The next day I continued to mope around the house. I was feeling a little better, but still uninspired. My mother dragged me into the kitchen to help with lunch. My father invited me again on his patrol. I refused. Choosing to hang around in my room waiting for those golden moments when the internet was suddenly working. I watched a bit of television, I avoided my brother. For a kid who packed his bag to join the revolution he seemed to be more absorbed in his own world than before. The revolution seemed to be just information to him now. Bits of information he picked up from the television and the internet when he could. And yet last night what he said made sense to me in some way. Maybe he was just saying what I was thinking. That it’s OK to not be there. That it is possible to be a part of it but not participate. But how? There were people risking their lives everyday, how could anything I do in my small little world compare? What he talked about didn’t seem like it would be enough for me.
And it showed in the moping. So I avoided him. I tried to avoid my father too. He was grumpy. I could tell his frustration. My father is the worst person to go on holiday with. After about three days he gets grumpy. He misses being in theatre, operating, it’s where he belongs, where he is at his most relaxed.
Neither of my parents had been to work. Appointments were cancelled, operations postponed, or relocated where they could be. They became neighbourhood doctors: checking temperatures, blood pressure, sugar levels. Having them barricaded in the neighbourhood meant suddenly everyone’s warts and sores came out of the woodwork.
My parents often visit sick neighbours. They visit partly because that’s what you do when someone is sick and also partly because the neighbours feel reassured by their comforting words as doctors. That alone would often heal them; a doctor friend saying everything is going to be OK. Now they seemed to do it a lot more.
By the evening I was also feeling sick. Sick of my room, sick of the lack of Internet, sick of the clothes I was wearing. I regretted not going on patrol with my father.
We all sat around the living room, all together before curfew. All slouched around the television. It felt like a movie moment. Like there were other people watching us on television wondering what the hell we were doing. We looked a state. We looked like we were living through groundhog day and we had done it so many times we had lost all hope of anything being different.
Suddenly, we heard a wail. That was different. It wasn’t the usual cries and noise you hear in our neighbourhood, those you know. All of us could tell the difference. My father went to the front door and listened for a while through the peephole. There was no other sound than the howl of pain. He opened the door slowly and instantly the wail got louder. It was in the staircase. My father stepped out to follow the sound. I jumped to join him, but my mother grabbed my arm to stop me. I pulled away from her. It happened so fast, I didn’t realise I had done it until I was at the door. She didn’t try to stop me again. Salem was watching from his seated position, paying attention to what was happening in his usual silent way. I followed my father into the staircase and we peered over. I could sense the other neighbours behind their front doors, listening through their peepholes too. No one opening the door, saying to each other ‘It’s OK, Dr Ahmad is seeing to it.’
Down at the bottom Mustafa was rolling around on the floor, his clothes wet, holding his head, wailing. There was blood on his hand. My father rushed down to him on seeing the blood. He blocked my path midway. ‘You’ve come far enough,’ he told me.
I stopped there as my father knelt down over Mustafa. He softly removed Mustafa’s hand away from his head to look at the wound. It was only now the neighbours started leaving their apartments, some rushed to help and eventually they prepared to carry Mustafa upstairs.
Before they lifted him my father called for my mother. She also came rushing down. Kneeling on the opposite side of Mustafa, my father handed her a towel that was handed to him a moment ago. She took it and needing no instruction folded it efficiently and placed it over the wound with the right amount of pressure. With her other hand she stroked Mustafa’s hair and standing up with the others, she made herself small as they carried him to our apartment. I leant against the wall as they passed me, my mother completely ignoring me. It said enough.
The neighbours hung around for a while offering my parents towels, cotton wool and thanks. One even offered my father a needle and thread. He laughed of course, ‘What, you think we are in a movie?’ My father loves his rhetorical questions. ‘That won’t be necessary, thank you,’ he said, closing the door to the offers and spectators dressed as Good Samaritans.
The wound was deep, but thankfully didn’t require stitches. They cleaned and bandaged Mustafa up. They talked about concussion, gave him a cup of hot sweet tea and laid him on the sofa until he began to slowly say what happened.
