Edie threw Laura a faded beach towel. ‘The showers are at the end of the block.’ She looked around her, located a bottle of shampoo and chucked it in Laura’s direction.
‘By the way,’ she added, as Laura turned to go. ‘How on earth did you find your way here? I didn’t give you the precise address. And where did you come from, where have you been the last few months?’
‘My very own personal, inbuilt sat-nav, little sis.’ Laura had been born first, by ten minutes or so, and never let Edie forget it. ‘I could track you down anywhere.’ She twirled the shampoo bottle round and round in her elegant hand. ‘But – questions later. Right now, I need to wash. I can smell my own armpits and that’s not even the worst of it.’
Laura glided out of the room and Edie drained her glass, still not quite believing that her twin had appeared as if from nowhere. She pulled a bundle of clothing out of the canvas shelving that was all she had for storage and dumped it onto the bed. By the looks of it, Laura would definitely be needing to borrow clothes – she didn’t seem to have anything with her; her pack couldn’t hold much more than a few pairs of knickers. Make-up, she always helped herself to anyway. Men – the same. Edie stopped short at this thought. Not Vuk. She was not giving up her claim on Vuk. This time, Edie would make sure she kept the big prize for herself.
When the barrel bombs came to their neighbourhood, Fatima and the girls were not there. They had gone to visit friends in another suburb. They heard the explosions as they travelled home but explosions were nothing new so they tried to ignore them. You could never tell exactly where the bombs were falling anyway; sound ricochets and distorts, making distance incalculable. It was better to assume – to hope – that it hadn’t hit your street, your home. Inuring yourself to the violence, the terror, the bloodshed, was the only way. So many times already it had been someone else’s turn to take the brunt of this insane and insatiable war. Fatima gathered the twins protectively to her as the taxi proceeded through the deserted streets. For so long the fighting had taken place elsewhere and perhaps they had all assumed it would continue to be so even whilst knowing that there must surely be a limit to how often they could escape it.
As they neared home, it seemed that that limit had arrived. The taxi driver pulled over abruptly and told them it was finished; he would go no further. As if in a dream, Fatima got out of the car and pulled the children after her. She had had no phone call from Fayed, her husband, or his parents or brother with whom they lived, so she assumed things were all right at their place. But as the three of them stumbled onwards, picking their way through rubble, choking on dust, tripping in potholes, it was clear that their neighbourhood had been the target. And that it was bad. Really bad. She tried to remember what Fayed had said he was doing that afternoon, where, exactly, he would have been. Had he been planning to spend the hours that she and the girls were out at home? No, Fatima was sure he had mentioned popping into the office – his accountancy premises that were in the downtown business area about twenty minutes’ drive away. He would have been far enough away to have avoided danger.
‘Mummy, where are we going? What’s happened?’ asked Marwa, always the bolder of the twins. How to answer such questions? With the truth: ‘I do not know’, or with a platitude, blatantly untrue, ‘Everything’s fine, don’t worry’? However much parents across the land tried to shield their children from the dreadful events that were occurring, it was impossible. They saw the images on the television, heard the news reports, gazed uncomprehendingly, but with full awareness of the horror of it all, at the pictures in the newspapers displayed on stands outside shops. Children, after all, were not stupid.
As Fatima searched for a response, Marwa’s inquisition continued.
‘Why did we come here? What are we doing? This is not where we live.’
And then, when greeted by Fatima’s continued silence, more urgently, ‘Mummy? Answer me.’
Children grow up fast in war. They have no other option. Today would mark a stage in that process for her twins, Fatima realised. There was no point in trying to hide what was plain to see.
‘There’s been a bomb.’ Fatima took a deep breath. She looked around her, at the ruins that lay everywhere. ‘Several bombs. Lots. We need to find out what has happened to our house.’
Maryam began to cry. Fatima gripped the girls’ hands and held them tight as they walked on. Drawing closer to where they lived, she began to lose her bearings. Familiar landmarks were gone, buildings she had walked past a hundred, a thousand times, were no longer there. The main street, where she had drunk coffee with Fayed in happier times, shopped and chatted with friends, pushed the girls up and down in their pram when they were babies, had been badly hit. Some structures were still standing, upright but crooked teeth that only served to emphasise the gaps on either side. But most were wrecked and half-collapsed. The contents of shops and houses were strewn across the road; broken toys, smashed plates, ruined furniture. The carpet shop’s façade was blown away, the handmade silk floor and wall-coverings still hanging forlornly inside, coated in dust that weighed them down and robbed them of texture, pattern and colour.
Both girls were sobbing now, wailing and screaming, not understanding, despite her explanation, why their mother was dragging them through this hinterland of horror. The sluggish surge of fear that had begun when the taxi stopped began to grow in Fatima’s stomach, rising up through her diaphragm and into her throat. She coughed back the bile, shuddering at its bitter taste and caustic burn, trying to avoid the children seeing or sensing her fear. They were at the corner of a block, only five minutes from home. Their house was this way – just down the short side-street ahead, and then right where the fruit seller had his stall, into a wide, tree-lined boulevard that led towards the little park by the river where the children played in the sunshine. The winter her twins had been born it had snowed and she had wished the girls were old enough to build a snowman and join in the snowball fights. There had been no snow the next winter, nor the next. Looking around her now, it was as if the snowfall had come at last, out of season and discoloured, a thick, grey, flattening blanket that stank of staleness, dirt and desiccation and covered everything with the pall of devastation.
Should she walk down the side-street, take the right turn and amble past all the well-tended courtyard houses towards her own? What chance was there that it would still be standing? The trance-like sensation intensified and Fatima felt that she was walking on air, not really touching anything, distant from all that was unfolding around her, as if it were not real. The feeling was intensified by the absence of any other living being. Those who had survived must have fled already, fearful of repeated onslaughts. Or perhaps they were hiding in dark corners, too terrified and traumatised to emerge. Whatever the truth, no friend or neighbour could be seen; not even a cat prowling the pavement.
The dream-state propelled her onwards and, advancing cautiously along the rough stone sidewalk, at first things didn’t seem as bad as all that. The concrete apartment buildings still stood firm and the only obvious signs of damage were broken windowpanes and shattered car windscreens. Even the fruit-seller’s stall was intact, the cartwheels chocked with wooden blocks that were blackened with age rather than any more recent calamity. The carefully constructed piles of fruit, of apples and persimmons, mangoes and guavas, had collapsed into muddled rivers of greens, browns and yellows and the fruit seller himself was nowhere to be seen, but with a little bit of tidying up there’d be no sign that disaster had struck so close. Fatima had to stop herself from a compulsion to pause and right the fallen fruit, to rebuild the neat pyramids, as if somehow repairing this small piece of damage would mend the horror that surrounded her.
Instead, she turned the corner, tugging a twin on each arm, and started down the boulevard. Each step was a step further into Hades. Bombs had fallen here; direct hits that had left craters in the road and taken rugged slices out of buildings as if a drunken giant had tramped down whatever lay in its path.