The Water Thief

by Claire Hajaj

  Nicholas wants a Ferrari. Bad choice, I told him. Someone will steal it. So he said, ‘OK then, a Lamborghini.’ Still bad, I told him. They are fast but not strong. He laughed again. ‘You choose a car for me,’ he said. ‘You’re the expert.’

  The fat man who drives Nicholas, he smells. His teeth are bad, like Imam Abdi’s. He laughs too loud and spits. He says: ‘So you’re coming with the men today, boy? Child labour, eh, Nick?’

  Nicholas, though, he is quiet. He asks me questions, but not too many. What is your favourite subject? Do you have a best friend? My favourite subject before was mathematics. But I am not so clever any more. I get the red pen on my workbook. And my best friend was Adeya.

  He asks me about Adeya. ‘She seems very smart,’ he says.

  Nicholas tells me he did not have many friends at school.

  ‘Some people are not good at friends,’ he says. Then he is quiet for a while. Afterwards he says: ‘I made one friend. His name was Madi. He was my best friend for a while. You remind me of him, JoJo.’

  I ask: ‘But was he English like you?’

  Nicholas says: ‘Many English people do look like you. But in our village all the English people looked like me, so Madi was very unusual. He was a refugee, you see. They put him in my school when he was a few years older than you.’

  I do not know this word: refugee. But I do not want Nicholas to think I am foolish. So I ask him: ‘Are you still best friends?’

  ‘Not any more,’ he says.

  I ask: ‘Were you sad?’

  ‘Yes,’ he says. ‘I miss him very much.’ Then he smiles at me again. ‘It’s why I’m so happy to be here with you. It reminds me of the time we spent together.’

  I like to talk to Nicholas. I was afraid Baba would not let me go with him. But Nicholas asked Baba, and Baba came to talk to me in my room. My heart was beating. He sat on the bed and he looked so sad. Then I felt ashamed. I said, ‘Baba, I know I’m trouble for you.’

  He said, ‘I do not want your sorrow, Yahya. I want to know if you understand the difference between right and wrong.’

  In my mind I thought: how can you tell me what is right and what is wrong, Baba? All men think you are weak. They laugh at you. I hear them, after Friday prayers. I heard Mr Kamil speaking to Imam Abdi and Tuesday and the rest behind the mosque wall. He was saying: ‘We must deal with Ahmed – he is too afraid to fight, and he will make others afraid, too.’

  But I can say none of these things to Baba. Instead I told him I was wrong to break the window in the school. This is true. Adeya – her desk is by the window. The morning air is cold and she is not strong.

  Baba had many more words but then he took my hand. He asked if I wanted to take some time to go with Nicholas and see the new hospital.

  I said: ‘Yes, Baba.’ Then he took my head and pulled me close. He smelled of oils and medicines, of the polish he uses for his clock. His heart beat like the clock – tock tock tock.

  ‘It is a long time since we measured you,’ he said. ‘Shall we see if your body is growing as well as your throwing arm?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, so I followed him into the hall. ‘Come, Margaret,’ he called, and Mama was there with Nagode and Nicholas.

  I stood with my back to the clock. Its bones felt thin. But its skin shone. Baba has a trick to make the shine come. He rubs groundnut oil on there with a soft cloth. But the real trick, he says, is love.

  ‘Stand straight,’ Baba said. With his knife he cut a small line above my head. There are many lines beneath it for me – and three for Bako too.

  ‘There,’ he said. ‘At least an inch.’ He went to Mama, and took Nagode to kiss her. ‘Our boy is growing up,’ he said to us.

  There are soldiers outside the governor’s hospital. The fat man talks to them and gives the tall one a cigarette. They are not older than Mister, but taller, with nice uniforms. Maybe they eat meat every day, not just on Friday. Goggo once told us that if Baba worked for the governor we could buy a long table. She meant, to pile high with all the food we would buy with his big salary. But Baba, he said: ‘I already have a long clock.’

  We drive inside, to the place where the machines are working. The fat man stops the car. But I don’t want to get out. The whole world is roaring, like a storm. Nicholas comes to me with a plastic hat. He opens the door and shouts: ‘Very peaceful, isn’t it?’

