Some time later, in a vile, sticky heat, the plane lands with a thump on the runway, screeching to a halt as a soldier yells, “Welcome to Kandahar, folks!” The loud voice has a ring of satisfaction to it that crushes Khalid as well as confirming where he is.
He’s squashed between two much larger handcuffed men who’ve spent the whole journey praying. Their bobbing heads and closed eyes are now impossible to ignore as men nearby join in. Each in turn, including Khalid, is hauled up, pushed towards the wide ramp and led stumbling from the plane to an area of dusty ground and the noise of engines, generators and mad barking dogs.
Khalid sinks to his knees after a thump on the back. A plastic hood is shoved over his head while he sniffs the spreading dust. Then he’s thrown down on his face to wait.
A man begins wailing, pleading for help nearby. A man Khalid hopes isn’t Masud. Within minutes, Khalid’s bundled towards what sounds like a big echoing building. A building teeming with yelling soldiers and the sound of men crying and groaning as they’re herded and kicked into line with hard boots.
A soldier trips Khalid, crashing him to the concrete floor with a violent yell. A familiar pain rips through his side, giving him the sensation his arms are splintering from their sockets. He bangs his head so hard he blacks out for a second and teeters on the edge of consciousness. Coming round only when they start stamping on his aching spine to hold him down before buzzing a metal-cutter through the tough handcuffs, allowing his arms to flop to the ground like rags.
Then they begin ripping off his T-shirt and jeans and pull him to his feet totally naked. Surrounding him, one pulls off the hood. Khalid squints at the extraordinary sight of soldiers screaming abuse at naked men lined up against the white walls of a massive hangar-like, metal-ceilinged building. The prisoners’ heads are bowed in shame like something out of a horror movie as another man photographs each one in turn.
Men with gloves start searching Khalid’s body. Touching him all over. Others scream in pain at the intrusive violence of the searches. The worst embarrassment of their lives. Humiliated at every turn by the soldiers’ ugly taunts, the naked men are taken to one side and photographed again. When it comes to Khalid’s turn, he refuses to move forward. Standing proudly, no matter what they intend doing to him. With a swift punch, he’s knocked into line.
Several photos are taken of his face, front on as well as in profile. After that a barber shaves his adolescent face stubble, then his head, with the same tenderness as a sheep shearer with a thousand fleeces to go. Then another photo’s taken of Khalid with his head shaved.
“OK, move it. You’re done!” The photographer dismisses him. Swearing harshly at the next man in line to hurry up. The middle-aged, soft-faced man, naked, vulnerable, with tears in his eyes, glances at Khalid as if to say the experience means his life is over. It ignites a terrible anger in Khalid, who knows the shaving of the man’s beard—an important part of his Muslim identity—is the final insult for him.
The naked man sits and weeps while his face is being shaved. The barber carries on, while the sight of grown men crying and yelling like babies as they’re routinely humiliated gnaws at Khalid’s heart. The two nearest him, naked as the day they were born, close their eyes and silently pray. It’s then that Khalid spots two kids younger than him: one skinny boy about thirteen years old who’s acting brain-damaged, with his tongue hanging out and rolling eyes, and another scared-looking boy at the back of the line who’s so small he could be eleven or younger. He cranes his neck to see them better, but they disappear from view when, one by one, men are taken into a nearby concrete building.
Shielded by a soldier on either side, Khalid is shoved into a small room where more American soldiers take his fingerprints, then swab saliva from his mouth before herding him through another door where two men in jeans and white shirts sit behind a green plastic desk.
The biggest American smiles. Holding out his hand as if welcoming the shivering, naked Khalid to Afghanistan.
“Hi, I’m Anthony. This is Sam. We’re CIA.” Khalid doesn’t know whether to laugh or cry. Standing there waiting to hear his fate, he’s not sure if he’s supposed to say hi back to them or not.
With a poker-like expression on his pink face, Sam asks, “When did you join al-Qaeda?”
Not this again! “Listen to me—I’ve never joined them. I don’t know anyone in al-Qaeda,” Khalid says breathlessly. Scared of the thoughts going on behind Sam’s sharp voice, he’s not sure what else to say.
Then Anthony raises his eyebrows. “You speak good English!”
“I am English!”
“Oh yeah? Where you from?”
“Rochdale.” Khalid watches Anthony lose interest, not having any idea where Rochdale is. “It’s near Manchester!” But the queue behind him is getting longer and the Americans keep looking past him to check it out, giving him the impression these questions are just a formality.
“When did you last see Osama Bin Laden?” Sam pipes up.
“What?” Khalid frowns. “I’ve seen him on telly if that’s what you mean. I’ve never met him. You lot can’t even find him, so how am I supposed to know where he is? Just let me go. I haven’t done anything.”
