Baghdad Fixer Read Free Page B

missing the lift. “I am praying hard for your Noor, and Inshallah, we’ll do our best.”
     
    I gaze at him and don’t know what to say in return except Inshallah again. God-willing. My Noor? Why not Dr Mahmoud’s Noor?
     
    I tell him I need to help these foreigners find a friend, and with another arc, which feels more artificial than the first, he points us in the direction of the morgue.
     
    I hear Baba’s admonitions replay in my head. “Don’t tell me Inshallah ,” he used to say when we were children, “tell me you’re going to do it. Inshallah is a euphemism for abdicating responsibility.”
     
    ~ * ~
     
    I am worried that I will not be able to tolerate the smell and the sight of the bodies, so I implore the nurse to search for us. And while she is explaining that she is too busy, I fish around in my pockets and take out a wad of cash — at least 50,000 dinars — and even though this is probably half a month’s salary for her, it’s worth it for me. When I place the money in her hand and call her uhti, my sister, and say please, please, help these nice foreign people who are suffering alongside us in such a time as this, she nods and says tab’an, of course. I remind her that I am Dr al-Amari’s son and that we will be in the fifth-floor reception area.
     
    Raphael, who trails behind the women taking notes, comes forwards.
     
    “Hey, wait, this doesn’t make sense. That nurse isn’t going to know what Jonah looks like. I mean, Sam, not that he’s there. What are the chances? But still, if they don’t even have a name ID on him...someone’s got to...I’ll go down with her.”
     
    Sam turns towards Raphael and wraps her arms around his shoulders and gives him a hug. I look around to see if anyone’s watching, though I’m not sure why. “That’s a good idea,” she says after she lets go. “If you can’t find us, just meet us—”
     
    “On the fifth floor,” I interrupt. “We’ll be on the fifth floor.”
     
    Raphael nods and leaves, loping down the hall in the direction in which the nurse disappeared.
     
    In the lift, the women smile politely at me but then talk only to each other. They run through the places they’ve checked for their friend. The places they’ve yet to check. The time it will take to get back to the hotel in order to “file a story”. A story. Is that the same as an article for the newspaper? Isn’t “story” the word one uses when it’s made up?
     
    We walk down the hallway towards the cardiology unit, but when I open the door nothing is as I expect it to be. The waiting room has been turned into an overflow space for patients, and there are about fifteen of them in various states of injury, a patchwork of flesh in disrepair. Nothing is as it is supposed to be, the machines are beeping too loudly in their cacophony of life-support and there’s no fresh air. I feel a sense of relief when I see my father walk out of one of the consulting rooms. He smiles as though he is surprised to see these foreign women alongside me.
     
    “I thought you were resting,” he says.
     
    I try to focus on his eyes, to avoid seeing the dried blood on his shirt which I know is Noor’s. Just as the splatters of blood on my shirt are Noor’s. I am glad that the foreign women cannot understand Arabic, and that they probably won’t detect my father’s less-than-enthusiastic reception.
     
    “These are foreign journalists who got lost looking for a missing friend,” I say to him in English.
     
    My father turns to them and introduces himself, and I find myself wishing that his words could sound perfectly English like mine, instead of his rolling Arab accent that reminds me of being ten years old in Birmingham and suddenly feeling conscious of the way my mother sounded when we went round the shops.
     
    Baba walks the three of us to his office, down the hall past the labs. The small office feels familiar: the worn-out medical textbooks, the picture of the five of us on