Kiss the Dust

by Elizabeth Laird

  The school had been built over and added on to so many times that it was a rabbit warren of stairs, corridors and extensions. To get to the Science block Vicky and Tara had to go down a flight of stairs, through the Art department, past Home Economics and down the corridor that ran alongside the big new sports’ hall. They were just coming up to the sports’ hall as the P.E. teacher was setting up the equipment with the older boys. There were two sudden tremendous echoing bangs as he slammed the big metal fire doors shut. At the same time the horse, being dragged across the floor, made a deep rumbling noise, while the parallel bars were pulled out from the wall, rattling noisily in staccato bursts of sound.

  Tara stopped. Her head was suddenly in a turmoil of terror. Her heart pounded and she cowered instinctively against the wall. Vicky and Sarah walked on for a moment, then realized they’d left her behind and looked back.

  ‘You all right, Tara?’ said Vicky. Tara had gone white and she was trembling.

  ‘That noise,’ said Tara. ‘I thought . . .’

  Vicky laughed.

  ‘Oh, it’s always like that when Mr Fry’s in there,’ she said. She paused, obviously expecting Tara to say something.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said Tara, recovering with an effort. ‘I thought . . . it sounds like . . .’

  ‘Sounds like world war three,’ said Sarah. ‘Come on, we’ll be late, and Miss Hammond’ll look at me and she’ll turn round and say “Late again, Sarah. What am I going to do with you?”’

  Vicky was still looking at Tara.

  ‘What did you think?’ she said.

  Tara swallowed.

  ‘I got a fright,’ she said, feeling stupid. ‘It was like bombs.’

  ‘Yeah.’ Vicky wrinkled her nose in thought. ‘Have you been in a war then?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘What, really? With bombs and dead bodies and everything?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Wow.’

  ‘Hey, did you see War Games last night?’ said Sarah. ‘There was this really funny bit where this officer goes up to this prisoner and he says . . .’

  They had reached the door of the chemistry lab.

  ‘Shut up, Sarah,’ said Vicky, and opened the door.

  Tara’s first view of her new classmates was not encouraging. She had unconsciously expected something like her old school at home – neat rows of desks, quiet girls with their books open in front of them, a teacher, chalk in hand, presiding from a raised dais.

  Instead she saw seemingly random clusters of boys and girls sitting and standing round tables in different parts of the room. There was a cheerful buzz of chatter which died down a bit as they all looked towards the opening door.

  Tara looked round the room for the teacher. There didn’t seem to be one here. Vicky went across to the biggest group by the window. In the middle of it was a young woman in a pink sweatshirt who was fitting two bits of apparatus together. She seemed too young and casually dressed to be a teacher. She looked up as Vicky approached and saw Sarah, who was trying unsuccessfully to make herself invisible.

  ‘Ah, there you are, Sarah,’ she said. ‘Late again. What am I going to do with you?’

  Then she saw Tara and smiled. The smile made her look younger than ever.

  ‘Hello,’ she said. ‘You must be Tara. I’ll come and see to you in a minute when I’ve sorted this lot out. Sit over there, next to Sharifah, will you?’

  The Muslim name startled Tara. She turned round and saw a dark-eyed girl with a long plait of black hair who was absorbed in a book. Tara sat down beside her. Sharifah looked up and smiled fleetingly then went back to her book again. Tara was longing to ask her a question, but Sharifah looked as if she was really concentrating, and anyway, even though everyone else was talking she didn’t feel she should. She’d learned the habit of absolute silence in the classroom at home.

  ‘Excuse me,’ she said at last, plucking up her courage. ‘Are you Muslim?’

  Sharifah looked up.

  ‘Yes,’ she said shortly. It was clearly not something she wished to discuss. She was about to go back to her book when she caught Tara’s eye. She hadn’t looked at her properly before.

  ‘Where do you come from?’ she said.

  ‘Iraq,’ said Tara.

  Sharifah nodded understandingly, and Tara read an unspoken message of fellow feeling in her face. She felt a little less lonely.

  ‘Class, get out your exercise books, and draw up a graph to show the results of the experiment,’ called out Miss Hammond.

  Tara looked round anxiously. She had no idea what to do.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ said Sharifah, moving her chair closer to Tara’s. ‘I’ll get you a book from her, and you can borrow my spare ruler. I’ll show you what we’ve been doing.’

  27

  Tara put her hand in her pocket and pulled out some change. She counted it and sighed with relief. There’d be enough to pay for the bus fare home today, so she wouldn’t have to walk.