“Tell me about your links to terrorist cells in England.”
“What?” Khalid’s too puzzled to answer.
“You communicated by code on the computer with other terrorists.”
“No way. Who said that?” Khalid says. “What computer?”
“But you know Al-Jaber?” Anthony asks.
“Who’s he? What computer are you talking about?”
Sam clasps his fingers together on the green desk. “As usual, another time-waster!” He nods to the soldiers to take Khalid away. Making space for the next naked man to be asked the same questions.
They lead Khalid off to one side and hand him a large white T-shirt and navy-blue plastic-feeling trousers with an elasticated waist. They don’t bother with underwear, taking him as soon as he’s dressed to another room, where a different man asks his name and address, and whether he’s married or not. The names of his children.
“I’M FIFTEEN!” Khalid screams for England. “DON’T YOU GET IT?”
That’s when he loses consciousness. Blacking out from the thump to his back. Waking up later on a cold earth floor in a makeshift wire cell. One of many cells dividing a long, low building into ugly compartments. The prisoners are dressed in the same blue trousers, some in Afghan-style white caps. The grinding sound of a nearby generator interrupts everyone’s thoughts with the same constancy as a road digger and there’s a faint smell of urine in the air. Then a whiff of cooking oil.
“No talking while you’re here,” the military policeman warns him as he patrols the space between the cells.
Khalid gazes around him, through the dazzling spotlights shining from either end of the row. Eyeing the bucket in the corner with disbelief. A bottle of water to one side. Blanket folded on the floor next to a thin mat. Woollen shawl on top.
A man with big cheeks and bushy eyebrows in the next cell watches him closely, sympathy in his eyes as he waggles his head from side to side, as if to say, Keep quiet. Take no notice. You’ll be OK.
Beside the open doors at either end of the building, soldiers with huge rifles, machine or hand guns laugh and joke among themselves. Their eyes move down the lines every few seconds to check nothing’s changed. As if any of them have the smallest chance of escaping when they can’t even leave their cells to go to the toilet without asking permission.
It’s not really a surprise to Khalid when the nearest man covers his lower body with a shawl to go to the loo in the metal bucket, but surely they have toilets here for all these men? What kind of place is this? In desperation, Khalid scans the cages for Masud, for Dad, for any familiar face in the midst of this madness—or even for more boys who look his own age. As he gazes from cell to cell, face after face stares back at him with the same look of miserable resignation. Utter defeat in their dark eyes. Angry, afraid, lost and forgotten—just like him.
One man kneels to pray, hands clasped to his chest. The hum of his words gradually spreads round the cages until many adopt the same position. The volume of their voices increases to such a pitch, it adds a strange echo to the noises outside of planes and barking dogs.
Khalid sits back against the wire wall, full of compassion for their devotion but angry at the same time. Angry at the Americans for seeing them as just that: Muslims. Dangerous foreigners who they can’t even tell apart. Angry too at the Muslim religion for getting him into this mess. He once heard a newsreader say it was the fastest-growing religion in the world. Khalid remembers wishing the media wouldn’t say stuff like that. People don’t want to hear those facts, and he doesn’t particularly want to be lumped together with loads of people he doesn’t know, Muslim or not. And Muslims aren’t all the same, just like Christians aren’t all the same. He’s Khalid—himself, not a result of any religion. He hasn’t even done anything with his life yet.
Time drags. Not being allowed to talk makes the hours go by slowly. There’s nothing to do but watch the soldier with the machine gun walk up and down, staring into each wire cage as if there’s a chance something might happen.
The soldiers at either end of the row chat idly to each other. Laughing. Coming and going after coffee breaks and lunches. Performing high-fives after only ten minutes apart, as if they haven’t seen each other for years. Acting as if they’re guarding a warehouse of baked beans instead of forty kidnapped men with no access to a lawyer and no way to reach their families.
Khalid realizes that the only stuff he knows about prisons is from films. American films. Exciting ones where the hero wins the respect of the most hardcore prisoners before breaking out. But then he remembers they have the death penalty in America too.
Death Row—yeah, people are electrocuted there all the time. Khalid remembers a news item about some guy who spent twenty years on Death Row before they found him innocent. Plus that film, what was it called? He’d watched it on Nico’s computer after he’d downloaded it from the Internet. They watched loads of films like that when there was nothing else going on. Usually lounging around on the beds and floor with the rest of the gang in Nico’s older brother’s bedroom until Pete came in and screamed at them: “Get off my bed!” And everyone would scramble as if they’d committed a crime by just sitting there.
Holgy was always the first to straighten Pete’s stripy duvet, plump up the pillow and apologize: “Sorry, mate.”
