Andrea Busfield - Born Under a Million Shadows

Now, there was one small problem with this new mission. I could see only a third of May’s bedroom from the wall, and it wasn’t the third she undressed in. After thinking about this situation as I waited for my mother’s light to snap off, I realized my only option was to jump from the wall onto her balcony. This meant I would have to clear a gap roughly a meter wide and try not to think about the fall below.

After a fortnight of undercover operations I’d discovered that the buzz of the generator, which gave light to the house every second night when the city electricity took a holiday, easily hid any noise I made as I scrambled around, so with no fear of alerting May, even if I fell to my death, I climbed up the wall opposite the edge of her balcony and concentrated on the railings in front of me. Twelve bars across. I just had to jump and reach out for one of them.

Taking five deep breaths, I closed my eyes, offered a prayer to Allah, and pushed my feet from the wall with every bit of strength my legs had in them. Suddenly, almost as if I hadn’t yet decided to jump, I felt my head slamming against the railings, and by some miracle my hands had hold of two of the bars.

Dazed and not quite believing I was there, I took a moment to breathe the silence back into my thumping heart. Only one small kick, and I could swing my legs onto the edge, pull myself onto the balcony, and the secrets of May’s balloonlike figure would be mine. I’d get to see her breasts, possibly more. If I was really lucky, I might even see her—

“A-hem.”

A sound came to worry my ears. It was a sound like a cough, and it seemed to be coming from below.

“A-a-hem.”

There it was again.

Slowly, hoping against hope that I was just imagining things, I looked down, a little to the right, and saw James standing there, shaking his head and wagging his finger at me. I looked back at the bright light coming from May’s bedroom, then back at James. He hadn’t gone anywhere, which would have been the polite thing to do. He was obviously waiting for me to make some kind of move.

“Salaam aleykum.” I smiled weakly.

I let go of the bars and fell to his feet, rolling myself into a tight ball as I landed to kill the blow of the soon-to-come assault. After a silence that lasted only seconds but seemed to last at least half of my short life, I heard another cough. I looked up to see James smiling. His eyes were shiny like glass, and he was swaying slightly. He then nodded his head in the direction of the garden and waved at me to follow.

I was in no hurry to go, but I decided it would be better to take a beating as far away from the front of the house—and as far away from the chance of my mother seeing my shame and adding her own style of torture afterward—as possible. So, holding my head high like a man, I followed James to the plastic chairs standing ghostlike in the gloom of the garden.

Without a word he invited me to sit next to him. He then reached down to his side, picked up a bottle of beer from a cardboard box, knocked its metal cap off on the edge of the table, and handed it to me.

It was obviously a trick, but I took it anyway.

James then reached for another bottle, opened it the same way, hit it against the one I held in my hand, and slurred something I didn’t understand. His breath smelled of old cheese.

Carefully I watched him, not daring to move, but he tipped his hand to his lips, showing that I should drink. So I did.

At first the beer tasted disgusting, bubbly and bitter like rotten Pepsi, but this was obviously my punishment and it was better than being beaten with a stick, so I took another sip, and then another, and another, and another.

In no time at all, I found my head had gone numb. A warmth, different from heat, breathed through my body, traveling up inside my veins to finish at my cheeks, making my eyes feel starry. Everything around me seemed to be muffled by an invisible blanket, and James was speaking in a language I didn’t understand. As I continued to drink, I began to talk to him too. I couldn’t help myself; the words were jumping from my mouth as if they were racing down a hill, rolling over and over one another. Neither of us knew what the other was saying, that much was still clear, but it didn’t seem to matter. It felt like the best conversation I’d ever had in my life. The fact is, James really seemed to understand me.

By the end of my second bottle I’d told him all about Jahid and Jamilla and my best friend, Spandi. I revealed the secrets of our wages, our trips around the city hanging off the back of trucks, how we once found Pir the Madman asleep in the park and put wet mud in his pants so he’d think he’d shit himself when he woke up.

As the night grew old and the edges of the world blurred, I confessed to spying on May. At the sound of her name, James wiggled his hands in front of his chest, waved his cigarette and beer in big circles, and laughed. I laughed as well, although I wasn’t sure why, and soon James was jumping up from his seat, slapping me on the back, crashing his bottle into mine, and rubbing my hair, which I didn’t seem to mind anymore.

But then, as quickly as it had started, it all stopped.

Like a street dog caught in headlights, James turned and froze, his hand raised above his head, still holding the bottle of beer. Everything around us seemed to grow still, even the air we were breathing, and I watched mesmerized as the ashy tip of his cigarette floated to the floor and a dark figure emerged in the distance in front of him. It looked something like Georgie.

She was staring at us, and she didn’t appear happy.

She was dressed only in a long black T-shirt, her legs were bare, and her dark hair whipped about her head like a mass of angry snakes. She looked more magical than normal, furious and amazing, and I thought my heart would break at the dark, angry beauty of her, but then maybe it was the shock of her arrival, I don’t know, or the sight of her naked legs, or the heavy thumping in my chest, or the sudden weight of a thousand camels that had come to drag at my head, but at that exact moment I leaned forward in my chair and threw up on my shoes.

THE DAY AFTER I covered my shoes in vomit was possibly the worst day of my life. Well, not the worst. But it was pretty damn bad.

My throat was sore, all dry and swollen; my stomach ached, feeling empty and rotten; my skin was damp and cold; my head had a million steel workers hammering inside it; and my mother had found me a job before noon, even though it was Friday and nobody was working—yet another example of the mysterious magic mothers carry out when their eyes burn with anger. From now on, for two hours after school I would have to play servant to Pir Hederi, a shopkeeper as old as the King’s Tomb whose sight had disappeared behind milky white curtains.

I was beyond annoyed.

“If you can’t behave, you’ll have to earn,” my mother stated matter-of-factly. “And from now on you stay away from James. Do you hear me?”

I groaned. It was just like Jahid all over again.

“How am I supposed to do that ?” I whimpered.

“I don’t care how you do it, just do it!”

My mother was impossible. In fact, she was more impossible than all the warlords trying to run this country, and that was pretty much as impossible as you get. Thank God, then, that Georgie informed her only that I’d been drinking beer. If she knew I’d also been trying to sneak a look at May’s breasts before I fell to the ground and hit the bottle, I’m certain she would have packed me off to a madrassa, right there and then.