‘I was pushing my stall out from under the stairs to take onto the street. You know I have no fruit or vegetables left to sell. But, I thought “Let me wash the stall before curfew.” I like to keep it clean. You know the dust in this city. If I don’t keep it clean the customers won’t buy. If they see it is filthy, my fruit rots. And besides, my cousin said he will bring me some apples tomorrow … inshallah.’
‘Get on with it,’ my father snaps, wondering like the rest of us when this man will say what happened instead of going over every detail like he was reporting to a Chief Constable. Did we really need to know about the apples and the cousin?
‘Anyway, so I was washing it and these thugs, I don’t know them, they didn’t tell me their name, I didn’t ask. They came and threw the bucket of water over me and started shaking my stall and laughing. Now I may be old, but I’m not a coward. I started pulling them away from it, fighting them but they were three. One smashes the bucket over my head and the next thing I remember is waking up at the bottom of the stairs. Did no one hear the shouting?’ he asked, looking around him, wondering where all the neighbours had gone.
My father stood up. ‘What is the use of a neighbourhood watch if no one is watching?’ he boomed. Another rhetorical question and Mustafa looked like he wanted to answer, but decided it was better not to.
Then my father stormed out of the house and banged on the door two doors down. A man slowly opened it. ‘Dr Ahmad, something wrong?’ he asked with an innocent smile.
‘Yes, there is something wrong. Where is the patrol schedule?’ he asked, stretching out his hand demanding a paper trail. The man looked at my father’s hand like he didn’t know what to do with it. Shake it? Twist it? What?
‘We decided the patrol wasn’t necessary today,’ he offered as a meek explanation.
‘We?’ my father asks.
He stormed back into the house, slamming the door. ‘We?’ he asked us, the word refusing to sink in. ‘How can this country have a revolution if it’s still “We”? We can’t agree on anything. We try to establish a neighbourhood watch which is beneficial to everyone and by the end of the first week it has fallen apart.’ He said this dropping his hands to his sides, as though a weight dropped from them. In my imagination that weight rolled along the floor and stopped at my feet, waiting for me to pick it up and carry it on my shoulders.
‘And what about you Mustafa? Are you not part of the neighbourhood?’
Mustafa affirmed that he was indeed.
‘So why was nobody watching? Why are you under the stairs? Is it enough for us that you are under the stairs?’
I wished he would stop asking so many questions. Everything he said, he said in a question. I could see Mustafa moving to answer the questions, but not being able to keep up, not knowing if he even should.
My father sat down on the armchair. And Mustafa awkwardly pulled his legs from off the sofa to leave.
‘Where are you going?’ my father noticed.
‘I should go,’ he replied. ‘Thank you for your help, but I don’t want to bother you. Thank you.’
‘Are you crazy?’ my father exploded again. Mustafa sat back. ‘Did you just not hear what I said?’
My mother leaned into Mustafa and put her hand on his arm. ‘You will stay here with us,’ she told him softly.
‘Of course he will,’ my father announced. ‘I can’t let him out there to face those thugs on his own.’
I wondered if he was talking about the three men that beat him or the neighbours.
Later we all calmed down. Mustafa settled as best he could, conscious of the fact that he took up the whole sofa in a family home. Still, not totally relaxed because intruding into a family’s home is considered very rude, even if you have concussion. Of course he wasn’t intruding, but it was difficult for him to not think that.
We all drank sweet tea again. My father had a whisky. He drinks sometimes, but very rarely, usually when he thinks he has earned it. My mother doesn’t drink, she used to but stopped when she became pregnant with me. Mustafa stuck with the tea, not because he didn’t drink, he probably did and could have done with a double shot. But the offer to share whisky was too hospitable for him. He didn’t want to disrespect my mother. My father accepted his offer of abstinence with grace.
‘Who can we trust?’ my father asked us all, us all knowing it was directed at Mustafa.
‘How can we have a revolution if we can’t agree on a simple thing?’ repeating his question from earlier, the whisky making him turn philosophical once more.
‘But we can agree, Dr Ahmad,’ Mustafa said. ‘We all agree Mubarak must go.’
My father nodded a few times, ‘We seem to only be able to agree on what we don’t want.’
Eventually we all went to bed. Mustafa was given a pillow and blanket and we all put our cups in the sink and made our way to our rooms.
I slept well that night.