Selma Dabbagh - Out of It

The silly fucker had got him right there, in the heart, and he was done for, the lookout knew it. He had fallen on to one leg and then the other one just closed in all by itself. It was as though the raft he had been standing on had been tugged from under him away from where he was leaving life to rush up and down his body under his skin in waves like a sheep with a slit throat, rush up and down and out of him until it left him all together. It was all dark below and wet with a stickiness that he didn’t expect and it is only his son that the fighter thinks of now, not the other fighters and the meetings and the jealousy of that man Ayyoubi who had it all so easy and had never wanted for a thing in his life. He does not think of his mother or his father or the tent he had been born into, which had been so low that you could not step into it without lowering your head, or his father’s second wife who had made sure his father left them there when he had moved out of the camp. He does not think of these things, but just of his boy for whom he had wanted it all to be better, for whom no act was too small or too low for him to carry out. He thought only of the boy’s soft-skinned arm on his neck and the swoop of his trusting eyelashes, for that was what it was all for, but he thinks no longer as he is turning now under these waters, caught by a current in these new depths that let his body rock back and forth giving him only the consolation they can afford.

And how wonderful it was then to run, to feel the mechanism of his body moving how he wanted it to, finding within it a fuel and propulsion that he had not known he had. The synchronicity of mind and body amazing him as he hopped from side to side, along alleys creviced by a run of water in their centre: how he could do this while barely slowing himself down, how he could leap at the end of it all over the cut-up earth, fallen pillars and tent strings of the wasteland that was theirs, how he could feel his heart propelling him forwards with a love of chance, of risk, of the opportunities for tomorrow. And he loved it all: the light of the moon on the sea, the blinking, blackness of the water with the gunboats turned away for the night, for it was his night and their presence in it was not required. And he’s running in such long strides now – a beat, a beat and another – that he is flying high above it all, up, over, out of it all; flying all the way until he reaches the sea.

I would like to thank the following friends, relatives, writing professionals and institutions for taking the time to read my work and to provide advice, encouragement and support over the years: Ghassan Abu Sitta, Layla Al Maleh, Omar Al Qattan, Mitchell Albert, Lorraine Bacchus, Samia Bano, Shameen Bashir, Brenna Bhandar, the British Council, Gaenor Bruce, Emily Burnham, Clem Cairns, Caroline Cederwell, Cathy Costain, Steve Cragg, Amy Cramer, Claire, Dina, Hani, Hassan Salah, Nadia, Salma, Samira and Taysir Dabbagh, Wafa Darwish, Mick Delap, Khaled El Ali, Azza El Hassan, English PEN, Bernardine Evaristo, Fish Publishing, Emanuel Garboua, Haris Gazdar, Vanessa Gebbie, Carlo Gebler, Maggie Gee, Zeina B. Ghandour, Jo Glanville, Francisco Goldman, Katia Hadidian, Annie Hickson, David Holmes, International PEN, Randa Jarrar, Mike Jones, Frederic Joseph, Dina Kasrawi, Kavi Kittani, Rahat Kurd, Maha Ladki, Daniel Machover, Eloise Marshall, Lena Masri, Scott McGaraghan, Abdullah, Lulwa, Linda, Naser, Samir and Jumana Mutawi, Nadia Naqib, Tessa O’Neil, the late Harold Pinter, Christine Pohlmann, Adil Rahman, Caroline Rooney, Jacob Ross, Dana Sajdi, Tope Saraki, Stacy Stobl, Tales of the Decongested, Catherine Viala, Sue Said Wardell, The West Cork Literary Festival, Sarah Leah Whitson and Josh Zimmer.

Special thanks to the following friends and relatives who provided particularly thoughtful and detailed comments on earlier drafts of this novel: Paloma Baeza, Nadia Capy Osgood, Felicity Cunliffe-Lister, Claire Dabbagh, Nadia Dabbagh, Izzat Darwazeh, Christine Habbard, Graham Harfield, Elias Nasrallah and James Richard.

I am also greatly indebted to the enthusiasm and support that I had from Kate Jones, whose sudden death in February 2008 was a shock and a loss to so many. Many thanks also to Amanda (Binky) Urban at ICM and to Margaret Halton for their advice and encouragement.

I have a stupendous agent. Karolina Sutton at Curtis Brown could not do more in terms of understanding and furthering my aspirations for both the style and subject matter of my work. Her editorial comments on Out of It were incisive and invaluable. This book would have been a lesser one without them. She has always believed in me and always protected my interests and for that I am extremely grateful. Many thanks, Karolina, for everything.

A very special thank you goes to Ahdaf Soueif for praising and promoting my work as well as for making the publication of this novel possible. Her support of individual Palestinian writers, as well as her work with the Palestinian Festival of Literature (PalFest), is critical for those of us who write about a crisis that many would prefer nothing more to be heard about. Her writing is also an inspiration: In the Eye of the Sun changed my life in a way that few books have come close to doing.

Thanks also to Bloomsbury Qatar Foundation Publishing, most notably to Andy Smart, Seif Salmawy, Jehan Marei for selecting this novel and to Kathy Rooney and Safaa Mraish for working on taking it through to publication, with special thanks to Jehan for her editorial comments.

At Bloomsbury Publishing, I would firstly like to thank the reader Wala’ Qasiah from Hebron who upon finishing Out of It told Alexandra Pringle, ‘But this is what it’s like.’ Thank you Wala’. That was important and meant a lot.

I am also indebted to Clare Hey for her eye for detail, detective and editorial skills in general, to Erica Jarnes for editorial work and for seeing the text through to publication, to Alexa von Hirschberg for being so enthusiastic, to Greg Heinimann for taking my idea for a cover and making it beautiful, to Jonathan Ring for being a patient photographer with a restless subject and mainly, of course, to Alexandra Pringle who did nothing less than realise a personal (but very specific) dream by backing this novel.

Thanks to the Bashir family of Somerset Avenue, Karachi, for their extraordinary hospitality when I stayed with them to work on edits in January, and to the O’Neils of Yateem Gardens, Bahrain, for letting me have use of their house for the same purpose the following month.

On a (more) personal note, special thanks to my children, Miro and Maia, for being fabulous, funny, warm and mad, to Ranjanie Nirmala Devi John, without whose unflaggingly high standards and dedication to my family much less would be possible, to Zeina B. Ghandour for giving me a notepad and telling me to just do it, and to Abdullah Mutawi, father of my children, ex-husband and friend.

Selma Dabbagh is a British Palestinian writer based in London. Her short stories have been included in a number of anthologies, including those published by Granta and the British Council. She was the English PEN nominee for the International PEN David T.K. Wong Award. Out of It is her first novel.

First published in Great Britain 2011

Copyright © Selma Dabbagh 2011

This electronic edition published 2011 by Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

The right of Selma Dabbagh to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

Every reasonable effort has been made to trace copyright holders of material reproduced in this book, but if any have been inadvertently overlooked the publishers would be glad to hear from them.