In the distance, I’d heard the faint sound of bells as a trio of donkeys grazed above the shoreline, and someone singing in a language I could not understand. I’d found Europe, but lost my family. It wasn’t a trade-off I would ever have chosen.
Now, I wade out further, barely aware of the water soaking my jeans, splashing up to stain my T-shirt. The further I go from the shore, the wilder the sea seems: pushing, shoving, calling. I remember how heavy my limbs had felt that day, how the coldness had seeped right through to my bones. I remember thinking how much easier it would be to stop fighting, stop swimming, let go.
‘Sami!’ Lexie’s voice cuts into my thoughts, and I stop abruptly, shocked at how far I’ve waded. Lexie seems distant, unreachable and I can taste salt on my lips once more.
‘Sami! C’mon!’ she yells, and I flounder back through the waves to lift her up and whirl her round and round, the two of us laughing. And then we’re kissing, and although the kiss tastes of salt and shadows it also tastes of sunshine and hope and happiness.
‘Time to go,’ Lexie says, checking her phone. ‘Two o’clock, they said, by the pier. We don’t want to be late!’
I don’t want to be late, of course – I have waited three years for this. Lexie scoops up Mary Shelley and puts her into the travelling case. She links hands with me as we head back along the shoreline.
‘Looks like we finished the list,’ I say a little sadly. ‘Finally. And school starts again on Monday … Summer’s over.’
‘Summer’s over, but we’re just beginning, Sami,’ Lexie says. ‘We’ll make another list. A hundred dates. A thousand!’
‘We will,’ I promise. ‘Thanks for coming today. I hate that something that feels so wonderful for me must be so painful for you.’
Lexie shakes her head. ‘Nope, not painful,’ she says. ‘I’m happy for you, I really am. I just hope …’
Her voice fades away to nothing. ‘Sami,’ she whispers. ‘Do you think …?’
I look up, frowning, and I see what Lexie has seen. Two figures are walking towards us along the beach, both small and slender, both dressed simply in jeans and T-shirts, with the same dark curls and olive skin. I would know my mother and my sister anywhere.
My mother’s hair is streaked with grey and clipped up in a messy bun, her face criss-crossed with worry lines. She’s wearing a faded green scarf printed with roses, the fringing matted and straggly. Roza is no longer the little kid I remember; she must be twelve now, just a year younger than Lexie. She looks so grown up, so beautiful.
All four of us have stopped, wordless, staring, and I’m aware of Lexie letting go of my hand, stepping back.
‘Samir? Is it really you?’ my mother asks in Kurdish, her grey eyes wide. ‘After all this time?’
And then I’m running towards them, laughing, and my mother wraps her arms around me, pulls Roza in too. We cling together like the pieces of a complicated puzzle that have finally slotted together, just when you’d given up hope of working out how they might fit. I breathe in the scent of lemons and vanilla I remember so well from my childhood, the smell of my mother, and my T-shirt is wet with her tears.
‘So tall!’ my mother says, switching to English, stroking my face, pushing the bird’s-nest curls out of my eyes. ‘So handsome! Not my little boy any more, but a young man! I cannot believe you’re real!’
‘I’m real,’ I promise.
‘This is Lexie,’ I say, stepping back at last to slide an arm around her waist and bring her forward. ‘My girlfriend. And Mary Shelley the tortoise …’
Lexie lifts the little tortoise out of her carrying case, and Roza squeals and steps forward to stroke Mary Shelley. My mother folds Lexie into a brief hug before glancing anxiously beyond her to where my aunt and uncle and a bearded man, who must be the bloke from Footsteps to Freedom, are now approaching.
‘OK,’ I say. ‘You probably know … or maybe not – this is Uncle Dara and Aunt Zenna, and the man from the charity who is helping us!’
Everybody looks hopeful, cautious; everybody is smiling.
‘Little sister,’ my uncle says, and his face is wet with tears. ‘Yasmine! I am so very glad you’re safe. And, Roza, my niece – I am so glad you are here!’
‘Dara,’ my mother whispers. ‘My brother! You … you haven’t changed!’
They start to laugh. There will be lots of talking to do, lots of reconciliation and explanation. Past hurts and misunderstandings will be put aside, because blood is thicker than water and love wins over fear and pride. It will all work out. We have all the time in the world to see that it does.
