Out of It Read Online Free PDF Page B

slopping-around-the-house thoub . Away from the house she was a flesh-coloured-tights and fitted-knee-length-skirt woman, a wearer of short-sleeved chemises and cardigans. For the outside world she blow-dried her hair into hard outward-turning curls. Unlike the rest of the family, her nose was trim and tiny, as straight as her eyebrows were curved, the latter being regularly threaded down to dark arches. With the mandil over her hair and her thoub she looked older, but fresher somehow. Her skin had an unblemished look about it that was unnaturally wax-like, as though an exploratory scalpel would find her flesh to be blood-free under its surface.
    His mother mainly left the cooking to Sabri who could spend hours chopping parsley for tabouleh , stuffing vine leaves or trying out different seasonings on the Sultan Ibrahim, that prince of Gazan fishes. His mother just pickled.
    ‘What are you preparing for, a siege?’ he asked after the last batch, when every inch of counter space was taken up with fat, square-sided bottles stuffed with eggs, aubergines, olives and courgettes. To Rashid they seemed morbid: embryos in formaldehyde, preserved body parts, mutated limbs bobbing around in tinctured jellies. She did not look up. ‘We’re already under siege, can’t you tell?’
    Rashid popped at the lids of the pickle jars with a wooden spoon. Pickles. London. Pickles. A sense of the previous night came over him. Part fear, part thrill. The leap under the helicopters, Gloria’s stars under his skin. He stopped. A small pink-rimmed mirror hanging on a hook over a dishcloth shot a look back at him, one that said he must’ve been truly stoned, no not just truly stoned but royally stoned; his eyes were amassed with stringy red veins. Rashid picked a pair of mirrored sunglasses from the top of the microwave and put them on.
    ‘The belligerent aerial attack, their military sources claimed, was in direct response to the bombing of a park yesterday afternoon for which the Islamic Justice Party has claimed responsibility . . .’ It was the local station who had chosen not to name the bomber.
    ‘Did you hear she’s a Hajjar?’ his mother asked. ‘Foolish girl gave those bastards the excuse to bomb the hospital.’
    ‘I saw them do it.’ Rashid moved so that she could get to the sink and lifted his sunglasses on to his head. They were scratched and covered with fingerprints and kitchen grease. His mother pulled her sleeves up from the elbow and banged again at the base of the pan with a wooden spoon. Steam hissed out from under a wodge of brain-like meat.
    ‘They cut the power for over five hours this morning. Everything’s partly defrosted; blood dripping out of the freezer when I opened it. All I can do is cook the lot, put it back and hope they leave the power alone. At least fifteen kilos I have still to do.’ Arrayed on the floor on a waterproof sheet, shoulders of lamb and cubes of beef lay bagged up and oozy in see-through plastic bags.
    She turned in his direction, as though there was something she remembered. Rashid pulled the sunglasses down. The sight of him appeared to confuse her. It was as though he were somehow misplaced, a lost man in her kitchen. His mother could do that. She could choose not to see things. She could choose, for example, not to see that Sabri was in a wheelchair with sores across his buttocks that she had to treat every night, a catheter bag that she had to empty several times a day, a body that she helped lift in and out of bed. Instead, she spoke as though he was still her strapping son, her noble warrior. Once Rashid had heard her say, ‘Sabri could still have children, you know,’ in a tone that challenged the world to contradict her.
    And their father leaving? That, of course, hadn’t happened either.
    He would ask her about the split. He would sit her down, here in the kitchen and ask her why their father had suddenly shot out of the marriage like that, propelled himself out of it so