The Last Gift

by Abdulrazak Gurnah

  In those first few days after she returned to work, she felt again the shock of what had happened to Abbas, he who hardly ever fell ill and now was so weak and confused, so angry, so quickly reduced to tears and sobbing for no reason. It was more shocking to think of him like that when she was away from him. Somehow when he was there in front of her, she could lose herself in the details of what needed to be done, even if it was an ordeal at times to go close to him. But at a distance he came to her in pieces, in shocking episodes that she could not get out of her mind. Her friends at work asked after him, and she told them briefly, making the best of her bulletins from sick bay. The bulletins helped her to reduce her shock into something more ordinary, to fit what had happened into familiar dramas. Who did not know a father or a sister or a husband or a neighbour who was struggling with a lingering illness or waiting for a major operation? After her bulletins, she listened to those of her friends and between them they made tragedies tolerable, blaming doctors, fate or even the unfortunates themselves for the miseries they described. It was better that way. They were not the kind of friends she could open her heart to. She did not have that kind of friend except for Abbas. She was afraid that if she spoke openly she would release a torrent of empty sympathy, which she guessed would be the best her friends at work would be able to offer. Which was probably also the best she could offer if one of them were to open their heart to her too. It was enough to feel the human gestures without probing too much, it was enough.

  If anything, she did not want to think about how he was now. She wanted not to think about that for just a few hours in a day, but she could not manage it. It was not right to leave him on his own all day, but the doctor said he was getting better and it was worth a try. The medication is doing its work and he will be fine. Don’t fuss over him all the time, she said, let him look after himself a little, let him learn. Stop fussing, that was what he said too. She knew he wanted her out of the house so he could be alone with his silences. But it was not right when he could not manage, when he spilt things and soiled himself and sat weeping all day in his loneliness. It hurt her that he spoke roughly to her, which was not his way, but she had to get used to it. He was not well, and anyway, she would fuss if she wanted, what else was she supposed to do.

  It was their regular doctor, Dr Mendez, who said don’t fuss over him all the time, let him look after himself, as if she was not a champion fusspot herself. She was very firm with Maryam, as she had always been from when Maryam first took the children to her all those years ago. Her instructions were to be obeyed in full, and her diagnosis often had a hint of blame, as if Maryam were at fault. Dr Mendez was a Spanish lady doctor, and a very stubborn one, in Maryam’s view. She was about Maryam’s age and had been their doctor for years, growing more and more like a rugged lady wrestler as she grew older and filled out. Perhaps it was Maryam’s own fault, that she had not found a way of preventing the doctor from bullying her, but she spoke to Maryam as if she was not very good at looking after herself. After the diabetes diagnosis, she lectured Abbas about his negligence too. Older men are too vain to go to the doctor until something terrible happens to them and then they are a nuisance to everyone, she said. He should have had regular blood tests as a matter of course, a man of his age, and then they would have diagnosed the diabetes years ago and would have had his heart problem under control too. Now the children must have blood tests at least once a year. These conditions are passed on in families, she said. It was as well that Abbas was so weak; doctor or no doctor, he would not have taken that tone of voice from her when he was well. As the stubborn Spanish lady doctor lectured him, Maryam thought she saw Abbas briefly smile, and she preferred to think that it was his mischief smile, saving up some mockery that he would deliver to her later, when he had the strength.

  She thought of him then as he used to be, as he was when she met him all those years ago in Exeter. She often thought of him like that since his illness, the man she met when she was seventeen, not to compare or grieve that he was no longer like that, but as a pleasure, as a memory that came to her on its own and which made her smile. Perhaps it was also to mourn that ease that was now so completely past.

  She saw him for the first time in Boots in Exeter, such a long time ago, in an almost imaginary life. They were both standing in a queue and he smiled. People did not always smile when they caught her eye that way, or she did not think they did anyway. More often than not she looked away before she could read what was in their eyes, so perhaps they did smile after she had broken eye contact, but in those days she was afraid of their despising, sneering looks and their angry faces, and preferred not to know. He was a slim, strong dark man, wearing a light-brown, polo-neck sweater and a denim jacket. He was ahead of her in the queue, and she had time to have a good look at him as he looked this way and that way while he was waiting his turn. Then he looked back and saw her, and looked again and smiled. It made her feel good, that smile, as if she was someone he had recognised, as if they were part of an understanding, of something the two of them knew that no one else there did. She was not surprised when she found out later that he worked as a sailor. It was the way he looked, like someone who had been places and had done things, someone who had known freedom. She was born in Exeter and had never been anywhere else or done anything. She was living with Ferooz and Vijay then, and that life was becoming difficult. The thought of Ferooz and Vijay made her wince, as it always did even after all these years, and she stretched her shoulders and neck, and then gently eased that memory away.

  She knew, just by looking at Abbas then, without knowing anything about him, that he had done things. He had a certain look in his eyes, a mean look, a look that said I am not taking it quietly, whatever you have in mind. She had to say it was a mean look. When she knew him better she saw that it was not in his eyes all the time, only in passing when he did not like what he heard or saw, or when he suspected he was being treated with disrespect. He could not bear disrespect, all his life, even to the point of silliness. Sometimes that look was like something burning, his eyes glowing, and his face would be angry and determined, as if his mind had taken him somewhere else. When he was not about to burst like that, his eyes were calm and big, like someone who liked to see, and when she first met him she thought he was someone who liked to please.

