The Friendly Ones

by Philip Hensher

  ‘Dolly will have to come back with us,’ Sharif said calmly. ‘There’s nothing for her in Dacca any more. I thought Mother would last longer.’

  ‘She’s only twenty,’ Nazia said. ‘I can’t think of Dolly, twenty.’

  ‘I don’t see why she can’t finish her degree at the university here,’ Sharif said.

  ‘She’s not on her own, is she?’ Nazia said.

  ‘We should phone Samu Khondkar,’ Sharif said judiciously. ‘That was the surgeon with the collection of butterflies. He had a son called Samu, a fat little boy. She must be with them. It was kind of him to phone, an awful job.’

  ‘Strangers,’ Nazia said dazedly. She could not remember any Khondkar, any collection of butterflies. For a moment she envisaged a man in a room, his head swathed with flying creatures, a fat little boy like a cupid among them in the air. ‘We are here and Bina is in Cardiff. How would Bina know?’

  ‘I will telephone Bina now,’ Sharif said. ‘I expect that light blinking on the answering machine means that she or Tinku has already tried to call us. And then I will go immediately to the travel agent and book flights to Dacca for you, and for me, and for Bina and for Tinku. Aisha. What do you think about Aisha coming, at least? We will be too late for the funeral, but there are always things to be done.’

  That evening, Nazia sat with Aisha in her bedroom and told her about poor Nani. It was very sudden, she said; it was best for Nani. She had been very sad since what had happened to Rafiq-uncle. (Aisha now was only two years younger than Rafiq had been when he disappeared – when he was killed, they must think.) It was very sad that now she would never know what had happened to him, or be able to bury his body. She had been very sad since Nana died, too, and now it was all over for her. Tomorrow, they were going to go to Dacca, Aisha too.

  ‘Mummy,’ Aisha said. ‘When did Nani die, exactly? What time of day? Was it yesterday?’

  ‘Why do you ask?’

  ‘I just want to know what I was doing when it happened. Was she in her house?’

  ‘Do you remember it? The house, Dacca?’

  ‘Of course I do,’ Aisha said. ‘I was eight when we came back here. Are Raja and Omith coming?’

  ‘I think they’re too young,’ Nazia said. She picked up the green-haired plastic troll sitting against the pillow; set it down again. ‘I’ve spoken to Mrs Mottishead, and, this is so kind of her, they’ll go and stay –’

  ‘Mummy,’ Aisha said. ‘I’m telling you. Don’t leave them with the Mottisheads. You don’t know what you’re doing.’

  Nazia stared. ‘What is this? Less of the drama, please. Just because you’ve fallen out with Samantha. It’s very kind of Mrs Mottishead to take them in.’

  ‘They mustn’t,’ Aisha said. ‘Mummy –’

  ‘It’s not a matter for discussion,’ Nazia said.

  6.

  It was only yesterday, Aisha felt like saying to her mother. But her mother thought she was popular. There was too much to start explaining now. Mummy hadn’t even noticed the sticking plaster on her fourth finger.

  Mummy had dropped her at the bottom of Darwin Lane in the mornings. There was no need to drive right up to the school gates, and everyone would think she was spoilt if they saw it. Almost everyone else got the bus to school. It was raining, and underneath the trees lining the road, it was dismal, dark and dripping fatly onto Aisha’s umbrella, like the stroke on a drum. Ahead of her there were some little ones, and just beyond that three figures she recognized. She slowed down, but somehow Samantha Mottishead knew she was there. She was flanked by Alison and Katy. They used to be her friends. They were still her friends: just the sort of friends that were always horrible to you. They were waiting for Aisha to catch up.

  ‘It’s this afternoon,’ Samantha Mottishead said. Her voice was croaking with excitement; her horrible face was lit up with what she knew and what she had planned. Her glasses were half the size of her face, and because of her long-sightedness, enlarged her almost colourlessly pale eyes in her white flat face, like a fish that lived in the dark. The mothers felt sorry for Samantha Mottishead because of what she looked like, her dark hair parted in the dead centre of her skull, falling to a cloud of split ends somewhere two feet below. She had not had her hair cut in five years because, Aisha believed, she thought she drew some of her power from it. ‘It’s this afternoon it’s going to happen. It is Wednesday afternoon. My powers are approaching.’

