Alias (2 page)

Before we landed at Sana’a, Mum gave me a navy headscarf to wear. Hers was grey, which suited her bright-blue eyes. I went to the loo to see what I looked like – it was strange the way it changed me. Slightly scary, or maybe it was the whole situation that was slightly scary.

According to Hugo, Yemen was cripplingly poor, life expectancy was sixty-two and everyone was either a militant or a farmer. I was dreading it. If Mum and Dad hadn’t been so jolly I might have tried to tell them how I was feeling, but they were acting like we were on our way to Disneyland!

Stepping out of the aeroplane was like walking into the nozzle of a giant hairdryer, set to maximum everything. A cousin of Dad’s met us. Despite his traditional dress, the way his red-and-white headdress was flicked over his ears made him look jaunty. He whisked us off to his car, putting his shades on as soon as we were outside. It was surreal hearing him and Dad jabbering away. Mum and I sat in the back and I must have dropped off, because the next thing I knew the
car had stopped and there was a face pressed against my window. It took all my willpower not to cry out.

‘It’s all right,’ said Mum, patting my arm. ‘It’s a checkpoint.’

We had to show our passports and permits. I stared at the back of the driver’s seat because I didn’t want to look at the guns the police – or whoever they were – were carrying.

That happened a few times. I kept expecting to be dragged from the car and denounced for pretending to be a Muslim.

At some point we started to climb, driving up dirt tracks at speed. It felt as if one accidental twitch would send us careering down the hillside to certain death. I was silent, wishing I was safe at home, slobbed out on the sofa, counting the days until my GCSE results like everyone else. Yemen was more than foreign – it was alien.

The journey eventually ended in a village made up of buildings clinging to the side of the steep slope, with a fancy minaret in the middle. It would have been grand, if it hadn’t looked as though the whole lot might crumble at any minute. We were welcomed by what must have been the whole population. It was like we were celebrities – people pushed through the crowd to touch us, shake our hands, stroke my face … I had to make myself not flinch.

I met my dad’s brothers and sisters and a hundred cousins and their children, and some grandchildren. Mum
slipped out of view, swallowed up by the sea of people. It was all a bit much, what with the oven-like heat and the chatter I couldn’t understand and the smell – ripe and raw and foul and sweet all at the same time.

A girl about my age, wearing a white hijab, spoke to Dad before taking my hand and leading me away through a web of alleys. I didn’t want to go, but there didn’t seem to be an easy way to refuse. She repeated the same words again and again, but it meant nothing to me. Every time we turned I tried to find a landmark that would help me find my way back to Mum and Dad – the empty baskets all in a pile, the washing line hung from two windows, the man asleep, cross-legged, with a shiny dagger tucked into his waistband.

The girl stopped in a doorway and, when I hesitated, pushed me inside.

‘Samiya,’ the girl said loudly.

A wrinkly hand stretched out to take mine. I didn’t want to but was just about well brought up enough to take the hand. The old lady stood up agonisingly slowly, as though she needed oiling. She let go of my hand and reached up to cup my face in her palm, saying something to me that I wished made sense. She was tiny, only reaching my shoulder. I stared at her, because I couldn’t look anywhere else. She was the photo from Dad’s wallet. I smiled. And so did she. Being almost toothless didn’t make her smile any less affecting. Tears began to pour down her face. I felt myself join in.

‘
Jaddah
,’ she said. ‘
Jaddah
.’

I nodded.

‘Grandmother,’ I said. And then, ‘
Jaddah
.’

The girl that brought me, who was grinning away, took my grandma’s hand and repeated, ‘
Jaddah
.’ I got it. We shared a grandma. She was my cousin.

‘Lamyah,’ she said.

I repeated her name, ‘Lamyah.’

We traded English and Arabic words – house, village, chicken, Dad – mimicking each other, and ended up laughing. The joy was completely contagious.

That was all it took for the wizened nut-brown stranger, shrouded in black, and the girl in the white hijab to become part of my family. There must be something chemical, to do with having the same genes, because from then on nothing felt quite so alarming.

