Refuge

by N G Osborne

  “No, you go,” she smiles.

  “Fine, whatever you want.”

  Charlie lays down “serve”.

  “What’s that?” he says. “Eighteen?”

  She writes down his score and scans the board. ‘Box’ is now available with two double letter scores, and with the ‘so’ and ‘ex’ that go with it, it comes to forty-two points.

  Look what your sexist attitude got you.

  She places her word on the board and looks triumphantly at Charlie only to discover he’s looking around the room like a distracted toddler.

  “What you reading there, Aamir?” Charlie says.

  “Middlemarch,” Aamir Khan says.

  “Who’s it by again?”

  “George Eliot.”

  “He any good?”

  “George Eliot was actually a woman.”

  “It was a pseudonym,” Noor says. “She used a man’s name because women weren’t taken seriously as writers back then.”

  “Guess you learn something new every day,” Charlie says.

  “I guess you do if you never went to college.”

  Aamir Khan peers over the top of his book at Noor. She wonders if she’s gone too far. Charlie smiles back at her.

  “You think you’re going to win this pretty easily, don’t you?” he says.

  I severely doubt you’ll come within a hundred points of me.

  “I’m sure you’ll provide me with stiff competition,” she says.

  Charlie leans in.

  “Watch out, I just might kick your butt.”

  Noor can’t stop herself from blushing.

  Right that’s it. No mercy.

  Charlie puts ‘ad’ perpendicular to ‘serve’ to achieve both ‘ad’ and ‘served’.

  Only an amateur puts down the first word that pops into their brain.

  She takes three more tiles. I‌—‌T—U.

  Could I have picked worse?

  She stares at her tiles.

  “If you’re up for it, Aamir,” Charlie says, “I was thinking you could come with me to the hospital on Wednesday, you know say ‘hi’ to Wali, that sort of thing.”

  “That sounds like a wonderful idea,” Aamir Khan says. “In the meantime I have started reading up on rehabilitation methods.”

  Noor places ‘it’ on the board.

  “‘Exit’ for eleven,” she says.

  She takes two more tiles and draws a U and a Z. She lets out an inadvertent sigh.

  “Shitty tiles?” Charlie says.

  “Of course not.”

  “You know what they say, a bad workman blames his tools.”

  “I don’t have bad tiles.”

  Charlie grins; it’s clears he doesn’t believe her. Charlie puts his word on the board.

  “What does ‘heir’ get me?” he says.

  “Are you incapable of adding it up yourself?”

  “Okay, chill‌—‌seven for ‘heir’, five for ‘ha’—so twelve total.”

  “Was that so hard?”

  “Not as hard as those tiles of yours, I’m guessing.”

  Noor does everything in her power to concentrate. It’s impossible; she knows he’s staring at her. She looks up and confirms her suspicion.

  “So?” he says.

  She’s tempted to exchange her tiles but couldn’t bear the ridicule he’d fling her way.

  “‘Our’ for five points,” she says.

  “Thought you said you didn’t have bad tiles.”

  “I didn’t.”

  “Then five’s kind of a shitty score, don’t you think?”

  Noor glances over at her father. His face is hidden by his book. She suspects he’s smirking behind it. Charlie places ‘quart’ off the ‘t’ of ‘exit’.

  How on earth did he come up with that?

  “Twenty-eight, not so bad,” Charlie says.

  Noor pulls out two more letters. O and T.

  Oh dear Lord.

  “So did you guys play this a lot back in Kabul?” Charlie says.

  “To tell you the truth, we have played it more in recent years,” Aamir Khan says. “Soon after we arrived I carved some wooden letters and drew a board on the back of a poster, a Hekmatyar poster to be precise. Given his distaste for girls’ education I always thought it fitting that we rubbed his face in the dirt whenever we played.”

  Charlie laughs.

  Good God, what a couple of sycophants.

  Noor stares at her tiles. She can’t find a spot for her Z.

  “So what you got?” Charlie says.