  I shout back: ‘It’s too loud!’ He smiles and puts his hand to his ear like he can’t hear me. So I punch him in the arm.

  Nicholas shows me the machines working here. There are men who want to speak to him. But Nicholas tells them to wait. He takes me to see the deep hole. He says: ‘The foundations will keep the building stable. This soil here is sand and clay. Rock is much harder to dig through – but also much stronger. Sand and clay cannot carry as much weight. So you have to compensate for this in the design of your building.

  I ask, ‘What is compensate?’

  Nicholas takes my hand and asks me to hold it loosely. He pushes it down fast, and my hand drops. He says: ‘This is weak ground. Now,’ he says, ‘push against me when I push you.’

  This time I keep my hand strong. He tells me: ‘You see, my hand is one force. You are compensating with a force that is equal to mine. And now we are balanced, you see? When you build a strong building you have to find this kind of balance. Do you understand?’

  ‘I do.’

  The fat man is laughing at us. ‘Listen to the fucking professor,’ he says.

  But Nicholas, he says: ‘JoJo is smart. He might be your boss one day, so mind your manners.’ Then he winks at me.

  We go inside the other hospital, where Nicholas must pay his men. The walls are white, like the coats on the men. One of them stops to greet Nicholas. He has a gold pen in his pocket. His shoes are shining, like Baba’s clock. Even his hair shines. He smiles at me and says something. I want to smile back. But I cannot. I hate this shiny doctor. Baba went to a university. He was in England. And now he has old shoes and old hands with nothing in them.

  Nicholas’ office has drawings on the wall. They are made of straight lines and circles. It is a kind of language, Nicholas says. He can teach me to understand it.

  Men come and go from the office. Nicholas gives them money. He says to the fat man: ‘October’s wages, materials and hire, bloody money to resubmit the amended plans – but we may as well do the right thing.’

  ‘Matter of fucking opinion,’ says the fat man.

  Suddenly they both stand up. Nicholas says: ‘Sir, good to see you.’

  I turn. And he is right there. The governor.

  My stomach twists. On the poster he looks smaller. In life he is bigger than Baba. A friend of Shaitan, Imam Abdi says. The one who challenges Allah.

  He says: ‘Good to see you too, Nicholas. And who is this young man?’

  His eyes are on me. He puts out his hand. I have to take it. If you touch the devil, does he drain your strength from you? Or can you take strength from him?

  Nicholas steps behind me. He says: ‘This is JoJo, Dr Ahmed’s son. I’m bringing him on some field trips. He has a gift for science.’

  ‘Ah,’ says the governor. He lets my hand go, but his heat – it stays inside me.

  ‘Your father is a good man.’ The governor is speaking to me now. ‘It’s a shame we could not persuade him to lend us his talents here. But maybe his son will do us the favour one day.’

  ‘Yes, sir,’ I say. And I think: I can be an engineer in this place or a doctor with a gold pen. Only children like Akim believe in the devil.

  The governor takes off his hat. It is a baseball cap. On it I see the word BROWN. Next to that is the head of a creature that snarls. I know this animal. It is a bear.

  The governor holds out the cap. I take it. It feels hot when I put it on my head.

  The governor, he laughs. ‘It suits you,’ he says. ‘A leader in the making.’

  I watch Nicholas. I see he is not happy. His eyes are thin, like knives.


  The governor says to him: ‘I’m glad to meet your apprentice. Blessed are the teachers, isn’t that what Jesus said?’

  ‘ “Blessed are the peacemakers”,’ says Nicholas.

  ‘Ah,’ says the governor. ‘Close enough.’

  Nicholas, he says: ‘Did you want to talk to me about something, sir?’

  ‘Later,’ says the governor. ‘You have a lot on your plate, I see.’

  Then he turns to the door. He puts his hand on my head. I feel his weight, like a stone. It pushes me down.

  He says: ‘The most important lessons are learned outside the classroom, young man. Study well. I’m sure I will see you again.’

  Nick took JoJo home at sunset. The boy was breathless with exhaustion, his forehead pressed to the window under the brim of the governor’s cap, staring into the sun’s brilliance. Light lent the boy’s features adult definition. Nick could almost feel his concentration, filtering new ideas into purposeful order.

  ‘So was it interesting?’ he asked, ‘at the site?’

