Pieces of Me Read online

  Tonight in my imagination, Adam and Dave and the other men prepare for the mission in the team room. They stand around the table doing final checks on equipment. The old fridge that buzzes and flickers. They all know the plan. They have run through it countless times, played out all possibilities. They are ready.

  There will be no Iraqi forces with them this time. It is just Adam and his team. On previous attempts the Iraqi Special Forces led the way and, technically speaking, this time should be the same. But time is running out and someone high up has decided to look the other way. As long as the mission is a success, the head will stay turned. If something goes wrong, who knows.

  Adrenaline buzzes through them. No one wants to go home unsuccessful. It will hang over them whenever they think about this deployment, or all of their deployments, to Iraq.

  “Okay,” says Dave. “This is it. This is our last chance. I need your heads to be here and only here. It sucks that we’ll miss Thanksgiving, but forget about that. I don’t wanna have to tell your family you got shot by some Haji because you were pissed about missing the turkey.”

  “I’m not complaining,” says Ramirez. “My wife’s turkey is dry as shit and we have to have her whole goddamn family over each year.”

  A few guys laugh.

  “There you go then. Count your blessings,” says Dave.

  At zero one hundred hours, the team load up into their vehicles. They each have their own routine, developed over countless missions and deployments. If you do a particular thing and everyone comes home safe, you damn well keep doing it. Ramirez wears his socks inside out. Lee cracks his knuckles one at a time, always left to right. Riley takes out a photo of his family and says a quick prayer, then stuffs it into his helmet. Adam won’t tell me what he does himself, in case telling me changes anything.

  The men enter the Humvees in the same order they always do. Dave slaps each of his team hard on the backplate of their body armour as they pass, then he climbs into the front seat. Adam says Dave has never been one to lead from the back.

  The vehicles leave the compound and the men are out in Baghdad now. They head to the location they marked with a drawing pin on a map back on base. The lights on the vehicles remain off. They wear night-vision goggles that turn the black into shades of chemical green, like a video game. Heavy metal blasts through their headsets. The Humvee interior smells of sweat and cheap energy drinks.

  Ramirez moves his head to the deep beat of the song, but Adam is motionless. He goes through the mission, the movements, the plan. I do not exist to him now. Nothing exists except the hours ahead.

  The streets are empty, the city’s inhabitants under curfew. The only movement the men see is dogs, scrounging for food among the trash at an hour when they are safe from being pelted with stones.

  As they pass one building, Adam glimpses a young man, silhouetted against the flickering images of a television. He lowers a shisha pipe from his mouth and exhales slowly. Smoke curls above his head, lit up by the changing colours from a television screen. Then he is gone.

  They get closer. The houses are poorer now, the streets more potholed. Everything is soaked in darkness. The rolling blackouts hit this area at this time of night and no one in the neighbourhood has enough money for a generator. It is as they planned.

  The men stop 200 metres from the target house. Some stay in the vehicles and some move towards the building on foot. Every piece of equipment is secured tightly to their bodies. The only sound they make is the light shuffle of boots on gravel, wet from the November rain. There is nowhere for the water to go so it collects in dips and depressions and transforms into a thick sticky mud that weighs the city down.

  They get to the building and some of the men peel off, moving round to the back of the house. Dave crouches behind a wall at the front of the building, Adam squats behind him, followed by Lee. Everyone is in position.

  Dave turns and motions the countdown.

  Three.

  Two.

  One.

  MOVE.

  Dave’s boot meets with the door, slamming it inwards. He stands to one side and Adam moves past him, runs up the stairs and clears one room, then the next. White lights and lasers sweep around in search of danger. More boots split off into different parts of the house.

  There is a bedroom. A bed. A young woman screams and a man reaches for his gun, but it is too late. Ramirez pulls the man out of the bed, onto the floor. Adam puts a knee on his back, fastens the handcuffs.

