The Friendly Ones

by Philip Hensher

  ‘We’ll miss him when he’s gone,’ Sharif said, over dinner. Nazia had made a real effort, had cooked a chicken biryani but also had done a Thai-spiced dish of four mackerels, roasted asparagus in garlic and sea salt, some scallops and a brilliant salad of her own invention with a dressing she’d seen on television, only improved.

  ‘Pa, don’t talk about him like that,’ Raja said. ‘He looks OK. He’s got another ten years in him, I reckon, fifteen, easy.’

  ‘Your father isn’t talking about him dying!’ Nazia said, standing behind Omith, serving him. ‘What a thought. No, he’s selling the house and moving into a smaller place. Going! He just wants some more money. He’s finding retirement more expensive than he planned for. Anyway, he’ll get five hundred thousand pounds for that house, I would say, and he’ll get a very nice flat for half that.’

  ‘I’m amazed,’ Raja said. ‘I thought he loved it here. Just because of money? What are those seeds on the salad – like frogspawn or something?’

  ‘It’s passion fruit, wretched boy,’ Nazia said, very pleased. ‘Does your mother have to put up with this sort of stuff from you and your sister, Martin?’

  When dinner was done, it was nine; they did not want to go to bed, of course. Nazia went to the bookshelf in the sitting room and extracted a volume. She could feel her husband’s eyes on her back. It was a volume of Feluda, an old collection. They must have bought it some time in the 1980s, been sent it as a present. She had loved Feluda, and so had the boys. The book had a particular smell. She raised it to her face and sniffed: a smell of damp and mottle and a warm hot iodine humidity, steel-edged. It was the smell that things that came from Dhaka had. For a moment she had thought about reading to them from Feluda, just as they had in Dhaka thirty or more years ago after dinner. But it would not do. She slid the volume back onto the shelf and turned, smiling.

  ‘Your family,’ Martin said later. They had cosily reconvened before bedtime for a chinwag in their jim-jams in Raja’s little room. They sat cross-legged, Martin and Raja on the bed, Omith swivelling round in the captain’s chair that Raja had chosen for his desk when he was eleven years old. They were enjoying the mucking about – here they were, three boys in their jim-jams, having just played a couple of rounds of Tetris, and the three of them with something like half a billion dollars between them in the bank. Martin had produced a baggy and they’d done a line each on Raja’s old desk – it gave Omith a queer feeling to think of it, and he only did it to be sociable, ever. ‘Your family,’ Martin said. ‘They’re mental.’

  ‘Mental how?’ Raja said. ‘They’re all right.’

  ‘Well, what’s that about buying vinyl and keeping it safe in the plastic? That’s mental. And that food, it was nice, but what was it? Do they eat shit like that like every day of the week? And you know what, that thing your mother does, right, at that dinner we just ate. When you sat down she stood up and went by you and served you, like she was some waitress or something. Is that because you’re rich now?’

  ‘No,’ Omith said. ‘She’s always done that, even when we were like ten years old. It’s just what she does. She did it to you, too, but that was different, you’re a guest.’

  ‘It’s the fact she gave us a fish head each,’ Raja said.

  ‘Yeah, I saw that,’ Martin said. ‘That’s disgusting.’

  ‘It’s because we’re so rich,’ Omith said. ‘We get the fish heads now. My dad always got the fish heads before. The serving when she stands next to you, that’s always happened, nothing new.’

  ‘I don’t get it. You told my mum to do that, she’d hand you a book by Germaine Greer, saying read that before I cook your dinner again. And your mum, right, she ain’t no servile downtrodden type otherwise. Your dad too. He’s saying stuff to you like, if I heard it, I’d say, “Yeah, you got a point, bruv”, move on, nothing to see here, but you just started arguing with him and everyone didn’t seem to care. I know you ain’t got an opinion about Iraq and Tony Blair, bruv, that was all to have a ding-dong with your dad, and he like wanted it. It’s mental round here. I love it.’

  ‘They were going to tarmac the whole back garden last year,’ Omith said disloyally.

