Authors: Selma Dabbagh
‘I met someone I knew. We went for a drink.’ Iman tried to make it sound like something she did regularly.
‘Who?’ Khalil asked, ‘did you meet for a drink?’
‘Who did I meet?’
‘Unless it’s personal that is . . .’
‘I was with Ziyyad Ayyoubi.’
‘What did you think of him?’ Lisa butted in before Khalil had a chance to express his surprise. ‘He was good, don’t you think? I was just saying that we weren’t sure initially, because we wanted one of the big cheeses to speak, but they insisted on Ziyyad so we agreed. I thought he was quite charismatic. He’s a friend of yours?’ Lisa spoke with a mixture of reverence, jealousy and petty dislike.
‘Who exactly did recommend him, Lisa?’ asked Iman.
‘I think it was whatshisname? Abu? With the big moustache and bald head?’
‘The spokesman?’ Iman gave a name.
‘That’s the one.’ She nodded. ‘Ayyoubi’s a friend of yours, is he?’ Lisa asked again.
‘I met him once before I left,’ Iman said. Her hair, which was still wet, sprayed everything around her when she turned her head.
They could make out the sound of several keys unlocking the door that led down to the interview rooms and the cells. The owner of a loud androgynous voice that was shouting down a mobile was approaching the waiting room. Iman, Khalil, Lisa and the rest of the room stared as the speaker stepped into the room and took it over. She was several feet wide and dressed in a floppy crêpe fabric, her neck strung with low-carat gold chains, her hair dyed into soft orange curls that exaggerated the age of her face. She reminded Iman of a stuffed cushion with a small dog’s pointed face coming out of one side that they had at the nursery in Gaza. The children called it Foofee.
The Foofee woman settled quickly on Iman and Khalil. ‘You here for Rashid Mujahed, then?’ she asked, but before they had a chance to reply, Lisa was talking to the woman – standing up she reached the other woman’s shoulder height – lowering her voice and saying something about the broadening of the terrorism laws and how she knew, if it ever came to that, there was a QC who she was sure she could get to act.
‘Don’t think it will come to that this time, love. All right then, who should I talk to. You all with him, then?’ the woman asked.
Lisa sat down, her bag back on her lap. Iman and Khalil stared in awe at the commanding tower of flesh and fabric standing before them.
The woman wiped her brow. ‘Humid, isn’t it? Rain hasn’t shifted it at all.’ She sat opposite them, taking up two seats, the cheeks of her bottom divided by the moulding between the chairs. ‘Right, OK, so what’s happened is, they arrested your friend. Is he . . .?’
‘Boyfriend,’ said Lisa.
‘Brother,’ said Iman.
‘Friend,’ said Khalil.
‘All right. Whatever. I’m Annabelle Prieston, right? I represented Rashid Mujahed during his interview. I was his legal representative. What happened was Rashid was arrested this afternoon by the Terrorism Unit in a case of mistaken identity. Apparently they were looking for someone else from the same place as him who is said to be in London at the moment. The other person was being watched during the demonstration but they weren’t watching hard enough and they arrested your friend and brought him here by mistake. Then they did some checks and found out they had the wrong guy. Right?’
The woman flicked through her notes. Her handwriting was very tight and sloped backwards menacingly.
‘Why didn’t they release him, then?’ Lisa asked.
‘They would have, except for the fact that your friend, brother, boyfriend, whatever, had a not insubstantial amount of a Class C divided into two separate packages which the police chose not to overlook.’
‘Class C?’ Khalil and Iman asked at the same time. Lisa was holding her bag tightly against her stomach as if trying to protect herself from a punch.
‘Marijuana. Dope. Hash. Black. Whatever you want to call it.’
‘Grass?’ asked Iman.
