by Emily Danby
‘She’s not coming back!’
‘I’m not going back!’
Aliyah hit the heels of her shoes against the ground as she cursed Hanan using foul expressions. She imagined jumping on her from behind and slicing her with her knife, just as she had once done to the neighbourhood boys. ‘Fucking bitch... Fucking bitch,’ she heard her own voice croak, muttering the words into space.
Opening her eyes, Aliyah stared into the horizon stretched out before her. The compact mansions were silent. The scent of the desert had a reinvigorating effect, but her bag was still heavy and her body had started to wane with fatigue. It had not been an ordinary night: the mistress and the master, the streak of light, ghosts of al-Raml and, to top it all off, there before her was her elder sister, carrying her along on her magic carpet, encouraging her to keep going.
She felt a prickling sensation around her neck and remembered the gold chain, reaching out her hand to feel it. The necklace was a gift from Hanan. She could sell it, she thought – a reassuring idea. Then she would be able to take some things back for her brothers and sisters, and her mother too. After all, it wouldn’t be right to return after so many years without even a few sweets or some fruit. The tin-sheet room occupied Aliyah’s mind. Imaginings of her future in al-Raml took over her thoughts. But the visions were not alone; for a little while now another image – that of a closed window – had gnawed away at her mind.
Aliyah remembered how she and her siblings would trample on each other’s toes as they gathered full circle around a large aluminium dish on the floor, placed in the exact centre of the room. It was difficult to tell precisely whose fingers were reaching towards the bowl; hands scrambled chaotically, rising from the dish, before they delved into mouths so cavernous it seemed they would never get out. Huddled together, the children would push and shove. Sometimes they joked with each other, but usually they swore and hurled insults, while their mother watched over them from a corner of the room, keeping an eye out for any sign of one of her children attempting to push another. After the youngest brother was once pushed head-first into the bowl, the mother had grown cautious to avoid a repeat incident. The boy’s face had been covered with food and the rest of the dish had spilled onto the plastic mat, depriving the children of their dinner.
When the time came to sleep, the siblings would lie close together in special formation, each huddling on the floor with their arms tucked in to leave enough space for another member of the family. In winter especially, Aliyah felt herself slotted snuggly between the others like spoons in a drawer. In summer things were different; the bitter cold turned to blazing heat and the sheets of tin making up the roof and walls roasted their flesh. To sleep, the family would spread themselves across the plastic mat on the floor, since in summer the sponge mattress burnt their backs and the insects living inside became an instrument of torture, with their incessant scurrying and constant drone. The noise of the bugs and the biting mosquitoes buzzing about their ears kept everybody from sleeping.
Next to the sleep-stealing mosquitoes, everything else seemed insignificant. By the morning, the children’s faces would have become swollen red lumps, which they scratched at, night and day, until the lumps bled and turned into little brown pimples. As a preventative measure, their mother would smack their scratching fingers. But there was something about the situation that the children didn’t understand – something which made them lose control and attack their own skinny bodies. They would flee the house to the corners of the alleyways, where most of the other neighbourhood children came to scratch too, having escaped from their mothers. The children chose a corner far from view to hold their scratching parties and when they were finished, they returned home, their faces covered in blood and their eyes heavy with drowsiness. Aliyah was always afraid of leaving traces of blood on her face or on her legs; she knew that if her mother caught sight of the broken skin she would come at her with that strange, strong-smelling substance and dab it on the red patches. The ointment stung so strongly that she would kick out, jumping up and leaping about, until her mother pinned her to the floor and covered her body with the horrid ointment.
Aliyah tried to kick as she hobbled along on her high heels. ‘I won’t go back!’ she insisted through gritted teeth.
She kicked the ground, then came to a halt. Swearing incomprehensibly, she lashed out at the pebbles on the side of the road, pummelling the stones like her father used to pummel her on those nights when one of his children started groaning or humming. The earth sent dust rising up around her, the whole place remaining deathly silent. She sneezed, then putting her bag down beside her, she continued to lash out at the ground. Surely the window would be open now, she thought. Aliyah recalled the faces of her brothers and sisters, frightened and packed in together at her side, with barely enough space to breathe. The children would stare, their eyes glistening bright like those of cats, terrified of the expressions they might transmit during their father’s kicking sprees.
