by Claire Hajaj
‘But you will take Mama when you go.’
Nick looked up to meet the boy’s eyes. ‘I want to take all of you, JoJo.’
For the first time Nick saw the cold adult mask shift, a glimpse of painful confusion beneath. The boy looked down, uneasy. ‘What if I want to stay here?’
‘I can’t stay here.’ The words felt unreal even as Nick voiced them. ‘I committed a crime. The money I was supposed to spend building the hospital – I used it to build the well instead.’
JoJo kept his arms folded in front of him. Nick noticed the way his fingers locked onto his own flesh. His eyes were in shadow.
‘Where did you get this money?’
‘I stole it.’ Nick pointed to the safe. ‘From there. Not all – there’s a little left. Two thousand maybe.’ He rubbed his forehead against the terrible itch burrowing inside.
‘You stole like Robin Hood?’ JoJo’s voice was still tremulous with childhood – but Nick heard something deeper building beneath.
Nick laughed. His throat burned, sinews straining in his neck. ‘Just like Robin Hood.’
‘So it was good stealing, then?’
‘I thought so.’ The question overwhelmed him with sadness. ‘I thought I was putting something right. For all of us.’ He dipped his head under the weight of memories – sins of action and inaction linked together, heavy as a chain around his neck.
‘Only thieves steal.’ JoJo’s voice was a challenge. ‘Maybe they will put you in prison.’
‘Oh, JoJo.’ Nick rubbed his temples, exhausted by explanations. ‘Maybe some things in life are more important than laws.’
‘So you are in trouble?’
‘Yes. A lot, unless I can pay it back.’
‘Are you afraid?’
Nick struggled for an answer. Am I afraid? He lived inside a spinning cyclone of hopes and fears, all whirling past him too fast to count.
‘I’m afraid you won’t forgive me,’ he said, at last. ‘Maybe I deserve that. But only you can decide.’
‘Mama says she will not go with you.’ The boy’s eyes did not waver.
Nick swallowed. ‘We can’t decide anything now, JoJo. Not yet. When this is over, I’ll talk to you and your father. I’ll answer any questions you want. But please – wait.’
JoJo looked on in silence. Then he released his arms, and began to turn around.
‘Nagodeallah does not eat tonight,’ he said over his shoulder. ‘She cries all the time. Baba, he says we must stay away from each other. In case she is sick.’
Then he was gone from the doorway, leaving only the empty sky.
Nagode cried through the night. Her sobs reached Nick’s window, sharp slivers shredding his sleep. Before dawn her cries lost their rhythm, becoming ragged and faint.
Nick opened his door into the milky air. His chills were back, frightening and powerful. The world was hot, but felt icy cold. His stomach cramped as he entered Dr Ahmed’s house. The slick cool of the door handle burned and abraded his skin. Nothing was as it should be. I’m dehydrated, he told himself, clutching at drifting straws of reason. But it’s not cholera. Cholera has no fever.
A candle still burned in the living room. Nick steadied himself on the grandfather clock as he passed. The wood felt soft under his hand, ripples of grain blurring like moth’s wings. They seemed to dissolve under his touch, his fingers slipping through to the cogs and wheels beneath. He imagined the faraway London workshop where the clock was made – a delicate system of right angles and circles and symmetry conjured out of a simple tree trunk. The thought made him laugh aloud. And, now, here you are, thousands of miles from home. And you don’t even tick.
Dr Ahmed stood in his dim bedroom doorway. He turned at Nick’s approach, face bleak.
‘She does not do well.’ The reek of diarrhoea drifted up the hallway, in slow pulses of fetid air. ‘She’s making a lot of water.’
Nick felt a selfish dread. He looked into the little room. Margaret lay next to her daughter, one hand resting on Nagode’s stomach, another on the pulse at her wrist. Candlelight crept over the bed sheets. Nagode’s eyes were half open, following little flickers on the wall. Her face was beaded with sweat, an orb of dark gold melting slowly into the sheets.
Cholera sucks the body dry, he remembered. The baby’s living reservoirs – her skin, her lips, her small hands – were being drained to emptiness.
