by Nick Lake
Until now.
And yes, I have told you about the pirates. I have told you about me and Farouz. I’ve told you about the guns, and the times I thought I was going to die, and the time when people did die, the time when Farouz died, and he, who was always smoking, was smoke instead.
But there’s something more important I’ve got to tell you, something I feel like I’m meant to tell you.
This is it:
I’m here to tell you that if you get broken, it’s possible to put yourself back together. I’m here to tell you that if you get lost, it’s possible that a light will come, dancing, on the horizon, to lead you home.
I know this sounds like something a vicar might say. Actually, no, it doesn’t; they probably say things like, would you like some more tea, and, could you pass me that Battenberg.
But it does sound like something a preacher might say, one of those zealous guys you get on US TV, from the kind of states where my mom came from. Only, here’s the difference: a preacher doesn’t know for sure that god exists, or that Jesus died for our sins, or any of those things. But I do know what I’m talking about. I know for an absolute honest-to-goodness fact that life can kick you to pieces, break you into a thousand little shards, and that you can get up again and mend yourself.
I promise.
And maybe, by the time I’m finished, you will believe me.
After my interview at the Royal Academy of Music, I head home, sitting for nearly two hours on the tube and then the bus, not reading, not listening to anything, just watching the world move past me.
It’s already after dusk as I walk across Ham Common to our house, and the stars are out. I look up and see the sky blazing – not as bright or as much of a multitude as in Somalia, but still beautiful. The Milky Way is a streak of stardust across the sky.
As I open our gate and follow the short gravel path to the front door, I think about how, if you look at a picture of the Milky Way, like the ones that the Hubble Space Telescope takes, it looks like someone has painted fire across the darkness. From down here we see the stars as clear things, sparkling, like ice or diamonds. But really they are burning.
While I’m turning my key in the door, I hear something from upstairs floating down through the window. For a moment I think it must be some kind of animal that has got into the house. But then I realise what it is: it’s Dad, laughing. I’m startled. Dad doesn’t laugh; it isn’t his style. Laughing doesn’t inform you or make you money or achieve anything. The thought of Dad laughing is like the thought of Dad reading fiction. And yet there he is again, laughing.
Sarah is doing that, I think. Sarah is making him laugh. I’m grateful for it – for her lightness, her silliness, the things I hated about her before, her little sweetnesses. Even my mom never managed to make my dad laugh, not really, and this strikes me as an important realisation. I am aware, all of a sudden, that if I’m not careful, my mom’s untimely death will cause me to remember an ideal version of her, like some perfect specimen caught in amber.
She was not perfect.
She was my mom.
When I get inside, I stand at the bottom of the stairs.
— Dad, I call. Can I speak to you?
He comes downstairs on his own, and I guess Sarah has decided we need to talk alone. I’m grateful to her for that, too.
We go into the living room. I sit on the sofa, and he sits on the armchair in the window.
Then, slowly, my voice halting, I tell him everything.
When I’m finished, I look up at him. Dad looks like he’s just found something unspeakable floating in his soup.
— What were you thinking? he says.
— I wasn’t, I say. I wasn’t thinking.
— Did you . . . ? he asks. He does this awful mime that I never want to see again, no matter how long I live.
Which I’m now hoping, by the way, will be a very long time – my life, I mean. I wondered – a hundred years ago, it seems like – if I was like my mom. If I really was self-destructive, like Sarah said, that night before she announced the trip. Now I know I’m not.
— Jesus, Dad, I say. No, OK? No, we didn’t.
Something happens on Dad’s face – it’s like there are two hims, a sad one and a happier one, and they’re struggling against each other.
— The boy, Farouz, says Dad. His voice is kind of strangled. You really felt something for him, didn’t you?
— Yes, I say. Yes, I felt something.
— Oh, Amy, he says.
— Yes, I know, OK? You told me not to. I disobeyed you, so have a go at me. But not right now, please.
He gets up and comes and sits on the couch next to me, the leather one that Mom had made by some guy in Connecticut who took, like, a year to do it. His hand touches my arm.
— That’s not what I meant, he said. I meant that I’m sorry. For you.
I stare at him.
— What? I say.
Now Dad looks hurt.
— Amy, he says. Do you think I don’t care about you, or something?
— I think . . . I say. I think that . . . Mom was amazing, and she was hardly cold in her grave before you replaced her with someone else.
I sit a little straighter, startled. Even I wasn’t expecting this to come out of my mouth.
Dad doesn’t seem surprised, though. He just looks down at his hands.
— You’re right, he says. Your mother was amazing. He pauses for quite a long time. Then he looks me right in the eye. But she left us, Amy, he says.
And there it is. I hug myself.
— I know, I say very quietly.
— You . . . he begins. I remember you saying that it was her right, if she was unhappy. And it was, of course, it was. But I think . . . by thinking that . . . by forgiving her so quickly . . . maybe you made yourself forget some things.
I blink, finding myself on the brink of tears.
— Maybe, I admit, even more quietly now. But my voice doesn’t break, the tears don’t come, even though my mind is churning, like waves in the sea.
