Free Qissat by Jo Glanville Page A

relationship seemed to jar something in my parents for I had never seen Dad and Mama return home from an evening with the Sa’eeds in anything less than a maniacal fury with each other.
    Tawfeeq and I watched the humidity slide down the windows, the night reflecting the room back at us. It must have been over fifty degrees and I wondered how invasions could happen so fast and who was keeping the air conditioning on. Did they fight in the Ministry of Electricity? ‘We will only keep the electricity on if Kuwait is free!’ No, they could not do that, it would kill us all. Even the cockroaches are too spoilt to survive the climate now.
    Tawfeeq was bearing no traces of his reputation for dirty jokes with unidentifiable punch lines and for photographing topless women on French beaches.
    ‘Pepsi,
ammo
?’
    ‘Yes, yes, with just a little chocolate biscuit if you have one.’
    Dad arrived with a file of papers, stored in a see-through plastic bag like DNA samples, a small white sticker in the corner had my mother’s handwriting on it,
Identity Documentation Nabil
and a five-digit code.
    ‘Found it as soon as I managed to get that filing cabinet open! Excellent classification systems, your mother. Excellent!’
    It was the first nice thing he had said about her since she had left.
    My father had studied under my mother in Hungary when he was training to be a dentist and she was a professor of biochemistry. They did not admit to falling in love, but they must have done so because they had married and he had taken her back to Syria, then Jordan, then London, where they both studied some more, gave birth to me, worked hard until they finally ended up in Kuwait. ‘A quick fix that got stuck,’ was how my father put it.
    Most of this is in his papers. A small broken up Refugee Card, ‘United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East’ on the top, with a picture of Dad as a child in Syria. He looks sweet. I have the eyebrows but unfortunately not the cheekbones. An old Jordanian passport, dated 1969, out of date in 1979. A couple of older British passports and his current one. A batch of student visas for Hungary covered in the bureaucratic stamps of Eastern Europe and the Middle East.
    ‘You need that.’ Tawfeeq points at the outdated Jordanian passport.
    ‘It’s expired,’ says Dad, ‘totally out of date.’
    ‘What about her?’
    ‘Just British, and Hungarian, ah, yes, and the Hungarian passport records her with her mother’s maiden name.’ Dad shrugs in front of Tawfeeq’s look of horror. ‘It was easier at the time.’
    ‘You can’t travel out of here with a Romanian, sorry Hungarian, with such a different name to you. They’ll think she’s your whore! Sorry. Sorry, Nabil. No offence. Sorry, no offence. But, you know what I mean.’ But I cry easily so I went to the bathroom until I was done.
    Dad was waiting for me when I came out of the bathroom after Tawfeeq had left, ‘You must ignore Tawfeeq. He is very upset. And he’s a bit of a silly man at the best of times.’ And he did something weird for him, he put his arms around me and tried to give me a hug.
    I find another entry for a couple of days later. It is the last one.
    05.08.90 11:24 Dad at the hospital since approx 9:30. More cars on the road than yesterday.
05.08.90 13:23 Sh.’s lawn brown. All flowers dead next door.
05.08.90 15:23 Bustanji watering lawn with a watering can. Waleed waiting in the car.
    The brown grass in the neighbouring gardens gave me the creeps. They did not use Bustanji and their gardener had left. In just three days without water their lawn had dried into rust shavings. It reminded me of the abridged John Wyndham books they fed us in junior school and the other ones about ‘the Day After’ (the Flood, the Plague, the Atomic War). Nightmare-inducing. Horrible.
    Bustanji caught me smoking on the upstairs balcony when Dad was out but had just smiled and waved through the eucalyptus, pointing