Breach by Olumide Popoola Page B

affection for the girl and doesn’t care that much about her brother’s opinion, but she loathes the idea of anyone – especially herself – using someone else for their own ends.
    Her hands have stopped shoe-sorting. She gazes down towards the other end of the warehouse – and cavernous is the right word: it’s a vast metal cave – to the shadows of people and vehicles crossing the open gates, making the sunlight flicker. New arrivals seeking signed permission slips to go into the camp. Ever more vans full of donations: sleeping bags, kids’ toys, tents, food, every size of jacket, woolly hats, stout boots. Some tat, but not too much, really. And in here a hum of voices, the efficient stride of organisation, the rattle of trolley wheels over the gritty concrete floor. Marjorie smiles to herself. This comforts her, the meld of big-heartedness and discipline. A tall, grey-haired man walks past her trestle table, forehead furrowed in concentration as a young and multi-tattooed woman with a clipboard explains his task for the day.
     
    Up on stage, the flute teacher jumps onto a chair to seek out Muhib’s face in the crowd. Under its beehive hexagram panels, the Dome buzzes with voices and laughter. Muhib sees her – who can miss those pink dreads? – and slips through the crowd to the front.
    ‘Yeah man, be close by,’ she yells at him over the tuning of instruments.
    Feedback squawks from a speaker as two grinning boys sprint from amps to mixing desk, bouncing on their rubber soles. Muhib nods to the guy on the xylophone, one of his Ethiopian buddies. To the side of the stage, turned away from the crowd, an older man blows notes on a saxophone and the clamour slowly dies away and it all begins.
    Muhib watches the musicians, watches his teacher, watches her lips make the flautist’s pout, grips his own flute, swallows. To walk up there – will he be able to do it? Will he remember the chords? Ha! Will she even remember to invite him up on stage, engrossed as she is?
    She does, she remembers. First in German and then in English, she tells the audience that her student – so talented! – is going to play. ‘Give a big hand, people!’
    From the stage, because of the way he holds his head to play, he sees the face of one girl, a girl he hasn’t met before, her hair in plaits, smiling at him, and he plays especially for her.
    ‘My hands were shaking, believe me!’ he tells her afterwards, this English girl. So sweet. Such green eyes. And her hair, which looked blonde from the stage, turns out to have red in it. ‘What is that called in English?’
    ‘Ginger,’ she says, wrinkling her nose.
    ‘Beautiful ginger!’
    *
    Marjorie sees him before Julie does.
    ‘There’s your handsome friend,’ she says, pointing up at the restaurant window.
    Marjorie has parked her van and they’re heading back to the hostel. At the Afghan café in the camp, Julie had faced the door, hoping he’d walk in, hoping she’d spot him over her plate of spicy beans. And now it turns out that he’s been here in town this evening instead, eating with his volunteer friends. She can hear them laughing through the open window, above Marjorie’s head, sees one of them throw his arm around Muhib’s shoulder. Perhaps the pink-haired flute teacher is there. Probably she’s the one he’s in love with.
    ‘Do you want to go in and join them?’ Marjorie asks her.
    ‘God, no.’
    How humiliating that would be, trailing around after him. With her aunt too. A pair of ginger mice.
    But now Muhib has seen her and leans out of the window. ‘Come, Julie,’ he calls. ‘Come!’
    So she does. She climbs onto the railings and reaches up her hand and he and his friend lift her into the restaurant through the window, laughing, to land on her bum on the wooden floor. When she’s right-side-up again, Julie shouts down to Marjorie, ‘See you later!’ and Marjorie waves back.
    Muhib’s English friend is laughing. He cuffs Muhib’s