Polyamory on Trial by Jude Tresswell

Author:Jude Tresswell [Tresswell, Jude]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781911569794
Publisher: Rowanvale Books
Published: 2020-06-30T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter 12

Contrary to what Raith had thought, Mike and Ross had been considering the best way forward. Following up their ideas, Ross had made enquiries with contacts who lived in other parts of the United Kingdom. He wasn’t above a little deception. He told them that he knew of a young man, with immigration papers but with little English, who needed two things: some Kurmanji speakers to talk to, and a job. Given that some of the people he spoke to were gay, he’d considered mentioning Khaled’s homophobia but, on reflection, decided to stick to what he’d always thought: sexuality was no one’s business except your own. How the lad felt was none of their business, just as how they felt was none of his. If Khaled intended to stay in England, he’d have to get used to the zeitgeist. Of the people who replied, some asked simply: what’s Kurmanji? Two replies looked promising, though, and with an admitted sense of relief, he saw they were from people that he knew were straight. Mike, on the other hand, had pursued a less deceptive route.

As they’d worked on rebuilding RossandCromarty together, Mike’s combination of firmness and kindness had prised apart some of Khaled’s reserve. In broken English and armed with an atlas and a great many actions, Khaled had described the events that had driven him to leave his native country.

He wasn’t Arabic, he insisted, as most people from Syria were. Kurds were not Arabs. He spoke some Arabic and a little English. He’d been taught them in his secondary school, but like many of his Kurdish compatriots, on principal he stuck to his native language, Kurmanji. That was one reason why he hadn’t read the Koran that Phil had bought, though he was grateful for the thought behind it.

There was so much war and so much killing. It didn’t matter which side you were on, you became caught up in it. He was from Kobane, close to the Turkish border. His father, his mother and his sister had died at the start of 2015 when a battle had destroyed hundreds of buildings and hundreds of lives. He’d had two elder brothers who had both been killed, fighting to regain control of the area. At eighteen, you had to join the army. He wasn’t scared of fighting, he insisted, nor of dying, but he wasn’t sure what he’d be fighting and dying for, especially as, by then, both Russia and the US were involved and the scale of the fighting was escalating. So, like thousands of others, he’d crossed the border into Turkey—to avoid the airstrikes, bombs and bullets, to avoid dying and to avoid the misery of living in a place where food and water were scarce and a ‘normal’ life was non-existent.

He’d heard that he could travel to Europe—to Greece—across the Mediterranean Sea, but the stories he heard in the refugee camp he’d arrived at made it clear that this route was less and less likely to offer a means of escape to freedom.

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