by Anna Perera
Trouble is, there’s no one here to talk to about anything. There are no computers. Nothing to read. Nothing to do but think. All they have is one copy of the Qur’an between them. The guards pass it on when someone’s finished with it. The problem, though, is it’s written in another language and, after glancing at the pages for a while, Khalid gives up trying to make sense of the holy book.
Holgy, what would he do if he was stuck here? Khalid guesses he’d sit there just like him. Legs crossed. Staring across at the sleeping man next to him. Thinking a mixture of things. Same as him.
Khalid’s mind directs itself to the ongoing problem of his history coursework, however unimportant that seems right now. Like all his mates, schoolwork is something he worries about non-stop, simply because the teachers and his parents never let up. Most of them pretend not to do homework or care about school, but they all do.
“What are you going to do with your life if you don’t get any qualifications?” Dad always says.
“Er—become a chef like you?” Khalid once smirked.
“Not like me,” Dad said. “These kids now, they got college degrees in catering to cook. To be electrician these days you must have papers. Everybody want certificates.”
Khalid knows he’s right. Most of his mates—well, Nico and Mikael along with him—are in the top set for most of their subjects, expected to get As and Bs in seven or more GCSEs, and the pressure is constant. Escaping some of that by being here is no relief, because weirdly all Khalid can think about is if this goes on for much longer he won’t have time to look at any of his coursework over the holidays. Unless he gets out before term starts he’ll fall behind. Will the teachers take something like this into account? Khalid doubts they’ll care. None of the “official” people here care what happens to him, so why should they?
What if he never gets out and fails all his GCSEs? He’ll become the class loser. They might even make him redo everything and put him down a year to repeat the work he’s almost finished. What a fool he’ll look then. Sat in the year below’s class. Probably behind that idiot Derek Slater and the bunch of stupid toads who follow him round like he’s God. Despite his growing fear, Khalid decides he’s not going to allow that to happen. Nothing will make him suffer the shame of being a year older than the rest of his class.
If worst comes to worst, he’ll refuse to go to school ever again. He’ll ask Mac, their neighbor, to get him work in the supermarket where he’s a cashier, stacking shelves or something—part-time. Anything to make some money to pay for the bus fare to the sixth-form college on the other side of town. He read in the local paper that they do GCSE courses in the evenings with loads of good subjects.
Now Khalid has a plan, he feels slightly better. More prepared. They can punch him, keep him awake, treat him like a criminal, but they can’t ruin his chances of a better life when he gets out of here. And that’s when he gets out, not if.
“No one’s ever going to do that to me, man!” Khalid says out loud without thinking. Embarrassed, the moment the words leave his mouth.
The soldier halfway down the line turns to look at him. The man two cages down quietly puts down his bottle of water and whispers something. Something that sounds like English but Khalid can’t be sure.
Khalid shuts his eyes to blank everything out while he goes over the plan again. Mumbling to himself so the approaching soldier will think he’s crazy. It works. The soldier passes by, his brown desert boots pausing in front of Khalid’s cell for a moment before moving on.
Khalid conjures up an image of himself in baggy jeans and a white, long-sleeved T-shirt, hair slickly gelled, waiting at the bus stop for the number 23 that will take him to college. Stamping the picture at the front of his mind, a weird feeling spreads over him that his real life is happening somewhere else. Perhaps Holgy’s right. We are all holograms.
Imagining he’s waiting for the bus right now instead of sitting in a wire cage in Afghanistan sparks a picture of Niamh in the weird red-and-brown knitted Peruvian hat with side bobbles she sometimes wears. She’s waiting, arms folded, for the bus.
“Hiya, Kal. You all right?” Smiling at him with glossy pink lips.
“Not bad,” he says.
“Your hair’s looking great,” she says.
“Yeah? Thanks. I, um, great hat.” No, no! This isn’t working. Khalid can’t tell her he likes that mad hat. She’ll have to take it off. That’s better.
Niamh’s still smiling at him in 3D moving color, as real to him as the wire that surrounds him. She only disappears when voices at the end of the row bring Khalid back to the present time.
