Shereen Malherbe's Blog, page 18

The Tower- Available to pre-order now

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Hi all,

My second contemporary fiction novel, entitled, The Tower  set in London, UK, is now available to pre-order!

[image error]Beacon Books will be publishing the novel on April 17 2019. Follow me for more updates and Monday’s exciting cover reveal!

[image error]The book is currently being read by book reviewers so keep up to date with the reviews before its release by adding the The Tower on Goodreads.

If you would like to know more information, then visit my website or ask me a question on my Goodreads author page.

Looking forward to releasing The Tower to you all soon!

 

The Award-winning Palestinian YA Novel Written in Prison

An inspiring post from ArabLit on a Palestinian prisoners YA book, woven with the harsh realities of occupied life. I had to reshare this. Thank you again, ArabLit.

ArabLit

The book that won the 2018 Etisalat Award for Arabic Children’s Literature in the Young Adult category, The Oil’s Secret Tale, was written by Palestinian author Walid Daqqa, who was sentenced to life in prison in 1986 and has served more than three decades:

By Hend Saeed

Palestinian author Walid Daqqa was born in the town of Baqa Al Gharbiyeh in 1961.

When he was 23 years old, in 1986, Daqqa helped plan an operation that resulted in the kidnapping and death of an Israeli soldier. Two years later, at the age of 25, he was sentenced to life in prison. He has thus far served 32 years of his sentence, which makes him among the longest-serving prisoners in the Israeli system.

While in in prison, Daqqa has both gotten married and studied towards his Master’s in political science. He’s published a number of studies and articles, as well…

View original post 993 more words

Revisiting why I wrote Jasmine Falling

Hi all,

As you know, I am back online after a two year hiatus and I return with exciting news about the upcoming publication of my second novel, The Tower. Beacon Books will be publishing my second book in April and before it goes live to all my readers, I wanted to reflect on why writing novels is important to me. So , I revisited my first ever interview with BelAhdan host, Ahmed Tharwat who I spoke with regarding my first book, Jasmine Falling.

Reflection time as we complete projects and look forward to what is next is an important part of the journey and also an important part of refocusing on why we begin certain projects in the first place.

So, I am reposting this interview to remind myself and my readers, why I wrote Jasmine Falling. I hope that it inspires you to write, create and explore your stories and share them with the world for your own reasons. It can be easy to become lost in what success looks like, but we all have different reasons for what we do and reflecting on why we began a project can remind us of what those are.

You can watch the interview via YouTube here.

I hope to be returning to post soon for The Tower’s cover reveal!

 

 

The Tower. Out Soon!

[image error]The Tower is Shereen Malherbe’s second novel, due out in April 2019, published by Beacon Books.

Book summary:

Reem is a Syrian refugee who has arrived in London, trying to discover the whereabouts of her 10-year old brother, Adar. Obsessed with history and consumed by her fragmented memories of home, Reem is also hiding secrets she hopes will never be revealed.

After being placed in a tower block, she befriends Leah; a single mother who has been forced to leave her expensive South Kensington townhouse. Their unlikely friendship  supports them as they attempt to find their place in a relentless, heaving city, and come to terms with the homes they left behind.

Both bold and timely, The Tower shows how Reem and Leah’s lives changes and intersect in the wake of individual and communal tragedy, as well as in their struggle to adapt to a rapidly shifting society.

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Author Q & A

Why did you write The Tower?

I wanted to explore hope and humanity under circumstances that are relevant today. We are living in unprecedented times, with a global refugee crisis, a huge gap between the rich and the rest of society, the commodification of people and belongings. I wanted to capture this using a fiction novel, set in a contemporary city and the obvious choice for me, was to do that in London. I wanted to explore how diversity can be a strength and unify society. If we try to understand each other more and celebrate our shared humanity instead of using difference as a base for misunderstanding and segregation I think we would live in a better world.

What genre is The Tower ?

It is contemporary, literary fiction.

What is the book about?

It is about a group of people, strangers mostly who, through various circumstances, end up sharing parts of their lives in the same community.

How long did it take you to write The Tower?

I started working on the idea about 18 months ago. It took about one year to finish the first draft and get the manuscript ready for publication.

Your last novel, Jasmine Falling was based in your heritage homeland or Palestine. How was it returning to your British roots for this book?

I wanted to set my novel in Britain and see the intersection between East and West. This is something both novel’s share. This element is present in The Tower, but it is almost in reverse. You have Reem, a refugee adjusting to London but seeing home though a series of perspectives. And home, as it is for millions of people now is not a set place. For Leah, she is British, but she also experiences this shift between what she used to know and the situation she now finds herself in. These shifting homelands is something I have experienced, and this was an interesting element to explore.

