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  “Glorious. A story that will be found and enjoyed and dreamed about for years to come.”

  —Neil Gaiman, bestselling author of The Ocean at the End of the Lane

  “If ever a book like this was needed, it is now. Dhikilo is a splendid heroine for our time: She stands for kindness, honesty and humanity.

  Her triumph will have readers rejoicing.”

  —Diane Setterfield, bestselling author of Once Upon a River

  “Faber’s writing is so dizzyingly accomplished that he is able to convince you that, just sometimes, the old stories are the best ones.”

  —The Guardian

  Michel Faber has written seven other books, including the highly acclaimed The Crimson Petal and the White, The Fahrenheit Twins and the Whitbread-short-listed novel Under the Skin. The Apple, based on characters in The Crimson Petal and the White, was published in 2006. He has also written two novellas and has won several short story awards, including the Neil Gunn, Ian St. James and Macallan. Born in Holland and brought up in Australia, he now lives on the south coast of England.

  Also by Michel Faber

  Under the Skin

  The Hundred and Ninety-Nine Steps

  The Courage Consort

  The Crimson Petal and the White

  The Fire Gospel

  The Book of Strange New Things

  Michel Faber

  D

  (A Tale of Two Worlds)

  With Love and Thanks

  To Louisa

  Contents

  1

  To Begin With

  A Leaflet with Advice

  Laascaanood

  What Words Meant

  The Second-Best School in Cawber

  So, Let Me Try to Help You

  To Begin With, Again

  Eeper Unerstaning

  Onkeys, Only a Fiver

  Hel in Our Hearts

  Not Knowing

  A Note from a Parent

  An Unacceptably Odd Burial

  Sniffing Out the Truth

  Antique Splendours

  Ectoplasmic Helpers

  Back to Normal

  Because

  The Land of Liminus

  A Particularly Short Chapter

  2

  What the Shining Objects Were

  Dreadlocks, a Dolphin, a Piece of Driftwood

  The Magwitches

  The Growing Attraction of Lying Down

  The Bleak House

  The Management

  The Wrong Kind of Trees

  The Quilps

  Evil Cheese

  Scarcely Limping at All

  Humanly Possible

  The Drood

  The Purportedly Magic Weather-Changing Song

  Nothing Like a Comb

  All Hallelujahing

  Why Seek Evil?

  The Real Eal and Other Impressive Artefacts

  A Sound without Any Meaning

  An Apology

  An Exciting New Evelopment

  The Law Must Be Obeyed

  The Marshalsea Room, No. 8

  Just a Story Someone Had Told Her

  Asking for More

  The Smallest Possible Cage

  At Last, the Gamp

  The Trial

  All the D-Words She Could Think Of

  An Explosion of Fed-upness

  An Adventurer of Considerable Experience

  Homewardly Re-Encounter 1: The Spottletoes

  Homewardly Re-Encounter 2: The Drood

  Homewardly Re-Encounter 3: Mr Pumblechook

  Homewardly Re-Encounter 4: The Quilps

  Homewardly Re-Encounter 5: The Bleak House

  Homewardly Non-Encounter: The Magwitches

  To End With: Dhikilo’ s Story

  After Such a Grand Assortment of Words

  Author Note

  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.

  Her English mum smiled, her face all complicated with knowledge about grown-ups that couldn’t be explained. “Still the Mystery Man, I’m afraid.” That was how she often referred to Dhikilo’s original father: the Mystery Man. Nobody seemed to know what had become of him after he’d tossed Dhikilo through the air into the arms of a nurse.

  By contrast, Dhikilo’s English dad was not a Mystery Man at all. He was in the next room reading a book about a retired politician, with a mug of tea balanced on the arm of the sofa, and his name was Malcolm—Malcolm Bentley. Which made his adopted daughter Dhikilo Bentley. Or sometimes, if she was in the mood to write a nice long line at the top of her school jotter, Dhikilo Saxardiid Samawada Bentley.

  What Words Meant

  For a while after getting the news about her mother, Dhikilo tried to learn more about her. At first it seemed that Malcolm and Ruth didn’t know anything, and then after a while it seemed there might be some official stuff that Dhikilo could find out, maybe, but not until she was eighteen.

  “Why eighteen?” she asked.

  “Because that’s how the law works,” said Malcolm gently. “They’ve thought very carefully about these sorts of situations.”

  “Who’s ‘they’?” asked Dhikilo.

  “The people whose job it is to figure out the best and kindest way to help children with...questions,” said Malcolm. “And they decided there are things that are easier for a child like you to understand if you’re a little bit older.”

  “But when I’m eighteen I won’t be a child any more,” said Dhikilo.

  “Yes, exactly,” said Malcolm, as if she was seeing his point instead of disagreeing.

