Act of Grace Page 9
Did she do it? For years, Robbie would pretend that she didn’t know. But there was a yelp, a sound like she imagined a dog would make if you kicked it just so in the ribs, and it stayed with her.
Out on the footpath, Robbie ran. Cars passed her, headlights flaring, wipers going. At one point Robbie stopped to catch her breath, then ran again. She ended up at Danny’s old school. Robbie wrapped her hands around the iron gates and recalled how she’d sat on the step, pretending to be the little match girl. She banged her head against the metal. Fucking idiot, fucking idiot.
Grabbing hold of the wet bars, she climbed over and onto the school grounds. She was soaked, her hair dripping down her neck. She walked past the gothic architecture to the building where her father used to turn the lights out. She remembered standing in the staffroom with Otis, watching the door, and her father’s face when he came in. He’d been scared, she realised. In his head he’d probably played it out – Mrs Eckersley’s word against his – and he had figured she’d win. If she decided he wasn’t fit to look after them, well, they could be taken away. It had always only been the four of them, and Robbie had never questioned why. It was lonely at times, but she’d just figured they were close-knit. Now she thought their father had not trusted to share them. Not even with Grace and Gregory, his foster parents – or maybe especially with them. Maybe he’d thought if they could be complicit in that with him, what would stop them doing it again? Danny had the three of them, that was all he had. And now? What did he have now? A nurse pinning him down saying, it’s quiet time, it’s quiet time.
Robbie saw the lockers lining the forecourt and went over, trying each handle until one banged open. Inside was a pencil case and some textbooks. She rifled through the pencil case and found a black Sharpie. She took it out and was about to close the locker when she saw, on the top shelf, a jacket just like the ones Mrs Eckersley had wanted her and Otis to try on. Robbie tugged it out. It was navy blue, with the gold insignia of the school on the breast. Annuit Cœptis. Robbie put it on. Mrs Eckersley was right; the fleece was warm on her skin. She flicked the hood up.
Robbie went back to the building with the fish windows and found a dry section under an eave. She started to write in big thick letters on the brickwork, and when she finished, she stepped back to admire her work:
MRS FUCKING ECKERSLEY
On the street, a security car stopped in front of the iron gate and a man with a torch got out. Holding an umbrella, he unlocked the gate as Robbie flattened herself against the bitumen. On the school grounds, he shone the light over the buildings and the oval. The beam swept over her. Robbie kept still. She waited until he walked around a corner. Then she ran, hunched down – made for the open gate, and heard a yell behind her, saw a ball of light dance about her sneakers. She kept running, down the street, past the 7-Eleven where she had stolen the sunglasses, and as she ran, the fancy school coat swishing, the rain coming off it in sheets, she thought of her father, his eyes in the rear-view mirror as he drove, looking straight at her. She knew what he was thinking. The system: it would come for her.
Saddam’s Horses
She’d gone to bed fully dressed the night they came. It was almost a relief when she heard them break down the door, but when they entered her bedroom, black hoods over their heads, Nasim wished to return to the waiting. They hauled her out of bed by her hair and dragged her to the kitchen, muttering hadiths while one put the plug in the sink, turning the tap on. When the basin filled, someone put his hand on Nasim’s head and shoved her down, into the water. Everything went blue, red, pink, and then the back of her head cracked against the tap as she was pulled up, guttural sounds coming from her mouth. One of the men put his phone close to her face, yelling at her to look. At first she couldn’t see, couldn’t make sense of the image on the screen, but finally it began to take shape. They weren’t her girls, that was her first thought.
A few drops of water fell from her face onto the screen. The man yelled at her, taking the phone away, wiping it on his shirt. Allahu Akbar, you whore, he shouted, and the others said it too. He thrust the phone in her face again. Nasim identified a few of them this time, girls she’d worked with in the past, wrists she’d twisted, fingers she’d unpeeled from her own and bodies she’d shoved into cars. They were in a shower, six or maybe seven of them, the ones on the bottom with their legs sticking out, the others thrown on top, tight T-shirts and capri pants tugged the wrong ways, grazed knees, straps of flesh around their bellies, fingerprint bruises pressed into their thighs, a spill of breast over the tops of their bras. Blood pooled around the bodies on the tiles, leaking along the grout towards the drain.