  And how I despise his impatience.

  “‘It’ for fifteen,” she says laying down her tiles.

  Her father comes over and takes a look.

  “You could have done ‘ziti’ off the end of ‘quart’ for forty-three, my dear.”

  “Or you could have done zit,” Charlie says.

  “Zit?” she says.

  “You know a pimple, like the one on your chin.”

  Noor blushes once more. She pushes her chin down into her chest.

  “Good night, my love,” Aamir Khan says. “I am retiring to bed.”

  No, don’t leave me.

  Aamir Khan bends down and kisses her on the cheek before bidding Charlie good night. Noor looks around. Bushra’s nowhere to be seen. She must have slunk off too.

  “Now your dad’s gone there’s no shame in quitting,” Charlie grins.

  Noor doesn’t deem his remark worthy of a reply.

  “Okay, I guess it’s to the death,” he says.

  “To the death,” she says.

  Charlie lays down his tiles.

  “Quarte and elate,” he says. “For twenty-two.”

  How could he possibly know what quarte means? He can’t. It was just a lucky guess.

  She pulls another ‘O’ and a ‘G’ from the bag.

  Finally.

  “Zit, that was the word?” she says.

  “You got it.”

  “Zoo and Zit,” she says. “Forty eight points.”

  She looks across at Charlie and gives him the smuggest smile possible.

  Two more rounds and it’ll be over.

  Charlie puts down three tiles.

  “Okay,” he says, “‘Fie’ and ‘de’ with the triple word score makes twenty-one.”

  “Neither of those are words,” Noor says.

  “What you talking about? De’s the language of a recently discovered Amazonian tribe.”

  “And how do you know that?”

  “My mom took me on a trip up the Amazon.”

  “And you managed to learn their language?”

  “He no ra te la dosaya doda.”

  “I assume that’s your sorry attempt at one of their expressions.”

  “Means ‘my brother likes goats more than girls’.”

  Noor giggles despite herself.

  “And fie?” she says.

  “It’s a shrub. A Chinese botanist stumbled on it in deepest Congo and named it after a girl he loved. Rumor has it she was so beautiful he thought this gesture might win her over.”

  “Typical man.”

  “When he returned, he discovered an astronomer had named a newly-found galaxy after her, and already won her heart.”

  “I’d prefer to have a shrub named after me than a galaxy. At least a shrub’s a part of this world.”

  “You got a point.”

  She looks up to see if he’s mocking her, but there’s nothing in his expression to suggest so.

  “So you cool with both of them?” he says.

  “Absolutely not, I’m challenging.”

  Noor grabs the dictionary. She looks up ‘de’ first. It isn’t an Amazonian tribe, but it is a prefix.

  How stupid. I was certain I knew all the two letter words.

  She flips forward to the f’s. She can’t believe it. There it is. Fie‌—‌an exclamation, Middle English, used to express disgust or outrage.

  “Neither of them match your definition,” she says.

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nbsp; “But they’re in there, aren’t they?” Charlie grins.

  Noor purses her lips.

  “So I get another turn, right?”

  “Go.”

  “Remind me how much do I get if I use all my tiles?”

  “Fifty points, why?”

  Charlie places ‘painted’ down the right edge of the board.

  “Thirty eight for ‘painted’ plus the fifty gets me eighty eight. You mind adding up the scores.”

  Noor scrawls down eighty-eight on Charlie’s side of the ledger, the number even more unbelievable now it’s there in pencil.

  “You’re at two-hundred and fifty five,” she says.

  “And you?”

  “Two-hundred and two.”

  Noor renews her focus but nothing seems to work. The next few rounds pass in a blur with her words routinely coming second best to Charlie’s. As she lays each word down her fury mounts, not at Charlie so much but at herself.

  How can you be losing to him?

  She looks at the score‌—‌three-hundred and twenty-three to two-hundred and forty-two‌—‌she knows it’s impossible to beat him.

