Shadow

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“I wish you could come in with me, Matt,” he said.

“Me too,” I told him. “But you’ll be fine, Grandpa. Just go for it. And you’ll like Aman. He’ll remember you, I know he will. And you’ve got the Monopoly, haven’t you? He’ll beat you, Grandpa. But don’t worry about that. He beats everyone. And tell him to write to me, will you? Or text, or phone?”

We were driving up a long straight hill. It seemed to lead to nowhere but the sky. Only when we reached the top of the rise did we see the gates, and then the barbed wire fence all around.

“And they keep kids in there?” Grandpa breathed.

We Want You Back (#ulink_75881970-d1ea-518e-83af-91a9c4a6eb3e)

Grandpa

I left Matt and Dog in the car, and walked up towards the gates. I wasn’t looking forward to this at all. I had that same sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach that I remember from my first day at school.

An unsmiling security guard was opening the gate. He suited the place. If Matt hadn’t been there watching me from the car as I knew he must be, I’d have turned round at that point, got back in the car and gone home. But I couldn’t shame myself, I couldn’t let him down.

I turned round, and saw that Matt was already out of the car and taking Dog for a walk, as he’d said he would. We gave each other a wave, and then I was inside the gates. There was no going back now.

As I walked down the road towards the detention centre building, I tried to keep my courage up by thinking about Matt. Ever since I’ve been on my own these last two years, Matt has been to stay a lot. I love to watch him playing with Dog.

Dog is getting on these days, like me, but he is like a puppy when Matt comes. Matt keeps him young, keeps me young too. I only have to think of them both together, and they make me smile. They cheer me up. And that’s good for me. I’ve been rather down in the dumps just recently. Matt and I, we’re not just grandfather and grandson any more, we’ve become the best of friends.

But as I joined some other visitors making their way in, I was wondering what was the point of visiting Aman. After all, weren’t these asylum seekers about to be deported and sent back to where they’d come from? So what was the point? I mean, what could I do? What could I say that could make any difference?

But Matt wanted me to do it for Aman. So there I was, inside the place now, doors locking behind me, the Monopoly set under my arm. I could hear the sound of children crying.

Like all the other visitors, I was being processed. The Monopoly set had to be handed over to be checked by Security, and I got a stern ticking-off for bringing it with me in the first place. It was against the rules, but they might let me have it later, they said grudgingly.

Everywhere there were more of those unsmiling security guards. The pat-down search was done brusquely, and in hostile silence. Everything about the place seemed to me to be hateful: the bleak locker room where visitors had to leave their coats and bags, the institutional smell, the sound of keys turning in locks, the sad plastic flowers in the visitors’ meeting room, and always the sound of some child crying.

Then I saw them, the only ones still without a visitor. I recognised Aman at once, and I could tell he knew me too, as Matt had said he would. Aman and his mother were sitting there at the table, waiting for me, looking up at me, vacantly. There were no smiles. Neither of them seemed that pleased to see me. It was all too set up, too formal, too stiff. Like everyone else in the room, we had to sit facing one another on either side of a table. And there were officers everywhere, in their black and white uniforms, keys dangling from their belts, watching us.

Aman’s mother sat there, shoulders slumped, stony-faced, sad and silent. She had deep, dark rings under her eyes, and seemed locked inside herself. As for Aman, he was even smaller than I remembered, and pinched and thin like a whippet. His eyes were pools of loneliness and despair.

I kept trying to tell myself, don’t pity them. They don’t want that, they don’t need that, and they’ll know it at once if you do. They’re not victims, they’re people. Try to find something in common. Do what Matt said in the car. Just go for it. And pray the Monopoly arrives.

“How is Matt?” Aman said.

“He’s outside,” I told him. “They won’t let him in.”

Aman smiled wanly at that. “Strange,” he said. “We want to get out, and they won’t let us. And he wants to get in, but they won’t let him.”

I tried, again and again, to make some small talk with his mother. The trouble was that she spoke very little English, so Aman always had to translate for her. Aman only became animated at all, I noticed, when we talked about Matt, and even then I found myself asking all the questions. I think we’d have all sat there in silence if I hadn’t. Any question not about Matt, he’d just divert to his mother, and translate her replies, which were mostly ‘yes’ or ‘no’. However hard I tried, I just could not seem to get a proper conversation going between the three of us.

So when Aman spoke up for himself suddenly, I was taken a little by surprise. “My mother is not well,” he said. “She had one of her panic attacks this morning. The doctor gave her some medicine, and this makes her quite sleepy.” He spoke very correctly, and with hardly a trace of an accent.

“Why did she have a panic attack?” I asked, regretting my question at once. It seemed too intrusive, too personal.

