The Good Sister

by Chris Morgan Jones

  Even in September, the sun was strong and relentless; he could feel it burning his neck and arms. By the castle he bought a baseball cap and suncream, stopped and drank a coffee, and for the tenth time since arriving saw a face he was sure he had seen before. Yesterday it had been the young man with the mirrored sunglasses; today it was the woman with the navy headscarf and a way of turning away, always naturally, just as he was almost certain. Or they could be ten different men and women, the light was so bright, the crowds so quick to pass, and his mind so shot. Probably he was just seeing what he thought he ought to see. But who would come for him? He was an irrelevance, a speck. Unless the police in London had notified their counterparts in Turkey – unless they thought he was on his way to join Sofia – unless they were following him in the hope of finding her.

  He should stop. Leave it to the men who did this work. The fighters, the strong, the ones who knew what they wanted and took it. This was no job for a man like him.

  Abraham retreated to the Ambassador Hotel, where three men were lounging on the oversized leather chairs in the lobby. One Abraham’s age, the other two younger, chests and arms straining against their T-shirts, the phones they were tapping at tiny in their hands. Their faces told him they had seen and done things that no man should see or do.

  He had noticed men like them all over town; they had a way of fixing you briefly with their eyes, as if making some instant calculation of your potential threat, and these three did this now – let their gaze sit on him with that lazy intentness, then looked away, satisfied that he was nobody.

  The gaunt receptionist was on duty. Abraham nodded at him as he walked to the lifts, received a blank stare in response, and as the doors closed saw him pick up the phone. It meant nothing. Receptionists made all sorts of calls.

  Room 312 was long and thin, with a window that overlooked the main street, lively with cars and shouting and music coming from a cafe a hundred yards away. The noise came in through thin gauze curtains that had yellowed with age. The bed, a largeish single billed as a double, was in the middle of the long wall and perpendicular to it, so that it cut the room in two and forced Abraham to turn sideways and press himself against the other wall to walk from one half to the other. From somewhere inside the hotel he heard a man’s voice shouting, then another in response. They could be fighters. They could be perfectly normal people who just happened to be yelling at each other in the heat of the day.

  The safety chain on the door was broken. He could jam the wooden chair under the handle, but anyone who really wanted to get in would get in – and besides, there was no other way out, short of tying the curtains together and abseiling down from the fourth floor.

  So few routes were open to him. What would be would be.

  He took a fresh T-shirt and shorts to sleep in, his toothbrush and toothpaste, put the bag in the tilting flat-pack wardrobe and went to wash in the tiny bathroom. The water ran brown for thirty seconds when he turned on the tap.

  The mattress was small but sagged from every corner as he lay on it, and he struggled to find a comfortable position, folding the single pillow behind his head, bringing his knees up and resting his computer on his thighs. He could sleep right there – take a pill and it would all go away – but he fought it and, willing himself to look, set off into his daughter’s new world.

  For hours, sickened and compelled, Abraham wandered this way and that, no longer hearing the noises from the street or the voices shouting from floor to floor. Chatrooms, videos, Facebook, Twitter. It was like a great city where everyone shouted their grievances endlessly without restraint. A free market whose currency was anger, offence and horror, and where the worst examples won. There was no looking away.

  So now she was Umm Azwar. An ugly, warlike name to his ear, and probably to hers. The first search brought up her Twitter page and there she was: a photograph of a young woman taken in sharp profile, the tip of her nose just showing beyond her hijab, and below it a tagline, a sort of motto.

  No rest until the khilafa is built on earth.

  He scrolled down. Quotations from the Koran, in English and Arabic, posted and retweeted by her. Links to stories about the war, about bombings, about the viciousness of Assad and his soldiers and his spies. In amongst them, retweets of sickly messages of peace and brotherhood over stock photographs of flowers and mountains and horses.

  Her own messages were plain and direct, and effective. It was like listening to her in the different modes he knew so well: fierce, pensive, hectoring. Sentimental. In many her anger was clear.

  Assad and his evil will not survive the edge of our sword.

  If we let him the kafir will wage war against the Ummah until no Muslim is left standing.

  Filthy coward US dogs kill our brothers and sisters from the safety of their shores.

  Attached to this was a photograph of a building crumbled into bits, its dust covering bodies in the foreground. Drone strike, Peshawar, said the caption, and gave the date. From the same incident she had posted a picture of a dead child, its head hanging limply from the arms of its mother. This had no caption but the one Sofia had given it, in Arabic and English: Kafir Genocide.

  Every fourth message contained an image he broadly recognized: soldiers waving black flags, SUVs patrolling tired cities, children dressed in black being taught by women covered head to toe in it, men thrown from buildings and flailing in mid-air, balaclavaed fighters holding up knives that looked as if they’d cut a bar of steel clean through. Vast stacks of cash being counted and oil refineries ringed with guards (We are not only rich in spirit!). Here was a blank-faced man in an orange jumpsuit kneeling, beside him some faceless black demon pressing the knife into his throat; but here too was the desecrated body toppled onto the sand, the head held up high towards the sun. These were the photographs that no one showed. Bodies smashed on the tarmac where they fell. Bodies crucified in the midst of crowds. Backs whipped, hands severed, heads stoned.