  ‘Yeah, that’s cool,’ Martin said, cracking up. ‘I saw they’ve got like three rows of plants in pots out the back, all of them flowering, man. That’s brilliant. Tarmacking the back garden, I feel you.’ It wasn’t even true, but Omith thought he might as well say it, the stuff about tarmacking gardens that the white kids always believed the brown kids’ families were planning. He didn’t know what was wrong with having rows of flowering plants in pots in the garden. That seemed a good idea.

  ‘The thing is,’ Raja said, ‘they’re maybe a bit like that because my dad, right, he had a little brother who got murdered when he was like seventeen. You get to hear a lot about little-brother Rafiq if you hang around here long enough.’

  ‘And he was murdered, right?’ Martin said. ‘That’s cool. I don’t know that I ever met no one who had a murder in their family, like not that close. Who murdered him – was it like gang stuff?’

  ‘It’s a long time ago,’ Raja said. ‘Ask my mum. She’ll ask you to leave the house for not respecting us and little-uncle Rafiq who got done in. That I want to see.’

  ‘Man,’ Martin said, disappointed.

  9.

  When they returned to London, Omith instructed his lawyer to write to Dr Hilary Spinster of Sheffield. He investigated the recent house prices in the street where Dr Spinster lived and his parents lived, and now asked his lawyer to offer to purchase Dr Spinster’s house for £650,000 in cash. (This was the maximum house price reached by properties in the street, plus one hundred thousand pounds.) He made, however, an unusual offer. If Dr Spinster wanted to remain in the house, he would be very happy to offer him a permanent and irrevocable tenantship, without requiring any rights of inspection or access to the property, for the sum of one pound per annum. The offer was made by his lawyer on behalf of an anonymous buyer. In time, a typewritten letter from a machine of shaky tendency was received by Hunt, Hunt, Branksome and Newburg saying that Dr Spinster was asking his grandson, Josh Spinster of Brigham, Townsend and Self (solicitors, a parenthesis in wobbly blue biro in the margin clarified the wobbly typescript), to investigate the legality and soundness of the offer, and subject to his advice, Dr Spinster would be prepared to accept this offer with thanks and some puzzlement.

  ‘I don’t know why you wanted to be anonymous,’ Raja said. ‘You ain’t gonna be anonymous, neither. They’ll work it out. I’d want a bit of gratitude, to be honest. Acksherly I’m gonna look modest. Take the credit. I bet Ma was thinking of installing him in one of her houses in Wincobank, too. She could do with the fifty quid a week, I reckon.’

  ‘It’s the thanks I can’t be doing with,’ Omith said honestly. They were in Omith’s Pimlico house, a hired decorator’s symphony of oyster and cream and highlights of orange; a pair of muddy green Nikes lay on the white rug waiting for Omith’s housekeeper to tut over them.

  ‘And what’s going to happen when he dies? You’re not giving it to his children, are you?’

  ‘No way, man,’ Omith said. ‘I’m selling that motherfucker when Dr Hilary exits. Or I’ll give it to Ma and Pa to keep their recipe books in. I don’t know.’

  ‘Well, I can’t really understand why you’re doing it,’ Raja said.

  ‘He saved my brother’s life once,’ Omith said.

  10.

  They were good boys: Omith and then, separately, Raja phoned their mum before she would have heard about the bombs in London. They were OK; they weren’t hurt; Aisha was in Sri Lanka and perfectly OK. It was a beautiful morning and Nazia was in the garden with a book. She probably wouldn’t have known about the bombings until she heard the one o’clock news. She phoned Aisha in Sri Lanka on her mobile – she thought it was probably justified, just this once – and told her that everyone was safe and she was thinking of her. Aisha was between meetings and sounded calm; it was
only afterwards that Nazia realized hers was probably the third, at least, phone call she’d have had. She’d been phoned by her brothers, one after the other, before Nazia had got to her. ‘Of course we’re in Sheffield, so we’re not in any danger,’ she said absurdly.

  She had thought, however, that with that she had been spared, and it was only the next day, watching the horrible news, that Sharif turned to her and took her arm – laying his hand on her forearm in an awkward and unfamiliar gesture.

  ‘Hugh Spinster,’ she said, repeating what the television news had just said.

  ‘I saw him come out of the house this afternoon,’ Sharif said. ‘He was just sitting there without moving. What a thing. I must go over.’

  ‘What can you say?’ Nazia said.

