Hidden

by Miriam Halahmy

  “In here,” says Samir, and he pulls me into the kitchen.

  A short woman, her head completely covered in a black head scarf, is laying out sheets of incredibly thin pastry onto a huge tray on the kitchen table.

  She’s younger than Mum, in her thirties maybe, with the same light-brown skin as Samir, and she’s wearing a full-length dark blue dress, a black cardigan and red slippers.

  “Hello, Samir friend, good, sit, sit,” and she gives me a huge smile and pushes me onto a stool.

  “This is Auntie Selma,” says Samir, grinning. “Hello,” I say.

  Auntie Selma speaks in rapid, heavily accented English, and it’s hard to follow everything she says. But she and Samir hoot with laughter when I carefully say shukran.

  “Where’d you learn that?” says Samir in surprise.

  “Guess,” and I give him a wink. Then I say, “What are you making?” I point to the jars of honey and bowls of mixture that look like nuts or perhaps garden gravel ground up quite small.

  “Baklava,” says Auntie Selma, and she and Samir have to say it about ten times before I get it.

  That was the word I got wrong the last time I came to Samir’s home. I thought they were making balaclavas for suicide bombers. How embarrassing. For a minute I can’t meet Samir’s eyes.

  But that’s not the only thing I got wrong in the last few days. I didn’t realize that Mum and Dad have been speaking to each other for the last two years behind my back. That’s so like sneaky of them and then I have an awful thought. Maybe Mum thinks I don’t deserve to be in touch with Dad because I’m “running wild” or whatever.

  Samir is telling me that baklava is a kind of very sweet Middle Eastern pastry. Auntie Selma makes it by the tray load for the Turkish restaurant on the high street. “They pay her,” he says, and I nod.

  Every little helps, I think, like my paper route money. Although I’ve decided to quit so now I’m unemployed again. Can’t wait to tell Mum the good news. She’s bound to blame me.

  Auntie Selma gives me two different kinds of pastries to try, and it’s the most fantastic melt-in-your-mouth stuff I’ve ever had.

  “Take, Alix,” says Auntie Selma, and she hands me a spoon and a bowl of mixture. “Put here and here and we make together and make good, inshallah.”

  I look at Samir and he says, “Inshallah, it means God willing.”

  I try it out a couple of times and Auntie Selma corrects me until I get it right.

  “Shukran, inshallah, I’m speaking Arabic,” and I laugh. Auntie Selma laughs too, and says, “Alix make good Iraqi girl.”

  What would Auntie Selma think about hiding Mohammed? Maybe she would think we were crazy and tell us to go to the police. Is that what a good Iraqi girl would do?

  We all work together for a while and it’s really great fun. Samir and me get sticky to our elbows and then Samir gets a bottle of cola out of the fridge and, handing me a couple of plastic beakers, says, “Let’s go next door. It’s too hot in here.”

  He says something in Arabic to Auntie Selma and she smiles and waves us away. But as we leave the kitchen I suddenly think, What if Nasty Naazim is in the next room? I’m beginning to feel very nervous.

  29. The Photos

  Samir leads me into the living room. It’s a small, square room with brightly colored cotton rugs on the tatty carpet and pieces of deep red velvety material thrown over the sofa and armchairs. No sign of Naazim, which is a relief.

  But it feels as though I’ve stepped into a foreign country with all the colors and the sweet spicy smell floating in from the kitchen. Very different from our living room in the cottage with its wooden beams in the ceiling and the dark, polished furniture.

  My eye is caught by the sideboard, which runs down one side of the room. It’s absolutely crammed with dozens of photos of what look like family members and, even more incredible, the entire wall’s covered in photos too. You can’t see one square millimeter of wallpaper. I look over at Samir, who’s fiddling with the radio, finding a music channel. I can tell by the way he’s standing that he’s embarrassed.

  I look back at the photos of men and women, all ages, in groups and pairs and on their own, eating meals outdoors in white-hot sunlight. There are little children grinning with their front teeth missing and women with their hair covered, stirring big pans of food. These photos must be from Iraq.

  “So where are you?” I say.