  She had seen the looks on the faces of the others as they went on, through rain and in the shadows under the trees, in quiet ordinary interiors with the curtains drawn, in neat gardens. What did Samantha Mottishead believe about the powers she claimed for herself, when her voice dropped into that bestial deep wail? She had started alluding to them months ago, perhaps even a year, and by the time she came out with it and said she had powers, the group did not laugh. The others might believe Samantha, and a serious secretiveness took hold.

  There was almost no one that Aisha could talk to about it. Mummy was such friends with Mrs Mottishead, and she felt that if she tried to say anything to the others, it would get back to Samantha. Samantha looked at her in her own way; she was searching for a person to cast out, and Aisha was on the edge of the group. She only spoke to Fanny, when they came over for their monthly visit; they were allowed to sit upstairs or to go out for a walk, these days. Fanny thought it was hilarious. ‘She sounds mental,’ she said. ‘There’s a girl like that in our school. The boys throw conkers at her.’

  The afternoon was devoted to sport, and you were allowed to undertake sport of your own choice, self-supervised. Four of the boys went off to the swimming-pool; others formed two five-a-sides; the keen girls played a hockey match, a football match, or a pair did their best with the school’s pitted tarmac tennis court. The sports mistress had been persuaded by Alison and a couple of the others to let five or six of them go off jogging. The morning’s rain had cleared; it was only damp and cloudy now. They left the school in their shorts or tracksuits, theatrically stretching and raising their knees and even performing short sprints down the drive; they even ran in a manner of speaking down Darwin Lane. But now they reached the bottom and walked the half-mile to Samantha Mottishead’s house. At the beginning of the walk, it was only Samantha Mottishead who was silent, a dark island in the middle of their noise. The silence spread; by the time they reached her house, no one was talking.

  The Mottishead house was not like anyone else’s: it hid its towers and rooftop pavilions away behind a jungle. Once inside, you could not understand it, and afterwards, it was impossible to remember the shape it had exactly. In other houses, the things that could be moved stayed in the rooms they were ordained for. The plates went from the kitchen to the dining room and back again; the clothes went on a tidy circular journey from bedroom to wearer to laundry basket to washing machine to ironing board to bedroom again. In the Mottishead house, you could feel a hard prod in your back as you were sitting on the sofa, and it was somebody’s toothbrush. Once Mrs Mottishead’s bra had been draped over the back of a dining-room chair. And there were books everywhere, in the kitchen and bathroom and even in the porch. Nobody ever tidied Samantha’s bedroom. They trooped upstairs and she carelessly pushed her old clothes and things to the back of the room, staring at each of them, daring them to say anything. She had not opened her curtains that morning and she left them shut now.

  ‘They’re all out,’ she said. ‘Except Granny. She’s probably sleeping. She won’t bother us.’

  ‘What’s that?’ Alison said, pointing at something behind the bed. Aisha would not look.

  ‘We need to start straight away. Or there won’t be time. You have to do what I tell you and not to argue. You see? Understand? Now. You need to sit in a circle,’ Samantha said. ‘It won’t work without.

  ‘I discovered this,’ she went on. ‘I found this through my powers. Sit. Sit.

  ‘Little Tommy Tucker sang for his supper …’

  Aisha knew that Samantha had not fo
und this through her powers. She had found it through watching the same old film on the television, last Saturday afternoon, a film about summoning up ghosts. She had silenced the group nevertheless. They were in a circle, cross-legged, just as Samantha had ordered, and Samantha’s head now fell backwards. It returned to upright slowly. Samantha’s eyes had rolled back in their sockets, the blank of the whites terrible behind the enlarging lens. Her mouth was hanging open.

  ‘Who is it, who is it, who is it?

  ‘Kadapatazaxou, tiddy-otty-gilly-quash, pabaranagoofin, graaaar …

  ‘I feel your presence, O great one …

  ‘I feel you, now command us, ask us for what you want …’

  It was stupid and ridiculous, what Samantha was doing, but Aisha had never felt like laughing. If Fanny was here, she would have had somebody to encourage her into laughing, but these others, they were serious, even frightened by Samantha’s special voice and her made-up language. Did they believe she had powers? That she was summoning up the dead? It was impossible to know without making the precise observation that would expel her from the group.

  ‘Yes,’ Samantha was saying, as if listening to a detailed set of instructions. ‘Yes. Yes. I hear and understand. Yes, from the dark one, I hear and understand and obey.’