“It is this place. It is being shut in here,” he replied. “She was in prison once in Afghanistan. She does not talk about it much. But I know they beat her. The police. She hates the police. She hates to be locked in. She has bad dreams of the prison in Afghanistan, you understand? So sometimes when she wakes up in here, and she sees she is in prison again, and she sees the guards, she has a panic attack.”

That was when the security guard suddenly arrived with the Monopoly game.

“You’re lucky,” he said. “Just this once, right?” And he walked away.

Miserable git, I thought. But I knew it was best to keep my feelings to myself. Now I’d got it, I didn’t want him to take it away.

“Monopoly,” I said. “Matt says you like it, that you play quite well.”

His whole face lit up. “Monopoly! Look, Mother, you remember where we played it first?” Then he turned to me. “I used to play it a lot with Matt. I never lose,” he said. “Never.”

He opened the board at once, and set it all up, rubbing his hands with delight when it was done. Then he started to laugh, and couldn’t seem to stop. “You see what it says here?” he cried, his finger stabbing at the board. “It says, ‘Go to Jail’. Go to jail! That is very funny, isn’t it? If I land here I will go to jail, in a jail. And so will you!”

His laughter was infectious, and very soon the two of us were almost hysterical.

That was when I saw another officer coming over towards us, a woman this time, but no less officious. “You’re disturbing people. Keep it down,” she said. “I won’t tell you again. Any more of that and I’ll end the visit, understand?”

She was being unnecessarily offensive, and I did not like it one bit. This time, I did not try to hide my feelings. “So we’re not allowed to laugh in here, is that right?” I protested. “People can cry, but they can’t laugh, is that it?”

The officer gave me a long, hard look, but in the end she just turned round and walked away. It was a little victory, but I could see from the smile on Aman’s face that he thought it was a lot more than that.

“Nice one,” he whispered, giving me a secretive thumbs up.

Shadow (#ulink_47b962c4-ebb5-5ad4-b1f4-970da3972c36)

Grandpa

Matt had been right about Aman’s prowess at Monopoly. Within an hour he owned just about all of London, and had left me bankrupt, and in jail.

“You see?” he said, punching the air with both fists in triumph. “I am very good in business, like my father was. He was a farmer. Where we used to live in Bamiyan, in Afghanistan. He had sheep, many sheep, the best sheep in the valley. And he grew apples too, big green ones. I love apples.”

“I’ve got some nice ones in my garden at home,” I told him. “Lovely pink ones. James Grieve, they’re called. I’ll bring you some next time I come.”

“They won’t let you,” he said, ruefully.

“I can try,” I told him. “I got the Monopoly game in, didn’t I?”

He smiled at that. Then, leaning forward suddenly, and ignoring his mother, he began asking me all sorts of questions, some about where I lived, what job I did, about what football team I supported – I could tell that Matt had told him a fair bit about me already, and that pleased me a lot. But Aman wanted to talk mostly about Matt, about how he’d got all his letters, and how after a while he decided he couldn’t write back, because he knew he wouldn’t be seeing Matt again, and it only made him sad.

“You mustn’t say that,” I told him. “You don’t know you won’t be seeing him again.”

“Yes I do,” he said. I knew he was right, of course, but I suppose I thought I should give him some hope.

“You never know,” I said. “You never know.”

It was then that I remembered the family photo I’d brought in with me from home, at the last moment – another of Matt’s ideas, and a good one too, I’d thought. I took it out of my jacket pocket and was about to hand it over.

Suddenly there was a guard yelling at us. Then she was striding across the room to our table – the same woman who had ticked me off before. Everyone in the room was looking at us. “It’s not allowed!” She was standing right over us by now, still shouting. “Are you just trying to make a nuisance of yourself, or what?”

Now I was properly angry, and I let her know it. “For goodness’ sake, it’s just a family photo.” I held it up to show her. “Look,” I said. She took it from me, and examined it sullenly, taking her time before giving it back to me.

“In future,” she told me, “everything has to be passed by Security. Everything.”

I just nodded, buttoning my lip till she was gone. I hated myself for doing it, for not arguing back. But I knew that to have a stand-up row with her would be pointless – if I wanted Aman to see the photo. I waited till she’d gone away, winked triumphantly at Aman, slid the photo across the table, and then began pointing out who everyone was. “That’s the family in the garden, last summer. There’s the apple tree. And Matt, kneeling down beside Dog. Yes, I know. Not a very imaginative name for a dog, is it? I think he must be about the same age as Matt, same age as you. That’s pretty old for a dog.”

A sudden frown came over Aman’s face. He picked up the photo to look at it more closely. “Shadow,” he murmured, and I saw his eyes were filling with tears. “Shadow.”

“I’m sorry?” I said, not understanding at all. “Is it something in the photo?”