Are there any novels that inspired you to write this?

There wasn’t a book that inspired me to write this, but how widely I have read makes constructing fiction easier. For example, when I read Elif Shafak’s Flea Palace and saw how she represented a microcosm of Istanbul through having the characters share the building, I liked this idea. I also love the classic books Jane Austen wrote because there is something unique about how she captured life for women during her century and it’s important we continue to share our own unique perspectives to capture how we are experiencing the times we live in.

You write and research on behalf of Muslimah Media Watch on the representation of Muslim women, how has this work helped in your writing?

All our unique individual experiences add to the fabric of our writing and critiquing media has added to mine too. I hope that it adds authenticity and balance to the current narratives that are portrayed in society and it is an important reason as to why I write. That doesn’t mean every Muslim woman or women’s experience is the same, but the more we contribute to diverse narratives, the more we can add to this richness of experience and it is needed in a world where stereotypes tend to dominate.

When is the book out for release?

The Tower is due to be launched in April 2019. For Advanced Reader Copies, please contact Beacon Books.

Haunted

Dear readers,

I have recently announced that my short stories will be available for free via my website. If you visit my homepage, you can scroll through the posted ones and choose any that take your fancy. Let me know your thoughts or favourites!

For a U.A.E based story, read Ayesha.

For a memoir extract on loss, We bought white lilies.

Or if you are feeling reflective try, Reflections at an English Teahouse in Borneo.

Here is another new one. I enjoy experimenting with different genres. Haunted is a short tale I wrote after being inspired by the wild Scottish countryside.

[image error] Haunted.

Nightfall.

Outside I hear the ghost wailing, coming for me. The sound is getting closer. Louder. Now it is just outside barely a few metres away from the house. I console myself in the fact that it cannot get through the barred windows and deadlocked doors. The door begins to rattle in its frame. Unnervingly, the sound stops followed by silence. No wind. No sounds of the waves crashing on the close shoreline. Just dead silence. I am not afraid of ghosts, because sometimes I feel like a ghost myself. My mind leaves my body behind and travels to other worlds. That is how I have stayed alive this long.

I ask myself how I ended up in an old farmhouse on the isolated moors on an island off the coast of Scotland. The high tide makes the island inescapable for most of the daylight hours and now I am trapped. I stare down at her, the reason I am here. Victoria’s face is distorted in the dark as she looks back at me from the faded missing poster.

I glance out of the window. The thick clouds briefly expose the moon and in its grey light a shadow passes by the window. I retreat further into the kitchen away from the door. The silence is shattered by the rattling sound of the door shaking. The howling begins again. Surely, it can’t pass through the door? I don’t know what to believe anymore. Anything seems possible. If the sky were to crack open and evil were to fall from it, I would not question my sanity. It seems penetrable.

A stone screeches outside. The lock unbolts. Once, twice. The door swings open and in the fading moonlight, it enters.

The morning before.

It is almost nine and the sunrise signals my final seven hours to find Victoria. There were no witnesses, only tales of the ghost that haunts the hills and a sea that pulls its victims down to a watery grave. Perhaps she died on the moors? I have heard that those who don’t belong in its harsh landscape run over the frozen ground in the depths of the night never to return. But why would anyone be running out into the moors in the middle of the night? What was she running from that would make her risk the Atlantic Ocean? I wasn’t buying the stories they were selling me. There would be a reason. Someone would know what had happened. I pack the rest of my clothes, The Wasp Factory and the photo of Victoria into my case. Outside the window, I see the hillside undulate gently and smoothly like womanly curves. Unlike the house. That beast sits on top of the hill by the sea, stamped into the landscape. Even on the wildest of nights where the winds whip up into a frenzy and the sea threatens and roars it remains standing, defiant.

I walk down the old staircase scanning the unusual layout of the house. I try the doors. They are all locked. The house hides its secrets. It conceals its past. It leads me down to the only place I am allowed to be, the kitchen. Its sparse wooden floors stained like they have been scrubbed with bleach water, the stone walls covered in limestone wash are stark white even in the dim winter sunlight.

Agatha is there, like every morning before that, standing at the cooker stirring porridge in a pan above a flickering flame. At first, she was pleasant. An old woman who once looked like she withstood this hard landscape, but something had bent her strong bones out of shape and she had set that way. Almost disfigured. Her skin was tough, like rubber as though she had developed a thick, wrinkly hide to protect herself. She used to make small talk, despite me feeling like she didn’t want me to be there, but when I mentioned Victoria, she had snapped.

