Selma Dabbagh - Out of It

He, Rashid, was dead. His body was lying out in front of the TV in a state of undress. He was dead but they were talking about someone else. Typical, he thought, typical.

‘His parents were assassinated in Beirut,’ Iman was explaining to a Western woman sitting with her back to the door. ‘Intellectuals. Both of them.’

‘He’s fought for the cause all his life. A man of integrity. The type we need more of,’ Sabri added.

‘A hero you could say.’ Sabri’s mother directed this at the passed-out Ziyyad. ‘Could be my own, don’t you think? Looks like he could be my son, no?’

‘The son you never had,’ Rashid said, but his mouth was dry and the scene was so surreal he didn’t know whether his words had been spoken or dreamt. He didn’t understand how, in a couple of hours, his house could be so changed. His sister fawning over a man lying with his jaw hanging open on a bed sheet; Khalil whispering to a bespectacled white girl (and he had told Khalil all about English girls after Lisa; he had figured it all out and yet Khalil apparently had not listened to a word of it).

‘Ah, Rashid.’ His mother eventually noticed him. He was there. ‘This is Ziyyad Ayyoubi.’

‘He’s been shot by his own people,’ Sabri added.

‘We’re looking after him,’ his mother continued. ‘He’s a brave man.’

‘Wonderful,’ Rashid said. ‘Wonderful.’ And he wandered into the corridor and leant over the basin. He splashed water over his face and picked the sand out of the corners of his eyes, rubbing them before snorting water up into his nose from the palm of his hand and blowing it out while holding the bridge. He did this several times until he started feeling a post-swim tingle of water going down the wrong way somewhere in his nasal passages and realised that Khalil was standing behind him.

‘You OK?’ Khalil asked.

‘Sure,’ Rashid said, drying his hands on his trousers and his face on a piece of bandage left next to the basin. ‘Sure. Just hungry. Really, really hungry. You want to eat?’

Over a plate of bamya and rice in the kitchen, Rashid discovered that Khalil had brilliantly discovered two heroes in one afternoon, one of either sex: Eva ( ‘So brave! I mean what’s it to her? She could’ve got killed!’ ) and Ziyyad ( ‘Did you know his parents were assassinated? And they tried to get him too? A gifted leader, I understand.’ ). He had apparently also formed a solid friendship with Sabri of the type Rashid had never had ( ‘I never knew that it was Abu Omar who had informed on Sabri. Why’re you looking at me like that? Didn’t you know? He just told me.’ ).

Wonderful. Wonderful. Rashid had approved but didn’t look up from his bowl. That was it. Rashid decided he hated all forms of hero worship. All forms of secrecy. He realised that he had had it with the farce of family and that romantic relationships should be banned ( ‘What d’you think? It looks like Iman has struck something up with Ziyyad, don’t you think?’ ). The bamya was all slime; someone had picked out all the okra, all the meat; it was a tasteless tomato soup with loose vegetable fibres that he had to force himself to ingest. On the sideboard was one of his mother’s trays for Sabri. Bet he got meat, thought Rashid. It was the worst bamya Rashid had ever had, despite his hunger, despite the joint. His mother had probably had him in mind when she made it; she’d spooned it full of her own disdain.

Khalil was watching him. There had been a way, before, that Khalil used to look at him, that Rashid always tried not to register on a conscious level. A look that when he caught it, he wished he had not. More than love, even. He had never dwelt on it before and had preferred to pretend that it was not there. But now it was gone, Rashid missed it more than he would have believed possible.

There was no place for Rashid in the other room. They had formed a ring of seats and had positioned the unconscious Ayyoubi at its head.

He could hear Sabri’s radio: ‘… vowing to continue its aerial attacks on Palestinian territories. The Israeli officials spoke of fierce reprisals following Sunday’s failed rocket attack…’

Rashid sat alone in his bedroom, his computer at his feet on the tiles in a mangle of plugs and wiring, its screen dusty and dumb. There was no one he wished to hear from now. No news that he wanted to receive.

A group laugh burst out from the sitting room and he found himself standing very close to the window, so close that night coldness touched at his cheeks. He rolled his forehead against the chilled, bare pane.

He was not stoned any more. He was not even fuggy.

His family must have been in his room looking for something while he was out; his shirts had been pulled out of a bag on to his unmade bed. The sweatshirt Lisa used to wear was spread out flat and empty in the centre of his bed. Rashid sat with his passport open and thumbed through it, as though it was a religious text, a path to salvation. They must have been looking for a shirt for Ayyoubi.

Raised voices in agreement came from them now, and then another laugh. The sound of Khalil’s goat-like bray even cut through the argument going on between the neighbours upstairs and over the TV news broadcasts and the screams of the neighbour’s kids.

It was then that it came to him, what he needed to do. It suddenly all became clear to him.

Rashid stood up and looked at the bed, the clothes, and the bags on the floor. He looked down at his computer. He stared at the photograph in his passport. It all confirmed what had come to him, the solution that had been revealed to him.

And once he found it (his destiny), he became wired with a sensitivity to his surroundings that he had never previously experienced. The decision seemed so obvious, once found, it closed down all other choices absolutely.

A jet plane burnt through the sky above with a low wail and a heavy thud juddered the house into silence leaving only the rise and fall of the commentators’ broadcast voices.

Rashid felt above it, high up, above it all.

Wired with purpose.

Reborn.

He strutted a bit once he was past the wasteland and away from the house. The gun hanging across his back gave him the zest to do so, gave him a purpose: to belong. Rashid headed towards the place where he had been so afraid, down to the seafront, stepping over spangles of barbed wire and collapsed fencing as he went. But it was quieter down there than it had been. No trucks of men roared past and his play for visibility was not picked up on. There was no one there. Even the sky was quieter. He could hear a drone buzz, but when he stopped to listen that was all he could hear. A gunship stood in the moonlit sea, stuck like a rig.

He crossed back towards the town, taking a different route along the edges of some farmland; the greenhouse plastic crackled and flapped in the wind and the earth was rutted in the ancient ways of Iraq, of Egypt. The moon illuminated it all with its fullness and across a field a porch light warmed the doorway of a house into an orange cube. How wondrous at this time of night this place was; even the deep, thick smell of manure was rich in its dankness. Rashid felt he could see and feel everything twice, with a heightened perception, a touched-up brightness, a childlike sense of wonderment and awe.

He ignored the helicopters circling over to the south, the clouds whirling like smoke in the shafts of light shooting down from their nostrils. Instead, he looked straight above him at the night clouds, high puffs of them stuck on to a moving dome pricked with stars beyond which was a fine muddled net of whiteness.