You keep looking him in the eye as he backs away towards the door.
A sob from Jamilah wrenches your eyes back to her, just as she disappears through the doorway and out of your sight.
You throw yourself towards her, and Hassan fires his gun. Pain rips through your leg and you drop to the floor. The two men holding Abshir punch him and throw him to the ground too, and as you both struggle to get up, they all vanish.
YOU DIDN’T KNOW there was something worse than dying, but now you do. The wound in your leg heals – you always wonder whether Hassan was being merciful or if it was just a bad shot – but the pain in your heart will never heal. Every day, awake and asleep, you little sister is in your mind.
Time passes. The first months are frantic and full of action, attempts to rescue her. Then action gives way to despair as it becomes clear that she will never be found.
Aadan still wants to bring you to Australia, but you refuse to go. You won’t leave Jamilah behind to face a fate you were spared from. You won’t leave Africa, the continent that made you, that made all the beautiful and terrible things you have ever known.
Like the desert dust, instead you drift back across the border into Somalia, never settling, always searching. For revenge. For clues. For a sign.
Like the dust, people try to get rid of you, but you find your way back, through corners and cracks. Like the dust, you are loose and dry, stripped of meaning, only looking for that one deep drink of water that will make you whole again, but which you will never find: your lost sister, Jamilah.
To return to your last choice and try again, go to scene 27.
‘Look,’ you say to Jamilah in Somali, ‘even if you’re right about Aunty Rahama, us trying to go to Italy is pointless. If she’s alive, she’ll find us – you know she will. Aadan will look after us in Australia. We can search for Aunty Rahama from there. And we need to make that money last, not give it all to Piggy.’
To Piggy, you say in English: ‘No. We still want to go to Australia. Soon – we want to go this week. No waiting.’
Piggy looks from one of you to the other. He’s clearly pissed off. ‘Stupid kids. Wake me up with shouting.’ He turns to go.
‘Wait!’ you cry, taking fifty dollars from your shoe. ‘I know we can’t see a doctor, but at least buy her some medicine. And a Malaysian simcard,’ you add hastily, as he snatches the money.
‘Shops closed now,’ Piggy snaps. ‘I get it tomorrow.’
You sit on the bed with your arms around Jamilah as she drifts into a feverish sleep. A long time ago, you think, we lived in Mogadishu, and we were kids.
You don’t feel like you’re a kid anymore. Kids get to have adults who look after them and friends who play with them. You’re not sure you can even remember how to play. Can you ever go back to being a kid, once you’ve stopped? you wonder. Or is it a one-way door?
The morning comes and goes. Mid-afternoon, Piggy comes in and throws a battered box of medicine at you.
‘Wait!’ you shout when you look inside the box, which says ‘Panadol’ on the front. All the tablets have been popped out and used except for the last two. ‘That’s not fifty dollars’ worth of medicine! Get her some proper medicine! She needs—’
But the door is slammed in your face, and fifty dollars of your money is gone. You have no idea if he’ll get you the simcard.
Seething with anger, you snap a tablet in half to try to make the medicine last longer and give it to Jamilah.
The Panadol does seem to bring down her fever, at least a little. But you never get the simcard. You know Abshir will be worried, and you wonder how long he’ll keep lying to Aadan about where you really are.
The next morning, Piggy wakes you and Jamilah before dawn and drives you to the coast.
‘You go to Indonesia on fishing boat,’ he says, pointing to where a blue wooden boat sits waiting in the mangrove shallows. ‘In Indonesia, man will meet you. Then get on boat to Australia. Okay?’
You nod. Piggy says something in Malaysian to the fisherman, a wiry man dressed in a singlet and a chequered sarong, who lifts up the deck of his boat. Inside the hull is a splintery, damp hole just big enough to lie down in. It smells of fish guts and mud.
‘We nail you in here, okay?’ says Piggy.
‘What? You’ll nail us in?’ cries Jamilah. You exchange horrified glances.
‘Sometimes police helicopter fly here. Sometimes police boat come to do inspection. They think maybe this fisherman is people smuggler. You must be very, very hidden, so we use nails. Okay?’ says Piggy.
It’s the third time he’s asked you ‘Okay?’ and you realise now that it’s a question with only one answer. It’s really not okay, but there is no other way, so you swallow your fear and reply, ‘Okay.’
The deck of the boat is made of latticed wood, with small square holes through which you can see the sky, and the faces of Piggy and the fisherman as they bend over to nail you in.
Bang. Bang. Every blow of the hammer makes the boat jump.
You hold Jamilah tight as you lie beside her. ‘We’ll be okay,’ you whisper.
Jamilah bites her lip and nods. She is sweating – from fear, or the fever, or both. You remember the feeling of squeezing her hot, damp, frightened body in a hug on the night you made it home after Aunty Rahama died. You stop and correct yourself: after Aunty Rahama disappeared.
The pen in your pocket pokes your thigh. If only you had a computer
