“Whose is that?” he asks when he sees the iPad in her hands.
“Abdi borrowed it from school. Sit down. You need to listen to something.”
She starts the recording. The volume is so low that Nur can hardly make out what’s being said, but Maryam stops him from turning it up, pointing to Abdi’s half-open bedroom door by way of explanation.
When he’s finished listening, Nur mutters a Somali proverb under his breath. If he were to try to translate it, he might say: “A snakebite received at the age of six kills you at the age of sixty.” Maryam understands immediately what it means: “Evil lingers a long time.”
She looks at her husband. “He knows something,” she says.
Nur isn’t so sure. “He’s asking questions, but we don’t know what he knows.”
“Should we play it to him? Ask him about it?” The thought terrifies her.
“No.”
“Should we tell the police?”
He thinks before answering. “I don’t think it has anything to do with what’s happened to Noah. We’ll talk to Sofia about it when she gets home. I’ll tell her that. Don’t worry.”
As Nur embraces her, Maryam feels huge relief that he’s taking control of this. She doesn’t think she could make a single sensible decision at this moment. She’s physically and mentally drained in a way that she hasn’t felt for years. It’s allowing old feelings of panic to creep in and threaten to overwhelm her, the way they used to after the family first arrived in the UK, when everything was so alien she thought she’d never stop feeling lonely.
Sofia drifts in and out of concentration during her lecture. The slides show incubators and tiny bodies with skin that looks as fragile as tissue paper. She thinks about how these children hover between life and death for weeks.
Her mother gave birth to a baby like these ones when they lived in Hartisheik camp. Sofia glimpsed the infant’s face for only a few seconds before the baby was wrapped in a cloth. It was a girl, and she lived to take only a few breaths.
Sofia walked through the camp beside her parents to the burial place, hours after the baby was born. Maryam leaned heavily on Nur’s arm. She insisted on seeing her child into the ground.
When they reached the place, Nur took turns with the other men to dig a hole in the ground as the women keened. In the distance, beyond the camp perimeter, where she wasn’t allowed to go because there were dangerous men, Sofia saw women bent over, collecting firewood. They were there for the thornbushes, whose branches grew silvery and spiky against the changing sky.
When it was done, Nur stepped into the grave and Maryam passed the baby to him so he could lay her down gently. The cloth she was wrapped in was pale blue.
Sofia remembers that when Nur climbed out of the grave and crouched beside it, he had dirt on his toes and sandals. She remembers the way his hands settled on his forehead, his fingertips snaking into his hair, sweat on his scalp and temples.
Other men filled in the red earth over the baby’s body, and the voices of the women rose and fell as Sofia clung to Maryam. The wind caught the edges of Maryam’s dirac and whipped it against them both.
Sofia’s blue-cloth sister wasn’t the first baby they’d buried at the camp. She was one of many.
When her lecture’s over, Sofia dodges her friends and slips away as fast as she can.
She heads across campus to the library and gets out a couple of books that she needs. The librarian nods at her and smiles, and Sofia returns the greeting. Her warm smile, politeness, and willingness to help others have always made her a well-liked girl, even though she keeps to herself.
At school, she found that some of the Muslim girls who had ignored her as they grew up through the school gravitated toward her later on, at the age when some of the non-Muslim girls began partying hard and hanging out with boys. It was difficult for cross-faith friendships to survive as lifestyles diverged when adulthood knocked on the door, but she benefited as her friendship group swelled. It kick-started a growth in confidence that has steadily increased since she started her degree.
She puts the books in her backpack and heads for the bus stop to make her way home.
After spending hours stewing about it overnight, she feels more rational about the recording now that she’s had a chance to think about it in the cold light of day. Her conclusion is that it’s almost certainly research material for a school project that Abdi’s doing. That would also explain the printed materials Ed Sadler had got out, and it wouldn’t be the first time Abdi’s used his ethnic roots as the basis for study. It makes her sad that he would approach Ed Sadler instead of talking to their parents, but she understands why he would, because, just like Abdi’s birth, life in the camp is something that Nur and Maryam never talk about.
She feels better once she’s rationalized this, much better. Even so, there’s a small part of her that knows she should probably tell the detective about the iPad, in case it helps him. She’ll ring him, she thinks, and tell him about the recording and her theory that it’s for a project.
She gets her phone out of her bag as she walks home from the bus stop. She programmed Detective Inspector Clemo’s number into it after he left his card at the flat.
He picks up quickly.
When we got back to the house I told Mum that Abdi and I were going to go to bed because I was very tired. She seemed relieved.
“I’m not surprised. It’s been a big evening,” she said. “All that socializing’s worn me out, too. Thanks for your help, boys.”
Abdi went up straightaway, but I stayed downstairs for just a few more minutes so I could give Mum a monster hug, just like the one I gave Dad earlier. I said, “I love you” (see Noah’s Bucket List Item No. 7: Make sure people know how important they are to you). I know she thinks that I love Dad more than her because he’s more fun, but she’s wrong. Dad’s more fun, but nobody else has fought for me like my mum has. Nobody.
She watched me walk up the stairs, her hand on the bottom of the banister. I thought of the hug when I got into bed: the way she felt, and all the things I hoped it said. I was so worn out that I fell asleep before Abdi finished brushing his teeth.
Abdi was fast asleep when my alarm went off at one A.M. My first reaction was that I was way too tired to go out, but I gave myself a talking-to (Noah’s Bucket List Item No. 9: Don’t waste time) and got up and put my clothes on.
By the time I was dressed, my legs felt like jelly because they were worn out after the party, but I wasn’t going to let that stop me.
I shook Abdi’s shoulder to wake him.
“What?” he said. He looked crumpled and tired.
“It’s time.”
I expected him to leap out of bed. It had been easier than I thought it would be to persuade him to come out with me tonight, so I felt like he would be up for it when the time came, but he just looked at me. His eyes were dark pools.
“Do we have to?”