A Private Business

by Barbara Nadel

  But he didn’t mention Iekanjika and his Peace in Jesus Foundation.

  Vi left having hit what was basically another brick wall. But she did now at least know that the surmised antipathy between the two churches had some basis in the silence that appeared to exist between the Reverend Manyika and Pastor Iekanjika. Or was that just her interpretation of things? But if it were the case then so much for Christian charity, she thought. Then she wondered what Iekanjika had done to upset Manyika, or vice versa. She walked out onto White Post Lane and saw a man run past her toward Hackney Wick Station. As he passed he looked at her and the sight of his gray, terrified face made her heart jump.

  Automatically, Vi shouted, “Hey, stop!” And then she began to run after him. “Oi, you, police!”

  The man, though clearly overweight, began to run faster. Whiteish and frightened, he could be the flasher. He could be almost anyone, but Vi had a strong feeling that he wasn’t. Over the years she had come to trust such notions. Vi’s attempts to run in stilettos came to nothing and so she took them off and then legged it after him, shoes in hand. Thirty-odd years of smoking didn’t help as she tried to make a call on her mobile back to the station. But then by the time she actually reached Hackney Wick station the man could not be seen or even heard any more. No footstep noises clattered through the night and Vi was left in the middle of White Post Lane panting, her shoes in her hands, her tights in tatters.

  XV

  “Marie, what’s wrong?”

  Betty must have thought she’d lost her mind. But she couldn’t go inside, her legs wouldn’t move. Slumped against the wall that Dave Delmonte had had built around the car park of his fun pub, Maria fought with sickness as well as with the way everyone kept looking at her. The service was due to start in ten minutes’ time and people were clearly conflicted as to whether to help Maria or go inside.

  Maria wanted to confess. People did it all the time, they called it “testifying.” But she couldn’t. In spite of what she thought about the Pope and Catholicism, she wanted, she needed, formality—a confessional—and she wanted a penance and then punishment that lasted forever. But Pastor Grint didn’t do that Catholic stuff. He was a good man and formal confession, as he always said, was just an exercise in futility. God wasn’t some sort of simpleton who could be placated by a few Hail Marys. But that didn’t stop Maria wanting it.

  “Come into church, we can look after you there,” Betty said.

  “No!” Her breathing had gone and her mouth had dried up. She thought about a routine she’d done years ago about Victorian women fainting and it made her feel even sicker. It’s said they fainted because their corsets were too tight, she’d said, but I reckon they had men up inside those crinolines. Men with mustaches. Licking.

  “What is it, Marie?” Betty reiterated. As people she knew and liked looked on, Maria clung to the wall with all of her strength. She couldn’t go in there. That was where it had all first come to light.

  “Come inside with me,” Betty said. “Come to church.” Her voice took on a sudden hard edge. “It will do you good.”

  “No!”

  The large crowd of people around her all looked at each other, and that included Pastor Grint. He hadn’t actually seen her collapse but he’d come out immediately when some of the others had called. “Whatever is it, Maria?” he said.

  “I’m too dirty!” she said, shivering as she spoke. Some congregants were confused by this apparent incongruity. “I can’t go in there! I can’t go back in there!”

  “But it’s our new church,” Grint said. “For the time being. I know it’s not exactly what we want …”

  She heard someone whisper, “Maybe she used to get drunk in there years ago,” and it made the dam inside her crack.

  “I got pregnant!” Like liquid spilling out of an overfull mouth.

  “In there?” The pastor pointed to his church.

  “No.” Her voice was just a whisper now. “I realized in there. That was where I found out. In that building. There.”

  Martin bided his time and then he struck. To hell with in theory! The headscarfed woman went out to get some shopping, leaving the girl in the garden—alone. He went out into his own mattress-and-dirty-disposable-nappy-filled garden, and he caught her eye.

  “Better day today, isn’t it?” he called across the fence. “A little bit warmer.”

