Far From My Father’s House

Jill McGivering

Far from my Father’s House

Dedication

For Nick

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Dedication

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

About the Author

Acknowledgements

Also by Jill McGivering

Copyright

About the Publisher

Chapter 1

It was May and even here in the mountains, the heat was thick and heavy. I was out alone, fetching water, walking in an idle zigzag to and fro across the path, swinging the pail in my hand and feeling the heat prick my hair under my scarf. Down in the shadowy orchards, men were reaching for the first ripe peaches and plums of the season. Beyond them, a car wound its way down the narrow road to town, coughing up dust. When it disappeared, the broken silence mended itself as the heat settled.

I was practising a new walk, holding my back rigid, swinging my hips in a sashay the way the older girls did. I imagined Saeed watching me, as he sometimes would, keeping his distance but following me to or from school. I thought of his handsome face and dark eyes and placed my feet as neatly as a dancer.

A noise. I stopped. Banging. A faint sound. I stood and listened. Hammering. Clean and hard and out of place. It was coming from my left, near the mosque. I crept through the grass to crouch behind the high corner of a compound. I held my breath and peered around the wall to look.

Three strangers were standing on the path near the entrance to the mosque. They were banging a piece of paper onto a tree, fixing it with nails. Further down, three notices were already fluttering on other trees, pinned like butterflies. I felt a stab of pain, imagining they were living things, nailed to the wood and suffering.

The men were thick-set with dark turbans, bushy beards and grubby shirts. One was as old as Baba and had a crooked nose, as if long ago he’d been hit in the face. His stomach bulged under his kameez. He was standing back from the tree, giving orders. The other two, doing the hammering, were younger. One was handsome; his upper arms thickened into ropes of muscle as he wielded the hammer. There was something dangerous in the set of his mouth. His eyes were cool. A long gun was hanging from a strap, slung over his shoulders, and the metal glinted in the sunlight as he lifted his arm and the hammer blows fell. My stomach tightened and the breath stuck in my chest.

They worked their way further up the road, banging papers onto all six trees outside the mosque, one by one. Finally they walked back down the path to a battered pickup truck parked far below in the road.

The older man got into the passenger seat beside the driver. The handsome young man and his friend climbed into the open back and sat with their guns propped upright between splayed legs. They gripped the truck’s metal cage, their knuckles white, as it started to move, pitching them off balance. The handsome man turned to look up the path. I ducked back behind the wall, heart thumping. Had he seen me? When I dared to look again, all that was left was dust, hanging in the empty air.

I counted to a hundred, then walked down to the first notice and stood, trying to read the lettering. It had been written in black curly handwriting and copied by a machine.

By Order, it said. All music is contrary to the will of Allah and is henceforth forbidden. All shaving of beards is contrary to the will of Allah and is henceforth forbidden. All contact between men and women who are not close blood relatives is contrary to the will of Allah and is henceforth forbidden. All women and girls shall be confined to their compounds and not venture into public. Praise be to Allah! It was signed by a man whose name I didn’t know and underneath his name it said: Supreme Commander, Faithful Soldiers of Islam.

I looked up and down the path. No one. I set down my pail and gripped the two sides of the notice in both hands, tearing it off the tree. The paper ripped from the nails, leaving behind shreds that hung like skin. I held it against my face, tasting the paper with the tip of my tongue and breathing its strange inky smell. It was dangerous and disturbing and made me shiver. I smoothed out the creases against my thigh and folded the paper carefully in half, then in half again, and hid it in my pocket.

Chapter 2

The pressure was so intense that the crowd seemed about to burst. All around Ellen, ahead and behind, fists were punching the air, thrust upwards in unison by the rhythms of the chants. The voices were shrill, on the brink of screams.

‘Pakistan Zindabad!’ Long live Pakistan. ‘Freedom Zindabad!’ The shouting was led by a man in a black baseball cap. A megaphone distorted his words, punctuating them with explosions of static and piercing whines. Placards, dancing above the protesters’ heads, showed the mass-produced images of opposition politicians.

