The Friendly Ones

by Philip Hensher

  ‘She’s a splendid girl, Aisha,’ the army officer said. ‘I thought you two were seeing each other at some point?’

  ‘Not actually,’ Enrico said. He began to roll up the sleeves of his old pullover.

  3.

  A girl Aisha had known at high school was at the conference, oddly enough. She had gone into immigration law after Manchester University. Unlike Aisha, she was working, and her firm had given her a couple of days off to attend the conference. Julie had come down by train, but since she was going back to Sheffield, she gratefully accepted the offer of a lift from Aisha in her new red Fiesta. Almost all the way – certainly beyond Leicester Forest East service station where they stopped for an awful sandwich – they laughed about poor Enrico. Julie had never met him before: she frankly couldn’t believe that Aisha had ever been serious about someone like that. Aisha said it was a weekend at home that had put her off him.

  ‘Not the mark he got,’ Julie said. At the conference, that second morning, Aisha had listened to the paper she had already heard summarized repeatedly, over cups of coffee in Cambridge cafés, in seminars that Enrico had monopolized, in his room late at night … There were no questions afterwards: Enrico had apparently taken that as a sign of people being overawed rather than kindly looking away from a car crash.

  ‘I’m always going to ask to see a man’s academic work before I go out for dinner with them in the future. Actually, I think I’m off men for the foreseeable future.’

  ‘Very sensible,’ Julie said. ‘I shook his hand. It was wet – I mean actually wet, not just a bit damp. What were you thinking?’

  ‘There was a certain Signor in my past that I longed for. I thought all Italians would have a bit of Signor in them.’

  ‘Ah, well,’ Julie said. ‘What are you going to do now, then?’

  ‘I honestly don’t know,’ Aisha said. ‘I didn’t expect to do as well as I did in the MPhil.’

  ‘That paper was brilliant,’ Julie said loyally. ‘I was on the edge of my seat.’

  ‘I’ve got an internship sorted out. A friend of my dad’s leapt into the breach. Someone had to drop out and he phoned on just the right day, apparently. Down at United Nations in Geneva. I did one before I did my MPhil and this other one came up. After that, I don’t know. Perhaps I’ll do what you do.’

  ‘We wouldn’t have you,’ Julie said. ‘You’d show us up.’ But in fifteen minutes it emerged that Julie was coming to Sheffield for the sake of a client of her firm, a piece of pro-bono work. They were borderline illegals, living on top of each other, a dozen and a half in the house and doing odd jobs for building contractors. Julie was going to see them, sort them out, put them on some kind of footing.

  ‘I should come along,’ Aisha said. ‘Offer my expertise.’

  ‘What expertise?’

  ‘We’re immigrants,’ Aisha said. ‘I know what it’s like.’

  ‘In what sense,’ Julie said, ‘are you an immigrant? You were nearly head girl.’

  ‘My mum and dad are from Bangladesh and I grew up there and I came to England in 1976. It’s only fifteen years ago. In what sense am I not an immigrant?’

  ‘Your dad came over to be professor of engineering,’ Julie said. ‘That’s not the same as what we’re talking about.’

  But she agreed to take Aisha to visit the men. It occurred to Julie, too, that some of them, at least, were also Bangladeshi, and if there was a problem with language, Aisha could try to translate. The easiest thing, Julie said, was if they went straight away to the men’s house in Burngreave. She’d just told her mother she’d be along some time today.

  Aisha had very little idea where Burngreave was in the city. The Wicker was the limit of her knowledge in that direction, and it came as a shock to the system when Julie directed her to turn off from the usual route from the motorway before they reached the city centre. There was a landscape of shops boarded up, or made secure with wire over the windows, and betting shops and dank pubs. They turned off the main road at Julie’s direction, and there was a gang of children trying to climb a no-entry sign, the one on top of the pile being pushed up by the others, his arms wrapped round the pole. There were a few cars in the road, and the occasional house had a neat front garden. Most were paved over. Julie directed her to stop at number seventy-six. The curtains sagged at the front windows, drawn across, and in the front garden was the rubbish of many weeks.