The noise of creaking wheels forces him to glance at two men in white aprons wheeling a food trolley into the building. A few men stand up to grasp the wire fence in anticipation, carefully watching the guards take cardboard boxes from the trolley and dish them out by throwing them over the tops of the cages.
“Nice curry lunch!” one of the trolley men shouts in a strange, not-quite-right American accent. “Here you go!”
Imitating feeding time at the zoo, Khalid quickly grabs it but finds the tightly folded box hard to open with his fingers, and has no choice but to bite into one corner. Pulling back damp cardboard with his teeth until specks of white rice and a runny curry are revealed.
The curry is like nothing Khalid’s ever seen or tasted before. The small squares of stringy meat, which he hopes is chicken, not pork, are surrounded by yellowy broccoli spears and raisins. Raisins? Who puts raisins in curry?
Whoever made the sticky white rice should give up trying to cook. His mum would have a fit if she saw him eating like this with no spoon, knife, fork, pepper, salt or anything else. They never ate with their hands at home, because she insisted on them being British first, while when they were in Karachi with the aunties, they scooped up their rice with their hands like everyone else. Here, Khalid has no choice but to drop his head in the slop like a dog. The man next to him is licking his food hungrily. Another sucks the contents up from a hole he’s made in the middle. Everyone improvises the best way they can to get the runny food down their throats as quickly as possible. Worse than the glue they call curry that’s dished up in the school canteen, this stuff smells and tastes of rotting lettuce.
Then plastic containers of crackers and cheese are flung at them. Wrapped tightly like airplane food, they take an effort to get into. Unfortunately, Khalid’s crackers land in his toilet bucket in the corner of the cell and, since it hasn’t been emptied yet from this morning, he decides to go without. After lunch, the soldiers appoint a couple of them to empty the buckets. The first two refuse. In the end, they ask for volunteers and three men from the other end of the row are let out of their cells.
The volunteers stretch their arms and legs for a moment. One man, who looks a bit like a Muslim Tony Blair, with the same grinning face, nudges the smaller man beside him, nodding as if to say, Anything’s better than being stuck in there all day.
After watching them closely, Khalid half changes his mind. Perhaps he should have volunteered, though he can’t get his brain past the horrible job they are doing. But there are clear benefits: for a start, the soldiers keep well away from them as they enter each cell to collect the bucket. Meaning each one has the chance to exchange a few words with the occupant and find out something about who they are and what has happened to them. They even get the opportunity to whisper to each other as they head towards the end of the building to hand the buckets over.
When the Tony Blair lookalike gets to Khalid, he’s ready for him.
“I’m only fifteen. English. I’m innocent,” he pleads quickly.
The man smiles. Saying something kind in a language that sounds like Pashtu, which confuses Khalid. Then he disappears into the next cell. Khalid watches closely as his neighbor reaches out to greet him like a long-lost son. Shutting Khalid out. There’s no one here he can talk to. He’s not like any of these men. He’d have a better conversation with the guards.
Increasingly frustrated, it’s the final nail in his coffin. Not only has he been kidnapped and taken to this joke of a place, but he can’t speak to anyone and he appears to be the youngest person in this building. Some look like they might be in their twenties, but none of them look as young as him. Where are the two kids he saw when he arrived?
He’s not even that comfortable talking to people older than him. The respect-for-elders thing has been drummed into him for so long, he finds it difficult to be natural about it. Remembering how some of his class had an easy, jokey relationship with the teachers, while he blushed when attempting to say something friendly to them. Even to Mr. Tagg, who’s the best of the lot.
His mind spirals out of control. Are those two boys being held somewhere else? Given special treatment because of their age? It didn’t look like they were at the time, but perhaps things have changed now.
Khalid’s thoughts exhaust him. Totally alone, out of place and forgotten, he lies down on his mat to cry. Hiding his head in his arms so no one can see.