‘Roza,’ I say, falling into step beside my sister. ‘I don’t know if you remember? I made this for you …’
I open my palm and offer her a Coke-can star. Her face breaks into the familiar grin I thought I had forgotten, then she flings her arms around me and holds on tight.
25
A Haircut, Maybe
The lady from the charity shop next door tells us that a barely worn blazer for Millford Park Academy has come in that might fit me, and so I go to school on the first day of the autumn term in perfect uniform.
‘Wonderful!’ Mr Simpson the head teacher says. ‘No more overcoat!’
He squints at my hair, which is collar length now and so bushy it could easily be sheltering a small family of mice. ‘Maybe a haircut next?’
‘Maybe not,’ I say politely, and Mr Simpson shrugs and lets me carry on my way.
Nobody else comments on the missing coat, but they all ask about the Lost & Found. Loads of kids have seen the busking video. Their parents have seen it too, and someone says it’s even been mentioned on the radio – Barney Bright has been boasting about having us in the studio, promising he’ll invite us back soon.
Some of the new Year Sevens ask Marley for his autograph, and he leans against the wall in the entrance foyer signing jotters with a Sharpie pen for a whole ten minutes, loving it.
‘Five hundred thousand views and counting,’ Happi reports. ‘Once things go viral, there’s no stopping them. It’s been shared all over the world – London, New York, Paris, Berlin, Rio, Sydney, Lagos … We are an international success!’
‘An internet sensation,’ Marley quips. ‘Who needs the Battle of the Bands?’
Pretty Street got their picture in the Millford Gazette, T-Dawg posing with his arm round Bobbi-Jo, who was wearing a minidress, a back-to-front baseball cap and weird hi-top trainers that came halfway up her tanned legs. The report says that her unusual backing vocals lend a distinctly British twist to the band, and that her dance routines are spellbinding.
‘I’m glad she’s with Pretty Street,’ Lexie says. ‘It’s definitely more her style!’
‘Their first single comes out next week,’ Bex informs us. ‘And guess who their new manager is? Oh well!’
We all know it wasn’t just Bobbi-Jo’s fault that she was such a bad fit for the Lost & Found – it was Marley’s too. If he’d been honest with her from the start, things could have run a lot more smoothly.
A week later, my mother and my sister come to live in Millford.
In three weeks flat, Uncle Dara has converted the attic into a big bedroom for my mother, complete with Velux windows and easy chairs and an offcut of emerald-green carpet. Roza takes my cousin Faizah’s old room, and everyone is happy.
My mother has been confirmed as a British citizen, and all of us now have the right to stay in Britain. Roza starts at Millford Park Academy and within days she has a group of new friends. Her English is still halting, uncertain, but that will not stop my little sister. My uncle puts a sign in the window advertising a new dressmaking service, and slowly the orders start to trickle in. My mother sits at the sewing machine in the workshop, turning cheap fabric into beautiful gowns, making magic out of nothing, the way she always used to.
‘Teamwork,’ my uncle exclaims, delighted.
‘Families should stick together,’ my mother agrees.
It hasn’t taken long f
or old misunderstandings to be swept away – there is laughter and rolling of eyes at my grandfather’s tall stories, regret at the family rift, and lots of shared memories between my mother and her brother about their childhood days.
On the afternoon of October 1st, Lexie and I race home, change out of our uniforms into our best clothes and head for the art gallery. Louisa Winter’s exhibition is opening tonight at 7 p.m., and I want to get there early to see how my work has been displayed.
As promised, the words and pictures have been framed in plain white frames and hung round the walls of a small side gallery. In the centre of the room, the old overcoat is hanging, a slender bough of driftwood pushed through the sleeves so they stretch out on either side like wings. The coat stirs and sways gently, suspended from the ceiling by lengths of tough yet almost invisible fishing line that also tugs the front of the coat open to reveal the lining. It looks so different now.
Stitched on to the shoulders and along the backs of the arms are hundreds of feathers, rescued from parks and pavements, hedges, ditches – even that gritty south-coast beach. A winding line of running stitches, made from thick scarlet yarn, snakes across the coat to represent the journey I made in it.
