She’s just received an email from her former headmistress, asking her if she would be willing to revisit the school and give a speech to sixth formers on career day.
Sofia’s twenty years old, and in her second year of studying for a midwifery degree. She’s never done public speaking before. She’s shy, so she’s avoided it like the plague. She’s flattered by the invitation, though, and especially by the sentence that describes her as “one of our star pupils.”
“Guess what?” she calls out to her parents. “I’ve been asked to give a speech!”
She takes out one of her earbuds so she can catch their response, but there isn’t one. They obviously haven’t heard her. She’ll tell them face-to-face later, she thinks, when she can enjoy seeing the proud smiles on their faces.
She rereads the email. “One thing that might really interest our Year 13s,” the headmistress writes, “is hearing about what inspired you to become a midwife.”
Sofia does what she usually does when she’s considering something. She gets up and looks out the window. Outside, she can see a small park that’s empty and quiet, and a large block of flats on the other side of it. The uncurtained windows reveal other people’s lives to her, lit up in all shades from warm to queasy neon, some with a TV flicker.
She knows exactly what inspired her: it was Abdi’s birth. The problem she has is that she’s not sure if she can write a speech about it, because nobody in her family has ever talked openly about what happened that night. Her mother tells a very short version of the story of Abdi’s birth: “Abdi was born under the stars.”
Sofia also knows that’s not the whole story, because she remembers the night in vivid detail. Like all of her memories of Africa, it’s intense. She sometimes thinks of that part of her life, the part before England, as a kind of hyperreality.
Abdi was born in the desert, and Sofia can picture those stars. They roamed the sky in great cloudy masses. They looked like cells multiplying under a microscope. They cast their milky brightness down once the truck had stopped and the headlights were extinguished.
The men didn’t let Maryam out of the truck until her time was very close. She had been laboring for hours, crammed into the flatbed with the others, and she continued to labor in the Saharan emptiness. There were no other women to help, so it was Sofia who knelt and cradled her mother’s head, her fingers feeling the sweat on Maryam’s cheeks and the clench of her jaw. Nur knelt beside them and delivered the boy with shaking hands.
Sofia remembers the feel of the stones digging into her shins, her knees, and the top of her feet. She remembers how the light from the stars and the crescent moon made the shifting surfaces of the sand dunes shimmer. She thought that their brightness drew Maryam’s cries up to the heavens and coaxed the baby from her body.
The smugglers spoke harshly to Maryam, telling her to be quiet and quick. Each of them had a third leg to their silhouette, made from a long stick or a gun. They leaned on them impatiently, propped up by violence and hungering for speed and maximum profit from their human cargo.
Sofia remembers how the blade of the knife glinted in the torchlight when the men severed Abdi’s cord. “Hurry! Get back in the truck!” the men said, and their eyes cast threats of abandoning Maryam there if she didn’t obey. Minutes later she delivered the afterbirth obediently, wet and bloody onto the parched ground, and the wind speckled it with sand.
Back in the truck, the faces of the other passengers were swaddled against the sand and wind. Maryam passed out: heavy body sweat-soaked, and clutching blood-dark material between her legs. Nur held her and his breathing shuddered as the engine revved. Sofia cradled her new brother. She kept him warm. She put her face up close to the baby’s and gazed at him. In the starlight she examined his sealed-up eyes, his damply soft flesh and hair, and she knew that she loved him.
As the truck swayed and skidded on the track through the desert, that thought brought her a feeling of warmth, even though she was very afraid.
Sofia breathes in suddenly—almost a gasp—and it snaps her out of her reverie. She types an email to her headmistress thanking her for the invitation and telling her she would like to give it some thought.
When that’s done, she lapses once again into thinking about Abdi, and how strange it could be to be born between places, as he was, under the gaze of smugglers and thugs. Where would you belong, really? How would it affect you, deep in your bones? Would you know that threats had torn you from your mother’s sweaty, terrified body?
She doesn’t dwell on it too hard, though, because her attention is soon diverted by the buzz of her social media notifications and all the distractions of the present.
Sofia doesn’t think about Abdi again that night. Nor do her parents, apart from a brief discussion once they’re tucked under the duvet, when they sleepily debate whether Abdi should give up chess club to make more time to study exams he’s due to take this summer. They have so much hope that he will get the results he needs to apply to a top-rank university.
All is quiet in the household overnight. It’s in the frigid early hours of the morning that the buzzer to their flat begins to ring repeatedly, long and loud, before dying away like a deathbed rattle as the battery fails. Nur climbs out of bed to answer it. He’s hardly awake enough to be on his feet.
“Hello?” he says. He can see his breath.
In response, he hears a word that he learned to dread at an early age: “Police.”
THE INVESTIGATION
DAY 1
It’s a good moment putting my ID badge back on after so many months off. Detective Inspector is a title I worked hard for.
The air is crisp and cold and the traffic seems lighter than usual on my morning journey to Kenneth Steele House, the headquarters of Bristol’s Criminal Investigations Department. I make good time on the new road bike I bought when I had time on my hands, between therapy sessions and tedious teaching duties. The ride feels very sweet.
Here and there, I see evidence of fallout from a march that took place in the city center a week ago: a huddle of yellow traffic cones like part-felled skittles wait for collection near the waterfront; a few boarded-up windows punctuate the reflective panes.
The march started as a small-scale problem, a nasty little anti-immigration demonstration by a neo-Nazi group, the only redeeming feature of which was that it was anticipated to be very sparsely attended. It might have petered out after a couple of hours if it had been well managed—it should have done—but things got out of hand. Medium-scale rioting and looting led to some large-scale embarrassment for the police. The whole debacle left a nasty taste in the mouths of many city residents.