The Friendly Ones

by Philip Hensher

  A nurse was at the door, just in time to see Celia’s face move from happy empty welcome to confusion and to crumple in real pain. She was here to deal with them, but her patient’s suffering presented itself, and she went to it with urgency. Leo thought he had met this nurse in the past – she was a plump blonde girl, with a moue for a mouth, a face that Hollywood in the 1920s would have loved. But if he had flirted with her, that mattered nothing now. ‘There’s a reason why we only permit two visitors at a time,’ she said. ‘I can’t have this. Celia can’t be hosting a party. Everyone out, and then two in at a time – the rest of you can wait patiently.’

  ‘I’m going,’ Leo said. ‘I’ve heard enough.’ He went. The rest of them could sort themselves out. He would go home – no, he would go back to the house where he had grown up and then after that he would go home. There was nothing left for him to stay for. The last thing he would ever say to his father was ‘If you say so.’ Let him think what he wanted to think. Leo was not going to contradict him. The life of the family was over and all he had to do was go home and live the life he could make for himself. A saying about childbirth came to his mind. He walked towards the hospital’s exit. A family had gone into that room, yellowish and disinfected and lined with paint that shone like nail varnish; one family had entered, and eight people had left. He would not say goodbye to his mother, even.

  10.

  At the entrance to the hospital an old man in a raincoat was getting out of a taxi. He was holding a bag and a bunch of yellow flowers; defeated, he gave the impression of visiting a daughter, not a wife. Leo waved at the driver, who was sorting out his money. Like most of Sheffield’s taxi drivers, he was a Kashmiri with a thick red beard. Leo pushed past the old man, and got into the open door of the taxi, pulling it shut behind him. The taxi driver turned round, surprised.

  ‘I was just dropping someone off, pal,’ he said.

  ‘Could you take me home?’ Leo said. ‘I’m in a real hurry.’

  ‘You’re supposed to ring, to book a car,’ the driver said, but then turned his meter on and set off with Leo in the back. Leo gave him the address. ‘So are you following the football?’

  ‘No,’ Leo said. ‘I don’t follow football.’

  ‘That match last night,’ the driver said.

  ‘I didn’t see it,’ Leo said. At a street corner, three boys stood; one raised his hand as if in ironic greeting before quickly lowering it. There was a clatter on the side of the taxi. The boy had thrown a stone or a clod of mud.

  ‘Little bastards,’ the driver said equivocally. ‘It’s been a good World Cup, this one. Last night, Schillaci – I thought he was out of spirits in the first half. He’s been a star of the tournament so far, but last night he left it until the second half to score. Italy versus Uruguay – just the sound of it. Two former champions meeting each other in battle, a passenger of mine was saying this morning.’

  ‘I don’t know about that,’ Leo said. ‘I don’t have any interest in football.’

  ‘It’s all about the heritage, you might say,’ the driver went on. ‘Do the current teams, do they match up to the great teams of the past? Italy – their striker Schillaci, Toto Schillaci, I would say he stands fair to be one of the greats. I didn’t know his name until the tournament started, but now he must be one of the most famous men in the world. Same with Roger Milla for Cameroon. Last night –’

  ‘I really don’t follow football,’ Leo said. ‘I really don’t have any interest in it at all. I wouldn’t have known anything other than the fact that the World Cup was running at the moment.’

  ‘That’s strange.’

  ‘I don’t know about that,’ Leo said. ‘It’s not so strange, if people don’t all have interests in the same things in life.’

  ‘But most English people who get in the back of my taxi, they really like football, they really like to talk about it. It brings people together, the World Cup. Everyone.’

  ‘Well, you’ve just discovered – Look. My mother’s in that hospital dying. She’s probably got a very few weeks to live. Just now my father, who’s nearly eighty years old, has told her that he doesn’t want to go on being married to her. He’s never loved her, he says, and now he’s determined he’s going to try to divorce her before she dies. My family’s just falling apart. So no. I don’t have much interest in keeping up with the football – World – Cup.’

