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. Lazy flames licked around a battered, roofless estate car slung sideways across the road, the tyres on one side flattened so that it was crooked and lopsided like a small child’s drawing. For a terrible, fleeting second Fatima thought it was their car; that Fayed had been coming home as death rained down.
But then she saw that it was the wrong make, and the wrong colour, beneath the grime. The relief was momentary; behind the pitiful vehicle, a building’s steel rods, stripped of concrete and plaster, reached towards a sky leaden with dust and ash and full of the stench of obliteration. Fatima was staring all around her, struggling to make sense of the sights her eyes were relaying to her, when she heard the noise. Involuntarily, her gaze sought to find its source. With a sickening surge of terror she saw that there were people in the estate car, the fire-blackened corpses of a family who had tried to escape but been too late and too unlucky. And that one of them was moving, groaning, dying in excruciating agony and unimaginable fear.
Fatima froze to the spot, quite literally petrified. The feeling of being in a dream evaporated in an instant. This was reality and it was awful. Nothing in her life so far had prepared her for a moment such as this. She should help, do something, call an ambulance. She fumbled in her bag for her phone and drew it out, frenziedly trying to tap in the emergency number, forgetting that there was a shortcut button for this. She had never had reason or cause to use it before.
The children were whimpering in terror, but saying nothing, seeming to have lost the power of speech. She should get them away from this horror but still she hadn’t managed to make the call and she couldn’t leave that person to die like an animal. She stabbed furiously at the keypad again, missing the numbers, her hands trembling too severely to hit them accurately. It was a nightmare, one of those hideous ones where you are trying to run but your legs won’t move and you keep replaying, over and over, your efforts – futile – towards flight.
A blast of intense heat, accompanied by a loud, fizzing hiss and the whoosh of fierce flames, brought her struggles with the phone to an abrupt halt. Nearly knocked off her feet, instinctively she grabbed the girls to her, hugging them close as if just her embrace could save them. The car’s petrol tank had ignited and the vehicle was engulfed in a swirling ball of fire, blue, red and orange. A wretched, animalistic scream ripped out from its innards, rending the smoke-laden air apart. And then stopped. Even the roaring flames could not fill the silence that followed. The world whirled around her. Fatima was struggling to breathe, was drowning in fear. She turned towards the car as if she could help, realised immediately the stupidity of such an idea and tried instead to flee. Running, she tripped and fell, taking Maryam off guard and pulling her down with her. Dizzy and disorientated, all Fatima could think of was getting away from this apocalypse. She stumbled back to her feet, dragging Maryam up with her, not even checking to see if she were hurt.
She had to get home, to find Fayed.
‘Ready to paint that town red?’
The sun had disappeared behind the mountains and much vodka had been imbibed by the time Edie pulled the scooter out from the shade of a handy oleander bush, clambered