‘Well, no. Actually, technically, yes, as far as the law is concerned, but grass is actually the leaves, whereas this was the black, the resin, the hash block. Now, thing is, you get found with this divided and they’ll do you for possession with intent to supply, a much more serious offence than simple possession. Added to this,’ she lowered her voice, as she led up to the best bit, ‘the fact that Rashid had a) signed for the stuff on the custody sheet when he was booked in and b) actually told the officers that he was going to give the other block to a roommate at uni.’
Annabelle’s eyes widened and she sat back against the wall, before leaning forwards again – she could see her audience were not quite getting it.
‘Even just passing a joint to someone is intent to supply, see, so by him saying that, he had basically confessed to the more serious crime. Right?’
Iman and Khalil focussed hard on Annabelle.
‘But I managed to get that discounted, because at the time there was no legal rep around and he had been arrested for something totally different. In the end I got him off on a caution.’ Iman and Khalil continued to stare at Annabelle, forcing her to spell it out. ‘It’s a bloody good result – a caution – considering how much dope he had on him. May affect his immigration status. You need to check on that. It’s not my field, but he won’t need to go to court or anything. No criminal record.’
‘What’s a caution?’ Iman and Khalil asked together.
‘Think of it like a warning. Right. He got a warning; if he does something like this again he’ll be in trouble, but for now he’s free to go.’
‘Where is he?’ asked Iman.
‘He’s just getting his stuff together. He’ll be here any minute.’ Annabelle looked disgruntled.
‘What do you mean that it might affect his immigration status?’ asked Khalil. ‘He needs to be here until September for his course.’
‘Like I said, I don’t know, but he might need to go home sooner than that.’
‘But he’s on a scholarship,’ Iman said.
‘Like I said, it’s not my area. Here.’ She handed over a card. ‘Give the immigration section at my firm a call in the morning, all right? They might be able to help him out although I doubt whether he’ll get Legal Aid. Right. I’m off now.’
‘You don’t need to wait for him to come up?’ Iman asked, taking on Lisa’s interrogative role now that Lisa had fallen silent.
‘He’ll be up any second, and I’ve got a GBH down south now.’ She stood in front of them.
‘Well, thank you.’ Khalil stood up before Iman did; he realised that that was what this vast woman seemed to want from him. The rep nodded before leaving the premises.
‘Drugs!’
Lisa was muttering, disgusted. ‘If I had known it was just some hash that he was in here for . . .’
Khalil was turning the card over, looking at the name of the immigration solicitor when Rashid arrived. Rashid only seemed to see one of them.
‘Lisa!’
he cried. She stood up as Rashid came towards them.
‘You all right, then?’ Iman asked Rashid.
‘Sure,’ said Rashid, still looking pleased by the sight of Lisa, who now held her laptop bag to the side of her body.
‘I didn’t think you’d come.’ He walked closer to her and held her arms. ‘You know, Lisa, down there, in that cell. It was so . . . I felt so, you know, lonely, and I was thinking . . . I’ve been so stupid. I’ve really missed you. I didn’t think you’d come—’
‘I probably wouldn’t have come if I had known it was just for some minor dope charge.’
Rashid was holding some of the bits and pieces from his pocket in a see-through plastic bag that dangled against Lisa’s upper arm.
‘What did you say?’ Rashid dropped his hold on Lisa’s arms.
‘I said I wouldn’t have come down here if I knew that it was just about some hash that you had on you. I thought you had been arrested for some terrorism offence or something. I was at dinner with Lord C. and I rushed off. I told them all that it was really serious and now it turns out it’s just some caution for a piece of dope.’
A look was building up in Rashid’s face that made Iman want to pull Lisa – even Lisa – away from him.
‘You’re disappointed, is that it? Disappointed? What is it that you wanted me to do, exactly?’ Rashid started out with not a small amount of malice in his voice. ‘Blow up Buckingham Palace? Would that get your attention? Is that what you want? Strap myself to some explosives? Is that it? What do you want from me?’ Rashid’s voice was raised now.
‘All right. All right. You lot. Move it outside. No domestics in here. Out you go.’ The policewoman was standing by the door, holding it wide and ushering them out. ‘That’s it then for tonight and leave Buckingham Palace out of it and all.’
