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LUCAS I lay on the smooth marble floor of the Natural History Museum, staring up through the bones of the giant 3D model of the ichthyosaur. It was as extinct as humankind would be if we didn’t do something soon. I was playing dead, but my heart was beating as fast as a hummingbird’s wings. Around me, a sea of bodies covered in sheets, with only their whitened faces visible. Eyes closed. Barely breathing. There was an eerie silence. It made me think of the stillness and quiet on the moors before a storm blew in. Only we were the storm, this time. I felt fear and elation as we waited, waited, waited. Surely people could hear my heart, which thumped wildly underneath the bag of paint taped to my chest? Zaynab lay next to me, her bony elbow sticking into my side, her crutch propped against my leg. ‘You won’t chicken out, will you?’ she hissed under her breath. ‘Promise! Promise me you are in!’ I turned my head towards her. She had asked me this a million times. Nothing had changed. She fixed me with her fierce stare and my heart stopped for a moment. ‘Well?’ I nodded. ‘I’m in. I promise.’ She moved her elbow just enough to stop my ribs hurting. We closed our eyes and got back to the die- in. In a few minutes, we’d die again and wake the world up. Oh yes. ZAYNAB I did not want to go to the UK, even if it was where Mama was born and I lived until I was four. I did not want to leave Mama. I didn’t want to go somewhere I would no longer see her everywhere I looked, or hear her voice, or even almost feel her touch, and I did not understand why Father would want to, either. Except, I was forgetting. For him, his work came first, before everything – even Mama with cancer. Even Mama gone and me on my own, missing her so badly that I could barely see the point of going on. And now his work was tearing me out of the place where Mama and I had laid our roots, except that Mama remained deep in Somaliland soil, buried beneath one of the yeheb bushes which she had helped so many people to plant in the fight against the endless droughts. ‘The change will be good for us. It will help us to forget,’ Father said, as we were driven to the airport. I said nothing in return. It seemed to me that he had already forgotten. Mama would have hated this trip. She would have hated that we were flying, hated that we were abandoning people who needed our help and turning our backs on the work she had done with the rest of the team at the charity to keep women safe in camps, to plant trees, to help them find a way to make a living when they had lost everything to the desert as it spread, destroying their farms. ‘And it’ll be an adventure. Something for you to tell your friends about!’ he added. He had completely failed to notice that I had stopped hanging out with my friends since Mama died, that they bored me with their silly talk, that I was truly alone. We spent the first night in the UK in a hotel near Heathrow. We’d been travelling for thirteen hours including the stop in Dubai. We were tired and it was cold. Not that it didn’t get cold in Borama. It did. This was a different cold. I began to shiver and felt as if the shivering would never stop. I stood in the hotel room with its dim light and huge bed and white, shiny bathroom and stared at the tray of sandwiches which had no flavour, and I knew I was shivering with hatred and sadness. People said I was lucky to have this opportunity. I did not feel lucky. I was being torn away from my home and from Mama and everything that reminded me of her. I dug around in my suitcase and brought out a scarf that had been hers. It still smelled of her perfume and I buried my face in the fabric and breathed deeply, then I set it aside and fished out my phone. I had downloaded an app to allow me to find Mecca. The qibla appeared on my screen, flickered and swung, settling in the direction of the door. I unrolled my mat and began my evening prayers. The focus cleared my mind of anger, but the inner calm did not last long. I could hear my father in the next- door room, taking a shower. I began counting the minutes. One. Two. Three. Four. Five. Six. I felt anger growing inside me, spreading like a poison. Ten. Eleven. Finally, the noise of the shower stopped. There is a saying in my religion: The believer is not the one who eats his fill when the neighbour beside him is hungry. It should also have said ‘or wastes water when others go thirsty’. I waited for a moment or two and then I hammered on the wall and shouted: ‘You hypocrite! You total hypocrite!’ Nothing. Five minutes later, a knock at my door. I ignored it, got into the bed with all my clothes on and fell asleep, with Mama’s scarf held close.
