Baghlan Boy

by Michael Crowley

  Robertson suppressed a sigh. What could he do about Scully? He was the one person on the wing it was pointless reprimanding. Some of the lads were worth the effort, but not Officer Scully. Atherton thrust his tray at Farood. The Afghan made no eye contact, put on a portion and smiled. Atherton left the tray where it was. Portions were broadly in keeping with wing hierarchy. The bullied got less than the brawlers and Atherton wanted more, but he wasn’t saying please. He wasn’t a Victorian urchin; he was from Collyhurst.

  ‘What’s this?’

  ‘It’s a portion,’ answered Farood.

  ‘It’s takin’ the living piss.’

  ‘I have to give everyone the same.’

  The Afghan had to learn something else. He’d just offered Atherton a fight, a straightener. It was on. It had to be.

  Officers kept their distance when lads were eating; thirty-five at a time in groups of three or four, segregated by race and by urban area. The prison had a diversity officer on a governor’s salary and two dedicated and derided officers, but integration was present only in one respect: the vulnerable and marginalised found each other, no matter where they were from. First-time prisoners sat together until they had permission to do otherwise. Farood was with Barker, who had ‘made in Preston’ tattooed on the back of his neck below a bar code. Although not in view, he had his girlfriend’s name on his wrist. It seemed Barker had everything but a return address; which might have been handy since he had a crippling stammer. His eyes said a great deal about him and they spoke of defeat. Barker found Farood good company. The Afghan spoke slowly and carefully, at a pace that he could at least aspire to, and although he didn’t always wait for Barker to catch up, unlike most people, Farood was usually still there when Barker finished.

  ‘What jobs are there away from the wing?’ asked Farood.

  ‘B-B-est.’

  ‘Where?’

  There was a drawn-out pause as the words surrendered to Barker without a fight. ‘The chapel.’

  ‘Why don’t you do that?’ asked Farood.

  Barker shrugged. From across the central aisle of the wing Atherton was sizing up Farood. He was jumpy; his boys were all anticipation, all in imagined dress rehearsal, all awaiting a cue. Atherton himself wasn’t sure when it would be, or what it would be.

  ‘Already… g-gotta job.’

  ‘As what?’

  ‘Inter… pre… ter for you.’

  Farood laughed; Atherton squeezed his white slice into a ball inside his fist. His audience was waiting. Scully was nodding vacantly at something Robertson was saying; Atherton got to his feet and began overacting on the nonchalant stroll. Violence in the jail was eternal, but episodes were regrettably brief: officers would fall on top of lads before a round was out. You had to strike early and firmly, and you might want to employ some furniture or appliances from your pad: a tap wrapped in one of your socks, the other sock holding part of your sink shaped into a Palaeolithic dagger. Chances were, you would only get one or two digs in. Atherton wasn’t averse to weaponry, but being tooled up implied fear, implied unfavourable odds. He leaned on the table as if he wanted to borrow the ketchup.

  ‘You didn’t give me enough chips, paki.’

  ‘I’m not from Pakistan,’ said Farood, not looking in Atherton’s direction.

  A clever bastard. He grabbed a handful of Farood’s chips and threw them over his shoulder; then he flicked the arm forward and crashed his knuckles against Farood’s eye. The Pashtun shrank back and looked ahead. He’d been hit before, a hundred times, a thousand times more than Atherton. Atherton’s boys sprang into combat stance; the officers switched over to control and restraint mode as Farood’s right heel immediately swung in an arc at Atherton’s face, punching out one of his bottom teeth. Scully belly-flopped onto Farood, crumpling him to the floor. He pressed a knee into his lower back as he twisted and cuffed his arms. Robertson led Atherton off to healthcare.

