Out of It Read online

  Abu Omar was not saying anything. He was feeling for the sunspots and moon craters on the back of his head. Rashid silently urged him on, Come on, man, stand up to her, you tell her, but Abu Omar’s fingers continued to trace around the indentations on his head as though they were pads upon which he could transmit a message for outside intervention. With the edge of a sandal he tried to rub the kicked-up dust into the tiles that they stood on. He was saying something now, something worthless, no doubt. It would be along the lines of: ‘You know I care for the boy as if he was my own, but how can I give up the apartment of my father?’ To which she would reply, ‘So he can wheel himself out, sit here, take his morning coffee in the sun; for shame, just a little fresh air for the boy…’ (He’s nearly forty, thought Rashid, he’s no boy.) ‘…rotting up there, writing his books.’ Abu Omar raised his head and Rashid willed for a retort – Come on, this time you tell her. Go on! Where’s the fight in you? – but the man’s grandson ran out to hug at his grandfather’s waist and have his hair pulled at by the man’s feeble hand. All Abu Omar could then do before he slunk off inside was to tenuously smile as though he had dribbled involuntarily.

  Rashid’s mother continued to stand in their neighbour’s garden, her hands on her waist. Then she leant down and ran her fingers through the soil, weighing it carefully, as though touching the fabric of a dress she knew she would never be able to afford.

  Rashid looked up at the smoke from the hospital generators, so black and so much of it, like an oil field ablaze. Endless.

  ‘He bought a new car,’ Sabri said.

  Sabri was going bald; this was probably not a new thing but Rashid had not registered it before. If he had been asked to physically describe his brother, he would have said that he had large sideburns and hair like someone on the cover of a Motown album. But that was the old Sabri; the Sabri he was now looking at was a middle manager character with (specially ordered) frameless glasses halfway down his nose and a broad dome of a head that was becoming increasingly visible. The middle manager was making some loaded statement about a car.

  ‘He bought a new car,’ Sabri repeated.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Abu Omar.’

  ‘I know. Red. I was watching him cleaning it last night.’

  ‘You don’t find that strange? The man has no job, has been complaining about poverty for twenty years, the roads around his house have been bulldozed, but he chooses to buy a car. You don’t find that somewhat bizarre?’ Sabri asked.

  ‘No, not really,’ Rashid shrugged. Give it a rest. Stop spying on the neighbours. Stop obsessing about minutiae. You can’t let yourself become a middle-aged fart, whether you have legs or not. Who cares anyway? It’s irrelevant. London! Lisa! London! Lisa! Lisa! Lisa!

  Sabri was watching him. Whatever it was, Rashid wasn’t getting it.

  ‘With a master’s you should be able to get a teaching post when you get back, pass on what you’ve learnt,’ Sabri continued.

  ‘And then I can fulfil my national duty?’ Rashid scratched at his neck. His T-shirt sleeve fell open over his armpit as he did so. Sabri read a lot from the exposed armpit hair that he didn’t seem to like. Possibly there was too much of it.

  ‘Then you can fulfil your national duty.’ Sabri held open a book and looked up at Rashid through the edge of his glasses. ‘If you think that’s funny, then I really can see no reason for you to be taking up this scholarship. There are a number of very hardworking students who would give anything—’

  ‘Oh, come on. I just… Come on, Sabri. I was… I’m excited that it worked out. Just pleased, really. That’s OK, isn’t it?’

  Sabri moved the book pile towards the back of his desk and lined his forearms up so that the fingers of one hand drummed on the back of the other hand.

  ‘And what reasoning would you attribute to them choosing a Hajjar girl for this suicide mission? They know the Hajjars are loyal to the Authority, to our great, wondrous leaders. Why do you think these religious groups did that?’ Sabri asked with a purpose that made Rashid stop pacing the room, until he realised he didn’t know the answer, which made him start pacing it again.

