by Fadia Faqir
A blonde girl in a white suit played a classical piece on the piano, one of Liz's favourites. She used to like classical music and say to me, `Divine music. I guess you don't know much about our music.' She would be sitting in the kitchen, listening to Radio 3, sipping her Darjeeling tea out of a fine china cup, flicking through Homes & Gardens, although we had a place you just about could call home and no garden. She would smile at me and say, pointing to an expensive antique dining room, `Isn't that splendid?'
'Splendid. 'l would try to imitate her accent.
At the end of the piece the chaplain pressed a button and the pine coffin slid through a hole in the wall then an electric curtain jolted then whizzed shut. No digging of graves, lowering makeshift coffins, reciting of the Qur'an. Nothing apart from the sniffs and sighs of the well-dressed mourners.
I was filling up so I walked out quickly before my Bedouin howls shook the birds in their trees. Natasha followed me and said, `Sally, thank you for everything you've done for her. We are hoping to put the house up for sale. We will come to collect some of the furniture soon.
`How soon?' I asked.
`In a few weeks.' She stopped talking and was about to walk away to join her family when she pulled the net of her hat down, hesitated and then said, `My aunt was fond of you, Sally.'
My chin quivered so much I could not say anything. Elizabeth used to talk about the musk roses and flame, jacaranda and hibiscus trees of India. I sheltered my eyes with my hand and walked through the garden looking for a flowering acacia tree, then I realized that I wouldn't recognize it so I sat under a horse chestnut tree, which is the only tree in this country I could name. Alone, surrounded by jars full of pacemakers, tooth fillings, gold wedding rings, remnants and ashes, I held my heart tight.
Through the small rounded window of the aeroplane carrying me to Greece - which soon would be no longer hidden - I saw the white fluffy clouds happily floating in a brightly lit sky. Their shapes shifted from horses galloping away, to waves fighting and overcoming each other, to seagulls forever soaring above the river. A long well, cold water, seeds popping open, a body breaking free, yielding, `I wish I had never set my eyes on you', `Cest la vie, ma fille!', `Jesus died to save us all', `You are on your own, Salma', a gun slung on a shoulder, grime-filled toenails, `Enough, shoot me!', throwing up in the bin, Rock The Casbah, `too much past', doves crying, sniffing falafel, `Min il-bab lil shibak', right behind you, get married to Sadiq, eating dry bread, Noura's blood and snot running down her chin, a heart-wrenching howl.
`Anything else, madam?' asked the air hostess.
`No thank you.'
Suspended between earth and sky in the small aeroplane she tingled her way back to my heart. I knew that air. Layla was calling me. A sudden chill ran from the roots to the ends of each hair on my body and my chest collapsed as if I were drowning. He held my hand and said, `Your hand is sweaty. Are you OK? Are you afraid of flying?'
`No, I am not afraid of flying,' I said defensively and held on to his hand.
She was tired, whimpering, hungry, looking for a foothold for her tiny feet. I was closer to the old country so I looked through the circular window, put a hug and a kiss in a bottle and cast it among the clouds. The waves might carry it to the opposite shore. An old Arab fisherman might find it covered in sand and sea salt and take it to her. My familiar smell, tender nipple, warm ribcage would reassure her, make her feel safe and protected. One day she would stop crying.
My husband's T-shirt was soaked when he said, `You have to let go of her, darling.You never know, one day you might be reunited.'
I had been trying to let go of her since she was born. I kept trying and failing then trying better to fail better.
Layla was emerald, turquoise encased in silver, Indian silk cascading down from rolls, fresh coffee beans ground in an ornate sandalwood pestle and mortar, honey and spicy ghee wrapped in freshly baked bread, a pearl in her bed, a lock of fine, soft black hair, tiny wrinkled fingers like tender vine leaves, pomegranate, pure perfume sealed in blue jars, rough diamonds, a dew-covered plain in the vast flat open green valley, a sea teal at the edges and azure in the centre, my grandmother's Ottoman gold coins strung together by a black cord, my mother's wedding silver money hat, a full moon hidden behind translucent clouds, the manes of white thoroughbred horses, the clear whiteness of my eye, my right arm, and the blood pumping out of my broken heart.
Layla was standing there behind the translucent white clouds, a thoroughbred mare, her taut body dark, coffee with cardamom, her eyes bright amber, Hamdan's mouth, ripe pomegranate seeds, her hair cascading on her shoulders. She smiled, a pearl in her cot, and walked away among the vines, glittered through the soft tender leaves, a column of diamond dust. My limbs were severed. The fig tree branch, pregnant with fruit but hollow, suddenly collapsed. A displaced amputee, full of past, future and phantom pain, I picked up my arm and waved at the dust grains ever floating in the sun rays.
That night was so hot that I kept tossing and turning under the white tulle mosquito net. I drank the cool sherbet my ayah had left earlier on the bedside cabinet. Daddy was out on a hunting trip with some of his Indian friends. Rex barked and barked at the darkness. I got up gasping for air and looked through the window. The tamarind tree, laden with seeds, shone in the moonlight and the smell of ripe mangos filled the air.
John said, `Stop teasing us," and kissed me.