The rain had stopped, but it was cold and the wind had picked up. Outside they were no longer performing for anyone, nor were they enclosed and the tension momentarily seemed to drop away. But Rashid’s fury was still with him and his English crumbled with the strain of it.
‘Do you know, I’ve had it with you.’ His accent became stronger and as his pronounciation weakened Lisa became more resolute. She stood with her bag over her shoulder, her arms across her chest, her jacket puffed out under it. The manifest effect of her stance was one of rebuttal and indignation.
‘I don’t have time for this, OK, Rashid?’ Lisa retorted. ‘I’ve been sitting here waiting for over an hour. I thought you really were in trouble and I thought I could help, but you’re not, so there’s no point in me hanging around. I’m off, all right?’
To Rashid it felt as though the wind isolated him on the street. It seemed to require him to shout, as though he was on a stage and it was a crowd not the wind that roared past his ears.
‘Of course you don’t have time for this. You only have time for the brown and the destitute – victim types, isn’t it? You do what? The politically repressed only? I don’t know why it took me so long to see it.’
‘How
dare
you? How dare
you
?’ Lisa started. ‘After all I’ve done! And you! You’re just . . . so ungrateful!’ she screamed. ‘The lot of you!’
Khalil and Iman had formed a wall next to Rashid and they watched her walk off. Khalil put his arm around Rashid’s shoulders and Iman came up close to him.
‘You really gave it to her
.’
‘He really did,’ said Khalil.
‘Oh, leave me alone. I’m sick of this, all of this. I don’t want to be politically engaged, OK? I don’t want it. I’m not like you two, or Mama or Sabri or even Baba; I just want out. All right? Out of the whole damn shit. Did you see that? That . . . that
bitch
would have been happier to have me locked up on some trumped-up charge for the next twenty years. Then she really would have loved me.’
‘Come on, Rashid, come on. I haven’t seen you for months. Let’s go and just, I don’t know, spend time together. I missed you
ya zalame
, really.’
‘I’m not in the mood; just leave me alone. I have nothing to say on any of the things you want to talk about. Leave me out of it, all right?’
And with that Rashid walked off into the darkness, fishing his cigarettes out of his plastic bag of belongings, lighting one by a streetlight and letting the smoke get whisked away up into the sky above him.
THE GAZAN SEA
Two months later
Gloria was dead and his mother had killed her. Each time Rashid looked at the burnt-out oily-looking stump of his marijuana plant he cursed his mother. And he could not stop looking at it. The stump meant one thing and one thing only. His mother didn’t care for him. Not one bit. He didn’t give a shit whether she was a hijacking legend or not. She managed to look after every other tree, plant, root or vegetable in the vicinity of their apartment, but his cherished Gloria had been neglected and had died from that neglect. It was unforgivable. There were even yellowed cigarette butts, squeezed flat by desperate fingers, sticking out of the soil. He swore at her unconvincingly in his mind
.
He heard her voice and the scrape of the metal outdoor table being brought around the edge of the house, as it was every morning, and could not swear at her any more. All he really wanted was for her to ask him how he was, but who would admit to that?
‘Asleep, of course,’ he could hear her saying. He was surprised that Sabri had so much as asked. Rashid looked around the room from where he lay. His most precious belongings, including branches of Gloria’s remains (it would not have taken much, just a bit of water, a bit of sun, a bit of love), were arrayed on the floor around him in black plastic bags that blocked his way as he tried to move around, rustling and crunching horribly when he lost his footing. He had already crushed four CD cases that way and there were wires everywhere, coming out of his computer and his stereo. He had not been able to get his computer up and running yet, because his desk for some (unconvincing) reason had been left upstairs. Another
lie
. In place of where his desk should have been was a new freezer, still wrapped in plastic, which belonged to one of the families camped upstairs in their old apartment; it would be stored there, he was told, until such a time as their house was rebuilt.