  It was funny, she thought, how your ideas about money changed when you didn’t have much. At home in Iraq there’d always been plenty, and she’d spent it for fun, on extra clothes, or sweets, or drinks. But now, when they had so little to live on, every coin was hoarded, and money wasn’t for having fun with any more. It was for protection, against hunger, and cold, and having to walk home for miles and miles instead of getting the bus.

  The bus came, and Tara pushed past the full seats to an empty one. She was quite tired this morning. She’d been out baby-sitting last night for a Lebanese family who lived nearby. Baby-sitting didn’t pay very much, but it was better than nothing. She’d wanted to get a job for ages. Vicky and Sarah both worked in a cafe two nights a week, but Baba wouldn’t hear of her doing anything like that, where she’d be meeting strangers all the time, and would have to come home late on her own.

  He’d looked upset when she’d said she wanted to work.

  ‘Why?’ he’d said. ‘Don’t you get enough food from your own home? Don’t I do enough for you?’

  Tara had felt terrible. Nearly all the money from the sale of the house in Sulaimaniya had been spent now, and the rest was being carefully hoarded for emergencies. Baba worked at a horrible job in a hospital laundry, where the hours were long and the pay was hardly enough to keep one person alive, never mind a family. And in the evenings he sat with a book, trying to study English, until his eyelids drooped and he fell asleep. Only one thing could ever bring back the energy in his voice and the sparkle in his eyes, and that was news of Ashti.

  News came very, very seldom, but it did come. Every now and then the phone would ring, and one of the big network of Kurds in London would have heard from a friend, who’d had a letter from his brother, who’d just got out of Iraq, and had seen Rostam and his nephew alive and well and carrying on the fight.

  There’d been terrible nail-biting moments when Baba’s big radio, which could pick up programmes in Arabic from all over the Middle East, reported a particularly horrible bombing in the Kurdish areas, or a major battle for a Kurdish town or village. Weeks would pass, and then another message would filter through, that so and so had seen somebody, who’d seen this person or that person, who’d heard that Ashti was all right.

  Only last week Rezgar had phoned from Paris to say that he’d heard that Ashti was planning to come out, that he had some contacts who would help him slip through the net that had caught his family and put them in the refugee camps. He’d try to come straight through to Teheran, and Uncle Daban would help to get him out to London.

  It had all sounded too good to be true, like just another example of Rezgar’s optimism. He’d raised the family’s hopes before, and Tara didn’t want to be disappointed again. She pushed the thought out of her mind and tried to think about next term.

  She was determined, desperate in fact, to do well in her GCSEs, to get decent marks. She wanted most of all to stay on at school and do A level, in Maths at least. If Baba got the well-paid job he was after in Mayfair, in th
e household of a Saudi Prince, he’d be able to afford to keep her at school. If not, she’d take the Careers teacher’s advice and try for a trainee position in a bank or an insurance company. She’d be earning money at once then, and still be learning, and she could always go to college in the evenings, and go on studying, even if it took twice as long. Somehow or other she’d go on with her education.

  ‘Lucky Hero,’ she thought. ‘It’ll be much easier for her.’

  She’d been amazed at how quickly Hero had learned to speak English. She sounded just like an English child, and now she’d started school she could even read a few words of English and write her name. Tara envied her sometimes, but not for long. It was depressing to think that she couldn’t remember Kurdistan at all, and would be more English than Kurdish when she grew up.

  The bus stopped, and Tara got off. She was looking forward to getting home to a good hot supper, to a chat with Daya, a few hours of homework and a bit of time in front of the TV before she went to bed.

  It was an ordinary evening at home, like any other, except that Rezgar phoned again.

  ‘What did he say?’ said Teriska Khan anxiously when Baba had out the phone down.

  ‘Not much,’ said Kak Soran. ‘You know what Rezgar’s like. He always exaggerates. He says there’s been a lot more fighting – as if we didn’t know that already. He’s trying to make me believe that Ashti’s already on his way to Teheran. He’s not sure, of course. Rezgar’s never sure. But he’s heard something from someone who met someone – you know what he’s like. I won’t believe a word of it till I hear from Daban or Ashti himself.’

  Teriska Khan’s face fell.

  ‘You were on the phone for so long,’ she said. ‘I did think, this time . . .’

  ‘Well, don’t think,’ said Kak Soran, speaking more roughly than usual. ‘Don’t hope for anything until Ashti walks in through that door.’

  Tara went to bed early. Her parents were restless and scratchy, and anyway she was tired. She didn’t hear the telephone ring, at two in the morning. She heard nothing until her shoulder was violently shaken.

  ‘Wh . . . what . . .’ she said, starting up.

