The Water Thief

by Claire Hajaj

  We burn the stones in Tuesday’s oven, to get the powder to make the cement. Nicholas pours water on some of it, and it hisses like a snake. We bring the lime bags back to the garden, singing a song that Nicholas is teaching me, about going to England on a jet plane. It has funny words. Kiss me! Smile for me! I sing it to Miss Amina as we pass her. Miss Amina, she yells at us. She is like a bat, an orange bat with big ears. ‘Boy, what is all this noise you make? Stupid boy. I will tell your father.’

  Baba comes out from his office. He is wiping his hands. Jalloh is hiding behind him. He does not want Miss Amina to see him there. Ha! Maybe he has a disease in his dick, too.

  ‘Ah, Miss Amina,’ Baba calls to her. ‘I have your medicine here when you want to come. Free of charge!’ He winks at me. I am happy, so I wink back.

  Every day we make a little more of my castle. First we dig the foundation. Then we make the outside walls and inside walls – the support walls they are called. Then three towers – two on the side and in the middle a big round one. The schematic is on Nagode’s sleeping tree behind us. I stuck it there with a pin.

  Mama comes often into the garden now. She helps to mix the quicklime with sand and small stones. Once Nagode tried to put some in her mouth. I had to say: ‘Hey, Mama, watch her!’ But Mama is too busy watching us.

  On the last day of our project, Mama comes into the garden with something rolled up in her hand. I try to take it from her, but she gives it to Nicholas.

  He opens it and says: ‘You made a flag.’

  ‘A castle should have a banner,’ Mama says. She holds the corner still, so Nicholas can see. It is a white flag and in the middle Mama has drawn a yellow flower. She says: ‘A daffodil.’

  I do not understand why this makes Nicholas smile at her. He winds the flag onto a stick and ties it on. We make some extra cement to put the flag on the tower.

  Baba comes back from his rounds then, as we are setting the flag. ‘Very good, very good,’ he says. He shakes the hand of Nicholas. And next he shakes mine. ‘My son the master builder.’ His hand is dry and I feel his bones. He goes inside to bring his camera that he brought from England. We line up, me, Nicholas and Mama, with the castle in front. Nagode is putting brown grass into the moat. ‘Smile,’ says Baba.

  After it clicks, I think Baba looks sad. He tells Mama: ‘I will make some tea.’ But I see him go to the office instead.

  Mama looks happy, though. She is picking flowers from Nagode’s sleeping tree. The tree was bright before, but now it is brown. She puts them on the castle tower.

  ‘Now a real queen would agree to live here,’ she says to Nicholas.

  Nicholas, he goes down on one knee and opens his arms. In a deep voice, he sings: ‘ “My good blade carves the casques of men, my tough lance thrusteth sure, my strength is as the strength of ten: because my heart is pure.” ’

  Mama, she smiles. She says: ‘So, Sir Galahad. And is this Arthur’s castle?’

  ‘No,’ says Nicholas. ‘In that castle, Guinevere was sad.’

  ‘It’s a strong castle,’ I say. ‘I can make soldiers from the rest of the cement. We can put them around the moat to protect the queen inside.’

  Nicholas gets up. He says: ‘Lady Margaret, will you dance with me?’

  Mama laughs. ‘No, sir.’

  But Nicholas, he holds out his hand. He says: ‘Please, my lady.’

  She covers her smile with her hand. I think she looks small, like Adeya.

  I say: ‘Go on, Mama.’

  So she takes his hand. And he pretends they are dancing around the castle. Their feet make the dust rise, with the small biting flies. Nagode, she is laughing to catch them, reaching in the air.

  In the window of the kitchen I see a shadow, watching us. I want to call to him: Baba! But then he is gone.

  When the day ends, Akim comes to see my castle with Juma. Juma has something to tell me. He comes close. I can smell him – broken cars and cigarettes.

  He says: ‘Mister, he knows what you did at the school.’

  I say nothing.

  Juma wants to pinch my arm, like he used to. His hand, it comes near me. But then he stops. He says: ‘Come with us tomorrow, JoJo. He will see you again.’

  I remember the knife in Mister’s belt. It was white, like his skin. White like the sky is now, when the sun falls low. I turn the governor’s cap so the bill shades my eyes.

  Juma thinks this means yes. He is smiling. He lights a cigarette and walks to the schematic that Nicholas and I made.

