His mother came to the door. He was braced for it; he knew it was going to happen; he had rehearsed it in his head; and yet all of that was no help. As with his father, as always, she started big and then faded.
‘Mark!’ she said. ‘You look . . .’ – eyes sliding, certainty level ebbing – ‘. . . nice?’ she finished, as if it were a question, with her eyes flickering. He told himself that with every second that passed, this experience, like everything else, was getting closer to being over. Tomorrow he would begin to make his move. As Andrew Carnegie wrote, ‘The rising man must do something exceptional and beyond the range of his special department. HE MUST ATTRACT ATTENTION.’
35
‘I’ve got a new system to organise the Islamic calendar,’ said Shahid to the table at large: Ahmed and Usman, Rohinka, Fatima and Mohammed. ‘Instead of dating things from the hegira, we begin to date things from when that moron Iqbal moved into my flat. So instead of being the year 1428 it’s actually the day 95. It makes sense. He’s so boring that he can cause a fundamental disruption of the space-time continuum. He’s so boring he’s a one-man walking injustice. He leaves a deep sense of grievance everywhere he goes just because the people he’s been with realise they’ve just spent time that they’re never going to get back. He’s a nightmare. And he’s in my flat! He’s stinking up the place with his smelly feet and his I-already-had-a-shower-this-month!’
Ahmed, good older brother, lost no time in saying, ‘It’s your fault for inviting him.’
‘I didn’t invite him, he invited himself.’
‘Then it’s your fault for allowing him to invite himself.’
‘I didn’t allow him to invite himself, he just invited himself.’
‘I don’t see a difference.’
‘That’s because you’re a plonker too.’
Usman snorted a reluctant laugh through his unkempt, I’m-more-devout-than-you beard. Rohinka said, ‘Boys, boys.’ Fatima chanted, ‘Fight, fight!’
It was Saturday and the Kamals were having lunch together, something they didn’t often do. Ahmed’s friend Hashim was looking after the shop downstairs, and Ahmed found that he could, with an effort of will, put out of his mind for as much as five minutes at a time the thought of Hashim running up incorrect amounts on the till, taking orders for expensive part-works without getting the customer’s full details, selling alcohol to fifteen-year-olds, and forgetting how to operate the lottery machine and the Oyster top-ups, while the queue backed out the door and regular customers vowed never to come to the shop again . . .
‘Iqbal seems all right to me,’ said Usman. ‘He takes things more seriously than you do, that’s all. It doesn’t seem to me such a bad characteristic.’
‘Get a shave,’ said Shahid.
Rohinka brought another casserole over from the stove and put it on the table. There was barely space for it: the table already carried two oven-hot dishes, one of chicken in cumin and the other of stewed aubergines, both of them resting on heatproof mats; a platter of naan wrapped in a kitchen cloth to keep them warm; and a bowl of dal, one of Rohinka’s specialities, something she cooked almost every day and never twice to exactly the same recipe. She lifted the lid of the new dish and a beautifully complex smell of lamb and spices, her recipe for achari gosht, floated above the table in a cloud of fragrant steam. The men made varying murmurs and groans of appreciation. The achari gosht was intended to change the topic of conversation, but it didn’t work.
‘That smells great but if I eat a single thing more I’ll explode,’ said Shahid. ‘Look, the thing about Iqbal is the way he’s just so oblivious. I come in, I hear the television upstairs, I know it’s going to be tuned in to one of the news channels, him watching some latest atrocity or other, or ranting to himself about the kafr media, or he’s going to be on the internet muttering and typing and he shuts the screen as soon as I get in, as if I care about his stupid life and his stupid MSN chats with his stupid friends in stupid Belgium or stupid Algeria or stupid wherever. He just acts like he thinks everything he says and does is a big deal and he’s this man of mystery; meanwhile he’s sitting with his feet on the sofa, and leaving dishes in the sink, and he’s like this child who hasn’t grown up yet and doesn’t even realise it.’
Rohinka and Ahmed exchanged a look. Both of them were thinking that this would not be an entirely inaccurate description of Shahid himself. Shahid saw the look and knew perfectly well what it meant, but didn’t care, because he knew he was right.
‘Do you think he is, maybe, I don’t know quite how to put it, up to something?’ asked Rohinka.
