by Nick Lake
— No? I asked.
— No, of course not. What happened was, I knew what Abdirashid was doing by then. So the next time I saw the imam, the one who taught the class with the window by which I would stand, I went up to him on the street. I told him that I would go to bed with him if I could enter his lessons. I told him I would do whatever he wanted.
— Fuck, I said.
— Yes, that, too.
I met his eyes. There was no indication at all that he was joking.
— Jesus, Farouz, I said.
I wanted to make this conversation stop, but it was like a car whose brakes have gone. I looked down.
— What happened with the imam? I asked eventually. What did he say? Did you . . . did you go to bed with him?
— No. The imam did not want to, said Farouz.
I smiled.
— Does this make you happy? You should not be. Instead I had to be that man’s slave. I had to clean his house, cook his food, every day. And of course Abdirashid beat me when he found out, except by then I was going to school, so it was too late to stop me.
— Cleaning for the imam doesn’t sound as bad as –
— As going to bed with him? No, that would have been easier. Have you ever scrubbed floors until your hands bleed?
I thought of Mom doing just that, and for no good reason.
— No, I said.
— No. So you cannot understand. And then . . . Well, I went to school. It is not a very interesting part of the story, though I enjoyed learning. Abdirashid made friends with some coast guards. He went to bars with them, drank, took drugs. He even went on a mission once. But something went wrong, I don’t know what. An argument with another pirate, maybe. Or maybe he hurt someone. Anyway, he never went again.
— So how did you end up with them? I asked.
— They came to my school, said Farouz, when I was sixteen. Not my brother’s friends. Different ones. To look for people like me. Crazy, isn’t it?
— And the imam let them?
— Oh, they said they had reformed. They came to talk about how children should not get into piracy. They asked which of us was clever, which of us could speak English, and they made it sound like they were just interested in the school, like they wanted to donate some of their money to help the imam. They did, in fact – I think Amir, who is now our sponsor, actually gave them a hundred thousand dollars. Then Amir stood at the front of the class. He is tall. He is handsome. People like him. He said, if something is dirty, wash it. If something is filthy, wash it with bleach. I am filthy, Allah, he said. Wash me with bleach. Forgive me for my sins.
— Wow, I said.
— Yes. The imams do not like pirates, but they like it when we ask for forgiveness. So the imam and the other people from the school, they loved Amir when he said this. Anyway, afterwards, when I was leaving the school, the pirates stopped me – the coast guards, I mean. They knew that I was the best at English because the imam had told them about a prize I had won. We know how you can make millions, they said to me when the imam was gone. How to get you and your brother a house.
You know my brother? I asked.
We know everyone, they said. So that was it – that was how I joined the South Central Coast Guard. For a few years it was OK. I mean, I was just a guard. I didn’t make much money, but it was better than before. Then my brother got arrested, and I was stuck with them. I had to earn the money for them, to get him out.
— Wait, I said, catching the allusion in his voice. Are you saying the South Central Coast Guard arrested him?
— No. The police did. But did they pay the police to do it? Of course.
— Wow, I said, sounding like a moron because that was the second time I had said that word in as many minutes. So you’re working to free your brother, and the people who put your brother in prison in the first place are the people you’re working for?
Farouz thought for a moment.
— Yes, he said.
Then he dropped his cigarette, crushed it under his heel, and the darkness rushed in at us, like hyenas.
People like Carrie and Esme asked me, after the Event: were there any signs? With my mom, I mean. And I wanted to say to them: well, of course there were signs. She was depressed. She had OCD. But I know that’s not quite what they meant. They wanted to know whether there was anything that, in the words of the counsellor I saw briefly at school, made manifest her intentions.
There was, of course, the phone call. The one where she told me. But I didn’t talk to anyone about that. Instead I told them about this other time.
It was the summer holidays one year Before. Dad was working, as usual, but Mom wanted to go away, so she got some complementary tickets from her magazine, review tickets, for a new luxury eco-hotel on the east coast of Mexico. The idea was, we’d go and see some Mayan temples, hang out on the beach, and then Mom would write an article about it when we got back.
— Let your father miss out, said Mom. We’ll have fun, just me and my Amy.
And we did do that. We had a great time, actually: the hotel was all little wooden huts by the sea, no electric lights, no TV, so it was just us and the palm trees, the birds, the shushing of the waves. Pretty magical, really. We had massages, swam, read books.
We took the bus to Chichen Itza and saw the pyramid there, where people used to have their hearts cut out on top and then their bodies got thrown down the steps. We clapped our hands at the face of it, and the sound came back, hissing and chattering – like a rattlesnake, the guide told us, like the snake god carved on to the sides of the pyramid.
Most evenings, we ate in our room. But there was also this restaurant right on the sea, ten minutes’ walk down the beach from our hotel. One night, we had both finished the books we were reading and were at kind of a loose end. We went to the lobby of the hotel, and there was this mom and kid that we had sort of made friends with, though I don’t remember their names.
Anyway, the mom said to us:
— Why don’t you come turtle watching? They’re supposed to be laying this time of year.
— Laying? said Mom.
