A passing young man asks her if she’s all right and she says, “Please could you help me to Stapleton Road.” At her request he walks her to a taxi rank on Stapleton Road and sees her into a car. She asks the driver to take her to the police station.
“Which one?” he asks. Behind him, neon lights in a shop front advertise money shipping services, and reflected in the taxi’s side mirror a bus approaches, its headlights dazzling her momentarily. The car stereo is tuned to a lively Asian music station and there’s a stink of air freshener in the car. Maryam finds it overwhelming. She doesn’t know which police station. It never occurred to her that there might be a choice. She repeats, “Police station, please.” The driver meets her eye briefly in the rearview mirror and swings out into the traffic.
“Okay, lady,” he says.
Maryam sits with her back straight as a rod, clutching the armrest as he swings too fast around the corners and joins the dual carriageway alongside which a handful of tower blocks make rectangular silhouettes against the black-orange sky. She thinks of all the lives stacked up on top of one another inside them, all the love and all the ugly.
The police station the driver takes her to is the local one, a redbrick building on an island of tarmac by a busy intersection, near the place where her neighborhood meets the city center proper. She pays him with the small amount of cash she has and wonders how she’ll get home if she can’t get hold of Nur. She wonders if her driver knows Nur, but she’s too shy to ask.
Inside the station, Maryam is intimidated by the reception area, but she steels herself and approaches the desk.
In her head, she knows exactly what she wants to say, but as soon as she tries to speak to the officer at the desk, the words become muddled and she finds herself blurting out two-or three-word phrases that make the officer’s brow crinkle.
“Say that again for me, darling,” the officer says once Maryam has fallen silent, She’s a middle-aged woman with a pencil behind her ear and a coffee stain on her shirt that’s wet where she’s tried to wash it out.
Maryam tries, gasping for the right words, but not finding them, like a fish drowning in oxygen.
“Your son is gone, but he’s on the telly?” the officer repeats very slowly.
“Please. Help us,” is all Maryam manages in response, and she begins to weep, defeated, as ever, by her foreignness.
“Take a seat, darling, let’s see if we can get a translator here, shall we?”
The officer emerges from behind the desk and settles Maryam on a hard wooden bench that’s designed to discourage comfort. She offers Maryam a cup of water.
“Where are you from? What’s your language?” she asks.
“Somalia,” Maryam replies.
Maryam sits and stares at her toes against the beige linoleum floor. She looks up at the ceiling where textured white tiles are interspersed with smooth rectangular light panels.
She checks her phone and sees that the battery’s run down to red.
Her stomach begins to complain and she realizes she can’t remember when she last ate something.
After half an hour the officer calls out to her. “Sorry, love, we’re working on it, but it’s a busy night.” Maryam nods.
She wants to say, “You must find my son. He’s missing because his life fell apart on Monday night when he discovered that he was the child of a rapist and a war criminal, and a terrible thing happened to his friend. He’s alone and seeking out a man who will hurt him.”
When she realized she was pregnant, weeks after the assault, Maryam hoped that she would miscarry the child. She’d lost three babies to miscarriage or stillbirth by then, but this one was strong. As her belly thickened, so did her sense that this child would not die. She feared the baby. She had been forced to look into the mocking, sadistic face of its father and she was afraid of what it could become.
When Nur returned from Eastleigh she dreaded the moment when he would discover her secret.
It didn’t take long.
That night, after Sofia was asleep, and the kerosene lamp was extinguished, its smoke dispersed, he began to explore her body, and she stopped him and whispered her story to him and knew that he might leave and never return, leaving her only with her shame and mouths to feed. Other men had done this, their pride too great to stay with a woman who had been defiled by another man.
Nur placed his hands on her taut belly as if trying to get a sense of the baby. They stayed like that for a long time, both very afraid.
By morning he’d made a decision. “We’ll leave here,” he said, “before you have the baby. We have nearly enough money.”
“Where will we go?”
“Europe. If the baby lives, I’ll raise them as my son or daughter. Nobody will know any different.”
Nur promised her that they would make a home that was safe for both children, and that Abdi would never know whose blood ran in his veins. England, he promised her, would offer them a refuge.
Nur never mentioned the shame, but she knew he was trying to protect her from that as well. If people had known, some of them would have shunned her and Abdi both. The children born of rape were called terrible things; their mothers, too.
Maryam kept her bump covered so the eagle eyes of her friends couldn’t judge its size, but she admitted to the pregnancy.
In the police station, she takes a sip of her water. One and a half hours have now passed since she arrived. Her phone is dead.
A man bursts through the doors into reception. His face is covered in blood. Dark drops of it land on the linoleum. He reeks of alcohol. He walks up to the desk and tries to explain that he was attacked, but he’s too drunk to get his story straight. Maryam understands that he’s not any more articulate than she was.
The desk officer calls for backup, and in the chaos Maryam slips away. She’s lost her nerve.
She starts to walk home in the rain. She feels frightened by her own shadow.
Fiona Sadler watches as Emma Zhang shakes the hand of the TV anchor, and they exchange smiles.
Somebody touches Fiona’s shoulder and asks if they can help her take her microphone off and she lets them dig around her clothing and draw out the wire. She experiences all of this as if she’s not really present. She has a sense that she was carried somewhere on a tide of anger and now she’s washed up in a place where she doesn’t want to be.
In the car on the way home she puts as much distance between herself and Emma as possible and stares out of the windows, whose tinted glass casts a pall on the city. She doesn’t respond to Emma, whose mood is adrenaline-pumped, and her attempts to chat are amped up and self-congratulatory. It reminds Fiona of Ed when he’s telling stories about his work. It’s the thrill of the kill.
When they reach her house, she gets out of the car before it’s completely stopped and stumbles but doesn’t look back. Inside, she retches in the hallway; the grotesque sound of it feels like a rebuke.