He did his level best to keep his voice calm.
‘We don’t know where Mama is,’ he said softly. ‘But lots of people are looking for her. I just want you to tell me a bit about how you think about her and how you feel.’
Catastrophe unfolded. Ash collapsed into hysterical tears, like those of a two-year-old: endless, sobbing until he was hyperventilating. He cried until he threw up the sandwiches and scones all over the grass, whereupon Ibrahim called him a disgusting baby, which made him cry more and Ib stormed off in disgust.
Saif tried to hold on to Ash and move him away, even as a large column of ants came to investigate the spew, and grabbed his phone to call Neda, cursing when he remembered, yet again, that there wasn’t a bloody mobile signal in the middle of one of the most peaceful, technologically advanced countries in the world – and he swore again.
‘I just want Mama back,’ Ash was howling and Saif rocked him like a baby, while shouting for Ibrahim, at first crossly, and then more and more worriedly. The fell was trickier than it looked; there were plenty of gullies and precipices one could easily get lost down.
‘Come on,’ he said to Ash. ‘We need to go find Ibrahim, right?’
Ash just howled harder. ‘Now Ib has gone too!’
‘He hasn’t gone. We just need to find him.’
Saif’s head was instantly filled with horror stories of children drowning in gullies and tripping and falling over rocks.
‘IB!’ he roared, but the wind carried his voice away. He swore massively and rapidly in English, which he didn’t think counted as proper offensive swearing, even though Ash looked up at him as if he totally understood what he was saying.
‘Where’s Ibrahim? Where’s my brother?’
Ash’s hysteria seemed to be taking on an even higher pitch. To make matters worse, the black clouds that could appear out of nowhere on even the sunniest days, like a speeded-up film, were gathering overhead. That’s all they needed, a quick drenching.
He stood up and gazed around. Nothing stirred, except for the wind through the straw and the lambs hopping through the lower fields. Oh goodness.
Joel was following behind the boys as they walked in a crocodile, finding an odd sense of recognition – even though the dialect they spoke was different – of the memories; of boys together. They bawled and hollered and laughed out loud and Jan and Charlie let them – as long as they were roughhousing and not being cruel – shake the kinks and the wiggles out, bay at the moon, tire themselves out, expend their energy without feeling that they were being troublesome; without having to conform to an institutionalised Victorian style of behaviour that so many boys simply weren’t designed for. There was some singing of songs, including one that got abruptly halted for reasons Joel didn’t understand, as it couldn’t possibly be worse than the filthily rude rugby song they’d been on a moment or so before. Jan made a face and said ‘sectarian’ which left him no wiser than before.
The clouds were coming in, but Joel had learned fairly early on that weather was simply a condition of clothing – nothing to revel in or complain about, but merely to be got through with a song and a lot of shouting. The boys had bird-spotting manuals, which Joel had thought they would ignore, but they were actually very officious about spotting the various breeds, and laughing at one another when they made mistakes. They were just about to stop at the top of the river, where there were gentle rapids that Charlie let them kayak down, when he caught a flash of a waterproof out of the corner of his eye.
At first Joel thought it was one of their boys, but when he looked closer he caught sight of a thin, darker-skinned lad ploughing blindly through the trees, tripping and stumbling up the hill. Charlie caught his eye and nodded and Joel peeled off and headed towards him.
He hadn’t met Saif’s children, but he guessed pretty quickly that this was who this must be. There was something almost transfixing in the boy’s misery and rage, and he wished he spoke a few words of Arabic.
As he drew closer, the threatening rain began to fall, and the boy, who still hadn’t seen him, grabbed for a tree root, didn’t make it and stumbled down the hill, tumbling over the too-large and unfamiliar wellingtons he was wearing.
Joel leaped down the copse and grabbed him by the shoulder just in time to stop him tripping back even further. The boy lashed out.
‘It’s okay,’ said Joel. ‘It’s okay, it’s okay. I can help you.’
‘NO ONE HELP ME!’ shrieked the boy, and Joel didn’t know whether he meant no one ever had or that he didn’t want anyone to, and realised of course that it could easily be both.
‘NO ONE HELP ME!’ the child cried out again piteously. ‘NO ONE HELP ME!’ and Joel looked at him, and he saw himself, and he saw little Caleb, and he saw a gulf he didn’t know how to cross.
He saw all of those things before the boy, to Joel’s utter surprise, collapsed into his arms, and Joel stiffly put his arms around him and said, ‘There, there,’ although he didn’t know why people said that, or whether it helped, or maybe it did, and then he said, because he knew this much was true: ‘People want to help you. They do.’
Saif was soaked and bedraggled by the time he’d carted Ash halfway across the damn mountain and found Joel and Charlie and a bunch of other people with his boy, warm and dry in a vast tent, a fire crackling outside. Ib wasn’t saying much, but the other boys didn’t seem to care about that. They’d met plenty of quiet ones in their time too. Caleb was sitting right next to him.
‘Oh, thank goodness,’ said Saif. He wanted to be cross, to ask the boy what the hell he thought he was doing, but he was just too relieved. Actually what he wanted to do was cry.
‘Do you want to stay and have some sausages?’ said Charlie jovially. ‘They’re veggie.’
‘Are they?’ said one of the lads. ‘Chuff’s sake.’
‘You’ll have to pay for them,’ interjected Jan. ‘We’re a charity.’
‘Um. Yes. Yes, I think we would,’ said Saif.
‘You know,’ Neda said on the phone when he finally got a signal again, with a smile in her voice that made Saif think that perhaps everything hadn’t been quite as dreadful as he’d expected. ‘This is a good start. Tears, anger, shouting, pain … These are all feelings. Letting them out. It’s a good starting point.’
‘Are you serious?’ said Saif. ‘I nearly lost one of them.’
‘Yes, but you didn’t,’ said Neda.
Saif glanced over to where the two boys were snuggled up to one another back in the house, drinking hot chocolate and watching television – in English, hallelujah, even though it appeared to be some strange adult drama full of people confronting each other in public houses; however, in his state of mind he’d take it. And of course Neda was right: nobody had ever said this would be easy.
Then he took a deep breath and went and turned the television off.
‘Let’s talk about Mama,’ he said, and he brought out the pictures he had stored on his phone, and they looked at every single one of them.
There was no need to talk about the last thing the boys remembered, that Neda had shown him on the transcripts, that he couldn’t allow himself to dwell on, not yet, possibly not ever: that one morning, after a night of heavy shelling around Damascus, Amena had gone to fetch bread, leaving the boys at home for safety, and had never been seen again.
Instead, they talked about the food she had cooked and the songs she used to sing until both the boys had inched closer, and Ash curled across his lap, which he’d expected, but Ibrahim fitted himself under his arm, which he had not, and they talked into the night, gradually quieting, until all three of them fell fast asleep on the sofa, tangled up like puppies.
Chapter Fifty-three