  Abraham scrolled, looked, shut his eyes in sadness and disgust, moved on. But the head had imprinted itself on his mind, and was there whenever he tried to turn away. Had she gazed at it? His daughter, whose innocence had been the most beautiful thing in the world, had gazed on this and run towards it with her arms out wide.

  And here was her endorsement: Shia scum laughs for the last time.

  Abraham imagined her writing the words and felt nausea starting in his stomach; wondering at the mystery that had brought her to this point, knowing her no better than a patient who had wandered in from the street.

  What these men had done to her. They knew the receptors in the soul and had applied the right amount of poison unerringly to each.

  4

  The girls in my school, I’d look at them and wonder why any of them bothered. Why get up in the morning? For a good job? A good job. A teacher shovelling sand into empty minds or a doctor stretching out lives that mean nothing till they’re so thin you can see right through them. And the question in my head the whole time was, for what? The gift you’ve been given, this gift of life, why sacrifice it to these false idols? For personal satisfaction. That’s a joke. My satisfaction doesn’t amount to a single atom in the whole universe. It’s like saying you should pray to get what you want, it’s not why we’re here. A bird doesn’t fly for its own pleasure.

  So many souls in the world and so little to fill them, like prayers that are never said or food left out to rot.

  While their souls starved, I watched those London girls – even the good ones, the ones who had been my friends – I watched them stuff every crack in their bodies full, like they were crazed with hunger and thirst. They were ill and they didn’t even know it, I felt so sorry for them. Smoke in their lungs, music in their ears, gossip clogging their minds every second of the day, skin perfumed and shiny with fake tan, even the food they ate was as far from God’s intentions as their blasphemies were from the holy purity of the Qur’an. Floating in pollution, they absorbed it through every pore.

>   It wasn’t their fault, they were blind to other possibilities. Blinded by a system that doesn’t want them to see. I don’t even mention what else they brought inside themselves, the depraved stories they told, the pride they took in it. Life for them was seventy years of flesh and appetite and abuse of their God-given soul.

  That world held nothing for me, and I’m not alone in that.

  Very far from alone.

  5

  When I finally get signal, I set myself up online again. Before I left on my journey I deleted everything for security reasons, just like Nadia told me – she was very clear about that – but also because I wanted to leave behind every piece of what I was before.

  So. New Twitter, as Umm Azwar this time. Finally under my true name. I follow a bunch of people and send a couple of tweets and it feels good to be connected with the community again. One day soon I guess I will meet Nadia. She was so wise, so supportive. So clear in all her instructions – everything she said would happen happened. There was faith in me coming here but really, she made it so easy. I haven’t heard from her, I guess she’s super busy with other sisters making the journey so I send her a message and leave it at that. Someone replies to one of my tweets straight away. He’s a brother from Germany. I recognize his name.

  Congratulations! Mahbrouk! You the English sister, my dear?

  That freaks me out a bit. How did he know? There are so many false agents out there, cowards who dare not show their faces and try to trap us with their lies. Also, ‘my dear’? ‘My dear’ is odd.

  — Thank you. I am a citizen of the khilafa, my friend.

  I look over his account. I don’t think he can be a spy – he’s been around too long. He comes back quickly.

  If it’s you you’re an example to us all. Good luck!

  I thank him, and google my name – my old name. It’s everywhere. Such a weird feeling, like I’ve travelled back in time and can see my former self. ‘English Schoolgirl in Syria.’ ‘“Genius” Student Joins ISIS.’ There must be fifty articles. There’s a picture of my house, and an old picture of me from Facebook. I don’t know how they got it because I deleted that account.

  How terrified these people are. One seventeen-year-old girl leaves their country and I end up on every front page! Scared out of their minds, and I know why. Because I’m right. Because their decaying, stinking society cannot survive on corruption and money-lust, blind to everything that is good and true. It will rot to nothing and the dogs will eat the rest. Before I left I went into town to buy some stuff I needed and from the bus I watched Oxford Street go by with my mouth hanging open at the emptiness of it all. Literally hanging open. Shop cafe shop McDonald’s shop. Shoppers with shopping bags, huge pictures of nearly naked women advertising shops. Is that it? Is that all you dream of? The West is a house with no foundation and no walls, a paper house, it will blow away or it will burn.

  Why fear us? We are a hundred thousand in the khilafa, and they are billions.

  Because every tree in the forest is dying except for ours. We are the power that will hasten their end. And they know.

  Scrolling through these pages I see my father’s name. It seems so foreign to me, like it’s written in a language I no longer understand. For the first time I imagine him finding me gone, and wonder what he’ll tell my mother, if he tells her anything.

  When the shock is past he’ll come to understand that our family died a long time ago, and that without him, and the part he played, I wouldn’t be here. Out of pain will come good. That is how history is made.

