Free Out of It by Selma Dabbagh Page A

can get to stay there for a while.’ He would ignore them. It was just the wrong time. He could still fly. He was still going. It would still work out.
    ‘Stay there? No chance,’ Iman said. ‘They’ll kick you straight out of there once you finish your studies. You would need a visa to stay, which no one would give someone like you or me. The only way you could stay would be to find an English wife.’ She cleared out her nose by blowing it hard, so hard that her jaw moved as she did so. No one spoke for some time.
    ‘I expect you’ll be more interested in this then.’ Rashid spread out Lisa’s message flat in front of Khalil. Khalil would not have had the chance to get to the Centre yet, but at the thought of it Rashid jerked as though someone had just kicked the seat of his chair. Rashid forced Khalil to look up by covering his hand over the message that Khalil was trying to read. ‘Is the Centre OK?’
    ‘I really don’t know. I presume it is, because I spoke to Jamal last night and he told me that their army had not entered the camp, that they were all on the outside, but I haven’t spoken to him since around midnight. His phone is disconnected again. I am going up there after this. I just needed to go south first before it all got closed up.’
    Iman looked at Khalil. ‘It’s got more doors than a CIA safe house, your Centre. I’m sure it will be fine.’
    ‘Yes, it’s got to be,’ Rashid agreed.
    Khalil lifted Rashid’s hand up and read Lisa’s message carefully. ‘Ouch. “Small fry” ?’ And then he read it again. ‘I think we can get what she wants. We’ll need to mention Raed, of course. I think he had a fairly senior position with the Party, didn’t he? That’s worth mentioning.’
    ‘Do we have casualty figures for last night?’ Rashid asked.
    ‘We can get them. I sent some fieldworkers out.’ Khalil’s hands were moving again; his voice had lifted. He looked up at Rashid and paused. ‘What’s this?’ He brushed a bit of sand away from the edge of Rashid’s scalp.
    ‘Who? Which fieldworkers?’ Rashid was finding it difficult to stay focussed. Their neighbour, Seif El Din, seemed interested in everything that they were saying. The fighters were making no bones about staring at their table. The conversation was not going as Rashid had expected at all. Iman was in and out of it and the man on the table next to them, this supposedly religious man, could not stop checking Iman out. Neither could the fighter in green.
    ‘Jamal would have tried to collect those figures without even being asked,’ Khalil said.
    ‘Of course, Jamal,’ Rashid said. Iman and Khalil’s admiration of Jamal bugged Rashid. What does Jamal think? Iman would always ask following a political development and Khalil would always know, because the camp viewpoint that Jamal represented was the one that would always give them the authenticity that they needed.
    Iman was smoking. She seemed to be completely unaware that she was in public. Saying something about it would make her worse. He should take her home.
    ‘I expect Jamal’s doing eyewitness statements around the hospital. I left one of the newer volunteers over at the camps in the south. It’s a nightmare down there. They demolished this house – well, a row of houses – but in this one house a gas canister in the kitchen had blown up. I went inside to get a bike for this kid who was standing outside screaming for it. My bike! My bike! on and on. Anyway, the smell?’ Khalil closed his eyes and shook his head, ‘Smoke, sulphur, sewage, rot, the lot. I can’t even describe it.’ He shuddered.
    ‘You don’t have to. It’s still on you,’ Rashid said.
    ‘There were these chickens running everywhere and once I got inside the family started shouting for blankets and fridges and I don’t know what, and I started telling them that I was not a removal man for God’s sake. It was pathetic. We are pathetic. They brought a donkey with a bucket of