Abdi still didn’t know if the guards saw him running and recognized him. Or if Hassan was only wounded when they shot him and they hurt him so he would give up their names. It didn’t matter in the end, not really.
His father was dead by the time he returned home.
He found him executed, shot three times in the doorway to their home, punished for what they had done. Abdi’s world ended at that moment. He felt as though everything he had or loved or dreamed was suddenly gone, and he was empty. His sisters were hiding in a closet. The men who did it arrived in a car, they said. Abdi’s father would not let them into the house, even though they had guns and he did not. So they killed him where he stood.
Little Aisha clutched his hand. “Is father hurt?” she said. “When will he be better?”
Abdi could do nothing but stare at the man lying dead on the floor. His father. The man who had raised him for so many years on his own. All gone.
“Abdi?” Aisha said, voice choking. “Why won’t he stand up?”
His other sisters, Hamdi and Habiba, led her away as the tears began.
The next morning, the leader of their militia, Osman’s former commander, came to the house. He told Abdi that he would need to earn money to support his family, but that the clan would not fail them, so long as he did not fail the clan. He would join the men on the road-blocks. He would carry a Kalashnikov and protect their people. He would shoot their enemies and the rewards would be shared by all.
Or he and his sisters would starve.
They are all there now. Abdi’s father. Hassan. Osman. And, at the back, another man. One he knows he will never see in this life. A kind, tall man, standing with his arms around his wife and three children, all healthy and strong. That they are all smiling is no comfort to Abdi, for he knows that the man is himself in a future he can no longer have. That his actions have destroyed everything he might have been as well as everything he was.
So Abdi stands there in the night, the ghosts all around him. And he does not fight them and he does not run from them. He stands there, a twelve-year-old man, a soldier and a killer, wishing that his father would speak to him and tell him that this is not his fault. That he does not blame him. That his life will change and he will never have to touch a gun again. That he could somehow give his father back that twenty dollars and stop any of this happening.
Then, he stands there, crying in the dark.
SERVED COLD by Zoë Sharp
Layla’s curse, as she saw it, was that she had an utterly fabulous body attached to an instantly forgettable face. It wasn’t that she was ugly. Ugliness in itself stuck in the mind. It was simply that, from the neck upwards, she was plain. A bland plainness that encouraged male and female eyes alike to slide on past without pausing. Most failed to recall her easily at a second meeting.
From the neck down, though, that was a different story, and had been right from when she’d begun to blossom in eighth grade. Things had started burgeoning over the winter, when nobody noticed the unexpected explosion of curves. But when summer came, with its bathing suits and skinny tops and tight skirts, Layla suddenly became the most whispered-about girl in her class.
A pack of the kind of boys her mother was usually too drunk to warn her about took to following her when she walked home from school. At first, Layla was flattered. But one simmering afternoon, under the banyan and the Spanish moss, she learned a brutal lesson about the kind of attention her new body attracted.
And when her mother’s latest boyfriend started looking at her with those same hot lustful eyes, Layla cut and run. One way or another, she’d been running ever since.
At least the work came easy. Depending on how much she covered up, she could get anything from selling lingerie or perfume in a high-class department store, to exotic dancing. She soon learned to slip on different personae the same way she slipped on a low-cut top or a demure blouse.
Tonight she was wearing a tailored white dress shirt with frills down the front and a dinky little clip-on bow tie. Classy joint. The last time she’d worn a bow-tie to wait tables, she’d worn no top at all.
The fat guy in charge of the wait staff was called Steve and had hands to match his roving eye. That he’d seen beyond Layla’s homely face was mainly because he rarely looked at his female employees above the neck. Layla had noted the way his eyes glazed and his mouth went slack and the sweat beaded at his receding hairline, and she wondered if this was another gig she was going to have to try out for on her back.
She didn’t, in the end, but only, she realized, because Steve thought of himself as sophisticated. The proposition would no doubt come after. Still, Steve only let his pants rule his head so far. Enough to let Layla – and the rest of the girls – know that he’d be taking half their tips tonight. Anyone who tried to hold anything back would be out on her ass.
Layla didn’t care about the tips. That wasn’t why she was here, anyhow.
Now, she stood meekly with the others while Steve walked the line, checking everybody over.
“Got to look sharp out there tonight, girls,” he said. “Mr Dyer, he’s a big man around here. Can’t afford to let him down.”
He seemed to have a thing for the name badges each girl wore pinned above her left breast. Hated it if they were crooked, and liked to straighten them out personally and take his time getting it just so. The girl next to Layla, whose name was Tammy, rolled her eyes while Steve pawed at her. Layla rolled her eyes right back.
Steve paused in front of her, frowning. “Where’s your badge, honey? This one here says your name is Cindy and I know that ain’t right.” And he made sure to nudge the offending item with clammy fingers.
Layla shrugged, surprised he picked up on the deliberate swap. Her face might not stick in the mind, but she couldn’t take the chance that her name might ring a bell.
“Oh, I guess it musta gotten lost,” she said, all breathless and innocent. “I figured seeing as Cindy called in sick and ain’t here – and none of the fancy folk out there is gonna remember my name anyhow – it don’t matter.”
Steve continued to frown and finger the badge for a moment, then met Layla’s brazen stare and realized he’d lingered too long, even for him. With a shifty little sideways glance, he let go and stepped back. “No, it don’t matter,” he muttered, moving on. Alongside her, Tammy rolled her eyes again.
Layla had the contents of her canapé tray hurriedly explained to her by one of the harassed chefs and then ducked out of the service door, along the short drab corridor, and into the main ballroom.
The glitter and the glamour set her heart racing, as it always did. For a few years, she’d dreamed of moving in these circles without a white cloth over her arm and an open bottle in her hand. And, for a time, she’d almost believed that it might be so.
Not any more.
Not since Bobby.
She reached the first cluster of dinner jackets and long dresses that probably cost more than she made in a year – just for the fabric, never mind the stitching – and waited to catch their attention. It took a while.
“Sir? Ma’am? Would you care for a canapé? Those darlin’ little round ones are smoked salmon and caviar, and the square ones are Kobe beef and ginger.”
She smiled, but their eyes were on the food, or they didn’t think it was worth it to smile back. Just stuffed their mouths and continued braying to each other like the stuck-up donkeys they were.
Layla had done this kind of gig many times before. She knew the right pace and frequency to circulate, how often to approach the same guests before attentive turned to irritating, how to slip through the crowd without getting jostled. How to keep her mouth shut and her ears open. Steve might hint that she had to put out to get signed on again, but Layla knew she was good and he was lucky to have her.