"That little
monkey is on the roof again."Kahil
heard his mother's voice drift up from the open kitchen window. His
father's voice came a moment later.
"I'll fetch him."
Kahil imagined his father walking from the kitchen
towards the front door and he followed the same path across the
roof. He had worked out the layout of the house from up here, knew
when he stood over his own bedroom, or his parent's room, or the
living room.
As Kahil reached the edge of the roof, the front
door opened and his father stepped out into the twilight.
"Kahil?"
"I'm here, papa."
He expected an order to come down, but instead heard
his father chuckle.
"Why do you climb up there anyway?"
"Because I can see the whole world from up here!"
Another chuckle and Kahil laughed too. Silly. He'd
thought that the first time he climbed up. Seeing the tall buildings
on the horizon, he imagined they were not Az-Ma'ir, but New York, or
London, or Paris.
That first time he had climbed up to retrieve a
football he'd kicked too high. Finding the decorative stonework on
the corners of the one storey house made good hand and footholds,
he'd kicked off his shoes and shinned up there like the little
monkey his mother had called him.
And discovered a secret place.
His football was there and he threw it down to
bounce around the yard. But another football lay there too, in a
corner, resting against the low parapet that ran around the edge of
the flat roof. It must have been there a long time, sad and deflated
now, blistered from sun and sandstorms. The top of it that faced the
sun had faded to grey; the shaded underside was still dark red. When
he picked it up, insects ran from the shady places now exposed to
the sun. He didn't recall owning the ball, or losing it. Whose had
it been?
Stones lay around. Big ones that filled his small
hands. How did they get onto the roof? Did someone throw them? Did
they fall out of the sky? Rocks did fall out of the sky; meteorites,
from space. But they didn't just drop onto your roof like rain; they
shrieked out of the sky in a ball of fire and left your house a
crater in the ground.
He'd found a dead bird there once. His father had
been at work that day, so his mother laid out an old sheet on the
ground and threw him her gardening gloves. He had to hold the gloves
onto his hands; small fists balled inside them, the fingers empty,
while he scooped up the bird and tossed it down onto the sheet.
Perhaps it was bigger than his mother expected; she shrieked and ran
away from the corpse. Kahil climbed down and, feeling like the man
of the house, dealt with the bird, bundling it up in the old sheet.
Later his father burnt it up in a bonfire.
One day he found, or rather met, a cat on the roof.
It lay stretched in the sun and looked quite put out by the
intrusion when the boy climbed up to join it. Where the cat came
from, Kahil had no idea. Nobody around here owned a cat. Some farms
lay a few miles away, perhaps it belonged there. Farms had cats to
keep down the rats, he knew.
Tiring of his curiosity after a few minutes, the cat
left, flicking its tail. Kahil watched amazed as it jumped from the
roof to the washing line tied between the house and a pole in the
garden. It walked along the line like a tightrope walker in a circus
and then jumped again onto the wall around their garden. Dropping
down from there it vanished from sight, until a moment later, when
he saw it walking away up the road, soon vanishing into a shimmer of
heat haze.
"Come down now, boy. Time for supper."
Well, if one thing got Kahil down from his secret
kingdom on top of the world, it was mealtimes. He ran to the corner
and started to climb down, hands and bare feet gripping the warm
stones. Half way down he put his right foot onto a stone and... it
moved, came loose, his foot slipped off the stone, hands slipped, he
fell...
His father caught him, grunted as he took Kahil's
weight, and then let him slide down to set him on his feet.
"Thank you, papa!"
He looked around for his sandals and slipped them
on, sand and grit from the roof and the ground still pressing into
the soles of his feet. When he looked up, he saw a scared expression
in his father's eyes for a moment, as he looked up, then down at
Kahil.
"Be more careful, son." He spoke quietly, and then
reached out to ruffle Kahil's hair, making the boy laugh and duck
away. "I won't always be there to catch you."
Kahil just smiled at him. Of course his father would
always be there. Where would he go