dress, all naked arms, with their udders hanging out the sides.’ The resentment was mutual and Ambaro and Jama mocked her behind her back. When Ambaro saw Mrs Islaweyne wrapping her nikaab around her face she would raise an eyebrow and sing in a bittersweet voice, ‘Dhegdheer, Dhegdheero, yaa ku daawaan? Witch, oh witch, who will admire you?’
Dhegdheer was a strange, vain woman with short, plump limbs, always oiled from head to toe, her eyebrows drawn on thickly with kohl, a fat, hairy mole on her cheek blending into a luxurious moustache, small, swollen feet squeezed into shoes that Ambaro could never afford. Sometimes Dhegdheer would appear on their roof glaring at them for no particular reason, marking her territory. When she returned downstairs, Jama would copy her signature waddle and squint to perfection. ‘Go eat yourself, witch!’ he shouted when she was safely out of earshot.
‘The one thing that woman is good at is breeding, she must have a highway between her legs, she gives birth to litters of two and three as if she was a stray bitch,’ Ambaro would say, and she was right, Jama had counted eight children but behind every door there seemed to be more sleeping or crying. The older Islaweyne boys went to school and chattered away in Arabic, even at home. Jama had learnt a rough, street Arabic which they mocked, mimicking his bad grammar and slang in slow, imbecilic voices. Although ZamZam was not the most alluring of girls, Dhegdheer had her eye on one of the wealthy Somali men who imported livestock from Berbera and wanted her daughter to appear a delicate flower cultivated in the most refined of settings.
Jama heard Dhegdheer complaining to her husband that Ambaro and her guttersnipe son lowered the honour of their family. ‘How can we be first class when we have people like that in our own home?’
Mr Islaweyne grunted and waved her away, but it was clear to Jama that his place in the home was precarious. As Jama spent more time on the streets to avoid Dhegdheer and her sons, the more their complaints about him increased.
‘Kinsi said she saw him stealing from the suq.’
‘Khadar, next door, said that he hangs around the camel mukhbazar joking with hashish smokers.’
Jama did joke with the hashish smokers but it was because he did not have brothers, cousins or a father to protect him like the other children. He knew his powerlessness so did not argue or make enemies. He had recently befriended Shidane and Abdi who were kind and generous, but friendships between boys of different clans tended to form and collapse like constellations of new stars forged in the heat of Aden, never lasting.
In the apartment the cold war between the women was thawing and simmering in the summer heat. Ambaro, tired and frustrated after work, became more combative. She used the kitchen at the same time as Dhegdheer, helped herself to more flour and ghee, picked out whichever glass was clean instead of the ones set aside for them, and left the laundry waiting for days at a time. Even with Jama she was like a kettle whistling to the boil; one day she wanted him to work, another day to attend school, another day to stay on the roof and keep away from those market boys, and yet another day she didn’t want to see him ever again. Jama at first tried to soothe her, massaging away all the knots in her body with his keen, sprightly fingers but soon even his touch irritated her and he left her to spend the nights with Shidane and Abdi. He returned every few days to wash, eat a little and check on his mother, until one evening he came in to find Ambaro and Dhegdheer in the kitchen, bosoms nearly touching, nails and teeth bared, ready to pounce on one another. From what he could tell through the shouts of ‘Slut born of sluts!’ and ‘Hussy!’, Dhegdheer was ordering his mother out of the kitchen and she was cursing back and standing her ground, looking as if she was ready to spit in Dhegdheer’s face. Jama grabbed his mother’s arm and tried to pull her away. Dhegdheer’s sons, older and stronger than Jama entered the kitchen, unable to ignore the shouting women any longer. Ambaro and Dhegdheer were now grappling with each other, pushing and shoving amongst the hot steaming pots. Jama hustled the pans off the fire and put them out of harm’s way. Ambaro was younger, stronger and a better fighter than the housebound Dhegdheer and she pushed the older woman into a corner, daring Mrs Islaweyne to lay a finger on her.