I find it odd that despite her moods, she always makes me breakfast. Two breakfast sets lay neatly on the ten-seater table that stretches the entire length of the small room, scarred as she was by overuse. I sat at it quietly. I don’t want her to snap again. I look at the empty chairs. I wonder if they were full of children once and if they were, what had become of them now. She put the porridge down in front of me and she sits a few chairs down. I put the spoon to my mouth, going through the motions of eating, waiting for my chance to bring up the subject.

“I must leave today.” I say. She doesn’t reply, so I continue, “I need to go outside.”

“There be no need for yer to be roaming these moors.”

“Please, just for some fresh air.”

“What if yer don’t come back? Then what will I do? Nah, it is too dangerous”

She hobbles to the fire, the house keys jangling from her belt. A bunch of them temptingly swinging, just out of reach. I will take them by force. I walk to her.

“Agatha, I need you to help me find out what happened to Victoria.”

“Aye, I want to know that too. But don’t you worry little lass, you will be going soon.”

“Going where? I decide what happens, ok, I am leaving today.” I lunge for the keys, but she grabs my hand. “Give them to me!”

I knock her backwards and she falls into the fireplace. Her strength dissipates. The house seems to consume her. The huge fireplace towers above her head, like an open mouth about to swallow her whole. I feel guilty I was so rough. She lurches ungracefully out of it and dusts her clothes off matter-of-factly and begins to look for something.

“Fire, we need fire. This hame wants me to die in its cold.”

“Did Victoria die here?”

“Get out of this hoose.” She snaps, her eyes bloodshot and wild, her hands shaking from the last dregs of adrenaline she has coursing through her blood. I push it further. She is about to break.

“Where has she been taken? Who took her?”

“Go,” she shouts, and I take my chance.

I run outside around the back of the house where scorched auburn land darkens a patch of the moors. I pick through the ash to see if I can find something. Anything that might give me a clue. Just as I want to give up I see an old key poking out of the ash. I tuck it into my pocket and yank up my hoodie. Even though the sun is out the cold wraps around me and sinks into my bones. I walk in front of the house to the coast line. The surf cuts itself on the jagged rocks. The dock is now barely visible. I stare down into the murky water and see Victoria’s face staring up at me. Did she drown? I close my eyes and imagine it. I place my hand in the cold water, within seconds it is numb. I feel like I know her from the photograph. She wouldn’t have gone in. Not unless she had too. Unless she was running from something that was worse than drowning in the freezing sea.

I turn and look back at the house. A slice of sun cuts through the clouds and lights up the doors to the outhouse. They were shut but strangely the doors swing wide open. I trudge back, beaten by the winds. I walk inside and see hooks, stiff and rusted, hanging from the walls. A loud bang shatters my bones and fear creeps into my stomach like a sickness; heavy in the pit of my stomach.

I am trapped in the darkness. The doors won’t open. I kick them over and over, but they don’t move. I try to calm myself and tentatively feel around the floor. My hand stops on a thin gap where the wall meets the floor. I run my hand across. A metal flap hides a key hole. I reach into my pocket. The key. I don’t want to open it, but I must get a hold of myself. I don’t believe in ghost stories. I believe in investigating and finding out the truth. The logic of truth. I turn the key in the lock and the door creaks open to a stairway spiralling down into the darkness and underneath towards the main house.

Cracks between the kitchen floor and the roof of the basement allow some light in so I can make out just enough to see. It is not full of dead bodies or the bones of ghosts piled up, but it is something far worse. Lined up across the bare stone floor are rows of beds. I count them. Four on each side. Eight altogether. An old teddy bear, slumps over. A disfigured doll stares at me with missing eyes and plucked out hair. The beds, stripped down. Naked. I can’t lift the oppressing feeling from the air. It overwhelms me. It seeps into the core of me, forcing me to throw up on the floor. As I lurch forward, I steady myself on the cold bar of a metal bed frame. Something glints from under the bed. I scoop down to pick it up. A delicate gold chain. It was Victoria’s. She was wearing it in the missing poster. She has been here. Did she ever escape this place? Did the other girls? I need a whole team to help me find some evidence of what happened here, but I don’t get a chance to think any further. Falling soil sprinkles down onto my hair. I turn and look up. I hear the outhouse door creak open. Heavy footsteps strike the floor above me. Someone is there. I run as swiftly and silently as I can through the winding corridor that leads from the dorm. A trapdoor opens out onto the moors. I stop to get my bearings. The sun is sinking behind the hills turning the heather black. The sea is a dark sheet of navy blue. I run to the house, panicked at the thought of Agatha locking me out. I pray the house is open. Relief flows through me as the door opens into the dark kitchen. I slam it shut.

