The Water Thief

by Claire Hajaj

  Inside, the remainder of J.P.’s cash lay in neat bundles.

  Twenty thousand spare to build a well. He pulled out the bundles one by one, stacking them on the desk.

  That last glance of Binza’s face in his rear-view mirror returned as he counted them, her expression twisting to something like laughter.

  Let her laugh. Twenty thousand spare to build a well. The money lay under the flickering light. To Nick, it looked like the only green thing left in a dying world.

  I hide in the reeds, where Nicholas cannot see me. I watch him where he waits, in his car. We are so close I could hit him from here. I reach down to take a stone in my hand, hot from the sun. I could throw it. I threw my shoe to break the school window. I was just a boy then. Now I am a man. Now Nicholas is the glass, and I am the stone.

  If he sees me, he will tell me more lies. Lies about going to England. Lies about how I am clever. He will tell me we are friends. Lies and more lies, so that so I cannot hear the truth.

  But I hear. I hear him start the engine and drive away from the lake. And the stone is still here, in my hand. I feel a pain, a sharp pain. But men do not cry.

  The pain is everywhere, like the sky. The voice in my head says: ‘Stupid, stupid JoJo.’ Maybe this is the reason. Maybe this is why he did not want me.

  I still have my schoolbag. Nicholas’ workbook is in it. I can smell vomit on it. I was sick before, from crying. I came to the lake, to wash the vomit away. But the smell is still with me. I think it will never leave.

  The pages are open. So much time I spent with Nicholas, making these lines and these angles. I did not play football with Akim, I did not go to Tuesday’s shop and read those magazines. I stayed with you, Nicholas.

  I close the book in my hand. Nicholas, you are a liar. You will never take me to England. You will steal Mama from me and take her instead. Baba will let you, because he is weak. So I must be a man. You will see.

  I throw the book as far as I can. It lands in the water. There is not enough water to make a splash. I can still see the corner of the book. It stands up in the mud.

  ‘Eh, boy.’

  She makes me jump. I did not know she was so close. She has no teeth in her mouth. Her legs are white and brown, like a disease.

  ‘Get away from me,’ I say to Binza. I hold up the stone. ‘Get back.’

  She starts to laugh. It is not a real laugh. Nicholas has a real laugh. He puts back his head and he laughs from deep down. Binza makes a dry sound – like ah, ah, ah.

  She says: ‘Eh, boy. Be careful with your step here. Do not disturb the spirits.’

  ‘There are no spirits,’ I tell her.

  She looks out to the water. ‘There are so many spirits,’ she says. ‘So many.’

  Her voice is sad. Her eyes are white like her hair. There is white spit on her lips.

  ‘They come to drink,’ she says. ‘The dead are always thirsty. Listen! You can hear them.’

  She puts her hand to her ear. But I hear nothing. Just the mosquitoes. They whine like Nagode. And the wind, too, it hisses. Together they make a song. There are no words to it. But it makes me sad, and I feel I will cry again.

  Binza says: ‘See, boy. You hear them too.’

  I tell her: ‘The dead go to Paradise. This is what the Qu’ran says.’

  Binza makes another laughing noise. ‘There is no Paradise,’ she says. ‘They are waiting for us here. They wait for us to join them.’

  ‘Imam Abdi would put you in prison,’ I warn her. ‘You are speaking against God.’

  Binza opens her arms. She has a bag tied to her clothes. It moves. I do not want to see what is inside it. She says: ‘The fools will come to me. Their spirits will drink here, too.’

  I can still hear them whispering. Like Mama singing to me and Bako, when we slept in the same bed. ‘Hush,’ she would tell us, if we would not quiet. ‘Hush.’ The spirits say it too. ‘Hush.’ They hiss in my ears.

  Now I am crying. I cannot stop. I wipe my eyes, but more tears come. I ask her: ‘Does Bako come? Does he wait for me?’

  She does not answer. She is looking behind me. She makes a hissing noise, like the spirits.

  I turn.

  He is there. White, the same as her. I can feel the stone in my hand. It is cold now, cold and hard.

  ‘JoJo,’ he says. ‘You came to find me.’

  When I saw Mister the first time, I feared him. Now it is different. I can taste the fear but I cannot feel it. The fear is far away, on the other side of the lake.

