Exit wound

Ali jumped onto the bed and pulled back the sheets. His father was curled in the foetal position, a bag of bones in a pair of stained pyjama bottoms. Every inch of his sweat-covered skin seemed to be scarred with short, angry red welts, like someone had turned a sandblaster on him years ago.

The girl knelt by the pillow and mopped his face with a flannel. The fact that he was shivering was the only way you could tell that he was still alive.

The girl lifted one of his eyelids. From where I was, just behind her, I could see that the pupil was as small as a pinhead. His breathing was painfully shallow.

Ali felt for a pulse. His sister stood up and put her ear to their father’s chest. Their eyes met and she gave a small shake of the head before turning to a chest of drawers.

‘Ali, you need help? I am-’

The girl raised a hand to me as he moved back towards the bed. ‘No, but thank you. We know what to do.’

Ali manoeuvred his father into the recovery position.

The girl held a syringe to the light, flicked it with her finger to work the air up, and squirted a small jet of the fluid from the needle.

Ali took hold of his father’s wrist and tried to find a vein. He looked at his sister and shook his head. She just shoved the needle into his arm, below the shoulder joint, and depressed the plunger.

I picked up the box from the top of the chest. The drug was American: Naloxone. They used it for acute cases of heroin overdose. Ali’s sister knew they didn’t need to get a vein up: straight into the muscle would do just as well. They’d been here before.

67

I turned back to see the two of them stroking their father’s wet grey hair away from his forehead. Ali checked his cheap market Casio as he and his sister murmured to each other. If the Naloxone worked, Dad’s pulse would become stronger and his breathing more regular in about five minutes. If there was no visible improvement within ten, there’d better be a doctor in the neighbourhood.

Right now I didn’t exist to them. It wasn’t the time to push them for what I wanted. I shut up and looked out over the broken rooftops, cluttered terraces, telephone wires and washing-lines stretching away into the middle distance. There was a thick forest of TV aerials and satellite dishes as far as the eye could see. The dishes weren’t allowed by law, but this was Iran. Another contradiction – and I bet there were plenty of viewers sitting down in front of their TV with a plate of kebabs to watch the BBC.

It was fifteen minutes or so since we’d stepped into the apartment and the Naloxone was doing what it said on the tin. Some colour had returned to their father’s skin. His breathing was stable.

The girl looked at her brother and gave him a faltering smile. The danger appeared to be over – for now.

Ali got to his feet. ‘Jim, this is my sister, Aisha. Aisha, this is James Manley, an English journalist here for the defence exhibition.’

She got to her feet. She brushed her dark hair away from her eyes. ‘Mr Manley…’ Like Ali, she spoke excellent English with a trace of an American accent, and a tone that betrayed the fact she wasn’t too pleased to see me.

Ali beckoned me towards the door. ‘We will need to keep my father under close observation for the next two to three hours. After that, God willing, he should make a full recovery. Aisha will watch first. You and I, meanwhile, can talk.’ He gestured towards the bedroom door. ‘Please…’

68

I followed Ali through the room and out onto a balcony. The sun had just slipped below the horizon. Night was falling fast and with it came the chorus of wailing. We seemed to be hemmed in on all sides by minarets.

Ali leant on the balustrade and stared at the street below. ‘I’m sorry you had to see my father like this. He is a good man, but he suffers.’

‘What happened to him – the scars? The war?’ That type of shrapnel injury does things to a man. I’d seen it.

‘Would you like a drink? I don’t drink myself, but my father always has whisky – black market.’

‘No, mate, I’m all right.’

‘Aisha will bring us something. Some chay, perhaps – tea.’

I asked him again.

He shrugged. ‘When Aisha and I were little, we used to ask him about the scars. He always used to tell us that he’d fought off a fire-breathing dragon.’ He gave a bad dragon roar and then a smile. ‘He used to breathe on us just like that, holding his hands up like claws, and making this noise – the noise that the dragon made when it breathed fire at him. We used to run away, squealing and laughing…’ His voice tailed away.

‘What happened to him, Ali? In the war?’