He wipes his suntanned forehead. He’s a little drunk, on the good beer, the amazing turnout, and the fact that this night represents the peak of his career but also a devastating personal low.
It’s only four days since Ed Sadler and his wife, Fiona, sat down with their son, Noah, and his oncologist, and received the worst possible news about Noah’s prognosis. Reeling with shock, they’ve so far kept it to themselves.
Somebody chinks a spoon against a glass and people fall silent.
Head and shoulders above the crowd, Ed Sadler gets a piece of paper out of his pocket and puts a pair of reading glasses on, before taking them off again.
“I don’t think I need this,” he says, crumpling the paper up. “I know what I want to say.”
He looks around the room, catching the eyes of friends and colleagues.
“Nights like this are very special because it’s not often that I get to gather together so many people who are important to me. I’m very proud to show you this body of work. It’s the work of a lifetime, and there are a few people that I need to acknowledge, because it wouldn’t exist without them. First, is my good friend Dan Winstanley, or as I should say now, Professor Winstanley. Where are you, Dan?”
A man in a button-down blue shirt, and in need of a haircut, raises his hand with a sheepish smile.
“Firstly, I want to thank you for letting me copy your maths homework every week when we were at school. I think it’s a long-enough time ago that I can safely say this now!” This gets a laugh.
“But, much more importantly, I want to thank you for getting me access to many different places in Somalia, and in particular to Hartisheik, the refugee camp where I took the photographs that my career’s built on. It was this man Dan who took me there for the very first time when he was building SomaliaLink. For those of you who don’t know about SomaliaLink, you should. Through Dan’s sheer bloody-mindedness and talent, it’s grown into an award-winning organization that does incredible work educating and rebuilding in projects throughout Somalia, but it was founded almost twenty years ago with the more humble objective of fostering links between our city and the Somali refugee community, many of whom came to Bristol via Hartisheik and its neighboring camps. I’m very proud to be associated with it. Dan, you’ve been my fixer for as many years as I can remember, but you’ve also been my inspiration. I never could contribute much in the way of brains, but I hope these images can do some good in helping to spread the word about what you do. Taking these photographs is often dangerous and sometimes frightening, but I believe it’s necessary.”
There’s a burst of clapping and a heckle from one of his rugby friends that makes Ed smile.
“I do this for another reason, too, and that, most of all, is what I want to say tonight . . .” He chokes up, recovers. “Sorry. What I’m trying to say is how proud I am of my family and how I couldn’t have done this without them. To Fi, and to Noah, it hasn’t always been easy—understatement—but thank you, I’m nothing without you. I do all this for you, and I love you.”
Beside him, Fiona’s face crumples a little, even as she works hard to hold it together.
Ed scans the room, looking for his son. He’s easy to find because his friend Abdi is beside him, one of only four black faces in the room, apart from the ones in the photographs.
Ed raises his bottle of beer to his son, salutes him with it, and enjoys seeing the flush of pleasure on the boy’s cheeks. Noah raises his glass of Coke in return.
About half the people in the room say, “Awww,” before somebody calls out, “Fiona and Noah!” and everybody raises a glass. The applause that follows is loud and becomes raucous, punctuated with a couple of wolf whistles.
Ed cues the band to start playing.
He steps down from the chair and kisses his wife. Both are tearful now.
Around them, the noise of the party swells.
While Abdi Mahad is at the exhibition opening with his friend Noah, the rest of his family are spending the evening at home.
His mother, Maryam, is watching a Somali talent show on Universal TV. She thinks the performances are noisy and silly, but they’re also captivating enough to her hold her attention, mostly because they’re so awful.
The show is her guilty pleasure. She laughs at a woman who sings painfully badly and frowns at two men who perform a hair-raising acrobatic routine.
Abdi’s father, Nur, is asleep on the sofa, head back and mouth open, beside his wife. Maryam glances at him now and then. She notices that he’s recently gone a little grayer around the temples, and admires his profile. He doesn’t have his usual air of dignity about him, though, because he’s snoring loud enough to compete in volume with the shrill presenters on the TV. A nine-hour shift in his taxi followed by a meeting of a local community group, and a heavy meal afterward with friends, has knocked him out as effectively as a cudgel.
As the TV presenters eulogize a rap performance that Maryam judges to be mediocre at best, Nur snorts so loudly that he wakes himself up. Maryam laughs.
“Bedtime, old man?”
“How long have I been asleep?”
“Not too long.”
“Did Abdi text?”
“No.”
They’ve been worried about Abdi going to the photography exhibition. They know the subject of the show is refugee journeys, and they know that some of the images that made Edward Sadler famous were taken in the refugee camp that they used to live in. These things make them uneasy.
Abdi never lived in the camp. Nur and Maryam risked their lives to travel to the UK to ensure that he never had to experience a life that looked the way theirs did once everything they’d ever known had unspooled catastrophically and violently in Somalia’s civil war. Both of them were torn from comfortable, educated homes, where James Brown played on the turntable some evenings, and Ernest Hemingway novels sat on the bookshelf among Italian books, where daughters were not cut, and children weren’t raised to perpetrate the divisive clan politics that would soon become lethal.
Nur and Maryam tried hard to dissuade Abdi from going to the exhibition, but he wasn’t having any of it.
“Don’t wrap me in cotton wool,” he said, and it was difficult to argue with that. He’s fifteen, confident, clever, and articulate. They know he can’t be sheltered forever.
They reasoned eventually that if the extent of his curiosity about their journey as refugees was to visit an exhibition, then perhaps they would be getting off lightly, so they let him go and told him to have a good time.
Maryam turns the TV off, and the screen flicks to black, revealing a few smudgy fingerprints that make her tut. She’ll remove them in the morning.
“Are you worried?” she asks Nur.
“No. I wasn’t expecting him to text anyway. Let’s sleep.”
As her parents go through the familiar motions of converting their sofa into their bed, Sofia Mahad, Abdi’s sister, is sitting at her desk in her bedroom next door.