  Yes, that was how she would always remember him, while memory lasted, that slim restless man she met in the first summer after her last year at school. She had a job in a café at the time . . . and here she was still doing the same sort of thing a whole lifetime later. She thought then that if she could earn enough she would move out of Ferooz and Vijay’s flat and into lodgings with one of her friends from work. But the money was no good and the work was a drudge, although she liked her mates. It made a difference then, when everything was so hard, to work with people you got on with, people who laughed at everything as if all their lives were a stupid joke. Later she got a better-paid job in a factory, which was where she was working when she saw Abbas again. She still went to the café sometimes to have a cup of tea and meet with the people she used to work with, and always got a cream cake on the house. That was where she saw him the second time. He glanced at her and recognised her. He hesitated for a moment and when she smiled at him, he came over. He hovered for a moment with his tray and then sat down.

  ‘Boots,’ he said, smiling.

  ‘It’s a pleasure to meet you, Mr Boots,’ she said, and they both laughed.

  They chatted for a while and then he said goodbye, see you again some time. He told her his name and said that he worked on ships. She told him her name too and said that she worked in a factory. Even that exchange seemed somehow amusing. She knew, without knowing how, that she would meet him again. She could not remember much of what he said or what she said in return, only the feeling of it remained and she was not sure if she could name it: excitement, anticipation. She remembered the way he looked at her and the pleasure she saw in his eyes and the way that made her fe
el.

  And the third time she met him, the blessed third time as he said later, because blessing always comes the third time round, was in the factory. It was such a surprise to see him there and she could see from his sly, pleased smile that it was no coincidence. He had taken a job there because he wanted a rest from the sea, he said. He was in Exeter to stay a few days with a friend and was having such a good time that he thought he would stay on for a while. In the meantime he took a job in the factory because a person had to work or become a burden on someone else. He spent so much time hanging around where Maryam was working in the line that the supervisor told him off in the end, but he still came to talk to her. The supervisor was a thin weasly man who strode about querulously, looking for provocation and bickering with everyone. Abbas was an immediate provocation to him, and it took a day or two before Abbas learned to evade his attentions. His work was supplying several of the lines with what they needed, so he could roam about whenever he was not in demand, charming the women and keeping out of the way of the supervisor. Afterwards he walked her home, still talking, making her laugh, flattering her outrageously. She knew she was being courted and she lay awake in the dark afterwards, thrilled by what it meant. All that week they went around like that, talking all the time, holding hands by the third day, a goodbye kiss on the fourth evening, and they made love for the first time that weekend. It was the first time for her altogether. She told him before, in case something happened. She was not sure what could happen but from what she had heard something was going to be broken and there was going to be blood, so she wanted him to know. He asked if she was sure, and she said she was. He was so handsome.

  Maryam would have preferred to stop her memories there for a while, to linger over the image of the Abbas she had just met, but she could not supress the presence of Ferooz in the vicinity. She was still living with Ferooz and Vijay at the time, and they did not like what was going on with Abbas. At first they did not like the idea of a boyfriend. Then they did not like his age, old enough to be her father. He is twenty-eight, she told them, which is what he had told her. Then they did not like that he was a sailor. They are wild, irresponsible people, Vijay said. Drunkards. He’s just using you. There’s only one thing men like him think about.

  It was a terrible evening. She was supposed to meet him at the cinema but they would not let her go out, talking at her with such alarm that she dared not move. The next morning, before anyone was up, she collected a few clothes in a carrier bag and went to him, to Abbas, to where he was staying with his friend. He must have guessed that she would come, that she had not been allowed to come the previous evening. He was standing at the window, so early in the morning, looking out for her, and as soon as he saw her, he ran downstairs to let her into the flat.

  ‘What happened to you?’ he asked, pulling her into the house and shutting the door gently so as not to wake up his friend. ‘I thought . . . I thought you no longer wanted to see me.’

  ‘They wouldn’t let me come,’ she said, thrilled, despite the tension of the moment, to see him so agitated.

  She told him about the arguments and the abuse, and he said let’s get out of this place, and she thought fine. She was happy to go far away from the mess, get away, leave it behind. She did not know if she had any rights, or if Ferooz and Vijay could have her brought back. So when Abbas said, Yallah, let’s get out of here, she said count me in, I’m coming. It felt glorious, not to stop and think, not to go back to the belittling life she was used to.

