Fraser flicks her fingers at me in a gesture of dismissal. “Go.”
I’m expecting a technology den, just like the cliché, a windowless space with overflowing bins and enough wiring to knit a scarf out of. In reality, we find a young, athletic-looking woman in a quiet space on the top floor of the building. She looks very much in control of the tidy suite of monitors in front of her and a healthy potted plant that’s in flower on her desk. If she swiveled her chair around, she’d enjoy a view of some of Bristol’s painted terraces stacked up on a hill in Bedminster like a row of multicolored Monopoly houses.
First off, she listens to the recording, and then works her keyboard until she’s isolated the sound that we’re interested in.
At first it’s a noise like two deep coughs in a row, more of an outburst of noise than anything else.
More tweaking and she’s turned it into two words. She plays it repeatedly and screws up her nose as she concentrates.
“Sounds like Roger Platts,” she says. “Any idea who Roger Platts is?”
“No.” Woodley shakes his head and looks at me, but I don’t know either.
“Can you send it to me?” I say. “That bit of it.”
“Sure.”
As we leave, she starts work on another recording, a phone conversation with contents so immediately sickening I wonder how many years anybody can last in that job.
By late afternoon, Sofia has a ton of responses to her posts about Abdi. Every single person expresses shock and concern. They all promise to keep an eye out for him and to contact others to ask them to do the same. None of them has heard from him since before the weekend.
One friend writes a long post on Sofia’s Facebook page about a former classmate of theirs who disappeared overnight and traveled to Syria to join the jihad. She had been carefully, comprehensively, and secretly radicalized, and nobody had realized until it was too late.
Sofia logs off. She knows this isn’t what’s happened to Abdi, or at least she’s ninety-nine percent certain. In her family, they would surely have noticed.
Nevertheless, she can’t help googling the news report on her old schoolmate, and that inevitably leads to others. She delves into one story after another about good kids around the world who were radicalized and persuaded to flee their new countries to join the jihad, leaving behind desolate loved ones who are reduced to making statements to cameras imploring them to come home, and to hiring mediators to try to extract them from war zones.
It’s something every parent and sibling in their community fears: a return of a family member to the violence they risked their lives to flee from. It’s an immigrant nightmare. But it’s also very rare, Sofia knows that. Most of her friends have too much sense. It’s the vulnerable kids who get targeted. Though that thought leads her to ask herself, “Was Abdi vulnerable to such things?”
She’s grateful for the distraction when her phone rings.
It’s Tim, from the Welcome Center.
“It’s a bit of a long shot,” he says. “But I asked around and one of my other volunteers, a guy called Dan who was working with Abdi on Friday night, mentioned that Abdi was agitated after your mum fainted and he was asking about a man. Dan hasn’t got a phone at the moment, but apparently he works at Hamilton House on Thursday, so you might find him there if you want to talk to him.”
Sofia takes the train again. Hamilton House is only a few minutes’ walk from the gallery where Ed Sadler’s exhibition is showing. When she gets there, she climbs the steps at the front of the building and skirts around a Staffordshire terrier that’s tethered to a railing beside a bowl of water. A couple are having a coffee and a cigarette on the narrow outdoor terrace, wrapped up warmly in colorful layers.
A large Banksy graffiti mural, The Mild Mild West—one of her favorites—is on the side of an adjoining building. The wall opposite has been entirely spray-painted in gold, and a vast mural of Jesus in a loincloth, doing a one-handed handstand, has been painted on it. Sofia has no idea if it’s supposed to mean anything.
A woman in the ground-floor café directs her to where she can find Dan. On her way she passes yoga classes and artists’ studios and finally finds herself in a large space where chairs have been set up in rows facing a screen. Dan’s in there, fiddling with a projector. Bursts of sound and motion fill the screen for a few seconds before it dies. It’s a black-and-white film.
He recognizes her. It’s a relief, because she doesn’t know him very well.
“Hey,” he says. “Sofia?”
They sit on two chairs at the back of the space.
“Can you tell me what Abdi said on Friday?”
“Yeah. I’m really sorry, by the way, that he’s disappeared. I’m sure he’ll be back. He always seems close to you guys, and he’s friends with, like, everyone.”
Sofia feels herself welling up.
“Sorry,” he says. “I don’t mean to upset you. After your mum fainted, everybody got her sitting down and brought her stuff. Amina was all over it, making sure she was okay. Your mum was all sort of glazed and nervous and we were thinking about calling for an ambulance, but she totally refused. While she was sitting down, Abdi started looking around the room and asking people if they’d seen a man who had a scar on his top lip. Apparently he was the bloke who was by your mum when she fainted. I don’t know if Abdi felt like the man said something horrible or insulting to her and he wanted to have a go at him. But the man was gone. A couple of people remembered him, but nobody knew who he was. We were so busy that night, it was mad. But I remembered Abdi asking, because it wasn’t like him to be agitated like that. He calmed down pretty quickly after, and Daniella gave them a lift home. Sounds a bit silly now I say it like that. And you came all the way here. But Abdi was looking for a guy, and he didn’t seem like himself.”
“It’s very helpful, thank you,” Sofia says. “I’m very grateful.”
“Do you mind if I . . .” Dan gestures to the screen. “The film’s supposed to start in half an hour.”
He gets up and begins to fiddle with the projector once again. As Sofia stands, it comes to life and she finds herself standing in its glare, black-and-white images playing out over the front of her coat.
She puts up a hand so she can see her way out of the shaft of light.
“Thank you,” she says.
“I don’t suppose you want to stay, do you?” he asks.
“No. I need to go home.”
“Of course. But come any time. We do film club every Thursday. You’re very welcome. And I hope you find Abdi. I know you will soon. If there’s anything else I can do to help . . .”
Downstairs she buys a cup of jasmine tea and takes a table where she has a view of the street life.