Sofia knows from her training that time works differently for everyone. Some mothers find that words pour from them the instant they meet their babies, every one of them designed to express the sheer joy of the new feelings they’re experiencing. Others take minutes or even hours or days to find words. Sofia’s good at respecting the women’s processes, but even that hasn’t prepared her for the frustration she feels in the face of Abdi’s silence.
“You should eat,” she tells him.
She passes him a plate of sandwiches that Maryam has prepared for him. Abdi picks one up and takes a tiny bit, chewing as if it’s cardboard. From the bedroom they can hear the crack of the clean sheets as Maryam whips the folds out of them before letting them float down onto Abdi’s bed. When he swallows the bite of sandwich, Sofia feels like cheering, but she forces herself to remain calm. She’s worried that if she puts a foot wrong he might withdraw completely again.
She desperately wants to ask about his conversation with Ed Sadler as well as the other events of Monday evening, but she doesn’t dare.
“I got your stuff from Noah’s house,” she tells him instead.
Another laborious swallow. His eyes rove across the room and eventually land on Sofia again, as if he’d forgotten she was there.
Her patience is stretched as thin as possible.
“Abdi,” she says, “you can talk to me, brother.”
As if she’d flicked a switch, tears start to brim from his eyes, big fat tears, copious and unstoppable.
She’s horrified, but the hopeful part of her also wonders if this means he’s ready to break his silence. She moves carefully toward him and takes his hand.
From the bedroom doorway Maryam watches them. She feels exhausted to her very core by the weight of what she knows and what her children do not.
For a moment she wonders if she should step into the room and take a seat between them, take each of their hands in her own and tell them the whole story—everything, from the very beginning. She won’t, though, because her instinct to protect her family is greater than any other.
On the street below, Nur is parking his taxi. Even if he’d had the stamina to drive into the night, the sight of the front page of the Bristol Echo on the newsstand at the rail station would have sent him home. A copy of the paper sits on the passenger seat beside him.
Nur climbs the stairs to the flat, feeling the usual stiffness in his lower back from the hours of driving. He wishes he could turn around and walk away.
He feels proud of what his family has achieved in Bristol. That they live modestly does not concern him; that he has to work long hours to support them is hard but also satisfying. They live quietly and happily, their children are achieving everything they dreamed of. Until now.
When he opens the door to the flat, he’s so upset that he doesn’t remember to check whether Abdi is out of bed. He takes the newspaper into the kitchen, where he finds his wife and daughter and holds it up so they can see the front page.
“They’re saying it’s a hate crime,” he says. “They’re accusing Abdi.”
He doesn’t notice Abdi standing in the doorway behind him, until he follows Maryam’s gaze and turns around. Abdi hears what his father says, and sees the headline and the photograph of his friend on the front page.
He turns his back to them. His knees buckle a little as he does, but he carries on walking away. He enters his bedroom and shuts the door behind him. They hear the key turning in the lock.
Nur is devastated that he’s been so careless.
Abdi’s door remains locked shut, no matter how hard they pound on it. Only when Nur threatens to break it down does Abdi unlock it, but he returns to his bed after he’s done so, as unresponsive as before.
Sofia goes to bed hollow-hearted and afraid, feeling simultaneously as if the walls of the flat are closing in on her while her family members are unstoppably moving away from each other, like an exploding graphic on screen, the component parts heading out into the universe in a multitude of different directions.
Nur and Maryam go through the familiar motion of pulling out their sofa bed and settling onto it. She lies rigid on her back, eyes open. She hears Nur fall asleep swiftly and knows that he won’t move until morning.
She pulls back the blanket and creeps out of bed. She retrieves her most treasured possession from the shelves in the corner of the room: a small, battered tin box containing photographs from her childhood.
She takes the box into the kitchen and perches on a stool at the counter. She turns on a light and removes the photographs from the box carefully. There are only two.
The first is a photograph of her at school, one in a row of nine children sitting on a bench against a pale gray wall. It’s an informal picture. The girls wear lace-up blue shoes, white socks, blue skirts, white shirts. Matching sky blue scarves are draped over their shoulders and tied at the front with toggles, and the final touch is a white headband holding each girl’s hair back from her forehead. Maryam remembers how much she loved that uniform. The boys in the photo are dressed to match in blue shorts. They sit with their arms draped around one another’s shoulders.
Maryam finds it bittersweet to look at the little faces of each of her classmates in turn: their easy smiles, some looking at the camera, some chatting to one another, long healthy limbs and bright mischievous eyes.
She remembers that it was okay for women not to wear the hijab during her childhood. The pressure to cover up came later, in the camps, when some clerics made it their business to preach that the civil war was a punishment from Allah for disobedience, and people took to a more extreme form of Islam through fear.
Maryam knows that she romanticizes her early childhood. It wasn’t perfect, and her parents bickered about money and their children’s education and all the usual family stuff, but in her head it remains a time of incomparable innocence, before civil war carved Somalia up into warring territories, as effectively as the sharpest butcher’s knife makes short work of a carcass.
The second photograph is of the entrance to her childhood home: a white wall punctuated by a doorway painted bright blue, clouds of bougainvillea in bloom around it. She remembers her father picking a sprig of those magenta petals for her mother when he came home from work each night, presenting it to her in the kitchen.
She remembers her mother resting in the evening while her father read out loud to her. Her mother would listen, rapt, too tired to change out of her nurse’s uniform, her bare feet tucked up under her, her hair cut short so it framed her face in soft curls, lamplight glancing off the side of her face.
Every time she looks at the photograph of her childhood home, Maryam wishes her parents were in it, or one of her siblings. She has to use her memory to keep them alive, and she hates that, because she struggles to remember the finer details of their faces.