Then Margaret moved her hand from Nagode’s – and Nick saw them: the red beads tied onto the child’s tiny wrist. The sight flooded him with unreasoning terror.
‘I’m sorry.’ He could not stay there one minute longer – the air was full of horror. ‘Let me know what I can do.’ Dr Ahmed’s lips turned up in a ghost of a smile as Nick bolted towards the front door.
Outside the sun had risen. Pale but burning, it turned the world ash white.
Nick walked down the dead front garden and through the gate. The wind was rising with the heat, blasting dust from all directions. Miss Amina’s broken chair still lay tilted on her porch. One leg rolled backwards and forwards, creaking with the random gusts. No goats brayed; even the dogs were silent.
Adeya and Hanan’s house was shuttered. Their fields looked savage, stumps of millet poking up like amputated fingers. She gave them all names. But that was another world, as remote as anything he’d left behind in England.
The well was hidden behind a wall of trucks. Around it, the governor’s soldiers were eating breakfast. Nick saw hands passing bread around, and flasks. One man shared a cigarette with his comrade. Tendrils of smoke leached out between the folds of his checkered scarf, as if the skin inside was steaming.
The itch in Nick’s brain was close to unbearable. Aren’t these people human? He wondered what would happen if he offered to take them to the little room in the back of Dr Ahmed’s house and showed them the child vanishing into the bed sheets. Would they think of their own children, their little brothers and sisters? What would they feel?
‘Don’t go.’
Nick looked around, shocked. The white boy was standing next to him, his shirt open. To Nick’s feverish eyes he seemed constructed of parched earth and heat – the elements in all their fury.
The boy nodded his head towards the soldiers.
‘They will not help you.’
Nick opened his mouth to argue. But weariness pressed into him. The pink scars on the boy’s skin were electric ribbons, the hilt of his knife a dark snake writhing from his belt.
‘The girl is dying,’ the boy said. Mister. His name is Mister. ‘JoJo’s sister. He told me. The mother, she weeps.’
Nick could not answer. His chest was tight, his neck muscles like iron bands. His eyes were drawn to the horizon, already erased by the heat haze.
‘And more are sick in the village.’ Mister laughed. The sound rose through the wind’s hiss, stirring Nick to rage. That laugh was the world laughing back at him, ridiculing all his hopes and efforts.
‘What the fuck are you laughing at?’ he shouted, his voice hoarse. ‘What do you want?’ There were sores in his mouth, the iron taste of blood. He wanted to hit this ghost boy, to exorcise him from his thoughts. His fists clenched and unclenched; a small presence in the back of his mind, perhaps his father’s, shook its head in disgust.
Mister was unfazed. ‘I want nothing. But what about you?’ He pointed to the men around the well. ‘Do you want them to leave? To have the water and fuel and medicines again?’
Now it was Nick’s turn to laugh. ‘Right. You’re the magician. You tell me how to make that happen.’
Mister put his head on one side. Then he reached behind his back and brought out a small bottle of Johnnie Walker Red Label. ‘Abracadabra! Isn’t that what the magicians say?’
Nick took the bottle almost by instinct. It glowed rich amber in the light. ‘Where does this come from?’
‘From Tuesday’s place. I know his hidden things.’
‘You stole it.’ Nick tried to hand the bottle back, but Mister put his
arms up, backing away.
‘Yes, boss.’ He smiled, a slow, red smile. ‘We are both thieves, you and I.’
The chills redoubled, pushing up spikes of fear. ‘JoJo told you.’
Mister bowed, pink scalp showing under the white curls. ‘Sir Robin Hood,’ he said.
‘Don’t you dare mock me.’
‘I do not mock you,’ Mister replied. ‘I respect you. You are brave, sure. But are you brave enough?’
‘Brave enough for what?’
Mister turned his head a few degrees. The men around the well had finished their morning meal and were stretching their legs in the sun. ‘To make them leave.’
Nick squinted into the killing light, trying to catch sight of the well. ‘How can I make them leave?’
‘They are loyal to one man, while he pays them. If that man is no more, they will turn to another who can pay. Someone who loves us. You know him, I think.’
