by Monica Ali
CHAPTER TWELVE
IN HIS SLEEP THE VERTIGO RETURNS AND PINS HIM ON A HIGH ledge. Then he is falling, this ancient, bottomless dream. He plummets into the darkness, gives himself up, lets go. The dead black weightless fall. The light begins to creep in and now he is underground in the endless passageways. He squats on his heels by the corpse and begins the examination, closing his hands around the feet, feeling each toe between his fingertips, tracing the lines of each instep. Kneeling, he presses the ankles as he scrutinizes the calves, and now he lifts the leg a little and cradles the slack flesh in his palm.
Gradually, he becomes aware of the food. It is piled high around him, around the body, and in every direction, glorious and glistening, and at last he will enjoy it, for this is his favourite meal. He tears the leg of a roast chicken, and bites into the crisp and bubbled skin. It makes him want to sob. He breaks off a piece of meat between his fingers, crawls along and pushes it gently between Yuri’s black lips.
He woke with a crushing weight bearing down on his chest. Gabriel tried to sit up but he couldn’t move. He pushed the covers down and then lay motionless until the pain had eased. He sat up, switched on the lamp and checked the time. Five thirty, which meant that he’d never get back to sleep. He wished he had a cigarette. There was no way he’d go back to being a smoker, but right now he would like nothing more than a fag.
No sooner had he thought it than the idea of it made him retch. He was nauseous, definitely, perhaps he wasn’t well. He lay down again and the dream came back to him. He curled up, trying to stave off the sickness, the sense of disgust. He wasn’t responsible for a dream.
It was impossible to sleep properly in this single bed. His knees were pushed up against the wall. He turned over. In the corner, under the window, was the wicker-bottomed cottage chair that he used to jam beneath the door handle when he needed privacy, when he’d lie on the bed with a box of tissues and an underwear catalogue. Whenever he was ill, laid up with flu or tonsillitis or tummy ache, Mum would pull up that chair and sit by him and the cool touch of her hand on his forehead made him safe.
She was never ill, not in those days. Not that he’d known. She was either brilliant or sad, but that was just her, so he’d thought. When he lost her it was a gradual fading, a merging, a blending of grey upon grey, and she seeped away so slowly that he failed to pay attention. When she died he realized she had been gone for years and he scarcely mourned her because there’d been little left, by then, to mourn.
She had become a shuffler. Her feet never left the ground. Whenever he came home she said, ‘You’ve got it all ahead of you,’ as if it was all over for her, and she’d whisper in his ear, ‘Don’t feel you have to stay,’ the moment he’d stepped in the door.
If he’d known. If Jenny had told him. Jenny and Dad and Nana, they hadn’t told him a thing. He was twenty-eight when she’d had the heart attack. An adult. He should have been told long before. Gabriel pushed his face into the pillow to wipe away the tears. He lay for a while on his stomach and allowed himself to cry. He moaned into the pillow. His breath was hot on his face. He pushed his hips against the sheet. When he groaned the sound travelled down his body and flexed his feet back and forth. His hips rocked softly. He hadn’t cried for years. His lips brushed the pillowcase as the blood thumped in his head. His tongue moved between his teeth. With his eyes tightly closed he saw her, she came back to him, his waif, his stray, Lena, stretched out on the sofa, all skin and bone.
He raised his head and let out a horrible noise, half-yelp, half-groan. What kind of man was he? In his grief, even in his grief, he was penetrated by desire, and for a girl he did not want. Gabriel rolled over and sat up. He tugged down his boxer shorts and surveyed the treacherous region. His penis stared up at him, a one-eyed implacable foe. It bore no sign of remorse. Gabriel closed a fist around it and slumped back again, his hand working up and down in a fury, as if to say, right, you asked for it and you’re not getting out of it now.
After breakfast he called Charlie. ‘I’m looking at my thigh,’ she said. ‘I’m in bed, watching the news, another car bomb in Baghdad, seventeen dead, but I’m more concerned about the way my thigh is starting to get these little dimples.’
‘It’s only the one thigh? Perhaps you could have that leg removed. It’s the second most common cosmetic surgery procedure in LA, after the full-body lift.’
‘It’s both thighs. These utterly trivial thoughts. Could I have them surgically removed as well?’
