Christmas on the Island Read online

  ‘Also, Santa Claus,’ said Ash. ‘I have a letter for him.’

  ‘You can’t write!’ said Ib viciously.

  ‘I’S CAN!’

  Ash jumped up and retrieved a faintly grubby piece of folded paper from his school bag. There were letters on it. They were completely incomprehensible, and mostly went from right to left, but they were there, which Saif took as evidence of progress of sorts and Lorna had said in his last assessment wasn’t notably worse than some of the locals. Thinking about Lorna again he had a sudden flashback to the look on her face as she’d lain, spread out beneath him on the bed, and it made him blush, so he concentrated hard on the paper.

  ‘What does this say?’ he said. ‘Could you read it for me?’

  ‘Abba can’t read,’ asserted Ash confidently.

  ‘Nobody can read that nonsense, you baby,’ said Ib.

  ‘Ibrahim! Stop it!’ ordered Saif. ‘Ash is trying, and I hope you’re trying too.’

  Ib shrugged. He understood everything in class and was performing very well in mathematics and anything science-related – just as his father had. When it came to English and writing things down, he wasn’t remotely motivated or interested; his spelling and grammar were atrocious, and truth be told, he wasn’t doing that much better than Ash, although he could read in English now.

  ‘Who cares?’

  ‘Everyone,’ said Saif. Next year, assuming they were still here, Ib should have to start weekly boarding at the secondary on the mainland. Saif was dreading it – he couldn’t bear the thought of sending his boy away when he had only just returned. In fact, he was planning on keeping him back another year but didn’t quite know how to break it to Ib.

  ‘If you can’t learn to spell properly, you won’t be able to move up a grade,’ he warned, and was somewhat comforted to see Ibrahim shrug as if he didn’t care. Keeping him back a year would punt the problem down the road a little; he remained small compared to the other boys too.

  He was just thinking he should discuss it with Neda, their social worker on the mainland, when his phone rang and it was her. Pleased, he picked it up and said a cheery good morning, but Neda’s tone was grave.

  ‘Can you talk privately?’ she said.

  Saif frowned at the boys, who were kicking one another under the table, and moved into the next room, his heart pounding suddenly.

  ‘What?’ he said. When he was nervous, he often became brusque without necessarily realising it.

  ‘You need to come to Glasgow.’

  ‘What? Why?’

  ‘I can’t tell you over the phone, I’m afraid.’

  ‘Is it Amena? Something about Amena?’

  He remembered the last time. It had been the Home Office who had contacted him, not the social work department, although he had long given up attempting to work out the vagaries of the British government departments. He was grateful, that was all, and felt that they were grateful to him for providing a useful service on Mure as well and that that was all that mattered.

  ‘You have to tell me what it is.’

  ‘I’m afraid I can’t.’

  ‘Can I bring the boys?’

  There was a long pause.

  ‘Best not.’

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Thank goodness for Mrs Laird, who could always step in, and Jeannie, the only person he could talk to that morning, explaining that he had to get to Glasgow urgently. Jeannie understood this meant government business and simply nodded, concerned about the shy, dedicated doctor she’d come to be very fond of, and set about trying to find a locum in Christmas week who’d drop everything to come to a remote island for an unspecified amount of time, as hapless a task as she knew.

  Fortunately, the surgery was quiet at Christmas. Jeannie had several private views on how much better people felt when they were busy and didn’t have time to sit around bothering themselves about nothing and taking themselves off to the doctor’s every five minutes. Of course, they’d all be back after Christmas, complaining about stomach aches when the answer was clearly that they’d been entirely unable to lay off the mince pies.

  Jeannie also thought that people were unnecessarily harsh on the subject of medical receptionists.

  Saif kissed the boys as they finished their breakfasts, telling them he just had a couple of things to do on the mainland.

  ‘Are you going to see Father Santa?’ said Ash, who had the whole thing completely confused.

  ‘There’s no such thing,’ said Ib shortly. This didn’t upset Ash quite as much as it might have done as he had only begun believing in Santa Claus five weeks before.