A slow pulse of dread pushed through Nick’s chest. He looked down at Mister, not daring to understand him. ‘You mean, without the governor, these become Danjuma’s men?’
‘Between one day and the next.’
‘So why doesn’t Danjuma just pay them himself?’
‘They took him, boss.’ Mister smiled. ‘The governor’s soldiers keep him. But these soldiers – they wait for word from us.’
Small shadows whirred between them – blowflies, searching for carrion. Nick felt one settle on his cheek; he tried to brush it away, with an arm heavy as lead. ‘What has this to do with me?’
Mister shrugged. ‘Only a little money, for some of these men,’ he said. ‘And I can make the governor go.’
‘Go?’ The light was blinding, tangled up with the flies and the buzzing of the wind. ‘Go where?’
Mister’s voice was soft. ‘Go.’ His hand swept across his throat and carried on upwards, towards the white sky.
Nick felt his gaze dragged along with it until the light scorched his retina. Go. He’d walked here with Margaret and JoJo once, gathering pebbles to decorate their castle. JoJo had raced ahead in exhilaration, Margaret’s scarf a stream of colour flooding the sky.
Now he turned away from Mister, towards the house, towards the dark little room and its smell of decay. Behind him, Mister stood wreathed in light and smiles, a young Dionysus.
The house seemed to retreat before him as Nick neared it. The air was thick, as in dreams of paralysis. The whisky bottle swayed in his hand like a pendulum. His feet dragged as he walked, each step heavy with the effort not to look back.
The house was all quiet and stillness. Margaret’s bedroom door stood open; he stepped through. She lay on her back beside Nagode, hands clasped between them – and his heart nearly stopped. Too late, a cruel voice whispered, until he saw the slow rise of their chests.
At rest they were so similar. He could see Margaret’s strong jawline under Nagode’s cheeks, waiting for life to sculpt it out of softness.
Then Margaret opened her eyes. She turned to her daughter without a word, checking her pulse.
‘I was praying,’ she said. Her voice was clear, normal – as if she’d said, I was cooking.
Nick nodded, rubbing his chest. For the first time in many months, he was lost for words with her. I held you in my arms and watched your face loosen, he wanted to say. We talked about your family, about Wordsworth and Shakespeare. We dreamed of where we would go together, and what we would do. I could smell you on my skin at the office and taste you in my sleep.
But now there was this terrible sense of drifting apart, of a world coming unmoored. He buried his face in her neck, breathing her bitter, salty smell; a distant part of him was conscious of Nagode’s wet sheets. And yet Margaret’s arms were around him and he felt their breath synchronising, the reassuring immediacy of touch – and for a moment he was secure.
But then her arms loosed. She pushed him back and turned away, towards her daughter. Nick saw her fingers brush Bako’s bracelet, bright on Nagode’s wrist.
‘I’m not a fool, in this at least,’ she said. ‘It cannot make her live. But if she goes . . .’ She swallowed, steadying herself to calmness. ‘If she goes, perhaps it will guide them to each other.’
Nick laid his hand over hers. ‘This is not your fault, Margaret. God is not punishing you. Or us.’
She turned to him, studying him in the candlelight. Her pupils were huge, but intently focused – as if he were a book in a foreign language. ‘We reap what we sow.’
Nick clenched her hand, feeling the grind of bones. ‘We didn’t sow this. The governor did.’
She shook her head, pulling her hand away.
‘None of you can see the truth,’ she whispered. ‘If JoJo asks why it rains, my husband will tell him about the clouds. You will tell him about the oceans and winds. But who gave us water in the first place and made us need it so much?’ She was crying now, tears making luminous traces on her cheeks.
He leaned in towards her, but she pushed him away. ‘No, Nicholas,’ she said. ‘We had a season. But it is over.’
Her words dropped onto him like stones, crushing some deep, sustaining hope. ‘Nagode won’t die.’ The words felt false and desperate; his mind raced, grasping at straws. ‘And this is even more reason to come with me. To keep her and JoJo safe.’
‘If she dies, there will be two children under my garden,’ said Margaret. ‘I will eat and drink them every morning, and I will know my penance is done.’