  “It’s not my family. It’s Auntie Selma’s, my uncle Sayeed’s wife. She came to England six months after me. Uncle Sayeed won’t leave Iraq, so she cries about him a lot,” says Samir over his shoulder.

  “But the photos, are they all your auntie’s family?” I say, astonished. How could anyone have so much family? “Where’s your auntie?”

  Samir points to a little girl of about nine with a ribbon in her curly hair, holding the hand of a man. He has a mustache and he’s wearing some kind of long white tunic. “That’s Auntie Selma with her father.”

  “What happened after that, did they lose the camera?” I say, grinning.

  “No, everyone in these pictures is dead. Only Auntie Selma’s left.”

  Samir’s looking at me and then he drops his eyes as he sees my face change.

  How could so many people from one family have died? Did they all get some terrible disease? Saddam Hussein couldn’t have killed them all in his prisons, could he?

  “I don’t understand,” I say.

  Samir goes to the door and checks that Auntie Selma’s busy. “She gets upset if we talk about it,” he says, coming back and slumping down on the sofa. “Me and Naazim don’t like it when she cries. We don’t know what to do.”

  I sit down too, next to a table with a large, heavy book on it, covered with a green cloth.

  “Auntie Selma comes from a village called Halabjah in the north of Iraq,” Samir says. “It’s where the Kurds live. They rebelled against Saddam Hussein and out of revenge he dropped gas bombs on the Kurdish villages. The worst attack was on one single day in 1988 when five thousand people were killed in Auntie Selma’s village. Auntie Selma is the only one left in her family.”

  “It must have been a very big family,” I say, thinking about Kim and all her brothers and sisters and uncles and cousins. Not like me, with just Mum.

  Samir nods and such a sad look crosses his face.

  “Yes,” he says very quietly, and a chill goes through me. “Thousands and thousands of people were killed, and most of them were women and children. Naazim said he saw one picture of a man sitting over the bodies of his wife and ten children, all dead.” Samir looks at me with his sad, dark eyes and I just stare back.

  All that in this little living room, every day.

  “Naazim doesn’t let me look at those pictures, all those piles of dead bodies. Like they showed us in History class.”

  “Germany in World War II?” I say, and Samir nods. Grandpa’s war, I think, only he didn’t go to any concentration camps.

  We are quiet for a few minutes. Samir goes back to fiddling with the radio and I look at the pictures on the wall.

  Then I say, “But five thousand people killed from one bomb? Surely one bomb can’t do that.”

  “No, there were hundreds of bombs, filled with horrific stuff like cyanide and mustard gas . . .”

  “Gas? They used that in the trenches.” Grandpa told me how his uncle Ted was gassed in World War I. He never worked again because his lungs were destroyed.

  When Grandpa was a boy he used to wave a newspaper up and down in front of his uncle to try and get some air into his lungs. “Terrible, it was,” Grandpa told me, shaking his head.

  That’s why they all carried gas masks around with them in the next war. But I thought that was all ancient history. What would Grandpa say about the gassing of Auntie Selma’s family?

  “The gas bombs fell for three days, thousands more were killed and thousands and thousands wounded,” Samir went on. “Naazim says he read about one whole family who all went
blind. Aunty Selma lost more than a hundred members of her family.”

  I can’t imagine so many people in one family, and all of them dead. You couldn’t fit a hundred people into our little cottage. “That’s a very big family,” I can’t help saying.

  “There are a lot of families like that in Iraq,” says Samir. “Auntie Selma was only ten. She was sent to live with relatives in Baghdad. She’s some sort of distant cousin of my grandfather. She and our uncle Sayeed played together as kids.”

  “Childhood sweethearts,” I say with a bit of a grin.

  Samir grins back. “I don’t know about that. She says he used to play tricks on her all the time. But then he went away to university and when he came back the family decided they should get married.”

  That’s a bit weird, I think. “Does she love him?” I say cautiously.

  “I think so, she misses him a lot. But she also misses all her family. I wasn’t born when the Kurds were massacred. Naazim was only a baby. But when he was about fourteen, the year before my father was arrested . . .”

  “When was that?”