Ellen, at the edge of the crowd, straightened her headscarf and climbed onto a boulder for a better view. No sign of the other reporters. She ran her eyes down the human river of people, dividing the chaos of raised hands and wobbling placards into sections. She made a rough mental count of one portion, then multiplied it to judge the size of the whole protest. Four thousand people, certainly. Perhaps five.

She wrote a few lines, noting down some of the slogans and a short description of the man with the megaphone. She’d like to kick off her report with colour, if the editors gave her enough space. Something dramatic to grab the reader’s attention before she started to expand and give context. Her readers would need help making sense of it all. Further pressure on the Pakistani government. No. She needed to give a greater sense of rising drama. She tucked loose strands of hair back out of sight under her scarf, thinking, then added: on this already beleaguered Pakistani government. Around her, the shouting was reaching a crescendo. She should leave soon. The latest in a growing number of protests. Showing mounting public frustration, public concern, about the government’s handling of the current crisis. She paused. How many readers would remember what crisis? She added: of the government’s handling of its current battle against the threat from Islamic extremists. Too long. She went back and crossed out a few words.

She looked up. In the short time she’d spent writing, the dashes of riot police drawn along the edge of the demonstration had begun to solidify into lines. They were herding the protesters into a narrowing strip, hemming them in between the barricades down the centre of the road and the brick walls of the buildings.

She shook her head. She didn’t like it. She always kept an escape route in view when she covered protests, a quick way out if danger suddenly flared. Until this point, there had been successive alleyways and side roads leading off the road. They served as natural valves if pressure built up. Now, though, the wall running alongside the road was solid and the police lines were closing in. They were being funnelled. It was time to get out.

She put her notebook away and shouldered her backpack, then launched herself back into the crowd, trying to force her way, elbows digging, across the forward flow. Men turned towards her, their brown eyes stretched wide with curiosity and amusement. She was engulfed in the smell of raw sweat. The men looked rough and uneducated. Probably bussed into Islamabad just for the demonstration.

Someone whispered something in her ear. At the same time, a sweaty hand touched her arm, slid over her buttock. She twisted and at once the hand slid away. She glared into a rack of blank faces, then steadied herself and pushed her way forwards again. The pressure of bodies around her was building and she wanted to get out as fast as possible. She fixed her eyes on a young policeman with a neatly trimmed moustache and concentrated on battling towards him. His dark eyes were strafing the crowd. He had a riot shield in one hand, a raised wooden baton in the other.

Protesters, starting to feel enclosed, pressed ahead with greater urgency and beat their way forwards. They gave off the keen, hungry scent of growing panic. Ellen fought to keep moving, but was repeatedly knocked off balance by the men surrounding her. The communal chanting was ragged now, disintegrating into a cacophony of shouts and cries. Her cotton kameez felt slick against her skin, her back running with sweat under her backpack. Her headscarf slithered to and fro across escaping hair.

An elbow stabbed her in the ribs. She coughed, tried to catch her breath. Her lungs strained. She pulled at her headscarf to anchor it. Must keep moving. A heavy man barged into her, stamping on the side of her foot. She grabbed at his arm to keep herself upright and he shook her off, pushing past. Her legs started to shake. She must get out. All around her, waves of hysteria ran through the crowd. The men’s shouts became rough and wild.

She sensed something moving at the edge of the crowd and turned to look. The riot police were shuffling closer, narrowing the spaces between them until they stood shoulder to shoulder, driving the protesters back against the wall. A high-pitched police whistle sounded and the officers advanced as one, shields high, wooden lathis swinging wildly. More policemen jumped down from the meshed backs of riot vehicles to join in.

The men around her twisted, ducked and skidded as they tried to get away. She was trapped between them, squeezed so hard she could barely breathe. The defiant shouting had gone. Her ears were filled with cries of pain and the crunch of lathis striking bone.

