Selma Dabbagh - Out of It

‘I am, but it’s nothing to do with you. You will follow me back to your house. I have business there and I am late for it, so you will follow me, understand?’

He breathed twice before stepping back into the street. As he did so, the body of a live woman with drowning eyes carried by three men jogged past them. The woman was screaming at her blood-stained hand. Her head and legs were bare, sandals hung off her toes, pale hair fell over an arm. Ziyyad stepped back so quickly that he knocked Iman against the door handles. He tripped awkwardly. His neck was next to her face and some of his sweat dropped on to her.

‘What the hell are you doing?’ she screamed. His skin was runny with perspiration as he turned to check on her, breathing hard from the bottom to the top of his chest, before he moved off into a smaller alley away from the crowds, walking with huge paces ahead of her. He looked back every minute or so to ensure that she was still with him, but he never let on that he might care whether she was or not.

It did not look good to Rashid. In fact, to Rashid, the road to the refugee camp where the Centre was based was littered with portents that Khalil was refusing to see.

Khalil kept trying Jamal’s phone and Jamal’s phone kept telling him that it was unobtainable. Barbed wire in spangled loops lolled around the outskirts of the camp. A man sat on his haunches by the entrance, cleaning out his front teeth with a thumbnail. A truck loaded with valuables (either cement or flour, it was not clear) was attracting a small gathering by the side of the road. Most of the destruction was new. Two buildings, their sides punctured but the concave half bubbles of bullet holes, were still smoking. The alley was empty of people. Unnaturally empty. No rugs hung on the walls waiting to be beaten and no clothes were pegged on to the lines that fanned out from single hooks, slicing the sky up into long triangles. It was just cement, graffiti and the sandy earth.

Rashid walked behind Khalil, close to the wall, avoiding the slow run of liquid through the middle of the street. Wild grasses sprouted around the edges of the puddles. The chemical smell of burnt rubbish came and went. The houses were all the same on this stretch: two rooms, a bathroom and a kitchen. Boxy squares of concrete with roofs of corrugated iron held down with breezeblocks and bricks. Occasionally one had a tiled floor, otherwise it was just sand on the ground and cables and wires strung across the ceiling.

A metal door to a house stood open. The inside walls were painted in the patterns of the mosques of Granada. Beige rugs, their corners folded with precision, covered mattresses on the floor. The floor tiles had just been mopped. A large engraved copper plate was propped up on foldable wooden legs, Bedouin-style. A girl sitting on a mattress drawing stuck out her tongue at Rashid as he passed.

Rashid started formulating a question about place, belonging and his role in all this as he walked, contemplating whether it was worth asking Khalil and if he would know the answer. He wondered whether he owed it to Khalil’s mother to talk to Khalil about leaving, but there would be significant fallout if he did. It would be no less than treacherous, no more than self-interest, as on some levels the idea of having Khalil with him in London was an amazing possibility, on other levels it was the carting of all of this over there with him, when London was the opportunity to reinvent himself. Would that be such a bad thing for him to do, to have a break from this for a while, to come back revived? He wondered what Khalil thought. He thought he should drink cocktails before visiting the Centre more often. It took the edge off things.

‘Khalil,’ Rashid started, but Khalil was calling out to a man walking towards them. The man was not looking up. Khalil called out his name again.

‘Ah!’ The man finally stopped and smoothed his beard down several times. ‘Khalil Helou. Greetings. What brings you here?’

‘We’re just going to check on the Centre.’

‘You don’t know?’ The man looked awestruck at the ignorance before him.

‘Know what?’ Khalil asked, hiding the irritation and anxiety that Rashid could nonetheless see. The man’s hands expanded outwards from his thumbs. ‘Nothing. Nothing. God be with you.’

‘And with you,’ Khalil replied, although the man had already gone.

‘Who’s that?’ Rashid asked, hoping to find something to discredit the man as a source of alarmist statements.

‘You know that boy who comes to the Centre who’s a computer whizz? The one who can hack? That’s his father.’

‘Religious?’

‘Who isn’t?’

‘That’s what Iman says.’

They stopped and said nothing more because by then they had seen the Centre and there was nothing else to say.

The destruction ran right up to its doors: graffiti, bullet holes and gutted buildings. The door to the Centre had been blown out into a rubble-filled cavity. A tetchy-looking cat sprinted down the stairs and out of the entrance.

It was worse inside than they could have imagined. The smell was overwhelming. The afternoon heat was invigorating every stinking molecule in the room. It was hard to breathe. A pinboard covered with children’s paintings had been removed from the wall and shat upon. Computer screens were smashed; wires had been cut; the drawers of the filing cabinet had been emptied and thrown to the floor. Everything left in the room was sprayed with paint, pissed on, scribbled over. All the documents had gone and the computer disks removed. Khalil examined the backs of the computers.

‘They took the hard drives.’

‘And Jamal? Shit. They must’ve taken him.’ Khalil walked around. ‘We have to find out where. That’s what I have to do first.’

‘We don’t know that for sure.’ Rashid’s chest felt as though it had a thin plastic sheet wrapped around it that was being tightened twist by twist with a tourniquet. ‘Why would they take him? He’s just a volunteer.’

Khalil kicked against the wall leaving a newer, fainter mark than the others. ‘It’s my fault. I should’ve taken the risks more seriously. I know they’ve taken him. I can feel it. It’s my fault. Fuck. And he’s getting married.’ Khalil crouched down with his back against the wall, his head on his knees. Fuck .

Rashid tried to move into his friend’s space. Khalil’s ponytail was not silly. There was nothing silly about Khalil.

‘Come back to our place, Khalil. Talk to Sabri. He’ll know what we can do to find out where he is. Don’t stay here.’

Khalil looked up from his hands. ‘Raed and Jamal in the same day. One killed, the other taken. And the Centre? Three years’ work and look at it.’

Something had attracted Khalil’s attention; he got up and walked over to the other side of the room where a small line of army graffiti, ‘ Feeling fucked now?’ was scrawled in red marker pen across the newly painted wall.

Khalil laughed out loud at the communication from the departed forces of destruction that had trashed his Centre. ‘See that? Feeling fucked now? That’s excellent. Ha! ’

‘How is it excellent?’ Rashid’s skin was telling him that the army could be waiting to come back and get them too. The skin on his face felt really tight.

‘It’s excellent. It’ s excellent .’ When excited, Khalil’s voice had a tendency to squeak slightly. ‘If this poxy little Centre really disturbs them that much, it has to be good. It must be worthwhile. It means that what we are doing is annoying them, even if it is just an irritation factor. It’s important. It’s something. Just to bug them. Get under their skin. This,’ he said, tapping at the writing on the wall, ‘is a victory.’ He stood back and smiled at it again. ‘I will put a frame around it.’ He glanced up at Rashid. ‘You think Sabri can help us to find out where Jamal is?’