The men pressed on Nasim, wrenching her head back, making her kneel and then stand, pushing her between them. In the other room she could see one of them smashing her piano, grunting as he swung his hammer, as though he had been harbouring resentment towards this hulking instrument all his life. He put his whole body into it, shoulderblades stretching and folding under his shirt, bringing the hammer down, then down again, keys flying off like exploding teeth. A couple of the men joined him, sinking their boots into the wood, and Nasim focused on the notes, saying goodbye as they detonated. Goodbye, F minor, she thought, Goodbye, B major.
The sound muffled as one of them pushed her under the water again, her face pressing against the gritty specks of food stuck on the bottom of the basin. The firm hand on the back of Nasim’s head was almost reassuring as her legs began to kick out from under her. It was then Nasim belatedly recognised one of the dead girls in the photo – something about the swanlike flop of the neck, the shade of her dyed hair. It was Sabeen.
Nasim couldn’t hold her breath any longer. She opened her mouth, sucking in water. The burning in her chest suddenly felt very faraway and her hair, swirling like tentacles, created a pleasant sensation. It was almost done. Then the grip on her head was released and she fell backwards onto the floor, vomiting water and bile, as the shadows inexplicably receded out the door.
For a time Nasim lay there, studying the thickness of her ankles in a daze. She turned her head to look at the bits of smashed piano strewn across the other room. Some keys were loose and scattered, others were hanging in strips like ammunition. She lifted her fingers, one at a time, and tapped out a slow trembling tune to steady her breathing. Sabeen, she remembered. The woman’s story had been convoluted; many of the girls’ stories were, and Nasim had not believed it at first, but when Sabeen had showed her a letter outlining a compensation payment, the paperwork with its strange insignia of a kangaroo and tall, leggy bird, Nasim had noted this with interest. She’d watched Sabeen carefully refold the letter, before returning it furtively to her small bag of belongings. The woman treasured that document from the Australian embassy, as if it were her only proof of a life she no longer had. Nasim sat up, her fingers now drumming purposively. She began to plan. She had a talent for this, this surviving.
*
Nasim’s mother had played the piano. Nhour couldn’t read music and had always regretted it, compensating by arranging lessons for her daughter. Nasim took to it like breathing: her mother attributed this to the lessons, but Nasim knew it was the hours she had watched Nhour play, memorising how she felt her way along the keys, gently forming sounds into chords and wincing when she hit an off note. Her melodies went unrecorded, fleeting as clouds but engraved on Nasim’s bones.
Nhour Amin was a celebrated poet. She was called a ‘true’ Iraqi, commended for stripping the British influence from her poetry, for her love of country and her revolutionary spirit. A modern woman, Nhour was often out at meetings and readings, openings and lectures, salons and dinner parties, while Nasim’s father stayed home in the evenings to look after Nasim. When her mother was home, it was mostly to work in her study or to bask in the company of many guests, including visitors from other countries, who brought Nasim gifts and sang her songs in curious languages, until she was bustled to bed while Nhour held the guests in thrall. It was often said tha
t Nhour Amin’s poetry was like rain to a desert, but in conversation she spoke plainly and with a delicious humour that few dared. People both feared and loved her honesty.
Nhour despised the black abayas worn by the Shi’a women. ‘They are like garbage bags,’ she had sneered to Nasim once, as they walked behind a flock of them on the street. And at the parties her parents held, her mother would laugh at someone’s half-hearted case for modesty. ‘Modesty?’ she would say. ‘Modesty? Look at them in the market – they’re the pushiest, rudest women there.’
Once Nhour imitated a goose to illustrate her point. She pushed her chin out, puckering her lips, shouldering everyone out of her way as she grabbed cakes from the table and clutched them to her chest, a wet hiss issuing from her lips. Everyone laughed in recognition. ‘For their husbands!’ someone called out.
