href="#litres_trial_promo">Edie
A shaft of bright sunlight found the gap between the misaligned wooden screen and the window frame and lanced across the room. The girl in the bed groaned, shifted onto her stomach and buried her face in her pillow. Moments later, she turned back onto her side, clutching her stomach as she fought back the nausea. Tentatively, she opened her eyes, feeling her pupils contract painfully against the light and becoming aware of a dull, persistent pounding in her head and a thumping at her temples.
Little by little, Edie Marsh woke up enough to sincerely regret the amount she had drunk the night before, and to chastise herself, as she had many times before, for not knowing when to stop. Hauling herself into an upright position, she reached out for the glass on the floor by her bed and drank, finishing it all even as she screwed up her face at the water’s stale taste and tepid temperature. Holding her hands to her head in an attempt to calm the throbbing, she shut her eyes and tried to concentrate. Something was wrong.
She dropped her hands to her lap and forced her eyes open again, head still drooping down with the effort of it all. Gazing around the room from corner to corner, scouring all pathetic three square metres of it, she did not see what she was expecting to. There was no one there.
No one but her.
The door was firmly closed – no sign that anyone had got up early for a swim or gone out in search of hangover-curing coffee and paracetamol. Even so, in case her eyes could not be trusted, Edie got up and investigated a couple of piles of discarded clothes, picking garments up and immediately throwing them back down again. She even looked under the bed. Then she slumped down onto the single plastic chair, the pulsing in her head suddenly overwhelming and uncontrollable. Massaging her eyelids with her thumbs, she searched her memory. What had happened last night? Hazy snapshots drifted through her mind but the details were sunk in alcohol and wouldn’t surface.
They had planned to sleep squashed into the single bed together, something that they were used to, that they’d grown up doing, of that she was sure. ‘They’ being her and her adored identical twin sister, Laura, whose unexpected arrival at the holiday resort on the shores of the Adriatic sea where Edie was working at midday the day before had filled Edie’s heart with happiness. They’d gone out on the town that evening, for sure. But right at this moment, Edie couldn’t remember how or when they’d got home or anything much of what had gone on at all, during their night out or afterwards.
And the bed, now that she, Edie, had got out of it, was completely empty.
Where the hell was Laura?
The sea looked flat and calm. Benign. Perhaps it always did from the shore, with the lazy ripples of tideless waves lapping the fringes of golden sand that gleamed in the heat. Fatima didn’t know as she’d never been to the seaside before. She wasn’t exactly here for the beach, anyway. Screwing up her eyes against the sun she could see, hazily in the distance, the outline of what she supposed must be the island they would be heading for.
It wasn’t far. Really not far at all. Just a little water in-between. Compared to the distance she had already travelled it barely registered. You could almost swim there.
But she had never learnt to swim and neither had her children. She was sure that Ehsan didn’t know, either, nor his son Youssef. Despair threatened to engulf her, together with an utter weariness that suffused her body and made her bones feel liquid, no longer able to support her weight. She sank to the ground, right there on the seafront promenade, crouching into the scanty shade offered by the low beach wall whilst tourists strolled past, all wobbly pink skin and red noses. They were so well fed and rested, so oblivious. But that was to be expected – they were on their holidays, after all.
A sudden, searing jealousy made Fatima want to stop them, to tear their expensive clothes from their backs, grab their over-priced ice-creams and throw them into the sea. Look at me, she would say to them. This is what it’s like to have nothing. But the problem was that wasn’t what it was like. Having no property, no income, no possessions, was not the problem.
The problem was having no hope.
The sun beat down on her head. She wanted to lie down and rest, regardless of the passers-by, heedless of the noise and bustle. She felt she could sleep for a hundred years. Perhaps if she looked pitiful enough, someone would save her. But she knew they wouldn’t. The more needy you were, the more they ignored you. The more woeful, the more uncomfortable for others. Few, if any, wanted to get involved and who could blame them? There had been kindness amidst the devastation in her home country, people sharing their shelter and what little food they had. But Fatima wasn’t stupid and not ignorant, either. She knew how she and her compatriots were viewed, talked about, written about.
As ‘swarms’ and ‘floods’ and ‘marauding invaders’. Or, possibly even worse, as piteous and desperate, each pair of pleading eyes or outreached arms diminished by the sheer number of them, dehumanised and depersonalised by being one face amongst so very many.
In deciding to leave her country – although was it a decision when there seemed to be no other option? – she had taken on inconceivable, unimagined challenges. There was nothing to do but pull herself together and face those challenges. To get on with it. Think about Marwa and Maryam. She closed her hand around the warm, metal object in her pocket and squeezed it tight. It was the key to her house that no longer existed in her city that had been razed to the ground. She should throw it away and would have already done so but for the fact that it was all that was left of her old life, the only thing to remind her.
Getting up off the pavement and dusting herself down she defiantly tucked in her headscarf where it had come loose. Some women had stopped wearing a scarf so as not to stand out, to avoid being noticed. But Fatima would no more go out with an uncovered head as with uncovered breasts. They had not taken everything away from her yet, not reduced her to being ashamed of her culture, her identity.
Setting off along the busy promenade, she held her head high and tried to look purposeful. She had a list of things she must buy, but it meant spending money and she needed to protect every cent because there were so many things to be paid for. She must choose wisely and purchase only what was absolutely necessary for the next stage of their odyssey.
Perhaps the saddest fact of all, the most depressing, she thought as she handed over the precious notes for the life-jackets,
