Chapter Two
After driving for an hour, Salma couldn’t resist the need to check her phone. She stopped at a motorway service point after Forfar. Iman got out to use the toilet, but this did not wake up Moni. Salma reached into her handbag. She found that her phone had slipped between the pages of Lady Evelyn’s book, Pilgrimage to Mecca. The book had an introduction about Lady Evelyn’s life with plenty of photographs. As Salma pulled out her phone, she caught a quick look at the hunting lodge beneath the dark slope of a mountain on the Glencarron estate. How exciting that they were heading there now! And it would not be in black and white like in the photo. It would be spread out in late-summer colours.
The feel of the phone in her hand was a welcome relief from the waiting. Again she admired it and smiled. Checking messages had become a reflex. Her excuse was the children. They might need something. She was good at organising things from a distance. She had even set up a group page so that the six of them could circulate their whereabouts and news. At first, David had thought it unnecessary. But it did turn out to be useful when Daughter No. 2 missed her bus coming back home from school and Son No. 1 broke his arm at judo. Diligently, Salma checked the family group and sent an update of her whereabouts with a ‘miss you already’. There were no phone messages for her and only a few inconsequential emails.
On social media, there was no message from Amir either, and he hadn’t updated his status. Instead of feeling disappointed, she felt calm. It was the need to check that was becoming more and more urgent rather than the communication itself. In his last message, sent yesterday when it was late at night for him and teatime for her, he had asked her to phone him. It thrilled her of course, this request to move the relationship up a gear. They would talk properly, hear each other’s voices, maybe even use the camera and see each other. It was flattering and intriguing, but his request also flustered her. Receiving it, she skirted past David setting the table and went to check on the bubbling pasta. Phone in hand, feeling the slightest bit uncomfortable.
So she had lowered the volume of the television set, examined her youngest child’s hand to see if it needed washing – annoying him because it interrupted his homework – and told David the truth. Not the whole truth, but no lies either. A segment of the truth, that a former university friend had contacted her. She had said his name out loud – Amir Elhassan – a blast from the past with links to other old friends. Photos she couldn’t even remember having been taken popping up on screen. She started to rattle on a bit as she stirred the pasta. Updates about people that David had not heard her talk about since their time in Egypt. The one-time firebrand head of the students’ union now working for an insurance company and driving a Mercedes; the handsome swimming champion bald and overweight; so-and-so at her daughter’s graduation. David only half listened and she was glad of that, as if his indifference was lifting a weight off her conscience. He looked up to swear at the television, where a politician was saying that anyone not born in the country should be deported.
‘Mama, out of all of us that’s only you!’ Such a clever thing for her youngest to point out. But despite his calm tone, she knew that an anxiety could start to lurk. This was how childhood fears began, beneath the surface of the everyday. She gave him a hug to reassure him.
While Moni was yawning herself awake in the back, Salma stared at the screen in case a message popped up there and then. She reread her last message, sent as a response to Amir’s ‘let’s talk’ request. Neither a yes nor a no but, ‘Away for a few days, out of reach of internet.’ Not that she really believed that there wouldn’t be any internet access at the loch. Surely there would be free wi-fi and she could use her data, but she was buying time, sidestepping out of his reach before he came too close.
It was Moni, instead, who received a phone call. Struggling to wake herself up, she had decided to get a coffee from the service station café and was standing in line waiting for her order of three lattes to take back to the car when Murtada called from Saudi. ‘I need you to send me a photocopy of your passport,’ he said. ‘The boy’s too. It’s good news. I’ve passed my probation. The job is mine now permanently and I can start to apply for you two to join me here.’
Moni turned away from the counter. Everything he said was wrong. Every single sentence. She didn’t know where to start, so she said, ‘No.’
‘No what?’
‘I am not sending you the passports.’
‘Photocopies,’ he said with deliberate patience. ‘Not the passports themselves. Haven’t you been listening? I said copies, not the original documents. For me to apply for your visas, I need the copies. Then, afterwards, we’d need to send in the originals.’
‘I’m not going, Murtada. I am not