At this, Nhour stopped and looked over at her husband, a Shi’a man, and smiled sweetly. ‘Forgive me, my dear,’ she said, picking up a throw and dropping it over her head, arms outstretched as she made howling sounds, blindly searching for him. ‘My darling husband!’ she called, ‘it is me, your modest, stupid wife!’
Chuckling, he ran around the room as she tried to catch him, until the guests caught him for her and she embraced him clumsily, still howling like a ghost.
Her mother would apologise later, Nasim watching as she whispered in her father’s ear, seeing his smile as he put his arms around her, but she was merciless. ‘I’m sure your mother was a wonderful slave,’ Nhour added loudly.
Many ventured that Nhour had Bedouin blood. It was a compelling thought, for her eyes were the copper of sand vipers, and her oval face was rugged with freckles. But it was more than that. She had an unyielding quality that reminded her admirers of the much-romanticised desert Arab – something unbending, a streak that would not, could not, adapt.
At the time, Nhour Amin’s piano-playing was an afterthought; it was something she did in private, like prayer. But then everything changed.
It happened after Nasim’s tenth birthday. She was in bed, her father having tucked her in, and she lay awake listening to the dinner party downstairs. She was in the habit of holding her breath so the sound of her breathing would not get in the way of her mother’s voice, which flowed into song as the night thickened, joined by the twang of her father on the oud. The doorbell rang. It often did, but this time after the door was opened there was a strange hush, followed by movement as chairs were dragged across the floor, and then a frenzied popping of corks and clinking of glasses. Nasim got out of bed and propped her door ajar to listen. The laughter and the music had resumed, her mother’s voice still bell-like, but there was something new: an unease in her tone.
Nasim, in her white nightdress with pink ribbon threaded through the bosom, tiptoed to the top of the stairs, peering down between the banisters. At first, she did not see anything beyond the flurry of guests, but then, in an opening of bodies, she saw him. He was sitting in their best armchair. Handsome, he looked just as he did on the posters: dark eyes kind and interested, eyebrows bushy and brooding. On television, Nasim’s favourite part was when he rode his horse, an Arabian mare, Al-Awra, named after the Prophet Mohammed’s favoured horse, meaning ‘the one-eyed mare’.
Her mother liked him too. This Nasim knew because she had heard her defending him once. ‘He’s bringing Iraq into the twentieth century,’ she said, when a guest voiced disapproval of his harsh methods. And now, he was here. In their home, listening avidly to her mother. Nasim was so excited she felt her chest might burst. She flew back to her bedroom and sat on her mattress, hugging her knees and holding her breath, listening for the voice of Saddam.
*
It had been a wonderful time. He told Nasim to call him ‘Uncle’, and when she shyly asked after his horses, he immediately organised a convoy of cars to take her to his palace. At the stables, Uncle lifted Nasim onto Husam, a mottled silver and white stallion, showing her where to hold the reins, putting her feet in the gilded stirrups. As he spoke to the stablehands, she put her arms around the horse’s neck, her face in his mane, and closed her eyes, the earthy scent filling her. Quietly, so no one could hear, she told Husam that she loved him, whispering into a velvet ear. The horse nickered, a wet warmth coming from his nostrils. Seeing this, Uncle laughed. ‘He likes you.’
He ordered a stableboy to lead Husam outside slowly, reminding Nasim to hold the reins. She nodded and pressed her thighs against the horse, weighting the balls of her boots on the stirrups. Then, with her ankles, she gave the stallion a flick. Without knowing, she had instructed Husam to gallop. He took off as the boy lurched to the side, and behind her she heard the startled shouts, and forgot to pull back on the reins as Uncle had showed her. Instead she sat low, the leather straps and the horse’s mane threaded in her fingers, sky and earth blurring as Husam kicked up clods of grass and shot across the field.
Suddenly, Saddam was beside her, on a beautiful black horse he hadn’t saddled, just flung himself onto. He pulled his animal close to hers, yelling, ‘Oif!’ and grabbing her reins, bringing Husam down to a trot with his. Nasim sat up and smiled.
Saddam began to laugh. ‘You are happy?’ he said. ‘You smile instead of feel fear?’ He laughed and laughed.