That first night we ate some kind of stew outside with about twenty strangers that Dad called our ‘close’ family. I sat between
Jaddah
and Lamyah. There wasn’t a moment when one of them wasn’t telling me something. It didn’t matter that I couldn’t understand what. Like them, I ate with my right hand. (Dad had briefed me on the plane – left hand for wiping your bum, right hand for everything else.)

I was so desperate for sleep when the party eventually broke up that I didn’t mind the mattress on the floor, even when I discovered I was sharing with Lamyah
and
Maryam and that the animals were tucked up on the floor below.

The next day I chose to hang around with
Jaddah
, helping her cook. Mum and Dad made bad jokes about me poisoning the village, but left me to it. At home I was never interested, but there’s a world of difference between opening a packet from Tesco and making food from things you’ve picked (or slaughtered) yourself. I chopped green stuff while
Jaddah
pulled apart a goat. I was rather proud that I managed not to gag. After that, we swept the floors and I beat the bedding with Lamyah. Hugo would have called me a skivvy. The idea of him wouldn’t sit properly in my head, so I tucked him away.

In the afternoon, while I used sign language and a few basic words to talk to Lamyah and some of the other girls, the men sat chewing khat – Dad included. He said it was traditional. I said it was drugs. They looked funny, chewing away, the balls of leaves making one cheek bulge like a hamster.

It was nice seeing Dad back where he belonged. A part of me that I had always found irrelevant became something to celebrate.

Days went by. The whole community just got on with the routine of living. Herding goats. Picking vegetables. I even milked a cow, pretty unsuccessfully. More successful were my cooking lessons.
Jaddah
taught me to make all sorts, but my favourite was the bread with a hot egg and coriander middle.

I quickly got to know the other teenagers, who all seemed a lot more grown up than me. We took long walks, stopping in the shade where I gave English
lessons. Hilarious. You wouldn’t think you could joke with people who don’t share your language, but you can. I taught them text talk.

LOL. OMG. YOLO.

Although I slept at Dad’s sister’s, we visited every other house in the village, drinking tea and doling out the gifts we’d brought with us – T-shirts, belts, jewellery, make-up and, bizarrely, watches. Time didn’t seem to matter – except for when the call to prayer rang out and everything stopped.

It was a beautiful place, like Dad said it would be – very green and totally wild. (Nothing like a desert.) I felt completely at home, which made no sense to me at all. And didn’t want to leave, which made no sense to Mum (who, after three weeks on a floor, missed her bed) or Dad (who was itching to get back to pre-season football training). It was hard to put into words … I suppose I felt special.

After days of begging, driving Mum and Dad crazy, they finally agreed I could stay on. I waved them off without a care.

From the minute they left, Lamyah and I were hardly ever more than a metre apart – which was odd, given how much I liked my own company. We were busy all day, tended to spend the evening with
Jaddah
– I taught her to play charades using Lamyah as a very bad translator – and slept like the dead. In the nanosecond between awake and coma, I imagined living in the village for real.

Way too soon, the day came for me to be driven back to the airport. I made Lamyah promise to come and visit me ASAP. (
Jaddah
said she’d never left the mountain and wasn’t going to – at least, I think that’s what she said.) The whole village came to see me off, but I only had eyes for Lamyah and
Jaddah
. Their weeping faces were engraved on my retina.

Arriving back in Buckingham at the beginning of August, everything was Strange, capital S. Or maybe I was. Mum and Dad had slotted straight back into the routine, clearly pleased to be home. I felt the opposite – as though I’d left something behind, which I had. Getting a date in the diary for Lamyah to come to England was all I could think about.

‘What about Christmas?’ I said to Dad at breakfast – thirty-six hours after touching down at Gatwick airport. ‘It might even snow!’

‘It’s not that simple, Samiya. She’d need a passport and a visa … someone to travel with …’

‘We can arrange that, can’t we?’

Dad’s body language was less than enthusiastic. He disappeared off to work, muttering something about ‘next year’. He could mutter all he liked. If necessary, I’d sort it out myself.