  He couldn’t quite make out whether she was afraid of him or just appalled that he, an old man, had spoken to her. She said, “Yeah.”

  “Summer coming.”

  “Yes.” She turned away.

  “You must have your exams coming up soon,” Martin persisted. “What is it? O levels?”

  “GCSEs.” She smirked. He was showing his age talking about O levels and she was amused by that. Little cow! She thought he was old, past it, a right coffin-dodger. Martin felt his face darken.

  “Studying hard, are you?”

  She shrugged.

  “Must have a good future in front of you going to a posh school like Bancroft’s. Bet they make you work hard, don’t they?” Again she didn’t respond and so Martin just went for it. “Give you a lot of home-study time do they, your school?”

  She looked up at that!

  “Noticed that you always seem to have Thursday afternoons off,” he said. “Bit of group study with your mates?”

  She was pale for an Asian and so he very clearly saw her face flush. It was good because it unequivocally answered his question about Thursday afternoons. That girl was not supposed to be at home. No sir!

  “Well, see you,” he said, smiling. Then he went back inside. He’d leave her to think about that for a while. He’d leave her to wonder whether the old man next door would tell her mother about her Thursday afternoons or not. He suspected that next time they met she might actually instigate the conversation.

  Something wasn’t right and it went beyond the fact that she was upset. She felt … violated. It was almost as if returning to that terrible place, even if it was now a church, had reactivated the feelings of dread she’d experienced before. But then it would. What she’d felt when she’d engaged Lee Arnold’s firm to surveille her house was not what she’d imagined it had been back then. Now she knew that no one was watching her, that somehow she’d moved Gog and Magog from the fireplace over to the TV, that she’d put the old Clarks shoebox in the corner herself. She had been haunting her own life because finally the guilt had come back and it wasn’t going away. She hadn’t admitted her crime and so she still wasn’t right with Jesus. He was pressing her because she needed to be right with Him. The location of the new church just served to underline it. Soon, she knew, she would have to tell everything. The congregation knew she’d had a child but … She felt it being forced out of her like icing out of a piping bag. She longed to be empty, to fill the space left behind completely with God.

  And yet because that old feeling of being observed had returned, Maria couldn’t completely convince herself that its perpetrator wasn’t either herself or another, human, being. She walked from the hall into the kitchen and took a bottle of whisky out of her drinks cupboard. It could still be a person, couldn’t it? Someone who knew her secrets and wished her ill will? She poured a small amount of booze into a glass, put a pill on her tongue and knocked both back while standing up looking into the garden. The sun was out and she could hear the sound of her neighbors mowing their lawns and cutting their hedges. Normal life was still going on. That was all she’d ever really wanted: normal life. Had God not given her that because of what she’d done? And had the subsequent boozing and drug-taking and all the vile stuff she’d put into her stand-up routines made that impossible?

  In the great silence that roared into her life after Len died, a little voice demanding justice had wheedled. She’d tried to silence it with flip jokes about God and sex and all sorts of shit she’d shut it up with years back, but it wouldn’t go. It just got louder. It had been then that she’d started to notice things—about God.
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  A random, tattered poster on a railway arch wall, leaflets through her door, a booklet. It had been as if Jesus was beckoning her. But then she’d always known she’d have to make amends some time. She went to the Chapel of the Holy Pentecostal Fire and there she discovered her old friend Betty and she found Jesus with her.

  Here at last was a measure of peace and security that mirrored, in some ways, what she’d had with Len. But then the feelings of being watched began to roll in, the dread and then, of course, the terrible, terrible guilt.

  Maria walked into her living room. It was so beautiful outside in her gardens, but she wasn’t interested. If she went outside there was always a chance she’d be obliged to talk to some neighbor over the fence and she didn’t want that. Betty had offered to come home and spend some time with her after the service, but Maria had wanted to be alone.