  6

  Abraham’s job, mostly, was to avoid mistakes. Sometimes he might do some good, offer useful advice, make someone better a little quicker, but he was paid to not screw up. Give the right number of the right pills to the right patient under the right label. Don’t make anybody worse. Say no to the scammers and the addicts and the ones who routinely try it on. Above all, don’t poison anybody, and protect the company. How did they put it, in their emails and their training videos? Control the risk. But risk wasn’t something you could control. Risk was something that sat patiently waiting for the right moment to sink its teeth into you. And it wasn’t interested in the company, it was interested in him.

  They had come at lunchtime, after the Monday methadone rush and the deliveries and the careful stocktaking of the controlled substances, with a small crowd of shoppers gawping and his colleague Amanda looking on as if she was sorry to say she’d been expecting that moment for some time. Abraham had been trying to tell a jumpy young man with one heavily bloodshot eye that he couldn’t sell him four bottles of cough medicine, no matter how ill his family was, when he caught sight of the uniform walking across the supermarket floor towards him. After a moment’s fear that they had come for him, he had known without doubt what it meant. He had been on the verge of calling them himself.

  At the station, the plain clothes had done most of the talking. Sofia was on her way to Syria; last seen at a bus station in Istanbul, flew through Budapest to cover her tracks, but definitely her, no question. That was yesterday, Sunday, and for all they knew she’d crossed the border by now – either that or she was holed up somewhere close to it waiting for the right time. The newest recruit, a coup, someone that young, that bright, the papers would be all over it.

  The words were black stones that he couldn’t get down. His throat closed.

  What had they done to stop her? Abraham wanted to know. These powerful men, they must have been able to stop her.

  The officer laughed. She wasn’t high-risk. They weren’t mind readers. His breath smelled of coffee and a diet of bread and meat.

  Had Abraham known she was going? Had he heard her use the name Umm Azwar? That was her ISIS name, the one she went by online. Was he sure he had no sympathy with the cause? With all those brave brothers fighting the good fight?

  ‘I’m a Christian, a Copt. My daughter converted and I had nothing to do with it.’

  ‘When did she convert?’

  ‘Three years ago.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘She had good reasons, reasons of faith.’

  The questions came like darts. Which mosque? Which imam? How often did she go? Who were her friends?

  Where was her mother?

  Her mother wasn’t well. She lived with Sofia’s grandmother, mostly, and didn’t take calls from anyone. Hadn’t done for a long time.

  They were preoccupied with money. If he hadn’t funded her trip who had?

  He had no idea. Perhaps that was something they could investigate. Maybe it had been sent to her, he had read they did that, these people.

  So he did have his fears then, of the road she might be heading down?

  This didn’t come out of the blue. He had been worried in the same way that a parent might worry about drugs, or pregnancy, or any of the thousand pits a daughter might fall into. Sofia wasn’t one to do anything by halves but she was still a child, foolish, susceptible. Didn’t policemen fear for their children?

  ‘Yesterday she was a child, Mr Mounir. Now she’s a terrorist.’

  Just how far off the track had he wandered? To be tricked by his own daughter, who lived in the next room. The blindness of it, and the foolishness, not to know his own flesh and blood. How easy to slip out unseen, with a father who never looked too hard for fear of driving her further away.

  He had known none of it, and all of it. Like the patients who went to their doctor too late to address the symptoms they had been ignoring for years.

  Abraham had walked the three miles home from the police station, head roaring so loud that no single thought settled. She’d left forever. She’d come straight back when the reality bit. She’d be dead within weeks. He saw the crowd of journalists and cameramen who clamoured at him outside his flat but they didn’t register; he might have been watching himself on the news along with everyone else.

  So hard, to be a father. The thousand mistakes to be made, and that thin line through them growing thinner by the da
y, and the worst of it how late you woke up: stray for years, wander miles off course – and no one would tell you, you had no idea, you thought the line was still under your feet.

  Any word from her, they had told him, you call us immediately. And don’t go anywhere. He had almost laughed at that. Where would he go?

  From the table by his bed he took the paracetamol bottle that held the oxycodone. Instant release, just two for now. A glass of water from the night before sat ready by his lamp, and for a moment he contemplated the pills nestled together in his palm and imagined the job they would quietly do, and the pain slipping away as surely as a headache.

  But the pills wouldn’t resolve anything; they simply froze the pain in time. Enough foolishness for today. He opened the bottle and slipped them back inside.

  If the place had been searched it barely showed. The books still lay in piles, glasses lined up unwashed by his chair, on his desk his notebook displayed the latest neat scribblings towards the book he would never write. In the kitchen, dirty plates and mugs sat by the sink.

  They had been in her room. The bed had been stripped and the linen bundled in a heap on the floor. Her neatly ordered books had been slotted back chaotically onto the shelves. They wouldn’t have found much. A Koran, if she hadn’t taken it, other devotional texts, school clothes pressed and ready, polished school shoes side by side, a desk, a chair, a computer that they would have taken if she hadn’t already, all encased in white walls that would have told them as much as they had told Abraham in the last two years. Sofia might have revealed herself to her God in here, but not to anyone else.