‘You’re so hard on yourself.’
‘But I’m not. I only said that because it’s a way to absolve myself – and have you absolve me – and that doesn’t make it better, it makes it worse.’
He decided not to stumble further into this minefield. He said, ‘I wish I’d brought you with me. I can’t talk to Dad. Nana’s pretty much senile. Jenny’s bleached her hair white and she screeches, it’s like she’s always about to fall off the edge of a cliff.’
‘It all sounds very enticing. I’m sad you never invited me.’
‘I don’t know what to say to him. My own father.’
‘You twit,’ said Charlie. ‘It doesn’t matter what you say. Talk to him. About work, about anything.’
‘Charlie,’ said Gabriel. It wasn’t how he’d planned to do it, but he was suddenly gripped by the thought that this was one thing he could sort out right now. If he felt a little light-headed it was only because of the giddy ease of it, the plunge he was about to take. ‘Charlie, will you marry me?’
For a few moments there was silence.
‘I hope you’re down on one knee,’ said Charlie. ‘Just how I dreamed it all those times.’
‘Sweetheart,’ he said. He got off the chair and knelt on the bedroom floor. ‘I’m down on two.’
Ted was in the dining room, bending over the Mary Rose which he had set on newspaper on the table, next to a tube of glue, a box of matches, a bowl of water and some cotton buds. She’d stood on the mantelpiece once, but the heat from the fire began to melt the glue and bits of the gunwale fell off. ‘She’s seen better days,’ said Ted.
‘Still beautiful,’ said Gabe. ‘I kind of like her like that. She was a wreck, wasn’t she, anyway?’
Ted dipped a cotton bud in water and began to clean the dust from the stern. ‘I’ve fixed up two already – HMS Endeavour and the Titanic. There’s a couple more I’d like to see right, if I’ve the time. You’ve six months to live, what’d you do? It’s a pub conversation. Well, you say, I’d go on a cruise around the world. Or you say, I’d go and find that little redhead from Fleetwood, see what she’s made of. Summat like that.’
‘Restoring matchstick ships doesn’t make it to the top ten,’ said Gabriel, smiling. He took a cotton bud and started to help his father, working his way up the mizzenmast.
‘Neither does spending it with a nurse with a needle in yer arm and a sick bucket by the bed. Don’t occur to anyone, that.’ Ted laughed.
‘I’ll come up in the next few weeks,’ said Gabriel. ‘I won’t leave it so long. Another visit before Christmas, at least one.’ He did love his father, but his love had a fugitive quality; it was always up to him to hunt it down.
Ted tried to unfurl a paper sail that had rolled in on itself. It crumbled between his fingertips. ‘Take Nana out for a walk,’ he said. ‘While it’s fine. Give her an airing. I can’t push the wheelchair any more.’
‘You could come to London when the restaurant opens. And Jenny and Nana. We’ll sort it out somehow.’ He watched Ted carefully but discerned no response. When he was a boy he used to scour his father’s face for warning signs. Like some amateur meteorologist he tried to see the clouds forming, attempted to predict the storm ahead. But the anger, if it came, even when – especially when – Gabriel had predicted it, stunned him every time.
Ted continued his tender labours, one hand cradling the prow of the Mary Rose while the other attended to the stern. ‘What I said last night – don’t pay any mind. About leavin’ yer
job. Wouldn’t blame you if you left the country, never mind a bloomin’ job. Way things are goin’, them as can, they up and leave.’
‘We’ve found a brilliant site.’
‘Great Britain,’ said Ted, without looking up, ‘no one says that any more. United Kingdom. Well, we’re hardly that. It’s going to the dogs, Gabe. Going to the dogs.’
‘This kind of opportunity … I’ve waited a long time for it.’
‘We’ve lost the “Great”. Know what else we’ve lost? Britishness. People keep talking about it. That’s how you know it’s gone.’
Gabriel looked round the dining room, at the spare chairs waiting against the wall for visitors who would never come, the best china trapped, as ever, in a glass cabinet, doomed to a lifespan of uselessness by constantly being ‘saved’. ‘Dad,’ he said, ‘things change. There’s no point trying to keep everything the same. And just because things are different doesn’t mean they’re worse.’