11
RED CROSS
When a solid, overbearing heat descends on the building, the sound of plane engines whirr into action, interrupting Khalid’s fitful sleep. In an attempt to stop the noise from fully waking him up, he turns over and dreams of chips and Cheddar cheese being spread on the football field at home in Rochdale. Then he opens his eyes, quickly calms himself down and tries to go back to sleep, but he picks up the dream at exactly the point where he left it, going through the whole nightmare again of trying to stop the mess ruining the field.
The noisy trucks, the shouting men and the incessant hum of the electricity generator annoy him as he sits cross-legged on the mat for a moment to bring himself round. All the time wondering about the men nearby—blue and white shapes he can barely make out through the layers of wire. Who are they?
It takes a while before Khalid gets to know the man to one side of him.
“As-salaamu alaikum,” he greets him each morning.
Soon Khalid answers him with the words, “Wa alaikum as-salaam,” as if he’s an old friend.
One day he surprises Khalid. “My name is Abdul Al-Farran,” he says.
“You speak English,” Khalid gasps. He can’t believe the man hasn’t spoken to him until now—he must have heard him shouting at the guards. But he doesn’t want to waste the opportunity by getting annoyed.
Abdul turns out to be the most random guy he’s ever met. Pressing his face against the wire, Khalid sees he’s slightly overweight, with a downturned mouth and miserably fat cheeks. His bushy eyebrows have a life of their own, rising and falling like curling caterpillars whenever he speaks.
Having decided to trust him, Abdul tells Khalid he was born in Lebanon. He moved to Pakistan, where his brother lives, some years ago to get a job teaching math. His English is quite good too, which helps.
“Mistake for me was travel all places, all time. I’m look—for wife. When I return Islamabad, I meet very bad man. Big fight. He make lie. Tell police I making bomb factory in house. My wife tell me run away, so I go Afghanistan. Wrong time I go that place.” Khalid finds it difficult to follow Abdul. He has the annoying tendency of jumping from one subject to another without pausing and Khalid can’t always understand what he’s getting at. Plus there’s the problem of his jumping eyebrows making it hard to concentrate, but he likes having him to talk to—it finally makes him feel a part of the group.
“How old are you?” Khalid interrupts, moving closer to their shared wire wall.
Abdul smiles and holds up his fingers, quickly flashing three tens and a five for him to count.
“Thirty-five?”
“Yes,” Abdul says, sighing.
“I’m only fifteen!”
“Fifteen! Bring you here for why?” Abdul’s shocked.
“I dunno. Who knows? I should be at school.”
“Then you must take chance to learn. I will teach everything I know for you.” Abdul grins. “Hezbollah, you know, means party of God!”
“Party of God?” Khalid blinks with surprise. From news reports he’d heard at home, Hezbollah were a dangerous group of some kind. Didn’t they go round kidnapping Westerners? But maybe Abdul is right. Maybe the actual meaning of the word is far more simple. Even so, he looks round to make sure no one’s listening. He’s scared, in case the word will be held against him in some way, thinking it really means terrorist—or something far worse—and Abdul Al-Farran’s having him on.
But then, “Fakir means poor man,” Abdul Al-Farran says without a hint of concern for the easy way he’d mentioned Hezbollah.
“Yeah? Cool.” Khalid makes an effort to calm down. Not really able to decide who Abdul really is. Maybe the word Hezbollah is a secret signal of some kind.
“Hmm.” Thoroughly enjoying being a teacher again, Abdul’s face crumples into a huge smile. His eyebrows suddenly part. “Imam means leader. Many English words they come from Arabic words. Yes. Genie—spirit. Sofa. Mattress. Checkmate—the king is dead. Algebra. Orange. Monsoon. Cotton. Zero. All Arabic.”
There’s no stopping him. Now Abdul has an audience, Khalid must wait and listen. Trouble is, his mind keeps wandering. It’s not his fault that Abdul reminds him of his geography teacher, Mr. Giles, who speaks in the same dull tone of voice, which sends the whole class to sleep even though what he’s saying is interesting.
“The word syrup, this is also Arabic!” Abdul smiles. “Sultan too.”