  She sat down on the sofa and scanned the Sunday Times culture supplement for the TV pages. Usually on a Sunday afternoon there was some sort of crime show on one of the channels. An old Columbo or Murder, She Wrote or something. Eventually Maria found a program that appealed to her on a distant cable channel. She leaned across to the sideboard behind the sofa and was about to pick up the remote control when she saw something she should have seen as soon as she came into the room. On top of the sideboard, tied together with a great big purple ribbon, like a bunch of flowers, were at least twenty perfect peacock feathers. Maria pulled her hand back and away from them immediately and only just managed not to scream. What were they doing in her house? Where had they come from? Who, who had put them there?

  Glenys, her mother, had always been and remained a superstitious woman. It was something she had passed on to her children. Peacock feathers brought bad luck. To have them in a house was tantamount to inviting ill fortune across the threshold. Maria knew it was bollocks, but as she looked at the feathers she felt her throat begin to close and her eyes start to water. She would never, ever bring such things into her house, not even in her sleep, not even in her nightmares. With trembling hands she grabbed the phone and called Pastor Grint. But he was “temporarily unavailable,” as the electronic message had it. Maria felt alone and let down, although she knew that was irrational. Why should Paul Grint be at her beck and call all the time? Her legs shook as she stood up and stumbled back toward the hall and the front door. The feathers were seeping malice—she could almost see it. She had to get out.

  Much as she would have liked to have cooked Shazia a traditional English Sunday meal, Mumtaz just couldn’t justify the expense this week. It was going to have to be dhal and to that end she’d had lentils soaking overnight. But she lacked cinnamon and also one of the most basic ingredients of mitta dhoi, the sweet—and cheap—baked yogurt treat she would use to try and take the edge off Shazia’s disappointment. For that, as well as the yogurt, milk and sugar she already had, Mumtaz also needed a tin of evaporated milk. There were several convenience stores up on Woodgrange Road and so she headed off to get what she needed at just after midday.

  Mumtaz spent rather longer in the Sylhet Convenience Shop than she had imagined that she would. Because the day was warm and bright, people were encouraged to talk as they went about their business in the good weather and Mumtaz stopped to speak to several ladies she hadn’t seen for months. As she suspected they would, these women all knew about her job and one of them even suggested that they should “talk” at some point. The world of Bangladeshi women could be, at times, very small.

  Mumtaz walked back from the shop down Osborne Road and into Richmond Road. All these streets were quiet and leafy and it didn’t take much to imagine how elegant they had been in the past. Mumtaz’s own house was one of those that even had an old coach house in the back garden. Not that her house was actually her house in reality. Most of it belonged to the bank that had given Ahmed a very dodgy mortgage. It was a mortgage he had extended several times. She paid them what she could, when she could, but recent telephone conversations had involved the word “repossession.” As calmly as she was able, Mumtaz had asked only that they restrain themselves until after Shazia had finished her GCSEs. The girl knew nothing about any possible repossession and Mumtaz wanted to keep it that way for as long as she could.

  She crossed the road at the junction of Richmond Road and Claremont Road. There was no traffic and so she didn’t hurry. Had she done so, she wouldn’t have heard the crying. But she did and, although she had to wrestle with her “nice-Muslim-lady-don’t-get-involved” thing, she eventually gave in to her much more recent private investigator’s curiosity. The sound was coming from her right and so she turned into Claremont Road and began walking back toward Woodgrange Road. Vast, tree-screened houses, just like her own, gently basked in the unseasonable warmth. Most of them were quiet. A lot of people had probably taken advantage of the weather to go out into Epping Forest or down to Brighton for the day. Maria Peters, half sitting, half lying on her doorstep crying, was an exception. Mumtaz walked up to her front gate, pushed it open and then closed it behind her.

  “Miss Peters,” she said once she’d reached the front step and put a hand on the woman’s shoulder. “Whatever is the matter?”

  They both looked across the room at the bunch of peacock feathers. They had all been tied, very artistically, together with a purple silk bow.