‘Soobax, soobax, come on,’ jeered Ambaro.
Dhegdheer’s oldest son grabbed hold of Ambaro and jostled her onto the floor.
‘Stop that shameful behaviour,’ he squeaked in his breaking voice.
Seeing his mother lying on the floor, Jama without any thought, picked up a pan of boiling soup and slung the steaming liquid in the boys’ direction. The soup fell short of their bodies but cascaded over their bare feet. Dhegdheer was beside herself. ‘Hoogayey waan balanbalay, my precious boys, beerkay! My own livers,’ she keened. ‘May Allah cut you up into pieces Jama and throw you to the wild dogs.’ Dhegdheer picked up a long butcher’s knife and began sharpening it, while Ambaro tried to wrench it out of her hands, Jama darted beneath their legs and escaped from the apartment.
Shidane and Abdi applauded Jama when he told them he was never going back to the Islaweyne house. Aden was a huge, dangerous playground for market boys and Shidane knew all of the secret nooks, crevices, holes and storerooms that made up the map of the unseen Aden. Together they could avoid older boys who would rob or beat them.
It was only when they became a gang that Jama realised Abdi was nearly deaf, he would put his ear right up to your mouth to compensate and hold your hands while he listened. As they sat on their rooftop, watching the setting sun turn the pools of water in the ancient tanks into infant suns, Jama and Abdi snuggled up under an old sheet. Shidane laughed at their canoodling and they laughed at his big ears.
‘No wonder your poor uncle is so deaf! You have taken enough ears for both of you,’ said Jama grabbing hold of Shidane’s flapping ears.
‘You can talk!’ exclaimed Shidane in response, pointing at Jama’s big white teeth. ‘Look at those tusks in your mouth! You could pull down a tree with them.’
‘You wish you had teeth like mine, rabbit ears, with a lucky gap like this in my teeth, you wait and see how rich I become, you would die for my teeth, admit it.’ Jama displayed his teeth for them to envy.
Ambaro had spent days holding her breath when Jama had disappeared. Mr Islaweyne had allowed her to move into a tiny room in the apartment while Dhegdheer took quiet satisfaction from Jama’s disappearance. Ambaro searched for Jama in dark, filthy alleys late at night, long after her twelve-hour shift had finished she was still looking, she went to his old haunts, asked around the other market boys but could not find him. She had no friends amongst the coffee women and unlike other Somali women whose troubles gushed forth at every opportunity, her anguish stayed locked up within her without release. Jama regularly disappeared but Ambaro had a panicky feeling that this time he would not come back. Her daughter Kahawaris began appearing in her dreams and she hated dreaming of the dead.
Unlike many Somali women, who abandoned four- and five-year-old boys on the street when their fathers absconded, she had guarded Jama as best as she could, and thought day and night ‘How can I keep my baby safe? How can I keep my baby safe?’
Jama was the only family she had or wanted, she had not seen the rest since leaving for Aden. Ambaro had grown up in the care of her aunt after her mother, Ubah, had died of smallpox. Izra’il, the angel of death, had barged down Ubah’s door fourteen times to decimate her legion of children, spiriting them away with diarrhoea, petty accidents, hunger, coughs that had wracked tiny rib cages until they had cracked. Ubah had left one live child, a heartbroken sickly little girl, who haunted her grave waiting for the day of judgement to arrive and restore her mother to her. Smallpox had laid its pockmarked hand on Ambaro’s body but she had survived, wearing her scars as proof of her mother’s ghostly protection. As she grew older Ambaro became a lean, silent young woman. Grief for her mother and lost brothers and sisters kept her detached from the other members of the family, who feared her and worried that misfortune might lead her to perform some evil witchcraft on them. Ambaro’s eyes were too deep, too full of misery to be trustworthy. It was only Jinnow, the level-headed matriarch of the polygamous family, who showed her any affection. Jinnow had delivered Ambaro into the world as a baby, had named her, and had demanded a veil be drawn over her growing intimacy with her cousin Guure. Guure the orphan lived with his elderly aunt