She was swept sideways by a sudden surge. Somewhere the crowd burst out and the men rushed to the right, carrying her along with them. People had crashed through the barricades and were spilling out into the road and its haze of shimmering petrol fumes. Car horns blared. She was knocked against the side of a stationary car, then along the edge of a windowless bus. A row of tired faces stared down blankly from inside.

Ahead of her, a scrawny young man fell and was sucked under in the wash of running, stamping feet. His face rose for a moment, blood trickling from his temple. She reached towards him through the crowd but he was too far away. He sank again and was lost. Beyond, a stout man swung the wooden pole of his placard and cracked it in two across a policeman’s head. Other officers in the line swarmed forwards, jumping on the man, pounding his head and shoulders with lathis and fists until his hair matted with blood.

Bitter smoke made her choke. A tyre was burning in the road, forming a puddle of melted rubber. The police line had collapsed. Everywhere men were throwing fists and kicks through air thick with shouts and splintering wood. She looked around, trying to find a way out. She was hemmed in on all sides. Distant sirens screamed the arrival of more police.

The crowd thickened again after the sudden rush of movement. Shock waves ran back through the crowd causing sudden compression. Ellen found herself trapped between two thick-set men. One fell back on her as he fought for balance. His fist caught her stomach. She couldn’t find the breath to cry out. The muscular man behind tried to claw through, heaving his way past. He grabbed at her shoulder and shoved her backwards. The sky wheeled, a ragged white emptiness far above. Her legs scrambled, were kicked from under her. Stumbling. Her hands clutched uselessly at the slippery cotton moving past her. She was falling, helpless to right herself, pressed down by the surge of bodies on all sides.

‘Ellie!’

She was hallucinating, she must be. Drowning in the noise, the chaos. A fist struck the side of her head and set her ear ringing. On her knees. A forest of legs. She must find the surface, get back on her feet. The men around her were a blur of kicking limbs. She put her hands to her head, shielding her face. A foot caught her hard in the ribs. Under. If she went under, she’d be trampled.

‘Ellie!’

Close. Urgent. A real voice? Her ears were deaf with stinging and shouts and blows. A foot caught her just above her eye, knocked her sideways, backwards into the crush. The legs around her blurred and shimmered.

‘Ellie!’

Louder. Still reeling from the blow, she managed to turn her head. A large clean hand was sticking through the swell at waist height. Reaching for her. She stared at it for a second, too stunned to move. A white hand with strong fingers and neatly clipped nails and long dark hairs above the knuckles. Beside her, a man slipped and his punching battle to stay upright forced a moment’s gap. She crawled on her hands and knees through the feet, the legs, the bodies, thrusting her arm out to grasp the hand. Her fingers locked around its wrist, firm and warm. The hand closed over hers, heaving her out and upwards as she clung to it, dragging her onto her feet, even as the waves of people crashed past her.

Her head was spinning, her eyes closed. She couldn’t speak. A strong arm was holding her upright, wrapped around her back and under her arm. She let her head loll into the curve of his shoulder, fighting dizziness. They were moving sideways together, his shoulder ramming through the crowd, steering them both. She clung to him, struggling to keep herself on her feet. When she tried to open her eyes the colours swam and shimmied, making her nauseous. She let them fall closed again. One eye was sticky, its lids starting to seal. He was dragging her on through screeching traffic and petrol fumes. She was too weak to stop him.

At last he lowered her with a bump onto a low wall. He was crouching over her, his arm still around her shoulders, his breath warm on her cheek. His body ran solid and safe down her side.

‘Ellie?’

She managed to part her glued eyes a crack. She was off the road now, looking back at a chaos of figures, some running, some crouching, dazed, on the central reservation, others curled on the ground, still and bloodied. Fresh police sirens, distant, started to wail. A young police officer was rushed past, carried by colleagues, his legs hanging limp, spilt blood stiffening his moustache.

‘Can you hear me?’

