The Water Thief

by Claire Hajaj

  ‘Look, Nick. What can I say?’ J.P. continued. ‘In this game we make lots of big investments for small returns. Sometimes you don’t see the returns in one year or in three. Honestly, this is why I don’t like this midlife tourism. You think nothing is good unless it happens in front of you.’

  ‘That’s . . .’ His irritated throat cut off Nick’s retort, turning it into a cough.

  ‘What’s up?’ J.P. sounded concerned. ‘You’re sick?’

  ‘No. We had a fire here yesterday.’ Now was as good a time as any. ‘Listen, J.P., it’s unbelievably dry here. Drought-dry. Are they talking about that in the capital yet?’

  ‘About a drought? No, not really. I mean it’s dry – but they know how to manage. They have wells, trucking arrangements.’

  ‘There’s no well here. And water prices are going sky-high. Yesterday – the fire – they didn’t have water to put it out.’

  ‘OK.’ J.P.’s voice crackled down the line. ‘Like half of the country. What’s your point?’

  ‘My point . . .’ Nick paused. ‘There’s an aquifer here, Eric said. Apparently there used to be a well, too.’

  ‘A well – yes, maybe. Tell me about it when you come through for Christmas. Sounds like you need a break.’

  After J.P.’s curt ‘Out’, Nick leaned his forehead against the radio, listening to the lonely hiss of the line. Suddenly he missed the cool and order of home; he hadn’t written to Kate in two weeks. Pulling her stationery towards him, he began to scribble a description of the fire and Dr Ahmed’s heroics with Adeya. The nib scratched like the crickets as the generator droned on.

  But halfway through he crumpled the paper and pushed it aside. It felt blasphemous to reduce grief and loss to postcard banalities. And it would only worry Kate, give her more ammunition to shoot holes in his decision. ‘Mr Indecisive’ she’d called him ever since their first night together, fondly, as a mother to a child. She encouraged him to have views and take stands – on politics, home-buying and job-changing – but in her secret heart he knew she liked the scales of choice tilted her way. Their private wedding vows – written at her suggestion just before he left – had been themed things I promise to accept about you. ‘Anyone can promise to love and honour the good parts,’ she’d explained. ‘But what about the rest?’ Her list had been characteristically full. I won’t pressure you. I won’t ask you to be more emotionally open than you can handle. I’ll encourage you to stand up for yourself when people push you down. He’d written a page of compliments, the words flowing with superficial ease. ‘It’s very sweet, Nick,’ she’d said, reading with a rueful smile. ‘But hardly the point of the exercise.’

  ‘I don’t need to accept anything about you,’ he’d assured her. ‘You’re perfect just as you are.’ Now, as then, he experienced the desolation of being most able to express himself when it mattered least.

  Margaret was calling him outside to help with Jalloh’s goat. She was carrying a bucket for the blood, her eyes puffy. Her headscarf was dark blue, the colour of grief.

  ‘Eh, Mr Nicholas!’ Tuesday came walking up the path behind Jalloh. ‘See – we burned the wind away.’

  Nick looked up. Jalloh was right. The morning sky was luminous, ghosts of sunlight flickering over an ethereal canopy.

  Tuesday stroked the kid, his gold tooth glinting. In his Western jeans and open-necked shirt he was not dressed for slaughter. ‘I will eat your leg tonight,’ he said, pinching the kid’s soft ear.

  Jalloh jerked the animal away. ‘Join us, Mr Nicholas,’ he said. ‘You were also a hero of the fire.’

  The butcher walked to the back garden. Margaret followed them, drawing her scarf over her mouth, the red beads on her bracelet turned liquid by the light. Nick followed instinctively, fearful but pulled along by her presence.

  Jalloh had driven a stake into the ground. With Tuesday’s help he drew the kid to him, lifting up its chin, talking to it softly. The big brown eyes fixed on him, a mute and yet intelligent response. Nick remembered the first night here and Jalloh’s claim. The animal knows who is master. He felt it, too – the calm trance of approaching death. When the knife sliced through the small throat his hands went up to his own in shock, half-expecting to feel life pouring out.

  The ground was red in an instant; the kid’s tied legs convulsed and buckled as Jalloh lifted it into the air and hung it upside down from the post.

  Then Nick was on the ground, coffee and bread surging from his stomach into his mouth. Vomit collected between his hands as he knelt. His heart raced, disorganised and stumbling.

