‘We’ll walk to that tree,’ you tell Jamilah, pointing, ‘then stop and rest. If we can sleep for a while, we’ll have more energy to walk during the night.’
The tree is a little way off the road, and it’s a good place to rest. You both sip a little water, and then you make a shady cover by hanging your blanket from a low branch.
Occasionally, a truck roars past. You sit as still as possible while the air around you heats to a temperature so high you can hardly keep your eyes open. It’s hard to rest when it feels like your skin is going to split from the heat.
You slip in and out of a muddle of sleep. Only when the day cools into evening do you start to think clearly again.
You and Jamilah eat a little of the thick, doughy millet that Jok gave you. It’s the only food you’ve eaten all day – bland and heavy, enough to keep you moving.
You don’t know how many nights this will take. The second night of walking already doesn’t feel as easy as the first. You might have ten nights ahead of you like this, or twenty, or more if you get lost.
The gun is heavy and cumbersome to carry, so you and Jamilah take turns. You don’t want to leave it behind – you might need it for self-defence, and if you ever see an animal, you could try shooting and cooking it. But the only signs of life so far have been flies, which came out yesterday during the heat of the day, and a single lizard you saw last night at dusk.
You walk through the night and the following dawn and morning. The strap on one of your thongs breaks, and Jamilah rips the hem off her dress to tie it back onto your foot.
The days turn to nights, then back into days. Occasionally, as you rest during the days, you hear a roar of an engine passing on the road, but you always choose resting places that keep you well hidden, and you only walk by the road at night as planned. The millet dwindles. Soon you are eating just a pinch of millet, and then nothing – just a few sips of water a day.
At first, to keep your minds focussed on other things, you would tell Jamilah to recite her alphabet as she walked along, or you sang a song together. Now you both barely have the energy to speak.
But for every one of those who survived the walk here, another lies dead in the desert, says Adut’s voice in your memory.
The desert wants to eat you.
Each evening you look into Jamilah’s face, see her red-rimmed eyes, the skin hanging from her cheekbones like dry cloth, her slack, exhausted mouth without even a drop of spit in it to swallow, and you know it’s a mirror of your own.
One day, as the heat starts to build, you stumble towards a resting place you’ve spotted: some sticks in the ground with a tarpaulin strung over them, a makeshift humpy half-buried in sand. Someone else who made this journey must have left their shelter behind.
But when you stumble closer, you realise the traveller is still there. Or, some of her is. A pile of clothes and bones and a hank of brown hair is all that’s left of her body.
Jamilah starts to choke with dry sobs. ‘No. No! We can’t rest here with a dead woman!’
‘We have to,’ you say forcefully. ‘There’s nowhere else.’
Feeling sick to the stomach, you move the woman’s bones aside. You shudder as you sit down next to them, pulling Jamilah into the shelter with you.
A sandstorm howls through the desert that day, blotting out the sun, filling your nostrils and ear-holes with sand.
When the sandstorm finally passes, the cool weather of evening has arrived, but since you didn’t get any rest you find that you can’t stand up and keep going. Your legs shake when you try, and you fall back to the ground. You feel like a hollow boy, made of sticks and string.
Waterwaterwaterwater, says your brain. But there is none left. Jamilah lays her head in your lap. Her eyelashes are coated in sand. A little scrap of breath – in, out, in – is the only difference between her and the traveller’s pile of bones beside you.
That night, you are tormented by dreams and visions. Men from al-Shabaab take your gun and tie it around your throat. Your parents arrive and sob as they try to untie the gun, asking, Did we die for this? For you to be collared like an animal?
The bones rise up from the ground and assemble themselves into a woman. The flesh grows on her body, then withers and falls away, and the bleached bones tumble to the ground again and again in a tortuous rewinding dance.
Rahama appears from the desert, and she is angry with you. You failure! she shouts. You’re both going to die! Then she starts hitting you, and you wake to discover you’ve been hitting yourself.
You want to cry, but there’s nothing left. You want to howl, but instead you just look at the moon, hearing that scrap of breath slide in and out of you, even as you wait for it to stop.
When dawn arrives, you can’t wake Jamilah. You shake her, and her head flops from side to side but her sand-encrusted eyes won’t open. You put your ear to her chest. There is still a steady, quiet drumbeat in there.
You heave her over one of your shoulders and stand. You’re not going to die beside this woman’s bones, under this last hopeless shelter in the desert.
You stumble towards where you think the road lies. The sandstorm has made it impossible to