I got dressed and went to meet the twins, feeling slightly uneasy. Six weeks and three days without a text or a Snapchat was forever …

For once, only Hugo turned up.

‘No Juliette?’

‘She’s gone to Oxford Street with Mum. They’re Luddites – I tried to explain that you can buy things on the in-ter-net but …’ He shrugged.

It was a treat to have him to myself. We sat on the bridge at the bottom of Meadow Walk eating 99s, and I told him all about my trip.

‘It’s like going back in time … They have nothing, except fields and cows and —’

‘What? No Wi-Fi?’ he said. ‘Inhuman.’

‘There’s no such thing as grabbing a snack, like beans on toast. Seriously, we made every meal from scratch and ate in groups of ten or —’

‘Sounds like feeding time at the zoo.’

‘They do
everything
by hand.’

As his comments got more barbed – ‘It sounds very primitive, Samiya’ – my monologue trailed off …

‘It’s not a crime to live in a poor country, Hugo.’

‘No, but it’s a bore.’ He stood up and chucked the remains of his cone at an unsuspecting duck. ‘Do you want to come to the house?’

Despite him being so dismissive of the whole finding-my-roots story, I was still keen to see where he lived.

‘OK.’

‘We’ll get a taxi,’ he said, scrolling down his contacts to T.

The driver dropped us in front of a modern house, all glass and wood. There was a Range Rover in the drive.

‘Is your dad here?’

‘No. He’s hardly ever here.’

The hall had a mirror on one wall that was way taller than either of us. I stopped in front of it. Hugo was wearing skinny jeans, pointed black boots and a stripy T-shirt – sort of French-looking. My outfit was more Primark.

He winked at me in the mirror and then turned his face and kissed me. It was totally unexpected, and a hundred per cent deliriously brilliant.

He took my hand and led me upstairs to ‘watch a movie’.

Hugo’s bedroom had a black squishy sofa, two computers on a glass desk and a bed bigger than my mum and dad’s. He pulled me onto it.

Close up, he was alarmingly hairless. I looked positively furry in comparison.

My dad always said boys were only after one thing, never contemplating the idea that girls might be after the same thing. What happened next was down to the both of us.

We were sharing a pillow, mid-chat, when Hugo reached across to get his iPad and held it above our two heads to take a selfie.

I put my hand in the way – photos always reminded me of how brown I was compared to my lily-white friends – but I was too late.

‘We look good,’ he said, showing me. ‘Like a chocolate éclair.’

He was right – we did look good.

I went into his en-suite bathroom and tidied myself up. When I came out he was sitting at his desk.

‘Mum’ll be home soon,’ he said, swivelling round. ‘Might be better if you’re not here. We have
trust
issues.’

I made a quizzical face.

‘One of the many downsides of being expelled from school.’

‘What did you do?’

‘We had a sort of rave …’

‘Tell me.’

He sighed.

‘Dad was away and Mum couldn’t be bothered to come and get us, so Juliette and I had to stay in the boarding house for the weekend, and some of our friends stayed too and … it got out of hand.’

‘How out of hand?

‘Quite. We knew we were dead, so we barricaded ourselves in.’

‘Did the police come?’

‘In droves.’

‘So that’s why you arrived mid-GCSEs.’

‘It is.’

Hugo kissed me and then manoeuvred me towards the stairs, clearly worried his mum would put a curse on me.

He offered to call a taxi but I only had three quid and didn’t want to ask him for money, so I texted
Mum, gave her the twins’ address and said I’d be outside – not keen for her to meet Hugo right at that moment.

Mums have antennae. As soon as I got in the car, she said, ‘I think you’d better tell me what you’ve been up to, Samiya.’

She didn’t really mean that. No one would want their daughter to describe
exactly
what they’d been up to.

‘I haven’t been
up to
anything.’

I got the raised-eyebrow look, so I told her the bare minimum.

‘His name’s Hugo. He’s an undernourished albino. We’re close.’

‘Invite him round and we’ll feed him up,’ she said.