‘No.’ Nick pushed himself off the bed, fury accelerating from a dark, hidden place within. ‘You think some God would be happy to see you suffering here for the rest of your life? You think Nagode would want that? It’s bullshit and you know it.’
Footsteps cut into his consciousness – Dr Ahmed coming up the corridor.
‘Is there trouble?’ The old man put his head around the door. Nick could not answer; fever still beat in his brain, raw and wounded. He knew how it must look: her tears and his in the charged air. But he was past caring. His mind reeled; he almost longed for discovery.
But then Nagode stirred, a soft cry escaping her blistered lips. Sanity returned, the raking touch of remorse. The baby lay unnaturally flat, as if starting to release her hold on her body. He had a sudden image of her stretched pale on a winding sheet in the mosque’s back room, Margaret slowly untying the beads from another child’s wrist.
He turned to the door. ‘I’m going to speak to the governor,’ he told them. ‘I need to get to the checkpoint by afternoon prayers.’
Dr Ahmed stood in silence for a moment, considering. Then he said, ‘Take my car. It has some fuel still. Yours is empty.’
Thank you. Nick opened his mouth but the words shrivelled in his throat. Dr Ahmed’s eyes were calm voids.
The car keys were on a shelf behind the grandfather clock. As Nick’s hands closed on them, he smelled the fresh polish. A buffing cloth lay there, brown with old wax.
The clock gleamed in the room’s half-light. Its face was bone white, solemn. It filled Nick’s vision, the circle with its eternal numeric procession restoring a memory of calm and order to the chaos of his feelings.
Please. The word swelled from him, an impulsive prayer. Let Nagode live. Bring back Adeya’s crops and Dr Ahmed’s white birds. Let JoJo grow up safe and happy. Let him learn to love someone, so he can understand and forgive me. Set Margaret free. Please.
Silence flowed from the clock in reply. It spread over him and through the room, drowning out the howl of the wind battering against the walls.
The white wind blew through the village, a relentless hiss against Dr Ahmed’s car. The market stalls were empty, bags of trash tumbling across the street.
The closest checkpoint was a mile away. Nick felt strength return to him as the car bumped and groaned towards it. The chills had faded, his senses calmed.
He slowed as two soldiers walked into the road to wave him down. Across the checkpoint he saw the white shape of Eric’s Jeep, its engine humming.
A te
enager in fatigues pulled open Nick’s door, indicating he should get out. The muzzle of a rifle slapped against his thigh as he stood. ‘Thank you.’ Nick’s voice rang clear through the flat space. The soldier pointed to the barrier where Eric waited and jerked his head.
Eric didn’t look at him as Nick swung into the passenger seat. He put the car into gear, swinging back north. They travelled in the cloudy wake of a pickup truck carrying armed men. Another followed close behind. ‘Escorts,’ said Eric. ‘Lucky us.’
The highway was empty, closed at both ends. ‘He took no chances,’ Eric explained. ‘If you want to go south from the Town, you have to drive way out east first. Another whole fucking day on the road.’
‘I didn’t expect it to come to this,’ Nick told him.
He looked through the windscreen at the soldiers just feet away. One returned his glance, hunched over, head jerking to the highway’s rhythm. Silence filled the car.
At last the convoy crossed the Town’s borders. The highway slowed and swelled into shops, into roadside flowerbeds and people. Life goes on. Nick leaned his forehead against the window, eyes trailing people as they went about their business – laughing, reading newspapers, buying shoes. He wondered if they would care if he showed them a picture of Tuesday’s son lying lifeless on Dr Ahmed’s table, or Nagode dying quietly in her stinking bedroom just a short drive away.
Something vicious began to bubble inside Nick, stirring memories long-sealed. He was back in his mother’s kitchen, roses climbing outside the window, his father home early from work to eat tea with them, asking Madi whether things were improving at school, probing beyond the boy’s hesitancy, asking whether he was glad he’d come to England despite everything.
‘We’re not always the kindest people,’ Nick’s father had said. ‘Not always welcoming to strangers. My own lot got their share, when I was a boy. Jews are foreigners everywhere. Not that we were perfect. There were brutes inside our community and brutes outside. It was hard to choose between them sometimes.’
