‘Outcasts stick together,’ laughed the cool kids.
The class yearbook had a damning verdict:
‘Anders used to be part of the “gang” but then he made enemies of everybody,’ was the book’s summary for the leavers of spring 1995. ‘Anders has staked it all on getting a perfect body, but we have to say he’s still got quite a way to go. Apart from that, Anders spends a lot of time in Denmark getting materials for his “art”. In Year 7, Anders had something going with X, but now he’s got an admirer in Tåsen (with red hair and freckles). Anders often does stupid, unprovoked things, such as hitting the headteacher.’
The piece finished by saying he now hung out with the losers in the class, who were mentioned by name. Nobody got off lightly.
Anders was desperate to find out who had written it, so he could beat him up.
The girl in the class with whom Anders was said to have had ‘something going’ was also furious with whoever had composed the entry. It amounted to bullying, because being together with Anders was the last thing anybody would think of. They would be outcasts themselves, then.
It all came back, crystal clear, to Morg’s former friend Wick when the police put the yearbook in front of him sixteen years later.
‘Yes, that’s how it was,’ said Wick, the tall, dark one in the gang. Then he suggested a slight rewording: ‘Not enemies, it was just that he was pushed out. Not wanted in the gang any more.’
As he sat in the sterile interview room trying to define why Anders was rejected, Wick recalled everything in minute detail. He remembered a pair of outsized hip-hop jeans, a make called Psycho Cowboy. The jeans were very popular, but disappeared overnight, after a few months of fashion hype.
Then they were ‘one of the worst things to be seen in’, recalled Wick. ‘And Anders went on wearing his just a bit too long.’
Is there anything worse than being rejected by your friends?
Yes, perhaps there is.
Being disowned by your father.
After his third arrest, Jens Breivik made it clear to Anders that he wanted nothing more to do with him. His son had broken his promise to give up tagging.
The decision was final.
Anders was fifteen.
He would never see his father again.
To Damascus
There is fighting in the streets of Erbil. Blood wets the sand that covers the cracked asphalt. Rubbish is mixed with desert dust and the stench of war fills the alleyways and squares. Life has gone underground, and flickers over a low flame.
It is 1996.
The Iraqi army has withdrawn, and the war being fought is no longer for freedom, but between the Kurds themselves, for power and money. Erbil is a city where old rivalries are never forgotten, only intensified and mythologised by fresh killings leading to further years of blood feud and enmity. Kurdistan is ripping and hacking itself to pieces. The fighters occupying the city are choking it to death.
Every night families are torn apart. Children are killed by other children’s fathers, or by young men who might become fathers one day.
In the cellars, people sit in darkness for days, weeks, months, while the militias battle it out above their heads. Children try to invent a game down there, in the cellars, because children will always want to play. Fathers are nervous and restless; should they be taking up arms as well? Should they be choosing sides? Should they?
Mustafa chooses life.
He is holding a four-year-old in his arms. Bano, his firstborn. With bullets whizzing through the streets above them and rockets landing God knows where, he wonders how to cope with everyday existence, how to find food for his family, how to get water, fuel and all the rest of it.
‘Why must we stay in here?’ whines the little girl. ‘I want to go up!’
Not a single glimmer of light finds its way into the cold room. It’s a relief that their neighbour built a proper cellar.
‘Let’s go up and play,’ begs Bano.
This little girl, conceived and born when snow was in the air, who wants to be part of everything, to have answers to everything – she is the apple of his eye. She learnt to walk at nine months, to put together long sentences when she was two; now she talks like a schoolgirl.
Bayan is sitting with Bano’s little sister on her lap. Lara was born eighteen months after Bano. Bayan had wanted a boy. She comes from a traditional family, where a woman gains worth and status only once she has borne a son. Now she is pregnant for the third time, and the oppressive cellar atmosphere is making her queasiness worse. She groans. This isn’t how life was meant to be.
Suddenly there is a huge bang. The house shakes, its framework creaks. Something shatters and makes a tinkling noise as it falls to the ground. The windows? The crockery?
The children wail, and terrified shouts can be heard. The parents sit there numbly, ready to evacuate the cellar if they have to. Two girls who share the darkness with them start to cry. The elders recite from the Qur’an, a stream of mumbling verse coming from their barely open mouths. Sirens pierce the night.
But the house stays standing, the cellar does not collapse or get filled with falling earth or plaster, no beams come crashing down. Is it over?
Not for the children. Lara is too upset to settle. Bano is crying hysterically. She turns her head to her father in the darkness.
‘Why did you want children when you knew there was a war?’
Mustafa sits in silence, rocking his daughter to comfort her. Then he hands her abruptly to her mother. He goes up the narrow flight of steps and opens the door onto the night. Something’s on fire, just down the street. Black smoke is rising into the air. A rocket has hit his neighbour’s house. One daughter is dead.
Before the next day is over, the neighbour’s twelve-year-old has been buried.
That evening, once they had put the children to bed and mumbled an assurance that tonight they would be safe, Mustafa and Bayan sat up talking. Mustafa had made his mind up. Bayan hesitated. They took the decision before morning came. They wanted to leave Iraq.
If only they could just have left, taken flight. But Iraq was one big prison. Without an exit permit they would get nowhere; the borders were closely guarded. Iraq was a land that was difficult to go to, hard to live in and almost impossible to leave. Mustafa, who was still a mechanical engineer at the water and sewage works in the city, tried to make contacts who might be able to help them. He offered bribes, he saved up and started currency dealing, looking desperately for a way out. His children should not grow up in fear of their lives.
A son was born, and Bayan could finally call herself Umm Ali, mother of Ali. They celebrated; civil war or not, a child is still a source of joy.
A year passed, then two, and in the third, Bano started school. Mustafa got her a decent pair of shoes; he bought a rucksack and a water bottle. Everything of quality, that was important now she was entering a new phase of her life, he told himself.
School life suited Bano well; she was mature for her age and had spent a lot of time indoors, where she loved to read. Lara was less well behaved, and more daring, always getting dirty, clambering around the bombsites to discover things, playing at war in the ruins with her cousins Ahmed and Abdullah. Lara was always the boss. She was the best of friends with the two boys and played them off against each other whenever it suited her. As the middle child, she was left more to her own devices, and was more independent than her sister; Bano had grown accustomed to attention and admiration, and thrived when people noticed her.
To survive the rampant inflation and be able to save up for their escape, Mustafa and Bayan both worked full time. The grandmothers looked after all the cousins while their parents were at work.