  ‘You come here at night,’ I say to him.

  Mister, he nods. He says: ‘What do you want with me, JoJo? What does the doctor’s son want?’

  I cannot answer him. I do not know. I want to tell him what I saw in the kitchen, with Nicholas and Mama. I want to tell him about the lies and about England. I want to tell him about Baba, how the love went out of him when Bako died. I want to tell him about Bako, about how he comes to drink at the lake and wait for me because I wished he would die when Mama loved him best.

  But I say nothing. I look down to the ground, to the mud and the water.

  Mister, he walks to me. He takes my hand with the stone inside it. And with the other hand he takes the stone.

  He says: ‘A stone is for children, JoJo. A stone is for games. You are becoming a man now.’

  Binza, she shouts. ‘Leave him!’ Her voice is like a frog. It croaks. ‘Let him be!’

  Mister looks at her. ‘Go,’ he says. His voice is gentle, but Binza, she crouches down like a dog. ‘Go,’ he says. ‘I will come soon.’

  Her mouth, it moves. But she does not speak. She turns her back to us and starts to move away, like a shadow.

  ‘Who is she to you?’ I ask Mister. He looks after her as she goes. He smells of oil and metal. But I think he looks smaller than before. He looks sad, like me.

  ‘She is my mother,’ he says.

  I cannot believe him. I remember what he told me – that his mother had sinned with another man and this is why no one would save her. I thought his mother must be beautiful, more beautiful even than Mama.

  I say: ‘She is too old. How can she be your mother?’

  Mister’s voice is different when he answers. It is quiet like Adeya’s.

  ‘She did not look so old when she birthed me,’ he says. ‘Or when they drove her to this place from the Town. They beat her and called her whore and witch and made her naked on the ground. I was small, but I remember. It is the curse that turns her skin white and makes her grow old too fast. I have the same curse.’

  He holds out his white arms, with the pink patches where the sun has burned him.

  ‘Touch them,’ he says to me. ‘Do not be afraid.’

  I reach out my hand. The burned places, they feel smooth. Soft and hard at the same time. I look up at his face. I ask: ‘Does it hurt?’

  Mister, he smiles at me. ‘I do not feel them,’ he says. ‘The pain has gone. I turned it into my strength. It was the only way for me.’

  He drops my stone on the ground. I watch as the mud takes it in.

  He says: ‘You still feel the pain, JoJo. I understand you. I was also betrayed. My true father left us to the dogs. But the dogs will take him too one day. He thinks he is strong and safe in his big house. But I grew stronger than him, stronger than this curse, stronger than every dog in this place.’

  Mister clenches his fists as he speaks. He breathes fast, like Bako when the fever came. The pink scars stand up on his arm, like snakes.

  ‘You said I was too weak for The Boys,’ I tell him. ‘My father is weak. My brother died.’

  ‘It was a test,’ he says. ‘Look at me, eh? You think I am the lucky one? You had a brother. You have a father. I have no one. Just The Boys. Just you.’

  I want to take his hand, to touch where the pink scars finish. I want to call him my brother, because I also have no one. But maybe Bako is here, still thirsty. Maybe he hears us.

  Mister opens his hands. On his palms, the pink m
arks have turned red.

  ‘I was not born strong, JoJo,’ he says. ‘I learned. I can teach you, too. If you are ready.’

  The sun has set and the spirits are quiet. There is nothing around us, just the whiteness of his face.

  ‘Teach me,’ I tell him.

  February

  They brought a new rig to the well’s deepening hole on the last day of February, after hitting water-bearing rock at fifty metres.

  The drill site was marked with a ring of orange flags – cut from Miss Amina’s old abaya. Nick had supervised while Adeya tied them onto sticks and planted them carefully in the earth. Water cycled in and out of the depths from two pools of black slurry, lidded by mud walls.

  Eric’s crew was racing to finish before the end of March brought the holy fast of Ramadan. Over three weeks, sand had given way to dark clays, broken stones and now this fractured, forbidding granite. Eric’s inexperienced operator had battered his ancient rig against it – until it gave up in a strangled grind of metal.

  It was another expense to add to a lengthening list. The new surveys had provided the first hiccup. Instead of confirming a good water yield at thirty metres, they projected having to drill down to the aquifer at almost three times that depth – a six-week process. Nick was horrified when the surveyor broke the news. Eric shrugged. ‘The best-laid plans,’ he answered. ‘That’s what you get for doing things on the fucking sly.’