  ‘Some of them will be sleeping,’ Julie said. ‘They’re either sleeping or they’re working. My man’s expecting me, or said he was – he’s working nights at the minute. That’s how they get eighteen in a house, there’s beds for six or eight at a pinch, some sleeping now, some sleeping when the other lot go to work, a couple between jobs who just sleep when they see an opportunity. God knows when they wash the sheets. Or wash themselves.’

  The man who opened the door had been woken up; his hair was tousled, his face open and bewildered, as if roused from a dream of a different, warmer, greener and less-peopled place. From him, or from behind him, came a wave of a smell, of the uneasy sleep of eighteen men after labour. He looked at Julie, his innocent face waiting for them to start, and looked at Aisha. He was young, perhaps no more than twenty.

  ‘This is one of the ones who struggle with English,’ Julie said. ‘Over to you. Tell him that we’re here to see Anis and he needs to go and wake him up.’

  ‘Good morning,’ Aisha said in Bengali. The boy responded, repeating her words, but awkwardly. She repeated what Julie had said, but the boy looked at her blankly.

  In the end he repeated, ‘Anis,’ and then something that Aisha could not understand.

  ‘He doesn’t speak Bangla,’ Aisha said. ‘I think it’s something from the north he speaks. I’d just be shouting at him.’

  ‘Anis,’ Julie said to him firmly. He turned and went into the house ahead of them, going upstairs one step at a time, like a tired old man, holding on to the banisters. The smell was overpowering in the house, and she led them past two shut doors into the kitchen. It was surprisingly clean, with almost nothing out on the work surface, kitchen table or sink. There were padlocks on each of the cupboards. ‘I thought it was all the same, your language.’

  There were steps coming down the stairs. The boy went into his room and shut the door. He had answered the front door because he was nearest. An older man, perhaps in his thirties, who had made an effort to brush his hair and to put on a shirt and trousers, came into the kitchen. His eyes lit up when he saw Julie.

  ‘Hello, Anis,’ Julie said. ‘I’ve brought a friend to help out, as you see.’

  ‘Hello, Julie!’ Anis said. ‘And hello to you, madam, very honoured.’

  ‘I’m Aisha,’ Aisha said, dropping into Bengali. ‘Where are you from, brother?’

  ‘I am from Chittagong,’ Anis said. ‘But now I am a citizen of the UK, thanks to my friend Julie. I have been here for four years, to my shame without papers, but my friend Julie is regularizing my position.’

  ‘How do you live?’ Aisha said.

  ‘I work,’ Anis said. ‘I was working on a building site and clearing away rubbish, but I was no longer needed at that job ten days ago. I arrived at the place where I was meant to be each morning, and there at the correct time, but the van driven by Michael that had come every morning at the same time, that did not arrive. But I have found another job in the last week, a job emptying a house where an old gentleman died, and the owner of the firm has told me that he will use me again because I worked very hard and we finished the job on time.’

  ‘Good, good,’ Aisha said, and translated all this to Julie, who had been asking, ‘What’s he saying?’ all the way through.

  ‘I don’t suppose he’s got any records of any of this,’ Julie said. ‘Payslips, hours worked … No, forget I asked.’

  ‘But why can’t he –’

  ‘There’s a lot of why-can’t-he in this job,’ Julie said. ‘We’ll have to go with what we’ve got, and on to the next one.’

 
; Anis watched their conversation patiently. When it had finished, he said, ‘I would like to make you a cup of tea, madam, and for Julie as well.’

  ‘Thank you, that would be nice,’ Aisha said, and with a look of relief and pleasure, Anis rose. From his pocket he took a set of keys, and unlocked one of the cupboards.

  ‘Is he making us some tea?’ Julie said. ‘He always asks, I always say no, thanks. I don’t want to put him to any trouble. You can see the struggles he’s got.’