  Two

  Crocuses were peering through the grass at last. The snow had gone and the mists had thinned out to a silvery film. All of a sudden, the river was in a hurry, and the faster it flowed, the more it became the colour of the sky. The rain in Baghlan province came seldom and heavily. After a four-day visit in May, the river could not carry all the water and some of it carved rivulets beyond its banks through the village and into houses, gradually dissolving earthen walls as it did. Even so the rain was welcome; it brought hope. What could the rain give? Wheat by the ton for the people in the stone houses who owned land, goats’ milk and lambs’ meat for the families in mud houses who dreamed of owning land. Every day new grass grew, more and more of desert ground was covered, more of it grazed as soon as it greened. Vegetable shoots appeared here and there on the crumbling terraces along the hillsides; on the alluvium flood plain below sunlight dripped off the thickening skins of melons. If given a chance the land could give trees for wood and fruit, and it could give wives for husbands.

  On this day in the village of Khosh there was a wedding. A teacher was marrying a farmer’s daughter. He’d paid the bride price many years ago when he was a government teacher and the time had come for her father to honour the contract. This was despite much better prices offered since for fourteen-year-old Gulnar; the teacher knew he was an indebted man. For the last ten years his living, his life, had been precarious. The Mujahidin had destroyed the school soon after the war broke out, leaving only the madrassa. He lived off root crops and by turning his house into a covert primary classroom for those that wanted it and were prepared to pay. One morning the Taliban’s religious police came to his house and told him to stop teaching, informed by those that were not prepared to pay or to see the word of God disputed. He thought about leaving but planted potatoes instead. Then the Americans came and drove out the Taliban. There was hope now of a new school, of an irrigation canal parallel to the river and of much else. There were two families in the village that were willing to pay for their daughters to be taught, but he knew that sooner or later he would be killed for that. The Taliban had been driven out of government – out of the village, even – but they were in the mountains to the south, in Samangan. They went there once before, when the Russians came, before they defeated them first, and then the other tribes. So, the teacher was content to teach only his wife.

  The bride sat by her husband at the head of the wedding table. She held a small, decorative mirror in her painted hand, smiling coyly behind her wedding veil. The guests had eaten and within the outer courtyard some of the other villagers had gathered. They stood, mostly apart from one another, in silence, in bare feet. All their eyes were upon the door. The husband told his brother they should move outside before the evening set in and what was left of the food – the apricots and almonds in breadcrumbs, rice, a few beef mince patties, the last of the belly from the goat slaughtered the day before – was placed on a rug in the yard. The teacher was not wealthy; he could not do what the wheat farmers did, but he wanted others to share in his joy. Twenty-five or so were stood around; many of them he had taught when they were children. They were there now with their own children, waiting for the teacher. Farood, his brother and father stood at the back, his father the tallest man there towering above the crowd in his white turban. Farood was nine years old. Birthdays weren’t observed, but he knew he was nine; he had been told and his eyes were above his father’s waist. The onlookers from the village were invited to sit and eat. Some did, but most kept their distance and did not talk to the wedding guests unless they were spoken to. The guests, some but not all wearing clothes for the occasion, formed an aisle: men and boys on one side, women and children on the other. They clapped in time as the bride and groom emerged from the teacher’s house, and the other villagers cheered and wailed. Saucepans were beaten; a man began to play a tola. He played quietly, the music sounding as if it was coming from elsewhere. Someone fetched a zerbaghali drum from inside the house and began to play behind the flute.
A few years ago, the Taliban had tied a musician to a tree, shaved his head and made him sign a contract saying he would make a living another way. Many at the wedding now feared the potency of music. But then the bride began to dance, discreetly at first, turning her henna-painted hands along the flow of the flute, then skipping to the rolls and slow beats of the drum. Her husband led the clapping in time and his bride took off her wedding veil and tied it around her waist. Farood watched all this conscious of the delight.

  A boy not much older than Farood, a rough, long-haired goatherd boy, invited himself into the courtyard, carrying a bundle over his shoulder. He laid it on the ground, revealing three small, imperfect, urn-shaped mud jars. Holding one aloft, he shouted at everyone, ‘Watch. Watch with your eyes – you won’t believe what you see!’