  “You win,” she says.

  She glances up expecting him to gloat. Instead he looks at her with sympathy. It infuriates her all the more.

  “Want to go again?” he says.

  “Of course.”

  “Great, let me just stretch my legs.”

  Charlie wanders out onto the verandah. Noor looks at the clock. Nine o’clock. It’s late. She wonders if she should’ve challenged him to another game.

  You have to beat him. You won’t be able to live with yourself if you don’t.

  Noor scans the dictionary for words she doesn’t know, and when she next looks at the clock it’s ten past.

  Where the hell is he?

  She strides out on the verandah and finds him leaning against the railing, a cigarette in his hand.

  “Are you coming?” she says.

  “Sorry, thought I’d have a second.”

  He takes a final drag and flicks the butt over the side. He looks over at the oak tree lit blazing white by the full moon.

  “That tree sure is tall.”

  “I’ve climbed higher.”

  Charlie looks across at Noor.

  “You don’t believe me?” she says.

  “No, I’m just amazed that’s all.”

  “I bet I could climb higher in it than you.”

  “That a challenge?”

  “Yes, I suppose it is.”

  Without waiting, Noor marches over to the tree. She takes off her sandals, tucks her kameez into her pants and starts climbing. When she reaches the first bough, she looks down. Charlie’s at the base of the trunk.

  “Hey, give me a moment,” he shouts.

  She doesn’t and continues on up past the second and third boughs. Above her the trunk splits two ways. To the left it carries on towards Charlie’s balcony. To the right it ascends vertically for fifteen more feet before splitting off again. She grips the right hand trunk and continues her ascent. Halfway up the bark becomes smoother. There are almost no crevasses or cracks to dig her fingers and toes into.

  “Still coming,” she hears Charlie say.

  She grips the trunk and begins thrusting her whole body up, one inch at a time. Her arms ache, her breath gets more ragged. She looks up. She’s two feet away from the split.

  “Noor,” Charlie shouts, “you can stop now‌—‌you win.”

  Noor sees a branch sticking out of the bough above. She grabs it and pulls herself up. The branch breaks, and for a split second she’s certain she’s going to fall to her death.

  And all to impress a boy.

  Her other hand flails, and by some miracle her fingertips latch onto another branch. She pulls herself onto the bough. She stands up, her heart beating wildly, and yells out in triumph.

  “Noor, please” Charlie shouts. “Come down before you kill yourself.”

  Noor detects real concern in his voice and finds it strangely comforting. She takes a moment to gaze at the twinkling lights of Peshawar before scooting down the trunk. Charlie is standing in the hollow of the split.

  “Unbelievable,” he says. “Insane but unbelievable.”

  Noor grins, her face flushed, her heart still beating madly.

  “I could always climb higher than my brother,” she says. “It infuriated him.”

  She waltzes along the lowest bough as if to confirm her fearlessness and sits down. Charlie comes over and plops down beside her.

  “So did you really go to the Amazon,” she says, “or was that just something you made up?”

  “Oh no, my mom was always taking me on trips. Paris, London, Costa Rica, New Zealand. She had this Mark Twain quote she never tired of saying, hell she’d even yell it out to me when she dropped me off at school.”

  “What was it?”

  “‘Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things you didn’t do than by the ones you did. So throw off your bowlines, sail away from the safe harbor and catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream! Discover!’“

  That is exactly what I am going to do.

  “The Amazon had always been a dream of hers, something she’d told me we’d do when I graduated high school, but that spring she was diagnosed with cancer, and she decided to move the trip forward.”

  “How long did you go for?”

  “Ten days. We flew into Lima and took this tiny plane over the Andes to a town called Iquitos where we boarded an old rubber boat. You ever read Love In The Time of Cholera?”

  “A couple of years ago.”

  Noor looks away so Charlie can’t see she’s blushing. What she doesn’t mention is that the book both aroused and disgusted her in equal measure, with Florentino Ariza seeming to embody everything she despised in men, and everything she hoped they might be.