— Their eggs, on the beach.
— Oh, yeah, Mom, we should totally do that! I said. I’d watched a documentary with the giant turtles crawling up on to the sand to bury their eggs. I thought it would be amazing to see that in real life.
— You’re going now? asked Mom.
— No, said the kid, who was about ten – cute, with freckles and an encyclopedia or something always in his hand. We’re having dinner first, he said. Then the turtle watching starts at midnight. It’s the best time.
— Till what time? I asked.
The boy shrugged.
— Till we see one.
— 3 a.m., said the mom. That’s when they give up, apparently, if no turtles have come.
— And we have to remember where they put the eggs, said the boy, so that people can dig them up and put them in a safe place to hatch. Otherwise robbers steal them.
— They’re valuable in Chinese medicine, said the woman, who had a few piercings in her ears and a little tattoo of a fat Buddha on her inner arm.
Mom looked at me.
— We’ll pass, she said. Sounds fun, though!
What she meant by this was: it sounds absolutely godawful, and I’d rather eat my own sick than sit on a beach doing nothing until three in the morning. Mom was all about physics and stars; she didn’t have a lot of patience for anything that involved animals – she used to talk about how crazy the British were, with their sanctuaries for donkeys, when it was people in need who deserved sanctuary. She could get pretty evangelical about it. I told the mom and her boy that it sounded really nice, but we had planned to go out for dinner instead, so I could get Mom out of there quickly, before she said anything embarrassing about wasting time on digging up turtle eggs, when there were people being blown up in Baghdad, or whatever.
So now that we’d told the mom and her boy that we were going for dinner, we so
rt of had to. We walked down the beach to the restaurant, where we’d been before, so we knew that it did an amazing puerco pibil, which is a bit like a really slow-cooked pork belly, except it comes served in palm leaves. We sat at a table overlooking the sea, our toes in the sand. We ate our dinner, and Mom let me have a couple of Coronas, which came to the table glistening, cold in the heat of the night, lime wedges shoved into their necks.
Above, the stars were a blanket of brightness across the sky. Nothing like in Somalia, but still impressive, and of course I hadn’t been to Somalia then, so I didn’t have that to compare it to. As we sat down, Mom pointed up.
— Watch that patch, she said. The Perseid cluster.
— Why?
— Just watch.
So, all through dinner, I kept glancing up at the swathe of star blanket that Mom had told me to watch, wondering what I was meant to be seeing. Then, just as I was finishing my second beer, it happened: a shooting star flared across the sky, sudden as a firework. Then another, and another, little flickers of angled light, like arrows of white fire.
— Shooting stars! I said.
— Meteors, actually, said Mom. The Mayans measured time using the stars, you know. It’s how they knew when to plant things, how to orientate their buildings.
— Right, I said.
— Prehistoric European peoples, too.
— Yeah, I said. Like Stonehenge. Where the sun rises through the entrance at the summer equinox.
— Summer solstice, said Mom.
— Oh, yeah.
— But it’s not just that, said Mom, who had that faraway look now. Did you know, Amy, that Taurus used to set, in Neolithic times, at the precise point on the horizon where the sun went down on the spring equinox?
— No, I said. But, then, I generally didn’t know the things she knew. Mom had, like, three PhDs. Dad said she was the smartest person he’d ever met, and he was pretty damn smart himself – he did something very complicated to do with computer modelling of weather at MIT, which is how he got the job in the bank in the first place.
— Well, said Mom, it’s true. The sun would set right on Taurus just that one day of the year. A lot of people think that’s how bull sacrifices started: people looked up at the sky, just as spring was about to start, and they saw the sun killing a giant bull made of stars. Then things started to grow again. So they figured that to bring the warm weather back, bulls had to die.
— Obviously, I said a little sarcastically. But they didn’t really think it was a bull in the sky, did they?
— Oh, I think they did, said Mom. Another interesting thing, she said, as if she were talking to herself, is that most cultures see a bull. The same as most cultures see a hunter for Orion. But neither of those constellations actually look much like what they’re meant to be, like a bull, or a hunter with a bow and arrow. I mean, it doesn’t make sense that people see the same things when the so-called images are so abstract. There’s a theory that these stories of the stars, and the shapes they made, started in Africa, when all humans lived there. Then, when people dispersed, they took the stories with them. So before writing and religion came along, nearly everyone in the world looked up at the night sky and saw a bull there, riding.
I leaned back in my plastic chair. It was a weird thought, that people used to look up at the stars and see stories they really believed were true. Orion, the hunter, chasing a swan. An eagle. A bull being murdered by the sun.
If I could go back in time, I’d say to Mom, well, I know someone from Africa, and he thinks the Great Bear is a camel, so, you know. But I can’t.
— Of course, said Mom, the earth’s orbit varies over time. Taurus stopped setting in that place at that time. And religion moved on.
— People forgot about the stars, I said.
— No, said Mom. They didn’t. Think of the wise men, how they found Jesus.
— Oh, yeah, I said.