  JoJo tilted his head towards the sound of Nick’s voice. ‘It was much better than school.’

  ‘School’s important, though. The men pouring the concrete didn’t finish school, but the men who designed the building did.’

  JoJo raised a hand to the governor’s cap. Lifting it off his head, he brought it slowly down to his lap. His fingers wandered over the roaring bear emblazoned on its front. ‘What about the governor? Did he finish school?’

  Nick fought the urge to warn JoJo against the man. He didn’t like to see that hat on JoJo’s head – and nor would Dr Ahmed, he sensed. But he’d received too many childhood lectures to feel like dishing them out. ‘I suppose he must have.’

  ‘Is he your friend?’

  The question took Nick by surprise. ‘No. Not like you are.’

  JoJo fell silent, the cap clutched in his fingers. Nick glanced at him in the rear-view mirror as the Jeep reeled southwards. What can he possibly make of his life, all the way out here?

  Then the light shifted in the rear-view mirror, and JoJo’s face blurred into another’s – Madi, his forehead creased in concentration as he peered at quadratic equations, Nick beside him correcting his answers. He could still feel his hands sticky from half-eaten jam sandwiches with their mechanical strawberry scent, hear the clatter of plates in his mother’s usually silent kitchen.

  They are so alike. When Nick’s headmaster had announced the arrival of a new boy at the start of Year Eight, there’d been no inkling of what it would eventually mean for Nick, no warning of how many lives were about to switch course. The name itself was strange, like the other word they’d used. Refugee. The headmaster’s pronunciation emphasised its strangeness, rolling the r and drawing out each syllable. Rrrreff-uu-geeeee. ‘I expect you all to be on your best behaviour – that means you, Phillip, and you Jonno – and show him how we do things in England. He’s missed some school so he’s got to make up a year.’

  ‘Why are they putting him here, sir?’

  ‘Because they are, Amanda. Ours is not to reason why.’

  ‘But he’s so old, sir.’ That had been Jonno, grinning as Phil whispered besssst behaviaaaaar behind his hand. ‘Fourteen already – he must be thick.’

  ‘Any more from you, Jonathan, and it will be detention all week.’

  Word had gone round the village, too. ‘There’ll be more curry shops than pubs round here soon, mate,’ the sweet kiosk owner had told Nick and his mother. ‘Don’t know what the government’s thinking sticking them down here, poor buggers. Send them up north with their mates, I bloody would.’

  He must be thick. Even Nick had secretly believed it. But the boy escorted into class the next day had been rapier-thin, cropped brown head held high in defiance, eyes flaring blacker than any Nick had ever seen. The uniform shirt had hung from his frame, flapping loose like a white flag. Nick saw the boy’s Adam’s apple jerk upwards as he folded his body into the empty seat in front of him.

  For two days Nick watched the back of the new boy’s head, sand-brown skin on his neck deepening into a dark curly cap of hair. Often Nick would see the boy’s face twist towards the classroom’s high window, eyes wide and unfocused. Once a careless jerk of his arm sent a ruler clattering from the desk to the floor. Instinctively Nick bent to pick it up, meeting the black eyes and seeing thanks mouthed quietly before the teacher called out: ‘Eyes forward, everyone, please.’

  During lunch break later that same day, Nick had taken his usual station alone by the far school wall. The playground’s other side belonged to Jonno and Phil, their thick fists fattened on the local housing estate – reigning over the school climbing frame and the puny bodies that dared to play between its arches.

  He was deep in his Beano when someone slumped down beside him, a dark hand reaching over to take the comic from his hands. The new boy flicked through panels of Dennis the Menace; his eyes slid across to meet Nick’s.

  ‘Where are the girls in this one?’

  Nick shrugged. ‘There aren’t any.’

  The boy handed the bright pages back to him. ‘So why read them?’

  Nick started to answer, flustered – but the hand came out again, this time offered open. Nick took it, embarrassed. It was such a grown-up thing to do, shaking hands. But then this boy was already a grown-up, who’d seen things Nick could not imagine.

  Cries drifted down from the climbing frame. Phil had chosen his victim of the day, an old favourite with thick lenses and runty arms, hair as red as his face as he strained towards his twentieth push-up at Phil’s feet.