Shahid didn’t want to think about that. It touched too directly on the things he had done when he was younger and had been, not exactly a jihadi, but a fellow traveller in jihad, and the companion of people who were certainly up to things then, and were probably still up to them now, if they were still alive. Iqbal was a blast from that particular past. For Shahid, he was therefore both a reminder of it and a reminder of how much he didn’t want to go there in his head. So he found himself not really asking too closely about who Iqbal really was and what his motives really were.
‘I hope not,’ was all Shahid said.
‘Would it be such a bad thing if he were’ – Usman waggled his fingers in contemptuous inverted commas – ‘“up to something”? Would it be so bad if somebody were doing something? Rather than just passively accepting a state of injustice and oppression?’
‘You are a child,’ said Ahmed, instantly very angry. ‘You don’t have any real opinions, you just strike attitudes to try and create an effect. It would be a boring enough habit in a teenager but in a man your age it’s pathetic.’
‘You were never a teenager, though, were you, Ahmed?’ said Usman, now just as angry. ‘You were always half-dead. Injustice? Oppression? Not your problem. As long as there was enough on your plate. Why care about anyone else? Why care about your fellow Muslims suffering as long as you’ve got enough food to stuff into your stomach?’
‘If you had ever cared for or looked after anyone in your life, you might know something about the responsibility of providing food,’ said Ahmed.
Rohinka, loudly and deliberately, gave a cough. They looked at her, and she looked at the two children. The brothers recollected themselves and decided to calm down.
‘This is very good,’ said Usman, glancing down at his plate and then up from it, and declaring peace. There was an air of reluctance in the way he said it, as if he were making an unwilling concession to the existence of a physical pleasure. Rohinka smiled and they began talking about cooking, which had been one of Usman’s interests before he went all super-religious.
Shahid grew quiet. He was irritated by Iqbal, more irritated than he could easily say, and that was against the grain of his character, because he prided himself on being the least easily annoyed member of the Kamal family. All the Kamals were fluent in irritation. They loved each other but were almost always annoyed by each other, in ways that were both generalised and existential (why is he like that?) and also highly specific (how hard is it to remember to put the top back on the yoghurt?). Shahid had been very angry indeed in his late teens, angry with everything and everyone, and especially angry about the state of the world, but when he came back from his travels he had, he discovered, been able to let that feeling go. It was part of growing up – which was one of the reasons Shahid knew that Ahmed was wrong about his not having grown up. He didn’t want to be tied down, not quite yet, but that wasn’t the same thing as still being a child. Ahmed himself was irritating, and yet Shahid didn’t feel irritated. That was how grown-up he was.
Which was why Iqbal was such an issue. Shahid couldn’t remember the last time he had felt so annoyed by anyone; and the secret at the heart of his irritation, which he couldn’t quite bring himself to say to his brothers and sister-in-law, was that there was something he didn’t trust about Iqbal. There was something not right about him; not sinister or nefarious, not necessarily, but not quite righ
t. Iqbal liked to have an aura of mystery about him, which was irritating in itself, and he did it in a way that left Shahid feeling uncomfortable. What made this all the more irritating was that if he told his family about it they would blame him: say it was his fault for having travelled in the first place, ask him what did he expect if he came back from Chechnya dragging jihadi mates behind him and letting them crash on his sofa? Just enough of him acknowledged just enough truth in this to make it infuriating to hear; so, because the conversation would turn out to be infuriating, he couldn’t even begin it. And nothing is more annoying than the thing you can’t say.
Fatima seemed to feel that enough time had passed without her getting any attention. She pointed a plastic spoon at her father and said, ‘Daddy! You promised sweeties!’
Mohammed was always much calmer than his sister, more self-contained. He spent enormous amounts of time pottering about and entertaining himself. But he knew a call to arms when he heard one.
‘Seeties,’ he said. ‘Seeties!’
‘You didn’t,’ said Rohinka warningly to her husband, hands on hips, the position Ahmed remembered from his cricketing days as the ‘double teapot’.
‘He’s in trouble now,’ Shahid said cheerfully to Usman.
‘Only after they’d eaten,’ said Ahmed. To the children: ‘After! Not now. After!’
His wife, daughter and son all looked at him with suspicion.