  Margaret’s hands were soft on his back, soothing, urging him up. He tried to stay hunched over, to hide the vomit with dirt. The ground was rock hard, baked to breaking by the sun. His fingers scraped feebly along it.

  I’m weaker than Adeya. Shame forced Nick up. Behind him blood soaked into the thirsty earth.

  ‘I’m so sorry.’ He made himself look Margaret in the eye. Her headscarf had come loose, her eyes wide with concern. He sensed Jalloh and Tuesday looking at them.

  ‘I . . . I can’t see blood,’ he explained, panting. ‘It’s a phobia. I’m sorry.’

  She bit her lip. Dipping her head, she spoke in a whisper. ‘You must clean yourself. Go. I will send them away.’

  In his room, he leaned against the mirror, forehead pressed to the cool glass. He heard the echoing shriek of children’s voices, saw the grey tarmac and its spreading dark stain.

  Something was fizzing upwards in his belly, nauseatingly sweet; he pushed it down with slow lungfuls of air.

  Breathe, he told himself. Breathe. But he couldn’t stop the flicker of memory; he pushed one down but others surfaced: the fascination of a bloody knee from a bike fall in the days before fear, the red welling around the point of Nick’s Swiss army knife when he and Madi became blood brothers on his thirteenth birthday. The knife had been his father’s birthday gift to him, instead of the pocket transistor radio Nick wanted. His chest had filled with disappointment when he opened the wrapping paper and saw it nestled there, red and sleek, as his father said: ‘When I was your age I would have killed for one of these.’ It was unexpectedly heavy for something so small, mysteriously compact, silver lines folding over and into each other. And then disappointment had turned to shock as his father sat down on the end of the rumpled bed, his faded brown corduroy suit just inches from Nick’s knees. ‘I got a prayer book for my thirteenth,’ he’d said. ‘And a room full of old men to hear me sing about God. They all looked the same – the same faces, the same clothes, the same delusions. I knew then I’d have to make my own way. And so can you.’ He’d rested his hand on Nick’s palm, cool as the metal lying at its centre. ‘It’s all right here, Nicholas. In your own hands.’

  But the knife was gone, like everything else. He’d given it to Madi the very same day – an impulsive apology for their hand-holding argument the week before when they’d both gone home upset and hurt. Madi had met him next morning at the top of his road as usual; but they’d walked in embarrassed silence, schoolbags heavy on their backs, the scuff of their feet echoing off the tarmac. And when he stopped at the top of the hill to press the knife into Madi’s hand, his own heart lifted at his friend’s startled look, the reverent way his fingers closed slowly around the flawless red casing, the sudden cast of doubt in his eyes.

  ‘Why you giving me this?’

  ‘Because I want to,’ he’d answered. And later, on the kissing gate, they’d laughed in the relief of forgetting, Nick watching Madi draw a red line across his thumb with the long silver blade, feeling the daring excitement of pain, bright red against the grey fields. ‘Blood brothers. You do that here in England?’ Back then he’d felt nothing but peace as their blood mingled with the clasp of their palms, blurring pale skin into dark.

  But those days were done. Nick made his way back to Dr Ahmed’s kitchen, filthy clothes bundled in his hand. Margaret stood by the sink, looking out of the window. Her nose wrinkled at the smell as she turned.


  ‘Better wash them at the lake,’ she told him. ‘In the open air.’

  ‘OK.’ Maybe then his shame would evaporate in the desert’s blind spaces.

  They made their way past Adeya’s shuttered house, past the millet fields, scorched and silent. Hanan was at work clearing blackened plants, swinging her machete back and forth in a dull rhythm.

  Slowly the land softened, their feet leaving muddy imprints. Out here the world expanded, its horizon swallowed by obscuring brilliance. The lake’s dark waters had turned pale gold. Nick felt his heartbeat slow. Squatting down, he began to rinse his shirt.

  In the distance he could see the red curtains of the shack where Margaret left food. Binza, he remembered. He’d seen Margaret leaving the house many times since, carrying away bread the family could barely spare.

  Now she sat on a lonely boulder, her fingers tracing her bracelet like a rosary. She met his eyes and something like a smile came to her lips. Look at us both, she seemed to be saying. She pulled off her headscarf, hair almost red in the light. Escaped strands curled around the nape of her neck and ears; he thought of the long, curled sideburns of his father’s few boyhood photographs, his shaved head and downcast eyes drooping like the woollen tassels from his shirt.

