The Walking Dead

She lit the candle. Before the evening had come, and the darkness, she had worked alone at clearing a space for them in the back room of the semi-detached house. The boy had not helped her, had squatted down against a wall, his eyes glazed, vacant, and he had watched her but had done nothing. She had heaved aside the crumpled, dust-coated carpet and had made thick clouds of rising dirt. She had pushed, needed all her strength, to manoeuvre the settee to the room's centre. She had found a broom in the kitchen, without a handle, and a dustpan, and she had swept and made more clouds. The man was against the other wall, opposite the boy, and she had had to drag the edge of the carpet out from under him, and sweep round his feet. From him, also, there had been no assistance. She made a cleared, cleaned space in the house of her father's friend's cousin, who would not have visited it for a year since the doors and windows had been boarded up, plywood and planks nailed on to prevent access, and would not come — most likely — for another year. By then more dust would have settled and the traces of their presence would have gone. She had worked dutifully, as she would have done at home when she cleaned for her father, her brothers and her mother, who was an invalid confined to her bed. Last, secure inside its bag, which was knotted at the neck, she had laid out the waistcoat and had been careful not to bend it; she had left it near to the door on top of the crude carpet roll. For hours then, without speaking, without moving and without food to eat and water to drink, as the darkness had thickened round them, they had sat in their silence and their thoughts, and she had not been thanked for what she had done.

She had brought the candle from the cupboard under the cottage's kitchen unit. She struck the match and it blazed, and she lit the wick. The flame burned upwards, brightly.

Faria saw the boy's face, blinking as if the light was an intrusion on his peace, and then there was confusion across it, and his eyes were dull, without life. She remembered what she had seen of his face when he had crawled — prodded forward by the man — through the loosened plank at the bottom of the back door. Then, on his face, she had seen despair, and she had tried not to look at it as she had worked on the room, but she saw it now and the same misery was closed over it…And she saw the man's face. It was cold and indifferent. She tried to smile, to match the faint warmth of the candle's flame.

The man asked quietly, 'Why did you light it?'

'Was I wrong to?'

'Did the dark frighten you?'

Was he laughing at her?

She bridled. 'No, I'm not afraid of it. Might have been when I was a child, but—'

He interrupted and his voice was distant, as if he talked to himself, not to her. 'The darkness is a friend. Throughout each day I pray for the darkness. The enemy has night-vision glasses and infrared that identifies a body's heat, but I can move with freedom in the darkness.' He looked away, as if the exchange of words was meaningless and the breath used on them wasted.

She had been kneeling by the candle, but she eased back and sat on the settee, its cushions, where a smell of age and damp reeked, sagged below her. She leaned on the arm and turned to the boy. Her smile was wider and making it cracked at the scar on her face. The knitted skin itched. What to say? He needed kindness, support. What was not hollow? She did not know.

'Are you all right, Ibrahim?' It was meant as kindness but its emptiness echoed round her.

He gazed at her and his eyes were wide open, stared at her. 'Is this where we stay, until…?'

She glanced at the man, saw his shrug. She said softly, 'It is where we stay.'

'Where do I wash?'

'I'm sorry, where..?'

He blurted, 'I have to wash, and to shave my body, spray on scents when it is clean and shaven. Where do I do that?'

She looked at the man. To Faria, he seemed to roll his eyes. Did it matter? She remembered what she had read: the bombers in Lebanon and Palestine, the martyrs, washed, shaved and put on perfumes before they walked to or drove a car at a checkpoint or a shopping mall. She saw it in the man's gestures and the backward toss of his head:, in Iraq, the bombers were on a conveyor-belt and sometimes they were prepared — dressed in a belt or a waistcoat or handcuffed to the steering-wheel of a vehicle — in a grove of palm frees beside irrigated fields, and they had no opportunity to wash, shave and anoint themselves, and went to God and to Paradise dirty. They smelt of sweat when they died. The man did not care. She leaned further across the settee's arm and let her hand rest on the boy's.

She said, 'I will help you to wash. When I go out to buy food I will bring back a razor for you, and scents. I promise I will.'