  ‘Bring a tree,’ he ordered peremptorily and Saif kissed him on the head once more, ordered them both to finish their porridge and headed off for the early morning ferry. He had two minutes to grab a coffee at Flora’s and did so, finding himself unable to stop checking out her stomach.

  ‘Stop that,’ she hissed at him.

  ‘I’m doing nothing,’ he protested.

  ‘You do! And it’s a secret.’

  ‘There’s nobody else in here. And you need a scan. We have ultrasound.’

  Flora blanched. She hadn’t thought about that. Oh God, she would too.

  ‘Can you do it here? In the kitchen?’

  ‘No,’ snorted Saif. ‘I do not walk about village with a scanner. Come to the surgery.’

  ‘Hmm,’ said Flora. ‘Where are you off to?’

  Saif didn’t want to think about it. He had been terrifying himself with what it might be ever since Neda had phoned. Or delighting himself. But when they’d found the boys . . . he’d got a letter.

  But they were juniors. He should call the Home Office line.

  He couldn’t bear to. That tiny fragment of hope sparking in him . . . he couldn’t bear to extinguish it. Not yet.

  He couldn’t allow himself to think of Lorna at all.

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Neda met him at the featureless detention centre door. She offered him what he already knew would be a cup of the worst coffee in the history of the world, and he shook his head.

  Neda was about five foot ten inches, her hair cut close to her head except for a small flat-top, large gold earrings swinging from her ears, wearing a bright pink trouser suit – normally she was the last person to look intimidated in the world. Her confidence, straight-talking and certainty Saif had never found anything other than comforting.

  Today she looked concerned, and he began to feel nervous. He followed her through to her tiny office, overflowing with bursting files that looked to Saif like great big compendiums of heaving misery, tied up in string but spilling out everywhere, each one of them families divided; war and misery and separation. He tried to look somewhere else.

  A tall man entered the room and introduced himself as being from the Home Office. Saif was suddenly so nervous he couldn’t remember the man’s name and could barely shake his hand.

  ‘Okay,’ said Neda. ‘As you know there’s been a lot of cutbacks in the refugee service, and they’re winding up the programme.’

  Saif did know. He could not – would never – understand the government’s reluctance, particularly in sparse, underpopulated areas like Scotland where they desperately needed people to work, to stop taking in desperate doctors, engineers, workers, families who only wanted to pay their way in exchange for a safe place to lay their heads, without bombs. But questioning politics was absolutely not something he was going to go anywhere near.

  Neda glanced at the tall man apologetically.

  ‘They thought this might be easier with someone you know. I’m sorry.’

  She tailed off. Saif simply nodded. Please let her get on with it. Please.

  ‘We have . . . we have some footage.’

  She looked at him.

  ‘I have to warn you. It’s rather upsetting.’

  Saif found himself blinking very rapidly.

  ‘We can’t . . . we can’t identify the person in it.’

  He remained si
lent.

  ‘We think it might be your wife.’

  * * *

  Saif was gripping the side of the chair. He wanted to be anywhere else right then. Back home with the boys draped on him watching Hey Duggee. In the surgery listening to Canna Morris who thought that he needed to hear his full theory of exactly how he’d come to get a haemorrhoid. In Lorna’s . . . No.

  He squeezed his eyes tight shut and opened them again, full of misery.

  The man had moved forwards and Saif noticed that a television and an old-fashioned video recorder had been set up in the corner of the room. Neda started closing the blinds in her office. Saif started to shake uncontrollably.

  ‘We have no DNA match,’ said the man. ‘But the pick-up was near Yarmouk, and we think the timings might match.’

  There was a lot of fuzz and rattling at the beginning of the tape; the date stamp was for November. At first, he couldn’t make out what he was looking at; then he realised it was a stone wall, which he was obviously seeing through a camera mounted to a man’s helmet – a soldier, clearly. There were orders being barked in his own language and they seemed to be moving through some sort of tunnel. Dust was falling from the ceiling. Someone called a halt, then they moved into a small space; a cellar possibly.

