Guantanamo Boy (14 page)

When a solid, overbearing heat descends on the building, the sound of plane engines whirr into action, interrupting Khalid’s fitful sleep. In an attempt to stop the noise from fully waking him up, he turns over and dreams of chips and Cheddar cheese being spread on the football field at home in Rochdale. Then he opens his eyes, quickly calms himself down and tries to go back to sleep, but he picks up the dream at exactly the point where he left it, going through the whole nightmare again of trying to stop the mess ruining the field.

The noisy trucks, the shouting men and the incessant hum of the electricity generator annoy him as he sits cross-legged on the mat for a moment to bring himself round. All the time wondering about the men nearby—blue and white shapes he can barely make out through the layers of wire. Who are they?

It takes a while before Khalid gets to know the man to one side of him.

“
As-salaamu alaikum
,” he greets him each morning.

Soon Khalid answers him with the words, “
Wa alaikum as-salaam
,” as if he’s an old friend.

One day he surprises Khalid. “My name is Abdul Al-Farran,” he says.

“You speak English,” Khalid gasps. He can’t believe the man hasn’t spoken to him until now—he must have heard him shouting at the guards. But he doesn’t want to waste the opportunity by getting annoyed.

Abdul turns out to be the most random guy he’s ever met. Pressing his face against the wire, Khalid sees he’s slightly overweight, with a downturned mouth and miserably fat cheeks. His bushy eyebrows have a life of their own, rising and falling like curling caterpillars whenever he speaks.

Having decided to trust him, Abdul tells Khalid he was born in Lebanon. He moved to Pakistan, where his brother lives, some years ago to get a job teaching math. His English is quite good too, which helps.

“Mistake for me was travel all places, all time. I’m look—for wife. When I return Islamabad, I meet very bad man. Big fight. He make lie. Tell police I making bomb factory in house. My wife tell me run away, so I go Afghanistan. Wrong time I go that place.” Khalid finds it difficult to follow Abdul. He has the annoying tendency of jumping from one subject to another without pausing and Khalid can’t always understand what he’s getting at. Plus there’s the problem of his jumping eyebrows making it hard to concentrate, but he likes having him to talk to—it finally makes him feel a part of the group.

“How old are you?” Khalid interrupts, moving closer to their shared wire wall.

Abdul smiles and holds up his fingers, quickly flashing three tens and a five for him to count.

“Thirty-five?”

“Yes,” Abdul says, sighing.

“I’m only fifteen!”

“Fifteen! Bring you here for why?” Abdul’s shocked.

“I dunno. Who knows? I should be at school.”

“Then you must take chance to learn. I will teach everything I know for you.” Abdul grins. “Hezbollah, you know, means party of God!”

“Party of God?” Khalid blinks with surprise. From news reports he’d heard at home, Hezbollah were a dangerous group of some kind. Didn’t they go round kidnapping Westerners? But maybe Abdul is right. Maybe the actual meaning of the word is far more simple. Even so, he looks round to make sure no one’s listening. He’s scared, in case the word will be held against him in some way, thinking it really means terrorist—or something far worse—and Abdul Al-Farran’s having him on.

But then, “Fakir means poor man,” Abdul Al-Farran says without a hint of concern for the easy way he’d mentioned Hezbollah.

“Yeah? Cool.” Khalid makes an effort to calm down. Not really able to decide who Abdul really is. Maybe the word Hezbollah is a secret signal of some kind.

“Hmm.” Thoroughly enjoying being a teacher again, Abdul’s face crumples into a huge smile. His eyebrows suddenly part. “Imam means leader. Many English words they come from Arabic words. Yes. Genie—spirit. Sofa. Mattress. Checkmate—the king is dead. Algebra. Orange. Monsoon. Cotton. Zero. All Arabic.”

There’s no stopping him. Now Abdul has an audience, Khalid must wait and listen. Trouble is, his mind keeps wandering. It’s not his fault that Abdul reminds him of his geography teacher, Mr. Giles, who speaks in the same dull tone of voice, which sends the whole class to sleep even though what he’s saying is interesting.

“The word syrup, this is also Arabic!” Abdul smiles. “Sultan too.”

“Really?” Khalid mutters, without much hope he’ll ever stop bending his ear with endless information, certain Abdul Al-Farran has spent his life reading the dictionary.

