The call from DI Clemo puts Sofia even more on edge. She checks Facebook every five minutes to see if Abdi’s replied, but there’s nothing. She can see that he hasn’t even looked at the message she sent him yet.
She decides to show her mum the photograph, as she promised the detective she would. She finds it on her phone. She’s also desperate to ask her mum if she deleted the recording on purpose. She’s been waiting for the right moment, but her nerve fails her. She breathes deeply before leaving her bedroom. She requires courage to approach her mum.
Maryam is cooking. She has embarked on a laborious recipe for a sweet Somali treat that her own mother used to make on special occasions. Maryam didn’t learn the recipe from her mother. They left Hargeisa when she was too young. She was taught it by Amina, who discovered that Maryam yearned to taste it again.
They worked together one morning in Amina’s kitchen soon after they met. Abdi slept peacefully, bound to Maryam’s back as they worked, and when the balbalow were finished and she bit into one, she did something rare. She cried.
She has no idea why she’s making balbalow now, in the midst of this crisis, but she doesn’t know what else to do.
Sofia arrives in the kitchen almost silently, startling Maryam.
“Balbalow?” she asks.
Maryam nods, and continues to knead the white dough that she’s made. The sensation of it underneath her fingers helps her to feel steady, as if her world isn’t spiraling out of control.
“Will you look at something for me?” Sofia asks. She’s holding her phone.
“In a minute.”
Sofia steps out of the room and Maryam keeps kneading. She feels as if she can’t break her rhythm, as if to do so would be bad luck.
When the dough’s formed and smooth, she puts it back into the bowl, where she mixed it with her fingers and leaves it to rest.
She wipes her hands and goes to find her daughter.
When Sofia shows her the photograph, Maryam has an instant reaction just as she did at the Welcome Center. It’s physical, visceral, and overwhelming. She grips the back of a chair and tries to stay upright, but a strong rush of nausea makes the world around her tilt.
When she comes around, she’s prostrate on the sofa. Sofia’s hovering beside her, staring at her anxiously.
“Hooyo,” Sofia says, using the Somali word for mother that softens Maryam, softens them both. “Are you all right? What happened?”
“I don’t feel so well.”
“Was it the photograph?”
“I think I need to shut my eyes for a while.”
Behind her closed eyelids Maryam fights to quell a flow of memories from the camp. She arrived there as a girl, grew up there, got a rudimentary education there, married there, and gave birth to all of her children there, except one. Many of her memories feel as if they’ve been stamped into her mind. They are vivid imprints. She cannot erase them.
Sofia’s voice interrupts her. “Mum. Please don’t sleep. I need you to tell me why Abdi was obsessed with this photo. I think he was, but I don’t know why. Please, Mum.”
Maryam feels her daughter’s slight hand shaking her shoulder and forces herself to open her eyes. “Where did you get this photo?” she asks.
“I went to Ed Sadler’s exhibition. I wanted to see the picture Abdi talked about in the recording. You remember? This is it. The detective phoned me to ask if any of us recognize this man.”
“Show it to me again.”
Maryam’s glad she’s already lying down when another look at the photograph confirms what she already knew. It is him: the man with the split lip and the teeth like a scatter of broken rocks.
She’d almost missed making the connection at the Welcome Center. She knew the man standing opposite her was familiar, she’d spotted the scar on his upper lip, but it wasn’t until she heard him speaking to somebody beside him in a thick, slurred voice, a voice that she last heard so many years ago and could never forget, that she knew who he was, and the skin on the back of her neck began to crawl.
“Abdi doesn’t know this man,” she tells Sofia. “This man has nothing to do with him.”
“What else, then? What could he have seen in the picture?”
Maryam studies it. There are other familiar faces among the men, one in particular.
“There it is,” she tells Sofia. She points at a profile buried in the shadows of the photo, at the end of a row of boys. “It’s Hassan Omar Mohammed.” She names a family friend, another Somali who came to Bristol via Hartisheik.
Sofia zooms in and frowns as she looks at the face her mum is pointing to. She would never have recognized Hassan.
“Are you sure?” she asks.
“Completely sure! You don’t believe me? Look! It’s even football he’s got his eyes glued to.”
Hassan’s known to be football mad. His prized possession nowadays is a season ticket for Bristol City football ground.
Sofia looks at the face again, seeing more familiarity in it this time, but she’s not buying into her mother’s certainty that this is Hassan. The boy could be anybody.
Maryam is looking at her expectantly, so Sofia feels obliged to reply, “Okay, yes, I guess that looks like Hassan,” even though she doesn’t believe it.
Maryam unexpectedly takes her daughter in her arms, surprising her. Sofia clasps her back and finds an extraordinary comfort in the ferocity of her mother’s embrace. In fact, Maryam’s not sure if it is a younger Hassan in the photograph, though it’s not impossible.
“I think the dough has rested,” she says when she’s released Sofia. “Will you help me make the balbalow?”
It will be a distraction, she thinks, and Sofia’s glad of the chance to feel normal for just a few minutes. The recording has slipped from her mind.
Side by side they roll out squares of the dough until it’s thin enough to see through. They share Maryam’s serrated cutting tool and each drives lines through their piece of dough so that it separates into small rectangles.
Maryam shapes her rectangles into a butterfly, nipping the sides of each one together in the middle, so the wings fan out on either side. Sofia bends a ridge up the center of hers and then brings up each side, pinching them together at either end, to make the shape of a boat.
They work in silence, each thinking.
Maryam is trying to work out whether her suspicions about Abdi are one step closer to being true, now that she’s seen this photograph. She tries to imagine Ed Sadler at the camp. She never saw him there, but it was a very big place. Foreigners came in and out, doling out aid, setting up facilities, medical, educational, or something other, their numbers in flux depending on the political situation. Some would give gifts to the children. Sweets, mostly. Others kept a distance or left almost as soon as they had arrived. Unlike the families, they had that freedom.
Sofia feels the relief of spending a few minutes being a child, under the wing of her mother, but she remains very uneasy.
By the time the balbalow are arranged in neat rows, none of them touching, Sofia can’t hold back any longer, because there’s something else she’s desperate to tell Maryam.