“Really?” Khalid mutters, without much hope he’ll ever stop bending his ear with endless information, certain Abdul Al-Farran has spent his life reading the dictionary.
“Ah, of course! I finish now.” Obviously slightly hurt by Khalid turning his head away from the wire, Abdul finally stops talking, drawing his bushy eyebrows down for the last time. For today anyway.
A military policeman wanders past. Not bothering to tell them off for spending the last half-hour talking. It seems that as long as they whisper for no more than a couple of minutes at a time no one will say anything. At least not on his shift. The later shift consists of two nasty soldiers who seem to enjoy making their lives miserable, but these two—one of whom is called Wade and comes from Atlanta—are almost human in the way they treat them.
Khalid feels a gut-wrenching shame for insulting Abdul Al-Farran. Especially after he’s dreamed of having someone to talk to.
“I just can’t take it all in,” he tries explaining later. But the midday call to prayer starts up from the other end and Abdul is happy to move from the wire to face Mecca.
Prayers fill the rusty hangar, rising to bounce off the roof and echo in the humid air like exotic birdsong. They transform the ordinary sounds of the building into a pure connection to the divine.
In time, Khalid’s eyes adjust to the dense wire separating the cells. In time, he can focus his eyes to see Abdul quite clearly without getting up from his mat. While the door wire is thin enough to see the soldiers walking up and down every few minutes, Khalid has no desire to look at them.
Wade, the friendly soldier, walks past again. This time he stops in front of Khalid to adjust the machine gun hanging on his chest.
“Don’t you like praying?” he says with a cheesy, fake grin.
“Not right now,” Khalid says.
“But you’re Muslim!”
“Yeah, but we don’t all pray all the time,” Khalid says crossly. Not seeing any reason to explain why he’s not able to let go just yet.
“Perhaps you’ll make a better Christian than a Muslim. I can bring you some pamphlets Mom sent me from Atlanta, so you guys can learn about Jesus.”
So that was it. The reason for Wade’s friendly manner. They were lost souls in need of saving. Mom in Atlanta was worried about them.
“It’s all right, thanks.” Khalid sees him off with a weak smile. Hiding his anger and frustration by clenching his fists behind his back.
Some time later, three sterner-looking soldiers, the first two with guns pointed at e
veryone, come down the line. The biggest one begins unlocking every other fence in turn. While the last soldier follows with an armful of shackles. Soon men are handcuffed and pushed out. Tied together with a long rope and led away. Khalid cranes his neck to see where they’re going and before long his question is answered when they return with water dripping down their dazed faces and soaking-wet hair. Plus big damp patches on their clean white T-shirts.
“Shower?” Khalid gasps in anticipation. The soldier nods, cuffing him tight. The thought of gushing water and sweet-smelling soap dominates Khalid’s mind as he’s tied to ten other men. Soldiers double up beside the line, all eyes and guns.
Twinkling hot sunshine hits Khalid’s face as he lowers his lids and steps from the gray hangar into an empty forecourt. Everyone is soon pulled through a block of cool shadow and a short walk takes them to the nearby doorway of a building with a wet, cold concrete floor. Inside the gray walls is a miserable place smelling of toilets, with rusty stains dribbling down the walls from the shower heads and a sound of running water. A sound with no feeling of pleasure attached.
The fear of communal washing is too much for the man behind him and he begins screaming, shaking his head in fear. Two more join in, yelling objections, while Khalid meekly allows himself to be untied, then uncuffed. He steps quickly to one side to undress, hard eyes bearing down on him, a gun a few centimeters from his forehead. The crying men are pushed to one side and stripped. Their clothes flung on a heap. One of the naked men stumbles, then falls to his knees. Head in his hands. They soon haul him up and throw him under the shower.
In a state of shock, Khalid faces the wall and squeezes the small soap brick which smells of taps, a hair’s breadth away from kicking out at something. For a moment he tries to relax into the water and enjoy the sensation. But the sound of crying cancels out any pleasure. It’s OK for Khalid, he’s used to showering with his mates after school sports and football matches. He’s not embarrassed to be seen naked. But for these men this is worse than death.
