Читать книгу The Missing Twin: A gripping debut psychological thriller with a killer twist - Alex Day, Alex Day - Страница 7

The sea looked flat and calm. Benign. Perhaps it always did from the shore, with the lazy ripples of tideless waves lapping the fringes of golden sand that gleamed in the heat. Fatima didn’t know as she’d never been to the seaside before. She wasn’t exactly here for the beach, anyway. Screwing up her eyes against the sun she could see, hazily in the distance, the outline of what she supposed must be the island they would be heading for.

It wasn’t far. Really not far at all. Just a little water in-between. Compared to the distance she had already travelled it barely registered. You could almost swim there.

But she had never learnt to swim and neither had her children. She was sure that Ehsan didn’t know, either, nor his son Youssef. Despair threatened to engulf her, together with an utter weariness that suffused her body and made her bones feel liquid, no longer able to support her weight. She sank to the ground, right there on the seafront promenade, crouching into the scanty shade offered by the low beach wall whilst tourists strolled past, all wobbly pink skin and red noses. They were so well fed and rested, so oblivious. But that was to be expected – they were on their holidays, after all.

A sudden, searing jealousy made Fatima want to stop them, to tear their expensive clothes from their backs, grab their over-priced ice-creams and throw them into the sea. Look at me, she would say to them. This is what it’s like to have nothing. But the problem was that wasn’t what it was like. Having no property, no income, no possessions, was not the problem.

The problem was having no hope.

The sun beat down on her head. She wanted to lie down and rest, regardless of the passers-by, heedless of the noise and bustle. She felt she could sleep for a hundred years. Perhaps if she looked pitiful enough, someone would save her. But she knew they wouldn’t. The more needy you were, the more they ignored you. The more woeful, the more uncomfortable for others. Few, if any, wanted to get involved and who could blame them? There had been kindness amidst the devastation in her home country, people sharing their shelter and what little food they had. But Fatima wasn’t stupid and not ignorant, either. She knew how she and her compatriots were viewed, talked about, written about.

As ‘swarms’ and ‘floods’ and ‘marauding invaders’. Or, possibly even worse, as piteous and desperate, each pair of pleading eyes or outreached arms diminished by the sheer number of them, dehumanised and depersonalised by being one face amongst so very many.

In deciding to leave her country – although was it a decision when there seemed to be no other option? – she had taken on inconceivable, unimagined challenges. There was nothing to do but pull herself together and face those challenges. To get on with it. Think about Marwa and Maryam. She closed her hand around the warm, metal object in her pocket and squeezed it tight. It was the key to her house that no longer existed in her city that had been razed to the ground. She should throw it away and would have already done so but for the fact that it was all that was left of her old life, the only thing to remind her.

Getting up off the pavement and dusting herself down she defiantly tucked in her headscarf where it had come loose. Some women had stopped wearing a scarf so as not to stand out, to avoid being noticed. But Fatima would no more go out with an uncovered head as with uncovered breasts. They had not taken everything away from her yet, not reduced her to being ashamed of her culture, her identity.

Setting off along the busy promenade, she held her head high and tried to look purposeful. She had a list of things she must buy, but it meant spending money and she needed to protect every cent because there were so many things to be paid for. She must choose wisely and purchase only what was absolutely necessary for the next stage of their odyssey.

Perhaps the saddest fact of all, the most depressing, she thought as she handed over the precious notes for the life-jackets, the plastic wallets for the mobile phones, water for the journey, was that if it wasn’t her and her fellow citizens fleeing for a better life, it would be other people from other countries. There would always be another war, another catastrophe whether man-made or natural, to cause the human tide to swell and surge. This was a fact that would never change.