At night, Aliyah and her siblings would hide to escape their father’s beatings, climbing under the woollen covers which their mother had woven from old jumpers. With the children’s assistance, she spent the winter nights winding the thread of old garments into a ball, then re-weaving the wool into colourful patches. After completing several pieces, she would join the patches together with threads of thick wool, until the rug grew and became a warm blanket big enough to cover their bodies.
The family used the small inner room for cooking, washing and doing their business. There was a black pit to urinate in, framed by white cement. By the door they stacked the dishes on top of a stone basin, which they used for washing the crockery and pans. In the opposite corner was a large gas stove; every Thursday it was used to heat the bathing water. To the children, wash day was torture. Not only would they be shivering from the winter cold, but they would have to wait patiently in line for everybody else to finish washing. For the unfortunate child who was still bathing when the father decided he wanted a coffee, it was even worse. He wouldn’t wait until they had finished pouring the small cups of water over their heads, but would kick the door open instead, barking at their mother to make him a coffee. Everybody froze still, their knees knocking together as they waited for the coffee pot to boil.
As the children grew up, there was no longer enough space for them to all bathe at once, and their mother extended wash day to a two-day event. After her lightening-speed wash, Aliyah would sit and roll between her fingers the short brown threads which peeled away from her skin when she rubbed it. It was Aliyah’s great pleasure to see the threads of dirt and dead skin on her body. She would watch them with pride, feeling as though something had been made from her own body. Aliyah also showed her siblings how to form the little threads and keep them concealed within their palms. When the children’s mother cottoned on to what they were doing, as the strings of dirt and dead skin mingled with the sweat in their clammy fists, Aliyah felt dismay. She would have to wait a whole other week before she could collect any new threads.
Aliyah was like a beast of prey and she delighted when others called her animal names. But sometimes, in her daydreams, she would notice peculiar things sprouting from her fingers, and a layer of hair covering her skin. Little black horns seemed to spring from her forehead and her teeth grew longer. Aliyah would scamper across the roofs of those packed-together rooms like a little wild animal.
That same sense of nimbleness returned to her as she heaved her bag and a faint happiness welled beneath her ribs at the return of her animal senses. She would leap about right there, she decided, just as she had done when she was small. She would frolic in the dirt, in the dawn twilight. The feeling that she was once again an animal made Aliyah feel protected from a fear of the unknown. Although she was alone, she was happy, and even though she didn’t know where to turn to – heading back to her first world, expelled from the second – the return of this feeling put a spring in her step.
She was a new creature on the ba
re cement ground. Aliyah looked about her; people were still asleep and there was not a sound to be heard but the howl of dogs – the only sensation that still made her feel connected to the world around her.
For Hanan, the girl’s animality was a source of attraction. She would savour the touch of her fingers as they played on her back drawing pictures, and feel a strange sensation at the sight of the servant’s dark skin against her own soft white flesh. Meanwhile, Aliyah would feel happiness flow through her as she noticed the mistress’s contentment, and she would continue to create new shades. She would be captivated by the colours and the contrast between the differing shades of their skin, as she drew clouds, a donkey, and sometimes roses on her mistress’s back. She would build white mountains of foam, which collapsed almost instantly. She laughed, then brought a hand to her mouth, her laughter ceasing. With soapy foam spread over her lips, she turned to her reflection in the mirror, pretending to be an old man. Aliyah laughed raspily, as she drew a great big tree, saying to herself:
‘I’m... I’m... Father Christmas.’
