The Diamond Fist: Chapter 6

[Spoiler]Hi all! It's taken me a while. A looong while. I've had this written for over two weeks and not even bothering to post it. I'm not sure why. Anyway, here, I tried to work on the dialogue here and make the dialogue more personalised. I also tried to show that while Omar speaks excellent English considering his age, he makes a few mistakes grammatically. (Naturally). Let me know how that went! (Also. Liam is now nearly 15).

Anyway, a summary: So, in the prologue and chapter one, we saw Liam feeling guilty for the disappearances of his diving friends. Even his date with Lauren is disrupted when he sees the MISSING poster. Meanwhile, we saw Mustafa Ehab get kicked out of power and beginning to forma plan to return to power while worrying about his ill relative. As for Omar and James... Omar doesn't even last a night with Jasmin and blames it on James, who was busy worrying about how to get Lauren with him. Little does he know that his attempts will cost him a lot more... [/spoiler].

Chapter 6

Liam

The class on Tuesday morning’s registration was buzzing with wild rumours of flying coleslaw and whatever. I busied myself worrying about the homework I hadn’t been able to do because I was at diving yet again, until late in the night, because I needed to get their disappearances of my mind.

Coward.

Yeah. I was a coward. I knew I hadn’t tried. But what was there to do? I could forget about it all if I wanted to, but...

I didn’t even know the police number, and no way would I dive in to see things for myself. It was like some sort of monster was in there, just waiting to suck you in to a dark, empty void of nothingness. Hell. A place to suffocate, but do nothing.

It was beach day that day actually, at Omar’s dad’s hotel which was usually a rare thing. Omar’s Dad was a hotel manager and sometimes he’d invite our class on a quiet day to a small corner of the beach. If we were really lucky... Omar’d be able to convince his Dad to let them try out some water sports, even if it meant we had to pay.

While I was busy etching my whole name into my desk (William Hunt – I lacked a middle name. I did consider using a name like Xavi as my middle name though), James began to talk to me, quietly. “She deserved it. Bloody deserved it. Did you see what she did?”

“I didn’t concentrate. I was just talking to Lauren the whole time.”

“Basically, yeah, we were talking about ... stuff, yeah, and then Jasmin comes up to him and asks him if he can go inside. He says, alright, but doesn’t come, so what she does is go back inside and ditch him for someone else.”

“Mm,” I mumbled, still busy etching the second ‘I’ in my name onto the desk with my maths compass.

“Imagine that! Piss take. Seriously. So yesterday, I went home by myself – it was all quiet–”

I stopped concentrating with what he was saying. He made it sound like a stupid teen drama which blew everything out of proportion or whatever on TV. I couldn’t be bothered listening to stupid crap or whatever. It didn’t even have anything to do with him anyway.

All I began to hear was just snippets of what he was saying as I thought of the time I used to be called ‘Will’ when I was 7 or something.

“...get revenge, so I bought coleslaw...”

When I was 7, a few years after my parents divorced, my mum once dropped me off, hugging and kissing me, before saying loudly in front of my class “Bye Willie!” I knew it was just an affectionate nickname for me, but my class thought it was the stuff of jokes.

“...walking down the street, yesterday, alone...”

Unfortunately, the class appeared to have thought it was the nickname for the body part. For the next three years, I constantly told people that no, it was not my name, until year 5 when I gave up and announced my non-existent Irish ancestry and therefore should be known as Liam. When Mum’s job moved to Sharm El Sheikh, the name stuck.

Dumb, really. Just a name.

Liam was me now though. Liam the diver. Liam the winner. Liam the coward...

“...so I grabbed a handful and kept lobbing it and two of them went splat and hit her hair. All messy and ruined her dress and she looked horrible.”

“What?” I looked up from etching my surname now.

“I said: I was the one who threw coleslaw at Jasmin. I hid behind a car and did it. She didn’t see me.”

“That’s nice. To do it to his girlfriend.”

“Ex, you mean. She flipping deserved it though.”

The bell rang.

***

I sat, shirtless, under a thatched parasol sitting on a sun bed at the beach. I had my hands clasped around my hand tightly absent-mindedly. My eyes were scrunched up so much that I could barely see–the sand was glittering and the water was dazzling, shining straight into my eyes.

I could see Lauren and James through my eyelashes, talking at this beach house where they had all the towels and you paid for the water sports you did. The strips of wood it’d been made out of had been painted beige in a similar colour to the lighter towels.

Omar walked up to them, saying something I couldn’t quite hear. Him and James seemed to be having some sort of disagreement. Omar pointed at the sea and moved it fast from one side to the other and clapped his hands, as if he was saying James’d hit something.

I shuffled slightly, before the sun rays hitting my eyes. I moved back under the shade, my eyes still shut. I didn’t feel like going and throwing each other into the water or sailing on a dinghy and deflating it or whatever. Not yet.

