‘Aren’t you going to pray?’ Iman asked.
‘I’ll do it later.’ Brown dust and crumbles of concrete from the rug stuck to Manar’s outfit. ‘I’ll help you with these first.’
They found the caretaker’s wife and returned the rugs in silence. Coming down the stairs, they didn’t speak to each other either and Iman felt a rush of foreboding come over her, like the realisation of a childish superstition. Today would be the day, Iman thought with a lurch of fear that felt like taking a step to nowhere in a dream, when something truly awful would happen to her family. It would occur to spite her for refusing to acknowledge the severity of the bombing. It would get her back for trying to shrug the whole thing off. They could have got them. They could have hit the house. Iman realised that her hands were stiff on the banister and that her teeth were clenched against each other in her mouth.
In the entrance hall the caretaker’s daughter was already mopping at the creamy floor tiles with a mop. The reassuring sound of water, mop hitting plastic bucket, water being spread across tiles, was echoing around the walls, up to the high ceilings. Iman took in the rectangular gilt clock, the enlarged photograph of the President and the boxed-in noticeboard displaying students’ results. These were all comforting – the girl would not be able to continue mopping the floor if Iman’s family had been hit in a strike, surely?
It was at the doorway that Manar turned to Iman. ‘It’s not what you came back for is it?’ she asked. ‘You didn’t come back for this.’ It was getting light outside and through the glass doors Iman could see the smoke. The girl with the mop no longer seemed particularly reassuring.
No shit, Iman could hear Rashid saying. You think someone would come back for this? ‘What do you mean?’ Iman asked.
‘You wanted a role.’ Manar chose her words studiously. ‘They are not giving you one are they?’
‘I have to find my own role.’
‘Exactly.’ Manar did not move, but nodded. ‘Exactly. But I think I could give you some help with that. There are people—’
‘What people?’ Iman asked.
Manar did not reply but closed her eyes slowly as though they had together chosen to listen to the swish and slop of the mop on tiles and dragging back of the sea on the sand.
‘Manar, maybe we can talk another time? I want to get home. I don’t know what’s happened to my family. And besides, you heard the chairwoman, she reached her conclusions and I am not part of them.’
‘You can do better than this. There are people who asked me to talk to you.’
‘Who can want to talk to me?’ Disquiet came over Iman together with a sense that she needed to listen to everything in order to be able to recall this conversation verbatim for Sabri who would be able to tell her what it all meant.
‘It’s OK Iman. I have been listening to what you say in there. You are right about making a difference.’ The statement was delivered with significance, like a medal dropped around Iman’s neck. ‘You were right to come back to Palestine. You do have a role here.’
‘And what is my role?’ Iman’s bag rattled on her arm. Her house keys, a lighter and some children’s bangles that a girl she taught had given her knocked together, ‘Who are you talking about when you say “we”? I don’t get this “we’’.’
‘A group. A serious group.’ Manar replied. ‘We don’t meet, not like this. It is a question of being contacted. It just depends whether you are ready.’
‘Ready for what?’
‘To make a difference. To really impact the situation.’ Manar’s pretty ringless hand rested on Iman’s arm. ‘They think you are capable of it. Only you. Of all of the Committee, they asked me to speak to you, Iman Mujahed. They chose you.’
‘They chose me? Who did?’ Exam-result expectation flushed to Iman’s hands. She always did well in exams. Behind her water sloshed out of the bucket on to the floor.
‘Yes, they did and I am here to ask you. You need to think carefully about what you do and say, because once you have been contacted, then you cannot change your mind. Our group is, as I say, serious, and we have to be – how will you understand this? –strict. Yes, we have to be very strict.’ Her eyes challenged Iman. ‘With anyone who changes their mind. So if you decide to do something that will make a difference,’ she gestured in the direction of the room they had just been in, ‘rather than all this, you know, talk, then you need to let them know. That’s all.’
A jet struck through the sound barrier. The slam of it seemed to pull up the floor, shaking them and the contents of the room. It appeared to gloat that theirs was a world that rested only on a sheet. Boom! Iman’s ears split. Down the corridor someone – the caretaker’s wife possibly – yelled out for the mercy of God. The jet returned. Boom! Somewhere a pane of glass slid and smashed to the floor.
You see? Manar’s lids said. What did I tell you?
‘The question is, are you ready?’ Manar’s smile signified that the conversation was coming to an end. ‘We knew that you were,’ Manar continued, as though Iman had replied to her, ‘We just wanted to be certain.’ She nodded before she left, leaving Iman standing by the main entrance with nothing but the sound of the sea shooting on to the beach and the residue of a limp hand on her arm.
Chapter 3
The emails were like certificates of release in Rashid’s hand. He’d got as far as the door with them where he waivered, undecided as to who to tell and how to tell them. It wasn’t really the morning for it.
He looked back at the room that he was now destined to leave. Brown corn bent in the wind along the hem of his curtains. Half-drawn, the curtains let in the light, but kept out most of the view. Between them, in the middle distance, two smoke spirals were pulled and twisted by their own clouds. A darker stretch of smoke stemmed out of the hospital. Black clouds spumed across the sky.
Rashid went to the window for a closer inspection of it all. Was it possible that the building teetering on concrete legs across the wasteland had tilted further since the day before? He leant his head to one side. Maybe it was his vision that needed altering. Three cars crouched beneath the building in cloth covers. There were days when everything needed to be checked. The trees with the sea beyond them, were all aadi, normal. The cars were aadi, too. The tents with his neighbours in them were the same as ever. The odd thing – and it took a while to figure out what it was that he hadn’t identified yet – was not so much the smoke, nor was it the building, the sea, the trees or the cars, all of which had their place and were in their place, but those men. The men coming around the building were not aadi at all. Not at all. There were two of them. Two of them and they were armed.
Oh, piss off. Just get out of here for today.
But the men neither pissed off nor did they get out of there. One fat, one thin, they moved around the garage pillars. The thin one leant against a car. One looked left, the other right, then both looked up at Rashid at the same time.
He stepped back and drew his curtains across the smoke, the buildings, the sea, the men, their guns.