“Abdi knows,” Maryam says. They’ve failed to protect their deepest secret.
Nur was living in the Eastleigh district of Nairobi in 1999, the year Manchester United played Bayern Munich in a historic final. The night of the Champions League match was one of the few occasions he risked arrest by the Kenyan police by venturing out of his accommodation to join a crowd watching the game at an open-air screening. He’d been overjoyed to have some time off.
The distance from his family gnawed at him every day, but he was there to make money so they could get away from the camp, where Maryam was becoming more and more withdrawn and depressed, and the prospects for his children’s education were pathetic. Nur wanted to rejoin them but knew he had to be strong and keep to his goal. He was just over halfway through a six-month trip. He was sleeping on a mattress in a room he had to share with seven other men.
That night, watching the football match was his treat: a rare few hours of pleasure. He was a Manchester United fan. The game and its noise and excitement totally absorbed him for the whole ninety-three minutes. He remembers the red flares the fans lit pitch-side, the delight of the Manchester players that verged on ecstatic when they stole the game in the last three minutes, and the desolation of the Munich team, who lay flat on the grass, disbelieving the result.
The guilt that he enjoyed himself on that night when his wife suffered so much still feels like a pinch in his heart.
Maryam says, “I don’t want Sofia to know.”
“Nobody has to know.”
“We have to tell the police.”
“Why?”
“Because Abdi’s looking for this man. He knows he’s here in Bristol. He saw him at the Welcome Center and must have overheard us talking about him that night. If he recognized him in the photograph”—she stabs at the face of the man with the split lip—“he could have put it all together because the football match gave him the date. It wouldn’t have been too hard to work it out.”
“He can’t have,” Nur says, but as he says it, he’s thinking about how hard it is to keep secrets, especially one this big.
“He can. He saw me faint. He’s perceptive, he’s clever, he’s everything we wanted him to be.”
“Don’t worry at your scar,” Nur tells her. Gently he pulls her hand away from her arm. She’s been known to pick at it until it bleeds.
“Whatever happened at the canal, it’s worse now. Abdi isn’t safe,” Maryam says.
She’s assaulted by the memory of the man with the gashed lip from that night. She grips Nur’s hand and tries to eradicate it, but the slap of that man’s flesh on hers is something she’s never been able to forget.
Maryam was helping a friend that night. Her friend was sick, and her son had sneaked out to watch the football game against her instructions. Her friend was furious but also afraid. Boys who ran loose at night in the camp were unsafe. They should be at home in the shelter, where they could study. Many of the women Maryam knew guarded the kerosene supplies like tigresses to ensure that there was enough light for their children to do homework after dark. Nobody wanted their kids to be roaming the camp, mixing with anybody. Many of them still held out hope for the future, in spite of everything. But the promise of a football game screened in public had driven the boys a bit crazy.
Maryam left Sofia sleeping in her friend’s shelter with her friend and walked up a long straight path to the area where the aid workers sometimes relaxed.
On that night they’d set up a TV so anybody who wanted to could watch the football game, but when Maryam got there, the game was over and the boy she was seeking was nowhere to be seen. The aid workers were climbing into trucks for the drive home, jolly and laughing. She wondered if the boy had gone to the hut of another family friend. She set off there but got confused. She was disoriented by the darkness. Some of the shelters glowed with torch-or lamplight, but most were dark.
She realized she was lost when she found herself at the outskirts of the camp, where the women gathered firewood in groups for protection. She extinguished her lamp, afraid that it would draw unwelcome attention to her, but it was too late.
There were men. Three of them, but only one had a wide gash on his upper lip. Two of them manhandled her out into the deep darkness, away from the camp where nobody could hear her or help her. Her heels dragged in the dirt as they pulled her, and all the way she watched the man who followed them, saw his deformed face and the way he walked so casually and pointed his torch ahead of them, indicating where he wanted them to take her, running the beam over her body once they got there.
His deformity meant that his speech was slurred. She’s never forgotten that, either, the distinctive sound of him.
When the rape was over, Maryam cowered in the darkness alone as the men picked their way back to the camp across the desert, and she heard their laughter. She pulled her clothing back around her and lay there because the fear of the pain and of the rest of her life was greater than her fear of scorpions or hyenas.
She felt the warmth of blood between her legs and on her arm, where he cut her with his knife. That wound would become infected before it healed, leaving an ugly scar.
Even after everything she’d endured already, that was the night that her life became defined by shame, and it was the night that Abdi was conceived.
Ed takes a call from the hospital confirming that Noah’s death has been referred to the coroner for a postmortem.
The expectation, the doctor on the phone tells him, is that this will take place over the next few days and then the body will be released for the funeral, but Ed and Fiona will have to be in touch with the coroner’s office to confirm this.
The thought of a postmortem sickens Ed. What he would most like, after years of medical intervention, is for them to leave Noah alone.
When he tells Fiona, she barely reacts. She went to bed after their argument, and she’s still there, gray-faced.
“Shall we talk about the funeral?” he asks.
“No.”
Ed knows what Noah wanted; they talked about it the same night they discussed his bucket list, and Ed wrote notes.
Noah knew more about funerals than Ed would have thought healthy in any other circumstances. He wanted a certain drawing on the cover of the order of service, and he wanted it to be nondenominational. He had three pieces of music in mind, one that Fi liked, one that Ed liked, and one that was his own favorite. There would also be a reading from The Little Prince that Noah chose, and he wanted each of his parents to select another.
“I don’t mind who reads them, though it would be nice if Abdi did one.”