  In the corner of the cellar was a figure, crouched over. Saif felt his heart beating incredibly fast. Neda was next to him then, sitting down. He felt her hand on his arm, attempting to be reassuring.

  A figure was bowed over, shaking in fear. It was filthy, dressed in a head covering and a shapeless dress. Saif leaned forwards. The darkness of the cellar meant that everything was lit by torchlight; people’s eyes glowed strangely.

  Someone asked the figure her name and who she was, but there was no answer. Eventually, someone else leaned out and gently touched her arm to try and get her to turn around, and she flinched and shook like a dog.

  Saif found tears springing to his eyes. He couldn’t tell – he couldn’t see – she was the right height, more or less, but it was so difficult to tell. He could see a long strand of dark hair escaping from the head covering, but that told him absolutely nothing.

  ‘Please turn around,’ he muttered to himself, even as the soldiers, clearly nervous about being rough, asked her to come out with them.

  One shone his light directly on her face and she veered backwards, her hands to her face as if she was being blinded. Saif immediately wondered how long she’d spent in the dark. Her clothes were filthy.

  ‘Where is she now?’

  The man looked awkward.

  ‘We tried . . . we tried to bring her in. But she ran away.’

  Saif moved closer and closer until his nose was nearly at the screen. He put his fingers out.

  ‘Freeze it,’ he ordered, and the man did so, as close onto her face as he could get. It was so dark. Then Saif noticed something up the side of the woman’s face. He gradually made out a scar.

  How could he not tell? It had only been three years. Surely he would know her anywhere? Surely? How could he ever forget that beautiful face, the long straight nose, the tinkling laugh? How could he be looking into another face and not even know if it was that of his wife?

  ‘Move it on,’ he said. The idea that Amena, so funny, so clever, had been reduced to this – an animal, living in a hole. His heart was breaking. Was that her?

  The man pressed play.

  ‘Stop it again.’

  Now the woman had moved her head to the side and he traced her profile, frowning. Her mouth was open and he saw that several teeth were missing, and it felt like a punch in the stomach. He did not want to think of how she had lost them. Her beautiful smile. But was it her?

  How much of how you recognised someone, after all, was in the turn of their head, or the way they stood and moved. And this person was contorted, feral . . . but he was making excuses.

  They had moved it on several times when he saw it.

  ‘Stop.’

  It paused.

  ‘Move it back. Stop it again.’

  There. It was right there. And he didn’t know how he felt about it.

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  ‘It’s okay. We understand,’ Neda was saying, her voice gentle. There was a plastic cup of the horrible coffee next to him. Unable to think of anything else to do, he picked it up and drank it. It was foul.

  The man was packing up in the room. Nobody mentioned what Saif had done to the video player after he’d apologised profusely, offered to pay for the damage.

  The fact that it was the woman’s ears that gave her away was ridiculous to Saif. He would have known Amena’s little curved ears anywhere; both the boys had exactly the same ones – little shells, flat to the skull. She thought they were too small and rarely wore earrings; he adored them. This woman – this poor bedraggled creature – had ears that stuck out more normally, and not in a way that violence could have caused.

  The man had let the video run on: she had started to scream, and Saif had pulled the machine out of the wall to make it stop and hurled it at the ground.

  ‘How dare you show it to me?’ he had shouted.

  ‘Because we wanted to help,’ the man had said mildly, picking up the heavy machine as Neda settled Saif back down, made him take deep breaths until he was at least semi-calm. He ran his hands through his thick black hair.

  ‘What happened to her?’ he demanded.

  ‘The soldiers got her out of there,’ said the man. He did not add that she had been chained to the wall. ‘Then she just ran . . . But we’ve . . .’

  He turned to Saif.

  ‘We’ve been trying to find her. We’re worried. And she matched the description we had on file – which means, as your wife, she counts as under allied protection.’

