Jill McGivering - The Last Kestrel

‘Have you no manners?’ she said. The boy paused, backed off a little. ‘Weren’t you taught to show respect?’ He took a step towards her again. ‘Well, weren’t you?’

She was punched in the back of the head. Struck hard. Pitched forward. Knocked down. A deep, resonant boom. Powerful as thunder. Her bones vibrated with it. Her face smacked into the ground. Deafened. Dust filled her eyes. Her mouth. A wave of sickness. Her limbs were shaking, drumming the ground in spasms. She blinked frantically, trying to see. She managed to lift her head. The broken shards of the pot were rocking from side to side in the road.

She lay still. She must breathe. The world must settle into place again. Alive. Praise Allah. She was alive. She closed her eyes. She was sinking. Her limbs were like stones. Still and heavy, held by the ground. She tried again to lift her head, to open her eyes. She was breathing now. The air stank. Petrol. Burning cloth. A stench of singed meat. Her stomach was convulsing. Around her, a blur of fast-moving shapes. People were running. Arms were waving in and out of clouds of dust. She could hear nothing. Was she dying? No. A pop. She was bursting up from the bottom of a well. Raw sound broke into her ears. Screaming. Men shouting. Feet beating on the road.

The soft tang of fruit pulp broke near her face. Rivulets of juice running in the dust. Bubbling as it sank into the ground, turning it to mud. The small boy. His bottles. Burst. She sensed him scrambling to his feet beside her. He peered into her face. His brown eyes wide with terror. A sweet boy. Like Aref. She shouldn’t have scolded. He was staring past her, back down the road, towards the market. Something there. What? She eased her head from the ground. Twisted her neck. Black smoke hung, thick and oily. A tall orange flame. A flame dirty with smoke, bent like a person staggering. She let her face fall back to the dust. Exhausted. Someone was tugging at her. A frightened voice in her ear. ‘Get up, Auntie. Get up.’ The boy.

Finally she managed to sit. She was in the road. In the way. People were crying. Hugging children. A man, running, stepped on her hand. His arms were brimming with shoes, snatched up from somewhere. A plastic sandal fell in the dirt beside her. Green. Shiny. How stupid, she thought. To steal an odd shoe.

The boy had run towards the smoke. Now he came running back. His face was contorted. He knelt in the dirt, took hold of her shoulders and shook them.

‘Get up.’ He seemed ready to cry. Why didn’t he leave her be? He was pulling on her arms. She got onto her knees, then to her feet. She stood uncertainly. Swaying. Her scarf was in folds at her neck, her head exposed. She lifted it back into place. She felt sick. Her head was dizzy with fumes, with noise. Maybe she should sink down and sit again. The boy, pulling at her, was agitated.

‘What?’ she said. ‘What now?’

He lifted his hand and pointed down the road to the wreckage. ‘The policemen,’ he said. ‘Look!’

She tried out her legs. They were shaking. She took a step. The boy buzzed about in front of her. She was intact. She was alive. He seized her hand and pulled her forward, down the road.

A ring of people had formed. A tight crowd. Men stood, silent with shock. Others draped their arms round shoulders and craned forward to see. Their arms and heads were blocking her view. The boy had crouched to look through the legs. She sank down beside him. The flame was burning quietly in a sheath of smoke. It was thin and dying, rising from a greasy heap of twisted metal. The fumes filled her mouth. The air was shuddering with its heat.

She twisted to see through the gaps. She could make out the mangled remains of vehicles. She couldn’t tell how many. Too many blackened parts. Many were blown some distance. They smouldered where they lay. Scattered fragments of metal, of glass, covered the surface of the road. Dark pools of oil, others of blood, stained the dust. Splashes of black and deep red against brown.

She sat heavily. The boy was pulling at her sleeve, pointing. She couldn’t look. The heat of the fire, the press of the men, was making her giddy. She tasted bile and tried to swallow it back. She put her hand to her mouth. ‘I’m sick,’ she said. No one was listening.

The boy was still tugging. She lifted her head. Through the legs and the shifting smoke, she made out figures slumped along the road. A policeman, his torso drenched in blood. On his side. A woman, her hair blackened with soot. Sitting. Bent over the shape of a child stretched across her lap. A man, staggering, his hands grasping the air. A boy, staring about him in confusion. A police radio, abandoned on the ground, suddenly sparked into life, pumping out voices from far away. She covered her eyes with her hands. Too much. How could this happen? The fading smell of orange was still on her fingers. Dizziness enfolded her in waves. She lowered her head to her lap.

The sounds swelled and faded and swelled again in her ears. She sat. She had to get home. How would she get home? She shifted her feet. The soles of her sandals stuck to the filth in the road. Two men beside her were talking in low voices. She opened her eyes, looked up at them. Their faces swam.

‘What happened?’ She didn’t bother with the customary greetings.

‘Bombs,’ said one of the men. ‘Maybe two.’ He gestured towards the debris. ‘Suicide bombers.’

‘Who?’ She had clasped his leg, digging her nails into his cotton trousers. ‘Who did it?’

He leaned back from her, his face closing. ‘Who knows?’

Aref. Could he be…? She crawled frantically into the crowd. Pushing herself forward through the legs like a dog. A young man barred her way with his foot. She knocked it away. She was nearing the front. Voices above. Men moved aside for her. Now the heat from the fire was scorching. She blinked, stared in disbelief. The horror. Soot-blackened corpses. Hair burned. Flesh swollen and bubbling as it cooked. A single arm, severed. Lying with its knuckles to the ground, fingers curling. Half a man’s body. A pair of trousers still clinging, drenched with blood, to the legs. She moaned. She couldn’t look. Her elbows gave way. Her face fell to the dirt. She was shaking too much to move.

Her mind was bursting. Images seared her eyes. Her throat burned with acid. Abdul. I must reach Abdul. She was sobbing, rocking herself. It wasn’t true. Couldn’t be true. Allah, in His mercy, would never allow it. Such wickedness. Such mutilation. She started to wail. A strangled sound. High-pitched with pain. She had seen another thing. Too terrifying to bear. Limp on the ground, blackened and pockmarked, a brass talisman. Still threaded on a scrap of leather. In the shape of a bird with its wings spread and claws outstretched.

A man was dragging her away, scolding her. The boy’s face was in hers, hovering with big eyes. The crowd around her was being broken up. A thickset man seized hold of her shoulders and propelled her forward, away from the flames, the bodies. He was stern-faced. Get away, he kept saying. Go home. The foreign soldiers are coming. Go! A mess of people tugged at her.

She didn’t know how she got home. She had a sense of running, stumbling, arms outstretched. Calling Abdul. Aref. She made it just inside the hut, then collapsed on the ground in the cool darkness. She flattened her palms against the mud, clinging to it. The earth was spinning out of control. Her stomach turned. Her body, exhausted, ached. She banged the flat of her hands against the ground. She dug her fingernails into the earth, scraping them along the smooth earth, and howled. Her eyes were already blind with weeping.

As she lay there, pounding the floor with her hands, all she could hear were the voices. A pitiful voice which refused to believe it. Maybe he’s safe. Maybe he wasn’t there. Maybe he said No and left them. Even as her mind tried to think this, a second voice was louder, tolling like a bell, saying: it’s over, it’s over, my boy, my Aref, he’s gone. The smell of burning flesh seemed to cling to her.