The Friendly Ones

by Philip Hensher

  Ain’t argue with 276 mllion in three days bruv

  I don’t get it

  YAWN

  I like it when it says FIN at the end because it goes off like a fish going off or something

  Man that French means End you is kidding me right

  Ye ye I got you there you thought I was like stupid or

  There was a sound in the real world. Omith looked up and the accoutrements of the room swam into his consciousness. The long pale oak table, the huge screen hanging on the far wall, the remains of the corporate coffee and Danish and four types of water, tap, still, Badoit, old-school sparkling. The view of Toronto out of the window. The people were from Chicago, but they’d had to meet in Toronto: Raja and Omith had gone on holiday to Iran in 2012, basically to buy a carpet. They were assuming that they weren’t going back to the US any time soon, now this new guy off of X Factor was in charge. The Chicago lot could come to Canada. It was a beautiful day; the lake sparkled to the horizon. There was a smell of new furniture and blond new carpet; an opulent meeting space, hired by the hour. These people had made all their money since October; there was nobody for him to talk to within ten years of his own age, apart from the lawyers.

  For a moment he could not think what the sound in the room was. It came from his bag, a music case with a horizontal bronze rod, forty years old, containing nothing but his tablet and the very first model of iPhone, a retro antique. The sound that rang out was the Nokia theme tune. It came to him that somebody was telephoning him on his mobile and expecting him to talk to whoever it was. This was unusual.

  ‘Mummy,’ Omith said into the phone.

  ‘There you are,’ Mummy said. ‘Where are you today? That was a very unusual-sounding ringing tone.’

  ‘Canada. Toronto. It’s twelve here. Beautiful weather.’

  ‘Oh, yes. I remember. Have you met up with your cousin Camellia? She’s getting married to a boy called Henry. He’s a dermatologist, isn’t he?’

  ‘Mummy, she lives in Vancouver.’

  ‘You’re not cancelling on poor Dr Spinster, I hope.’

  ‘No, no, no,’ Omith said. ‘I’ll be there. Don’t you worry. What’s up?’

  ‘Oh, I just wondered …’ Mummy said. ‘It was really only that I …’

  Seeing you tomorrow, Omith typed, as he listened to his mother.

  What tomorrow

  The hundredth birthday man we promised at Sheffield yo

  Yeah man can I come I’m back in England can be there in like half an hour

  NO.

  Tell Martin fuck off

  See you tomorrow be there by 2

  Easy bruv

  ‘What is it, Mummy?’ Omith said.

  ‘Where’s Raja?’ Mummy said. ‘Is he there? Can I speak to him?’

  ‘No, he’s not,’ Omith said. ‘He’s away too – Mummy, don’t panic, he’s much closer than me. He’ll be back tonight probably and with you in the morning first thing. I’m not supposed to tell you where he is because it’s too much of a clue. He’s buying someone a little present.’

  ‘I’m not going to rest until I get it out of him,’ Mummy said. After a few more exchanges Mummy said she would see him tomorrow and hung up. He didn’t quite know what she had wanted. He warned Raja.

  Ye its ringing now the phone MAAAAAN

  and logged off. He would be done with these people in a couple of hours. They were only pretending to be difficult, pretending to be exquisitely, plutocratically specific. That boy with his water: ‘Half Badoit half Evian, Madison, please.’ It cracked him up. He wasn’t even going to trouble Martin and Raja with the details; they had agreed to start at seventeen and be happy with twenty, and if they wouldn’t accept twenty-five at the outside to just walk away. He’d told Raja that he was confident of being accepted with nineteen; in fact he thought their price was probably twenty-two, which he’d be happy with. The sun was shining! Relax! The plane was on the runway with its engines running, practically. He started to watch the thing again: 72, 63, 55. It made him feel old, not getting stuff. Soon his time would be over, and his days devoted to Pac-Man and Fuck That, Cluedo, Ludo, draughts and shit.