Later, when they rode back to the others, he told her parents, ‘I thought she’d be in tears, but your girl was smiling. She is a natural.’ And she was.
Nasim took to riding much like she’d taken to the piano, but this time, in contrast to her father’s high praise of her piano-playing and her mother’s insistence that she practise daily, her parents said nothing. When she tried to talk about the horses on the chauffeur-driven journeys home (‘Which car would you like?’ asked Uncle, and when her parents deferred to him he would say to her mother, ‘This one, it matches your lovely dress’), they would not answer.
‘I love them all, but I love Husam the best,’ Nasim would say breathlessly, and to her mother, ‘Which one do you like best?’
Once her mother had snapped, ‘None of them, none,’ and her father put his hand on her knee, jerking his chin at the driver. Her mother frowned and stared out the window again. Confused, Nasim also fell silent.
*
At parties in his Baghdad palace, Saddam’s daughters would lead Nasim up the spiral staircase and into an enormous dressing room filled with gowns and shoes and jewellery and perfume. They were older than Nasim, and would undress and dress her like a doll, frowning expertly as they made up her face, applying lipstick, dusting her skin with a gold-flecked powder while Nasim squeezed her eyes shut. Armed with dryers, curling irons and bottles of hairspray, Saddam’s daughters would do her hair, getting the scissors out to ‘straighten’ her fringe. Nasim would sit still, thinking of the horses, understanding this was a game she must play. They put her feet in too-big high heels, showing her how to strut as if on a catwalk.
Finally they would lead her downstairs to perform a fashion show for the guests. Nasim stared ahead as she walked the prescribed length – ‘Here,’ one of them said, standing at one end of a long ornate rug – and struck a pose, hands on hips and freezing for one, two, three seconds, then swivelling around to totter back up the stairs, delighting the guests.
Often the daughters fought over her. ‘I’ll dress her,’ the older one would say, pulling Nasim’s arms. ‘You can do her hair.’ Nasim would not say anything, knowing not to state a preference, simply waiting for them to tire of her so she could run to the stables, rubbing the make-up off her face with her sleeve. There, she’d go to each of the horses and whisper in their ears, which flickered with her breath. At home, she played the piano and thought of the horses, imagined calling their names as they cantered towards her. She pressed her body against the piano as she played, just as she did against the horses’ flanks.
*
Presents kept arriving: a large freezer that would only fit in the living room; a doll’s house; a brass lamp of a ballerina, her hand outstretched as she held aloft a lightbulb;
a tiger skin. Each time something arrived, Nasim hopped around excitedly, helping to unwrap, impatient with her parents, who seemed reluctant to find out what new treasure they’d been sent. Nasim’s mother recoiled when she revealed the tiger skin, pushing it down in its box. It was her father who reached in, drawing it out and draping it over the rug in the living room.
‘No,’ Nhour said and tried to remove it, but her husband’s face was grim.
‘We have to, Nhour.’
Their parties continued, but there were more guests now, different guests, and more food, more popping of corks. There was still laughing and singing, dancing too, but it was louder, foot-thumping, frenzied. Often Uncle stood at the bottom of the stairs and called Nasim down to join them. She couldn’t believe her luck – but then, one night as she ran down in her nightdress, she caught sight of Nhour watching. Her mother’s face was taut, furious. Then Uncle picked Nasim up and spun her around, the guests applauding. When she looked back at her mother, Nhour was clapping too, a smile on her face.
After this, Nasim started to pay more attention. There were times when her parents had gone to bed and the doorbell rang. She listened as they quickly got up, whispering as they put their clothes on and opened the front door with what seemed like false cheer.
Other times, during the day, a car would arrive. Nhour, seeing it through the window, would stiffen. Before she left, she would tell Nasim to stay inside, that her father would be home soon. When her father came home and heard of the palace car, his face would darken. In the beginning Nasim thought her mother was having an affair with Uncle, a notion that brought mixed feelings. She was sad, yes, for her father, but also wildly excited for her mother. But one day, Nasim summoned up the courage to ask where Nhour went when the palace car came to collect her, and her mother replied, through gritted teeth, ‘To advise Uncle on his poetry.’