Nightfall

I hear the ghost outside. I tremble as I look through the window. My eyes see a dark, overbearing silhouette coming towards the house. Heavy even without bones, it recognises its power. I duck away from the window and tuck myself further into the corner of the kitchen. The floor is cold. The kitchen is dark, and I now can’t remember where the candles are. I want to shout Agatha, to call her so she can do something. But it is too late. The door swings open and in the fading moonlight it enters.

It is not a wispy, ethereal figure as I imagine a ghost should be. It is impossible that its presence is so overbearing. It carries a smell of blood and air hooked into its clothes. I scream but no sound leaves my lips. I can’t breathe. My eyes open to see Agatha hunched on the stairwell. The door is wide open. She looks at me. She looks at the door. She darts to shut it. I run.

“Go noo to yer room.”

“Move, let me out,” I scream as I push past her and out onto the moors. She shouts after me, “Yer aff yer heid”.

I run, thinking of Victoria. Is this why she left? But I can’t stay, not even for her. I will never survive this place. Out on the moors it is so dark I cannot make out where I am. I stop and listen. The howling wraps around me. The sea heaves and swells on the shoreline. The ferry. It must be due. I hear its horn bellow out into the night time sky. A light comes over the horizon as it approaches the shore, bound for the dock near the house. I run so fast my breath carves up my lungs until I feel nothing. The darkness of the night is all I see.

Mainland

I wake up in an unusual place. I am in a hospital bed. There is a woman sat in the chair next to me. She is talking to a police officer. He leaves. She turns to me.

“How are you feeling, Grace?”

“I…don’t know where I am. How did I get here?”

“I’m your new social worker.”

“How did I get here?”

“The ferry driver brought you. He found you, near the docks. Do you remember how you got there?”

My mind races trying to piece together what happened.

“This is the fourth foster home you have ran away from. Agatha was worried about you.”

“She doesn’t care about me. She kept me like a prisoner in that house.”

“She told me you had tried to run away before.”

“You don’t understand. I must find Victoria. She is missing. I know what happened-” I try to sit up, make my voice heard.

“Victoria?”

“Yes, she went missing.” I pull out the missing poster from my pocket and thrust it into her hands.

“Grace, Victoria is not missing. Well not anymore”

“What do you mean?”

“She was missing but we found her a few weeks back. She is living in Edinburgh.”

“No, that can’t be true.”

“She didn’t have to go back because she turned eighteen. Like you now. You don’t have to go back into a children’s home, if you are feeling like you can manage to be by yourself?”

“I don’t understand.”

“It is not uncommon for survivors to see things, to invent things,” she paused. I feel as if she wants to say more, “You can get back into therapy. We can manage your past. Help you look towards a new future.”

Edinburgh.

Over the following weeks I try to recover. My time at the moor house morphs into many different scenes and nightmares. I don’t know what is real anymore.

I live in Edinburgh now and I am going to find Victoria. I must see her for myself, so I can finally stop thinking about her. I have the address of where she works on a piece of paper; a tearoom at the bottom of Arthur’s Peak. It isn’t far now. As I arrive, I see it is a quaint place with prettily decorated windows and tables where everyone wears those black pinafores you see in the old films. I watch through the window until a waitress comes through the double kitchen doors. It is her. I go inside and sit at a stool at the tea bar until she comes to serve me.

“Can I take your order?” Her voice is sweet, a little shaky.

“Tea.” I say, but when she is about to leave I hold her arm. “Sorry, this is going to sound strange but are you, Victoria?”

“How do you know my name?” She says, pulling away from me and taking a few steps back.

“I stayed at the home, you were in. The moors, on the island-”

“I am trying to forget that place.”

“I am sorry, I just had to…you know…I had to make sure I wasn’t crazy.”

“Crazy? That place will turn anyone crazy.”

She leaves to go and collect my tea. I disappear before she comes back. I go back to my apartment in the city with its large windows overlooking the bustling streets. It lives within its landscape, it echoes with people’s footsteps and laughter from the pavements outside. It doesn’t hide its secrets. I am slowly learning how to become free.

 

The End.

*Source image

 

Exciting News

Dear readers,

I am pleased to announce that my latest novel will be published by Beacon Books this coming year.

I am looking forward to sharing this journey with you. Soon the title and book cover will be revealed and we are searching for readers who want to receive an Advanced Reader Copy (ARC) to review before the book is available for sale. If you would like to be considered then please contact, Beacon Books.