And then you see the inside, glinting bright like treasure, a coat-shaped collage of all things silver. There is silver paper and chocolate wrapping, coils of shiny silver wire, old earrings, the paper lining from discarded cigarette packets, scraps of an aluminum can snipped into star shapes, milk-bottle tops, foil food trays, beads from a broken necklace. There is a beaten-down spoon, barbed wire, broken strings from Marley’s guitar, a slender chain found in the mud in Serbia, scraps of Lurex and plastic and sequinned material, shards of broken glass and the fragments of a smashed mirror. There is a ribbon, a tassel, half a dozen pins, a short length of chain, nails, screws, washers, the insides of an old-fashioned wristwatch. There’s more, much more, and even in places a glimpse of the shiny grey satin lining my father stitched into the coat so long ago.
The coat looks as though it is flying: a tatty, beautiful, disembodied angel spinning softly in the quiet air.
Lexie tugs at my sleeve.
‘It’s perfect,’ she whispers. ‘I promise, it is. Quick, come and see the portrait – you’re famous!’
We step into the foyer, where Louisa Winter has just arrived in a flurry of black silk, her vivid auburn hair piled up on her head and bound with a green silk scarf.
‘Children!’ she exclaims, arms stretched out to greet us. ‘You’re here! Have you seen your little gallery, Sami? It looks amazing! That coat!’
‘It’s awesome,’ I say simply. ‘Thank you!’
‘Don’t thank me,’ she says, laughing. ‘All the hard work was yours. I just encouraged you to share it! I expect you’d like to see the picture you modelled for too …’
We step into the main gallery and the painting is right in front of us, six feet tall and almost as wide. In the centre of the canvas stands a sad-faced boy in a threadbare coat, playing a flute while two or three small children dance around him. His hair is wild and tangled; a small blackbird is perched on top of it. Louisa Winter’s trademark is that she includes an animal in every painting she makes – I guess my bird’s-nest hair has made the choice easy for her. The background of the painting is a collage of pages torn from a junk shop atlas, overpainted with trees and tents and what look like water stains. That part makes me shudder.
‘It’s wonderful,’ I say. ‘It’s … the way it was. The way it felt. I love it!’
It’s almost seven now, and the gallery is starting to fill up. The rest of the band arrive and start to set up in a corner of the lobby, ready for our set later on. Lexie’s foster parents arrive, and her grandparents, and my aunt and uncle, and my mother in a moss-green dress she’s made herself. Roza and a couple of her school friends are here, holding collection buckets for Footsteps to Freedom. I see Mr Simpson drop some notes in, and my art teacher and Miss Walker, the pink-haired librarian. The mayor of Millford is here, making small talk with Barney Bright, Bobbi-Jo and T-Dawg. I see the bearded man from Footsteps to Freedom, my social worker Ben and even a couple of photographers and TV cameramen.
‘Whoa,’ Marley whispers, elbowing me in the ribs. ‘Look! Ked Wilder!’
The legendary sixties pop star cuts through the crowd, unmistakable in his black fedora, skinny jeans and Chelsea boots. He embraces Louisa Winter and is instantly surrounded by reporters and photographers.
‘Don’t hassle him,’ Lexie warns. ‘Stay cool, Marley. Seriously.’
‘But …’
‘Lexie’s right,’ I tell him. ‘Trust me.’
‘OK,’ Marley agrees. ‘At least we’ve got a cover of his song in our set list!’
Moments later, a reporter collars me, asking how Footsteps to Freedom helped me, how I came to meet Louisa Winter and why I began to make art of my own. Across the room, I see Ms Winter and my mother talking to a TV cameraman, with the beardy guy from Footsteps to Freedom next in line to be interviewed. This isn’t just an exhibition; thanks to Ms Winter, it’s much, much more than that. People clump together in front of the paintings, peering closely and sipping glasses of champagne. ‘Iconic and powerful,’ I hear the mayor say as I wander past.
My mother is harder to impress, but when she sees the art piece made from my father’s coat, she cries.
‘Oh, Sami,’ she whispers. ‘My clever, wonderful boy!’
Later, she pauses in front of Ms Winter’s portrait of me, frowning. ‘I like it,’ she concedes. ‘But, Sami, that blackbird … your hair! I’ll make an appointment at the barber’s tomorrow!’
