Selma Dabbagh - Out of It

No one spoke for a while as Sabri smirked and Khalil smouldered.

‘How is the book going today?’ Rashid tried to avoid looking at Sabri, as he didn’t want to see the stumps any more than he had to. The way they ended like the knots on sausage meat was disconcerting. He closed the window with a slam as the air was blowing in dust and the smell of manure from a nearby farm.

‘Not bad but I was sidetracked. I came across something different.’ He looked at Khalil. ‘It may be of interest to you, perhaps. Maybe not, but it was a transcript of the conversation between the soldiers when they shot that girl last week by the checkpoint. The one that was leaked to their press somehow.’

‘Oh yes?’ Khalil said, still trying to digest the concept of preventive detention (he would get a second opinion; he found it hard to believe it was quite that arbitrary) and the loss of Jamal. It annoyed him that his inner desire to ingratiate himself to Sabri had not been dislodged.

‘Soldier on guard says that they’ve identified “someone on two legs a hundred metres from the outpost”. The other soldier, in the lookout, says, “A girl about ten,” but by then they are already shooting. Girl’s dead, etcetera, etcetera.’ Sabri wheeled around to Rashid who was still standing by the window and looked him up and down.

‘I remember that incident,’ Rashid said. ‘I’m sure I heard about it on the TV or something.’

‘The point is this use of code, on two legs , denoting human. It reminded me of that speech by their Prime Minister saying that we were beasts walking on two legs . I thought I could make something of this. The idea that having legs makes you human. I thought of adding a Primo Levi-ish dimension to it. Merging this two-legged idea with a sort of general question about what is a man, you know, linking in to “if this is a man who labours in the mud/ who knows no peace/ who fights for a crust of bread?” That kind of thing.’ He stopped and twisted around to face Rashid before going back to Khalil. ‘My thesis being that the Occupation, the closures, the siege have made amputees of all of us, crawling around in the mud. Legless in Gaza. The lot of us.’ He forced Rashid to look at him. ‘Do you know what I’m talking about?’ The boys nodded although Rashid didn’t do so with much vigour. ‘What do you think?’ he asked Khalil after sneering slightly at Rashid.

‘Well, it’s an interesting idea, Ammo . It’s an interesting idea.’ Khalil’s eyes were not focussing on Sabri. He was struggling. ‘I mean Levi is—’

‘You can pass me the blanket,’ Sabri gestured towards a tartan rug on a chair, ‘if it makes you feel better.’

The clock whirred and cuckooed twice although it was well past five. No one spoke.

‘Oh, could you do something for me?’ Sabri said. ‘Could you possibly bring up the notice that they pinned on Abu Omar’s door? They did pin a notice, didn’t they?’

‘Of course.’

Khalil and Rashid jumped up as though in front of them a door was sliding shut leaving them only enough space through which to fit their fingers before it closed.

From Rashid’s window he had a bit of everything: vast poplars bouncing light off their leaves, stained wooden telephone poles, smutty-faced Victorian town houses, grey drainpipes, a squat spire, the tower of a council estate and the rail tracks that spread out over the foreground like entrails.

Rashid turned the toast over in his mouth, giving the jam direct contact with his taste buds. His tongue sought out the sugar lodged in the bread’s perforations. He gulped to wash it down.

Lisa’s tea was bad. Lisa’s tea was gully water.

He had woken some time before her. His sober sleep rarely carried him through until morning as it was, but here the morning came early slicing a chunk out of the night. Lisa had slept pyjama-ed hugging at her boobs sulkily, as though trying to reclaim them from his grasp.

As soon as she had woken, she was up and out, down to the shower room, back to get dressed, then out to the shared kitchen in the corridor and bringing him tea and toast. Englishy things for old ladies with blanket-covered knees. Lisa had been bent on coddling him since the visit to her parents’ house and the dream incident that he was trying to forget.

He had tried to pull Lisa back on to the bed for a final fondle before she left but something sharp on her head scratched at the side of his eye, the under-wiring of her bra trapped the tips of his fingers and one of his toenails had snagged the leg of her tights. She had pushed him off, redone her hair (brushed it straight, down, down, down, as though it was part of a military drill, then pulled it through a hair band twice, her fingers straining pink and unsteady as they stretched it wide to pull the hair through, up high and bouncy into a girly ponytail) and she was off. Off in her puffy hip-length coat with the diamond shapes stitched over it. Gone. All strapped up and padded and off to do big things with her little laptop all packed up into its own miniature flak jacket.

Lisa’s family’s house had been cushioned and soft, with clocks that had tocked, clucked and whirred into buffered surfaces. Her parents’ movements were synchronised around the clocks’ understated commands and seemed to be conducted in complete isolation from the outside world. The heavy wooden front door automatically locked ( click!) and was then manually latched after Rashid and Lisa had arrived and stayed that way until they left. The doorbell never rang, nor did the phone.

Close to her parents, Lisa had seemed drunk or at least very highly caffeinated. Her conversation was jittery and full of show-offy statements and brash confrontation, which was never followed through but caved into simpering cuddles (with her father) and a chummy snuggling up of shoulders (with her mother in the kitchen).

‘Will you be getting changed for lunch?’ her mother had asked, as they stood in the corridor seemingly unsure how, or whether, to greet each other. Lisa had chosen to wear one of Rashid’s oldest sweatshirts, climbing boots, jeans and a checked black-and-white keffiyeh that they had bought together in Gaza.

‘No, should I?’

‘Of course not, dear. Not if you don’t want to. I was just wondering.’

Lisa’s mother went back to the kitchen, leaving them with her father, who kept leaning his weight forwards on to his toes as though the pressure could cause him to emit something of importance each time.

‘Would you care for a little something? Say a G & T or a sherry, perhaps? Lisa didn’t say whether you are, you know… unless of course you would like something soft, if you’re observant , that is?’ And at this proposition Lisa’s father had braced his hands together at the knuckles and set his mouth in preparation for something truly horrible.

‘Oh, no. He drinks anything,’ Lisa put in, ‘anything.’

Rashid had not spoken and was silently wishing that he was wearing something else, but he only had one pair of smart trousers which were far too light and Lisa had laughed off a jumper Khalil’s mother had given him for London (‘You can’t wear patterns, Rashid, really ! You look like a computer technician or something’) so he had ended up dressed identically to Lisa, but uncomfortable with it. Lisa, however, seemed to be very pleased with how he looked in her parents’ house. It was as though she had brought home a particularly gaudy piece of jewellery from a junk shop and could now, against a plain background, appreciate its particular panache. When her parents left the room she leant over him and kissed his mouth with hers in a pout, her eyes open, and with an air of hungry sexiness that he felt she must have copied from a celebrity.