads station.”

  Nur carries the city in his head like a map seen from a bird’s-eye point of view. He can visualize the rail lines snaking away from the train station, from where they eventually reach out into the rest of the country. A short distance away from those serpentine tracks he knows there’s a dead-straight road running alongside a dead-straight stretch of water: Feeder Road and Feeder Canal.

  Nur is a voracious reader and a self-taught student of everything, so he knows that the canal is part of the grand Victorian engineering project that made Bristol’s floating harbor and swelled its trading coffers. He knows everything about the colorful mercantile history of his adopted city, and on the whole he admires it, in spite of the deeply shameful parts of it.

  Nur admires it because he believes in possibility, and in hard work’s paying off. He believes that there’s good to be found in people, and in life. He believes in hope. It’s what gives him the strength to get up each day. It’s what got him and his family here, all the way from Somalia.

  “They asked me if we knew why the boys were there.”

  “Abdi will tell us when he wakes up,” Maryam says.

  The dishcloth she’s holding is twisted tightly between her hands.

  Next time I wake up, I remember that I’m in intensive care, but I don’t know how much time has passed. To be more accurate, I know I’m physically present in the intensive care unit, but I feel as if I’m floating on water somewhere with a big empty sky above me. It’s only the sound of my parents’ voices that anchors me now and then. Mostly I spend my time drifting, experiencing my past
and my present all at once.

  I met Abdi on my first day at secondary school. I was nearly twelve.

  I looked like a thin, ratty kind of creature that day. My hair had fallen out unevenly during treatment and begun to grow back in unevenly afterward, so my scalp resembled a badly shorn sheep with some fuzzy bits in places and some weird comb-over wisps, all a lifeless shade of pale brown, and not enhanced by the ghostly pallor of my complexion and my red-rimmed eyes. You don’t take a lot of selfies when you’re in treatment.

  Before I went to my classroom I had to sit in a meeting with the headmistress, the special education needs coordinator from the school, my specialist learning mentor from the hospital, Molly, and my mum, and they went through my care plan, which was designed to help me back into mainstream education. It was the world’s most boring document.

  I shut my eyes while they over-discussed every point and subpoint. When Mum noticed I had zoned out, I said I was conserving energy so I could get through the rest of my day. It was sort of true. I felt like I would get chronically fatigued if I heard the word special one more time.

  “Don’t feel self-conscious,” Molly said to me when we eventually stood in the corridor outside my new classroom. She was always very earnest, and more often than not, she had biscuit crumbs stuck between her bottom teeth. “Just be yourself.”

  I was a bit worried, but I wasn’t going to tell her that, because I was determined that I would make friends and have a good time at Medes College. I felt like people would be nice to me there. It was my dad’s old school. Our family knew at least two of the governors. After my last relapse, one of them sent me a framed photograph of the Bristol City football team. It was signed by all the players. I made some good money for that on eBay.

  In the classroom, everybody stared at me when I went in, and I had to stand at the front and be introduced.

  The kids sat at tables in pairs apart from one boy, who was all on his own: Abdi. I took the spare seat beside him.

  By the time Mum came to collect me after school, I felt dead on my feet. I was leaning against the school fence in the spot where we agreed she would pick me up.

  She didn’t need to ask if I’d made any friends because Abdi was standing right beside me, grinning. He stuck out his hand when I introduced them, and she shook it and complimented his backpack.

  In the car, she said, “Abdi seems nice.”

  “He’s really nice.”

  “What are the other children like?”

  “They’re okay.”

  “Did you talk to them?”

  “A bit. It was very tiring.”

  The truth was that I hadn’t talked to anybody else because I’d concentrated on being Abdi’s friend. He was funny, and he showed me everything I needed to know. Not many other people talked to him, so it was mostly just the two of us sitting together in class and hanging out at break and lunch.

  I didn’t want Mum to know that, though, so a timely reminder that my stamina wasn’t a hundred percent did the job of distracting her nicely.

  “You’ve done so well to last the whole day. To be honest, I was expecting a call earlier.”

  I rested after school and thought about my day. I made it to the table for dinner that night. Dad was home.

  “To a good day,” Mum said and raised her glass of wine, and the edges of her lips. I was happy to see her smile was in her eyes, too. It wasn’t always.

  I didn’t have much appetite, but I ate a bit and pushed the rest of the noodles to the edge of my bowl where I calculated Mum couldn’t see them from where she was sitting.

  “Did you talk to Will Kelly?” she asked. “At school?”

  I shook my head.

  “He’s in your class.”

  I knew that. I spotted him after I sat down with Abdi. He’s the kind of boy my parents probably thought I should be: a rugby/hockey/football boy with the kind of clear skin and confident posture you get only if you play sports all summer and every weekend. At break, I noticed he was surrounded by a group of boys and girls. They jostled each other and talked loudly.

  I thought about joining them, but I decided to go with Abdi instead. He needed help moving some books for the librarian. Will Kelly could wait until we got the chance to talk when it was just us, and probably when I was a bit stronger. I didn’t want him to judge me on my breadstick limbs and my voice that didn’t have a hope of projecting across a cafeteria. I was confident this was a smart decision, but I didn’t think Mum would understand.