  ‘Well, girls are less likely to be checked as thoroughly as boys, so they probably thought that would help, and if she was not veiled and religious-looking like most of the bombers are…’ Rashid cupped his chin with his fingers as though his greatest point was yet to be delivered. It was a mockery of himself in an intellectual pose.

  Sabri could not be bothered with either the pose or the point. ‘I’ll tell you what I think, because your assumption is no longer either relevant or accurate. Their security checks everyone: man, woman, girl, boy, stuffed bunny rabbit, veiled or in a bikini, everyone and anything. What I believe is that these religious groups are trying to show how powerful they are getting. What they are saying is, “Hey, look at what we can get one of the women from your most loyal families to do for us.” That’s what they’re saying. It is an internal message, not an external one. You must learn to tell the difference.’ Sabri gestured towards the window. ‘And what we saw last night, that bombing, was a direct result of the pretext handed to the other side by that Hajjar girl’s silly theatrics and the Islamic groups’ divisive politicking.’

  ‘I don’t think her family will see it that way.’

  ‘What? Her family? I am not concerned as to what her family think. They’re no concern of mine. But, to be positive about all this, I think we should view these moves as signs of desperation on their part – the Islamic groups that is.’ Sabri looked up at at Rashid as though he had little faith that Rashid could possibly be following what he was saying. ‘Here.’ He moved the books towards Rashid. ‘You better start on these. You only have a couple of weeks before you go.’

  Outside the room, the books were too awkward for Rashid to hold; his thoughts were too angry for his mind to articulate. And the door of his brother’s room suddenly seemed sinister and horrible to him. The gunmen were still there, the fat one and the thin one, watching their building. Rashid had wanted to get Sabri’s opinion on them, or better still, tell Sabri about them as he might not have even seen them, but now he didn’t care. The hell with them.

  He let a bit of light in for Gloria and snipped off some of her dead leaves with his nail scissors. Her soil was moist; her leaves were green. Everything about her was captivating, luscious, plentiful. She was divine. Gloria – the Finest Marijuana Plant in Gaza.

  He looked around his room. A tape was stuck in the mouth of his video and the light was still on. He scraped out the tape with his nail scissors and placed them back into his open drawer of horror. On nights like the previous one when the ground shook, the sky was torn through and chemicals streaked through the air, he would go to this collection after coming down from the roof. He would lock himself into his darkened room with a screen of poltergeists, exorcists, zombies and vampires. He would listen to them scream out with the heightened sensual terror that only Gloria could engineer and would let them walk around his room taking over him and his reality to the exclusion of all else.

  And then he could turn them off.

  But London! Again he read the admissions secretary’s email that he had printed off, tracing each line with his finger before hugging it to his chest.

  There were still two messages from Lisa that he had not even opened yet. He’d been too blown away by the email. The first one was about work and the Centre as it was addressed both to him and to Khalil:

  Dear Rashid and Khalil,

  OK, I hope you guys are doing all right. It sounds a bit rough right now. Sorry that it’s been a while, but we’ve been working late and really slogging at it here, to the extent that we hardly get to see TV and know even what we are working away at! Anyway, I always say that, don’t I? I’m just working so hard – blah, blah, blah. But that’s not what I was writing to tell you, what I am really writing to let you know is that we have managed to get the meeting with the Parliamentary Committee set up! I know, I know, I’
m a star and all that. It did take a lot of lobbying and pulling strings but I hope it’s going to be worth it. We agreed that it would be best to present on the following topics:

  (1) impact of closure

  (2) impact of bombing

  (3) assassination policy

  (4) situation on the ground in general

  The meeting is taking place next week (Thursday at 6 p.m. in Westminster! In the Houses of Parliament!). I told them there was no way you guys could get here by then and they were a bit disappointed, you being the real thing and all that, but don’t worry, they still want to hear from us. Can you get some data together by then? The more numbers the better – you know: declining nutritional rates, increased unemployment statistics etc.?

  Have we missed some of the assassinations? I get the feeling only the high-profile ones are being reported over here. Let me know about any small fry, will you?