  “He was taken away in 2002, Naazim turned fourteen in . . .” He pauses and has a think. “October 2001, so I was eight. Anyway, my father told Naazim what happened to Auntie Selma’s family and Naazim told me. I had nightmares for ages.”

  We are quiet for a minute while I try and take all this in. First of all, Auntie Selma’s family are all killed, then when she grows up, she gets married and settles into a new life. Then everything goes wrong again about five years ago. She, Samir and Naazim only just got here alive.

  Samir doesn’t say anything and I can see he’s retreating into being the ice man. I don’t blame Samir, I feel the same, all sort of chilly and cold inside. It makes me feel very lost and alone again.

  Where’s Kim when I need her? I really need to ask her what she thinks about all this stuff. And what about my dad? My biggest problem at the moment is my pathetic parents. Samir hasn’t even got any parents. All my problems with Mum and Dad, cleaning the house and keeping the boiler alight, they all seem so silly when I think about everything Auntie Selma and Samir and even Naazim have been through.

  I’m fiddling with the green cloth without thinking and suddenly it falls off, revealing a large, heavy-looking book.

  Samir leaps to his feet and quickly covers the book again. “You mustn’t do that,” he says. “It’s the Quran. Our Bible.”

  Everything’s so different here what with Auntie Selma’s life history on the wall and religious books that have to be covered, let alone a foreign language, which would probably be a lot more interesting to learn than boring old French.

  Maybe I’ll become fluent in Arabic and become a diplomat in Iraq and help to bring about peace. Then Samir and his family could go home.

  Samir says, “I used to bring my father the Quran every morning and he would read to us before breakfast. We had to learn the verses by heart in school, so my father would test us.”

  He smiles and shakes his head. “Naazim used to call me ghabi, stupid, when I made a mistake, and then he’d get told off.”

  “Do you still read it together?” I ask.

  “No . . .” and his voice fades away. I stare down at the floor and try to think of something to say. Then Samir sighs and says, “We miss my father’s voice too much.”

  We’re quiet for a minute, finishing the cola, and it’s all so sad that I decide we should talk about something else.

  “Did you get into trouble for the exclusion?”

  Samir shoots me a little smile of relief and his face clears. Then he says, “I haven’t told Auntie Selma or Naazim and school’s closed tomorrow for teacher training so I’m hoping they just won’t notice.”

  The door slams downstairs and we both leap to our feet. It’s Naazim and suddenly he’s in the doorway, the usual glare on his face. Samir doesn’t seem to notice and starts chattering away about helping Auntie Selma. But Naazim just keeps glaring at me.

  I’m beginning to wonder if I’m wearing the wrong clothes even though I’ve got my school joggers on and my legs are covered. Not for the first time I wish I’d listened more in Religious Studies lessons. I try to catch Samir’s eye but he’s just fixed on his big brother.

  Then Naazim launches into an interrogation, which makes MI5 look like summer camp, asking me a whole series of questions about brothers and sisters, what my dad does—that one’s easy, nothing most of the time—about my mum and even my dog. I’m getting very nervous and flustered when Samir shouts out, “That’s enough, Naazim. She’s a friend, a good friend.”

  Naazim stops but you can see he’d rather just juggernaut on and he still hasn’t managed to crack a smile. “I’m going to see Auntie Selma,” he says, but before he turns to go he says, “Don’t speak about the photos.”

  30. Soaked Again

  “Time to go?” I say, and Samir nods.

  “Just give me a minute,” and he slips out of the room.

  I hear him speaking in Arabic. Naazim answers in short grunts and Auntie Selma’s laughing. Then he comes back with our jackets and a grin on his face, “Okay, let’s go.”

  What a relief to get outside and away from Naazim’s interrogation. I wonder if that’s what they taught him in the Iraqi army as we run for the bus. He probably treats every new person like an enemy, automatically. I’d rather pull my eyelashes out than go through that again.

  “What’s his problem?” I ask once we’re on the bus.

  “Naazim? He says our parents wouldn’t want me to be friendly with a girl, especially if she’s not Muslim. It’s haram, forbidden. Teenagers don’t go out with each other in Iraq like they do here. Muslims are very strict,” says Samir. “Naazim tries to look after me like Mum and Dad would.”