Without any warning, Aman got up and rushed out of the room. His mother went after him at once, leaving me sitting there and feeling rather stupid. I looked down at the photo, still trying to work out what there could possibly be in this family snap that had upset him so much.

That was when another officer came wandering over and spoke to me, in a low and overly confiding tone. “Temperamental, you see,” he said. “That’s the trouble with them. And I’m warning you, that one can be a bit surly too.”

I felt like getting up and shaking him. I should have given him a piece of my mind. I should have said, “And how would you feel being caged up in here like this? He’s just a kid, with no home, no hope, nothing to look forward to, except deportation.”

Instead, and for the second time that day, I said nothing. In keeping silent as I had, I felt I had betrayed Aman yet again. Whatever way I looked at it, the whole thing had all been my fault. I should never have shown Aman the photo.

He was just beginning to trust me, and I’d blown it. I didn’t understand why, but that didn’t make me feel any better about it. People were looking at me from all around the room. I was sure they thought I had upset Aman intentionally somehow. I waited for a while, hoping he might come back, but longing at the same time to get out of there. When he didn’t reappear, I decided to pack up the Monopoly game as quickly as I could, and go.

I had just collected up the last of the Monopoly money and was closing the lid, when I saw Aman coming back across the room towards me. He sat down opposite me again, without speaking a word, without even looking at me. I thought I’d better say something.

“I can leave the Monopoly game, if you like, if they’ll let me,” I said. “You can play it with your friends maybe.”

“I don’t have any friends in here,” he said, still not lifting his eyes. “All the friends I had are on the outside. I’m on the inside.” Then he did look up at me. “I’ve got a photo of my friends though. Mother says I should show you.”

He was looking around the room, making quite sure no one was looking. Then he took a piece of folded paper out of his pocket and handed it to me surreptitiously under the table. I opened it out on my knee.

It was an e-mail printout of a photo of a school football team, in a blue strip. They were all crowding around one another and laughing into the camera. Matt was standing at the back, his arms raised in the air, as if he had just scored a goal.

“That is my football team, and there is Matt. See him?” Aman said. “They sent it to me from school. And that’s my shirt.” They were holding up a bright blue football shirt. On the back was a number 7, and above it in large letters, AMAN.

“If you count the players,” he went on, “you will see there are only ten of them. There should be eleven. I’m the one that is missing. That’s Marlon, centre forward, twenty-seven goals last year, as good as Rooney, better even. And the tall one, like a giraffe – next to Matt at the back – that’s Flat Stanley, our goalie, the one grinning all over his face, and giving me the thumbs up. Can you see him?”

I could see him, right in the middle of the top row, holding up a huge banner that read, WE WANT YOU BACK.

“These are my friends,” Aman told me. “I want to go back to them, back to my school, back to my home in Manchester. It is where I belong, where Mother belongs. It is where Uncle Mir lives, where all our family lives. Mother says she is sorry, but she is very tired now, and she must lie down. But she sent me back to see you, to talk to you. When I spoke to Mother just a few moments ago, she said that she had a dream about you last night, even before she met you, and about Father, and about the cave in Bamiyan where we lived, about the soldiers too, and Shadow.”

“Shadow? What is… who is this Shadow?” I asked him.

“Shadow was our dog,” said Aman. “She was just like the dog in your photo. We called her Shadow, when she was ours. And then later she was called Polly. She had two names, because she had two lives. She was brown and white, like yours. The same droopy eyes and long ears.”

It was all too puzzling, too difficult to understand. “So Shadow,” I said, “she’s your dog, and she’s back at your home in Manchester then? Is that right?”

Aman shook his head. “No. It’s like Mother told me,” he said. “She said I should tell you everything, all about Shadow, and about Bamiyan, and about how we came to be in this place. Like I said, Mother says she had a dream about you last night, before she even met you. And in the dream, she told me you took us by the hand and led us out of here. She says she was not sure about you at first, but now she is. She says you are a good listener with a kind heart, that all good friends are good listeners. Like Matt, she said, just like Matt. Why else would you come to see us if you did not want to listen? She says you are our last chance, our last hope of going home to Manchester, of staying in England. This is why she told me I must tell you the whole story now, right from the beginning, so you will know why we have come here to England, and what has happened to us. She says that maybe you can help us, God willing. She says there is no one else who can, not now. Will you help us?”

“I will try, Aman, of course I will,” I replied. “But I don’t want to build up any false hopes. I really can’t promise anything.”

“I don’t want promises,” he said. “I just want you to listen to our story. That’s all. Will you do that?”

“I’m listening,” I told him.

Bamiyan (#ulink_40da88b0-c35f-532c-b264-f06c37ea1a49)

Aman

I think you should know about my grandfather first, because in a way he was the beginning.