  “They bring bad fortune,” Maria Peters said. She bit her own lip and frowned. “I know it’s all bollocks, but it’s an old tradition—in the theater—and it’s what my mother taught me.”

  “What our mothers teach us, stays with us,” Mumtaz said. When she leaned forward to touch the feathers, she heard Maria wince.

  “You don’t think they bring bad luck?”

  “No.” Mumtaz smiled. “I think only God gives and takes away.”

  Maria wanted to say that that was what she tried to believe too, but she didn’t. She said, “The point is, I didn’t put them there, I wouldn’t and I don’t know who did, or would.”

  “You think that someone is trying to frighten you again?”

  She didn’t want to say “yes.” But this time she couldn’t have done this to herself. She would never have been able to bring herself to touch those … things.

  Mumtaz picked up the feathers and turned to look at her. “If you want me to dispose of these, I’ll do it gladly,” she said.

  “That would be nice.” Maria smiled. But then she put a hand up to her mouth and chewed down on a fingernail.

  Mumtaz put the feathers into her blue plastic shopping bag. She couldn’t be sure that Maria Peters hadn’t put the feathers there herself, it had to be a possibility. But it was only that. No one had ever really got to the bottom of her last bout of persecution fear.

  “Would you like a friend or a relative to come and be with you?” Mumtaz asked.

  Maria sat down. “Like my mother? I need her in my life like a hole in the head. If she calls I ignore her.”

  “The police?” Mumtaz offered.

  “No.”

  “If you feel that your house may have been broken—”

  “There’s no sign of any sort of break-in.” Maria rubbed a hand across her face, smearing what was left of her mascara out toward her temples.

  “Maybe whoever put these feathers here has a key.”

  “No.” She shook her head. “No one else has a key but me. I love my friends and even my mum, in a way, but I wouldn’t want them to be able to just come in when they felt like it.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “Yes.”

  But Mumtaz wasn’t. Even when people didn’t give keys away, people still managed to get hold of them. Her oldest brother Tariq had stolen their mother’s key when he was a teenager, had a copy made and then put it back in her handbag before she noticed. For almost a year it had allowed him to come and go at will from the family home whether his parents approved or not.

  “Whatever’s going on here, I don’t want people that I care about and who care about me, involved,” Maria said. “No
t this time.” Sitting out on the doorstep she hadn’t tried to call Grint or anyone else again.

  Mumtaz sat down next to her. “But don’t you think that people who love you would like to help if they can?”

  The comedian looked into Mumtaz’s eyes. “You’ve a background in psychology; do you think that I’m doing these things myself? Do you think I’m losing my mind?”

  Unknown to Maria Peters, these were not easy questions to answer. Neither Lee, nor Neil nor Mumtaz had been able to actually witness Maria placing objects and moving things around back in February. But that didn’t mean she hadn’t been doing it. She was genuinely afraid of what she seemed to genuinely feel were the actions of an outside agency of some sort. But clearly some anxieties about her own sanity were present too. An honest answer in either the affirmative or the negative was impossible. Mumtaz said, “I don’t know.”

  “You don’t know!”

  “Miss Peters, things have happened in this house that no one as yet has got to the bottom of. But peacock feathers, which you hate, do not just appear out of thin air. Well, not really. I think that someone could be getting into your house somehow. I think that you should call the police.”

  But Maria Peters shook her head.

  “Why not?”

  She didn’t answer. She didn’t need to. Last time the police had got involved with Maria it had ended with her not just dismissing them but also sacking Lee and the agency too. It had been something about not wanting to upset her friends, about not wanting to be watched “by men” any more. Lee was still of the opinion that her reasons had been bollocks. He really did think she’d lost her mind.

  “Miss Peters, if you’d like the agency—”

  “Oh, no, no, no, no, no!” She shook her head violently. “Men outside my house looking into every corner! No, no, that was awful dreadful, like a nightmare!”

  “You engaged—”