  “I’ll talk to Will Kelly tomorrow,” I said. “I just didn’t get a chance today.”

  “Who’s Will Kelly?” Dad says.

  “You know, the Kellys who live on Chantry Road?” Mum said, as if she were referring to God or the prime minister, it was so obvious.

  “Oh! Okay, that’s nice.” I could tell Dad still didn’t have a clue.

  Silence. Mum topped up their wine.

  Dad made an effort: “When did we meet them?”

  “Noah’s sailing course. Last summer.”

  Mum rewrites our history a lot. What she meant by that is the morning I sat on the side of the floating harbor and watched my peers learn to sail. They wouldn’t let me take part because of my central line.

  Mum loved it because she got a bit dressed up for once, and had a coffee with the other mums in the sunshine while I helped the instructor’s daughter sort out life belts.

  Dad nods.

  “I thought we might be able to carpool with them,” Mum said, as if that explained everything.

  To change the subject, I told Dad about Abdi.

  “Where’s he from?”

  “I don’t know. He doesn’t walk to school. His dad brings him in his taxi.”

  “I mean where is his family from?”

  “I don’t remember. But he said he might take the bus to school when he’s older.”

  “Daddy means what country are his family from originally?” Mum never speaks with her mouth full, so she did a whole load of laborious chewing before saying that. Outside, the light was fading, and I could see a magpie scaring the smaller birds off the feeder.

  “I don’t know.”

  “What’s his second name?”

  “He’s got two second names, but I can’t remember them.”

  “Somalia, maybe,” Dad said. “Ask him if they’re from Somalia.”

  Mum’s eyes rolled because Somalia was one of Dad’s favorite subjects. He began to give us a potted history of Somali immigration to Bristol, even though we’d heard it all before: “Lots more of them than you’d think . . . over decades . . . strong links between the camps and Bristol . . . quite a community now . . . do you remember that shop in Easton where we went to get the preserved lemons for the Nigella recipe . . . most of them live there . . .”

  When Mum couldn’t bear it any longer, she cut him off by saying, “Anyone for dessert?”

  As she went to take the ice cream out of the freezer, Dad leaned over and ate the rest of my noodles.

  “You should ask Abdi where his family’s from,” Dad said. “It’s interesting to know people’s stories.”

  “Okay.”

  “Guess where I’m off to next week.”

  “Timbuktu?”

  “Ha! Not a million miles away actually, though maybe a few thousand.”

  He sucked a noodle into his mouth slurpily and raised his eyebrows as if to say: “Keep guessing!”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Namibia. Skeleton Coast.”

  “Where the shipwrecks are?”

  “Shipwrecks that stick up out of the sand like carcasses. And sand dunes that look like shallow waves when you fly over them, but when you’re at ground level, they’re immense. They drop off into the ocean like the face of a cliff.”

  “Will you go in a plane?”

  “A small plane, yes, so we can fly low to get the shots.”

  “You won’t use a drone?”

  “No. I like to hold the camera and feel the pict
ure with my own hands, see it through the viewfinder myself. You know you’re making something special that way because you connect with the scene. You’re the author of it.”

  “Noah!” It was Mum, back in the room, cookie dough ice cream and bowls in hand. “You’ve gone white!”

  Just like that I was back in the land of fatigue and fussing.

  I heard my parents talking as I lay down in the next room. They were always bad at lowering their voices.

  “Sounds like it went well today,” Dad said.

  “I think so. The teacher gave me that impression.”

  “You spoke?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  That made me feel upset because I didn’t like being spied on and reported on. I wanted Mum to take my word for it.

  “A good start, then,” Dad says.

  “I just . . .”

  “What?”

  “I want him to fit in.”

  “I know. I do, too.”

  “Do you think this boy is a suitable friend?”

  “I’m sure he is.”

  She said something that was too quiet for me to hear, and Dad said, “Seriously, don’t do this.”

  “Don’t do what?”

  “Don’t create a negative from something that’s good news. He’s had a good day. He made a friend. Shouldn’t we be grateful?”

  A clash of cutlery and crockery and then Mum’s voice: “Sorry.”

  “Talk to me, Fi.”

  “It’s nothing. I am grateful. I can’t believe he’s even made it back to school.”

  “He’s made a friend on his first day. That’s got to be a good sign. I loved Medes College. I know he’s going to.”

  “I just want something to work out for him.”

  “It will. I promise you, it will.”

  I put a cushion over my head. Ears muffled, I imagined myself in a small airplane, high in the sky above the Skeleton Coast, flying into the sun until I was so close I couldn’t see anything at all.

  The next day when I got to school, Abdi was talking to another boy, but I tapped him on the shoulder and asked him if he could help me find the maths staff room. I could have found it myself, obviously, but I wanted him to come with me.

  On the way, I told him all about my dad’s trip to Namibia, and the sand dunes that rose out of the sky like cliff faces.