  He patted her arm; he tried again and now squeezed her hand. He got up. ‘Whatever there is, it must be said. He can’t be alone.’

  ‘Those bombers – those men – the murderers – they were –’

  ‘Whatever they were.’

  ‘They weren’t …’

  ‘Say it,’ Sharif said, seeing the necessity – seeing the historical necessity, it might have been. ‘Say it. Just once and then never again.’

  ‘They were Pakistanis,’ Nazia said.

  ‘I know,’ Sharif said.

  ‘They were …’

  ‘That’s enough now, Nazia,’ Sharif said. ‘That’s enough historical wrongs.’

  ‘OK,’ Nazia said. She had said what she needed to say. Sharif left the house. It was for him to go round to Hilary, his friend, and tell him whatever it was that needed to be said, in the house that had been his and now was his only by the forbearance of his neighbours’ children.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  1.

  Mr Benn had been admitted six days ago. He had been placed in the Carnation Room – a pleasant room, but not one with a view. It looked out over a scrap of garden, a red-leafed maple and an ivy-covered old wall, then the sober eighteenth-century roofs of respectable south London. He was beyond the point of appreciating the view. The doctors had taken a view of his likely progress, and he was now following the pathway they had anticipated. At first, the bed had had to be changed every eight hours, at the beginning of each shift, to keep him comfortable. By the fourth day, he had sunk into a calm unconsciousness, his breath shallow and rattling, his movements tranquil, like someone summoning another with a languid raising of the hand. His face had been drawn tight with pain; now it had relaxed with the support of morphine, and his eyes fluttered under the lids as if watching something very interesting go by. He had passed into a world of painless confusion and warmth. His bed had been changed that morning; it would not need to be changed again.

  Often patients had crowds of visitors, who needed to be managed and asked to wait. Mr Benn’s only visitors were his two children. He was sixty-two, though the dying have no evident age: so often, they look like the dying, their cheeks sunken and their skin pallid and glistening. Leo had seen men born less than thirty years ago who, on this bed, looked just the same. His children were simple-looking, bewildered rather than grief-stricken. Mr Benn had been brought in the first day by the daughter riding in the ambulance with him. She was a girl with a white-blonde bob and a flush of pink in her white face. She was wearing what she ordinarily wore, a neat greenish sweater and a knee-length tartan skirt with black stockings underneath. There was something old-fashioned about her as about her brother, and something indelibly youthful, as well. The son had followed two hours later, and had come directly from work; his black shoes shone, and his grey suit, his white shirt, his blue patterned tie were all neat without being anything out of the ordinary. He, too, had brilliantly white-blond hair, an old-fashioned cowlick, his head nearly shaved round the sides. Probably his father and his grandfather had gone to work looking very much the same. Today, they had greeted each other in Reception, modestly, before the sister had led him upstairs. She had merely reached out her hand and squeezed his, before they went upstairs to sit with their father. Now the last hours had been reached, and the brother had arrived for the last time.

  They were quickly brought cups of tea. They were sitting side by side, next to their father’s bed, and the daughter held her father’s hand. Sometimes she called out her name, ‘Judith. It’s Judith,’ and sometimes her brother, in shyer tones, said, ‘And Kieron. Can you hear me? Kieron’s here.’ It was strange that he was called Kieron, a name so redolent of 1980s babies. He should have had the name of a minor royal, George or William or Henry. They called their names as if throwing something to keep a drowning man afloat, or to give him something to clutch on the journey to come. They only left the room when the doctor arrived and took them off to explain what was happening, and what was likely to happen. Dr Solomon explained these things well, with kindly sympathy, and was very clear that their father was no longer in any pain or distress. The end would be very peaceful. The brother held his sister’s hand; the sister looked away when one of the orderlies came in with more tea. She was wiping her face, not wanting anyone to see that she had been crying.

  Leo had worked at the hospice in Clapham for twenty-one years, and in that time had seen thousands of people die. He should know what it was like by now. He had seen people reacting in rage, by bursting out in laughter, which they could not understand, in silence, in tears that came in floods or the smallest trickle, by marked embarrassment as their relation lost control of him or herself and died in front of them, perhaps as they were being told an interesting story. He had been thanked and blamed and coldly dismissed. Some people went on sending him Christmas cards, with a reminder, in brackets, of the name of the person he had helped to the end of their life. Here, the higher medical professionals were impotent and useless. It was those who were tasked with nursing and cleaning and taking measurements and bringing cups of tea for visitors who mattered, especially to patients who had come in for the last time.