  ‘You’re friends with them?’ Madi asked, watching intently.

  ‘No way.’ Phil’s gang had gathered round, counting down push-ups in vicious delight. ‘They’d never be friends with me.’ He wondered where the playground supervisor was: but it wouldn’t help anyway. Miss Tinner was as loathed as Phil, from the same heavy-skinned, angry-faced stock. She ignored Phil’s macho infractions and forgave his undone maths homework. But otherwise she was hard-eyed and vicious – particularly to ‘fancy boys’ like Nick with their careful manners and BBC accents. And Madi had come in for even worse treatment. She found everything about him offensive: she scoffed at his kindergarten-level mistakes and the slouch of his gangling form in the classroom’s narrow seats. She found a reason to call him up in front of the class every lesson, drawing her scorn slowly across him like a blade as he stood at the board, tense and silent, scratching chalk desperately across the black slate.

  Madi’s eyes were still on the red-haired boy puffing at Phil’s feet. ‘Phillip – the big one. He’s a dick, right?’

  Nick squirmed. ‘What?’ It was unthinkable to bad-mouth Phil. In your head maybe, but never in the treacherous open air.

  ‘Dick. It’s English for this?’ The boy pointed at his crotch.

  Nick laughed in embarrassment. ‘Your English is good.’

  ‘I watched movies back home. American ones. And my father was an English teacher.’ His fingers were long, drawing circles in the loose gravel. ‘Here he drives a taxi. He taught me all the bad words first. So I could ask the English girls to – you know.’

  ‘You’re lying.’

  Madi grinned. ‘Maybe. They wouldn’t, anyway. Girls don’t like me here. They like ones like you.’

  Nick looked over to the chapel steps, where the oblivious classroom queens held court. He sensed that Madi was being kind; he’d seen girls staring at the stranger, with his nut-brown, unblemished skin and deep-lashed eyes.

  ‘They don’t like me either. That’s why I’m here reading this.’ He brandished the Beano. And Madi had laughed. This wasn’t the cruel jibe of the Phils and the Jonnos; it was the rare sound of empathy.

  Now Phil was coming towards them, tailed by Jonno and his friends, seeking fresh game. Nick stiffened by instinct, Phil’s meaty finger stabbing towards him as he approached. ‘Yeah, that’s right, nancy boy. I’m watching you.’ His eyes flipped to Madi – but the moment had pa
ssed. They kept moving, heading off to smoke behind the school shed. Nick breathed out, and Madi rubbed the playground dirt with his trainer, casting Nick a curious glance.

  ‘Is it always like this here for you?’

  ‘Sometimes.’ The question shamed him; his unpopularity must show on his skin, as disfiguring as eczema.

  But Madi didn’t seem to notice. Instead he shifted his body closer to Nick’s.

  ‘See this.’ He drew a piece of paper from his pocket, dropping it on Nick’s lap. He unfolded it – a page ripped from an exercise book – to see a cartoon sketch of razor-sharp accuracy: a large pig with Phil’s face gazed out at him in porcine ecstasy; its puckered mouth rested on the backside of a girlish cow – Miss Tinner to the life – with ringlets and buxom udders, holding a giggling hoof up to her lips.

  Nick gasped. ‘You’re mental. He’ll kill you.’

  Madi grinned. ‘I’m no good at anything else here. And I haven’t any friends. So I make these.’ His English was almost perfect, warmly accented with only the occasional stumble. ‘It’s what they’re really like, isn’t it?’

  It was; even Nick could see the cartoons had their own savage justice. ‘My mother draws too. You’re nearly as good as her.’ He felt strangely grateful, as if the picture was a coded message confessing I’m lonely too – a suicidally brave admission in the playground’s dog-eat-dog world. And he was suddenly embarrassed that he, Nick, hadn’t been the one to reach out – that all he’d offered this new boy so far was surface admiration at a distance, for the casual way he walked through the halls in his long, loose gait, ignoring the whispers and turning heads. But now he noticed tell-tale signs of other stories – a fine scar arcing down from one eyebrow and into the pale hollow under the boy’s eye, deep scuffs marking his trainers, their laces almost frayed through, bands of bright string tied around too-thin wrists that Madi worried constantly with his fingers, like rosary beads.