  Downstairs there was a small noise, a thud of something falling to the floor. It was probably only the old grandmother’s book sliding off the arm of her chair, but it made Alison shriek.

  ‘He comes, he comes,’ Katy moaned, joining in. ‘I hear his dreadful footfall.’

  Samantha’s eyes slid back into place. Her mouth closed. She focused with disdain on Katy. ‘You hear nothing, foolish one,’ she said, but in her normal voice. ‘He does not make himself heard to just anyone. I have my instructions from him. He has asked for something, one small thing. He wants the life force of the dark one, as he calls her, just one drop … of blood.’ A wavering hand was raised; a finger extended; and it moved around the circle slowly before stopping where Aisha knew it would stop.

  ‘Forget it,’ Aisha said. She pulled her hands away from Katy on her right, Marian on her left. ‘I’m not your dark one.’

  ‘Oh …’ Samantha said, a sigh diminishing into a deflating noise. ‘Oh … so small a thing … a drop of the life force … If you disappoint him …’

  ‘If you disappoint him, he will grow angry,’ Katy said, singing the last word.

  ‘I don’t care,’ Aisha said. ‘I’m going.’

  But somehow now Samantha had sprung forward like an angry dog, and Aisha found her legs being gripped. Samantha’s bare knees rammed her shoulders to the floor. Get off, she started to shout, but a hand was in her mouth. She could not breathe.

  ‘Fetch the knife,’ Samantha said. ‘And the bowl. So small a drop, it will not hurt, and a drop of the life force from the dark one, from the dark continent, from far away, her black blood an offering to the one we all serve …’

  ‘Don’t,’ somebody was saying, in real terror, but now Samantha was reaching out her left hand to where somebody was passing her a Stanley knife.

  Not my neck, not my neck, Aisha was trying to say. But the hand in her mouth was firm, and the blade of the knife was, surely, against where her jugular vein ran. Could Samantha be as stupid as that? She was holding the knife there; the cold of it against Aisha’s skin.

  ‘So fine and delicate,’ Samantha said. ‘And a drop of the life blood, a gift for our master.’

  ‘Not the neck,’ someone said.

  ‘No,’ another voice said. ‘Not the neck. The neck isn’t necessary. It is only the blood we want. A little prick on the finger will do.’ Had somebody new come into the room? It was a voice to be obeyed, it appeared. The knife left Aisha’s neck; in a moment her hand was picked up. She tensed; a short savage pain at the end of her fourth finger, and then fierce pressure.

  ‘Blood! Blood! The life force!’ Samantha was crying, and got off Aisha’s shoulders. Aisha raised herself. It seemed to her that the door to Samantha’s bedroom, behind her, closed. Samantha was clutching her hand, and pressing blood out of it into a little Chinese tea-bowl that Katy was holding. She was pleased to see that some of the others were looking at Samantha with real dislike.

  ‘Get off me,’ Aisha said, pulling her finger away and sucking it. ‘If you ever – ever –’

  ‘And now,’ Samantha intoned, ignoring what Aisha had said, hunching with a performance of glee over the few drops of blood in the white and blue bowl, ‘now the real magic can begin. I call upon my powers. Descend! Descend!’

  The afternoon was over. For another half an hour, Samantha Mottishead waved her arms in the air and muttered syllables. She performed a dance of her own invention, all undecided gestures and songs she was making up; she announced what she was about to do was a mime of gratitude to the Sun, but explaining that Night was better. In the end she cast a spell, raised up above the others in the only way possible, by standing on her bed with the rainbow-patterned continental quilt, and lifting the bowl with Aisha’s blood in it to her mouth. Aisha did not believe that she had drunk her blood. Her finger really hurt. She had sucked it and sucked it. That Samantha Mottishead was going to get her an Elastoplast. She could walk out: she thought she could get further by staying with her arms folded and putting on a sarcastic expression.

  ‘What’s that spell going to do, Sam?’ Alison asked, when Samantha Mottishead had finally collapsed on her bed. It was true: she had not explained its purpose.

  ‘It’s a curse unto death,’ Samantha said, getting up. ‘It is the most powerful curse a witch can cast, against those who stand against the bond of love between witches, and the acolytes of witches.’

