Still Midnight

22

Even from inside the boot Aamir knew that where they were going was worse. The texture of the road beneath became rough. First they were bumping across broken asphalt then on grit, the wheels crunching over small stones, not factory-ground gravel but wild irregular stones.

The driver slowed, saving the car paint from being chipped. Aamir remembered it was a new car, he had smelled it last night. They crawled along the road for more than a mile until Aamir couldn’t hear the sounds of any other cars, just the wind buffeting the side and the faint swish of grass, birds.

The car stopped. The engine died. The men in the cabin spoke in short sentences. They got out and opened the boot to the blinding daylight. Someone prodded him to get out, yanked him up by the neck and Aamir scrambled to his feet, felt the wind on his hands and neck, chill and damp on his legs and hands.

A British passport.

They couldn’t read, those soldiers, just saw the navy blue cover and knew that they had official sanction to steal, to do whatever they wanted. It was on the way to the airport, one day before the ninety days ran out. His older brother had stayed behind to guard the house. They never saw or heard from him again. Aamir saw his mother sobbing by the roadside, the contents of their suitcase strewn across the red dust of the road, green shirts, photos of ancestors, her meagre jewellery taken.

They all disappeared behind the van and Aamir heard them: her sobbing and the men laughing awkwardly, the way men do when they see a stripper or talk about sex, a different quality laugh, deep, embarrassed. And he knew before they came around to the road, adjusting their flies, before he saw the blood, that they had fucked his maman. Aamir sat very still in the taxi, staring forward, straight through the soldier sitting on the taxi bonnet smoking a cigarillo, knowing they would be killed.

She fell back into the taxi next to Aamir, sari pressed tight over her mouth and didn’t look at him. One of the soldiers shut the door after her, hung in the window and touched her hair because he could, running it between his thumb and finger as if it was material he was thinking about buying for his wife.

Aamir felt the cold Scottish wind buffet him again and braced himself, cowering, his chin on his chest. Men like these men did not drive to the countryside for no reason. They were going to kill him. He shut his eyes to pray and, from a deep dark place, a small bubble of honest emotion rose to his chest, an old feeling, a puff of African dust and the smell of cigarillos. The feeling was urgent and fresh, unadulterated by memory. He had been running from this small bubble for thirty years, suppressing it with prayers and work and worry, with children and home improvements and food. A puff of dust from the November road to Entebbe airport. Under the pillowcase Aamir opened his eyes in shock. Facing death his last thought was honest and pure. It was relief.

In Scotland a hand pulled him roughly by the arm, so that he staggered wildly over the uneven road of shattered concrete, he tumbled forwards, over and over, around a big building that blocked the wind, through a high open door into shadows. Inside smelled damp and stale, of cold and mud and wet on the walls. It sounded like a tall wide room.

They walked Aamir through the hall, deeper and deeper into the gathering darkness, away from the door and the sound of the wind. Leading him calmly now, across metal pathways with a pattern on it, nonslip, he could feel it through his slipper soles. Silent, they took him over wooden planks that were not fixed into the ground, rocking under his weight. Up a steep set of clanging metal steps, they kicked the back of his heels, making him lift his feet and step through a lipped doorway.

It wasn’t a room. The air smelled of dusty iron. His footsteps were deadened. The sound of his own breathing echoed back at him like an ambush. Aamir tried to make sense of it: the floor was concave, he was standing in a big iron tube. Looking down at the ground beneath his pillowcase and in the light from the doorway, all he could see was a crumbling carpet of rust, red sheets that fell to dust under his feet, red like the road to Entebbe.

His arm was let go, the men backed away. Aamir shuffled around to face them, turned his palms up, lifting them in welcome to the coming close. The men shuffled on the metal steps, one of them going down, another dragging something. Something metal. A heavy metal door, rust resisting their efforts to pull it shut.

No. They had to kill him.

Aamir stepped towards them, hands out now, a beggar. They couldn’t leave him with this acid desire to be gone.

‘PLEA-’ He stepped towards them but the door slammed shut. All was darkness. A bolt ground closed on the outside of the door. They meant to leave him in here.

Reckless, trying to force their hand, Aamir yanked the pillowcase off his head but it made no difference: the dark was absolute. He could hear the distant thump of feet on metal as the men outside walked away.

Young again, on the road to the airport, a hand on the hot plastic of the taxi’s back seat and the smell of indifferent cigarillos. He’d stayed in the taxi and let them have her, listened to them laughing as they watched one another fuck her, just so that he could live. Pointless. He could never touch her again, never forgave her, felt soiled and tired for every waking moment after that. He had traded her honour for a life he didn’t want.

Aamir threw his head back and screamed, a strangled roar that echoed back, knocking him to his knees in the brutal inky dark.