Follow me to stay up to date with the latest book news, snippets and cover reveals. All of which is coming soon.

As a thank you to my subscribers & followers, I am publishing short stories via posts on my website so please check out my homepage for the latest and sign up to make sure you never miss out!

If you have any questions please contact me via my new Instagram or my author page on Goodreads.

 

Ayesha

I remembered the day I cracked. It was Sunday 11th September, the first day of term. I was in my kitchen scrubbing clean pans with the window ajar. The sound of bristles scraping on empty pans was interrupted by the grinding of metal gates opening, school bags screeching along the floor and the clamour of children’s voices shouting to be heard above the beeping school buses. I slammed the window shut and ran upstairs to my bedroom to seal out the day. I drew my curtains but as I looked out of the window, I couldn’t avoid the scene unfolding below. I watched even though I didn’t want too. I saw mother’s hastily stuffing lunches and homework into bags, tucking in school shirts, tying plaits and smudging fingers over cheeks as they sent their hareems of children off to school. They waved, watching the buses pull off down the street and eventually turning out of view.

The chaos lasted only a few minutes. Gates closed. The street was quiet once again. The silence crept up from the streets and seeped into the room. I looked around, an unnerving feeling settling with the silence as I realised I was in the wrong room.

My tiny baby was in my stomach, fluttering like a bird’s wing trapped inside me. I had stopped shopping midway through choosing her pram. Holding onto her, coaxing her, telling her that I was going to take care of her. Which blanket would she like? What colour would be her favourite? Would this one feel soft enough against her skin? Everything we had chosen together that day was laid out in this room like a play set; untouched, ready to begin a life. Except something was missing. Her baby shoes. Satin white booties with a big pink bow, I hadn’t taken them out of the cream shoebox.

Afsa appeared at the door, her face sullen as though she was watching the baby sleeping in the cot, learning to crawl on the woollen rug, rocking her in the chair. “Where is the shoebox?” I said.

“I don’t know madam.”

“Why has someone taken my baby’s new shoes?”

“I don’t know. I will look.”

“Find them!”

Afsa hurried down the long hallway passing one empty bedroom after another. There was something about her footsteps echoing in the corridors. The emptiness of the room. The hollowness. I slipped my abaya over my bed clothes, opened the front door to the courtyard garden, passing the dry fountain and was beaten to the gates by Afsa running ahead of me to unlock the heavy wrought iron gates cut between the concrete walls around the house.

“Madam, I should come with you,” she said, slipping a prayer shawl over her hair. “Let me fetch your shoes.”

She darted off inside to get my shoes and I took that moment to escape out onto the street. I followed the white stripe along the edge of the grey concrete road, running barefoot past a blur of villa’s, walls, gates and Emirati flags licking the rooftops in red, green, white and black.

The tops of the villas peeped out revealing fancy brickwork, ornate metal balconies sitting on top of the roof gardens like beautiful tiaras. Outside the gates, squares were dug out from the concrete and planted with chilli’s, tomatoes and pomegranates. Baby palm trees stuck out razor sharp leaves. My lungs felt squeezed of air. I slowed down and knelt on my knees as teardrops fell and vanished into sand impressed with tiny footprints.

At the end of the street, something made my skin cold. It was a white shroud, wrapped around what appeared to be a body. A tiny body. I turned around and ran in the opposite direction, trying to retrace my steps. I turned until I had no idea where I was and became lost down a dead end. I clambered over the sand, its firm lumps rising from the earth, falling under my feet as they slipped down the side of it. My legs were tired. The air heated up. The sun bore down relentlessly burning all the clouds from the sky. I slumped down against a telegraph pole; the only sign that people lived close by. My eyes opened and closed as I imagined the barren desert, miles of sand rising falling. Buried.

Damp. Cold. A voice I recognised. It was Afsa. She must have followed me. She pulled me to my feet and tipped water over my face. I limped alongside her, my feet cut from the stones. Exhausted I fell into bed floating between an endless desert of swelling mounds the size of shoe boxes.

*

Streaming sunlight broke my slumber with Afsa parting the curtains, “Wake up, madam. You have a gift.”