“Liam.” A few minutes later, I looked up to see Omar standing in front of me with his rectangular glasses in his hands too; the gold rims glinted in the light. “Mind if I–“

I nodded, shuffling to make space for him to sit on the sun lounger. I moved slightly and I could see the cliff nearby. I felt like a hammer hit my heart like a bell as it vibrated. I looked down.

A wispy cloud was slowly rolling past the sun, so I managed to see Dan being pushed onto a rubber dinghy. I put on my sunglasses before he made a stab at starting a conversation. “Aren’t you going to join those guys?

“Dun feel like it.”

He nodded and pulled out a newspaper from his pocket. James and Lauren were clutching kites in their hands, as if ready to kite surf. I stretched to read the title. I knew enough about Egyptian Newspapers that it was one of the weekly private opposition papers. It also had a regional news section.

Regional News, huh? Nothing much ever happened in South Sinai. Maybe...

“Say,” I started. Omar looked up. “You can read Arabic... right?”

He snorted. “Course. Better than I read in English. Didn’t you know that I’m Egyptian?”

“Err.” I scratched my head. “Yeah. I–er–forgot. Um. Yeah.”

Omar looked at me weirdly and shook his newspaper with a smile on his face.

“Anyway–have you heard anything on people going... Missing?”

“Nnnno... unless you count that French guy our school. Remember when they asked if anyone saw him in Maths? Anyway, hold on a sec’. I think there was something in here... regional news... Yeah. Here.” He began to read something aloud in Arabic which I couldn’t understand. Or at least, I couldn’t understand any of the key words necessary to understand the article.

I watched Lauren and James kite surfing far in the distance. Lauren was doing alright, managing to keep afloat for a minute. James was closer to the shore, and I could tell there wasn’t any wind. He kept falling off every ten seconds.

He plunged into the water. A few seconds, he rose up facing Lauren. I assumed they were talking to each other because Lauren cupped her ear and replied something back.

Omar finished reading. I dragged my eyes away from them and said, “I didn’t understand much.”

Omar smiled. “Basically it’s saying that on the twelfth, some people went missing. Hey, they all went to a diving competition. You might know who they–”

“Carry on.”

“–anyway, it said that they found that Damien person–French, probably, his surname looks like it–but no one else and there was a list of names like Lukas–“ He leaned in towards the paper “–Wer...ner,  and whatever. It’s interesting. The first ones who went missing were our age. Anyway, there were some snorkelers a few days ago who seem to have gone missing or something. They were at our hotel,” he said, pointing with his thumb behind us. “Wife and Husband, I think. Seventy. From Germany or Russia, can’t remember. Their names weren’t easy to pronounce though... Weird, huh?”

“Um... no. Erm. Thanks. You wouldn’t–er–”

“Somethin’ up? You seem nervous like I’m gonna find out a big secret. I know that you and Lauren are going out, if that’s it.”

I frowned. I hadn’t told James yet. In fact, I hadn’t spoken to him much since the revolution. “You do? Oh... yeah. The disco. Anyway,” I began, prolonging the ‘n’. “Do you happen to know what the police number is?”

Omar began to snort and then laugh, like I said some sort of hilarious joke. Well, whatever it was, I definitely didn’t know, unless it involved some joke about calling ‘999’ when one dumb idiot pointed out there was only one ‘9’ on a phone. I doubted 999 would work in Egypt anyway. “Police...” he roared with laughter.

“Do you?”

It took a while for a moment for him to calm down. Now it was Jasmin being shoved onto the dinghy–Dan’s had over turned. Someone held their breath and went under the water. Few moments later, the dinghy began to sink as they pushed it further into the sea. She began to shriek for help while everyone laughed.

I could still Lauren, floating near the cliff in the water with her kite next to her. James was farther away now, skimming the top of the sea which foamed, like a monster with rabies. The sea was a monster. Then my heart felt like it was hit by a hammer, like a bell being whacked. I tried to think about something else, like how the foam on the sea resembled the top of a Cappuccino with seaweed at the bottom.

“Man...” he panted, “you really don’t know anything, do you?”

I know I’m a stupid idiot, that’s all. “O...kay...”

“There aren’t any policemen around!”

Well that was helpful. “None at all? ... I could’ve sworn the police were shooting people during the protests.”

“They were. I stayed on the edge, and even then my dad’s shadow was hiding me. I’m lucky not to have gotten shot when I went, but it had to be done. Some people near me weren’t so lucky. But they’re cowards and they ran away later. Or maybe they weren’t and it was his stupid Majesty telling them to run away, making the whole place like ... like An-archie–”

“Anarchy?”

“Yeah, that’s the word.  And trying to beg him to come back. Strange how he’s not been arrested. But they’ve been gone since. We’ve become the police. We are the police because we’re one. Eighty million of us, but we’re all one. We’re all Egyptian–what makes Egypt. That sort of means you’re looking at Junior Private Omar Kareem. How can we help?”