  ‘Me, I just want a quiet life – I just want to be at home with my kids and the missus, eat my dinner, do my job, don’t get beaten up by the passengers, go to the mosque on Fridays, that’s all I ask. Most English people like sitting back there and telling me what they think about the football World Cup.’

  ‘I’m sorry. I wouldn’t know what to say to you about football.’

  ‘Don’t give it another thought, pal.’

  The streets of Sheffield unwound. Down the hill: there were patches of green, scrubs of lawn and thin, hopeful trees at junctions, then bare-windowed supermarkets, local shops with self-painted adverts and chain-link over the windows. This was the poor half of the valley. Leo was never going to see it again. The car reached traffic lights at the worn-out bottom of the valley, just before the old stone bridge that carried the road over one of the city’s rivers, plunging towards the centre. On the other side of the valley, the hill began to rise, and now the houses were made of stone, not brick, and came in pairs with gardens, not facing the street in a bare, hopeless way. They were neat, the gardens, and sometimes elaborate, with a pergola or a shade at the front, and in the windows of the houses there were net curtains, and in the upper rooms the shadow of the back of a dressing-table. Soon they were in the shopping centre near to home – near to his father’s house – and a fishmonger stood there, a bookshop, a café and an ironmonger’s. There was a group of teenagers sitting on the back of a bench outside the newsagent’s – it was a Tuesday, Leo remembered now. They were eating chips from paper with forefinger-and-thumb amused delicacy; they were wearing the yellow striped tie of King George V School. It was terribly funny to recall that he could, if he wanted, take up his promise and go back to the office, not even on Thursday, as he had suggested, but tomorrow. In the streets outside the florist three women stood, one with a wicker basket even, passing the time of day. Leo had never seen them before and he would never see them again. And then up the hill once more, vast trees now, planted a hundred years ago, buckling the pavements outside the big stone houses, yew trees in the gardens at the front, or Japanese maples, and on top of the walls the stubs, like black teeth, of what had once been iron railings. These were the roads he had walked all his life and he would never walk them again.

  The taxi stopped outside the house. Leo told him to wait: he would only be two minutes. He went in, turning off the burglar alarm with its old code, 9389, and upstairs to his old room. He had been living out of the suitcase, and the pile of crumpled clothes sitting on his bedside chair went straight into his bag. There were probably dirty clothes in the wash – he wouldn’t hang about finding them. He was out of the house in a minute. He set the burglar alarm again, astonished by his own responsibility and decency. On the other side of the road a man was standing, watching Leo’s rapid progress in and out in a transfixed, idle way. Leo ignored him. He could be identifying houses to burgle, or anything. It didn’t matter any more. Leo wasn’t going to come back here. He had said goodbye to his mother, and his brother and sisters, and his father had done the rest. He put the suitcase into the back of the car. There was one more thing to do, and he told the driver to wait for a couple of minutes. He hoped Aisha’s mother, at least, was at home.

  But it was her father who answered the door.

  ‘Come in, come in,’ he said. ‘We’re just finishing our lunch.’

  Leo followed him through the hallway and left into the dining room. This was where the Tillotsons had kept their piano, and Nazia and Sharif had changed it in other ways, not at all easy to identify – the wallpapers had gone and the house was now painted in pl
ain colours. ‘Please, sit,’ Nazia said, sitting at one end of the table. ‘Would you like to eat? There’s biryani, it’s very nice,’ she went on, indicating a blue-and-white china tureen with a lid on it.

  ‘How’s your father?’ Sharif said. ‘Sit, sit.’

  Leo refused: he had a taxi waiting outside. ‘He’s fine,’ he said. ‘At least …’

  ‘He seems a bit lost,’ Sharif said. ‘I never see any of you talking to him. Just walking away and leaving him still talking to himself.’

  ‘He’s fine. I wondered,’ Leo said. ‘I wanted to write to Aisha. I think we left it –’

  ‘Yes,’ Nazia said. She picked up a chicken bone from her plate and gnawed at it. She set it down, chewed, swallowed; looked in a friendly but unsupportive way at Leo. ‘She went back to Cambridge.’