  ‘You’ve got to accept hospitality,’ Aisha said. ‘My mother would never talk to someone who refused it. Drink his tea.’

  In the cupboard were two mugs on one shelf and another on the upper shelf. From signs of duplication such as two bags of rice, it looked as if the two shelves belonged to different tenants. From the lower shelf, Anis took three teabags. With an unnecessary number of journeys between table, cupboard, sink and kitchen work surface, he filled and boiled the kettle, made three mugs of tea and added dried milk and sugar from the cupboard, not asking for any variation. Finally he took three digestive biscuits from the packet and placed them on a small plate. Aisha reflected that if he had a teapot he could probably have managed with two teabags. But there was no teapot. She sipped the strange-tasting tea with Anis’s eager eyes upon her; she took a biscuit from the plate.

  ‘Why did you leave Chittagong?’ Aisha asked.

  ‘I came to England to join my brother,’ Anis said. ‘The university closed and it had been closed for some time. It was best to come to England. I wanted to study but I could not study, so I worked in a job my brother found for me. It was near Derby, an hour from here, and then another job in Chesterfield, and so it went on. When I heard what the job was paying me I thought of it in taka and I thought that I would save nearly all of it to do my degree at the university. But, alas, sister. The cost of everything is so much greater here. Even small-small packet of food. And living here in this house, it is already eighty pounds every week, which is how much in taka?’

  ‘How many of you are there, paying eighty pounds a week?’

  ‘Sixteen,’ Anis said. Aisha made a quick calculation. The landlord in receipt of sixteen times eighty pounds times fifty-two, call it fifty, would have made the money in one year to buy the house that her parents had just bought in Ranmoor. She doubted that this house was worth more than ten or fifteen thousand pounds. She wondered what her mother’s income from the houses in Wincobank was, with four students in each, everyone with their own bedroom. The landlord probably owned several houses just like this one. There was no reason for him not to buy another with the profits from the previous one every two or three months.

  ‘Who is your landlord?’ she asked, when she had translated Anis’s explanation.

  ‘My brother Quddus,’ he said simply.

  ‘My father says “brother” to anyone who speaks Bangla, pretty much,’ Aisha explained to Julie. ‘Brother, who are the other men in this house?’

  ‘They work hard,’ Anis said. ‘I want to get a job in the post office, a good, respectable, safe job. But I need to have a permission to stay in this country. I have been in this country seven years now and I have not been a problem to this country. Once I was very ill and I tried to get better and I went to Boots the chemist and they told me I had to go to a doctor. And I went to the doctor and he gave me some antibiotics and it was cured. I went to the doctor in the hospital because they would treat me without looking to see if I had a number of permission, which I do not have. That is the only time I have been to the medicine and the only time I have been to something that costs money. The property taxes are paid by my brother who owns this house and the income taxes are paid by the men who employ me and I am not worried by that. Can you tell me when I will be English? Are you English? Did Julie help you to become English?’

  ‘I was born in England,’ Aisha said simply.

  Afterwards, as she drove Julie back to her mother’s house on the borders of Crookes and Broomhill, where the elm trees shaded the road and a stately stone house acted as a branch library, the children’s books upstairs, where the shops were open, selling meat and fruit and birthday cards and posters and dry goods and newspapers and books and flowers and wine and shoes and clothes for old and young and children, selling everything in profusion – she watched them come, the shops, and she knew they complained about their prospects and it could have made her cry. Anis would never step through the door of any one of these shops. They talked about it, in a way.

  ‘I don’t know anything about that sort of thing,’ Aisha said. ‘It makes me feel so lucky.’

  ‘Lucky, how?’ Julie said.

  ‘I didn’t have to do any of that,’ Aisha said. ‘My mum and dad – they just came over because my dad got a job at the university. And my grandfather sold his big house in Old Dhaka that no one lived in so they could just buy a house here. And we’d been here three years when my dad just went out and bought a video recorder.’

  ‘A video recorder? Didn’t he have to buy a TV first?’

  ‘Oh, you know what I mean,’ Aisha said. ‘Those men, they’ve got nothing.’