  Saif’s head jerked up, surprised.

  ‘Which means it’s our job to find her.’

  Saif shook his head.

  ‘I am so sorry. That is not her.’

  The man nodded.

  ‘Well, I think they’re still pretty determined to find her anyway.’

  ‘I’m sorry you had to come all this way,’ said Neda. ‘I’m sorry you had this shock. We couldn’t discuss it over the phone; you understand.’

  Saif could barely speak.

  ‘I hope you do find her.’

  The man nodded and left the room. Neda opened the blinds.

  ‘I’m so sorry,’ she said again. ‘About all of this.’

  ‘It’s fine,’ said Saif. But it was nothing like fine. Everything was churning up in him; everything threatened to overwhelm him. What if Amena was in similar circumstances? What if she was living through this daily hell, this living agony? Suddenly he wanted to lay his head on the table and sleep for a hundred years.

  ‘Don’t think about it,’ counselled Neda. ‘There’s every chance . . .’

  There was not every chance. There was zero chance that his wife was alive in happy circumstances and hadn’t come looking for him and her sons. In fact, the military man had made it even worse; confirmed that if she had come forward, the British government would treat him as a priority case, would help them search, would have offered her protection. And here was a woman, who must be someone else’s mother, wife, daughter, sister, being kept underground like an animal. And this was going to be in his head for ever now. Saif thought he was going to be sick.

  ‘Are you going to go back today?’ said Neda. Saif nodded. Then he looked up. He had made a decision.

  ‘Do you have time for lunch?’ he said.

  Neda nodded. Of course.

  * * *

  Saif couldn’t eat when it came to it, so he bought a sandwich to play with while Neda drank more coffee and carefully ate a salad, waiting for him to say what he had to say.

  ‘I want to ask. Is it possible to move?’ said Saif directly.

  ‘What do you mean?’ said Neda carefully, putting down her fork.

  ‘Move from the island. Move somewhere like here. Glasgow.’

  Ned
a blinked.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Is it possible or not?’

  ‘Well, there’s a huge shortage of GPs . . .’ mused Neda. ‘But I have to tell you. It would be in very difficult areas. Drug abuse, alcohol abuse, child abuse, stabbings . . . Everywhere most staff don’t want to be. I know you think Britain is a rich country, but there are some very, very poor areas, and a lot of them are around here.’

  ‘Good,’ said Saif. ‘At least I could be useful.’

  ‘You’re useful in Mure. Very, if the reports I get back are anything to go by.’

  Saif shrugged. ‘It is blood pressure, vaccinations, stitching. Nothing difficult.’

  ‘Isn’t that good for you though?’

  Saif shrugged. ‘I am good doctor,’ he said without false modesty.

  ‘And the boys – they’re settling in well, aren’t they?’

  ‘But here in Glasgow . . .’ Saif was still feeling stung about the nativity play. And something new: that he needed to be around people who would understand. People who were suffering. Not the contented people of Mure who knew so little of what passed beyond their own tiny borders. People who had lost, people who had been through hard times. It was a sign, he was convinced, even though he was not a man who was remotely superstitious. He was being punished. To see that woman’s feral face. Because he had dared to love another.

  Saif pressed on.

  ‘There would be more boys like them. There is a mosque. There are people who look like us.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Neda. That was undeniably true. ‘But they’ve made friends . . .’

  ‘They don’t need friends. They need their family. Which is me,’ said Saif shortly.

  Neda leaned back in her chair and looked at him.

  ‘What’s really going on, Saif?’ she said. Saif was silent. These were not the kind of conversations he generally got involved in.

  ‘You saw what happened in there?’

  Neda shook her head. ‘No. You’ve had this idea before. This isn’t new.’

  She leaned forwards.

  ‘There’d need to be a very good reason to move you from somewhere that is working out so well. Of course it’s not been easy, Saif. Nobody expected it to be easy, to move to somewhere so different from everything you know; to take the boys on yourself. But changing the landscape isn’t going to change that.’