  The mystery of Death had been before him steadily for twenty-one years. Like everyone in the same position, he averted his eyes and managed to find something joyful, even, in the work he did. He did not contemplate suffering and he did not dwell on the process, but on what must be done now, at this moment. Only sometimes did the realization of what was happening come to him in the way that it must come to the relations, who were probably seeing a person die for only the first or second time in their lives. He had never seen a person close to him die in this way, not intimately, patiently waiting from beginning to end. From time to time he reflected, as relations did, on the last event of a particular type in the life: the last meal was half a small bowl of chicken soup, defeating the moribund after half an hour’s effort; the last time that their sheets were changed under the living flesh registering as a solemn and serious event, since the next and final time their sheets were changed would be for the viewing of the body; the last thing they said – and what fuss there was about last words – was often ‘Nurse’, or merely ‘Thank you.’ If Leo thought about it, it would strike him as very nice that the last emotion of a person’s life was gratitude, and that it expressed itself in such a very nice way, whatever the person had been like. Very nice: he had once known that you could be more precise in your vocabulary to explain what had happened, but over the years he had come to appreciate the solid, banal, universal worth of two words that everyone could say, and that everyone, at some point, almost always did. ‘Thank you, Doctor,’ the simplest said. (They hardly ever distinguished between the highest dignitary and the simpler sort of nurse or orderly, like Leo.) ‘That was very nice, at the end.’

  His shift finished at two. There was a principle that you merely left work, not saying goodbye. He did not believe he would be seeing Mr Benn and his children again when he returned to work at six the following morning. This was a difficult thing for families to accept, that one member of staff was just the same as another member of staff. Leo himself understood that this was not the case, and that some colleagues were lacking in warmth, understandin
g or kindness, but it was not for him to compensate for that. He had often heard a daughter say to her husband, or a wife say to her children, ‘That’s Leo. He’s one of the friendly ones.’ When he had first started there, he had sometimes seen that a patient was within an hour of their death, and had stayed beyond the end of his shift. Then it was explained to him that that would not do. He slipped away; the nurse just coming on duty took charge of the patient’s last moments.

  There had been a note in his pigeon hole from Mr Ghosh, the manager of the hospice, asking if he would come to see him at the end of his shift. At first, long ago, these notes had made him nervous. For a long time now, however, they had appeared when Mr Ghosh needed Leo’s help in a difficult matter. He had worked there much longer than anyone else.

  Mr Ghosh made his importance plain, however, by continuing to type on his desktop computer when Leo entered. Leo sat down and waited patiently. After a while Mr Ghosh said, ‘I will be with you in a moment,’ and carried on with what he was doing. In the end he turned away, gave a brief smile and said, ‘Now. What can I do for you, Leo?’

  Leo was used to this tactic. ‘Actually, you asked if I could come to see you.’

  ‘So I did. Now. What was it? Ah, yes. I don’t know if you heard, but we were preparing for a visit from our MP.’

  ‘I hadn’t heard,’ Leo said.

  ‘It was going to be quite informal, just her dropping in, finding out what we do. I hadn’t announced it just yet because she said at the time that, of course, it depended on the result of the general election. Well. I thought she was just speaking for form’s sake, but it seems not.’

  ‘They’ve given her a peerage, haven’t they?’ Leo said. He was aware of his hands tensing in his lap.

  ‘A sort of consolation prize,’ Mr Ghosh said. ‘A very nice one, of course, to be called Lady Sharifullah. I don’t think anyone thought the election result was a reflection on her personally. In any case, we were in touch with the new MP’s office, but unfortunately he doesn’t think he can find us a date for some time. So we went back to Baroness Sharifullah. She’s coming – delighted, she said. She said there was no reason now for her to wait until December. She doesn’t want any fuss, just two or three people to tell her about our work, what we need, that sort of thing. She’s coming next Wednesday. I’d like you to take charge of her, talk her through everything.’