  Teriska Khan was standing by her bed, holding back her long hair with one shaking hand.

  ‘Daban’s just phoned from Teheran!’ she said incoherently. ‘Ashti’s out, came out safe into Iran, and he’s got right through to Teheran. He’s got a small leg wound, but it’s not serious, Daban says. He’s putting him on a plane tomorrow! Ashti will be here tomorrow! He spoke to us himself! We heard his voice!’

  ‘Teriska!’ Tara heard Kak Soran call.

  ‘Coming!’ shouted Teriska Khan joyfully, and she ran out of the room.

  Tara lay still, her eyes open, looking up at the grey light that filtered through the thin curtains. There was no point in trying to go back to sleep.

  ‘Ashti,’ she said experimentally. She was thrilled, of course, and happy, and relieved, but she felt a bit nervous too. She hadn’t seen Ashti for three years. What would he be like now? And what would he think of his family, of the way they were living here in this little English house, and Dad doing a job he hated, and herself going to school with people like Sharifah and Vicky and Sarah, the sort of girls he’d never met before in his life, and Hero who spoke English better than any of them and even talked in Kurdish with an English accent?

  She tried to remember what Ashti looked like. It wasn’t easy. She tried to picture him going off to school in his uniform, then at home, talking to Rostam on the blue chairs in the sitting room, and dressed as a pesh murga in the mountains. Nothing seemed very clear any more.

  I’m forgetting home. I’m forgetting Kurdistan, she thought sleepily, shutting her eyes. Then, when she’d stopped trying, clear, dream-like pictures began to drift into her mind.

  She saw troupes of laughing girls running down a hillside, their rainbow dresses billowing out in the wind like giant flowers. She saw lean, turbaned shepherds leading their lambs through pastures spangled with flowers near a bubbling spring. She saw wrinkled old grandmothers with children all around them, sitting and laughing in a courtyard, listening to Baji Rezan whose restless hands shaped in the air the characters of her unfolding story. She saw a cluster of boys in crisp white shirts, reading a paper near a mosque wall.

  The dream was moving too fast now. She couldn’t control it any longer. The girls seemed to rise in the air and were blown away on the wind. The sheep and the shepherds scattered as an explosion ripped into the hillside. The old women choked and gasped for breath as a cloud of poisonous gas engulfed them. The boys raised their arms together as the piece of white paper fluttered to the ground. They dropped to their knees, and kissed the dust, the dust of Kurdistan, as a stain of blood spread out from under them, and a crow took off from a tree and flapped down to hover above them.

  Then, as Tara tossed and turned in her sleep, a figure marched out of a pair of giant gates that barred the way to the mountains. Ashti, limping a little, came and stood with his family, and the Kurdistan of Tara’s dream rolled itself up like a blanket and disappeared.

  ‘We’re Kurdistan, you and me, and Baba and Daya and Hero,’ said Ashti. ‘Where we are, it is. Kurdistan is its people and they can’t take it away from us, even if they lock us out of our homeland and throw away the key.’

  About the Author

  Elizabeth Laird is the multi-award-winning author of several much-loved children’s books, including The Garbage King, Red Sky in the Morning, The Prince Who Walked with Lions and The Fastest Boy in the World. She has been shortlisted for the prestigious CILIP Carnegie Medal six times. Having lived all over the world, Elizabeth lives in Britain now, but still likes to travel as much as she can.

  Books by Elizabeth Laird published by Macmillan Children’s Books

  Welcome to Nowhere

  Dindy and the Elephant

  The Fastest Boy in the World

  The Prince Who Walked with Lions

  The Witching Hour

  Lost Riders

  Crusade

  Oranges in No Man’s Land

  Paradise End

  Secrets of the Fearless

  A Little Piece of Ground

  The Garbage King

  Jake’s Tower

  Red Sky in the Morning

  Kiss the Dust

  First published in Great Britain 1991 by William Heinemann Limited

  Published 2007 by Macmillan Children’s Books

  This edition published 2017 by Macmillan Children’s Books

  This electronic edition published 2017 by Macmillan Children’s Books

  an imprint of Pan Macmillan

  20 New Wharf Road, London N1 9RR

  Associated companies throughout the world

  www.panmacmillan.com

  ISBN 978-0-230-73803-4

  Copyright © Elizabeth Laird 1991, 2007

  Introduction copyright © Elizabeth Laird 2017

  Cover images © Shutterstock

  The right of Elizabeth Laird to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  You may not copy, store, distribute, transmit, reproduce or otherwise make available this publication (or any part of it) in any form, or by any means (electronic, digital, optical, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  Typeset by Intype Libra Limited

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