  In the room that Lee is in a child cries out. The man in handcuffs hears him and struggles. The child is comforted by an elderly woman, who holds his face close to hers. She wraps a blanket around them both, then rubs his back with arthritic fingers. She looks at the solider guarding the entrance to the room. He wears a helmet and goggles and black fatigues like ISOF, but when he speaks to her the words are foreign. She cannot imagine a human inside the uniform.

  Back in the first bedroom, an interpreter reads out a warrant for the man’s arrest, written by a Baghdadi judge. The man has a dark moustache and greying chest hair that protrudes from under his vest. He has baggy underwear and bare feet and a face that is familiar to everyone on the team. They have searched for it for seven months. The man with the familiar face spits on the floor by Adam’s boot, but Adam does not react. His job is done.

  Now, Adam and his men are back in their vehicles. The prisoner is loaded up, ready to be handed over to the detention facility back at base. They return with their victory song booming through the sound system. Adam lets out a long breath and finally allows his mind to drift to the end of the deployment, to Colorado, to me.

  Dave yells over the music on the headsets.

  “Good work, guys, now let’s get the fuck home. My wife will kill me if that baby arrives before I do.”

  Every night, I imagine a different version of the mission. Every night, it is a different collage of news stories and movies and things he has said after a drink. But the one thing that remains the same is that each night is a success; they all come home safely. So close to the end, I cannot let myself imagine it any other way.

  38

  While I am at the art shop I get a text from Zainab. Hi Emma. Is there any chance you could come over this evening?

  I sense the tension in Zainab’s house as soon as I arrive. She shows me into the living room and Farwa gives me a smile and a little wave from the sofa, but does not jump up to show me her homework or tell me about the new style she has learnt for braiding her hair. Zainab shifts around. I have not been to see them in the week since Ali’s death and I wonder what has happened.

  “Do you want to come through to the kitchen?” Zainab asks, changing her mind about the location.

  “Sure,” I say. Farwa watches us as we leave the room.

  In the kitchen, Zainab fusses around, rearranging pots and wiping surfaces even though the room is spotless.

  “Coffee?” she asks.

  “Yes please,” I say. “What’s going on? Is everything okay?”

  Five minutes later we are sat at her small kitchen table. I hold a small cup of cardamom coffee to my nose and breathe in deeply.

  “I’m just so embarrassed,” she says. “Neither of them has been suspended before. We had to go and sit in the principal’s office while he asked questions about where Hassan could have picked up violent habits. And then Haider said it wasn’t unusual for teenage boys to get into scrapes and the principal said that might be the case where we come from, but it was an issue taken very seriously here. I was so embarrassed, Emma. I wanted the ground to eat me.”

  I try not to smile at the idioms that have begun to find their way into Zainab’s sentences. The principal’s comments annoy me. I am tempted to go and talk to him myself, but from Noor’s description of him it might not be worth it.

  “And Hassan won’t tell you what happened?” I ask.

  “Nothing. Just said the boy deserved it. I want to believe that it’s not his fault; he’s never been in fig
hts before – at least not that I know of. But he’s been acting out of character ever since we arrived in America. I don’t know what he’s capable of anymore.”

  “Try not to worry too much, Zainab. Haider’s right – Hassan’s a teenage boy. It happens.”

  “I just feel like I’m losing him. Like I can’t get through.”

  “Is there anything I can do to help?”

  “Can you try to talk to him, Emma?”

  Fifteen minutes later I am sat on Hassan’s bed, my back leaning against the wall. He didn’t say much when I knocked on his bedroom door and asked if I could come in for a bit, just made a noise that I took to mean “okay”. Since I’ve been in there he has mostly sat jabbing rapidly at his keyboard. I assume he must be talking to someone from the way he types a bit, pauses, types again, but I have no idea who. The thought concerns me. I read an article last week about the online radicalisation of young Muslim men and I can see how Hassan would be a prime target – a recent immigrant, struggling to settle in his new country, an impressionable age. Maybe that’s why he’s acting out.