  He takes the paper off Nagode’s sleeping tree. He says: ‘What is this?’ He turns it this way and that. The ash is dropping on the ground. But Juma cannot read this language, the numbers and the lines. He will never read it. All Juma can do is clean a car, like Baba cleans his clock.

  I take it from him. I say: ‘It is nothing. Juma. Don’t worry.’

  He can see my meaning, I know. His smile fades. He looks smaller than before. Like Akim. It means I do not need them. I do not have to follow them.

  And then Nicholas calls from the door: ‘JoJo! Dinner time!’ Juma and Akim, they are still looking at me, waiting.

  I go inside to Nicholas. I run with our paper, and I leave them behind.

  November

  The harmattan arrived early – a relentless, hair-dryer wind sweeping a red curtain across land and sky. Workmen turned up to Nick’s site muttering about bad omens. Day after day dust choked machinery and shrivelled Adeya’s millet plants into spears of yellow bone.

  The wind was a harbinger, Nick’s foreman told him, a bad omen, the earth surrendering to the sky. Men feared for their crops; they were harvesting early, to save what they could.

  ‘How do people stand this every bloody year?’ Nick asked, beside the rattling corpse of one dust-clogged digger. Eric frowned at the horizon, already dark at noon. ‘It’s not usually this bad.’

  By mid-November Nick finally surrendered, too, shutting the site until the worst passed. The crew covered their machinery with tarpaulins, as he and Eric headed back down the highway, under the ominous haze.

  The haze intensified as they neared the village, thickening into eerie darkness. As they rounded the square, Nick grabbed Eric’s arm. People were racing towards the lake, carrying bundles of cloth. Others gripped brooms and buckets, yelling through smoke.

  ‘Fuck,’ Eric said. Smoke was billowing directly ahead of them now, from the village edge where Dr Ahmed’s house stood, and Adeya’s fields. Nick’s heart thudded to a hollow stop. Eric slammed down a gear and accelerated forward, towards the village millet fields. A strange sound filtered in through the window – chaotic, agonised keening. Behind a wall of flame, Adeya’s goats were screaming.

  Nick jumped from the Jeep, stumbling as a huge body slammed into him, leaving a grimy trail on his shirt. A burning stench coated the air – the stink of charred hair and meat. Adeya’s field was a furnace, black and boiling. Wet fabrics had been laid over the shrubs all the way back to the outlying grain storehouses – bedsheets and towels stained dark with earth and soot. But not enough; the tail of the fire was curling around to encircle the thatched roofs of Hanan’s millet store.

  Nick ran towards these new cries of alarm, gathering armfuls of soot-stained sheets to join the circle of desperate, beating arms. Pieces of thatch were already aflame; he could picture those soft white ears, so lovingly tended and carefully harvested, blackening and withering inside, consumed to nothing.

  The sheets were heavy in his hand as he beat the flames, frenzied now, his shoulders aching with effort, delaying the inevitable surrender. The heat was incredible, a red wall pushing him back. Smoke choked his nostrils, violent and sickening. Eric grabbed his shoulder. ‘Forget it!’ he yelled. ‘It’s already gone.’ Eric was right; the whole thatch was now a roiling orange. As Nick stepped back, half of the grain store collapsed, flames arcing into its heart.

  He turned away, his chest tight, fighting against nausea – and saw Dr Ahmed on the ground, cradling Adeya as sh
e sobbed. Hanan sat beside them, grey with cindered flakes, one scorched stem lying on her lap. Adeya’s hands were held out palm up, as if in prayer – and then in horror he realised why: they were a raw, swollen mass of red and white blisters. A foul-smelling brown fluid trickled from her dress over Dr Ahmed’s legs.

  Margaret knelt beside Hanan, taking the dead plant from the older woman’s hands. Hanan sat motionless, as if dead herself. Mazed, his father used to say of his mother. Away with the fairies.

  Margaret drew back her hand and slapped her – hard enough to draw some faint recognition. JoJo beside her, red eyes in a smoke-streaked face.

  Dr Ahmed looked up. ‘Her bag has broken,’ he said to Nick. ‘Help me. We need to get her to my surgery.’