That was what happened during dinner. I’m telling you so you get a sense of my mom, the kinds of things that interested her, but the important thing is what happened afterwards. We were walking back along the beach, hand in hand. Mom was carrying our flip-flops. We were on the hard-packed sand, close to the shore, where the water had firmed it up, darkened it. The moon was huge and round, lighting up a path along the sea towards us that looked like we could walk down it, over the water, to somewhere else.
At the back of my mind, I was thinking of the turtles, so something snagged on my attention when we were passing some big rocks in the surf. I glanced at the rocks. Then one of them moved.
— Mom, turtles! I said, and I pointed.
We stopped.
— Oh, yes, she said.
Close by there was a dune with some grass on it, so we went and sat down. We watched as the turtles crawled slowly up through the white froth of the waves on to the sand. Neither of us said anything, even though this must have taken maybe fifteen minutes. Then another half hour passed, with the turtles moving up the beach. There were two of them, each one as big as a coffee table, leaving smooth trails in the sand behind them. Their flippers swept at the sand, dragging the shells upwards. Their great hooded eyes looked around for danger. The way their mouths were set, it was almost as if they were smiling.
It’s like we’ve been chosen, I remember thinking. Like we’ve been selected to see this, and it means something. I knew it was a silly thing to think, but I thought it anyway.
We’d chosen our dune well because one of the turtles stopped just below us and started digging its hole. We were practically holding our breath the whole time. We saw the turtle position herself, and then the eggs coming out, miraculously smooth and white, like a magic trick, and falling into the hole. After that, the turtle turned around, ponderous, and filled in the space with sand to keep the eggs safe.
Then, very slowly, it crawled back down to the sea, closely followed by the other one. We kept our eyes on them as they sank into the water, before finally disappearing. There was something about the whole scene – the moon, the giant turtles, the beach where you couldn’t see any modern buildings or lights – that was utterly magical and old, really old, like we were seeing something ancient and powerful. And we were, I suppose: turtles must have been coming up to lay eggs on that beach for tens of thousands of years.
— Holy shit, said Mom.
It was the first time I’d heard her so excited about anything to do with nature or animals. Usually it was only the stars, or music, that got her like that.
— Yeah, I said.
— We should tell the turtle preservation people, she said. Let them know where the eggs are. She was still sitting, hugging her knees. Wow, she said. It’s just . . . It’s a sign, I think, Amy.
— A sign?
— Yes. Like someone wanted us to see that. Like the turtles chose us.
— I know! I said. I feel like that, too!
I was amazed that Mom had also felt it. And I felt even more amazed the next day, when we got talking to that hippy mom, and she told us that she and her son sat perfectly still, further down the beach, till 3 a.m., and they didn’t see anything at all. And they were with guides whom they had paid to find them!
But that was the next day, and it might as well have been a lifetime away. For the moment, Mom and I just sat on the beach together in the moonlight and the starlight.
— Hmm, Mom said in her vague, distracted voice. So beautiful.
— Yes, I said.
— I mean, it’s like they were telling me something, she said. Like they were telling me to hold on.
— To hold on?
She coughed.
— Ignore me, Amy, she said. That was lovely, that’s all. I’m glad we got to share that moment.
She always sounded very American when she said things like that. She reached out and held my hand, then we got up and our legs were stiff, so maybe we’d been sitting even longer than I’d thought. And we walked back to the hotel.
The next day, we did tell the Turt
le Watch people where to find the eggs, and they happened to have some baby turtles that had just hatched and were ready to go in the water. So we went with them to watch all these little things crawling into the sea, swimming away, to where most of them would die. When I saw the baby turtles, so tiny, I thought, each one of those had been inside an egg. And the eggs were inside a bigger turtle. It made my head spin: turtles in turtles, like a Russian doll that went on for ever.
And that was amazing, too.
But it was the earlier thing that I remembered, After. It was the way Mom said the turtle was telling her to hold on, and what that must have meant.
So, yes. That was the only sign. A turtle, laying its eggs.
That’s not quite what I mean, though.
What I mean is: Mom said it was the turtle that was the sign. But it was never the turtle. It was what Mom said: about the sign; the way she got all distant, and talked about holding on.
I noticed the turtle. I noticed the beauty of it, the way it felt like we’d been chosen.
But I didn’t notice the real sign at all.
For the first time, Dad seemed suspicious of where I was going in the evenings. We must have been in Somali waters a week, at least. I was trying to leave the cinema room after sunset. We had just had soup, made by Felipe using tins from the stores, and toasted bread from the freezer. The pirates had taken a lot of our tins, though, to go with their pasta, and I knew we were getting low on plenty of stuff – I knew it from the looks between Dad and the crew, even though none of them had said anything.
— Where are you going? he asked. Why don’t you stay and play Scrabble with us, Amy-bear?
— I need air, I said, which was a lie, but was also, obviously, true – we all need air.
— Oh, come on, said the stepmother, to my surprise. It’s no good playing without you on my team. Your dad and Damian are too good.
And so I ended up playing one game with them to keep them happy, and, under the circumstances, it was actually kind of fun. The stepmother and I beat Dad and Damian, while Tony read some book about Magellan.