See, there are things. Dad is right – there are some things.
There is, for example, the watch. I remember going into my dad’s wallet, a week or so after my sixteenth birthday, to get some money for a night out. And in there, tucked into the bill fold compartment, was a credit card receipt for a Chanel watch, with a signature on it.
My dad’s signature.
Was he with her, and they bought it together? Did he buy it, and she just decided to give it to me on her own, over breakfast? I don’t know; I’ve never been able to ask him. And he never said anything, even though I saw the surprise flare in his eyes, like a match being struck, when he came home the next day from work and saw the watch on my wrist.
My mind flies to Mexico then. And this is the truth: Dad wasn’t working that summer. His own mom, my Granny Fields, was dying. But my mom wouldn’t stay in London with him, wouldn’t go to the hospice.
She said:
— I’m only just coping. I can’t deal with that shit.
She said:
— I need the sunshine, for my serotonin levels.
She said:
— If I don’t go to Mexico, you may as well commit me here and now.
So she and I went to Mexico instead.
Sitting there with my dad, I realise for the first time that it is possible and allowable to believe two opposite things at exactly the same time:
I still love my mom. I still believe that she was entitled to her choice, that she answered her unhappiness, that she escaped from something terrible, that she had no other way out, and I can’t blame her for it.
Also, I admit something else to myself.
I admit:
That I hate her for leaving me.
That I will never, ever forgive her.
I look at Dad, sitting beside me on the sofa, looking crumpled, like a worn suit. He had to live with her, too, I think. He has had to live without her as well. He probably hates her,
or part of him does, even while he loves her, and that must be tearing him apart; I can imagine, because it’s been tearing me apart, too.
And yet, even though none of this is OK, even though it’s so not OK, what has happened, everything that has happened . . . Despite all that . . . I have a feeling, as I look at Dad sitting there. I have a feeling it might just, one day, be OK.
— I’m sorry, Amy-bear, he says. I fell in love. It happens. He touches my hair by my forehead, hooks it over my ear. I think you know that, he says gently.
— I know, I say. It isn’t that. It’s . . .
But no. I can’t say what I want to say. My mouth closes on the words.
— It’s what, Amy? he asks.
— It’s that you left me, too, I say, the words coming out in a rush, as if I was trapping them in there all that time, like birds in my lungs, in my vocal cords, and now they’ve escaped.
— What do you –
— Work! I say. Trips. The office. Yes, she left me, she left us. But you left me, too. And you’re alive.
Dad shrinks, like a balloon when you untwist the end.
— I know, he says. Of course, he continues, work isn’t an issue any more.
— No, I say.
Out of the corner of my eye, I can see a family walking home across Ham Common. A mother, a father, two children, one of them swinging between their parents’ hands. I’m lucky, I think. I’m so, so, so lucky. In my mind I am picturing those women Farouz told me about, even though I never saw them, the ones burying their babies by the side of the road, as they ran from Mogadishu.
— I need . . . I start to say, but I can’t finish. It’s too American, speaking about feelings like this, and I’ve been in London for years – it’s atrophied some muscle in me, the one that pushes sincere emotions out of your mouth and into the world. Or maybe it’s just that there’s too much now: Mom, Dad, Farouz . . . There’s too much hurt there, and if I start to let it out, what if it never stops?
— You need a parent, he says. You need comfort. You need security.
— Yes, I say.
— I’m sorry, he says. I’m so sorry. And I’m sorry about Farouz, too.
He sits still for quite a long time. Then he holds out his arm, and I incline my head a fraction, let him know it’s OK – I’m still hugging myself, but, yes, maybe it’s better to be hugged by someone else – and he puts his arm around me, holds me close.
— I thought of a present, I say. For my eighteenth.
— Yes? he says. Name it.
— Lunch. Once a week. And you’re not allowed to cancel on me. Ever.
He finds my hand and shakes it.
— Deal, he says.
There’s silence for a moment.
Then.
— Dad, I say. On the yacht, when Sarah wanted to go with the pirates . . . Was that true, what she said? That you couldn’t do it because you didn’t want to leave me?
He doesn’t answer for a moment.
Then . . .
— Yes, he says.
And I know that it is the truth, that he wasn’t scared, not for himself, anyway.
— Oh, I say.
— And the thing is, Amy, he says. The thing is that I’m here now.
— Yes, I say.
And it turns out that, actually, this is all that needs to be said.
I meet him a couple of weeks after my interview.
I’ve sent emails, using the address he gave me in the shower cubicle – loads of emails. I don’t know why – it’s a stupid thing to do, really. But I write to him anyway, tell him about my life.
And one day, to my total shock, I get a reply.
We talk back and forth a bit; his written English is not so good and it’s tricky. But we get across the essentials, I tell him my side of the story, and then he says he’s coming to London, and would I like to meet him? It’s so out of the blue, it shocks me. Of course I want to meet him. But I’m scared, too, of what he might say, of what it might be like.
