Selma Dabbagh - Out of It

Rashid worried that he had gone too far, that he had pushed his luck with this boy, whose eyes were now glazing over while staring hard at Rashid.

‘Understand something?’ the boy asked. ‘You want to understand something? Well, I tell you that this show, this part of it: this is my show, fahem keef? You see how it is?’ He lifted the phone up by the chain that it was attached to around his neck. ‘I’ve got the number in here to do the car, see? So it’s my show. But this time, just as, you know, the usual strategy requires, there’s someone else too. He’s just the lookout, but you should know that he’s there.’

‘Where exactly?’

‘OK, well, we’re here, you go straight down here and you hit the playground in front of you, yes? OK, now what you do is… the car is to your right when you turn into the main street. It’s blue, third car along. Opposite where the car is parked down that small side street next to the playground is the lookout. Now…’ The boy licked the end of his index finger repeatedly with his tongue, then looked again at Rashid as he rubbed his forefinger and thumb together as if he was about to start counting money. ‘ Fa , this Ayyoubi, batal aanjad ?’ he asked. ‘He’s a hero, really?’

‘ Batal aanjad. He’s really a hero,’ Rashid confirmed. ‘ Aanjad , really,’ Rashid said seriously.

‘Well, if you’re prepared to die for him,’ the boy smirked and puffed himself out a bit, ‘ Ya zalame, I’d die for no one. Never,’ he said proudly. ‘Except Palestine, of course.’

‘Of course,’ Rashid replied. ‘I understand.’

‘OK,’ said the boy, rolling his tongue around the front of his mouth between the gums and the lips as he thought, nodding his head in a way that seemed to indicate some kind of delinquent purpose. ‘ Shuuf. See here, here’s what you’ve got to do,’ and he told Rashid what it was that Rashid had to do.

‘I can trust you, ya zalame ?’ Rashid asked.

‘With your life, brother,’ the boy said, bending the dry-cleaner’s ticket in half and putting it in his back pocket, ‘with your life.’

And with that Rashid had agreed to do what it was that the boy had said he had to do.

It was just around the corner, but it must have been that Iman had not moved for a while from where she stood. She had been frozen somewhere in time and place on a badly lit street on a strip of land in the far corner of the Mediterranean where people fought over something which she could not remember. ‘We’re two sides of a walnut,’ Rashid had said to her. When was that? When she had cried at school in Switzerland frustrated by another move, another loss of friends, another departure of her parents to greater things? Was it in an airport somewhere? On a border? ‘We’ll never be apart. I’ll always be with you.’

The people were coming out of everywhere with the explosion, out of dark houses with torches and candles. There was a cameraman jogging past her with a furry pink boom microphone and a flak jacket and she was being pushed along too with the crowd around the corner to where the flames fed off tangled cars, fuel and the lives of idealistic people. She found herself in the crowd where she was one of the women, one of many dressed like her in thoubs and scarves, screaming and crying for the loss of her brother, her brother.

‘Ayyoubi!’ the scream goes up. ‘They killed Ayyoubi!’

‘A dead fighter!’ someone is crying as the stretcher is carried above her, past her head, but it is not Rashid; she can see the legs, the size of the body, the feet are not his, the shoes are not his.

‘From the Authority!’ they cry. ‘A fighter from the Authority!’

‘They wired his car! Ayyoubi was the target!’

‘Death to the Islamists!’ a cry went up from a boy. ‘Up with the Mainstream party of the Authority!’

‘I can’t stand it any more!’ a woman next to Iman wailed, beating her chest. ‘I just can’t take it any more, not if we are killing ourselves. No! I can’t take it! Not after all we’ve been through.’

‘What an explosion! The force of it! No trace of him left from the car! Must’ve been right under him!’

‘Just some of his jacket here. See, the green. I would always recognise that jacket.’

‘Rashid.’ Everything was pouring from her nose, her eyes; it was messy, red and stinging all around her face and each time she wiped it away with the arm of the thoub it was back until she could not see. ‘Rashid,’ she was wailing now and there was someone behind her, a figure, the bulk of Umm Nidal from the Women’s Committee, holding her up.

‘You can’t find your brother, habibti ? He probably followed the body, with the other men. Go that way. There, go,’ and with that Iman was guided to go back the way she came, with a big warm hand on her back. Not knowing what else there was for her to do or who it was she was to grieve for, Iman joined the crowd mourning the death of the unknown fighter.

If the boy’s plan had involved taking care of the lookout, then it could have been said to have gone according to plan.

The main street had been even darker than the one he had left the boy in. From the moment he turned into it, he could feel the blood pumping in his ears as though he were in an upturned boat on the shore with the sea pounding at it. The moon was still fat and bright in the sky and he felt his way out into the street, pat, pat, only so many single steps to the car door, only so much space to cover. He concentrated hard on the practical element of it, and by trying hard to forget all else: this new brightness under his skin, the drugged-out beat of his heart. His breathing that was so heavy it was like someone there, behind him, huuh, huuh, huuh, like an obese old man, huuh, but it was him; he knew it was him. If he forgot all else and concentrated solely on the line of cars: the dents picked up in the half-light, the bent wing mirrors, the stickers on back windows, the stuffed dogs and leopard-skin fur on the back ledges. He could move forwards, as he usually did, one step before the other, the one foot picking up and coming down, and then the next.

Startled by a foe in the grasses, a cat leapt off the low wall that ran around the playground in an awkward backward twist, as though pulled by a string from its neck. Rashid looked over at it instinctively, without thinking, looked to see whether it was the ginger tabby of that afternoon and by doing so he saw, and was seen, by the fighter, the lookout.

He had expected the lookout to be younger than the boy, or at least smaller. He had not expected him to be the man with the Stalin moustache from the day of Abu Omar’s arrest. ‘You,’ said the man, who was far closer to Rashid than the boy had led him to believe. ‘You?’ and despite all that Rashid had not expected, he had at least expected it more than this man had and it was this advantage of shock – a two-second, perhaps a five-second advantage – which had allowed Rashid to think, ‘But this must be how you do it,’ and to pull down the trigger, aiming the implement at the man’s gut protruding like a question mark towards him. That had been all that was needed before something jumped away from Rashid with a bloody-minded resolve and then whipped back at him with an awful thwack that made him stumble. He was thrown against the car, a side mirror cracking at his hipbone and the lookout was down.

One second, maybe two, the jacket was off and thrown into the car, the gun too. Inside with the door open, he cranked the window down, down. The beating pulse coming now from his face; it was rushed with blood; his head centred his world. The shot would have been heard. Beyond the rushing layer of sea about his head there were voices coming from the houses. Rashid closed the car door and leant in through the window. It was a question of the boy, the question of the reliability of the boy, the triggering of the device with the boy’s phone. He turned the key in the ignition to make it more real. Now! his body and his head screamed, running towards the corner, heading away from the car, down towards the small alley, to somewhere tight and secret. Now! it screamed again as he reached the turn. Do it now, boy. Press it! And then the blast came like the door of heaven slamming behind him and he was lifted off his feet like a cat, thrown forwards, headlong, like an inanimate thing, on to broken paving stones, wet leaflets and fragments of glass.