Free Into My Arms by Kylie Ladd Page B

face cream while she told him the ancient story of Simurg and the pomegranates and the god who had three sons. ‘Yet I am richer,’ she had always added at the end of the story, leaning down to kiss him on the forehead, ‘for I have four,’ and he would wriggle under her lips until she tickled him. It had been a long time since he had heard the tale.
    The washing was all tangled. His mother had obviously thrown in everything she could find, turned it on and then left it, overwhelmed. Zia had to strain to drag it from the ancient machine, and as he hauled out a jumper entwined with a pair of jeans the heavy lid fell and hit him across one bicep, the blow resonating down to the bone. He rubbed the area ruefully. Last week the lid had got him across his shoulders.
    Zia’s arm still ached as he stretched up to hang the wet clothes on the washing line. Still, at least he was alone in the communal courtyard today, no one else here to blow smoke at him or mutter about terrorists. Zia didn’t like living so close to other people. The smells of their cooking clogged the hallways; their arguments came through his bedroom walls late at night. Worst of all, there was nowhere for him and Farid to play save for this grubby concrete square littered with cigarette butts. The one time they’d tried to kick their football here—a real football, not the red egg-shaped one that all the boys at school were so in love with—the smokers had laughed and the women hanging out their washing had shouted at them to go away.
    Shiraz had been different, Zia thought, shaking out one of his father’s shirts and remembering to peg it from the bottom. There were many gardens in Shiraz, parks and fruit trees that no one minded if he climbed or kicked his ball against. They had had a proper home there. He’d had his own room, rather than having to share with Farid, who wheezed at night and sometimes wet the bed. There had always been someone visiting—cousins, aunts, friends—someone for his father to talk to or his mother to laugh and gossip with over coffee. There had been his older brothers.
    Zia leaned over the washing basket while he blinked back the tears that stung his eyes. It wouldn’t do for his father or Farid to come out and see him crying. Farid would only cry too, and his father would be angry. We need to look forward, not back , he was always exhorting his wife. This is our country now. But his mother didn’t believe it, Zia could tell. How could she, when Iman and Habib were still living somewhere on the other side of the world?
    Or at least she hoped they were. They all did. Zia knew the story now; knew it as well as that fairytale about the pomegranates and the three sons. The family had had to leave Iran quickly. Why, he wasn’t sure, but it was something to do with some papers and religion and his father. There had been frantic conversations that stopped as soon as Zia came into the room; there had been his mother’s tears and the worried line etched between his uncle’s eyes. One night, still sharp in his memory, there had been such a loud knock at their door that it had woken him from his sleep. Zia had leapt out of bed and peered into the hallway, but was promptly ordered by his parents to return to his room and not come out again. He had lain in bed much as his mother did now, eyes open in the darkness, the staccato tread of unfamiliar footsteps echoing throughout the house. Later, when they had gone, his father came into his room and told him not to worry, that it had all been a mistake. Yet the next afternoon when he returned from school, his mother had placed a plate of figs and cheese in front of him and announced that they were moving to Australia.
    Over dinner he found out more. That they would leave within the week, as soon as they could and apply for refugee status on arrival. Iman and Habib would remain behind, but only temporarily. It was too expensive, Zia’s father explained, for all six of them to fly so