‘After!’ he said again. They all slowly chose to believe him and order was restored. Fatima went back to swinging her legs and semi-eating, semi-playing with her curry, and Mohammed, who had finished a while ago and had his bowl taken away, went back to shuffling stray pieces of rice around on the tray table of his high chair. Rohinka made offering gestures with a serving spoon, to which the brothers variously groaned and patted their stomachs. Seeing the children distracted, Ahmed lowered his voice and leaned forward.
‘There is the question of our mother to discuss.’
This was the real reason for the lunch. An air of seriousness came over the proceedings. Shahid pursed his lips. He said:
‘Have you spoken about a visit to’ – and then suddenly switching to an exaggerated Bollywood accent and widening his eyes so that the whites flashed – ‘mamaji?’
‘No, but she’s expecting an invitation.’
‘So invite her,’ said Usman. He was only partly bluffing: Mrs Kamal was at her easiest, not all that easy but her easiest, with her last-born son. Shahid, who was next in line to get married, would have it much worse, and so would Ahmed, who while safe on the marriage front, would be the brother who had to put their mother up, and who therefore would be open to multiple bases for advice, criticism, fault-finding, factual correction and silent disapproval: the way he ran his business, the way he ate and how much he ate, the way he brought up his children, his conduct as a husband, as a Muslim, as a son. Mrs Kamal visited roughly once every two years, and no one looked forward to it. This would be her first visit since the immediate aftermath of Mohammed’s birth.
‘It’ll be nice to see Mrs Kamal,’ said Rohinka, sweetly. Ahmed swivelled around and glared at her. But Rohinka – it was part of what made her sexy – was a genius at mock-innocence. She fluttered and dimpled at Ahmed from her place by the sink. He gave a snort.
Shahid realised that he was sitting with his head in his hands. His mother would without question be on at him about getting married, an arranged marriage at that – she might well have a candidate in mind. If she didn’t have a specific person she would certainly have a plan. She would bully him into agreeing to come to Lahore to assess suitable candidates. He had done this once before, two years ago, and it was excruciating, like a sustained assault on his sense of himself, on everything he wanted to be as a man, a free spirit, a traveller, a citizen of the world, a man who had seen and done things but was still young; sitting in a series of Lahore rooms with a series of variously embarrassed Pakistani women, some of them as reluctant as him, some (and this was much worse) evidently quite keen on the idea. At this point, it would be hard to find anything he more exactly didn’t want to do than go to Pakistan and leave Iqbal in his flat with his smelly feet and his opinions . . . Then Shahid had an idea. Maybe he could use the fact that he had to go to Lahore as a way of getting Iqbal out of his flat . . .
‘She’ll be on at me. What have I done to deserve this?’ said Shahid. He would like to say more – would like to say much more – but it was hard to, because Rohinka and Ahmed had had an arranged marriage, so it would be grossly insulting to go into his objections. And there was also the difficult-to-ignore fact that their marriage was a self-evident roaring success. Ahmed loved Rohinka and she (less explicably in Shahid’s view) loved him back; and she was also seriously foxy. So arranged marriages were outdated, wrong in principle, demeaning, no better than a form of licensed prostitution (but then so was Western marriage), patriarchal, sexist, and yet on the other hand if you ended up with someone like Rohinka . . .
‘Aren’t you going to denounce arranged marriages?’ asked Ahmed, guessing what Shahid was thinking, since Mrs Kamal plus Shahid meant a guaranteed row on exactly this subject. Shahid thought about saying, not everybody is as lucky as you – but he didn’t, because it was true, and would give Ahmed too much pleasure.
‘Ahmed, how much weight would you say you’ve put on since you got married?’ said Shahid. ‘It must be at least ten kilos, wouldn’t you say? Usman, don’t you think our brother is about twenty-five pounds fatter?’
Rohinka returned from clattering around at the far end of the room with a tray of Indian sweets – kulfi, gulab jamun. Mohammed slapped the sides of his high chair to make sure his interest in this new development was generally known. ‘Boys, boys,’ said Rohinka, in a voice which made it clear that she hadn’t been really listening, and beneath that, implied that male conversation never really advanced the state of knowledge much anyway, but should be tolerated all the same, as long as it didn’t get in the way of important things.