There is only one person in the whole wide world I’d consider getting my hair cut for, and that’s my mother. Maybe.
In the side gallery, a photographer is taking shot after shot of the silver lining coat. ‘I always knew the coat was symbolic,’ Bobbi-Jo is telling T-Dawg. ‘A metaphor. Or something. A work of art …’
Out in the lobby, Lee blows a trumpet blast, the signal for everyone to gather for the speeches, and the foyer fills up as Louisa Winter takes the mic.
‘I want to thank you all so very much for being here tonight,’ she begins. ‘It’s a long time since I’ve done an exhibition. I have to admit I was very much inspired by Millford’s own rising stars of the music world, the Lost & Found, who practise at Greystones and will be playing for you shortly.
‘When I discovered a few months ago that one of the band was a fifteen-year-old Syrian refugee, I was astonished. Sami’s journey and the hardships he endured were unimaginable to me, but slowly the theme of journeys began to creep into my work. When I found out about Footsteps to Freedom, who work at grassroots level to help unaccompanied refugee children, I knew I had to help them – suddenly, the idea of an exhibition was much more appealing.
‘It was only recently that I discovered that Footsteps to Freedom had helped to bring Sami to his relatives in the UK, and more recently still that I enlisted their help in reuniting Sami with the mother and sister he believed were lost. You can see some of this extraordinary young man’s artwork here today …’ She waves an arm towards the side room, a dozen bracelets jangling.
‘I hope you’ll take the opportunity to look and to understand, and perhaps find it in your hearts to donate. As you know, all proceeds from the paintings sold here will go to the charity also. Sami’s is just one small story, but it has a happy ending – thanks to Footsteps to Freedom!’
The crowd erupt into loud applause, and after a short speech by the bloke from Footsteps to Freedom we take our places on the makeshift stage.
Marley takes the mic. ‘Thank you, Ms Winter, for having us here tonight. We’re thrilled to be part of this, not just because we love your artwork but because of my mate Sami. Who knew he was such a brilliant artist on top of his musical skills? Sami isn’t just talented; he’s a genuinely good guy … I’m proud to have him in the band and proud to call him a friend. We’re going to kick off with a brand-new song in
spired by Sami and his lovely family – it’s called “Setting Sun”.’
After weeks of practice, we are pitch perfect, and our newest song has the audience silent, transfixed. When the last violin notes fade away, the applause is deafening. We have the audience enthralled, and when our short set of original material is done, we go on playing our summer covers playlist as background music while the crowd, at Marley’s request, relax and go on looking at the paintings.
As Marley announces our last cover, the classic ‘Summer Daze’ by Ked Wilder, I notice the TV cameras moving closer and, without warning, Ked himself steps up to the mic to duet with Sasha in a joyful, high-energy finale.
‘Ked!’ Marley gasps as the last dregs of applause fall away. ‘It’s great to see you! We’ve missed you!’
‘You’ve been working hard in my absence, I see,’ the star says. ‘That was a great set. Let’s meet soon and make some plans, yeah? See if I can help you?’
‘Yes please!’ Marley says. He flings his arms around me and Lexie, then hauls in anyone else within arm’s length for a messy group hug. I find myself caught in the middle, and instead of breaking away I realize that this is where I want to be, right here, in the middle of my friends.
When an Arctic summer is over, the big freeze sets in again, but I don’t want to go back to that, I really don’t. I’m getting used to the sunshine. I have my mother and my sister back, I have friends, and I have Lexie. I have hopes and dreams and plans for the future … and at last I’ve learned to make my own silver lining.
* This one’s fictional, but the others are real … Check them out!
Afterword
Sami’s journey to the UK was fictional but it is based on real journeys that were every bit as tough. Sami and his family left Syria early on in the conflict, and life has become much harder since then for refugees fleeing to Europe. Borders have been closed, barbed wire and soldiers with tear gas have been deployed to prevent people moving across Europe, and laws have been passed to deport many refugees back to where they came from. If my fictional characters had not had relatives in the UK (or British nationality in the case of Yasmine) they may never have reached safety here, and thousands of unaccompanied children and teens are still struggling through terrifyingly dangerous situations to find somewhere they can call home.
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