Rashid felt above it, high up, above it all.
Wired with purpose.
Reborn.
Chapter 48
He strutted a bit once he was past the wasteland and away from the house. The gun hanging across his back gave him the zest to do so, gave him a purpose: to belong. Rashid headed towards the place where he had been so afraid, down to the seafront, stepping over spangles of barbed wire and collapsed fencing as he went. But it was quieter down there than it had been. No trucks of men roared past and his play for visibility was not picked up on. There was no one there. Even the sky was quieter. He could hear a drone buzz, but when he stopped to listen that was all he could hear. A gunship stood in the moonlit sea, stuck like a rig.
He crossed back towards the town, taking a different route along the edges of some farmland; the greenhouse plastic crackled and flapped in the wind and the earth was rutted in the ancient ways of Iraq, of Egypt. The moon illuminated it all with its fullness and across a field a porch light warmed the doorway of a house into an orange cube. How wondrous at this time of night this place was; even the deep, thick smell of manure was rich in its dankness. Rashid felt he could see and feel everything twice, with a heightened perception, a touched-up brightness, a childlike sense of wonderment and awe.
He ignored the helicopters circling over to the south, the clouds whirling like smoke in the shafts of light shooting down from their nostrils. Instead, he looked straight above him at the night clouds, high puffs of them stuck on to a moving dome pricked with stars beyond which was a fine muddled net of whiteness.
Occasionally a jet would crash through it alclass="underline" Keeooww, a wild pre-emptive scream followed by a thud, a blast and the kind of horror he had no desire to think about.
Walking with the intention that he now had made him freer than he could believe possible. When he remembered what it was that he had resolved to do – something far better than anything else that he had ever done – his heart reverberated with massive pride and then shrank into itself, scared. His face became hard and insensate as did his hands, but this was a different kind of fear; it was a calculated, necessary one and he could force himself into its pace, into a liberated step he never thought he would have.
The key had been in the pocket of the jacket, as he knew it would be. There was a small pendant with it, a turquoise eye on a string to protect the bearer from hasad, the evil eye, to stave off the envious. The key had the name of the car model and registration number on it, as he had hoped. It was enough; he would be able to find the car.
The town was deserted, lines of hard walls and metal shutters padlocked to the ground. The rubber from Rashid’s soles squeezed against the paving stones. He was coming up to the corner of the street, with the main road next to the playground in front of him, when a wave of it, the fear, came over him, almost uncontainable this time until he set it firm in his jaw, in his hands which now held the gun up, pointing straight at the sky, up in front of him. Nothing moved, but he could hear somewhere the cry of a baby in a room and the tunnanana tunnanana of the drumroll which introduced the beginning of the news. The precarious street lighting that still worked spat in its casing. He had never been there when it was so dark. Across the road, one of the signs boasting European funding swayed forwards out of the playground, catching a streak of light on its painted letters, the space behind it flat as a black card.
A click. First one, then a couple together. Click, click, click, fast like a marble finding its way down a run. He turned to where he thought it was coming from, but the street stopped dead after the lamp post, its light dull, grey on the dusty roofs of the cars. Then he saw a figure. Not that little sneak of Sabri’s, Abu Omar’s grandson, that Wael from upstairs? Click! He turned back again, but there was nothing. Even the baby had stopped crying.
Chapter 49
Eva had fallen asleep in the middle of a long sentence filled with question marks and qualifying clauses. She had been given, despite her insistence that she should not, Iman’s bed and Iman was on a mattress on the floor. It was like camping under a flyover; the planes roared and thudded; the helicopters circled. And through it all Eva snored, small sniffly snores, her mouth slightly open. Her hair spread out in sticky wisps around her head.
The snoring became more obvious as the planes became less frequent; it rose in flurries of snuffles and fell into troughs of baby snorts. Above, with the departure of the planes, Iman could hear children being settled to sleep, moved on to blankets in the centre of their rooms, away from the windows. If she lay on her front she could feel her heart.
She was wide awake. More awake than she had ever been. More happy than she could remember, so happy that she could not trust it at all. It was going to be taken from her; someone would just come in and take it from her.
They would get him.
Iman sat up to listen.
They would take him from her. Probably now, his enemies were searching for him and someone would inform on him. Her neighbours would have no idea what other members of his party wanted from him, that they wanted him harmed. They weren’t to know that. They could say, ‘Yes, yes, Ayyoubi. We saw him, didn’t we?’ (She could hear them say it.) ‘That way, he went over towards the Mujahed house, over there.’ They could break in to find him, smash panels in the front door, slide the locks across, and drag him out. She got out of bed. She should check outside for bloodstains again; there was one splotch of it that kept coming back to her, on a fallen cement pillar in the wasteland that he must have stepped over. Not all the blood had come out when she had tried to smear it away with her foot without drawing attention to herself. His enemies would see it and come over the wall, like he had.
The corridor smelt of cardamom, disinfectant and cigarettes. A strip of fluorescence lit the hall above the basin catching the Russian beech trees plastered on the wall behind it. She stepped down towards the living room, where the double doors hung open. Khalil was asleep on a sofa, his feet bare and hairy, poking out from under a blanket, his shoes tucked into a corner, the socks rolled up inside them. And he, Ziyyad, was still there, also covered partly with a blanket, his head tilted to the side, resting on the back of the sofa. She crept into the room and turned on the table lamp so that she could see him better.
The tablecloth was decorated in a loopy pattern made up of fine synthetic tubing and satin trim. Small imitation crystal droplets hung off it over the side of the table. It was old and dust had darkened the undersides of the tubing, dulled the trim; it had been coloured with children’s pens and branded with the rings of saucepans too hot for it, but it was not the stains that Iman found herself wondering at, but at Rashid’s passport, lying open at the page of his Canadian visa. Someone had placed a book of Myres’ across the pages to keep them open.
She thought that she should, perhaps, remove Ziyyad’s shoes. It couldn’t be comfortable to sleep with shoes on. She untied them and loosened them hole by hole. Rashid probably needed something more for his visa and he had put out the passport for that, so that they could remind him in the morning. She tugged at the heel of the right shoe and eased it off, spilling out some sand on to the floor, and started on the other foot. She should have washed his feet before he passed out, but then her family would have known, would have guessed she was not the type to wash strange men’s feet.