Chapter Three

      Amal was the first to arrive. She was a long-limbed girl in an orange coat who had just started at school. No one knew where she'd come from or why. We only knew that she couldn't talk. At school she had to write everything down.

      ‘Go and speak to her,’ Teta insisted, giving me a push, but I wouldn't. I'd only invited her to be polite. She wasn't my friend. She wasn't anybody's friend. At school she always sat alone. Not even the teachers knew how to treat her; some were sugary-nice, others ignored her.

      Amal put her present on the table and, still wearing her coat, went to sit near the window. Dark hair hung to her shoulders, and her fringe needed trimming. But then, everything about her was a little too long: her legs and neck, her arms and fingers. When she turned to look at me, though, I decided it was her eyes I liked least. They were eyes that made me feel guilty.

      Half an hour later she was still sitting at the window. Two boys beside her were screaming with laughter, jumping up and down, but she sat quietly as if they weren't there, playing with a button on her cuff.

      ‘Maybe she can speak,’ whispered Naji in my ear. ‘She might be pretending.’

      ‘Why would she do that? It's a silly thing to pretend.’

      He said we could find out. He would step on Amal's foot by mistake and see if she yelped. I watched as he went over and trod casually on it, then strolled back.

      ‘No,’ he said.

      ‘She can't speak.’

      After I'd blown out the candles, played some party games, and Teta had encouraged Naji and me to eat some more, because we didn't eat enough to keep a bird alive, the Rose Man, who lived upstairs with his two daughters, came in to give me a rose. ‘For your birthday, little girl,’ he said. He always called us ‘little girl’ and ‘little boy’ – Naji said it was because he couldn't remember names.

      I thanked him. He often smiled at his bed of rosebushes out on the veranda or touched them as he watered, but I'd never known him pick one before now. He joined Papi in the kitchen, and by the time I went in to put my rose in water, they were deep in conversation, as usual about ‘the events’.

      ‘Which army should we prefer?’ Papi was saying. ‘On one side we have the Palestinian troublemakers, and on the other the Israelis come to remove the problem.’ The red stain on his forehead was wrinkled, like a healing burn. ‘So long as they give us back Beirut, let them come.’

      ‘Yes, let them come to remove one problem and put ten in its place,’ replied the Rose Man sharply. ‘There'll be no end that way – none that we want anyway. Blame them if you like – every Christian does, I know – but—’

      ‘So, are we to let them overrun our country?’ interrupted Papi. It was always this way, with Papi blaming the Palestinians.

      I noticed that even the hair on the Rose Man's chest was white: it stuck up over his shirt, like the hairs on a corncob. He said there was nowhere else for the Palestinians to go, and that in any case they and the Muslim militias were controlled by Syria.

      But Papi was coiled tight as a spring. The Palestinians attacked northern Israel, he said, and the reply always came back ten times as strong, and always aimed at civilians. We were stuck in the middle, watching our own people being killed. ‘So now let Israel fix it. Let them do whatever they can to get rid of the Palestinians. They're taking over our country like rats.’

      ‘Nabeel,’ tutted the Rose Man.

      ‘Like rats, I said,’ he repeated. ‘They've set up a state in Lebanon the same as they tried to do in Jordan.’

      ‘You're unreasonable, Nabeel. So much hate. Too much.’ And I wondered as I left the kitchen why Papi hated the Palestinians so bitterly.

      It was busy in the living room, and when Mami told me to take my presents to my room, Karim followed me. Although he was in my class, I didn't really know him and, besides, everyone thought he was weird. Earlier, his light blue suit had made Naji goggle. ‘And look at his hair,’ Naji had hissed. ‘It's been stuck down with glue!’ But his present had been ping-pong bats. There was no ball and we didn't have a table, but Naji's whistle had told me he thought it was the best present too.

      ‘I want to be an astronaut.’ Standing in my room twisting his neck round uncomfortably in his collar, Karim announced it as though I'd asked him a question. ‘I want to fly and wear a helmet and grow five centimetres taller, because you grow five centimetres taller in space.’

      When I admitted grudgingly that they were good reasons, a crescent moon smile opened in his face, and I saw he'd recently lost a front tooth.

      ‘If you were standing on Mars and looked up, the sky would be pink.’

      ‘How could it be pink?’ Pink. A pink sky. Maybe it changed colour every day so it was always a surprise when you woke up. Everything else would be different too: trees would grow sideways and shed feathers instead of leaves, the wind would tell you secrets as it blew, roses would grow big as houses, and there would be no war.

      ‘How come your father's sitting in the kitchen? Doesn't he like children?’

      ‘It's not that. He's just different from other people because he had a curse put on him. He wasn't always like this,’ I explained. ‘He used to be happy and laugh.’ Then I told him how I'd gone up to the witch's house with Naji that summer. ‘And we were so close we could see the broken fountain outside.’

      Karim's eyes were wide. His hair was unfurling from his head, and his ears stuck out like handles.

      ‘How are you going to go up into space in a giant firework if you're scared of an old witch?’ I asked.

      ‘I'm not scared!’

      #x2018;Okay.’ I stood up. ‘But everyone thinks you're weird.’

      He didn't say anything, and I felt sorry to have said it. Besides, I was starting to like him.

      ‘Where do you live?’

      ‘Up the hill.’

      ‘Do you want to come over and play ping-pong sometime?’

      He frowned. ‘Do you think I'm weird?’

      I shrugged. ‘Maybe. But you can come anyway.’

      We went back into the living room to rejoin the others, and were in the middle of Musical Chairs when the Rose Man left. Behind him, Papi's face was taut. ‘All this noise!’ he barked. ‘Can't you shut up for five minutes?’

      The laughter faded. No one spoke, only the music played on.

      Teta went up to Papi. ‘Son, they're children. It's Ruba's birthday. Let them enjoy themselves.’

      ‘My head's throbbing, and all I can hear is their shouting and squealing. Haven't they had enough yet?’

      Teta tried to soothe him, but he swung round to face us. ‘That's enough, do you hear? Enough!’

      Mami switched off the music. One of the girls had begun to cry.

      ‘All right, son, all right,’ said Teta. ‘We'll send them home.’