  “So that’s why he’s in a total fury every time he sees me with you,” I say.

  Samir gives me a shy grin. “He thinks we’re going out.”

  “Oh,” I say, and I feel my face go all hot.

  We both giggle a little bit and then Samir stares out the window all the way down the Island while I fiddle about with my cell phone.

  It’s almost four thirty by the time we’re jogging down the road toward the sea, and its beginning to get dark. I can hear the barking of a big dog as we run between the last houses and onto the yacht club road by the inlet. A huge hairy Alsatian, which I think I recognize, is racing over the top of the sand dunes toward the sea. Then with horror I realize it’s chasing someone.

  It’s Mohammed!

  He’s looking over his shoulder, arms waving about wildly, as he tumbles down the steep slope and onto the beach.

  I think my heart’s going to stop.

  “What’s he doing out here?” I yell to Samir as we hurl ourselves over the dunes. Mohammed isn’t looking where he’s going; he reaches the water’s edge and flounders into the sea. At least the water isn’t as deep this side of the dunes, unlike on the Solent side where Mohammed was thrown into the sea on Saturday. But it’s still very dangerous; you can sink deep into mud on this side of the point.

  The dog is barking like mad and Mohammed wades farther and farther and then he trips and falls right in. He splashes like mad and rolls right over onto his back. The dog leaps forward with a delighted bark and plants its huge hairy paws on Mohammed’s chest. In horror I see Mohammed’s head sink below the surface.

  I throw myself down the steep side of the dune and straight into the sea, the freezing water stopping my breath for the second time in less than a week. I hear Samir yelp with the cold as he rushes into the water behind me. My sneakers are sinking into the squelchy mud of the inlet and I’m terrified we’ll get stuck and start to sink. But I have to reach Mohammed and get the dog, which I now recognize as Barney, off him.

  Where the hell is Mad Murphy, his owner? “Mohammed!” I yell. “Just stay still. He won’t hurt you, I promise!”

  But Mohammed has stopped splashing and he’s almost completely submerged. He can’t drown now, h
e can’t!

  I lunge forward and grab an arm, hauling him to the surface with all my strength, but I can’t do it alone. “Samir, help me!” I shriek, and then he’s beside me, grabbing the other arm. I push Barney away with my free hand and he closes his teeth around it, playfully.

  “Get off, you stupid mutt,” I yell, and he releases my hand after giving it a playful nip.

  Mohammed’s body feels like a sack of concrete as we start to wade back to the shore. The water is nearly up to my waist and the dog keeps jumping around us, threatening to trip us up.

  “Where’s his owner?” pants Samir, shifting his grip on our man.

  “He doesn’t c-c-c-care, he’s m-m-mad,” I stutter, all my muscles shaking with cold.

  This is worse than a full marathon, what with the icy water, the mud sucking at our shoes and the terrible weight of Mohammed. I’m almost at the end of my strength. Suddenly Mohammed’s legs give way and he drops down, wrenching my arm almost out of its socket. I lose my grip and both Mohammed and Samir fall forward into the sea. Samir surfaces first, choking and rubbing his eyes. But Mohammed stays under and I’m tearing through the water, grabbing at his arms and shoulders, trying to heave him up.

  “We’re losing him,” I scream as Barney shoves against my legs.

  Samir drags himself to his feet, lunges at Mohammed and pulls him upright. Mohammed is gasping and sobbing but we manage to lug him to the shore. We fall onto the beach exhausted. A bitter wind is blowing up from the Solent, chilling me to the bone, and I’m shaking with cold.

  Then Mad Murphy appears on top of the dunes and whistles down to Barney. “Not in your way, was he, my lovely boy?” sings out Murphy, and I just glare up at him.

  “Won’t he tell?” splutters Samir.

  I shake my head. “He’s bonkers, won’t even remember he saw us.”

  Murphy and Barney wander off along the beach and we start up the dune. But I hear a car approaching slowly from the road. I look over the top of the dune and it’s a police car and we’re out in the open with Mohammed. The car is crawling along the yacht club road.