  ‘She went back before I could speak to her,’ Leo said, sitting down. ‘I’d like to keep in touch with her.’

  ‘To be honest,’ Sharif said, ‘I’ll tell her, but I don’t know that she will really want to get in touch with you. The easiest thing –’

  ‘Her parents live here,’ Nazia said pleasantly. ‘And your parents live next door. I expect you’ll see each other again some time soon. I’m sure you’ll want to be coming back. Make a bit of an effort with your father, I expect.’

  And now something very strange happened. Heavy steps came down the stairs, and one of the twins came in. It was the one his father had saved; there was a bandage at his throat still. He ignored Leo altogether. His mother stood up; the seat she was sitting in was ceded to her boy-son, and a clean plate provided for him from a pile on the sideboard. The mother stood by her son, almost like a servant, as she served him with biryani from the tureen. This piece of family behaviour, so remote from the way his mother would have behaved if any of her children had come in, was like a pain to Leo. He felt he should not have come into a house where the mother stood for her son to demand an address. He had made a mistake in thinking that Nazia and Sharif were in any way similar to him and his family. What were they doing at home on a Tuesday afternoon, the boy and Sharif?

  ‘I will pass on your request,’ Sharif said. ‘But I would be surprised if she wanted to write to you. The truth of the matter is that you should not have said those things to her. After she wrote a letter to you. You upset her a lot.’

  Leo began to blush; it was those things he had said that he wanted now to take back, to apologize for. He had no idea that she might have shared any of this with her father.

  ‘She wrote a foolish letter and she regretted it very much afterwards,’ Sharif said. ‘I saw the letter. It was foolish. We all write foolish letters sometimes, and sometimes when we lay ourselves bare like that we deserve to be treated with a little bit of kindness. Anyone would have known what to do. I can only thank you, I suppose, for not taking advantage of her in a stupid way. But if you had spoken to her with a little bit more … But, well, it’s all finished with now. She has a dissertation to finish. So you said you’re going back to London?’

  They didn’t get up from the table to say goodbye to Leo, and Nazia did not move from her sentry-duty by the side of her son’s chair. They would not. He went to the door and let himself out. The taxi was still there and, over the road, the man who had watched him leave his parents’ house and go into Nazia and Sharif’s. The man was tall and haggard. He called something, and it was only after Leo had got into the taxi and told the driver to go to the railway station that the call resolved itself into Leo’s name, called twice – Leo Spinster, Leo Spinster … there had been something about the way the emphasis had been fallen in that voice’s calling that made the name almost unfamiliar. He wondered who would next shake his hand and hear the sentiment ‘Hi, I’m Leo Spinster.’ The taxi drove on, now in silence from the front seat. The meter reading was north of twenty pounds by now. In five minutes, Leo understood why that man waiting on the street had been familiar in his general shape. It had been Tom Dick, six foot seven, come to see him. What had Tom Dick wanted? He had stood on the pavement opposite Leo’s parents’ house for some time. It didn’t matter; he wasn’t going to find out now. Whether apologies, humiliation, argument, self-justification were being plotted, he was now in another realm of existence. The taxi was almost at the station; the ticket was going to be bought to take him away from here. The family was over. He would go back to London and enter into training for the job he would strive to deserve. Blood; sweeping; shit; mopping; a man no more than five foot tall. The clock on the taxi ticked. He hoped to be of use.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  1.

  All the way to Penzance, Mahfouz kept feeling that something was about to drop, shamefully, from his inner clothing, from underwear or shirt collar. He got up – and it dropped. He was right. It was confetti. His new brother had rushed up to him at the last, at the railway station, and had shouted, ‘Congratulations, brother,’ in his ear before stuffing a fistful of confetti down his collar. Mahfouz had not expected that from Nawaz, or from anyone else. And confetti was thrown, was it not, over the heads of the bride and the bridegroom, not pushed hard down the groom’s neck? He was not sure.