“Don’t sit there again!” Pete would yell, while Khalid and the others kept their eyes focused on the computer, annoyed by his interruption but unwilling to react. They all know Pete is a mess—a bad-tempered bloke all round. The complete opposite to Nico, who rarely has anything but a smile on his face.
Suddenly realizing there’s nothing to relieve the boredom but remembering his mates and small incidents like this, Khalid wonders if perhaps little fox-faced Holgy had been right when he said, “We’re all holograms, you know?” He’d made the mistake of saying this when they were in the first year, all about eleven years old. Repeating the fact to everyone whenever he got the chance. So much so, they gave him the nickname Holgy, even though his real name, Eshan, is so much nicer. Being short for hologram, it was the obvious choice. Invented by Nico, who else?
“Your real life is happening on another planet,” Holgy argues whenever he gets the chance. “You are just a stupid gonzo reflection.”
“No, YOU are,” Mikael puts him right. He’s the brainbox, after all.
“Shut up about holograms,” Tony would add. “I’m a deathless star.”
Then the conversation would spin quickly to include Darth Vader, possible life on Mars and whether Lyn Howser has better legs than Jancy King. Yeah, awesome Lyn Howser and the new tattoo of a butterfly on her right ankle that makes them all drool.
In fact, Khalid was the only one who liked talking to Holgy about holograms. Holgy forced him to think about things that were far beyond his imagination, and the idea of reality being nothing but a projected 3D perception made him feel weird. Almost like electrodes were sparking fires in his brain.
Trouble is, there’s no one here to talk to about anything. There are no computers. Nothing to read. Nothing to do but think. All they have is one copy of the Qur’an between them. The guards pass it on when someone’s finished with it. The problem, though, is it’s written in another language and, after glancing at the pages for a while, Khalid gives up trying to make sense of the holy book.
Holgy, what would he do if he was stuck here? Khalid guesses he’d sit there just like him. Legs crossed. Staring across at the sleeping man next to him. Thinking a mixture of things. Same as him.
Khalid’s mind directs itself to the ongoing problem of his history coursework, however unimportant that seems right now. Like all his mates, schoolwork is something he worries about non-stop, simply because the teachers and his parents never let up. Most of them pretend not to do homework or care about school, but they all do.
“What are you going to do with your life if you don’t get any qualifications?” Dad always says.
“Er—become a chef like you?” Khalid once smirked.
“Not like me,” Dad said. “These kids now, they got college degrees in catering to cook. To be electrician these days you must have papers. Everybody want certificates.”
Khalid knows he’s right. Most of his mates—well, Nico and Mikael along with him—are in the top set for most of their subjects, expected to get As and Bs in seven or more GCSEs, and the pressure is constant. Escaping some of that by being here is no relief, because weirdly all Khalid can think about is if this goes on for much longer he won’t have time to look at any of his coursework over the holidays. Unless he gets out before term starts he’ll fall behind. Will the teachers take something like this into account? Khalid doubts they’ll care. None of the “official” people here care what happens to him, so why should they?
What if he never gets out and fails all his GCSEs? He’ll become the class loser. They might even make him redo everything and put him down a year to repeat the work he’s almost finished. What a fool he’ll look then. Sat in the year below’s class. Probably behind that idiot Derek Slater and the bunch of stupid toads who follow him round like he’s God. Despite his growing fear, Khalid decides he’s not going to allow that to happen. Nothing will make him suffer the shame of being a year older than the rest of his class.
If worst comes to worst, he’ll refuse to go to school ever again. He’ll ask Mac, their neighbor, to get him work in the supermarket where he’s a cashier, stacking shelves or something—part-time. Anything to make some money to pay for the bus fare to the sixth-form college on the other side of town. He read in the local paper that they do GCSE courses in the evenings with loads of good subjects.
Now Khalid has a plan, he feels slightly better. More prepared. They can punch him, keep him awake, treat him like a criminal, but they can’t ruin his chances of a better life when he gets out of here. And that’s when he gets out, not if.
“No one’s ever going to do that to me, man!” Khalid says out loud without thinking. Embarrassed, the moment the words leave his mouth.
The soldier halfway down the line turns to look at him. The man two cages down quietly puts down his bottle of water and whispers something. Something that sounds like English but Khalid can’t be sure.
Khalid shuts his eyes to blank everything out while he goes over the plan again. Mumbling to himself so the approaching soldier will think he’s crazy. It works. The soldier passes by, his brown desert boots pausing in front of Khalid’s cell for a moment before moving on.
Khalid conjures up an image of himself in baggy jeans and a white, long-sleeved T-shirt, hair slickly gelled, waiting at the bus stop for the number 23 that will take him to college. Stamping the picture at the front of his mind, a weird feeling spreads over him that his real life is happening somewhere else. Perhaps Holgy’s right. We are all holograms.