She forced herself to turn her head and looked into his face. It hung, eyes large with concern, in her vision. Him? She blinked, tried to swallow down the nausea, to focus. No. Impossible. She closed her eyes again, breathing thickly. A moment later, she tried again, forcing open her eyelids and peering at him. ‘Frank?’

‘Hey.’ His mouth broke into a smile, showing neat, whitened teeth. Lines fanned into cracks around his eyes. ‘Who’d you expect?’

The office was brightly lit and chill with air conditioning. The cut above her eye was painful. The sheen of sweat on her skin found its way into scratches and made them sting. Frank had half-carried her across a short hallway and now she was sitting in a hard plastic chair, sagging backwards, her head propped against a wall beneath a giant corporate logo which read: FOOD 4 ALL. She closed her eyes. People rushed round her, fussing and exclaiming. Her head throbbed.

Frank was at her side again. ‘Mind if I take a look?’ He eased her head back with gentle hands, swabbing her face and eye. Cotton, cool and wet. A trickle of water ran down her cheek and the curve of her throat and she lifted her hand to it. A moment later, the lids of her puffy eye sprang apart, freed. His face was close to hers, his lips pursed as he concentrated, assessing her cuts and bruises.

His hair, dishevelled, was completely white at the temples. Beyond them, it was streaked with grey. Middle age had rounded out his cheeks. But his eyes were the same, as intense as she remembered. When he looked directly at her, she could still see the young man of twenty he had once been.

‘You’ll live.’ His expression was amused. ‘No real damage.’ He squeezed sticky white ointment from a tube and dabbed it over her eye, then shook two tablets into her hand and gave her a paper cone of water to swallow them down. ‘Sit there, would you? Five minutes and I’m done.’

She didn’t argue. A young woman brought her a cup of sweet, milky Pakistani tea. Two tea bags were stewing inside, strings thrown out over the brim like lifelines. She sipped it, looking round. FOOD 4 ALL’s offices were cramped, with temporary partitions and an air of chaos. Large colour posters on the walls showed images of needy children with big eyes and babies squirming in their mother’s arms. Cardboard boxes of supplies were stacked along a side wall: oral rehydration salts, blankets and high-protein biscuits. The mix of English and Chinese characters on the packaging suggested it was all from China.

A television on a stand in one corner flickered, its sound muted. A Pakistani news channel was interviewing its reporter live from the scene of the demonstration. They’d named the item Chaos in the Capital. The reporter was standing in front of a pile of smouldering tyres, making the most of the dregs of the violence. The black smoke rose calmly, almost wistful as it billowed and gently dispersed. The street behind was littered with debris – the remnants of trampled placards, a torn shirt, a lost shoe. She wondered how honest the reporter was and if he’d placed them there himself. Around him, the sun was already losing its power. Dark pools glistened on the surface of the road. Blood perhaps, or just oil. To one side, almost out of shot, riot police were clambering back into their vehicles and pulling away.

A written commentary ran across the bottom of the screen: Home Minister condemns violence, blames opposition for illegal protest. Opposition leaders slam police, label action heavy-handed. Three thousand demonstrators, say police. An underestimate, she thought. Scores injured, organizers claim.

Frank reappeared. ‘How’re you doing?’ He leant past her for his bag, a battered leather case thrown on its side. If someone had asked her what Frank smelt like, she would have thought them crazy. But now, as he bent close, a hint of his old, familiar smell caught her unawares, hit the pit of her stomach. Warm and floury, like crumbled biscuit, cut with a Christmassy spice. Aftershave, perhaps. She stared after him as he moved away without waiting for an answer, bag swinging from his hand.

He was finishing off his day, hanging around the doorway of each small sub-office, asking questions, issuing instructions. She sat quietly, watching him, glad to be still and adjusting to the sight of him again.

As he strode back to her, he winked and made her smile. ‘Come on, Ellie.’ He reached down and hoisted her to her feet. ‘Let’s get you home.

