Paper Sparrows

by Nathalie Abi-Ezzi

‘I thought that you’d been living abroad when I saw you put that on,’ he says as she unfastens her seatbelt.

It is like glancing down and finding that she is wearing someone else’s shoes..

The weight of Mama’s dreams has lain heavy on her shoulders since she was a child.

She opens her eyes and is a child again, with the summer light shining between the slats of the shutters. The next instant the years return, clicking into place.

How could Ziad think that having to leave her family and live alone in a foreign country was the better deal? Struggling to succeed for Mama’s sake, when she would actually have been more than happy to stay here and join Baba in the pharmacy? If it hadn’t been for the fact that Ziad, as the son, automatically earned that privilege? But, looking from one of her parents to the other, she knows that she can never say any of this out loud.

There were things she had never seen before she arrived in London: ducks, a rainbow, body piercings, a baby bird dead on the pavement, grown-ups riding bicycles, a blue-tit, carriage clocks.

Inside, fans whirr in two corners, circulating the heat around the small restaurant.

She ought to know more about what’s been going on politically in her own country, and the region. Only, there’s always so bloody much of it going on.

She tries to imagine Heathrow Airport being bombed, British motorways and bridges being destroyed. Whole swathes of towns and villages. She imagines warships peppering the British coast. A blockade, with nothing – no goods or fuel or food or people – allowed in or out. She tries to imagine this, but can’t.

How can he stay so cool? Even now, there is an annoying correctness in every line of him: his smooth hair, his ironed clothes, even his straight nose. She wants to rumple him up, scuff and mess his clothes a little so he can look and feel the way she does.

They drive past a petrol station with queues of cars in both directions, and Layla silently thanks Baba for keeping a full tank. Just in case, Baba always says. You never know. A war mentality.

In the planes up there are men. Real human men. When they look down, what do they see? Not people. She thinks of the way Dog pees, marking his territory: this is mine, or at least, it’s not yours.

She is full of tears, but not a single one falls.

There is a drop of envy in Layla’s pity. Her own childhood home, made up of her, Ziad, Baba and Mama, and compact with safety, has dissolved. Perhaps in her old age, though, when she is lost in dementia, it will exist again.