‘I’ll go through and get some Häagen-Dazs from the shop,’ said Ahmed. He wanted some ice cream, and he was also giving in to the need to check on Hashim. Fatima got down from the table and came over to take his hand. She had strong opinions about ice cream.
36
The Refuge was a double-fronted late Victorian house in a Tooting side street. It was near the Common, near the Tube, not too far from the Lido, and handy for shops and amenities. There was a kitchen and two communal areas, one of them dominated by a large old cathode-ray television, the other furnished with battered sofas. The garden was untidy but functioning; it was possible to sit out there, but hardly anyone ever did. There were eight bedrooms, with eight people staying in them, including a house manager who was a paid employee of the charity. If it had been a domestic residence it would have been worth upwards of a million pounds. Instead it was a hostel for stateless failed asylum-seekers, and locals felt, bitterly, that it had a suppressing effect on house prices.
By now, Quentina had lived there for the best part of two years, and she had a good acquaintance with the range of types who came into contact with the charity. All of them were damaged by their experiences, some grievously, and many of them could barely function. Some were too angry: their rage was on a hair-trigger. These were the likeliest to get into real trouble. A Sudanese woman from the Refuge who kept getting into fights over perceived insults – proper fist fights, like a man – had gone to jail for three months for assault, after she punched a woman who she thought had jostled her while they were both sheltering from the rain under a butcher shop’s awning. She would normally have been deported at the end of her sentence, but thanks to the Human Rights Act she couldn’t be because it wasn’t safe for her to go back to Sudan, so when she came out of prison she had been taken in by another branch of the Refuge, this time in North London. Quentina did not foresee a happy ending for her. Other ‘clients’ were defeated by the burden of their own grievances and could think of very little else. T
he symptoms of this condition were silence, and then, in the face of kindness or interest or understanding, torrential unburdening. Ragah, the Kurd, was like that. She had no mode in between brooding on her losses and telling all about them, at length, in English which as she got more excited Quentina found impossible to understand, and which in any case she would often drop to lapse into Kurdish, apparently without realising that she was doing so. Ragah had lost her family, Quentina gathered, but that was all she knew, because beyond that she lost the thread of the story. By now she could hardly ask.
Silence was hard to diagnose because it was such a common symptom. In their heads, some of the refugees were still in whichever country they had left; they hadn’t yet caught up with their own lives. Others were culture-shocked and had no idea what to make of London; they were blank. That was usually OK because it usually wore off with time. Others still were silent because they were depressed. There had been only one suicide recently in the South London refuge, an Afghan who had hung herself in the bathroom. That was the week after Quentina arrived. One suicide in two years was good going. Others were simply possessed by a feeling that they had made a catastrophic mistake. They had made an irreversible error in coming to England, and their lives would never recover – their lives would never again be their lives, but the story of this huge mistake that they had made.
Quentina didn’t fit any of these categories. Perhaps what was decisive was that she was fully resolved to take part in her new life in London. She was determined to make a go of it. At the same time she was not planning to be in London for ever. Mugabe could not live for ever. Chinese peasants might once have thought Chairman Mao was immortal, but no one except the tyrant himself believed that Mugabe was. If he died the whole system might collapse overnight, or there might be a transition period, but Quentina felt sure that anyone who had had to flee him would be welcome back. So Quentina, however hard things currently were, felt sure that she had a future, and consequently she was the client of the Refuge who functioned best, a fact which was openly acknowledged by the charity workers and the other clients. She was not angry, she was not insane, she had a job (albeit an illegal one), she spoke good English, people could talk to her. As a result she had an informal but real role as a liaison and go-between for the refugees and the charity that was helping them. Quentina liked that: it appealed to the side of her that enjoyed administering and running things, getting involved. When the small committee of the charity had its weekly meeting to talk things over, she would be present as the clients’ representative. Martin, the house manager, a shy Northerner with a bossy streak, would chair the meetings. New clients didn’t often arrive at the Refuge – because to do so someone would have to leave, which they only did when they won a judgment allowing them leave to legally stay, which never happened, or they were forcibly deported, which had happened twice in two years. When new clients did arrive, they would be given a case worker to look after them, and then Quentina too would be asked to keep an eye on them. So Quentina was unofficially the leader of the Refuge, or anyway of its clients.
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