  ‘I’m so sorry,’ he said. ‘I embarrassed you.’

  She shook her head. ‘They are just foolish men. They see nothing.’

  The water was warm on his hands and face. He wrung out the wet shirt and spread it on a rock beside Margaret’s feet. Then he put his back to the heated stone, feeling the sun beat through his closed eyelids. The nausea was receding, leaving the hollowness of grief. ‘I’m going to stay here for a while,’ he said. ‘I can’t go back yet.’

  He waited for her to move. But there was only silence, the faint cry of birds and wind.

  Then she said, ‘Are you sick, Nicholas?’

  He opened his eyes to see her regal silhouette, calm as a priest.

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘Or maybe – yes. But it’s an old sickness.’ He looked up at her. ‘A penance, you would probably say.’

  Her gaze was steady, but he noticed her hand’s unconscious impulse towards the red bracelet on her arm. ‘A penance for what?’

  ‘For something I did when I was young. Something terrible.’ His hands lay in his lap, limp and accusing.

  She reached down, the lightest touch on his shoulder. ‘The young cannot do anything so terrible.’

  ‘I did.’ He swallowed. ‘To my brother.’

  ‘You never spoke of a brother,’ Margaret said.

  Nick shook his head – struggling to explain, even to her.

  ‘I loved him like a brother,’ he said, at last. ‘And he loved me, I think more than my real family did. My father wanted a saint, not a son. And my mother . . .’ He closed his eyes again and saw her – pale hair falling over her shoulders like water. ‘She would just paint by the window every day. Like she was expecting someone to arrive.’ The colours had seemed so alive when she brushed them onto the canvas, their scent warm and bitter across the table where he’d sit helping Madi with equations. But by evening they would fade away, vanishing into the canvas until only their ghost was left.

  ‘And how did you wrong this brother of yours?’

  Grief began to creep up his throat. ‘He was a foreigner in our village.’ He looked up at her. ‘Like you. And the other boys at our school – they bullied him. Beat him at break-times, took his money. Usually the teachers would stop them.’

  ‘Boys fight.’ Margaret looked back at him, her face quizzical. ‘JoJo and Akim fight every day.’

  ‘Not like this.’ They’d circle the playground like wolves, Phil and his friends, made bolder and hungrier by the wounds they caused. Sambo, stupid black cunt. Go back to Togobogo. Oi! Paki. What you doing in a class with kids? You like little boys? That your boyfriend over there?

  ‘It was about a week after my thirteenth birthday.’ A good week, he remembered, the scars of forgiveness still red on their thumbs, Madi scoring higher in Tinner’s maths test than Phil, thanks to Nick’s coaching – Phil’s face a violent red as Madi leaned forward to whisper Sambo strikes back, man while Tinner read out their marks. ‘It was Friday afternoon, so we had plans for after school. You know – head to my mother’s garden gate, drink soda, read National Geographic. Wild boys, right?’ Margaret smiled.

  ‘But at lunch break they came at him.’ Nick’s stomach clenched. ‘Worse than before.’

  It replayed as he spoke – the high shrieks of ‘you’re it’ travelling across the playground, the clandestine waft of cigarettes from beside the shed, the twang of elastic skipping ropes. Prefects, deliberately blind, confiscating teen magazines from the girls on the chapel steps. Phil’s gang flocking around Madi, Phil heading the pack. And Nick – watching as Madi backed towards the climbing frame, his dark head colliding with the silver arches.

  A bottle of Dr Pepper was open in Nick’s hand; he could taste its gentle fizz. Madi’s bottle was in his hoodie pocket, waiting for the peace and solace of the kissing gate at the end of Nick’s garden. A grey wind rose around them. Nick saw Madi look into Phil’s face, one unguarded moment of contempt. And Phil’s hands slammed into Madi’s shoulder, knocking him back against the bars.

  Now Madi’s gaze swung past Phil; Nick followed his eyes towards Miss Tinner’s closed classroom door. Everyone knew she sometimes snuck quick cigarettes there when she should have been on playground duty. All I have to do is run and get her. Madi’s eyes met Nick’s for an instant, his expression blank, before another blow jerked them away. Get her. Nick didn’t know if Madi had mouthed the appeal, or if it came straight from his own heart. Get help.

