Selma Dabbagh - Out of It

‘You all right, then?’ Iman asked Rashid.

‘Sure,’ said Rashid, still looking pleased by the sight of Lisa, who now held her laptop bag to the side of her body.

‘I didn’t think you’d come.’ He walked closer to her and held her arms. ‘You know, Lisa, down there, in that cell. It was so… I felt so, you know, lonely, and I was thinking… I’ve been so stupid. I’ve really missed you. I didn’t think you’d come—’

‘I probably wouldn’t have come if I had known it was just for some minor dope charge.’

Rashid was holding some of the bits and pieces from his pocket in a see-through plastic bag that dangled against Lisa’s upper arm.

‘What did you say?’ Rashid dropped his hold on Lisa’s arms.

‘I said I wouldn’t have come down here if I knew that it was just about some hash that you had on you. I thought you had been arrested for some terrorism offence or something. I was at dinner with Lord C. and I rushed off. I told them all that it was really serious and now it turns out it’s just some caution for a piece of dope.’

A look was building up in Rashid’s face that made Iman want to pull Lisa – even Lisa – away from him.

‘You’re disappointed, is that it? Disappointed? What is it that you wanted me to do, exactly?’ Rashid started out with not a small amount of malice in his voice. ‘Blow up Buckingham Palace? Would that get your attention? Is that what you want? Strap myself to some explosives? Is that it? What do you want from me?’ Rashid’s voice was raised now.

‘All right. All right. You lot. Move it outside. No domestics in here. Out you go.’ The policewoman was standing by the door, holding it wide and ushering them out. ‘That’s it then for tonight and leave Buckingham Palace out of it and all.’

The rain had stopped, but it was cold and the wind had picked up. Outside they were no longer performing for anyone, nor were they enclosed and the tension momentarily seemed to drop away. But Rashid’s fury was still with him and his English crumbled with the strain of it.

‘Do you know, I’ve had it with you.’ His accent became stronger and as his pronounciation weakened Lisa became more resolute. She stood with her bag over her shoulder, her arms across her chest, her jacket puffed out under it. The manifest effect of her stance was one of rebuttal and indignation.

‘I don’t have time for this, OK, Rashid?’ Lisa retorted. ‘I’ve been sitting here waiting for over an hour. I thought you really were in trouble and I thought I could help, but you’re not, so there’s no point in me hanging around. I’m off, all right?’

To Rashid it felt as though the wind isolated him on the street. It seemed to require him to shout, as though he was on a stage and it was a crowd not the wind that roared past his ears.

‘Of course you don’t have time for this. You only have time for the brown and the destitute – victim types, isn’t it? You do what? The politically repressed only? I don’t know why it took me so long to see it.’

‘How dare you? How dare you ?’ Lisa started. ‘After all I’ve done! And you! You’re just… so ungrateful!’ she screamed. ‘The lot of you!’

Khalil and Iman had formed a wall next to Rashid and they watched her walk off. Khalil put his arm around Rashid’s shoulders and Iman came up close to him.

‘You really gave it to her .’

‘He really did,’ said Khalil.

‘Oh, leave me alone. I’m sick of this, all of this. I don’t want to be politically engaged, OK? I don’t want it. I’m not like you two, or Mama or Sabri or even Baba; I just want out. All right? Out of the whole damn shit. Did you see that? That… that bitch would have been happier to have me locked up on some trumped-up charge for the next twenty years. Then she really would have loved me.’

‘Come on, Rashid, come on. I haven’t seen you for months. Let’s go and just, I don’t know, spend time together. I missed you ya zalame , really.’

‘I’m not in the mood; just leave me alone. I have nothing to say on any of the things you want to talk about. Leave me out of it, all right?’

And with that Rashid walked off into the darkness, fishing his cigarettes out of his plastic bag of belongings, lighting one by a streetlight and letting the smoke get whisked away up into the sky above him.

Gloria was dead and his mother had killed her. Each time Rashid looked at the burnt-out oily-looking stump of his marijuana plant he cursed his mother. And he could not stop looking at it. The stump meant one thing and one thing only. His mother didn’t care for him. Not one bit. He didn’t give a shit whether she was a hijacking legend or not. She managed to look after every other tree, plant, root or vegetable in the vicinity of their apartment, but his cherished Gloria had been neglected and had died from that neglect. It was unforgivable. There were even yellowed cigarette butts, squeezed flat by desperate fingers, sticking out of the soil. He swore at her unconvincingly in his mind . He heard her voice and the scrape of the metal outdoor table being brought around the edge of the house, as it was every morning, and could not swear at her any more. All he really wanted was for her to ask him how he was, but who would admit to that?

‘Asleep, of course,’ he could hear her saying. He was surprised that Sabri had so much as asked. Rashid looked around the room from where he lay. His most precious belongings, including branches of Gloria’s remains (it would not have taken much, just a bit of water, a bit of sun, a bit of love), were arrayed on the floor around him in black plastic bags that blocked his way as he tried to move around, rustling and crunching horribly when he lost his footing. He had already crushed four CD cases that way and there were wires everywhere, coming out of his computer and his stereo. He had not been able to get his computer up and running yet, because his desk for some (unconvincing) reason had been left upstairs. Another lie . In place of where his desk should have been was a new freezer, still wrapped in plastic, which belonged to one of the families camped upstairs in their old apartment; it would be stored there, he was told, until such a time as their house was rebuilt.

If it were ever rebuilt. The building work kept slumping with the cuts in the concrete supply. And at the amount it cost, his mother kept saying, you would think that it was ground out of diamonds. He would be gone before the freezer was.

And there was that boy, too, Sabri’s little prodigy, Wael, the middle grandson of Abu Omar. The boy was so principled, so dedicated to the cause that he had refused to leave with his family and had been taken in by Sabri who had decided, in his great benevolence, out of the largesse of his omnipotent magnanimity, on a de facto adoption of the little shit. The squit of a boy must have had at least six stomachs, the amount his mother cooked for him. ‘We’d developed a relationship over the years,’ Sabri had said of the boy, ‘an understanding.’ What understanding? Rashid wondered. Sabri had barely gone downstairs. Did they communicate out of the window? ‘He’s the same age that Naji would have been,’ Sabri kept saying. But that didn’t matter either to Rashid, because it was irrelevant crap. The Strip was full of boys of the age that Naji would have been. It was bursting at the seams with them: an unbalanced demographic disaster. What did Sabri need this boy for? To snoop on him probably, Rashid thought. He had spotted the boy down by the disused playground the last time he had gone out to score. ‘Greetings, Ammo Rashid,’ the little bugger had said when he realised that Rashid had seen him. At least they had the decency to put the kid upstairs and give Rashid a room on their floor. A room with a bubble-wrapped freezer in the middle of it, but a room no less. He should count himself lucky.