1
First
(slightly shorter and significantly less hazardous)
Half,
Set in THIS World
To Begin With
The first ray of light each morning always made her feel the sun was in the wrong place, or she was in the wrong place, or both. She would wake in her big soft bed, under a duvet decorated with smiling blonde princesses, and the cold English light would already be busy filling up the room, looking weird.
She told her friend Mariette about this, and Mariette said, “It must be because you’re missing the light back home.”
“Home?” said Dhikilo.
“Where you’re from.”
“I suppose so,” said Dhikilo.
But she didn’t suppose so, really. She had no memories of where she was from, and she’d never been back there. It didn’t even exist.
* * *
Mariette, Dhikilo’s best friend, came from France. Dhikilo hadn’t been there, either, but it existed for sure. People went there all the time. It was just across the Channel. On clear days, peering out over the cliffs at Cawber, she could even see it. It was a subtle haze between the silvery grey of the water and the blue of the sky.
The continent of Europe was very near. Ferries sailed back and forth from the white cliffs of Dover to a vaguely visible port called Calais, passing Cawber on the way through. Under the sea, there was a tunnel for cars, lorries and other vehicles, connecting England to the world beyond. During the summer, it brought busloads of tourists to visit Cawber. The buses would park next to the avenue called The Promenade, and whole families of French people would walk along the cliffside, speaking their language, eating English snacks. Germans and Japanese and Spaniards and Italians and Americans, too. All these people came from proper countries, countries that got mentioned in newspapers and had politicians who shook other politicians’ hands while photographers took pictures.
Fiona, one of Dhikilo’s other pals, came from Scotland, which was also a country, even though you didn’t have to cross the sea to get there. It was cool to come from Scotland. Everybody had heard of it, yet it was far away with magnificent ancient mountains and big modern cities and it was on TV quite often. A good combination.
The place Dhikilo came from was never on TV and nobody had heard of it. Sometimes people would say they’d heard of it, but after a while she would realize that they really meant another country whose name sounded similar but wasn’t it.
“I’m not from Somalia,” she would say. “I’m from Somaliland.”
People would look at her disbelievingly, as if she’d just told them that she came from Franceland or Australialand. As if she was just being silly. Or they would ask: “What’s the difference?”
And she couldn’t answer, because she didn’t really know.
A Leaflet with Advice
Some names were a problem to have and others weren’t. Names like Gail and Sarah and Mariette and Lucy and Susan and even Siobhan were OK, but “Dhikilo” was too unusual and needed tweaking. Her friends called her Dicky. A few of the other girls called her Dick and she wasn’t sure if they meant it to be insulting.
Dhikilo sometimes had trouble figuring out if the other girls were being friendly to her or not. Not long after starting at secondary school, she’d been given a leaflet with advice about how to cope with bullying. She hadn’t yet got around to reading it when an older girl called Kim squirted glue in her hair on purpose. Dhikilo had a book in her hands at the time, a big heavy one about history, and she hit the older girl on the forehead with it so hard that Kim fell over backwards and knocked over several of her chums. It was a very bad thing to do and it could have caused brain damage (as her Guidance teacher explained later), and when Dhikilo got home she read the leaflet about bullying and had to admit that the suggestions in it didn’t include knocking your tormentors flat.
Anyway, nobody bullied Dhikilo after that. Unless you counted being called “Dick” and not having as many friends as the average girl at school. She’d done the maths on this. The most popular girls had thirteen to fourteen pals they hung out with, and the least popular girls had zero, while seven was the median (she’d learned that word in Maths class). Dhikilo had three. Arithmetically speaking, that put her in the bottom percentile of befriendedness.
But that was OK. Three was plenty to be getting on with. People were so strange and sometimes you got tired just thinking about them.
Laascaanood
The last place Dhikilo lived before being relocated to the south coast of England was a town called Laascaanood, which sounded like a drink on a Middle Eastern restaurant menu that you think you might try but then you get worried you won’t like it and order a Pepsi instead.
There was a big dramatic story attached to her and Laascaanood, but it was all quite confused and hazy because she’d been less than a year old at the time and there were various adults involved who were all unavailable now.
Basically, there was a war on and her parents had split up and she was being carried around by her father, but there was fighting between Somaliland and Puntland, and her father decided she would be better off not going where he was going. So he gave her away and before she knew it she was in Cawber-on-Sands.
When other girls talked about their early life, there were usually loads of details and the story went on and on until it grew big enough to fill a book. Her own story was awfully short, she had to admit, and there were quite a few holes in it. She should maybe have kept her eyes open and paid more attention at the time.
But she was only a baby then, and babies slept a lot and usually had their eyes closed. Each day, as Dhikilo walked home from school along The Promenade, she would see the young mothers trundling their prams, and the babies would be asleep even when the seagulls were screeching and the wind was fierce. They were charging their energy, postponing the day when they had to sit up and deal with stuff.
* * *
When Dhikilo was eleven, just a couple of years ago, her mum told her that her mother was dead. That is, Ruth, her English mum, gave her the news that her original mum had died. Dhikilo had trouble thinking of the right thing to say.
“How old was she?” she asked.
“Thirty-one,” said her English mum. “It says here.” She was holding a piece of official paper with the news printed on it.
“That’s not very old,” said Dhikilo, after a long pause. “Was she sick?”
Ruth stared at the piece of paper and frowned. “It doesn’t say.”
“What about Dad?”
Ruth looked at her indulgently. “You mean your Somaliland dad?”
“Yes,” said Dhikilo.