The Missing Twin by Alex Day

Author:Alex Day
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780008271282
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 2017-07-18T04:00:00+00:00

TWENTY-ONE

Fatima

It was late by the time they got to the beach of the small town on Turkey’s Aegean coast. The lilos and deckchairs that colonised it during the day had been replaced by empty expanses of sand, darkly glowing in the moonlight. The sea lay flat and still, almost motionless. Black. Fatima gazed at it, longing to wade into it, to wash away the layers of dirt of the last week that had now been intensified by the scourge of the rape so that filth seemed to cover every inch of her. But she knew that even all the liquid in that great body of water before her could never make her clean. She was sullied forever. The shame, the embarrassment, the disgust, would live with her for all time.

Even though the tourists had gone safely back to their hotels, B&Bs and apartments there were still plenty of people about. Migrants were gathered in groups all along the road that curved around the bay, shadowy figures lurking in the atramentous night, waiting for the smugglers. In just the same way, having reached the small resort town by local bus, Fatima and Ehsan had once again shelled out a large sum of their remaining money to a man called Khalid, a broker for the smugglers, in the hope that at some point in the night they would be afloat and on their way to Europe. The more you paid, in theory, the less overcrowded the boat and so, again in theory, the less likely it was to capsize. If it had been a choice they had to make it would have been a bleak one, but there was no choice. They could only afford the cheapest – $650 per person – option. Khalid told them there would be ‘just’ forty-five people on board. He also told them where the departure point would be; they were to hide in the dunes that backed the beach until the smuggler arrived with the boat. During the hours they waited, Fatima went over and over what Khalid had told them, in answer to her insistent questions, about the danger of the crossing.

‘God decides who survives and who does not,’ he had said to her with a complacent shrug and disinterested tone. ‘If you don’t make it – it’s not my fault. It’s fate.’

There was no way to argue with such an opinion, nothing to say in response or retaliation. Fatima pulled the twins close to her and nuzzled their hair and necks and cheeks like a mother bear tending to her cubs. She could still turn back. She didn’t have to go through with this. Youssef and Ehsan could go on ahead and get established and then she and the girls could follow.

Lying in the soft, yielding sand dune in the pale moonlight, a tiny, fractious breeze blowing the salt air towards her, Fatima angrily bit her lip so hard she drew blood. What ridiculous way of thinking was this? Of course she was not

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