Dad, of all people, drives me to Richmond, to the tube. He’s still not working at the moment. I haven’t spoken to him about it again, him getting fired – we’re not quite at that point yet. Still, things are much better, that much I can say, and it’s only been three months since we left the Daisy May. Not perfect – I haven’t totally forgiven him yet, not at all, and I don’t think he’s forgiven me, for growing up, for falling in love with the worst possible boy – but definitely better. Above all, however much Dad is judging me in his head, he doesn’t say anything out loud.
That’s my dad all over, it seems. My old dad – because suddenly it’s like he’s kicked out the hermit crab that was squatting in his body and come back to me, a little. He’s paying for Ahmed’s defence – his lawyer thinks that, with our character references, she can get his sentence commuted. Maybe get him back to Somalia before too long.
After he drops me off, telling me to be careful, I take the tube to Embankment, then cross the Thames on the amazing footbridge, London laid out like a diorama around me. We’ve arranged to meet at the London Eye, so I walk along the river till I get there.
I see him after maybe two minutes of looking. He’s thinner, somehow weaker-seeming, a little paler, as if the English air has leached some of the colour out of him. There are different lines on his face, around his eyes. He is wearing an Arsenal cap. It makes me think of those parakeets in London and how long it will be before they belong.
I wave at him and he walks over to me.
— Amy, he says.
I shake his hand, which he is holding out in front of him, like an offering.
— Hello, I say.
— Is good to meet, he says. I’m sorry. My English not good.
— It’s perfectly good, I say.
There is something with soft wings moving inside my stomach, and there is something hot and wet in my eyes, but I blink it back. I won’t let myself cry. It’s just – he’s so like him. Older, of course, and harder somehow, like he’s a version of Farouz that was left a little too long in a cupboard and has gone slightly stale. But still with those grey eyes, the long eyelashes.
— You look like him, I say.
He nods.
— But not so good, I think, he says with a wink.
I laugh, surprised.
Then Farouz’s brother points to the Eye.
— We go? he says.
I wasn’t really expecting this, hadn’t planned for it, but I guess it makes sense. Actually, I’ve never been on it – when you live in a city you don’t tend to do the touristy things.
— Yeah, OK, I say.
So we buy tickets and queue, then we enter one of the little round pods, and we’re lofted slowly into the sky. I see the river elongate below us, Big Ben rising up, the city stretching out like a map, which is a stupid comparison, but I don’t care, that’s what it looks like. White clouds are sailing low over London.
— He speak of me? says Abdirashid, as we stand next to each other, looking out at the view.
We are near the apex of the circle. Around us, seagulls are wheeling, and we could almost be back on the sea. I wonder when there will be more seagulls in London than pigeons – when they will just be part of the city, belonging to it, at home.
— Yes, I say, which is the pure truth. He talked about you all the time.
Abdirashid is trembling, and I don’t know if that’s because of talking about his brother or drugs or what. I know from Farouz that he has not had a good life.
— Good thing? he says. Farouz say good thing?
— All good things, I say. He told me a story about a concert. As I say this I remember being under the shower, listening to Farouz telling it.
— Concert?
I mime playing an oud.
— Ah, says Abdirashid. Yes. He smiles.
— How . . . how did you get here? I ask. How did you get out of prison?
Abdirashid taps his pocket.
— A man bring money. A hundred thousand d
ollar. I pay for free. Then I know someone who sell passport.
— You got compensation? I say. For Farouz dying?
— Yes. From lawyer.
— Nyesh?
— Yes. Him. And then I am wanting leave. And I am checking Farouz email. And I get email from you. You speak to my brother, who is dead.
He says this in a kind of gentle questioning way, not like he’s saying I’m crazy, but more like he’s just curious. I nod.
— I knew he was dead, I say. But I thought . . . I don’t know. I hoped he might be there, anyway.
— Me also, says Abdirashid. This why I check email.
It’s a heavy moment, so to lighten it, I say in a kind of jolly breezy tone:
— It’s a good job you knew his password.
Abdirashid looks embarrassed, though, and at first I think it’s because he tricked his brother somehow, looked over his shoulder or something when he was logging into Hotmail.
But then he says:
— I always know Farouz password. Always the same.
— Oh, I say. OK.
— Is always my name. Abdirashid.
He looks down at his feet.
Whatever I was about to say, it stops in my throat, and it’s like it’s going to choke me. I’m about to cry, and I don’t want to do that. Instead I watch a barge, crawling small through the silvery water below us. I think about love. I think about money, about compensation. I assume this is why Abdirashid touched his pocket, because there is still some cash in there left over from the hundred thousand. So Farouz was right – that kind of thing does happen. There’s honour with the pirates, like he said. I’m so glad. I’m so glad that something has come out of Farouz’s death, something positive. I can’t say all this to Abdirashid – he wouldn’t understand my English.
So, as the pod we’re in arcs down towards the ground, I tell him, in as simple English as I can, about what happened on the yacht, how his brother died, the things that Farouz told me, the way I felt about him. Which is complicated – some part of me loved him but a big part of me was afraid of him, too; muscles are attractive things, but they pull triggers also, they slit throats. I did fancy him, obviously. And I felt sorry for him, for what had happened to him in his life. But is that the same thing as love? I don’t think so.