It was Mistress Hanan who had introduced her to Father Christmas. Aliyah had seen him on television as she lay by her mistress’s side. She had dreamt of him ever since, day and night. Sometimes, when she felt especially happy, she would gather a mound of foam on her chest and turn towards her mistress who, in a state of delirium, grabbed tightly onto the girl’s fingers, laughing hysterically. Aliyah would get out of the bath, damp with steam and soapy white foam which hung from her body like marshmallow. Then, she would go to her room to retrieve blank paper and a collection of pens with which she would draw for Hanan the pictures she had sketched on her back. As she drew, Aliyah recalled the soft touch of her mistress’s skin and the invigorating scents of the oils and felt as though she were living in a paradise. Her sketches would start at her mistress’s neck and end at the base of her back.
Aliyah’s senses were reawakened in that colourful, clean place. When she looked out into the distance, her view was no longer obstructed by the walls of the little room as it was back in the alleyway. She would close her eyes and try to believe she really was in a place shaded by trees, where the soft curtains played over the windows and, more importantly, where her father’s beatings could not reach. At night, there, she was no longer haunted by her sister’s wide-eyed ghost, and the smell of the skips had vanished.
When she was still eleven years old, Aliyah would tremble a little when Hanan al-Hashimi would place her in her lap and make her rub her body with strange oils, her fingers squeezing her quivering skin.
Pliant like dough, Aliyah would give in to the mistress, letting her do as she pleased. In the beginning she had feared her gentle caresses – the source of nightmares that stole her sleep – but day by day, as she grew older in the villa, the mistress’s touch became the subject of daydreams; she began to wait for it in anticipation. Aliyah knew now of the precious treasure concealed within her own body, which she could grant her mistress when she felt like it and withhold from her when she was in a bad mood. Yet this was only at night. In the daytime, Aliyah avoided the mistress, keeping a distance as though the woman were poisonous.
Night and day were two quite separate worlds.
Aliyah’s fingers froze around the handle of her bag. Sharp twinges ran through them as she struggled to hold her grip on the bag and keep her balance as she walked. As her fingers entwined over the leather skin she teetered on the point of falling. Then, her hand let go and the bag fell. Aliyah felt a chill run through her warm fingers, whose games had made her the queen of a magic realm. She watched the digits tremble, concealing them close to her belly as she wondered to herself what was causing them to shiver like that in summer. Perhaps it was the dawn chill, which arose there as in all desert-like places.
But the cold wasn’t so intense as to make her fingers freeze like that; it was fear, she realised. Fear alone had turned her to a lump of ice. Aliyah remembered how her fingers would become completely rigid, refusing to bend or dance as sharp twinges of pain shot through them. It was happening again right then, as she tried to put her hands in her pockets to protect them from the biting chill of the morning. Aliyah studied her fingers. They seemed unfamiliar to her now. Those fingers that had once transformed Hanan al-Hashimi’s nights into eternal pleasure, before she had turned her out into this new unknown.
That moment was etched upon her mind: the mistress charging at her like a woman possessed and throwing her out. Every time the memory arose, she shivered and began to falter, like a tattered yellow leaf on a wizened tree branch. Aliyah searched for a single convincing reason to explain why that woman – who was clearly deranged – wore so many different faces, some so frightening that she trembled when Hanan appeared in her dreams and turned into a savage. In bed, Hanan’s features were quite different, as if the djinn had taken possession of her. She became like an infant, her eyes shimmering as her body began to relax. In Aliyah’s embrace, Hanan was an obedient child. On other occasions, when she had guests, Hanan displayed a third face: her features would drain of colour and their contours turn to broken lines over a face devoid of laughter.
The prickling sensations intensified. Aliyah brought her palms close to her mouth and breathed some warmth into them. Looking behind her once more, she saw nothing of her own world – that world which, until so recently, had been everything she owned. Once more, she picked up her bag and started to run, stumbling in her high-heel shoes. Why she had been so insistent on that particular pair, she did not know. From the clothes she was wearing, Aliyah momentarily imagined she looked like Hanan al-Hashimi, dressed up for one of her soirées from which she wouldn’t return until dawn.
