find out for certain that he was of like mind.
In her room, feeling sick and confused, Edie stared around her once more. There really was no one else there. But she herself was there, had woken up in her own room in her own bed and she would never, ever have deserted Laura. That was the code, the rules of the game – one in, both in, never get separated, no one left behind. She slipped her feet into her flip-flops, went to the door and opened it tentatively. The sun hit her full in the face, making her pupils contract painfully and causing the throbbing behind her eyes to intensify. She stepped to the front of the narrow veranda that ran the length of the building and off which each of the staff bedrooms opened. At the far end, by an oleander bush, she could see her scooter, parked haphazardly, leaning heavily to one side.
A dim recollection of leaving it there in the early hours before the dawn surfaced, sending misty tendrils of memory through her sleep-deprived, hungover brain. Had Laura ridden home with her, holding on behind and screeching in alarm when she took a corner too fast or seemed to be coming off the road and heading for the clear water of the bay? She must have done. Edie could not remember unlocking her door, getting undressed and into bed. But she was wearing her pyjamas now so she must have done. It would have been a squash in the single bed with Laura but they had done it before. Had Laura slept beside her last night? She must have done.
It was completely clear that Laura must have done all these things. But beyond that certainty lay nothing. There was absolutely no sign of her.
There was no home.
Her house and those immediately around it had taken a direct hit. The tree-lined street, once green and peaceful, alive with birdsong and the gentle rustle of branches in the breeze, was now filled with noises of an utterly different nature. The sounds of carnage; of pain and despair. A man was running along the street carrying a child, a boy of about six. The boy was screaming with pain, his left leg bent at an impossible angle and his left arm dangling, limp and lifeless, by his side. Tears were pouring down the man’s face so thickly that his vision must have been obscured and his frequent trips and stumbles testified to that. Fatima turned her head away, appalled by their suffering. There was nothing she could do to help.
She stared around her. Charred remains of tree trunks stabbed at the sky where the once majestic maples had provided shade. Colour had been obliterated and replaced by grey, interrupted only by spatters of blood, deep red blotches on the shattered concrete. And everywhere she looked she saw bodies strewn amongst piles of stone and plaster and roof tiles. Or not, in fact, bodies, only pieces of bodies, randomly distributed; an arm here, a blackened and filthy leg, ankle and foot there. A head lay face down in the arenaceous soil of what was once someone’s carefully tended garden; its hijab soaked with so much blood it was hard to tell what its original shade had been.
Fatima walked forward a few steps, incapable of lucid thought. She would have screamed herself, like the young boy, but she had no voice, could not make her vocal chords produce any sound. A couple, ghostly in their dust-coated clothing, were standing on a pile of rubble, frantically but futilely sifting through it, lifting pathetically small pieces of wreckage and throwing them aside, their shredded hands raw and bleeding, making no impact on the huge mound beneath their feet. Fatima knew them; they were her neighbours, a young man and woman with a new-born baby. She put her hand to her head, covering her eyes as she realised what they must be looking for, and staggered on, away from them and their tragedy.
She continued her stumbling progress, the twins beside her. Somewhere here should have been their house with its courtyard and lemon tree, its almond orchard and its years of family history.
The house was gone.
In its place was a body. Its clothes were ripped to rags by the force of the bomb blast but it looked surprisingly intact, no injury visible. It was a body so familiar that Fatima knew instantly who it was.
Fayed.
Her husband; her children’s father.
She sank to her knees and vomited, retching so violently it felt as if her stomach would burst apart. The girls were becoming hysterical, screaming and sobbing and Fatima didn’t stop them, couldn’t stop them. Violently, she pushed them away to prevent them from seeing what she had seen. But, terrified as they were, they wouldn’t go, instead clinging desperately onto her, burrowing into her back as she crouched down, hiding their faces in the folds of her scarf. Their weight took her by surprise and she lost her balance, falling forward and instinctively putting out her hands to save herself only to find herself pressing down on Fayed’s stomach. The disgust of making contact with his dead flesh made her throw up again and again, her throat raw and burning, her mouth filled with the foul taste of bile.
Despite the warmth of the day and the heat from the fires that burnt amidst the remains, his body was already cold. Soon rigor mortis would set in and then, if the corpse were not buried, the flies would come, followed by the maggots. Fatima forced herself up and lurched away from what had once been her husband. The girls, clinging to her clothing, dragged behind her. They had seen the body, for certain, but Fatima didn’t know if they had recognised their papa. Please God that they hadn’t. They were screaming, and Fatima wanted to join them, wanted to howl at the dust-shrouded sky, wanted to make it all go away and not be true. But a mother’s instinct to protect her young kicked in. She must get away. She wrenched the twins after her, speeding up to a hobbling, stumbling, wreckage-impeded attempt at a run. With no idea where she was going or how she would get there, she knew only that she must flee, must escape these killing fields and arrive somewhere that still had a pretence of normality. Run. All she had to do was run.
Running, barely feasible for an adult, was almost impossible for a child. Marwa’s tiny legs could not navigate the treacherous terrain and she fell, banging her knee on the sharp protruding edge of a bent and contorted piece of metal that sliced into her flesh with the ease of a knife. There was a long pause before the first bellowing screech exploded out of her, far too loud for such small lungs, a yell laden with fear and pain and uncontainable panic. Fatima had no words with which to console her, nothing to say that would make it any better, no will in her body to tend to her daughter’s injury, the seeping gash in her baby-soft skin. Marwa howled and sobbed without cease, on and on, whilst Maryam whimpered and Fatima’s tears erupted from her eyes and poured unstoppably down her cheeks. She hauled herself and her children onwards.
A single gunshot rang out, close by, coming from behind one of the half-standing buildings of what had, until so very recently, been a peaceful and affluent middle-class street. Wiping snot from her nose with a filthy hand, Fatima’s legs froze, paralysed by terror. Her gaze darted from side to side. The sniper fire had prompted forth shadowy figures from other nooks and crannies, creeping, scuttling creatures, the undead, fleeing like prey escaping an unseen enemy.
What have they done to us, Fatima’s soul cried out. What have we become?
‘Run,’ a voice, dust-coarsened and gravelly, urged. ‘Run, now.’
Swept up in his wake, driven by the urgency in his voice, Fatima grabbed up Marwa and placed her on her hip, took Maryam’s hand in a vice-like grip and ran. She did not falter when the second shot came and her companion stopped in his tracks and languidly, as if in slow-motion, fell to the ground.
She just ran, on and on, through the dirt and destruction, between the mountainous heaps of boulders and rubble, iron and steel, traversing every obstacle, as if it were possible