“Ah, of course! I finish now.” Obviously slightly hurt by Khalid turning his head away from the wire, Abdul finally stops talking, drawing his bushy eyebrows down for the last time. For today anyway.

A military policeman wanders past. Not bothering to tell them off for spending the last half-hour talking. It seems that as long as they whisper for no more than a couple of minutes at a time no one will say anything. At least not on his shift. The later shift consists of two nasty soldiers who seem to enjoy making their lives miserable, but these two—one of whom is called Wade and comes from Atlanta—are almost human in the way they treat them.

Khalid feels a gut-wrenching shame for insulting Abdul Al-Farran. Especially after he’s dreamed of having someone to talk to.

“I just can’t take it all in,” he tries explaining later. But the midday call to prayer starts up from the other end and Abdul is happy to move from the wire to face Mecca.

Prayers fill the rusty hangar, rising to bounce off the roof and echo in the humid air like exotic birdsong. They transform the ordinary sounds of the building into a pure connection to the divine.

In time, Khalid’s eyes adjust to the dense wire separating the cells. In time, he can focus his eyes to see Abdul quite clearly without getting up from his mat. While the door wire is thin enough to see the soldiers walking up and down every few minutes, Khalid has no desire to look at them.

Wade, the friendly soldier, walks past again. This time he stops in front of Khalid to adjust the machine gun hanging on his chest.

“Don’t you like praying?” he says with a cheesy, fake grin.

“Not right now,” Khalid says.

“But you’re Muslim!”

“Yeah, but we don’t all pray all the time,” Khalid says crossly. Not seeing any reason to explain why he’s not able to let go just yet.

“Perhaps you’ll make a better Christian than a Muslim. I can bring you some pamphlets Mom sent me from Atlanta, so you guys can learn about Jesus.”

So that was it. The reason for Wade’s friendly manner. They were lost souls in need of saving. Mom in Atlanta was worried about them.

“It’s all right, thanks.” Khalid sees him off with a weak smile. Hiding his anger and frustration by clenching his fists behind his back.

Some time later, three sterner-looking soldiers, the first two with guns pointed at everyone, come down the line. The biggest one begins unlocking every other fence in turn. While the last soldier follows with an armful of shackles. Soon men are handcuffed and pushed out. Tied together with a long rope and led away. Khalid cranes his neck to see where they’re going and before long his question is answered when they return with water dripping down their dazed faces and soaking-wet hair. Plus big damp patches on their clean white T-shirts.

“Shower?” Khalid gasps in anticipation. The soldier nods, cuffing him tight. The thought of gushing water and sweet-smelling soap dominates Khalid’s mind as he’s tied to ten other men. Soldiers double up beside the line, all eyes and guns.

Twinkling hot sunshine hits Khalid’s face as he lowers his lids and steps from the gray hangar into an empty forecourt. Everyone is soon pulled through a block of cool shadow and a short walk takes them to the nearby doorway of a building with a wet, cold concrete floor. Inside the gray walls is a miserable place smelling of toilets, with rusty stains dribbling down the walls from the shower heads and a sound of running water. A sound with no feeling of pleasure attached.

The fear of communal washing is too much for the man behind him and he begins screaming, shaking his head in fear. Two more join in, yelling objections, while Khalid meekly allows himself to be untied, then uncuffed. He steps quickly to one side to undress, hard eyes bearing down on him, a gun a few centimeters from his forehead. The crying men are pushed to one side and stripped. Their clothes flung on a heap. One of the naked men stumbles, then falls to his knees. Head in his hands. They soon haul him up and throw him under the shower.

In a state of shock, Khalid faces the wall and squeezes the small soap brick which smells of taps, a hair’s breadth away from kicking out at something. For a moment he tries to relax into the water and enjoy the sensation. But the sound of crying cancels out any pleasure. It’s OK for Khalid, he’s used to showering with his mates after school sports and football matches. He’s not embarrassed to be seen naked. But for these men this is worse than death.

By the time Khalid’s back in his cell, his mind flipping in and out of the abuse he just witnessed, he’s in no mood to talk to the fair-haired man in jeans and red bomber jacket who’s wandering down the hangar with a bulging white plastic bag under his arm. Accompanied by one of the military policemen, this guy is a picture of happiness. Greeting each prisoner in turn with an Arabic phrase or two, he’s giving out paper and pens and a small plastic cup with a red cross on the side. When he gets to Khalid’s cage, he gives him a proper smile before saying with a posh-sounding American accent, “I’m with the Red Cross. Do you want to write a letter to anyone?”