Ted put down his cotton bud. He cracked his knuckles. ‘Britishness tests,’ he said. ‘What daft bugger dreamed that up? Eh?’
Talk to him, Charlie had said. She didn’t know how difficult that was. And this was not even his father; this was an impostor, one too weak for the role. It was galling. Now that Gabe was big enough to stand up to him, his father had conveniently disappeared. ‘It’s a citizenship test, that’s all.’
‘We used to know,’ said Ted, ‘what it meant to be British. We didn’t have to discuss it, because we knew. We used to know what it meant to be English. It’s a dirty word now, that is.’
‘Oh, I don’t know,’ said Gabriel, determined to dispel the doom and gloom. ‘Tolerance. Fairness. Fair play. There are definitely British qualities. I think we’d both agree on that.’
‘Just words,’ said Ted. ‘Don’t mean owt now.’
‘Come on,’ said Gabriel, laughing. ‘It’s not as bad as that. That’s part of the British character – always doing ourselves down.’
‘These sails,’ said Ted, ‘they turn to dust in yer hand.’ He shook his head. ‘British character,’ he said. ‘There’s no such thing. Not now. You see them, these politicians, talking about it, and it’s like a Punch and Judy show. No, there’s no substance. Time was, you could talk about decency. And it meant something. In this country, it did.’
‘You should see my kitchen, Dad. I’ve got every nationality in there and everyone gets along.’
‘Pleasure without responsibility,’ said Ted. ‘That’s how it is, you see. Character don’t mean anything, don’t count for anything any more. To lose yer good character, that were a terrible thing in my day. But now – you take a pill, you talk about it on TV, you blame everyone but yerself.’
‘I’ve got Somalis, Poles, Serbs, Russians …’
‘British character,’ said Ted, snorting the words. ‘It’s gone the way of maypole dancing, has that.’
Gabriel was only mildly irritated, and he viewed this as a sort of victory, if not over Ted then over himself. ‘A bit of an exaggeration, maybe,’ he said. ‘And I think you’re mixing up two things. When I said “British character” I meant, you know, national identity, as the politicians say. But what you were just saying about character was about individuals, about personality. That’s a different thing.’
‘Aye,’ said Ted, ‘maybe. I don’t know. You always were a clever lad.’ The low winter sun broke the clouds and pierced the folds of the net curtain, lighting dust motes that stood in layers across the room as if the air itself were pleated. ‘But I’m saying the same thing, either way.’
‘Which is what?’ said Gabriel indulgently. ‘Let’s have some coffee and then I’ll take Nana out.’
‘There’s nothing there, that’s what I mean. Nowt to get hold of at all.’
‘But “having character”, that was just a way of saying you did what was expected of you. It’s almost the opposite of having a character, a personality, of your own. Now you’ve got to know yourself, what you really are.’
Ted nodded. ‘That what it is, eh? I wouldn’t want to be starting out today.’ He picked up the Mary Rose and inspected the hull. ‘We used to build ships in this country, Gabe. That was part of who we were. We built merchant shipping for the world over. I reckon when you built a ship you knew you’d done a job. There’s no ships built on Teesside these days. It’s a breaker’s yard now. They send ships there from all sorts of places, full of asbestos and oil and God-only-knows, and they break ’em up.’
‘That kind of manufacturing …’ It was hardly worth finishing the sentence. Gabe got up and patted his father on the shoulder. ‘I’ll get us that coffee now.’
Nana wore a mustard-and-brown fur coat which, though Gabe did not remember them, must have seen better days. It was somewhat chewed and balding, and resembled a number of mangy tabbies sewn together. The thing smelt like a dead cat too. ‘Lovely coat, Nana,’ said Gabriel, wheeling her along Plodder Lane. ‘Is it real?’
‘Real?’ shouted Nana. ‘Real? Of course it’s real. Real fur coat, is this.’ She looked about her, this being information worth disseminating more widely, but there was no one else to tell.
‘Lovely day,’ said Gabe. He was beginning to sound like Nana. ‘Turned out nice.’ There was an icy sort of sunlight in the air but the day was hardly lovely. Across the valley there was mist on the moors; the wind was cold and damp.
‘Lovely,’ said Nana, chin in her coat, hands in her pockets, boots splayed indecently on the wheelchair footplates. ‘Lovely, lovely, lovely.’