  Anyway, send us what you can get. Look forward to hearing from you guys.

  Take care,

  Lisa

  She had delivered. Khalil would not show it, but he would be pleased.

  The second message from Lisa was just for him. Rashid read this more carefully.

  Rashid,

  It was a bad call, I know, and I realise that things aren’t great for you right now, but you do have to think of alternatives to just Getting Out. What you are doing at the Centre with Khalil is really important, honourable work. I know you don’t like voluntary work—

  Nor, as he had spelt out to her on numerous occasions, did he like being dependent on hand-outs from his father when he was twenty-seven years old.

  but we rely heavily on the data that the Centre provides, and I know that you are fed up and cynical but these things can make a difference. It is a war—

  Rashid had tried to explain to her on the phone that it was not a war, that it was more of a cage fight, where the other side could throw these flying kicks but their side was limbless or heavily disadvantaged in some way and kept getting disqualified for spitting. The audience loved it. He could hear them rattling their cutlery, but Lisa had grown impatient at the cage fight analogy.

  It’s not really something that you can just escape from. It’s part of you, part of your family. You have to remember that.

  I just wanted you to know that I think of you and worry about you. I do hope that you get the scholarship if that is what you really want and of course I would love you to be here, but I do so respect what you are doing and think that you would be so much happier if you viewed your situation differently.

  Miss you.

  Love,

  Lisa XXX

  Miss you. Love. Three kisses.

  Anyway, he had got it. Nothing else mattered. He would be there.

  Miss you. Love. Three kisses.

  London!

  Lisa!

  Iman’s bed had not been slept in and she was not in the kitchen either. It was his mother in the kitchen. He didn’t feel ready for his mother yet, but at least his sister was not in there trying to wash up or something. There was this state of mal-co-ordination that came over her after a night like the one before. Suds slipped out of basin on to the floor. She broke things. She walked into chairs that were where they were meant to be.

  Rashid’s mother stood firm in the kitchen, frying meat and onions in a vat. She was wearing her long, slopping-around-the-house thoub. Away from the house she was a flesh-coloured-tights and fitted-knee-length-skirt woman, a wearer of short-sleeved chemises and cardigans. For the outside world she blow-dried her hair into hard outward-turning curls. Unlike the rest of the family, her nose was trim and tiny, as straight as her eyebrows were curved, the latter being regularly threaded down to dark arches. With the mandil over her hair and her thoub she looked older, but fresher somehow. Her skin had an unblemished look about it that was unnaturally wax-like, as though an exploratory scalpel would find her flesh to be blood-free under its surface.

  His mother mainly left the cooking to Sabri who could spend hours chopping parsley for tabouleh, stuffing vine leaves or trying out different seasonings on the Sultan Ibrahim, that prince of Gazan fishes. His mother just pickled.

  ‘What are you preparing for, a siege?’ he asked after the last batch, when every inch of counter space was taken up with fat, square-sided bottles stuffed with eggs, aubergines, olives and courgettes. To Rashid they seemed morbid: embryos in formaldehyde, preserved body parts, mutated limbs bobbing around in tinctured jellies. She did not look up. ‘We’re already under siege, can’t you tell?’

  Rashid popped at the lids of the pickle jars with a wooden spoon. Pickles. London. Pickles. A sense of the previous night came over him. Part fear, part thrill. The leap under the helicopters, Gloria’s stars under his skin. He stopped. A small pink-rimmed mirror hanging on a hook over a dishcloth shot a look back at him, one that said he must’ve been truly stoned, no not just truly stoned but royally stoned; his eyes were amassed with stringy red veins. Rashid picked a pair of mirrored sunglasses from the top of the microwave and put them on.

  ‘The belligerent aerial attack, their military sources claimed, was in direct response to the bombing of a park yesterday afternoon for which the Islamic Justice Party has claimed responsibility…’ It was the local station who had chosen not to name the bomber.