“A letter?” It’s the first time Khalid’s thought about it. “Just one letter? Can’t I do more?”

“However many you want!” The soldier opens the cell and hands Khalid three pieces of paper and a black pen. Plus a cup which holds a card with a number. His is 256.

“I’ll be back later,” the guy says, smiling.

“Wait a minute.” Khalid grabs the door of the cage as it’s being locked again. “I shouldn’t be here. They’ve made a mistake. I’m a schoolkid.”

The man looks at him for a while. “OK, I guess you don’t look so old,” he says after giving him the once-over. “But you’re not a prisoner of war now—the term is ‘enemy combatant’ as the military like to say. I’m afraid that’s the situation at the moment.” He nods.

The last drop of hope drains from Khalid the second the man’s comforting smile disappears.

“The letters won’t get there, will they?” Khalid shouts after him, watching him quickly move on to speak to Abdul in Arabic.

“What was the point of that?” Khalid whispers to his friend when the man’s gone.

“Doing job.” Abdul shakes his head. “Red Cross—they have power to do nothing. America making all rules. Finish for us.”

“Enemy combatant! Me?” Khalid laughs. “How mad can they get?” Nevertheless, he sits in the corner, paper on his lap, to write a letter to Mum and Dad. Even though he doesn’t know for sure where they are, it’s worth trying to reach them. He half suspects Mum won’t return to England without her husband and son. But then, neither will Dad if he’s turned up at the aunties’ somehow. He won’t leave Karachi without knowing what’s happened to Khalid. Or maybe he’s here in Kandahar, somewhere in another building. Who knows where he is?

Either way, it’s hard to decide where to send the letter. A letter that probably won’t arrive anyway, because the Red Cross will most likely hand it over to the Americans. Then Khalid has an idea to write to Mr. Tagg. And maybe Mac, his neighbor. The Red Cross man has given him three pieces of paper. One of them might get to his family. If not, there’s a chance someone out there might read the truth.

“So this is how it happened when I went missing,” Khalid writes. Describing his abduction in Karachi, before quickly adding details about the trip he made to the flat, looking for his dad. Finding once he starts remembering, the words stream out.

A feeling of being someone else watching his own life overtakes Khalid as he scribbles as fast as he can. The first page fills up before he says anything about Kandahar, leaving him no choice but to draw an arrow pointing over the page, with the words
STORY CONTINUES
written along the edge.

Sadly, the blue airmail paper is too thin to take the strong black ink of the pen he’s been given and the words on the other side jumble into those on the first page. So much so, Khalid gives up after adding quick kisses for Aadab and Gul.

Going over the final words, “How can this happen? I didn’t do anything wrong!!!!!”, he sits back to read what he’s written. Just how well he’s described his situation, he doesn’t care. This is urgent.

There’s a sudden feeling of panic in his chest as he realizes he’s left no space for the address. Unless it’ll fit along the bottom of the first page under the arrow he’s drawn. He sucks his bottom lip and frowns as he tries to squeeze the address in and, weirdly, the words “9 Oswestry Road, Rochdale, Lancashire, UK” fit perfectly at the bottom of the page. He worries they might not notice the address down there, so he goes over it several times with the pen to make it stand out. Then does the number 9 again in case someone thinks it’s a zero.

Khalid’s tempted to quit worrying and start again on the next page. But he’s only got three pieces of paper and he might not be given any more. Trying all the while not to wind himself up by fretting that the letter won’t reach them. But when it comes to what to say to Mr. Tagg, the tip of the pen hovers over the blank page like a fly.

Mr. Tagg’s a teacher, after all, so he’s going to notice the bad sentences and misspellings, isn’t he? All this worrying cramps Khalid’s style. After several crossings-out, he decides to give it a rest for a while and go back to the letter when he’s clearer about exactly what he wants to say.

Glancing down the cages, he watches one man toss his cup in the toilet bucket, while another jumps on his. The cup feels and smells like the foam they stuff boxes with, but Khalid keeps it anyway.

When the Red Cross man finally comes to collect the letters, Khalid still hasn’t got round to deciding what to say to Mr. Tagg and Mac. Instead, he gives him the letter for his family. A horrible feeling inside warns him it’ll never get there and a split-second picture in his mind of Mum crying her eyes out at the kitchen table, Gul’s arms around her neck, brings tears to his eyes.