  “Well remember the boat Florentino and Fermina take when they’re really old, that’s kind of like the one we were on. Rickety, low to the water, dim cabins, creaking air conditioners, a big smokestack near the back. It was magical. I pretended I was Teddy Roosevelt searching for some undiscovered tribe.”

  “The De’s?”

  “Yeah, never did find them, but I saw a bunch of amazing stuff; pink river dolphins, tree frogs, squirrel monkeys, manatees, hell so many different types of birds you lost count, and, of course, and for a thirteen year old boy the coolest thing of all, piranha. They even let me help catch them, and at night we’d grill them under the stars. It was the greatest trip of my life.”

  “Did your father go too?”

  “The only trip he ever went on was to London and that was because he had business there. To be honest he and my mom should have never got married.”

  “Then why did they?”

  “Because for one summer after college my father thought he wanted to live this free spirited, selfless life, and during it my mom got pregnant. After they got married my Dad became a banker instead of an activist, and before my mom knew it, he’d joined all the right clubs, become an elder in the local church and set out on his new life’s mission of becoming a respected pillar of the community. To be honest my mom should’ve left him then and there, but for all her free-spiritedness she believed children needed to grow up in a family.”

  “Do you have any brothers and sisters?”

  “When I was born my mom got an infection, and they had to remove her uterus. It was a serious bummer for my dad, especially when he realized I took after Mom. He was always trying to steer me towards the things he thought important, and like some guerrilla warrior she always tried to counter his influence. The trips were part of that. Though he’d never admit it, I think her death was a relief to him. Eighteen months after she died he married this uptight paralegal in his office, and they had twins. Finally he had the family he’d always dreamed of, yet for some crazy reason he wouldn’t let me just do what I wanted.”

  “And what was that?”

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sp; “Be an artist‌—‌that was my dream at least. He couldn’t understand it. ‘Art is something you go to benefits for,’ he’d tell me, ‘it’s no career,’ and when it came to choosing a university, he wouldn’t let me apply to CUNY and instead used all his influence to get me into Duke. I think deep down he thought that one day I would change just like he had, and thank him. But I was never like him…”

  “You were like your mother.”

  “I felt paralyzed, like I was heading down some path I’d never be able to get off, and then one night, just before I was about to head down to North Carolina, Beau Geste came on TV, and suddenly I had an idea. I’d enlist in the army‌—‌it was the biggest ‘F you’ I could think of. I called him on the way to boot camp. He was so stunned he could hardly speak, he kind of just sputtered and told me if I got on that bus I’d be dead to him. We haven’t spoken since.”

  “Did you enjoy the army?”

  “If I thought my dad’s rules were stupid, the army’s were insane, but in some ways I didn’t mind. In the army, at least, I knew none of it was personal. And I made friends, with the type of people I’d never have come across at Duke‌—‌black guys from the Bronx, farm boys from Kansas, high school dropouts from the Jersey Shore. Don’t get me wrong, there are times I regret not going to university, there’s a lot I wish I knew which I don’t, but every time I meet college graduates back home all I see are a bunch of people who’re only interested in making money. It’s as if college has sucked every ounce of originality out of them. My buddies in the army were different. We may have been the lowest of the low but we were loyal to each other, a brotherhood‌—‌it was the first time since my mom died that I felt like I had a family again.”

  Charlie looks over and gives her a bashful smile.

  “Sorry, must be boring you to death,” he says.

  “Not at all. I’m sure your mother is really proud of you.”

  “I’d love to think that, but unlike you, I don’t believe in an afterlife.”

  “But she did?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “That song, My Sweet Lord, the one she had you sing.”

  “She was never religious.”

  “But it sounds like she was spiritual.”

  “Yeah, I suppose she was.”

  “So how does the song go?”

  “It’s really just the same words repeated over and over.”

  “Sing it for me.”

  “Trust me, you don’t want to hear me sing.”