  Nazia finished speaking to her other son and set the phone down. She should have told the boys why she was phoning them. But it made no sense. She had never quite taken to mobiles; she used hers only when she was mobile, and when she was in the house, she used the old cordless phone. The music from the sitting room started up, the theme tune to the television news. It was the reason why she had phoned the boys, and phoned Aisha before either of them. Aisha had been on the motorway; she would be here in an hour or two. She went into the room where Sharif was standing. He looked sick and solemn; he went on watching. The film at the head of the news was what it had been on the one o’clock, when they’d first seen it. Since Sharif had retired, he had always made a point of watching the one o’clock news: today it had rewarded him.

  They had last seen Mahfouz and Sadia at Mummy’s funeral. That had been in Dhaka, in 1982. They had tried to take that over, and had even had some kind of plan for finding a husband for Dolly. (They had phoned Dolly and Bina too, as soon as they had seen the footage; the children could wait until later.) They had come and slipped away and never been seen again. They were in their lives: there was no possibility for Sharif that the woman who was his sister could disappear from his mind for ever and irrevocably, and Nazia thought often of Sadia, speculating about where they were, what had happened to their boys. Now these questions had probably been answered.

  The piece of film was short. The cameras were positioned outside a suburban house, which, the voiceover of the reporter announced, was in Nottingham. It was tidy and clean; the front garden had long since been concreted over, and the curtains were drawn tight. The voice explained that this was the house of members of the family. It was a question of two boys, one twenty, one only sixteen, who had run away to fight. ‘The boys were last seen in Turkey in the company of their uncle, a seasoned jihadi,’ the reporter said. ‘They were initially suspected of travelling to Syria to fight for so-called Islamic State. Now it is thought that, in the company of other fighters, they have travelled to Dagestan where a new front in the increasingly global battle of terror is opening up. Their families had this to say.’

  The front door opened and a man in late middle age came out. Behind him were two women in full veils, who advanced a little, then turned sharply at a word from the man, and went back inside. There was no question as the man came towards the camera to speak. It was Mahfouz.

  ‘Please don’t let one of those women be my sister,’ Sharif said. ‘I could not stand it if I thought she had taken to wearing the jilbab over her face.’

  There was more than one reporter at the gate, and they called out to Mahfouz.

  ‘Where are the boys?’ one shouted. ‘How do you feel about them going to join a terrorist organization?’

  Mahfouz spoke. ‘My son and my nephew have gone abroad –’

  ‘Nephew, how?’ Nazia burst out, just as she had done before, at one o’clock. Bina and Dolly had not been able to enlighten her; they had no idea that any of Mahfouz’s brothers had come with their sons to England, which was the only explanation. Wouldn’t those sons have been too old? It looked as if Sadia had had another child in the 1990s. But how could that be? She would have been fifty to have had a twenty-year-old son now, and fifty-four if the sixteen-year-old were hers. Had someone – Mahfouz or one of his brothers – taken another wife? It seemed the only explanation.

  ‘Quiet, Nazia,’ Sharif said. The nephew and son had gone abroad to work for an Islamic charitable organization, helping refugees. There was nothing sinister about any of this, Mahfouz said. The elder had left his wife and two young children in the care of the family until he returned from this important mission. On the one o’clock news, he had gone on to say that this was just the usual anti-Islam position of the media and especially the BBC, but this part of what he had said had been cut for the six o’clock ne
ws. The report came to an end and the news moved on to the next item. Ronnie Corbett had died today.

  ‘They went to – where did they go to?’ Nazia said.

  ‘They went to Dagestan,’ Sharif said. ‘I had to look it up. It’s by Azerbaijan. Russia. Southern bit of Russia.’

  ‘Who are they?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Sharif said. ‘They had two children when we last saw them. It can’t be them. It could just about be their children, I suppose.’

  ‘No, the news said it was his son – Mahfouz’s son. They were very definite.’

  ‘You’ve got to warn Dolly and Samu and Bina and Tinku that there’s to be no talking about any of this at Hilary’s party tomorrow. And Rekha and Fanny too. We can talk about it later.’

  ‘But how could Sadia have another child, so old? I can’t understand it.’

  ‘They’re all breeding like rabbits,’ Sharif said.

  ‘Sharif, please,’ Nazia said. ‘Don’t talk about them like that, even now.’

  ‘Those are Father’s grandchildren,’ Sharif said. ‘All those grandchildren. What did we do that none of ours ever settled down?’