I knelt down and undid the ribbon. I lifted the lid. I don’t know what I expected to find inside but it surprised me. At the bottom of the box was a pair of walking shoes. Black with thick, cushioned soles. My size. I slipped them on. I walked around pressing down my foot purposefully to check the fit. I walked down the hallway, passed the kitchens and walked out of the backdoor. I kept walking. The sun was subdued by a roll of clouds and the street stretched out in front of me. Behind the villa’s the mountain’s silhouette cut clearly against the sky. The cool winter breeze blew through my scarf, the same breeze which had blown the sand to the edges of the roads. Wherever it settled, green plants sprung up and bushes thick with thorny leaves and rose-coloured flowers thrived amongst stacks of bricks and cement blocks. Big pots of industrial paint stood next to half-painted concrete walls. Outside them, palm trees were covered in fine, powdery tile dust as if snow had fallen on a small patch of the desert. Opposite the dust covered palms, an imposing grey building made of three concrete floors, a roof and stark columns connected uninhabited rooms. Those that were finished were decorated with ceramic water jugs framing the doors where uplighters and lamps hung along the walls. Arabic signs stuck in the sand, ‘Family homes to rent’.

I went walking every day after that, watching as the street shifted around me. Something about the sound of life roused me, the hum of the street cleaning truck, the sound of rakes on crispy fallen leaves, the hammering of metal and the birds swooping from the sky, chirping in the early morning sunlight. The days lullaby soothed me into feeling safe. So safe, I had forgotten the street of the shroud until I stumbled on it obliviously one morning.

It was like any other street in my neighbourhood, half-built and half lived in. It stood at the bottom of the road on a slight incline, so I couldn’t see past it. I walked closer. It seemed as if past the villa with the shroud, the world dropped off. The sky was its only backdrop. A vast breadth of heavens surrounding it. Damp skin. It was tightly wrapped. Perfectly formed ears. Not even the winter breeze stirred it. Closed eyes. I don’t know what colour they were. I was now standing right next to it. Jet black hair. Lots of hair. Thick and wavy, just like mine. White shroud. I touched it. It was warm underneath. She was gone. I reached out…

“Sabah Al Khair.”

Startled, I withdrew my hand.

“Do you want to see what is inside?” The gardener said, untying the rope at the top. I held my breath. My heart thumped in my head, I felt nauseous as I watched the fabric drop. My eyes took a while to register what I saw. Wooden stacked bark. Tough, pointed leaves. Jewels bunched together in a cluster underneath.

“This stops the birds,” he said gesturing to the fabric and tying it back into place.

Speechless, I carried on walking. I veered off the road heaving my heavy footsteps over deep drifts of sand. I rushed across a road, darting between cars and yellow buses all passing me in a bustle of beeping horns. I stood still as the world spun around me. My eyes hadn’t left the scene before. I hadn’t caught my bearings when a voice interrupted me.

“Do your children go here?”

She repeated the question. It rang through the chambers of my brain, asked so many times that my response was automatic.

“No, I don’t have children.” But this time, the statement felt different. Sharp. Clear. I waited for a heavy thud to land on my heart. I waited for the world to heave and sigh. But nothing happened. The sun didn’t fall from the sky. The clouds, despite their frailness, remained suspended above. The mountains stood firm on the horizon. Solid. Imposing. Firm. They stopped me from spinning.

“Do you want twenty?”

I looked at her strangely, until she repeated herself. My lips parted but no words came out.

“We desperately need teachers.”

She carried on talking. I nodded. I think my lips pursed into a smile a couple of times. Vacantly, I said goodbye and she headed inside the school.

When I returned home, I walked into my baby’s room and emptied the brand-new bedding and piles of clothes. I called the local charity to come and collect the furniture. When it was being removed, a small cream shoebox appeared, previously hidden under the sofa. I dusted it off and handed it to the removal team. When they had gone, all that was left was the four painted walls, the large window overlooking the street and dust particles falling in the sunlight.

 

*

The summer came. My walks stopped as the sun rose earlier and more intensely. The flowers and plants died, the sand became too hot to walk on. The schools closed. Afsa left to spend the summer with her family. I was awoken each morning only by the sound of worshippers before dawn. The call to prayer sounded from the illuminated minarets. The sound of footsteps in the dark walking towards the mosques. In my home, I joined them. After, I unlocked the door to my library and sat amongst books stacked high to the ceilings, the smell of walnut wood and dust filling the room, the mirrored windows dulled the sunlight as it rose to light the way for the worshippers returning to their homes. Before the morning had woken up, I had started my day.

*

September rolled around again. The sound of school children filled the air. I opened my windows wide to let the life in. I wrapped my abaya around my clothes and gathered a stack of books under my arm. I slipped my new shoes on and opened the gates. I wandered down the streets, through the buses and beeping cars, past the unshrouded palm tree, its dates already plucked. The fallen ones poked out of the soil, beginning to split and sprout. Patches of terracotta sand whipped around the edges, the first winter rains had rolled in and as I walked, I saw tiny white flowers climbing from underneath buried sand. Their green stems scattered all over the sands turning them into a delicate carpet of green and white.