  In the end, J.P.’s twenty thousand dollars had been all too easy to take. By the time Nick handed it to Eric, it didn’t even feel like theft. It was only a loan, he reasoned; he would repay it from his father’s inheritance as soon as Kate could liquidate their bonds. His father would have wanted such a memorial. For the first time in his life Nick found himself yearning for some way to bridge the gulf between the living and the dead, so he could find the old man and tell him.

  He’d steeled himself to write to Kate, faxing a message to her office via Eric. The first attempt to speak to her over Dr Ahmed’s hissing landline had failed, understanding possible only in fragments. She seemed to hear that he needed more money for something very important; he learned that a new business pitch at her office meant delaying his visit home until after March. Even her voice sounded unreal – made of static and echoes rather than human warmth.

  His letter repeated much of what she already knew about the village and the drought, layering grief already felt here with fear of worse to come. He softened J.P.’s position on the well with half-truths, blaming bureaucratic delays for the funding shortfall, implying that their money might be repaid in the future. He fought back against his conscience as he wrote; the stakes were too high. He finished by telling her to cash in his bonds and wire the money to him as soon as possible. He couldn’t bring himself to read the final version.

  Afterwards, he’d gone to find Margaret. JoJo was at school and Dr Ahmed due back from his monthly clinic at the market. She’d been in the bedroom, rubbing a laughing Nagode with a damp cloth. ‘Take her to Hanan and meet me by the lake,’ he’d said. And he’d waited there, watching Margaret pick her careful way through the reeds, her scarf streaming skywards. She’d grasped his hands as she reached him, recklessness in her fingers as she pulled him into the concealed hollow on the desert-facing side of a rocky hillock. Her abaya rode up above her legs as he pressed her into the dirt, cradling them as they moved on top of her outspread scarf, only dust and the sky as witness.

  Afterwards he’d put her palm to the earth as he explained his grand design to her. She’d pressed it flat, as if feeling a heartbeat. ‘So much water,’ she’d whispered. ‘So close.’

  ‘It’s what my father would have wanted me to do,’ he’d said. ‘Something that matters.’

  The earth in her fingertips had been dry and light as she sat up and sprinkled it on his chest, a light wind playing with the knots of her hair, drops of moisture beading a channel between her breasts. ‘So this is for him?’

  ‘No, it’s a present for you,’ he’d answered, only half-teasing as he stroked the contours of her cheeks and lips. ‘You asked me to prove myself.’

  That had startled her. ‘I’m not your judge, Nicholas.’ Her hand had pressed into his heart, gritty with dirt, the skin of her neck and shoulders darkly flushed, her shadow warm as it fell over him. ‘We left judgements behind us.’

  ‘You’re the only judge who matters to me,’ he replied. And as he pulled her to the ground a song from childhood played in the back of his mind – a psalm of David they’d taught him in the chapel choir. My soul thirsts for you, my flesh yearns for you, in a dry and weary land.

  Eric had also been a willing accomplice – raising no more than an eyebrow when Nick proposed his scheme. ‘Are you going to tell J.P.?’ Nick had asked then.

  The friendly blue eyes had turned impenetrable. ‘Is there a reason I shouldn’t?’

  ‘Everything else goes on as normal,’ Nick reassured him. The pace of construction on the hospital had slowed under the new ‘mornings only’ work policy, giving him a month or two’s grace to replenish J.P.’s funds.

  Eric looked away, rubbing the bristles on his face. Turning back to Nick, he jabbed a large, accusing finger. ‘You’re a fucking idiot, you know?’

  ‘I know,’ Nick said, relieved. ‘Thank you.’

  The permit to drill had been the biggest hurdle. How could they get a permit for what the governor himself had forbidden?

  In the end, help had come from an unexpected quarter – Mr Kamil’s friend Danjuma.