The guesthouse where Ellen was staying was just outside Islamabad and a welcome escape from the city. It was early evening by the time Frank drove her through the gates. Upstairs, in her room, she showed him where she hid her bottles of gin and tonic, pointed him to the small fridge for ice, and let him fix the drinks. They sat outside to drink them, side by side on the first-floor terrace, warming themselves in the mellow gleam of the falling sun. She rocked her glass against her face, cooling her swollen skin.

He slipped off his sandals and propped his feet on the rail. They were sunburnt, red with white stripes where the leather had been.

She looked out past his toes to the tips of Islamabad’s tallest buildings, just visible in the natural basin below. The tiles on the domes of the mosques glittered in the dying light. It was peaceful here, removed. She glanced at Frank. His strong Roman nose was more prominent than she’d remembered, the chin now soft with flesh.

‘So . . . ’ She looked into her glass. ‘Still do-gooding?’

‘You mean, actually making a difference to people.’ His tone was bantering but she sensed bitterness. ‘As opposed to stirring up trouble.’

She felt stung. ‘No fan of journalism then?’

‘Course I am. Huge.’

They sat in silence for a moment. She didn’t know what to say, where to start. Her mind was weighted by exhaustion. When she closed her eyes, she saw stamping feet, bloody faces trapped in the crowd. She’d been lucky to get out. She thought of his hand, reaching for her.

‘How come you were there?’

He didn’t answer for a minute, then threw back his head and laughed. It was a forced laugh, mirthless. ‘You’d like to think that, wouldn’t you? That I’ve been following you around the world, staking you out, waiting for a chance to save you.’

She shook her head. ‘I didn’t—’

He lifted his feet from the rail. For a moment, he seemed about to leave, then he rearranged his ankles and settled again, sipped his drink. ‘I was heading for the office, that’s all. Stopped to watch the fun. And there you were.’

‘There I was.’

His voice was the same. Lush and chocolaty and lazy with American vowels. It had seemed so exotic to her when they were students.

‘You look just the same,’ he said. ‘Haven’t changed a bit.’

She put her hand to her sore, battered face. ‘I’ve changed.’ He’d aged too.

Another silence. They were awkward together, unable to find the natural rhythm of a conversation, and that saddened her.

In the distance, a recording spluttered into life and the soulful notes of the call to prayer drifted across the fields. It seemed to carry the melancholy of the dying day. He too seemed pensive, listening to the gentle sweetness of the young man’s voice.

When it ended, she tried again. ‘You were in Africa, weren’t you? I saw you interviewed. South Africa?’

He nodded, stared into his drink. ‘Jo’burg for a while. Then Nairobi.’

‘All with the UN?’

‘Yep. Eighteen years.’

She thought of FOOD 4 ALL’s cramped offices. It was clearly a small agency. Nothing like the UN. ‘What made you leave?’

He replied as if he hadn’t heard the question. ‘I’ve read your reports, you know, in NewsWorld. Over the years.’

‘Really?’

‘Course.’ He grinned. ‘Afghanistan. Iraq. Beirut. You sure pick ’em.’

The screen door downstairs opened and slapped shut. The garden boy appeared. He connected the hose and started to water the flowerbeds, aiming the flow with languid movements. The soil blackened as the water pooled, bubbled and sank.

Frank lifted his glass and drank down his gin and tonic. No wedding ring. Still, that didn’t mean anything. Not all married men wore them. He probably had a wife back in the US. And a bunch of all-American kids. She thought of the ring she was wearing, her mother’s wedding ring, and wondered if he’d noticed.

He said, ‘How long’re you out here?’

‘Another few days maybe.’ She shrugged. ‘I’ve been covering the protests. But they get repetitive. I need something new.’

‘Like what?’ His teeth gleamed in a half-smile in the dusk as if he knew full well.

‘Like this government offensive everyone’s talking about. Against the Taliban.’

‘Ah.’ He sounded pleased.

She could sense that he knew something and was quietly enjoying the advantage it gave him. She pushed a little further. ‘They keep saying it’s imminent. But they’re taking their time.’