  But then Phil turned around to Nick, his fists clenched. The wind blew cold, Nick’s knees bare and shivering in his school shorts. ‘Don’t you bloody move. Queer. Or you’re next.’ And Nick’s body emptied of everything but the absolute authority of fear.

  Phil struck Madi again. This time, his eyes held Nick’s – fear finally breaking to the surface.

  Don’t worry. I’m coming. The wind was behind him, blowing him towards a threshold. Any moment now he would move, he would run to summon Miss Tinner, he would step up. But with each passing second, he found himself still there, motionless.

  Madi had given up then; he’d turned away from Nick towards the only escape left, hauling himself up through the climbing frame’s steel bars. Laughter chased him. Look at the monkey! Two of the boys were already climbing after him. Another ran to the far side for a quick ambush.

  At the top of the frame, Madi paused. His eyes searched the horizon. Escaping, Nick imagined – taking wing past the playground, past Nick, past the cold village streets and dark little council flats, past Nick’s mother’s gentle landscapes – heading outwards to the shores of the sea and its once-beautiful promise.

  Phil had nearly reached the top. Go! Nick screamed, inside the prison of his mind. Get away! Madi twisted round. He shoved a hand in his hoodie pocket, for an instant letting go of the bars.

  ‘He fell.’ Madi had slipped like a bird’s shadow, plummeting. ‘It wasn’t a long way down. I thought he would be OK. When I saw all the red underneath him I thought his Dr Pepper bottle must have broken.’ The stain had spread slowly from the pocket where his hand still rested. Later, in hospital, they’d unclenched his fingers from Nick’s Swiss army knife, the silver blade stuck deep into his abdomen.

  Nick’s face felt tight, dirty. He wiped it with his shirt, breathing in the smells of mud and heat. A touch on his shoulder – Margaret’s hand – restored him to the present.

  ‘You think he would not forgive you?’ she said.

  ‘I failed him.’ He breathed in, tasting the deep odour of water and warm earth. ‘I came here to make amends for that. But everything here reminds me of him.’

  She turned her head towards Binza’s filthy shack. ‘The dead do not want to be forgotten. Maybe your friend is still here, with you.’ She reached out her hand
; Nick could not tell if she was pointing to him, the land or the sky.

  He shook his head. ‘I don’t believe in ghosts.’

  ‘You are wrong,’ she said, her tone insistent. ‘There are ghosts everywhere.’

  The formless curve of the land stretched away, a white gulf. If ever a place could be haunted . . .

  ‘Maybe I wanted another chance,’ he said. ‘The desert seemed a good place for a test of character.’ He laughed. ‘Didn’t God like sending people to the desert? The prophets, the tribes of Israel. Poor old Jesus.’

  ‘You shouldn’t mock.’ She turned back to look at him, stern-faced. ‘You don’t know what may come.’

  Nick laughed, weary. ‘It’s my father coming out in me.’

  ‘You said he hated God.’

  Nick pictured his father writing his daily medical diaries, back ramrod-straight, unbending as Moses re-carving the stone tablets. ‘He hated blind faith. A “self-hating Jew”, he called himself.’ Nick laughed, the sound hurting his throat. ‘My father believed in tests, though. His tests were always much harder than God’s.’

  She nodded. ‘I also made my father into a God. JoJo, too, with Ahmed, when he was young. It makes it harder for us, when they fail.’

  Her words made him pause. As a small boy he’d woken from terrifying dreams, creeping halfway downstairs to hear the all-powerful reassurance of his father’s pen scratching against paper, see the desk-light’s yellow beams refracting off his glasses. But Madi’s death had widened the gulf between them, filling it with guilt and silence. A year after his funeral, Nick’s religious education teacher read them the story of Jesus and the Temple. ‘Jesus was younger than you sorry lot,’ she’d said. ‘And he already knew more than the scholars.’ Nick had felt something stir within him at the drama of Jesus’ worried parents – their frantic search for their son, that loving family reunion. In his bedroom, with Madi’s Dark Side of the Moon poster still pinned to the wall, he’d ached for the same homecoming with his own father – some acknowledgement, some way back into his esteem. On impulse, he decided to learn Hebrew and prepare for a bar mitzvah. He organised everything himself: found a rabbi in the yellow pages and ordered a Hebrew-English Pentateuch translation from the village bookshop. The shop assistant had squinted with suspicion at Nick’s careful handwriting. ‘That’s a first for me, mate,’ he’d said. ‘Lads your age normally order Jackie Collins under the counter.’