  But Nawaz had arranged everything. It was Nawaz who had decided that a honeymoon was needed for his sister – that he had heard of the perfect place, a long way down at the very end of England, that he knew of the perfect hotel, that it would be best if Mahfouz and his new wife took the train down there – that the best thing would be to take the train to London and then, no difficulty at all, the train out of London again. Nawaz was her younger brother. He was the only one still living at home, the one she still treated like a little boy, muttering into his ear and making him gurgle with laughter. But he had sat with her father and the old uncle and the three severe older brothers in their little house, walking Mahfouz delicately around what they all must have known already as they talked. He had organized the whole thing by saying out loud in the hearing of his sister that it might be best if –

  And at the end, at Nottingham railway station, he had leapt forward, his hand in what Mahfouz had taken for a packet of breakfast cereal, and had plunged a fistful of confetti down the back of Mahfouz’s new shirt. He had never been so close to his new brother-in-law. His glee-filled, almost furious face pressed up against Mahfouz’s; their beards smeared against each other. All around them the ordinary travellers looked away. A ticket collector lowered the tools of his trade, interested to see if action was needed. But Mahfouz had stepped back and they had all said goodbye. All the way to London, every time he moved, he could feel the wet lump of a fistful of confetti. Discreetly, sitting in the first-class seat by the window, he pulled the tail of his shirt free from his trousers and shuffled. He felt the paper fragments drop behind him onto the seat in a single mass. It was so strange that Nawaz had taken this one thing from English weddings.

  Then, of course, when the train pulled into St Pancras, he had to push his new wife forward to go ahead. She should not see the mess of confetti he was leaving behind him on the clean leather seat, like the brightly coloured droppings of a large animal.

  ‘What is it, my husband?’ she said, but he just told her to walk on. No one saw: at this time on a weekday, the first-class compartment had been nearly empty. In the taxi that Nawaz had insisted on, the one to take his sister from one London terminal to another, Mahfouz could feel more pieces of confetti, stuck in the hair on his shoulders underneath his shirt; and again as they had sat on the bench at Paddington, their suitcases before them, Mahfouz’s new wife producing a box of travel snacks and a Thermos of tea to fill the hour before their train left. The travel snacks had been delicious, a treat; her capacity to anticipate and please with food was the first thing he had liked about her. Today, however, he could only feel the confetti about him, damp and uncomfortable. He supposed that that was what English weddings were like, now, two hours out of London.

  ‘Look!’ she cried.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘So beautiful – the little ani
mals. The sheep.’

  There were fields of sheep, rising up to the left of the train, and on the hills beyond, a house in stone, a big square house.

  ‘Yes,’ Mahfouz said.

  ‘And the little ones, look – there are black sheep and their lambs. Look, husband – they are black, too – oh!’

  ‘Yes,’ Mahfouz said. Then he saw that this would not do. ‘Have you not seen black sheep before?’

  ‘Yes – oh, yes, but …’ She seemed to remember something she had been told, and lowered her head.

  ‘The black sheep produce black lambs,’ Mahfouz said. ‘It is their nature.’

  She went on looking. Her eyes were bright and curious. Perhaps she had not often been taken out of Nottingham. Schools took children out into the countryside, he knew. They had taken his son Ayub out, and his daughter Aaliyah, hadn’t they? It was something he could ask his wife when they had been married for some time. He caught himself thinking that he ought to ask Sadia to enquire about what sort of experiences this girl had had. The thought was painful. As a moral duty, to pass through the pain properly, he reiterated it with all the circumstances: I must ask first-wife to ask about second-wife, first-wife who died last year about second-wife. Sadia.

  ‘Oh –’ second-wife started to say. She stopped herself.

  But Mahfouz was not the man she feared he was. He had loved Sadia and now he was about to love second-wife. He was going to be gentle with her, as he had been with first-wife. He would love the sound of her voice, and listen with interest to what she said. She had been about to comment on the view from the train. The river had been widening, with mud-flats and wading birds; the afternoon sun flashed like a sheet of polished metal on the still water, standing in pools, brown and milky. The far side of the river was receding from them; a small cluster of white-fronted houses and a cliff of rock, surprisingly red in colour. The flat spread of water and mud and light: it was like a landscape from his childhood, from those long trips out from the city into the wide rivers and flat green of the country.