  She had thought of dying when she saw his collapsed body by the door, his dying, her own dying. Later, his collapse made her think of him gone, and then of her own life, of its beginnings and its endless furtive turnings. It was Ferooz who had told her the story of her arrival in the world, the story of her beginnings. She was found outside the casualty doors at Exeter Hospital, an abandoned baby. A night-duty porter, whose name nobody bothered to remember, stepped outside to see the dawn and to smoke a cigarette, and saw a bundle at his feet. It was wrapped in a cream-coloured crocheted shawl and had a brown envelope pinned to it like a delivery address or a label. When he saw that the bundle was a baby, the night-duty porter may have smiled or he may have been uncertain whether he should pick it up and take it inside in the warmth, or whether to call someone who would know exactly what to do. The nurses sometimes became annoyed when the porter tried to help, as if he might break something, or hurt the patient, or just generally be uncouth. He put his cigarette away without lighting it and went in to tell the other porter on duty. They called the duty Staff Nurse, who swept up the bundle and hurried inside with it, and Maryam expected that the nurse gave the porters a rebuking glance and that they exchanged a look at the fuss she was making.

  She was tiny when she made this dramatic arrival, weighing just over four pounds and was no more than two or three days old. The doctor who examined her said that she had been well looked after. Her mother was possibly a teenager, the doctor said, to judge from the size of the baby, but that was only a guess. Maryam wondered what faces the doctor and the Staff Nurse would have made at each other as they shared this information. What word would have described a girl like her mother at that time: scrubber, slag, slut? She was not told that kind of detail, and she had no choice but to add in some extra strokes of her own to fill in the picture. She was not sure about the cream-coloured crocheted shawl, for example, whether that was there in the story she was told or whether she added it because that was what she imagined an abandoned baby would be bundled up in. She had a cream-coloured crocheted shawl for her own babies, and sometimes thought my mother as she handled it, and felt tender towards the absent one.

  In the meantime, while the doctor continued his examination of the baby, the Staff Nurse called the police in case the mother was still nearby. Also, she did not think anyone should touch the envelope in case there was some evidence that would be useful to the police. One could not be sure what horror lay behind such cases. It was most likely that the mother had relinquished her baby out of the shame of being unwed, or out of desperation at the thought of a despised and lonely motherhood, but it was just possible that the baby had not been left by the mother but by a relative, or by someone who had harmed the mother. In any case, whoever had done it, it was a crime. Offences Against the Person Act 1861, Ferooz told her. She had looked it up.

  The police came immediately but could not trace the mother or whoever had left the baby outside the hospital. The envelope was unaddressed and contained a sheet of lined paper, a page torn out of a school exercise book. It said, Her name is Maryam they won’t let me keep her. Judging from the name and from the baby’s complexion, the police thought the mother must have been a foreign woman, or rather, they said, in the elegant phrasing of the time, that she was probably a darkie of some kind. As the police knew, some of the foreigners had worse prejudices than Christians in matters such as unwed mothers, and sometimes hurt their own daughters out of shame. So the first job for the police was to locate foreign families in the town and begin their enquiries there. This was easier to do then because there were so few of them, before the floodgates opened. However, they also found copious evidence of blonde hair in the shawl, and the baby’s little tuft of hair was fair, although this was not unusual for babies who grew dark hair in adulthood. So it was possible that it was the father who was foreign, and he had abandoned the teenaged girl he had made into a mother, who in turn was forced by her relatives to abandon the baby.

  The police made their enquiries, had their suspicions but could not announce a definite identification of the mother. If there had been another crime associated with the incident, they would probably have tried harder, but this looked like another case of a girl who had been foolish and had paid the price, and what information they had, which was nothing more than rumour, suggested that the strongest possible suspect was no longer in Exeter. Maryam was put out for long-term fostering with a family in Exeter. Her date of birth was estimated as 3 October 1956.

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nbsp; The family she was put out to foster with were Mr and Mrs Riggs, an elderly couple who were already fostering two other little girls. Maryam would think of them always as her mum and dad, even though she was only with them for the first few years of her life. For practical purposes, their name filled the empty space in her own name, and she became Maryam Riggs. Her own earliest memories were of the time she lived with them and shared a room with two little girls.

  Their mother was a large, tall slow-moving woman with a mole on her cheek. It was a large mole, and sometimes their mother worried it until the skin around it became red and angry. She talked to them in a kindly grumbling monotone, talking all the time, and she even carried on talking when she was on her own. When she was angry, her voice was sharp and painful to listen to, as if she was hurting. When she started talking like that, it took her a long time to stop, and the shortest word or the lightest sigh set her off again. She cooked them vegetable stews and watered down the milk to save money, and she filled them up with sweet suet puddings and scones that were hard as rock. They were to call her Mum.

  It was a cold house. They all wore several layers of clothing and Mum’s dresses reached all the way down to her ankles. The dresses made her look as if she was someone from another time, and Dad sometimes called her Queen Victoria. She kept their hair cut short to avoid nits, as she called them, and gave them a shallow bath, once a week, all of them in the same water. They were bathed in the kitchen, in a tin bath which Mum filled with water heated in saucepans. Mum had big hands, and scrubbed the children hard with a thick grey flannel, kneeling on the stone floor beside the tub, sometimes with a cigarette in her mouth. The only room with a fire was the living room. The kitchen kept its warmth from cooking and from heating the saucepans, but the water quickly lost its heat and their baths were hurried and brief. Their dad got into the bath after them, and they had to get out while the water was still warm enough for him to use. Afterwards, the children ran upstairs to get under the covers as quickly as they could. Maryam smiled when she described this bathing routine to her own children, and she made them see that some of it was fun.