I smiled a bit, but it quickly faded away. “Someone er robbed our TV.”

“I’m not going to fall for that. You all live in compounds. Everyone does. You’ve got security people and cameras. You wouldn’t be telling me, would you?”

Damn. He was clever. I remained silent, but took off my sunglasses. He could spot a lie without me needing to cover it up.

“I’m not going to kill you for it. I can help if you need it. We are the ... the... makers sure that people follow the law.”

“Enforcers.” I looked away, into the distance. Lauren wasn’t there anymore and James kept looking around him as if he was looking for her. I couldn’t see her kite either. She probably came by the cliff to the shore, or maybe was behind it.

“So? You gonna tell me?”

I shook my head. “It’s... a private thing.”

“Please.”

I shook my head.

“You can trust me. I swear, I won’t judge you for anything. I can help out.” Looking at the expression on my face, he added, “Even Sherlock Holmes had someone else. Tell me. I’ll help. Please.

I sighed. What help could he give?

Omar had a pleading expression on his face.

“The problem is, Omar, is that I can’t. If I created a mess, I’ve got to fix it. It’s like in Chess. I’ve been playing for about a week, and I’ve learned that the people respect you if you don’t randomly quit because you do a bad move, even if you suck. You can’t press ‘restart’ in a game. Not in anything.”

“So why won’t you tell me? I can help fix that mess you made.”

I shook my head again. “I don’t need to get more people involved.”

“I respect your decision, Liam. I admire you for it. Unfortunately, I don’t take no for no answer.”

I sighed. “But–”

“But what? I bet you I can get you out of this mess faster than if you’re on your own. I’ve got stuff you don’t. I can read Arabic, you can’t. I can speak it, you can’t. I know people from the hotel have gone missing. I’m in it as much as you are, or at least Dad would be. The only problem is that Dad’s busy worrying about what are they going to do about the big drop in tourists now, so I’m the one that can help because I’m not worrying about it.”

I could feel my eyes stinging with tears. Crying? Over this? I was a kid. A six year old kid that cries about something going wrong, not double that, not a diver that’s going to the regional competitions. Not one that’d gone through what I’ve been through.

I turned away. I didn’t want him seeing me break down over this. My stomach twisted into a knot.

What made it worse was that I wanted someone to talk to about it. Since Mum and Andrew, my stepdad, met, I had no one to talk to, no one to share opinions and thoughts. The nearest person that could be was Beth, and she was just four. She wouldn’t understand, and what she did she’d blab to Mum who wouldn’t give much of a damn piece of crap because all she ever did was get pissed off with me. Andrew was great. But he’d blab to Mum too because I was her son and she’d tell him to ignore it or whatever.

And here was a chance. Take it or leave it? Could I get in trouble with the police for it? What had I done? Well, it was bad enough.

“Ana hat ideelak kol filusy law inta aayez.”

I turned back to face him, hastily pretending the sun was in my eyes. I recognised things he had just said like “I”, “All my money”, “if” and “you”.

“No, Omar. You don’t need to.”

“Sherlock?”

“What?”

“I can be your Sherlock instead, if you want?”

I waited a few moments, gazing at the floor. To take this chance or leave it? Take it or leave it? “Alright,” I said, glancing at James, swimming towards the shore now. “I’ll tell you.” I inhaled a big gulp of are, but I couldn’t say anything. I exhaled, inhaled again, and couldn’t say anything. I tried again. “It was me.”

“What?”

“I did it. I saw it.”

“That doesn’t make a drop of sense.”

“I knew them,” I said. “I know who disappeared. They were my friends. We ... we were on that cliff. We were playing truth or dare as a celebration.”

Omar looked at me, mildly amused and shocked slightly.

“It wasn’t that version, Omar. It was all clean. We just dared Lukas to eat a chip with loads of salt and mustard and vinegar and Tabasco sauce and everything. We force fed another Miranda and coke mixed with mustard and lots of salt. Then it came to me. I dared Damien. I dared him to jump off the cliff. I didn’t mean it,” I added, to the shocked expression on Omar’s face. “But they took it seriously and thought it was a wicked dare, and all the boys went and jumped off. Only three of the girls didn’t. And me. I should’ve dived off, Omar. Not them. I should’ve.”

James stepped out of the water and slowly advanced towards us with his kite in tatters.

“I should’ve. Don’t tell, by the way.”

“Hey, Omar, Liam, you two seen Lauren?”

“No, I thought she was with you, man,” said Omar. “Weren’t you two kite surfing?”

“We were. I thought she came back.”

“She didn’t.”

Holy crap. Omar and I looked at each other, before grabbing my sunglasses and shirt, before almost running home.

She’s gone too.