  ‘Did you hear she’s a Hajjar?’ his mother asked. ‘Foolish girl gave those bastards the excuse to bomb the hospital.’

  ‘I saw them do it.’ Rashid moved so that she could get to the sink and lifted his sunglasses on to his head. They were scratched and covered with fingerprints and kitchen grease. His mother pulled her sleeves up from the elbow and banged again at the base of the pan with a wooden spoon. Steam hissed out from under a wodge of brain-like meat.

  ‘They cut the power for over five hours this morning. Everything’s partly defrosted; blood dripping out of the freezer when I opened it. All I can do is cook the lot, put it back and hope they leave the power alone. At least fifteen kilos I have still to do.’ Arrayed on the floor on a waterproof sheet, shoulders of lamb and cubes of beef lay bagged up and oozy in see-through plastic bags.

  She turned in his direction, as though there was something she remembered. Rashid pulled the sunglasses down. The sight of him appeared to confuse her. It was as though he were somehow misplaced, a lost man in her kitchen. His mother could do that. She could choose not to see things. She could choose, for example, not to see that Sabri was in a wheelchair with sores across his buttocks that she had to treat every night, a catheter bag that she had to empty several times a day, a body that she helped lift in and out of bed. Instead, she spoke as though he was still her strapping son, her noble warrior. Once Rashid had heard her say, ‘Sabri could still have children, you know,’ in a tone that challenged the world to contradict her.

  And their father leaving? That, of course, hadn’t happened either.

  He would ask her about the split. He would sit her down, here in the kitchen and ask her why their father had suddenly shot out of the marriage like that, propelled himself out of it so rapidly, like a cockerel from a canon, only to find himself in the Gulf preening down his feathers and resuming a perfectly cordial relationship with them once he had landed, financial commitments intact, civility impeccable, marriage ruined.

  He wouldn’t ask her today though. Another day would be better for that. She was dealing with all that meat for a start.

  Maybe it was not the time to tell her his news either, not with the bombing, the power cut and everything. His eyes focussed on her marked-up newspapers, piled up on top of a battalion of water bottles that spread out across the kitchen floor. She had done today’s paper already. Blue pen circled items on British arms exports to Saudi, bread riots in Cairo and the death of a Marxist leader in Colombia. On the last evening of the month she would date the side of each article, cut them out and place them all into a large brown envelope. ‘I can get you any article you want, whenever you want it. You can even find them by subject matter,
’ Rashid had tried to explain the Internet to her once, showing her a basic search function, but she had been distracted by Gloria’s presence behind the screen. ‘And when they cut our electricity, what will you do then?’ was all that she had asked.

  He could hear his mother saying something about his father from under the sink. She was moving detergent bottles and glass jars around so he was not sure exactly what it was.

  ‘Is it his health?’ Rashid asked.

  ‘Health? Maybe. Who knows? But the last time he called he started to say that maybe you and Iman should leave. He even suggested that you visit him.’

  ‘Seriously?’ Rashid made small crescents in the line of blackened putty around the sink with his fingernail.

  ‘He’ll probably change his mind tomorrow,’ she said to the cabinet. ‘Ah, here it is.’ There was a clattering of glass as she sat back on to her knees, breathless.

  ‘I got the scholarship, Mama,’ he said, but her response was not clear; she had gone back into the cabinet. It sounded like, ‘Probably drunk.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Your father, he was probably drunk. Men, they get old. They get drunk. They get sentimental. They wonder what they’ve done to their lives, to their families.’

  She handed a glass jar to Rashid and pulled herself up holding the sink edge with one hand, a yellow cloth in the other. The idea of a tipsy, maudlin father phoning late at night appealed to Rashid. Maybe he had misunderstood the man.

  ‘I got the scholarship, Mama,’ he repeated.

  ‘Sabri helped you with the application, did he?’ She looked up at him now. Rashid knew she had heard him the first time.

  ‘He just checked it.’

  ‘You should never cheat anyone or anything.’