A Brighter Fear Read Online Free Page B

questions, but nobody had any answers.
    The Americans shouted their orders in their brusque English, but so many didn’t understand them. I’m lucky my English is good, I have Papa to thank for that, speaking English around the house, keen for me to learn early and learn properly. His fluency and his vocabulary hadn’t come from Western films and music like so many people’s had; it came from living and studying there for years.
    “English history books teach you a different kind of English,” he told me.
    When I hear the Americans talk, I think they could do with some lessons from Papa.
    Was I glad the regime had fallen? Yes, I suppose, I was. But so frightened and so worried.
    Papa and Aziz talked about it over dinner – they chatted and argued and debated about what it would mean to us as a country and as a people. Papa, always the historian, reasoned his argument with fact, Aziz went with what he saw and what he felt. As I watched them and listened to them I sensed the change already; they were Iraqis and they were talking. But even when the debate heated up, it ended in one of two ways: either Aziz’s contagious laugh forcing up the corners of Papa’s mouth, or Hana mentioning the prisons, questioning when they would be opened, and the prisoners liberated. The opposite ends of the scale, one lightening your heart, the other making it feel like lead. Both bringing the family together.
    I saw clouds cross Papa’s eyes whenever prison was mentioned. I saw the muscles fall slightly in his face.
    Life in the city was beyond dangerous, a curfew in the evening, gunfire across the skies, explosions rattling the windows and doors in their frames. I felt closer to Papa than I ever had. We were a strange family for this city, this country. I didn’t know of any other single fathers and I thought of what he did, bringing me up alone, waiting for Mama’s return, and I wondered if he was lonely. He went to work and came home. He did very little else. And I wondered if his belief in Mama’s eventual return ever dwindled, if he ever dared to let himself think she wouldn’t come back.
    Maybe if he had, he would’ve taken Aziz’s advice; left this country, returned to England, found a job there, at least until Baghdad was safe. Things would have been better if he had done so, if he had left. Things would not have ended as they did.
    But his belief in her survival seemed forever undaunted, and he stayed.
    Some days I believed she wasn’t meant to be found, that I should accept she would never come back. Other days I believed it was kinder to think she had died. I knew there had been no justice in this city, and still it eluded us, but always a smallest shadow of hope, the tiniest chink of belief, lurked somewhere inside me, and I could never let go of the possibility that one day she might just return to us.
    But as we waited and we hoped, our lives continued to change before our eyes.
    I watched strange men, in strange uniforms and with strange voices, march and drive into my city with weapons at their shoulders, pointing right, left, up, down, uttering promises of a better life. Safety and security. Freedom and democracy. Liberation.
    When these things would come, I never heard.
    I saw shops with fronts blasted out, schools with roofs caving in, holes in roads, burnt-out cars, piles of rubble that had been homes, plumes of smoke, shells of buildings, husbands comforting crying wives, mothers nursing injured children.
    People at school disappeared; stopped coming, were injured, some killed. My class was suddenly only twelve.
    I cried. Selfishly, I cried for everything I had lost. I missed my friends so much. I sat next to different students, spent my lunch times and breaks with girls I had never spoken to before. I felt lonely. I hoped it might bring a sense of camaraderie between us; all in the same position, all with the same feelings, but it didn’t. It brought a bigger division.
    One of the girls asked me what it was