“I have to go,” says Samir.
“Me too,” I say, but I’m still worrying about Lindy. You just can’t trust her, she’s meaner than the Jayne family and she’s a Bellows. Everyone steers clear of that family. The oldest brother is in prison. They’re all thugs. For all we know she could go straight to Terrence and his gang and give us away.
Samir murmurs something to Mohammed who’s already half asleep again. Then we climb out the window and start to push through the bushes around the hut and I’m thinking, it’s actually not that difficult to spot from the beach. Lindy saw us coming this way, so who else might? Mrs. Saddler? Chaz?
“He can’t stay here forever,” I call over my shoulder to Samir.
“I know,” says Samir. “I’m working on it.”
“And we definitely can’t trust Lindy,” I say.
We crawl through the hole in the fence and walk around behind the Lifeboat Station as the Solent opens out in front of us.
It’s very cold but clear and you can see the outline of West Wittering on the other side of the water just a mile or two away to the southeast. At low tide when the sand flats off East Head are uncovered you could almost swim there.
“It reminds me of the Tigris,” says Samir, his hands shoved in his pockets, the hood of his sweatshirt pulled over his spiky hair.
“There’s a sea in Baghdad?” I ask.
Samir laughs. “The Tigris is a river; it goes right through the city. Iraq is the land of the two rivers, the Tigris and the Euphrates.”
I have to admit I haven’t really thought much about Samir’s country before. “So what is there in Iraq other than rivers and bombs?” I ask, not really concentrating because I’m wondering if I could fit a run in before it gets dark. Me and Trudy could do with the exercise.
Samir’s gone all quiet again and I look over at him staring out to sea. Is he wondering how long it would take to sail to Baghdad? I mean, you definitely can’t swim there. Even my geography’s not that pathetic.
“That seems to be all the people here know about Iraq. Bombs and killings. There’s so much more . . .”
His voice fades away and I’m a bit stumped so I say, “Do they have fish and chips in Iraq?” and Samir grins.
“We used to have picnics by the river. My dad used to buy fish fresh from the fishermen. Then we’d cook it with mint and garlic on charcoal under the palm trees. Everyone does it, we call it mazgouf.”
“Mazgouf.” That felt good to say. I can almost smell the barbecue. And palm trees? “Do you get coconuts?”
“Not in Iraq,” says Samir. “They’re date palms. We have the best dates in the world and we make this syrup called dibis. It’s sweet like honey. You dip your bread in it.”
I’ve never seen a real palm tree but I always thought it would be cool to climb one barefoot like they do on telly.
“So your palm trees, do they bend over like the trees on Hayling?” And I point to the scrubby trees on the edge of the Nature Reserve. The wind has pushed them so hard they look like they are going to tip over.
“They bend in the wind really low but they never fall down,” says Samir. “My father used to say we Iraqis are like the palm trees. We’ll never break, whatever happens to us. Our roots are too deep in the land.”
“You must miss it a lot.”
We’re walking fast now to keep warm and Samir says, “What I miss is playing football after school with Daoud.”
“Who?”
“Da-oud,” he says again slowly. “It’s like David. He was my best friend since we were born. We did everything together, always sat next to each other in class. I don’t have a friend like that here.”
He looks at me and our eyes lock for a few seconds. Then he looks away and I kick about in the sand wondering what to say. He must feel so lonely sometimes, his parents dead and everything he knew, friends, school, shops, all gone.
I look at the sea over the tall grasses waving about on the dunes and think about everything I love about my home, the beaches and the surfing waves and all the different birds, which are like old friends really. The air smells of salt and seaweed with a whiff of engine oil dumped by tankers crossing the Channel miles away.
My family have lived here forever. What if I never saw it all again?
Samir is rolling up a cigarette. He lights it, takes a drag and passes it to me. I take a small puff and pass it back.
“Naazim would go mad if he knew I smoked,” he says. “Once Daoud had a cigarette,” he says, and gives a little laugh. “He stole it from his uncle. We were only six. We thought we were really tough lighting up. Took us almost a whole box of matches to even get started. But when we took a puff we couldn’t stop coughing and then Daoud was sick all over his new shoes!”
I say jokingly, “Smoking can kill you . . .”
“Bombs can kill you,” cuts in Samir.
Once again we fall silent. There’s a lot of difficult stuff to avoid, I think, and then I decide that there is something I really need to know.
“If you’re worried they’ll deport Mohammed, why do you think your family are safe here?”
“No, it’s not like that,” says Samir, and he digs his hands in his pockets and looks away. Then he says, “We have proper permission to stay now. It’s called refugee status. We’re not asylum seekers anymore, we can work and I can go to school. That’s what Mohammed needs.” He sucks back the last of the roll-up and stubs out the end on a rock. “It’s my job to find someone to help him.”
“Our job,” I remind him, and he gives a little nod. “And we have to do that before Lindy starts blabbing and Terrence kicks off.”
We reach the road and as I watch Samir go off on the bus I can’t help wondering who on earth can magic up a brand-new life for our asylum seeker.