  The groom’s brother told him to leave, but the boy tossed the homemade jar into the air, kicked it like a leather ball. From amongst the shards a tiny robin fell to the ground; it lay stunned for a moment until it disappeared over the courtyard wall. There were cheers and laughter – a wall within the wedding party had been broken. A smile stretched across the dirty face of the goatherd boy. He held aloft another jar and held his other hand out for money. ‘Who’ll pay to have a go? Who’ll pay?’

  Farood tugged at his father’s trousers and Karam swept his arm away, but Farood continued to plead.

  ‘You do it, then, see if you can do it!’

  A young man in wedding finery gave the goatherd boy an Afghani note and demanded the crowd clear a space for them.

  ‘Ready? Are you ready?’ cried the young man.

  The goatherd boy with broken teeth and matted hair commanded the wedding guest to his position, making him wait as he bid the party clap in unison. The jar was thrown high, very high – the clapping stopped at its summit; it dropped and met a rising scissor kick. A bird, desert-coloured, was gone before the shattered mud reached the ground. Farood leaped off the ground and rehearsed his own kicking style, but the goatherd boy didn’t harry the poor. He went to the groom, the teacher, who gave him two notes. Everyone clapped.

  The teacher walked over to Farood and placed his hand on his head. ‘Okay, see if you can do this. Kick it very hard now.’

  Farood smiled up at his father, who nodded in gratitude and agreement.

  The jar was thrown gently towards Farood, but he only kicked it back to the urchin to catch, falling as he did.

  ‘Throw it higher for me,’ pleaded Farood.

  It dropped from the skies, but his scissor kick was too slow – the jar broke apart into the dust. A bird, a green warbler shaped like an English wren, staggered a few steps, reaching out one wing, trying to extend another, but half fell into the dust instead. It jumped, flapped violently along the ground under the laughter of the wedding. The goatherd boy picked it up, then broke its skull with a stone. The bride buried her face into the groom, Karam kicked his little brother and the other children laughed.

  Ten years on, the memory humiliated him. His hands held the bars of the cell window as he stooped to locate the sun or a shadow. In England you had to have good eyesight to read the time. But the view from the segregation block wasn’t the worst in the jail. He had the woods and some low hills with strolling cattle, even though his gaze had to make its way through a helix of razor wire decorated with rotting plastic, and beyond that the main gate where the sweatbox came and went from four times a day. Farood noticed a thrush hopping to and fro on a branch. He realised this was the furthest north he’d been. He’d seen fields and hills from the edge of his small town, but in the four years he’d been in England, he’d never stepped foot in what remained of the countryside. His foster parents had taken him to Blackpool once, to see the sea. Something he’d already seen plenty of during the many months at Calais. But they avoided his early life, wary of churning something up that they wouldn’t know what to do with. They concentrated on providing comfort and were affluent enough to shop for a pastime; a middle-class British couple with the disappointment of one child offering hope to someone else. Grateful as he was for the substantial meals and the luxurious car journeys, he turned his back on it for a hostel when he was sixteen. A big mistake, he considered, that he could draw a line from to the ocean of time ahead of him.

  Behind him, he heard the door flap squeak open, the turn of a key and the slide of a bolt, a variation on a sound he had heard in many rooms across two continents since leaving his village. An officer stood at the threshold of the cell holding a mat and a book. He held out his arms but didn’t enter. ‘Mecca’s that way,’ he said, pointing to the window.

  The officer smiled warmly and handed Farood a Qur’an and prayer mat. The prison was keener on his devotions than he was. Consigned to the punishment block, he would miss Friday prayers whilst he was there, which was a relief to him as it absolved him of any insincerity. He was beginning to reconcile himself that God would reward him and punish others only in another life. There wasn’t much he could do about how he lived, except wait. There was also the Iranian who went to prayers; a nice lad, happy, friendly, yet he hated him as he hated all Iranians now. He had become accustomed to speaking to God alone, in a darkened, filthy corner in a prison camp near Tehran. He wasn’t sure what an imam could tell him anymore. He put down the mat and Qur’an and lay on his bed.