I did invite him round, but he only came to the house once – the next Wednesday, which was one of the days Mum worked at the art shop, so she didn’t meet him. He didn’t suggest I go to his again.

Despite my high hopes for the summer, I spent most of August at home on my own, reading and watching films. Lucy had started going out with Jake – the class comedian – and in no time they were inseparable. I did meet Hugo in Buckingham a few times but he had Juliette in tow, which was a bit annoying, though not unexpected. The twins were Loyal to each other, capital L. And quite happy to be hermits.

One afternoon, fed up with obsessing over whether Hugo and I were actually a couple, I decamped to the
supermarket to find the ingredients my grandma had used – the goat became chicken – and surprised Mum and Dad with a Yemeni stew. It was the start of a cooking frenzy. I made breads, a biryani-type dish, samosas and green chutney, all from memory. The neighbours, Dad’s footie mates and Mum’s Zumba crowd all benefitted from my reincarnation as
chef extraordinaire.

The day after we got our GCSE results, the twins left for Vancouver. Hugo was silent apart from three Snapchats – his big toe, Juliette coming out of American Eagle with three brown shopping bags and a seagull. I missed him, apart from when I was playing
EVE
on my new laptop (a reward for my stack of A*s), when I didn’t think about anything at all.

Unlike the rest of us, who were wearing Marks & Spencer’s suits ‘because they’re washable’, Hugo and Juliette turned up on the first day of sixth form looking like models from
Vogue
. I only saw them briefly because we were put in different forms, but they waited for me after school.

Hugo kissed me on the lips.

‘You’re lucky I’m still here,’ he said. ‘I nearly got packed off to boarding school again for getting so many Bs.’

‘He’s promised to work hard,’ said Juliette, with a disbelieving face.

‘You’ll help me, won’t you, Samiya?’

‘Maybe … if you grovel.’

Hugo dropped to his knees.

I stayed with them until their lift came, then headed home, happy, full of the future. My grades were good enough to do whatever I wanted – law, or maybe psychology. I had a boyfriend, of sorts. And since our trip to Yemen, I had a whole other bit of me to think about.

Dad’s car was outside even though it was only five o’clock. I noticed, but didn’t think anything of it. I let myself in, shouted, ‘I’m home!’ and headed straight for the kitchen as usual.

‘In here, Samiya,’ said Mum. Her voice was odd. I walked into the front room, knowing something was up.

My dad was crying. Proper body-shuddering sobbing. My big, strong dad with the neat moustache never cried.

Mum was sitting on the sofa next to him, puffy-eyed, her arm round his shoulders. She’d made a mascara river, which she tried to wipe away.

‘What is it?’ I said. I had that sensation in my stomach, like falling, even though I didn’t know what was going on.
Cancer
?

‘What’s wrong?’

Mum looked across at Dad. He tried to tell me, but I couldn’t follow him. He was so distraught. In between words, he gasped, rocked and held his head in his hands.

What I thought he might be saying refused to go in.

‘Mum?’

‘Come here, Samiya.’

She held my hands between hers and explained, choking on every other word, that an American drone had killed
Jaddah
. The idea that she was dead took hold, but I still couldn’t understand how.

I’d heard Dad talking about drones, but we didn’t see one the whole time we were in Yemen. I thought they flew over terrorist training camps, not villages.

‘Did it crash?’

Mum looked at Dad.

‘What happened?’ I said.

Dad raised his head to look at me.

‘It fired at her, Samiya.’

He howled.

‘Shot?’ I shouted.

‘Nothing even to wash and bury!’ wailed Dad.

‘The drone fired a missile at her,’ said Mum. ‘She was in the fields.’

My knowledge of weapons was limited, but I knew a missile was huge. My grandma was tiny, bird-like.

I retched.

‘Why?’ I asked. ‘Why?’

‘A mistake,’ said Mum. She hesitated, about to say something else.

‘What?’

‘It wasn’t … only your grandma, Samiya.’

I knew.

I knew before she said the first letter.

My Lamyah too.