  It began with an unexpected invitation to dinner. Nick had arrived at Mr Kamil’s bungalow to the fading sounds of Imam Abdi’s muezzin call. Aisha Kamil’s house had carpets and cheap chandeliers where Margaret had only tiles and bare bulbs. She’d sat in purple silks, Juma and Akim in sullen attendance beside her, clicking her fingers to hurry Hanan who’d cooked the meal and was now dutifully spooning it into guests’ plates. The maid looked harassed as she passed Nick, her round face squeezed into the severe black ring of her abaya. Dr Ahmed was at the table’s other end; he murmured thanks as she reached him, before scooping up his rice in a slow, methodical forkful. The prayer hummed through walls lit gold by the evening, a song now so familiar – the Magrib, sung at the sun’s death.

  Nick had tried to persuade JoJo to come, too; but the boy had refused. His interest in coming to the Town with Nick had nosedived since their return from the capital. He claimed to have joined a school club that made him late most evenings, studying the Qu’ran with Akim. Dr Ahmed accepted this with his usual air of genial distraction, busier than ever with his drought-afflicted patients. Nick had been more perplexed. ‘If that’s what you want,’ he’d told JoJo with a smile, a clumsy attempt to recapture the old warmth. ‘Although in my opinion there’s more to learn from algebra than from hadiths.’ To his horror he sounded just like his own father.

  JoJo had responded with a blank, teenage shrug. It hurt Nick and troubled him; he sensed deception there – but while deceiving so many people himself, he had no courage to enquire.

  Dinner at Mr Kamil’s was soured yogurt and dried yellow dates, followed by one of Jalloh’s last goats flavoured with groundnuts. Tuesday brought his few remaining cans of Fanta. ‘Maybe next month I will have more,’ he said without conviction, pouring a trickle of blood-temperature liquid into each glass. Its sweetness revived Nick. The choking heat of the hospital site had threaded weakness through him, making the world feel shaky and unsure.

  Mr Kamil raised his Fanta glass to Nick. ‘I hear,’ he said, ‘that you plan to give us a Ramadan gift.’

  Confusion must have shown on Nick’s face, for Mr Kamil laughed. ‘Forgive me,’ he said. ‘A bad joke. I mean – this well you are donating to us. If it can be finished before Ramadan, then many of our problems will be solved.’

  Nick was only mildly surprised by Mr Kamil’s knowledge of what should still have been a secret. The only visible sign of the well so far was a pole marking the drill-site on the village outskirts, with
in sight of Binza’s shack. He had been waiting for Eric to produce the drilling permit before announcing the project formally to the village council.

  ‘Who told you?’ Nick kept his voice low. He was aware of Dr Ahmed’s attention, a forkful of stringy meat pausing on its way to his lips.

  ‘We heard you need a drilling permit.’ Mr Kamil eased himself back into his chair, his belly rising in his seat. ‘Most of these officials are the governor’s men, bought and paid for. Mr Eric, he is very right to be careful.’

  ‘Most,’ said Nick. ‘But not all?’

  Mr Kamil grinned. ‘Yes, not all. Some are already our friends. They are supporting Danjuma – and Danjuma wants to help you.’

  ‘That’s kind of him.’ He vaguely remembered the man at the council meeting – plump skin and smooth words.

  ‘I am serious, Nicholas,’ Mr Kamil said, his voice falling. ‘This is a good initiative and Danjuma supports it. I trust Danjuma, truly. So I hope you will soon have news.’

  Mr Kamil was as good as his word. Eric returned from the Town two days later with a permit and a rig. Speed was important, he said, and a certain amount of discretion. Nick laughed at that, despite his anxieties. ‘How can you be discreet with a massive drill?’

  Slowly, the great machine pounded its way through the earth. Children came after school to watch, wide-eyed and eager-fingered. Wonder drew them in as the ground split under the assault. They scrambled around the slurry pools’ treacherous walls to peer into their unreflective depths. The rig operator was often forced to leap from the cabin, shooing them away from danger.

  Adeya was often among them, her wounded hands hidden under the lumpy folds of her dress. During a quiet moment, Nick lifted her into the drill cabin, feeling the lightness of a body that took up so little of this land’s endless space. Her hands emerged from under her abaya, stiff with ugly ridges of scar tissue. She reached out towards the dials, her face transforming with an almost religious awe.

  ‘It is like an animal,’ she said to Nick. ‘It is alive like us.’

  Her dignified amazement touched his heart. ‘Would you like to learn how one of these works?’ he asked. ‘You could be an engineer when you grow up.’