They walked past the tuberculosis hospital and didn’t stop until they reached the space in front of the National Security Court. Some of the children had picked up stones along the way.
Nur and Fatima hung back, watching from a junction with a side street. They leaned against a shop wall, where pictures of the goods on sale were painted boldly.
On the steps of the court, Nur could see soldiers wearing red berets, standing with their legs apart. The sun licked their hard-set faces and the barrels of their guns. The berets cast shadows over their eyes.
More children arrived, packing the space, and the chanting grew louder. A portrait of the president hung on the front of the court building. In the morning air the children’s shirts looked bright, clean white.
A red beret stepped forward with a megaphone and commanded the children to leave. Beside Nur, Fatima shrank back. “I want to go home,” she said. “Go then,” Nur told her. He was transfixed by the scene. As she scampered away, the sky above Nur exploded with noise.
The red berets were firing their guns over the children’s heads.
The shots were followed by thuds, a series of them. The children were throwing stones in return. They smashed the windows of the courthouse, and the soldiers took cover to avoid the flying splinters of glass. The gunfire ceased momentarily, like a breath held, before the red berets regrouped, aimed their guns directly into the mob of children, and fired.
The crackling of gunfire froze Nur to the spot, but a hand grabbed his elbow from behind and pulled him roughly into the shop, where a man held him tightly behind the doorframe. “Stay still,” he commanded. Nur could feel their hearts beating.
Outside, vehicles began to arrive, engines growling. The children who’d stood their ground scattered now, wild-eyed and fearful.
“What’s happening?” A woman’s voice issued from behind the shop counter.
“They’ve sent in the military,” the man told her. “Against children.”
She beckoned to them from her hiding spot. “Bring the boy here.”
Nur and the man scuttled across the floor of the shop like lizards, and the woman pulled Nur toward her, shielding him with her body. The sounds of shouting and running and gunfire persisted. The couple threw themselves flat, pulling Nur with them so all three were lying in a tangle of clothing, faces pressed onto the gritty floor among little spills of maize and rice and sugar.
In the doorway, a silhouette appeared: a boy, in school uniform, about the same age as Nur’s brother.
“Here!” Nur cried, reaching out toward him.
“Come on!” the woman called. “Come on, boy!”
He didn’t move quickly enough.
There was another crack of gunfire and his body buckled, but it didn’t fall at first. He exhaled with a gasp. His hand went to his chest just before his knees gave way and he collapsed.
The shots were still coming. Cans and bottles tumbled from the shelves above, punctured by bullets, their contents exploding. The boy landed on a sack of flour and his blood soaked into the burlap. Nur saw that the boy’s eyes were open, but he wasn’t living behind them any longer, and he saw that the boy’s blood was so eager to flee his body that it even ran from the corner of his gaping mouth.
Nur began to scream. It felt as if he had only just stopped when he heard news that evening that his brother, Farah, had lost his life to the guns, too.
After that, Nur hated to be in Hargeisa.
The police didn’t just take the life of his brother, they took his father, too. He was arrested one night by three men who knocked politely at the door at two in the morning. Nur’s mother screamed as they marched him to their Land Rover. One of the soldiers returned to the house and drove the end of his rifle into her stomach.
The charge against Nur’s father was never clear. Nur’s mother took food to the prison for him every day for weeks until a guard took pity on her and explained that her husband had died many days ago. “Of illness,” the guard said.
Nur’s father had been healthy when he was arrested.
The two widows bereaved by Nur’s father’s death pooled their resources and made covert arrangements for transport the next day. The second wife had cousins in Yemen, so she traveled to the coast with Fatima. Nur’s mother went north, toward Djibouti, in the hope that relatives could help her settle there.
Nur traveled with her and his baby brother, and on the way, in the back of the car, his mother told her sons stories about their father. She told them how he was an intelligent man and a good man, and Nur made a silent vow that he would try to be the same.
Somebody hammers on the window of his cab. A businessman. Nur rolls the window down. He’s parked outside Temple Meads station.
“I’m not working,” he says.
“Then why the fuck are you parked here?”
“The queue for the taxi rank is over there.”
Once the businessman has gone, Nur walks along the row of waiting taxis at the rank and stops at the driver’s-side window of each one. He asks his colleagues to look out for Abdi. He hands each of them a photograph of the boy. To a man, they promise to help.
Fiona Sadler’s been prepared for many years for the fact that her son Noah might die. She’s a person who likes to try to face up to things. On the sly, she’s even read books about bereavement.
The books didn’t prepare her for how it feels, though. She knows that the first stage of grief is denial, but she hadn’t expected her sense of injustice to be so crushingly strong. She feels robbed of her child. She wants somebody to pay for what’s happened, and she’s never felt so lonely, even in all the years when she had to care for Noah by herself because Ed was away.
She bitterly resents the fact that Abdi Mahad was the last person to be with Noah. After everything, Fiona can’t stand the thought that Noah’s last moments of consciousness didn’t belong to her. The thought eats away at her.
Until now Fiona’s always felt guilty that she didn’t like Abdi. She’s examined her motives for disliking him over and over again, because she knows that Abdi’s a nice boy. He gives every appearance of being nice, anyhow. But she resented the spell he cast on her son, the way that Noah seemed almost obsessed with the friendship and clung to it as if it were a lifeline. She resented the fact that Abdi was healthy, too, that he was able to come and go at the hospital, perching on the end of Noah’s bed, all alert, all clever, while her son winced, and her fingers curled as she witnessed how much pain he put himself through to be better able to talk to his friend.
She’s not so foolish that she wasn’t aware of these emotions, and she was afraid to admit them to Ed, because he would have had no tolerance for them.
Her awareness didn’t erase the feelings, though. Far from it. They were deeply felt but furtive, and because of that, they were never debated or hung out to air, so they grew stronger.
She lies in bed and stares out of the window. She returns time and time again to the same idea: If Noah hadn’t been friendly with Abdi, this wouldn’t have happened.