  ‘They settled down,’ Nazia said. ‘They could not have better lives. They have everything they could have. They don’t want anything else. They’re not off fighting for religion in Syria or wherever those places are. They’re not wearing the veil, or making their poor wives wear the stupid veil.’

  ‘But Mahfouz’s children, they marry and they have children of their own before they’re twenty-one,’ Sharif said. ‘That’s something they can understand, out there in the rest of the world.’

  ‘We did nothing wrong,’ Nazia said. ‘It just hasn’t happened for them. They’ve got each other, too. Don’t start pitying our children. Nobody else would.’

  ‘I wondered …’

  There was a long pause in the room. Outside a blackbird began to sing in the early-evening light. The marquee in Hilary’s garden, a lovely white silk with absurdly festive pink pennants, shone above the fence; the measurements supplied by Raja had been absolutely accurate, and the marquee filled the garden. Inside, there would be forty golden chairs around a single table; perhaps twice that number had wanted to come, too. Beyond the marquee, in the last stretch of lawn, you could hear men calling to each other as they erected a wooden frame. It was supposed to be a surprise for Hilary and the guests, but at the end, the back flap and the front flap of the marquee would roll up: a band on Hilary’s patio would begin to play, and a series of military-grade fireworks would begin an unforgettable display. Tonight, on the eve of the celebrations, the evening was melting into a beautiful indigo night with the last day of Hilary’s one hundred years, and a man who must be Sharif and Nazia’s nephew was shivering in a tent in the desert, working out how to kill the infidel, how to establish the Caliphate and its theatrical executions on the steps of town halls, as the benign and yet murderous power ruling over the cities of London and Sheffield, of Edinburgh and Manchester, of Cambridge and Oxford, where a home had been made for students of the Koran for three hundred years, or so Sharif had once been told. The things he knew! The things that the children and grandchildren of his father had ended up doing!

  ‘I know what you were going to say,’ Nazia said. ‘You were wondering what Rafiq would be doing now.’

  Even after fifty years of marriage, his wife could surprise him. His train of thought was so clear to her, they could run through old arguments in abbreviated form, going from start to finish in seven minutes flat.

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Rafiq was crossing my mind just then. I don’t suppose we’ll ever find out what did happen to him, let alone what he would have done.’

  ‘I’m forgetting what he looked like,’ Nazia said. ‘I’m forgetting all of it. When I think of him I just think of that photograph, not what he was really like. I can’t remember any more what Daddy’s house looks like. And it’s all changed anyway.’

  ‘I don’t know whether it’s time or space that does it,’ Sharif said. ‘Made the changes in us.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘We’re so changed. But I don’t know whether we’re changed because it was fifty years ago. Or because it’s thousands of miles away. Perhaps we were changed when we got off the plane in 1976. Hilary is the same as he was and Rafiq is the same as he was. They didn’t go anywhere.’

  ‘If I’m a hundred years old,’ Nazia said, ‘and they write to inform us that they have Rafiq’s body, I am going to go there and bury him properly, with dignity. If I’m a hundred. I don’t care.’

  ‘Do you think he would be here, too? With all the rest of us? He would be sixty-three this year. No age at all. I just can’t imagine it.’

  ‘He would have stayed. He would never have gone, given up like us, run away. Once you had fought for the Delta, you wouldn’t settle for this, I don’t suppose.’

  ‘Perhaps not,’ Sharif said. ‘I can’t imagine what his life would have been like. I can’t think of him with a wife and children and grandchildren, telling stories about his days in the Mukti Bahini. He knew he was going to die, I suppose. The only thing is that he was thinking of a death with a bullet through the skull on the battlefield, dying gloriously. He never saw action. It was just Captain Qayyum and his sort, knocking on the door in the middle of the night. That man who took the scissors and sliced at Rafiq’s hair. I wish I hadn’t seen that.’

  ‘Don’t think about it.’

  ‘Anyway, it’s Hilary’s day tomorrow. We don’t have to think about Dagestan, or Mahfouz, or any of that. You were right.’

  ‘Right about what?’

  ‘Phoning them. But not telling them. That was the right thing to do. Is that Blossom in Hilary’s garden? She sounds like she’s handing out instructions. Should I go over there? I’m supposed to take the cake over in any case.’

