She has a swiftly changing kaleidoscope of memories from the camp they left when she was a little girl. She remembers the yellow jerricans that stored water, which was the most precious commodity of all in Hartisheik, and the straw mats that covered the floor of their shelter.
All around the camp people put up their shelters in enclosures made from the branches of thornbushes woven together. The sheep had black heads. Sometimes the camp flooded and they couldn’t lie down on the ground at night. A thin red curtain hung between the living and cooking area of her family’s tukul, and she would play with its tattered edges, pulling at the threads until her mother chided her. Outside, the boys played football as the sun set, and the dust they kicked up turned golden.
Sofia takes pancakes to Abdi and sits with him. “Abdi, can you talk to me? It’s just me. You can tell me what happened. I promise I’ll keep it to myself if that’s what you want. Come on, Abdi.”
He doesn’t reply, even when she waves the pancakes under his nose and tells him he’ll feel better if he eats. The pancakes go cold on the plate on his desk and the hot tea Sofia brought with them goes undrunk. She loses heart and joins her mum.
Maryam has switched on the television and is staring at it. Sofia understands that her mother doesn’t want to talk, so she goes to bed early, long before her father gets home.
They’re in limbo, waiting for Abdi to speak. It’s all that matters. The waiting is disorienting and frightening.
Waking in the night, she checks the iPad. It’s charged.
She taps and scrolls, and at first she’s part disappointed and part relieved because there doesn’t seem to be anything on it that could give offer her a clue as to what’s happened.
That’s when she notices the sound file. It’s the only one in a voice memo app. It’s dated from late yesterday evening.
Sofia taps the play button and watches as a thin red line tracks across the screen under an audio graphic.
At first there’s silence, but a second or two later, Sofia hears a familiar voice.
“Where do you want me to start?” It’s a man’s voice and it sounds slurred and slow, like a drunken storyteller.
“What was it like being at the camp?”
Sofia recognizes both voices. The first is Ed Sadler; the second, her brother, Abdi. Hearing his recorded voice startles her.
“Harshek,” says Ed Sadler. He can hardly get the word out. He laughs and tries again. “Har-ti-sheik. I went to Hartisheik camp back in 1999. Nineteen ninety-nine was one of my first trips I made with Dan, or was it 1998? First or second, not sure, but anyway, 1999 was good because Fi came to meet me in Addis Ababa when I had some R&R and we went to visit those underground church things, you know? The early Christian churches?”
“How did you find conditions in the camp?” Abdi sounds very earnest, as if he’s aspiring to be a serious correspondent.
“Bad, very bad, so bad.” He’s snapping in and out of sounding very drunk and very sober. “They didn’t want the outside world to see what it was like in the camps, so visits were controlled. They did that to stop word getting out about what was happening to those people in Somalia. But you know, I’m so glad I persisted, and then Dan gave me my break. These are the sort of things you have to do and connections you have to make to get stories.”
“How long were you in the camp?” Abdi’s voice sounds small but very serious.
“Just two days. I made two visits on two days. It was amazing. Amazing people. So much tragedy, but so much humanity, too. I’d been in Somalia proper the previous year, front line, you know—flak jacket, helmet, the works, in the thick of it, bullets flying everywhere, very Black Hawk Down—so going to the camp was a continuation of that story, showing the place where people went when they’d fled that horror.”
“What was the worst thing about the visit?” Abdi says.
“The sadness, the hunger, thirst, malnutrition . . . the lack of hope.”
“And the best?”
“Well, you know, I was thinking when I was hanging the exhibition that the day of that football match was a great day. We were due to leave that evening, but the aid workers had hooked up a TV screen outside their office to show the Champions League Final. Manchester United versus Bayern Munich, a huge match, so we stayed to watch it. Amazing atmosphere, all the men gathered around the screen. Incredible sense of camaraderie.”
Ed Sadler breaks off into a big yawn. “Apologies, but I think I’m going to have to turn in. Few too many.”
“You took a photograph of the men watching the game,” Abdi says. “I saw it at the gallery.”
“You’re right, I did.”
“What’s wrong with that man’s mouth?”
“The man with all the teeth sticking out?”
“Yes.”
“He has a cleft palate. It’s quite a common birth defect, and if you were born with it here, it would get operated on within days or weeks. That doesn’t happen in Somalia, especially if you’re from a rural community. There are very few facilities, and even if you can access one, you probably can’t afford to pay for the operation.”
“Did you talk to the people in the photo?”
“Not him, that’s for sure! I had to snatch that shot. He was a man who wouldn’t have wanted his picture taken. He was in a group of new arrivals and the aid workers suspected they were troublemakers. You can imagine that, right? That not everybody who arrives in the camps is a victim of the war. They said that he’d been part of a group who were responsible for many atrocities back in Somalia. It wasn’t too difficult for men like him to slip in and out of the camps and across borders. Nobody had papers, and desperate people were arriving every day in huge numbers.”
“So you didn’t learn their names?” Abdi asks.
“His nickname was Farurey. It means lip or harelip, or something like that. It refers to his lip. I never knew his real name, I don’t know if anybody did, and I don’t know the other men. It was so long ago. I only remember him because people talked about him. Anyway, I can barely remember my own name tonight! Bedtime? You should go up and I need to get a glass of water.”
“I tried to print something upstairs, and I think Noah’s computer sent it down here. Do you have it?”
“Let’s see. Have a look, but I think we ran out of paper. You might have to wait until the morning. Bedtime, Abdi, my mate. Come on. I don’t know about you, but I’m on my last legs. I’m getting too old for this.”
The recording ends.
The nurses change shift, and my parents’ voices get slower and lower, and stretch into yawns.
Sometime after Dad leaves, I hear Mum struggling with the big chair that converts into a bed. By the end of a long stay in the hospital, I wonder sometimes if her body will have been permanently bent into the shape of the hospital furniture.
Once Abdi asked me what I thought my family life would be like if I hadn’t got ill. It was hard to answer the question, because when your family’s one way, you can’t imagine how it can be any different. I tried to remember what it was like before my diagnosis, and that gave me my answer: “Normal.”
Abdi said, “There’s no such thing as ‘normal.’”