  Prison is the art of passing time. Anything to break up the routine always helps: visits, the attention of a counsellor or a psychologist, conflict. Atherton knew how to make an afternoon vanish with a well-organised incident. Time was the enemy and, like everyone else in the jail, it would mess with you if you didn’t stand up to it. As long as you were out of your pad you had an even chance of handling time. Unfortunately, officers much preferred you on the wrong side of an iron door, leaving you at its mercy. They too were on the receiving end of it. Whatever prisoners did outside of their pads they did as slowly as they could get away with. So, officers stood and watched as lads were overtaken by waddling ducks to and from the education block, and picked litter around the grounds like octogenarians. Farood considered how hard people worked not to get along. He’d never been able to adjust to the nexus of sarcasm at school, on the street or where he was now.

  Atherton called from the next window, ‘Yo, mate. Have you been down to the governor yet?’

  Farood was confused at the absence of hostility in the voice. ‘No.’ He paused for two beats. He didn’t want to fight every day. ‘Have you?’

  ‘No, mate.’

  Periodically the flap of his door squeaked open and an officer’s face loomed large in the deep oblong of glass. The Afghan had been placed on suicide watch with nothing to go on but the length of his sentence. It was standard practice when a lad had just become a lifer. Farood wasn’t thinking about killing himself, though, he was thinking about justice, about revenge on the man who had put him in prison. God would administer his justice in the end, for sure, but he also needed his own. He had been so easily betrayed, naïve in the face of the police, the lawyer and architect of it all, Khalid. His last chance was his appeal. The right lawyer would make a judge see misdeeds at every stage of his case. But he didn’t have the right lawyer.

  The door opened. ‘Show time, Farood.’ The officer was standing to attention this time. He then marched his prisoner down the gleaming corridor to the adjudication room. Adjudications were somewhere between a visit to the headmaster’s office and a magistrates’ court. The governor sat behind his desk flanked by two dutiful civilians. The charge was read out, an answer requested. It was difficult to plead innocent to fighting if fighting was all you could have done.

  ‘What reason did you have for fighting?’

  ‘No reason.’

  The governor looked to his desk for answers. What could he give him? It wasn’t extra days. Everything said, someone should keep any eye on him.

  ‘You’ve had a fight every week you’ve been here. So, you can spend a week here
, where you won’t be able to fight. That’ll be all.’

  Atherton was doing his pad workout in the next cell: press-ups with his feet on the bed, arms wide apart to maximise the tension, knuckles pushing up all his weight.

  ‘Yo, mate! What did you get?’

  ‘I have to stay here a week.’

  ‘So will I, then.’

  Three

  Baghlan Province, Afghanistan

  He had been gone longer than he’d said. It had been hours. The glassy afternoon was dying; a colder night than the last was coming. Maybe he’d been robbed, thought Farood. Now that the Taliban had gone into hiding there were bandits again in Baghlan. Maybe he’d sold the sheep to Kochi people, which was as good as being robbed. When the sky declared it was time for evening prayers he began to wonder if his brother had just left the rest of his family to cope by themselves. If he had, then Farood knew what to do. He would herd his cousin’s sheep and he would use his father’s rifle. No one would starve. And he would stay.

  Farood was squatting on a track, an hour into the hills to the south of his village. Behind him his mother and sister lay in the cave they had part-found and part-dug. A day-long fire had been lit to bake the earth and rid the four-metre square hole of the yellow spiders that would feed on you in the night. Straw lined the ground under their carpets. The boys had helped an old man cut his cave as well. In all, three families had made homes from crevices. They were out of the wind and Farood’s family had a donkey to carry water from the village. They could boil water, keep a torch lit from sheep dung and mustard seed; they could lie down and they could pray and sleep on sheep hides. By spring the rains would return what remained of their house to the earth and they could think about building again, if the Americans were gone by then. Even people whose houses and compounds hadn’t been destroyed were leaving the village, selling what they had and leaving for Pakistan. Some would return wearing the black turban of the Taliban. Farood watched an American helicopter circle the plain below. In their wake would come the snipers, the bombs planted beside the road, in the wall and the river crossing, the questions about collusion, the executions, and then more rockets on houses. The village would drain away.