Imagining he’s waiting for the bus right now instead of sitting in a wire cage in Afghanistan sparks a picture of Niamh in the weird red-and-brown knitted Peruvian hat with side bobbles she sometimes wears. She’s waiting, arms folded, for the bus.
“Hiya, Kal. You all right?” Smiling at him with glossy pink lips.
“Not bad,” he says.
“Your hair’s looking great,” she says.
“Yeah? Thanks. I, um, great hat.” No, no! This isn’t working. Khalid can’t tell her he likes that mad hat. She’ll have to take it off. That’s better.
Niamh’s still smiling at him in 3D moving color, as real to him as the wire that surrounds him. She only disappears when voices at the end of the row bring Khalid back to the present time.
The noise of creaking wheels forces him to glance at two men in white aprons wheeling a food trolley into the building. A few men stand up to grasp the wire fence in anticipation, carefully watching the guards take cardboard boxes from the trolley and dish them out by throwing them over the tops of the cages.
“Nice curry lunch!” one of the trolley men shouts in a strange, not-quite-right American accent. “Here you go!”
Imitating feeding time at the zoo, Khalid quickly grabs it but finds the tightly folded box hard to open with his fingers, and has no choice but to bite into one corner. Pulling back damp cardboard with his teeth until specks of white rice and a runny curry are revealed.
The curry is like nothing Khalid’s ever seen or tasted before. The small squares of stringy meat, which he hopes is chicken, not pork, are surrounded by yellowy broccoli spears and raisins. Raisins? Who puts raisins in curry?
Whoever made the sticky white rice should give up trying to cook. His mum would have a fit if she saw him eating like this with no spoon, knife, fork, pepper, salt or anything else. They never ate with their hands at home, because she insisted on them being British first, while when they were in Karachi with the aunties, they scooped up their rice with their hands like everyone else. Here, Khalid has no choice but to drop his head in the slop like a dog. The man next to him is licking his food hungrily. Another sucks the contents up from a hole he’s made in the middle. Everyone improvises the best way they can to get the runny food down their throats as quickly as possible. Worse than the glue they call curry that’s dished up in the school canteen, this stuff smells and tastes of rotting lettuce.
Then plastic containers of crackers and cheese are flung at them. Wrapped tightly like airplane food, they take an effort to get into. Unfortunately, Khalid’s crackers land in his toilet bucket in the corner of the cell and, since it hasn’t been emptied yet from this morning, he decides to go without. After lunch, the soldiers appoint a couple of them to empty the buckets. The first two refuse. In the end, they ask for volunteers and three men from the other end of the row are let out of their cells.
The volunteers stretch their arms and legs for a moment. One man, who looks a bit like a Muslim Tony Blair, with the same grinning face, nudges the smaller man beside him, nodding as if to say, Anything’s better than being stuck in there all day.
After watching them closely, Khalid half changes his mind. Perhaps he should have volunteered, though he can’t get his brain past the horrible job they are doing. But there are clear benefits: for a start, the soldiers keep well away from them as they enter each cell to collect the bucket. Meaning each one has the chance to exchange a few words with the occupant and find out something about who they are and what has happened to them. They even get the opportunity to whisper to each other as they head towards the end of the building to hand the buckets over.
When the Tony Blair lookalike gets to Khalid, he’s ready for him.
“I’m only fifteen. English. I’m innocent,” he pleads quickly.
The man smiles. Saying something kind in a language that sounds like Pashtu, which confuses Khalid. Then he disappears into the next cell. Khalid watches closely as his neighbor reaches out to greet him like a long-lost son. Shutting Khalid out. There’s no one here he can talk to. He’s not like any of these men. He’d have a better conversation with the guards.
Increasingly frustrated, it’s the final nail in his coffin. Not only has he been kidnapped and taken to this joke of a place, but he can’t speak to anyone and he appears to be the youngest person in this building. Some look like they might be in their twenties, but none of them look as young as him. Where are the two kids he saw when he arrived?
He’s not even that comfortable talking to people older than him. The respect-for-elders thing has been drummed into him for so long, he finds it difficult to be natural about it. Remembering how some of his class had an easy, jokey relationship with the teachers, while he blushed when attempting to say something friendly to them. Even to Mr. Tagg, who’s the best of the lot.
His mind spirals out of control. Are those two boys being held somewhere else? Given special treatment because of their age? It didn’t look like they were at the time, but perhaps things have changed now.
Khalid’s thoughts exhaust him. Totally alone, out of place and forgotten, he lies down on his mat to cry. Hiding his head in his arms so no one can see.