  Wordless, Nick bent to lift Adeya out of Dr Ahmed’s arms. Her stench enveloped them both, raw aromas of fire and faeces. Her body weighed pitifully little. Tuesday, gold-toothed owner of the village corner store, pushed onlookers aside to let them through.

  Murmurs followed as they passed, faces turning from Adeya’s stinking robes. Nick gripped her closer as she flinched into his chest through the rolling smoke, held earthwards by a heavy sky.

  Dr Ahmed and Margaret stayed in the surgery with Adeya till nightfall. Eric smoked outside and Nick made JoJo bread and jam. The boy was silent as he chewed, pink crumbs gathering at the corners of his mouth.

  ‘How did this happen?’ Nick asked him. JoJo twisted in his chair.

  ‘It was a bushfire,’ he said, eyes downcast.

  ‘How do they start?’

  ‘Allah starts them.’ JoJo took another mouthful of sandwich.

  ‘That’s not a scientist’s answer,’ Nick said. ‘It’s just a way of saying, “I don’t know”.’

  JoJo looked up, defensive. ‘Maybe He sent lightning.’

  Eric had come back into the kitchen and picked a slab of bread from the table.

  ‘No storms today, boy.’ He took a huge bite. ‘And bushfires are for April, not November. This ground is too fucking dry. When are they going to start calling this a drought? That’s what I fucking wonder.’

  Nick remembered Adeya’s sure hands, plucking beetles from her stems. All those months of sowing, seeding, nurturing and growing, of back-breaking trips to fetch water. For what?

  He looked out to Miss Amina’s house, her orange abaya now grey and dripping over her porch railing. A water tank sat on her roof. He wondered how much was left inside.

  He turned to Eric. ‘What if it were a drought? Dr Ahmed says water prices are higher every day.’

  Eric rubbed his chin. ‘You know they used to have their own water here? A well, some sort of underground system.’

  Nick looked out over the darkening land, swirling dust a yellow mockery of England’s misty sunsets. ‘How was that possible?’

  ‘Oh, there’s an aquifer hereabouts. There was a survey. I’ve still got the papers somewhere.’

  Dr Ahmed came into the kitchen from the hall, wiping his hands with a towel.

  ‘Ah, hello my friends.’

  ‘Adeya is OK?’ JoJo was on his feet.

  ‘It could be worse.’ Dr Ahmed was falsely jovial; he seemed to be looking through them all. ‘Their house at least was saved. Margaret will take them home now. I am sorry, you must be hungry.’

  ‘Don’t mind me, sir.’ Eric clapped Dr Ahmed on the shoulder. ‘I’ll be on my way. Let me know if there’s anything I can do.’

  ‘Make rain,’ the old man said.

  Eric laughed. ‘I’ll give it a try.’

  Dr Ahmed busied himself making tea. Nick moved out of his way, walking into the family room. The tick of the grandfather clock drew him in.

  To his surprise, JoJo was by the clock already, his forehead pressed against the wood, rubbing a section with a cloth. The grain was lighter there than elsewhere, shiny from intense polishing, showing the pale bones beneath. The boy’s breath came sharp and unsteady, and Nick saw tears in his eyes.

  He knelt down beside him. ‘Adeya will be OK, you know. Burns heal.’ The enormous inadequacy of the words made him hate himself.

  JoJo pushed into the wood with his fingers, a vengeful gesture. Then he said, ‘They tease her.’ The other hand scraped over his eyes, leaving them red and wet.

  ‘Who?’ Nick kept his voice gentle. ‘What for?’

  ‘At school. For her bag.’

  ‘Well, she has you to stand up for her.’

  JoJo stopped rubbing the wood and turned to Nick. In his face, Nick saw the futility of adolescence, with its impossible explanations.

  A sharp breeze rushed between them from the front door. Margaret came back into the room, dragging off her headscarf with fierce exhaustion, her bracelet leaving red imprints against her soot-stained arm.

  ‘They sleep,’ she said. Then she covered her face and burst into tears.

  Night fell, thick and hot. Nick tossed on the creaking bunk, waking intermittently from dreams of burning. Sometimes it was Madi he hunted in the flames, sometimes a nameless presence, turning wildly until panic spun him back towards consciousness.

  Waking for the third time he tasted sweat and smoke. The room’s air felt heavy, tangling his arms and legs in a tight, black blanket. He stumbled over to the hose, twisting the tap and splashing his face in water. The bathroom’s bare light bulb floated above him, a luminous phantom; somehow it reminded him of JoJo’s face.