I didn’t know him, but Mother often told me his stories – she still does sometimes – so, in a way, I do know him.

There was a time, so Grandfather told her, when Afghanistan was not as it is today. Bamiyan, where we lived, was a beautiful, peaceful valley. There was plenty to eat, and the different peoples did not fight one another: Pashtun, Usbek, Tagik, Hazara – my family is from the Hazara people.

Then the foreigners came, the Russians first, with their tanks and their planes, and after that there was no more peace, and soon there was no more food. My grandfather fought against them with the Mujahadin resistance fighters. But the Russian tanks came to our valley, to Bamiyan, and killed him, and many others.

All this was long before I was born.

After the Russians were driven out, Mother remembers that everyone was happy for a while. But then the Taliban fighters came in. At first everyone liked them, because they were Muslims like us. But we soon learned what they were really like. They hated us, especially Hazara people like us. They wanted us dead. If you did not agree with them, they killed you. They left us with nothing. They destroyed everything. They burnt our fields. They blew up all our homes, every one of them. They killed whoever they wanted to. There was nothing anyone could do, except hide.

That is why I was born in a cave in the cliff face above the village. I grew up in this cave, with my mother and grandmother. I wasn’t unhappy. I went to school. I had friends to play with. I knew nothing different.

Mother and Grandmother argued a lot, mostly about the same thing, about Grandmother’s jewels, which she kept hidden away, sewn into her mattress. Mother was always trying to get her to sell them, to buy food when we were hungry. And Grandmother always refused. She said we were always hungry, and that we would manage to survive somehow, God willing. She would always say that there was something more precious even than food, and she was saving her jewels for that. She would not say what this was, and that always made Mother very angry and upset. But I did not mind them arguing that much. I was used to it, I suppose.

Everyone I cared about in the world lived in these caves, a hundred or more of us, because there was nowhere else to go, because the Taliban had left us nowhere else to live. They had blown up all of Bamiyan, all of the houses, even the mosque.

And they did more than that. They blew up also the great stone statues of the Buddha that had been carved out of the cliff face thousands of years before. Mother watched them do it. She told me they were the biggest stone sculptures in the whole world, and that people from far away used to come to Bamiyan to see them because they were so famous. But there is nothing left of them now, just great piles of stones. The Taliban blew up our whole lives.

They were cruel people.

Then the Americans came with their tanks and their helicopters and their planes, and the Taliban were driven out of the valley, most of them anyway. We all thought things would be better for us from now on. Father spoke a little English, so he became an interpreter for the Americans. People kept saying there would soon be new houses for us to live in, and a new school. But nothing seemed to change. There was more food now, but never enough. So we were still hungry. In the cave Mother and Grandmother started quarrelling again.

Things were getting back to normal.

But then one night the Taliban came to our cave, and they took my father away. I was six years old. They called him a traitor, because he had helped the infidel Americans. Mother fought them, but she wasn’t strong enough. I screamed at them, but they just ignored me.

We never saw my father again. I remember him very well though. They cannot take away my memories of him. He used to show me the house down in the valley where he had lived, and we would sometimes walk the land where he used to graze his sheep, and grow his onions and his melons, and the orchard where he grew his big green apples.

Father would always let me go with him to load up the donkey with sticks for the fire. And every day we would go down to the stream to fetch the water, and carry it back up the steep hill to the cave. Sometimes he would take me into town to buy some bread, or a little meat from the butcher, if we had any money. Everyone liked him. We laughed a lot together, and he would wrestle with me and play with me.

He was a good father. He was a good man.

But the Taliban had destroyed everything, cut down the orchards, burnt the crops, took Father away. I never heard him laugh again. All we had left of him was his old donkey. I would talk to him instead sometimes. He was very sad, like me. I think maybe that donkey missed Father as much as I did.

After that there were just the three of us left in the cave, Mother, Grandmother, and me. For months after Father was taken away, Grandmother would spend her days lying on the mattress in the corner, and Mother would sit there beside her, gazing at nothing, hardly speaking. It was up to me now to find enough rice or bread to live on. I begged for it. I stole it. I had to. I fetched the water from the stream, a long walk down the hill and a long walk up, and I tried to bring in enough sticks to keep the fire going.

Somehow we managed to get through the winters without starving or freezing to death. But Grandmother’s legs were getting worse all the time. She could hardly get up at all now, unless one of us helped her.

What happened to Mother was my fault. I was with her at the market in town when I stole the apple, just one apple, nothing much – we had none left of our own by now. I was good at pinching things. I had never been spotted before. But this time I got careless. This time I got caught.

“Dirty Dog! Dirty Foreign Dog!” (#ulink_f4bfb3e2-9e44-584b-9103-40de6ebee5b5)

Aman