  * * *

  Next, Dhikilo had tried to learn more about the country of Somaliland, in case it helped her understand anything about her parents. Her Geography teacher was no use, and there was nothing in the school library. She got the impression that no matter how hard you looked, there wasn’t much to be found, especially if you were a young girl in Cawber-on-Sands who spoke only English (and a little French).

  There was a bookshop on the High Street, which had thousands of books but none specifically about Somaliland. On their Travel shelf they had one guidebook for tourists who fancied going to lesser-known places in Africa that were beautiful, uncomfortable and maybe dangerous, and in the middle of that book there was a chapter about Somaliland. Dhikilo read it in the shop. It didn’t take long.

  Somaliland was big—almost as big as Britain—but had far fewer people living in it. It wasn’t exactly desert, but it was desert-ish. It had a lot of cute goats and black-faced sheep who sometimes died of hunger when there wasn’t enough rain to let crops grow. It had bats and pythons and squirrels and giant guinea-piggy things called hyraxes. The skies in the photos were very blue and empty. The women wore head-scarves. There weren’t many shops and you were supposed to buy stuff with a special kind of money that only existed in Somaliland and wasn’t worth anything anywhere else. The rest of the world still hadn’t decided whether to accept Somaliland as a real country or not. It might happen one day maybe, but not soon.

  Somalilanders were very keen for tourists to come, but this wasn’t as simple as just going there in a tour bus and walking around eating ice cream. The war that had made Dhikilo’s father do what he did was officially over, but every now and then people started fighting again regardless. You weren’t supposed to venture outside the main cities of Hargeisa and Berbera. If you wanted to go to Laascaanood, the government insisted that you be accompanied by special soldiers who would make sure nothing bad happened to you. You were also supposed to buy a few bundles of chat leaf to give to guards at checkpoints so that they would let you through. Dhikilo turned the page hoping there would be a helpful picture of a chat leaf, but the next page was already a different country. She put the book back on the shelf.

  At home, Dhikilo tried researching Somaliland on the internet. The internet had a million pages on just about every subject in the universe, but amazingly little from Dhikilo’s country of origin. There was a website where Somalilanders argued with each other, in a mixture of their own language and English, about stuff you could only understand if you were in their gang, and another one where they discussed football.

  The most interesting websites were the ones explaining what words meant. They couldn’t agree on the spellings, or whether the words were Somali or just generally Arabic, but there were some beautiful meanings. “Saxansaxo,” for example, meant the smell and the coolness carried on the wind from a place where it’s raining to a place where it isn’t. How could one little word mean something so marvellous? It made you realize that language wasn’t just a code to communicate with: it was magic.

  Anyway, the word “magacaa” sounded like it should mean “magic” but it actually meant “what’s your name?” The word for “dog” was “eey” and the word for “eye” was “isha,” although it seemed you needed a completely different word if you had tw
o eyes instead of just one. Dhikilo got the impression that learning Somali would be quite hard unless you had parents to teach it to you when you were a baby. However, there were some easy words like “bataato wedjis” and “furuut,” which meant “potato wedges” and “fruit.”

  People’s names had meanings, too, although there was disagreement about what the meanings were, or maybe there were just lots of meanings. One person wrote that whenever his family had to move someplace else, his father would load all their possessions onto the back of a camel, taking care to balance the weight evenly. There must be an equal number of dhikilos hanging off each side of the camel, he said. Sadly there wasn’t a picture, so Dhikilo could only guess what a dhikilo might be. She liked the idea of hanging off the side of a camel, though, especially if there was another one of her hanging off the other side.

  There were loads of different words for camel, none of which sounded anything like “camel,” and “Khamiis” meant Thursday.

  The word for father was “aabo.” Mother was “hooyo.”

  The word for “daughter” was harder to figure out. At first she thought it was “inanta,” which sounded rather grand. But then other websites said that “inanta” was just the word for “girl” and that “daughter” was actually “gabadh.” But then other websites said that “gabadh” meant “slave-girl.” Or “chestnut.” Finally, the most trustworthy-seeming people she could find said that when a father in Somaliland speaks to his daughter, he calls her “aabo,” the same name as himself. That was a bit strange. But sometimes strange things are true.

  Just in case she would ever need them, Dhikilo wrote “aabo” and “hooyo” on the back cover of her school jotter, the one for History.

  The Second-Best School in Cawber

  Cawber School for Girls was the second-best school in Cawber and was officially classified by government inspectors as “Improving.” It had been “Excellent” once upon a time and “Poor” for a while and much better again recently. The whole town was a bit like that. Back in the nineteenth century it used to be a seaside resort where people from London would come for their holidays. Then it was bombed in the Second World War and never really got over it. The funfairs and ballrooms closed down, and the houses got shabby and crumbly. But Cawber had the sea and the cliffs and some handsome architecture and a high-speed train to the capital, so lots of rich people were moving there lately. And immigrants. People from all over the world, making a fresh start in a town that was improving.