What can’t be helped can’t be helped. I’ve jobs to be doing. I get out of bed like an old lady, carefully, open the curtains and open my window. Dunmanus Bay’s still a bit choppy, but I see a sailboat—probably Aileen Jones, out checking her lobster pots. The sea holly and myrtle at the end of the garden are being buffeted; back they bend towards the cottage, then spring up, then bend back towards the cottage. This means something. Something I’m missing, even though it’s there in front of me, as plain as day.
It’s an east wind, blowing from England; from Hinkley Point.
RADIO POC ISN’T broadcasting this morning; there’s just a looped message saying the station is off the air today for operational reasons. So I switch to JKFM and leave it playing the Modern Jazz Quartet as I quarter an apple for my breakfast and heat up a couple of potato cakes for Rafiq. Soon he smells the garlic and clops down the stairs in his makeshift dressing gown and he tells me about a zipwire some of the older village boys are planning up in Five Acre Wood. After we’ve eaten I feed the chickens, water the pumpkins in the polytunnel, make a few days’ worth of dog biscuits from oats, husk, and mutton fat, and sharpen the hair scissors while Rafiq cleans our drinking-water tub, refills it by taking the long hosepipe up to the spring, then goes down to the pier with his fishing rod. Zimbra joins him. Later he comes back with a pollack and a mackerel. Rafiq has bits of memories of fishing in sunny blue water before he came to Ireland, he says, and Declan O’Daly says the boy’s a natural angler—luckily for his and Lorelei’s diet, as they only eat meat once a month, at most. I’ll bake the fish for dinner tonight, and serve them up with mashed swede. I make a pot of mint tea and start cutting Rafiq’s hair. He’s long overdue a trim and it’ll be headlice season at school soon. “I saw Aileen Jones through my telescope earlier,” he says. “Out on the bay in the Lookfar, checking her lobster pot.”
“That’s great,” I say, “but I hope you were careful—”
“—not to point it at the sun,” he says. “ ’Course I didn’t, Holly. I’m not a total doofus, y’know?”
“Nobody’s saying you’re even a partial doofus,” I tell him mildly. “It’s just once you’re a parent, a sort of … accident detector switches on, and never switches off. You’ll see, one day, if you’re ever a father.”
“Euuuyyyuckh”is what Rafiq thinks of that prospect.
“Hold still. Lol should be doing this. She’s the better stylist.”
“No way! Lol’d make me look like a boy in Five-star Chongqing.”
“Like a boy in what?”
“Five-star Chongqing. They’re Chinese. All the girls fancy them.”
And dream dreams of lives of plenty in Shanghai, I don’t doubt. They say there are only two women to every three men in China ’cause of selective feticide, and when the Lease Lands were new and buses still ran to Cork, my relatives there told me about local girls being recruited as “China brides” and sailing away to full stomachs, 24/7 electricity, and Happy Ever After. I was old enough to have my doubts about the recruiting agencies’ testimonials. I switch the radio from JKFM to RTЙ in case there’s a report about Hinkley, which went unmentioned on the eight A.M. news. Zimbra comes and puts his head on Rafiq’s lap and looks up at the boy. Rafiq musses his head. The RTЙ announcer reads the birth notices, where people thread the program the names of new babies, birthweights, the parents’ names, parishes, and counties. I like hearing them. Christ knows these kids’ lives won’t be easy, especially for the majority who are born beyond the Pale or the Cork Cordon, but each name feels like a tiny light held up against the Endarkenment.
I snip a bit more around Rafiq’s right ear to match his left.
I snip off too much, so now have to snip around his left.
“I wish all this never had to change,” says Rafiq, unexpectedly.
I’m pleased he’s content and sad that a kid so young knows that nothing lasts. “Change is sort of hardwired into the world.”
The boy asks, “What does ‘hardwired’ mean?”
“A computer phrase from the old days. I just mean … what’s real changes. If life didn’t change, it wouldn’t be life, it’d be a photograph.” I snip the hairs up his neck. “Even photos change, mind. They fade.”
We say nothing for a bit. I accidentally spike the bit between the tendons on Rafiq’s neck and he goes, “Ouch,” and I say, “Sorry,” and he says, “No bother,” like an Irishman. Crunchie, a semiwild tomcat I named after a long-ago chocolate bar, strolls across the kitchen windowsill. Zimbra notices, but can’t be bothered to make a fuss. Rafiq asks, “Holly, d’you think Cork University’ll be open again by the time I’m eighteen?”
I love him too much to puncture his dreams. “Possibly. Why?”
“ ’Cause I want to be an engineer when I grow up.”
“Good. Civilization needs more engineers.”
“Mr. Murnane said we need to fix stuff, build stuff, move stuff, like oil states do, but do it all without oil.”
And start forty years ago, I think. “He’s right.” I pull up a chair in front of Rafiq. “Lower your head, I’ll do your fringe.”
I lift up his fringe with a comb and snip off the hair that shows through its teeth, leaving a centimeter. I’m getting better at this. Then I see Rafiq’s got this strange intense look on his face; it makes me stop. I turn the radio down to a mumble. “What is it, Raf love?”
He looks like he’s trying to catch a far-off sound. Then he looks at the window. Crunchie’s gone. “I remember someone cutting my hair. A woman. I can’t see her face, but she’s talking Arabic.”
I lean back and lower the scissors. “One of your sisters, perhaps? Someone must’ve cut your hair before you were five.”
“Was my hair short when I got here?”
“I don’t remember it being long. You were half starved, half drowned, then you nearly died of hypothermia. The state of your hair didn’t register. But this woman, Raf—can you see her face?” Rafiq scrunches up his face. “It’s like, if I don’t look, I see her, but if I look at her, her face melts away. When I dream, I sometimes see her, but when I wake up, the faces’ve gone again, leaving just the name, like. One was Assia, I thinkshe’s my aunt … or maybe a sister. Maybe it’s her with the scissors. Hamza and Ismail, they were my brothers, on the boat.” I’ve heard this a few times, but I don’t interrupt Rafiq when he’s in the mood to study the surviving fragments of his life before Ireland. “Hamza was funny, and Ismail wasn’t. There were so many men on the boat—we were all jammed up with each other. There were no women, and only one other boy, but he was a Berber and I didn’t understand his Arabic very well. Most of the passengers were seasick, but I was okay. We all went to the toilet over the side. Ismail said we were going to Norway. I said, ‘What’s Norway?’ and Ismail said it’s a safe place where we could earn money, where they didn’t have Ebola and nobody tried to shoot you … That sounded good, but the days and nights on the boat were bad.” Rafiq’s frown deepens. “Then we saw lights across the water, down a long bay, it was night, and there was a big fight. Hamza was saying to the captain in Arabic, ‘It can’t be Norway,’ and the captain was saying, ‘Why would I lie to you?’ and Hamza had a sort of compass in his hand, saying, ‘Look, we’re not north enough,’ and the captain threw it over the side of the boat and Hamza told the others, ‘He’s lying to us to save fuel. Those lights aren’t Norway, it’s somewhere else!’ Then all the shouting began, and then the guns were going off, and …” Rafiq’s eyes and voice are hollow. “That’s where I am for most of my nightmares. We’re all jammed in too tight …”
I remember how the Horologists could redact bad memories, and wish I could grant Rafiq the same mercy. Or not, I dunno.
“… and most times it’s like it was, with Hamza throwing a ring into the water, telling me, ‘We’ll swim together,’ and he throws me into the water first, but then he never follows. And that’s all I have.” Rafiq dabs his eyes on the back of his hand. “I’ve forgotten everything else. My own family. Their faces.”