  As Hassan types, music plays from his computer. It is a mix of English and French and Arabic, but nothing I’ve heard before. The quality is grainy, but I think I can make out North African accents and a lot of lyrics about “the regime” and “the system”.

  “So you like rap then?” I say, making another attempt at conversation. He nods. So far, all question have been answered with shrugs or one-word answers.

  I examine my nails. I have been biting them more recently. I wonder if I should at least paint them again before Adam gets home.

  “Do you like any American artists?” I ask.

  “Not really,” he says without turning around.

  I shift on the bed. I need to go to the store to get the food for Thanksgiving. Zainab asked me if I wanted to join them and I felt guilty saying I already had plans.

  I check my watch. I’ve been in here almost twenty minutes and it’s becoming increasingly awkward. What did I think I was going to say to a teenage boy anyway? I could go back down and tell Zainab that I tried. That he’s fine. That this is probably normal. Then a song comes on that I recognise.

  “Hey, is this Narcy?” I ask.

  Hassan turns round.

  “Yeah. How do you know Narcy?”

  “A friend played it to me once.”

  “Your friend has good taste,” says Hassan and turns back to his computer.

  “He does,” I say with a smile. In my mind I am sat in Green Beans café again with Ali, the day he bought me the baklava. He is showing me a music video on his phone. We are getting sideways glances from other people in the café, but I don’t care.

  “He’s from Basra, like me,” Ali is saying. “Well, not him – his family. He lives in Canada. This one is my favourite. ‘Phatwa’.” I watch the video, which shows the rapper being searched at a US airport. “I hope it will not be like this for Ameena.”

  “She’s strong Ali. She will be fine.”

  Ali’s face flickers and now we are not in Green Beans but at the side of a road. He is kneeling, hands tied behind his back, gun pointing at his head. He lifts his head and looks at me.

  “Emma?” he says.

  *

  “Emma?”

  It is not Ali’s voice but Hassan’s. I wipe my forehead with my hand and realise I am sweating. Hassan has turned around in his seat.

  “Yes?”

  “What happened at school… It wasn’t my fault, you know.”

  I try to refocus my brain.

  “The fight?”

  “Yeah. They were… They were saying stuff about Farwa.”

  “Like what?”

  “Laughing and stuff. Farwa… She tries to be like the other girls, wearing lip gloss and learning the words to American songs. But she doesn’t see how they make fun when her back is turned. I saw one of the guys put his jacket over his head, pretending like it was the hijab. It just made me flip.”

  Of course. He was protecting her.

  “Oh, I’m sorry, Hassan. That’s horrible of them.” In my head I call them things far worse than horrible, but I am supposed to be the adult here, setting an example. In my head I would have hit them too. “Why didn’t you tell the teachers that? Or your parents?” I ask.

  “Why bother?” He shrugs. “The principal hates all the brown kids. He gives stupid sermons on being a good Christian and treating people equally, but he always punishes kids like me more.”

  My language is less controlled this time.

  “That’s fucked-up, Hassan. Is there another teacher you can talk to? What that boy did is wrong, but fighting him is not the answer.”

  “You just want me to stand by and watch them joke about my sister?”

  “No, of course not. But getting into trouble will make things harder for you. You need a good school record, Hassan, especially to get into college.”

  “College?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Who said anything about college?”

  “Well, no one. But you’re about the right age for applications, right?”

  Again, that shrug.

  “I dunno. Never thought about it,” he says.

  He starts typing again and I can tell that he considers the conversation finished. I stand to leave and as I do I catch a glimpse of his computer screen. It is not some kind of messenger as I had expected, but a long stream of words and letters and symbols on a white background. It looks like another language.

  “Hassan?”

  “Yes?”

  “I don’t want to pry, but what is that?”