She took off the shoes and carried them, running and crying at the top of her voice, just like when she was a little girl. Aliyah dried her tears as she ran. Stumbling, she came to a halt, then charged on once more, without a thought for where she was going. Why was she so terrified? What was she afraid of? She didn’t know; she was afraid and that was that. Days which she thought were gone for good came back to her: memories of the times when she would carry a knife close to her thigh, of how her heart would pound as she kept watch over the doorway to the family’s little room, where her sister lay.
The sound of tears filled the wide open space as she crossed the terrain on a narrow track, with nothing for company but her fingers, her bag and her fear. And with fear came the memories of al-Raml.
Aliyah jumped at the sound of a car. She was all alone on an empty road, the morning sun having not yet risen. She stopped, looked down and pulled out a sharp knife from her little bag. She held the knife tightly, ready to brandish it in the face of any being, whether they came out of the ground or swooped down from above. But the car didn’t stop, or even slow down and she carried recklessly on her way, her heart pounding as the car shot past. In the next moment, silence had returned and the dust settled.
Aliyah sighed. Returning the knife to her bag, she looked back towards the villa. In a daze, she stared out at the expanse before her. She had crossed the terrain so quickly that Hanan’s villa seemed like a mirage now. For a brief moment, Aliyah imagined she had never lived there, attempting to gather courage again. Over the years, she had trained herself to be brave, but now she felt shaken. Every part of her body bubbled and fizzed; her chest rose and fell heavily; her stare was as sharp as her knife, which had not left her side since the day her mother had hidden it in her school dress. It was her mother who had taught her how to use the blade to ward off the boys, or the men, who harassed her from time to time in the alleyways of the red-light district.
Aliyah was not the only girl to be taught how to wield a knife; there were many but unlike the others, she had once brandished hers openly and seen the enchanting way it glistened in the sunlight. Yet her actions that day were not random, nor were they out of bravado.
It had happened on one of the days when the door was left ajar and her siblings had gone out. Aliyah Senior had been left alone i
n the house to watch the sunlight stream through the gap in the door, to listen to the passing footsteps, the wailing children and their screeching mothers. She didn’t notice the shadow suddenly cast over the doorway; it had appeared in the blink of an eye. There was little time to ask the neighbour’s son what he was up to, for he shut the door and immediately descended upon the girl. Aliyah felt as though her bones would be crushed under his weight as he gagged her mouth. She flapped beneath him like a fish out of water, but he didn’t seem to care. Her face suddenly creased, her hair became tangled about her neck and her limbs began to shake. Aliyah was no longer the beautiful young girl she had once been. Ever since the room had swallowed her up, the neighbour’s son had been watching it day and night, waiting for his chance. He had easy access to her now. He lifted her robe up to her navel. What happened after that, the boy wasn’t quite sure. Before entering her, he began to shake so violently that everything around him shook too. Aliyah Senior was almost unconscious. She struggled to breathe with his hand covering both her nose and mouth. Had he not started to shake and then fled, without looking into her blue face, she would have suffocated under his weight. On subsequent occasions, the boy would again wait for the family to leave their room. Now he would come with a sharp knife in one hand and gag Aliyah’s mouth with the other. He would remove her pants violently and then mount her. The boy had been back dozens of times before Little Aliyah caught him. She had opened the rusty iron door to hear her sister sobbing quietly. She noticed a pair of black buttocks accelerating steadily above where her sister lay and the knife glimmering between Aboud’s teeth. Little Aliyah threw down her books and took out her own blade, which was held by a leather belt at the side of her pants. She screamed wildly, as if not knowing how to speak. Then, tearing her school dress, she jumped onto half-naked Aboud, gashing his buttocks until the blood poured and he leapt about the room like an ape. Aliyah clung to Aboud like a small wild animal, lunging with her knife at every part of his body within reach. The boy staggered a little as he attempted to put on his trousers and Aliyah jumped on his back, bit him and brought him to the ground. Had some of the neighbourhood men not managed eventually to extract her, Aliyah would have killed him; her teeth had sunk into his shoulder, staining her little mouth with blood. For a moment, Aliyah’s body fused with the boy’s. She had reduced him to such shreds that the men imagined they were seeing a wild beast before them.