  The water was blood-warm. Closing his eyes, he rested his forehead against the relative coolness of the tiles. I’m still dreaming. The cool was a fresh wind on the wild Atlantic shore; he was racing the rollers with Madi, breaking and plunging up the surf line. He felt the spray soaking their backs through to the bone, saw their pale feet kicking up the sand, Madi’s cigarette smoke whipping out to sea, carrying away the smell of burning. ‘Here, mate, take one. Come on, they’re only Silk Cut, for little girls. Don’t be a pussy.’ Phil had taught Madi to call people ‘pussy’ by slamming him into the crossbars of the school climbing frame and whispering,‘You stink, Sambo. Don’t you wash? You smell like a black pussy.’ ‘We should report him,’ Nick had suggested, later on the kissing gate. ‘Get him suspended.’ But Madi had shaken his head. ‘I promised my dad. No more trouble. He’s scared they’ll send us back.’ Instead for a week they’d called each other ‘pussy’ all the time, to draw the sting – until Madi’s weary-eyed, bent-backed father walked into the flat while Madi was scrubbing his arms raw to get rid of the smell of the fishmonger, yelling, ‘Come here, my little white pussy,’ to Nick over the running of the tap. His father’s dry palm had whipped across the side of Madi’s face. The boy had already outgrown him, the father whittled away to insignificance, the son just reaching life’s cusp. But Madi just stood there, frozen, arms covered in suds, one cheek branded red. And Nick remembered the look that had passed between them – JoJo’s hopelessness on a different face.

  Rolling back into bed, Nick pulled the pillow over his head. His chest felt raw, his body too drained for sleep. But eventually the rain came, pattering on the glass of his mother’s kitchen window. Madi was eating across the table, his bruises black as burns. Nick’s father rested one hand on Madi’s shoulder, another on JoJo’s. ‘What were you doing?’ he asked Nick, his eyes a challenge. ‘Why weren’t you there for him?’ Nick opened his mouth to reply – but suddenly he was back on that empty shore again, alone. Icy water tumbled around him, swallowing his voice as he shouted their names towards the cold and distant cliffs.

  Next morning Nick opened his door to see the butcher, Jalloh, smiling at the gate. A kid lay over his shoulders, thin legs splayed around his head.

  ‘Good morning, Mr Nicholas! Is Dr Ahmed within?’

  The house’s front door opened – Dr Ahmed came out of the living room, holding a screwdriver and an oily cloth. ‘He is indeed.’

  ‘This goat is for you, sir. From the widow Hanan.’

  ‘Hanan is too kind. I don’t want to deprive her of any more of her flock.’

  ‘D
on’t worry, sir. This one’s mother has another still nursing.’

  ‘Well,’ Dr Ahmed’s glasses had misted into a tired greyness, ‘perhaps it’s best. We can invite them to a good meal at least.’

  When Jalloh opened the gate, Nick started back in surprise.

  ‘He’s going to kill it here?’

  Jalloh swayed up the path. The small creature on his shoulders had long fine ears dangling around massive black eyes. It examined Nick with innocent interest.

  ‘Excuse me,’ said Dr Ahmed. ‘I will rouse my wife.’ Last night he had put Margaret to bed with a sedative, her face swollen with weeping. The fire had not touched her, yet a part of her soul seemed to be burning with some private grief.

  Nick also felt drained – rising before dawn to hack up soot and smoke from his lungs, turning on the hose to douse his face. Then he’d cut off the flow in an adrenalin surge of guilt. When are they going to start calling this a drought? He’d watched the yellow drops patter to the floor, a slow, inadequate beat.

  He’d called J.P. over the radio afterwards, to update him on the weather and his decision to close the site.

  ‘Assuming we can open again later this week, I’ll run out of cash soon,’ he’d warned his boss. ‘We seem to need permit after permit. Permit to connect to the drains. Permit to link to the electricity supply. Cost of inspections for the permits.’

  ‘Think of it as a public good,’ J.P. had said. ‘You’re used to a private-sector culture. This is different. Every extra stamp on your paper means another family with an income. It’s better than Western bullshit, frankly. There, it’s just self-importance. Here it’s necessity.’

  Nick rubbed his forehead, trying to ease a deep needle of pain.