Selma Dabbagh - Out of It

‘I need to explain that.’ There was a goofiness to his closed-lipped smile. It didn’t match the tunnelling that went on behind his eyes, as though something somewhere had been cast adrift.

He ordered her a fruit cocktail as she couldn’t be bothered with the menu, and tea for himself. When her drink arrived she found herself contemplating the straw that stood erect at the centre of the layer of paper umbrellas, cherries and chopped pineapple on the drink’s surface.

‘What do you need to explain?’

‘I had an episode back there when I was giving my talk. I’m OK now, but I have these moments… crowds, blood. I’m phobic, apparently. It’s been a long time since it last happened. I was fine when I was speaking, because I was looking up so I could not see the people. And then I had this strong desire to look down. And suddenly all these faces around me, waiting.’ He grimaced. ‘It’s over now.’

‘You’ve always had this?’

‘Since I was a child. It was when my parents—’

‘My father knew your parents.’

‘Really?’ He brightened momentarily. ‘Where? Beirut, I suppose.’

‘They read too much for his liking.’

‘Read, talked and partied is what I remember.’ Again, the missing tooth at the back of his mouth. A line of vein across his temple that one could trace along with a fingertip. ‘Listen, Iman, I need to explain about that day, about Abu Omar—’

‘Abu Omar?’ Iman hadn’t wanted him to raise their former neighbour or anything about that day again.

She would have rather let Abu Omar slip for a moment as they sat in that glassy place. The closeness and the strangeness of where they came from wrapped around them like a thick rug, but she didn’t want it between them. She was fed up with voicing her views, giving her position. His shoulders were beautiful. There was rain coming down on the glass roof above them. She put the cherries into her mouth and tried to discreetly remove the stones with a cupped hand and he looked at her as though her doing this was curious and charming. He concentrated so much on her wrist that she became quite self-conscious about it. She found herself looking at it as though it was something quite new. She didn’t want to have Abu Omar and his sorrowful gut brought into the uniqueness of being there.

‘What about Abu Omar?’ she asked dutifully.

‘He was instrumental…’ Ziyyad started. ‘We have proof that he was instrumental—’

But her phone rang and it was Khalil telling her about Rashid and she didn’t get to hear any more than that.

The corridor outside Rashid’s cell was filled with the anger of drunks. A woman’s high heels dragged backwards down it. You fucking waankerrs…

It was remembering that he had left his window slightly open that morning that made Rashid feel a plunging sense of absence and desperation at being in the cell. In his room, it would be dark now. The sheets on the bed would be cold and the computer would be blipping to itself as the messages piled up on to its screen. There would be an orange light from the street. It was those transformative hours of the evening as night came about that he relished most in that room.

It was all there waiting for him. But he would not be going back, maybe not tonight, maybe not ever. He would become just another story of a detention, a deportation, a rendition: another story of injustice and illegality to be deleted as junk. That was how it was to end for him, on a piss-stinking mattress in an underground cell of a London police station with hookers and drunks. If he had known that this was how it would end. If he had known.

Lisa. He had screwed up with Lisa. If he had not drunk so much beer at the restaurant, it would have been different. He would not have so much as thought about asking her sister out; he knew now that that was where things had started to go wrong. The small things he remembered now: the way she edited his essays with her red pen and straight back, the time she had stitched up his bag where the buckle had come undone, how she pushed her chin up as her hair fell back across the pillows and down the side of the bed, that time together on the stairwell. He hugged at his legs but they were stiff, bony things that no one would want.

The noise of slamming cell doors punched at his gut. Winded him. A round-up. All the Arabs in London. It was all over. There were grass stains on his knee from looking for the lighter he had dropped under the bench outside the Public Records Office that afternoon. They were signs from a different life. His mother smiling with the gun. They had not got her. She had done things – hijacked a plane for fuck’s sake – and they had not got her, and he had not even done anything and yet it was all over for him.

You fucking… the shouting started up again. Songs from the demonstration came from somewhere transformed into ancient chants by the acoustics of metal doors and shiny walls.

‘Mr Mujahed.’ Moojaheed. One of the officers had slid back the tile-sized opening in the door. ‘We have now been able to verify your identity and due to that, we are able to downgrade the basis of your arrest from that of a Serious Arrestable Offence to an Arrestable Offence. This change of status, which has arisen due to a clarification of your identity, which appears to have initially been mistaken for that of another person, wanted by the police for more serious offences, means that—’ The eye had now been replaced by a mouth.

‘I can go?’

‘Oh no, my son. You cannot go.’ The officer sounded almost gleeful. ‘Because upon your person you were discovered to have – in your possession – a significant amount of cannabis resin. You even signed for it on your arrival.’ Rashid didn’t know how, but he had completely forgotten about it. ‘That would be marijuana,’ continued the officer. ‘We are therefore holding you on suspicion of being in possession of a Class C drug with intent to supply. You have requested the duty and the duty is on her way, although she seems to be taking her own sweet time due to the fact that they got all excited in her offices when they thought you were here as a terrorist suspect and they were going to send the partner, but now it is only a drugs and immigration matter they are sending a rep instead.’

The eyes appeared in the hole, pale popping eyes that moved slowly towards Rashid.

‘Only a junior mind, probably fresh out of nappies. Sometimes do more harm than good, so what do you think? You can go ahead with the interview without her right now if you choose to. Your choice, mind, but we may need to stick some others in your cell, if you see what I mean. Could disturb your peace and quiet, so if you want to get going, we are happy to go ahead now. At your service and Her Majesty’s pleasure, so to speak.’

Would youse shut it? The woman’s voice yelled across the corridor at the revolutionary chanter. ‘Damn right,’ joined the officer. Pigs replied the voice. ‘Fucking shut it,’ the officer boiled up and exploded, ‘or I’ll fucking shut you up.’

‘I’ll wait for the lawyer, thank you.’ Rashid was standing now. Thank you ? It was pathetic.

‘Suit yourself, if that’s what you really want. Could be a wait though.’ The officer slammed the window shut.

It was Lisa on the phone. A Lisa so breathless with consternation that it made her voice almost unrecognisable. Khalil excused himself from Eva to stand with the phone by the window of Eva’s flat.

‘It’s Rashid. They’ve arrested him. He left a message but I was tied up with everything. You see, my phone was off because I had a dinner, you know, with…’ Lisa mentioned the name of an aristocrat and gave another name that sounded very familiar to Khalil. ‘You know, the poet?’ she asked. ‘And I just picked up my messages. He must have been there for ages.’