Gabriel stopped for a moment and looked down across the town, the houses and mill chimneys and spires huddled for warmth in the basin, the streets that marched crookedly up the hill, the long sheds of the industrial park where Jenny clucked down the phone, the bright cars scattered across the grey and brown canvas like spatters of metallic paint.
‘She’s a lassie from Lancashire,’ sang Nana, vibrato. ‘A flounce on her petticoat, a comb in her hair …’
Gabriel started wheeling. He picked up the pace.
‘Oooh,’ sang Nana, turning a streaming eye to Gabe. ‘If those lips …’ Her mouth continued to work, but it was a few seconds before the sound was restored. ‘If those lips could only speak. Ta-da de-dum da-dum.’
‘We’ll cut down this way, shall we, Nana? Down the side of the park?’
‘Gabriel! Gabriel!’ shrieked Nana. ‘I’ve forgot me hat. I can’t go to church without a hat.’
Gabriel leaned over her but carried on pushing. ‘It’s all right, we’re not going to church. You wanted to go to the market, have a look around.’
Nana sniffed loudly. ‘I am perfectly aware of that.’
The houses on Park Street were Victorian mansions with porticos and sweeping bay windows, which had been turned into care homes, social security offices and temporary employment agencies or given over to charities. Only a few remained as family homes, and they belonged not to wealthy mill owners but to wealthy Pakistanis who owned the local bingo parlour, a string of convenience stores, a pickle factory and curry houses either side of the East Lancashire Pennines. As they came closer to the centre of Blantwistle the streets began to narrow and steepen. Gabriel slowed his pace, fearing a skid that would send Nana flying off down the hill. They were nearing Astley Street now, passing through the old back-to-backs with the front doors that gave straight to the street, front windows that displayed overstuffed lounges crammed with fake leather suites and gargantuan TVs. Some of the houses, in an advanced state of disrepair, stood empty. Others, equally dilapidated, had steamed-up windows and slamming doors.
‘We used to sit in front of the fire a Sunday night,’ said Nana, ‘after me mother had been baking, and we’d bread and barm cakes all round the skirting boards. Ooh, the smell, it was lovely. But we hadn’t to eat them, because warm they weren’t good for your tummy. But we did sometimes, when Mother weren’t looking, we’d smuggle a barm cake up our jumpers and take it up to bed.’
At the corner a group of young Asian men
, some in skullcaps, some in hoodies, were engaged in kicking a portable television to pieces. They appeared to take little pleasure in the task, which they performed with an air of weariness as if, were it up to them, it would be the last thing they would choose to do.
They were on Astley Street now, the row of two-up, two-downs where he’d begun his life. Here they were, passing the house. HAPPY EID was spelled out in tinsel across the ground-floor window and an old man sat on a chair in the doorway, a tiny child on his knee.
Gabriel was expecting Nana to comment – on how the Asians had depressed the house prices, how they never scrubbed their doorsteps, how they butchered goats in the backyard. But Nana was lost in her childhood, not seeming to notice where they were.
‘I had it across here from me mother, many a time, for answering her back. She were a good woman, right enough, and she knocked the goodness into me. I’ve her to thank for that. And we’d respect our elders then. Fetching and carrying, with no excuses. I’d try one, now and then, and she’d never let one slip by. “That’s a tackler’s tale,” she’d say.’ Nana popped an Extra Strong Mint in her mouth; it clacked between her dentures.
‘In and out each other’s houses, we were. Well, that’s how we lived. Never locked the door. And we helped each other out, clubbed together, you know. Funerals were the best. There’d be a whip-round and there’d be a wake, and the body’d be in the parlour, that’s the way we did it then. Oh, there were some right good funerals, and all the adults would sing, especially when they’d had a few.’
Gabriel looked down on the delicate eggshell of Nana’s skull, visible through the nest of hair. ‘You’ll have to show me some photos, Nana, of the old days. Let’s get the albums out when we get back.’
‘Are we meeting Sally Anne?’ said Nana. ‘Are we meeting her here?’
They had just wheeled into the covered market. The place had a distinct smell of vegetation and decay, like wet and rotting leaves. Gabe, startled by the mention of Mum, failed to make a reply.