Arriving at the school, I waited in reception until I heard, “Ayesha?”

I nodded and followed the chattering assistant down the winding school corridors. We eventually stopped at the doorway of a classroom. Inside, it was full of children. They stopped to look at me. “This is Miss Ayesha.”

At that moment, I realised who I was supposed to be. Who my mother had named me after. I remembered the footsteps I follow.

We bought white lilies

An excerpt from a memoir piece.

TW: Loss, cancer

I will always remember that summer when us three girls were on the brink of turning nineteen. Every summer, our houses would be surrounded by fields full of rapeseed with its sweet pollen smell drifting through the air. It coated the fields in sunshine yellow and we knew school was out. That year, the news called it an ‘Indian summer’. It summed it up for us and we spent hazy, long days relaxing after our exams and dreaming of a future that rolled out in front of us like the shining expanse of gold fields surrounding our childhood. There was nothing in our world that we couldn’t overcome. Our youthhood, completely wrapped up in a world of light and absorption with ourselves that we hadn’t seen the dark clouds rolling towards us.

It wasn’t that the news came unexpectedly. He had cancer for months but he had fought it before. He had his leg amputated but he could live. Of course, he recovered at seventeen. No-one dies from cancer at seventeen.

‘You will be fine darling, it will be just the same as it was before,’ my mum had said as I was putting off visiting him. The last time I went was before he became sick. We all had a massive sleepover and no one had cancer and we didn’t need to worry about anything.

I drove down the familiar street. His once normal home, became a home where a teenager with cancer lives. The front room where we had the sleepover was now his bedroom, as he couldn’t get up the stairs. I pretended not to notice. Once I was past those slight shifts and I saw his face, it was just as mum said. He joked about his car, how fast it would go with the pedals adjusted for his one leg. We were going to go for a cruise soon. He would be better soon. I left him, smiling with his shaved head doing wheelies in his wheel chair whilst another stream of visitors arrived into his childhood home. I was happy I went. I didn’t know then that that would be the last time I ever saw him.

Before him, I had the memory of visiting churches, for history lessons where we would trace the carvings on the gravestones and the people buried below us only existed in another world, one of ghosts and fairy-tales. It wasn’t how I had imagined or watched on films like an overwhelming wave of grief. I don’t think I cried. It was stunned silence.

His funeral came around quickly. We had the date. We went to the florists. We were adults now. We had to be prepared. Yes, you take flowers. White lilies. There is note.

“What would you like to say?” the florist said. My friends looked at me. I cannot even remember what I wrote. We were grown up now. That’s how you handled it when people died. You brought white lilies and you said things like, we are sorry for your loss. Or, we send our condolences to you and the family.

When we arrived at the funeral, it felt like it was just us three there. Everyone else turned into weeping strangers. I imagine now that they were all dressed in black, but the invitation had said to dress cheerfully. I don’t remember what people wore. The funeral car drove past with his friends sat atop the sunroof. Flowers spelt his name.

I couldn’t get out of the car I felt my heart falling out of my chest my lungs choking in the thick summer air my body shaking uncontrollably I was losing it his coffin was too small he was too young too full of life to be buried he was the sweetest boy in the class it wasn’t something people just said after he died he really was he was the first boy I kissed I saw him just last week it wasn’t really happening he’s going to get up now and it was all a joke on all of us just like his joke in class when he yanked his trousers up and pretended to be the class geek and we all laughed and we all loved him for it.

I cannot remember how I recovered. But I remember being picked up off the floor as I struggled to pick up the lilies. A sickly-sweet smell drifted under my nose. But the smell could have been from the lilies. The florist had removed the pollen stems. Cut short. Their deformed stumps stuck out at me. I have hated amputated lilies ever since.

Into the Borneo Rainforest

Sabah, Borneo.

A wooden boardwalk weaved through the 130 million-year-old rainforest that grew down to the coast on the South China Sea in Sarawak, Borneo. Dense jungle trapped the moisture in the air. Under the rainforest canopy as we walked to our cabin, gibbons swung above our heads, poisonous vipers wrapped themselves around trees, almost luminescent in their greenness. A critically endangered possum-like creature, lazily wrapped around branches unaware of the marvel of its own existence. Our cabin was barely visible under the umbrella of trees that towered higher than any chimney I had seen, clambering over each other to reach the sun. Leaves parachuted to the ground, wider and taller than me. The undergrowth buzzed and crawled with life.

