Meanwhile, back on the south side of the island, where the lights were still on, in the old rectory, Saif Hussein was staring at his computer and wondering how on earth he had ever believed that he had come to Mure for a quiet life.
There was no doubt that his children were thriving here, even though that sometimes made him a little sad, that they could be Scottish now, British if they wanted, but their Syrian culture was falling away, day by day, however much he tried to interest them in their own background and keep up their Arabic. Frankly, he was working too hard and was often too tired to remember; he spoke to them in English more often than not.
And Lorna. He hadn’t expected to fall in love. The idea of it was so far beyond his concept of what life would be like. Just surviving had been the priority for so long: making it into Europe, claiming asylum, resitting for his exams, being sent to the end of the world. Then when the boys came home, dealing with that: trying to heal their trauma, even as it meant that their memories of their homeland were dropping behind them like a scene glanced from a passing train.
And now he was staring at something on his computer, shaking, trembling. Because everything was about to get a lot worse.
By the following afternoon, he was in Glasgow, back at the same horrible, horrible Home Office police building he’d been to the last time, when they thought they had found his wife, and it had turned out to be somebody else.
He had told Lorna he’d been summoned but that he didn’t know why, and she had longed more than anything to go with him, although they both knew that that was impossible. So he had gotten on the plane, and she had gone to school, as always.
ONE OF THE good things about being a primary school teacher, Lorna had always thought, and was more grateful than ever for today, was that it left simply no time or mental space for pondering or mulling over things. Children didn’t care what was going on in your private life. Children had absolutely no idea that you actually had a private life in fact. Even though they lived in a small community, the little ones still gawked when they saw her out and about at the post office or the grocery store, as if she lived in the school stationery cupboard.
No matter how upset or worried you were, you had to come in, smile, and you would instantly be distracted by Hamish McGill’s underpants mysteriously appearing on the outside of his trousers after PE, or Robbie’s poster paint incident, or getting everyone to put their hands on their heads, or correcting math while simultaneously preventing a muddy scuffle over the toy elephant, so big you could ride it, that Fintan and Colton had kindly donated the Christmas before last, which unfortunately was so much better than all their other handed-down toys and games that it caused World War III at least twice a week.
So she threw herself into school life as usual, trying not to think about what was going on in Glasgow, two hundred miles to the south.
Except of course Ash was in her class, and every so often she’d look up and he’d be eyeing her anxiously. He sidled up after break.
“My daddy is away.”
“I know,” she said.
She was concerned, always, about giving Saif’s boys special treatment. The problem was, what if, as in Ash’s case, they patently needed special treatment? And it was wrong not to give him a bit of extra fuss, even if she was absolutely terrified of giving herself away or stepping out of line. Why, why, why was it all so complicated?
“But he’s coming back soon?”
Ash nodded. “Soon,” he said. “I don’t like it when he’s away.”
“I know,” said Lorna. “But you like Mrs. Laird, don’t you?”
“I like sausage rolls,” said Ash. Mrs. Laird, their babysitter, was one of the great bakers of the island, and she did indeed make a mean sausage roll.
“Well then,” said Lorna. “It won’t be for long.”
“It will,” said Ash gloomily. “I’ll be sleeping. But. I won’t really be sleeping!”
“I am sure,” said Lorna, putting out the rubber cement, at which Ash’s expression perked up a bit. When you were six and rubber cement was coming out, you knew it wasn’t extra math. Even a downhearted child could be perked up momentarily by some rubber cement.
“I was thinking,” said Lorna, pragmatically changing the subject, “would you like to help me hand out the glitter?”
“Glitter!” Ash almost forgot himself. “Yes, I would.”
“Okay then,” said Lorna, as the bell went for the end of break. “And, Ash,” she said, as he took the little plastic canisters containing the tantalizing shiny dots of silver and gold, red and green, which were going to decorate their Christmas pictures, which in turn would wallpaper the entire entrance of the school.
“Uh-huh?” he said, turning the glitter containers upside down and back again, enthralled.
“Your dad isn’t going to mind you waiting up for him. Not at all.”
“Look! Agot! I has glitter!” Ash was already shouting as his partner in crime came charging in, pink-faced, from outside. Immediately she pulled up, furious.
“I do glitter. I help.”
“Just let Ash do it, Agot, please,” said Lorna, who was so fond of lovely laid-back Innes and didn’t know quite how to break it to him that his beautiful daughter—and her best friend Flora’s beloved niece—was a stealth hellion.
“No, I help!”
She made a grab for the red container, and Ash instinctively jerked his hand back, which meant he shook the lid off the container and the glitter went in the air. A huge “Ohhhhhh” went up from the other children streaming back into the classroom, in awe and excitement, sensing a row in the offing.
“I did not do that,” yelled Agot immediately. “That was Ash!”
And Ash’s face screwed up, ready to cry, and Lorna had to dash forward to sort it out, and, well, it was an effective distraction. She supposed.
It was the same wet day in Glasgow—did it ever stop raining here? Seriously? In Mure, high up and east, the rain blew in and it blew out again. Glasgow was undeniably beautiful and vibrant and noisy and fun. But it felt like it was in a sunken valley forever under a gray cloud. He suspected if you ever asked a Glaswegian, they would defiantly declare that they liked it that way.
But also he had never been there for anything other than fairly rotten news. So that probably colored things too.
“How is it going?” said Neda in her usual no-nonsense way. She had a heavy caseload—well, who didn’t in social care. But Saif was a bit of a special case. She’d managed to place many refugees with other Syrians or people who spoke Arabic at least. Saif had had to manage entirely on his own, at first without even knowing whether his children were alive. The fact that he had not only done so but was patently thriving (even if he would not call it that, his patients adored him and he was a more treasured member of the community than he knew) made him one of her successes and she was proud of him. Therefore this was harder than ever.
“You need a haircut,” she added.
“I know, I know,” said Saif. There was a female hairdresser, not a barber, in the village, and Saif had been somewhat reluctant. It was just habit, he knew, but even so. Neda had a neat flattop that always looked tidy.
“There’s a Turkish barber just down the road,” she said. “You could pop in afterward.”
Saif nodded numbly. After what? he wanted to ask, but he knew Neda couldn’t tell him, even if she knew herself. It had to be done under the proper circumstances.
IT WAS THE same secure, dull, ugly low building, the same signing in and military personnel. The same grave expressions and long corridors and bad coffee, and the same tedious administration of the state, of inconvenient persons and complicated caseloads and tired human beings trying to work out a way to be fair to one another, to live with one another, when they weren’t given enough money or political support always to be kind.
Saif knew he should be grateful to his adoptive country—and he was, he absolutely was, of course; he and his children could be in a horrible refugee camp, or conscripted, or dead by now. But the very act of having to feel constantly grateful could also feel like a burden, and he wasn’t sure how he could express that. A rich country trying to be parsimonious and magnanimous at the same time was a painful thing to witness.
He was led into a small room, and a man who looked like he didn’t normally wear a suit cleared his throat. Without preamble, he opened a plain brown file and took out three large photographs. He turned them round to show Saif, and time slowed down.
In many ways Saif told himself he’d been waiting for this, or something like this.
But, he discovered, he had not. For this was beyond imagining.