  ‘Are you –’

  ‘Yes,’ Samantha said. She raised her grubby hand to her throat, clutching it. ‘I am now a witch. I am a white witch, and I use my powers for good, against the forces of evil.’

  Aisha said nothing. She would leave with the others, and go home instead of going back to school. If she went in first thing, yesterday’s clothes would still be on the peg in the changing room where she had left them.

  7.

  In fact the twins had behaved very well on the long flight to Dhaka. The stewardess had managed to find them a pack of colouring-in pictures with crayons, and a little magazine with games to play. There was, too, the excitement of looking out of the window, and they were good at taking their turn to sit on Mummy’s lap, though they were getting rather big for that. And the excitement of dinner on a tray, full of strange little things like butter wrapped up in a square in foil and salt and pepper in sealed paper twists! Bina-aunty had told them a story after dinner, and Tinku-uncle had kindly swapped places so that they could sit either side of her. Mummy had not told anyone, but at the last moment she had put Mr Rabbit and Doopstop the bear into the hand baggage. (It was lucky that the two favoured totems had been put through the washing machine only last week: Raja had been trying to get the bear he had named Doopstop to eat some cheese squeezed from a tube, and the toy had looked and smelt very strange afterwards.) Sharif had told her not to create excitement by producing them before bedtime. He believed he could let the twins go off to sleep and then gently place Mr Rabbit and Doopstop the bear next to their owners, Omith and Raja respectively. That would be a comforting and nice way to wake up in this very strange place, a metal tube hurtling eastwards through the air.

  Sharif wished there was something that would help him. He had had his own Mr Rabbit, a small brown bear called Butter, but Butter had been through the wars and was probably in a tea chest in somebody’s cellar. The arrangements had occupied him: the tickets, Tinku and Bina, the yielding to Nazia’s sudden decision that the boys must come too. Now they were all on a plane together, and there was nothing to do for a whole long day. When the stewardess came, he refused any food, taking only a glass of water, knowing he would regret it later. There had been a bad moment at Heathrow when, in the crowd at the departure gate, he thought he had seen them. But the ma
n had turned, and it had not been Mahfouz after all.

  Nobody had said anything about Mahfouz and Sadia. Ten years ago, when Father had died, they had been informed. But they had not responded. At the time everyone had said that Mahfouz, safe in London, would not dare set foot in Bangladesh again. He would be seized by the police and thrown into jail before he could reach home. That might have been the case in 1975: certainly Mahfouz and Sadia had not made an appearance at Father’s ceremonies. It was clear to Sharif, however, that things must have changed in Bangladesh. The Friend of Bengal was dead; he had promised that wrongs would be righted; and now there were no elections and no freedom, and the country was being run by a general who would welcome Mahfouz and his kind with open arms. Sharif, in seat 12F, his family around him sleeping, brooded in the little tent of illumination cast over him by the reading light.

  And now finally they were there. They queued up for Immigration, Bina taking Raja’s hand and Nazia Omith’s, and, in a crowd behind Sharif, listened while he answered the many questions, respectfully responded to the officer’s salaam, his careful but peremptory offering of sympathy when he heard the reason for their visit. How dirty the hall looked, and how dim the lighting was, as if a transparent veil of brown had been cast over everything. Somewhere an amplified voice fell into distortion and crackle, wailing its way to an abrupt conclusion. The smell of wet earth penetrated this ramshackle building, as if through widening cracks. It was long familiar to Sharif and to Bina and to Nazia, but Raja was going as far as to hold his nose. His twin was vastly amused by this, and of course copied it; it was not a bad smell, though, just an unfamiliar one. Sharif looked at the filthy rim of the immigration officer’s white cuffs, the thick line of dirt running behind the man’s neck on his white collar, and restrained himself from moving backwards six inches.

  The baggages were delivered, and had to be searched. They were small enough bags; most of the clothes they had packed were mourning clothes in white. A book that Tinku had brought was confiscated – it was nothing so very dangerous, just a silly-sounding novel, but it had a girl in a swimsuit on the cover, holding a gun. Their attention was held by the women’s and Aisha’s toiletries; at one point Tinku was on the verge of stepping forward angrily, but Sharif restrained him. These men must be allowed to go their own way, greeted by a cheerful, smiling, submissive face. Sharif, watching their dirty hands go through his wife’s carefully folded white saris, made a vow to himself: he would not leave this country without his little sister Dolly. She deserved better than this.