That afternoon, my young children witnessed a Bornean cobra try and kill an equally terrifying and large poisonous python. The snakes’ bodies wrapped around other. The cobra delivered his poisonous bite and the python tightened his grip; dying together in the undergrowth. A mass of patterned skin, interlocking. “They usually eat small monkeys, like the size of your son,” the guide said, pointing at our one-year old happily running up and down the wooden ramp, oblivious. The boys ran off to play. I moved them away from the cracks in the café boundaries that plummeted down to the where the snakes were.[image error]

That evening, we pushed the beds together, so I could keep our children close. I stayed awake with a torch strapped around my wrist and my finger permanently poised over the on/off button. Like a paranoid security guard, I would intermittently switch it on and off shining it at the windows which were wide open covered only with mosquito wire. There was no phone, no internet just the sound of rustling in trees, singing cicadas, howls, rustles and creaks. But it was the silent ones I was most scared of. I was looking out for the deadly snakes who I imagined were mapping out my little ones with their infra-red vision as we slept. They hadn’t accounted for me though. I would not succumb to sleep. But, I am only human so sleep I did only to be awoken by a bang inside the cabin.

“Wake up,” I said, shaking my husband, “There is something in here with us”.

“It is probably just a rat, don’t worry about it.”

My South African husband was more used to the wild than me; a self-confessed English country girl who fears even an owls hoot in the night. I could not rest. I went on patrol. My heart beat rapidly. I imagined Agnes in her wilderness, ‘Everything in the jungle that day united in a malevolent effort to defeat me…A hundred times I’d told myself, never again, never again.’

I yelped. A big, brown rat scuttled away from the bin. I ran and jumped into bed tucking my feet up high out of reach. I glanced at the clock. It was 5am. It was time to pray the dawn prayer. That meant I had to kneel on the floor with the creature. I decided to be brave. I could do this. After I prayed, I was relieved that soon dawn would come. Waiting there, the rat sat under the bed watching me. I watched it. In that moment, we understood each other. It was hiding from the snakes too. Just like me. Eventually, the sun peeped over the horizon and illuminated the dark corners of the jungle. Birds tweeted, insects rustled in the undergrowth and butterflies filled the air in search of their first taste of sweet morning nectar.

With the children in tow, we walked down to the secluded beach cove with the stunning jungle backdrop alive with pygmy squirrels and birds and creatures I had never seen, swinging on the branches. Noah slept in the shade of the trees as I wandered along the coastline. I remembered what Agnes had wrote about her coastal walks with the indigenous island people she met, ‘It is natural to follow in the shallow waters and search for the wealth of the sea.’ I could see the beautiful shells and brightly coloured fish darting between my feet. In the quiet ripple of the ocean I heard the trees come alive. A group of gibbons swung into view, swinging effortlessly from branch to branch, one holding a bright orange fur-coloured baby. I was watching in awe, unused to the wild so close to us when my husband called out to me.[image error]

“Stand next to him, just in case.”

I jogged towards my baby laying on the beach mat, wondering how wild this place was, to think our baby could be snatched into the rainforest. I imagined him, hanging from the gibbons high in the tree tops, effortlessly stolen away as I watched helplessly from the beach. Why was I here I wondered? As Agnes answered once in response to the same question, ‘I guess I’m afraid of too easy living’.

I don’t think I share her sense of adventure.

 

*The italics are extracts from Land Below the Wind, by Agnes Keith. I read it on my travels throughout Borneo.

 

Friday Finds: ‘Damascus 1968’

This piece is from ArabLit one of my favourite blogs & one worth signing up to.

ArabLit

Issue 3 of The Bennington Review has a poem by Ghassan Zaqtan, “Damascus 1986,” translated from Arabic by Fady Joudah:

Zaqtan, of course, is a multi-award-winning Palestinian writer living in Ramallah, the author of ten collections of poetry and two novellas, winner of the prestigious Griffin Poetry Prize (for Like a Straw Bird it Follows Me, tr. Joudah)and twice nominated for the Neustadt Prize. The Silence That Remains (Copper Canyon Press, 2017), also translated by Joudah, is his most recent poetry collection to appear in English.

His novella, Describing the Past, translated by Samuel Wilder (2016), is a must-read; his Where the Bird Disappeared (2018) builds on that book.

This poem, “Damascus 1986,” is full of hard sounds, scarcely tethered images, and missed opportunities. It opens:

DAMASCUS 1986

The key’s clang

the sun I called from the windowsill

the brief time of fondness

none of it were mine

Read the…

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