  Blossom had arrived with Russell about half an hour before; she was a strong, confident driver, who saw no reason why she should obey the speed limits if it meant spending an extra half an hour in the company of her nephew. That nephew was now crouched on the floor of the sitting room, the patio doors open. He had not removed his long leather coat, and his rounded squatting back shone in the evening sunlight, like an infected cyst of huge dimensions. He was peering into the eyes of Gertrude, who was having none of it. Behind him, Father was standing, trying to see what Blossom was doing.

  ‘Daddy, stay where you are,’ Blossom called back. ‘There’s no need for you to come. And Lavinia and Jeremy and Josh and Thomas are going to be here any moment. You’re going to need to let them in. Daddy, stay where you are. There. What did I say. Russell? Go and let your mother in. Russell. Russell. Russell. I can’t believe,’ she said, to the three men from the party organizers that Omith had found, ‘I can’t believe that my nephew, who’s fifteen, is letting my father totter off to open the front door. Wretched child. My father was born during the First World War, how about that? He’s earned the right not to do anything any more, I would say.’

  ‘He’s looking good on it,’ one of the men, the handsome mixed-race one, smoothly said. They were a Manchester firm, astonishingly efficient and emollient under Omith and Raja’s beadily assertive commands. ‘It’s not often you see someone who’s as fit as that who’s even eighty. My old gran …’

  Blossom listened for three more patient sentences.

  ‘But that stage,’ she reverted, ‘it looks dangerously close to the marquee, in my opinion. What we absolutely don’t want is for the marquee to go up in flames because of a few sparks. When we had fireworks at my old house in the country, the fireworks were at least a hundred yards from anyone. This can’t be more than twenty.’

  ‘Twenty-five,’ the other man said, the older, grumpier one. ‘We measured. It’s well outside the recommended minimum, it’s perfectly safe.’

  ‘We do this all the time,’ the mixed-race man said, whose name, she remembered, was Ralph. ‘Over in Manchester, footballers and their wives, they order the
maximum size of marquee, fill the garden, then the maximum possible fireworks display. We’re used to the minimum requirements. Believe you me, these people who are new to their own money, we say no to them all the time if they want to let off a really massive effect. You’re fine as you are.’

  ‘Lavinia, darling,’ Blossom called. ‘Stop hugging Daddy and bring Josh out here for some expert opinion. What do you think? It looks terribly close to that flapping silk to me. Even if it doesn’t go up in flames, will they even be able to look up and see the things going off in the sky?’

  ‘What’s the weather supposed to be?’ Josh said, coming out and holding his grandfather by the arm.

  ‘Perfect,’ Lavinia supplied. ‘The weather’s continuing unbroken for at least five more days, apparently.’

  ‘Well, I don’t see why we need a marquee at all,’ Josh said. ‘Why don’t we take it down and have dinner in the open air? It’ll be quite warm enough.’

  Hilary said something, pawing a little at his grandson. He looked anxious. Josh asked him to say it again.

  ‘Grandpa wants the marquee,’ he said resignedly. ‘Omith went to a lot of trouble, apparently, and now Grandpa wants the marquee for his birthday. He’s never had one before. Forget I said anything, Grandpa. You’ll have the marquee. It all looks lovely.’

  ‘It will all be absolutely fine, sir,’ Ralph called, in a hearty, consoling, unconvincing way.

  And really Hilary felt fit as a flea. He was going to be a hundred the next day! How about that? There weren’t many around who lived to be a hundred. If they wrote his biography, they would say, ‘Hilary Spinster’s remarkable life began during the First World War: he lived to see …’ What had he lived to see? Bloody Jeremy Corbyn as leader of the Labour Party? That moron running America? For God’s sake, that would be forgotten soon enough. An independent South Sudan? Hadn’t been there, didn’t know where it was, even. It was all so uninteresting, what had happened recently. If only the dear old Queen would die soon, they could say that he lived into the reign of King Charles III, or King George VII, or whatever he was going to call himself. People always remembered that sort of thing when wars and political leaders faded from the collective memory. On Pointless, his new favourite TV show, those idiots could hardly remember the name of the chancellor of the Exchequer from twenty years ago. (Lamont. Or Clarke. He tested himself.)