  “Nothing. Just my game.” He types a bit more. A mix of square brackets and odd words that seem like instructions.

  “What kind of game?”

  He gives a frustrated sigh and I wonder if I have become that annoying older person asking obvious technology-related questions.

  “This isn’t the game itself. It’s the code for it. I’m adding some bits.”

  “You’re coding it yourself? Really? Can you explain it to me?”

  He sighs again.

  “Yeah. I guess. Sit here next to me.”

  “So he’s been developing these whole multi-player games and then playing them online with his friends back in Jordan and Iraq,” I say to Zainab.

  “I had no idea,” she says, her hands suspended halfway through washing up. “I didn’t know that was even possible.”

  “It’s incredible,” I say. “Apparently, when you were in Jordan, he went to some kind of computer club, and then he taught himself the rest online.”

  “I remember the computer club!” says Zainab. “I had no idea he was learning anything though. I thought they just hung out there and messed around.”

  “You know, he told me he hasn’t thought about college, Zainab, but he seems to have a real talent. Perhaps it’s something I could talk to him about more?”

  “But higher education is so expensive here, Emma. I don’t know how we’d ever afford it.”

  “Maybe he could get funding. I’m sure there are grants and scholarships he would be eligible for, especially with your story.”

  “You think so?”

  “I do, but I need to research it. Are you okay with me talking to him about it more?”

  “Of course,” she says.

  As I drive home, I have the same butterflies I used to get in Baghdad when I heard a case had been approved. I have found a way to help this family and I won’t stop until Hassan is at college. Hassan is going to be okay and Adam is coming home and for a moment at least everything feels all right.

  39

  Today is Thanksgiving. I wake up early with a strange feeling, like I should be excited but I’m not. It is odd celebrating Thanksgiving without Adam. It reminds me of the feeling I used to have on Christmas morning as a teenager, after my dad died and the magic was no longer there. Today I feel nostalgic for a holiday that was never mine.

  I turn on the television. On one cha
nnel there is a reporter live in New York, broadcasting amid the crowds gathering for the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade. I turn over to a local channel where a firefighter from the Colorado Springs station warns people of the hazards of deep-frying their turkey.

  I check on the jelly for the trifle that I left to set last night. I’ve used raspberry flavour instead of strawberry because I know it’s Noah’s favourite. The other dishes are prepped and waiting in the fridge.

  I boil water in a pan and stir in two sachets of vanilla pudding mix. I haven’t managed to find custard, but this pudding stuff seems similar enough. Someone who hasn’t eaten trifle before won’t know the difference anyway.

  I messaged Kate last night to see if there were any last-minute bits she wanted me to pick up for her. I haven’t heard back from her yet.

  I gaze out the window while the mixture cools. It looks cold outside and there are low heavy clouds. It might even snow. Adam told me he would switch my car over to winterised tyres when he got home, but I’ll need to do it myself before then.

  I haven’t heard from Adam today either. I expected a Thanksgiving email when I woke up, but there wasn’t one. I wondered whether he had forgotten it was Thanksgiving altogether – the days do run into each other out there. But then I remembered the turkey cake in the chow hall and realised there was no escape from Thanksgiving in Baghdad. I decide to email him first.

  Subject: Happy Thanksgiving!

  Hey! Happy Thanksgiving from your Brit in ’Murica! I hope that you are celebrating with large amounts of tasty chow hall turkey. I might even attempt to cook you a proper Thanksgiving dinner when you get home. Kate is giving me tips.

  Love you,

  Emma

  Then I send Kate another text message.

  Hey. I’ll be over at about twelve. Just finishing the trifle. Offer’s still open to pick stuff up on my way.

  The vanilla pudding is cool now. I scoop it carefully onto the combination of jelly and sponge cake. My phone rings. It must be Kate calling about some ingredient she’s forgotten or to say we should have that turkey pizza after all. I wipe my hands on a dishcloth and pick up the phone without looking at the number.