  ‘They’ve got a video recorder,’ Julie said. ‘I happen to know there’s a TV and a video recorder in the front room where the guy who opened the door sleeps on the sofa.’

  ‘Well, it’s not …’ Aisha said. She couldn’t explain what she felt. ‘They didn’t have to share a house with anyone and they didn’t have to put a lock on the kitchen cupboard against someone stealing their teabags. We just came here and my mum handed her credit card over to Cole Brothers immediately. It’s class, not race, divides people.’

  ‘It’s fine,’ Julie said. ‘Do you think an Englishman would have got your dad’s rightful job as the professor of engineering? Do you think that if he hadn’t come, using up, I don’t know, twenty thousand pounds of English people’s money every year, there’d be space for five more people like Anis to come and be ripped off by builders to pay them four thousand a year each, tops?’

  ‘My dad wasn’t paid that much when he got here,’ Aisha said. ‘It was 1976 we came over. He wasn’t a professor then, either.’

  ‘Anyway,’ Julie said. They were arriving at Julie’s mum’s house; half of a pair of big stone houses with a huge rhododendron bush by the front gate. Julie’s dad had scarpered five years ago, was living with a girl he’d taught at school out in the Peak District, and now Julie’s mum had been looking out for them. She was standing with delight at the front window, holding her unruly dachshund Eccles up, like a fat writhing sausage with legs, trying to make him wave with his ginger front legs.

  ‘How long are you here for?’ Aisha said.

  ‘Just while Friday,’ Julie said, putting on a joke-Sheffield accent. ‘I’m reet thraiped wi’ struggle.’

  ‘I’ve no idea what that means,’ Aisha said. ‘I’ll be off – give me a ring if you’re at a loose end.’

  ‘Oh, come in for a cup of tea,’ Julie said. ‘My mum’ll be thrilled to see you – “your clever friend”, she always calls you. You know,’ she said, seeing that Aisha wasn’t to be tempted, ‘it’s the women I worry about. When the men get a bit beyond the Anis stage, they come and see you to say they want a visa for their wives. And the wives come over and they can’t speak a word of English and they never learn. They just disappear into the back rooms and the kitchens and they just look out of the window and that’s it.’

  ‘Not all of them,’ Aisha said. ‘My mum –’

  ‘I’m not talking about people like your mum. She’s not done down by the class struggle. Listen, thanks for the lift. I’ll see you.’

  And then, quite soon, she was home. It was home for a while longer. Then she would go out into the world, as people did, though perhaps not as Anis had, at the mercy of a man he called his brother, a man called Quddus making £1440 a week from that house alone, somewhere in the region of £75,000 a year. She had always been good at mental arithmetic. She would not go out into the world like that. In a month or tw
o her parents’ house would stop being ‘home’, but for the moment, she pulled into the driveway of the new and barely familiar house, and her mother was already opening the front door with poor old Raja in tow, she looking delighted, as if it had been weeks since Aisha had gone away, Raja – who should, surely, have been at school – making a performance of grinning and waving at his sister. I have no idea how we deserve this, Aisha said to herself, smiling and waving back. Then she remembered that her mother was being especially nice to her since that business of writing a stupid letter to the son of the man next door. There was a lot of sympathy and advice to get through in the weeks before she went off to Geneva for the internship, the second one she’d had.

  4.

  At first when Ada Browning had arrived there, the engineers had all seemed the same. They had had their bright faces and their air of ingenuity; they dressed in nylon-heavy ways that academic engineers liked; and at some point they had all lost the ability to observe a woman. After a time she had started to register the differences between Bob and David, between Phil and James, and the differences were not all to do with age. She had been there twenty years and as soon as she had been able to identify him, she’d never got on with Steve Smithers. It was all to do with treating you like a grown-up, she believed. She had always liked Sharif, on the other hand, because he didn’t come into the office and start picking up things and putting them down again before getting round to asking her a favour. He came in and he asked a question and then he went away again.