`Ayye!' I said.
Bare foot in my white cotton nightie I walked to the kitchen to look for ice. We bought a large slab yesterday from the ice wallah and I hoped that there would be some pieces left.
Blocking Hamdan out, our persistent love-making, I received the gentle kisses of my husband. He ran his fingers over me lightly as if I were fracturable. `Onyx,' he said.
Hita was sitting on the balcony of the kitchen looking at the darkness. When he saw me he smiled. I stood there, a seventeenyear-old girl, white, untouched and brimming with need.
The sun was flickering through the leaves of almond trees. I could hear the barking of shepherd dogs and the buzzing of bees.
'I want some ice,' I said to Hita.
`I don't have any ice left, Upah, but I have made kulfi. Do you want some?' he said and ran his fine fingers over the uneven wood of the kitchen table.
`It's still outside,' I said.
Perfect night for a thunderstorm,' Hita said while scooping up some ice cream, fresh lime green pistachio nuts and cardamom seeds.
I wanted to be overpowered, killed, but John treated every part of my body equally. He explored, stroked, examined, fondled. I bit, scratched, squeezed, screamed until he said, `You're hurting us' Hamdan would have said, `Tighter, harder, closer.'
We ate kulfi together listening to the thunder. His wide chest, brown sugar, shone whenever lightning lit up the kitchen. He stood up, crossed the sea dividing us, held my head tight between both hands and kissed me hard on the lips, so hard I could taste his tart blood.
In his arms I sought forgetfulness, oblivion, the colour of new seeds.
He became the master and I the slave girl attending to his every need. He whispered orders and I, the English lady, obeyed.
Our skins had melted away exposing pulsating veins, throbbing heart, twitching livers.
`I cannot have enough of you,' John said.
Walking on the beach, hand in hand, you would have thought that we were an ordinary couple. There was nothing unusual about us apart from the darkness of my skin. Sitting on a cliff in Santorini, overlooking the deep turquoise sea, I watched a young Greek boy in an old white boat fishing. He threw the rod up then dropped the fishing line in the sea. John was reading a fat book about Greek mythology. I just sat still. I did not sniff the air or look for clouds or riffles. I just sat still. The boy hooked more bait and cast the line again in the rippling water. The white cliffs and clean fine sand framed the calm greenblue sea leaving the opposite shore out. Finally I saw a fish wriggling in the air. The boy jumped with glee, stood up, rele
ased the fish and put it in a large net basket.
`It should be OK, having a swim, I mean.'
`Yes,' John said mechanically.
`They not think I am a loose woman,' I said.
`No. Why should they?' he said.
`I want to learn how to swim,' I said to the opposite shore, to Hima.
`You can do a course when we get back,' he said while still reading.
I took the book out of John's hand and closed it. His thin toes looked ridiculous in his big brown leather sandals. I stroked his thinning hair and kissed his tired eyes.
`Salma!' He smiled.
Coming out of his lips, my name sounded right. I taught him how to pronounce it, which letters to stress and which letters to let go.
Max did not approve of my marriage to a Geordie. `Up north they think the French are monkeys,' he said, slapped his knee and smirked. `They tortured the poor sod until he squeaked a confession to being a French spy.' Max pushed his chair back and roared with laughter. When he finally stopped he said, `I don't blame them for hating the damn froggies.'
I bowed my head and continued running the machine on the hem.
`They're also stingy. They want to make a buck out of us southerners,' he said and ran his hand over his gelled hair to make sure that the laughter had not shaken it out of place.
It was hot that day and the place could have done with a fan or an air-conditioning system, but Max insisted that five days of sunshine did not justify the expense. My sweat dripped between my tender breasts all the way down to my swollen belly. I wiped my forehead with a tissue and listened to a doctor on Radio 2 talking about a man finding it hard to get it up.
Max pricked up his ears.
I pretended to have not heard him.
`What is he talking about? We are so virile in the south.' He smirked again.
I rubbed my belly where the baby had just kicked me and passed the twentieth pair of trousers to Tracy to iron.
She winked at me.
I smiled.
`I am married to a Scotsman,' she said.
`Northerners are terrible, aren't they?' I said.
We laughed.
The doctor said that the sperms in England were too weak to climb up to the egg.
`What if the sperm count is OK, but the "you know what" does not "you know what"?' he asked the old radio on the windowsill.
I suppressed my laughter.
`I did not promote you to laugh at me,' he said, threw down the trousers he was altering, and dug into his sardine sandwich.
Although I had been in her bedroom several times it still felt like trespassing. It was a mess, ruffled sheets, dirty clothes scattered on the floor, some mouldy soup in a bowl, dark stains on the beige carpet where wine had been spilt. It smelt of dust, lavender soap, denture cleanser and damp.
I put the bundle of letters tied up with a rubber band, the silver box with the rancid butter and her diary in the crimson satin box, closed it and hid it in my wardrobe on top of my winter jumpers.
When I pulled the curtains open the velvet and lace released clouds of dust that floated in the sunrays down to the ground. I stripped the mattress, pillows and duvet, unhooked the curtains, rolled up the rugs and lace tablecloths, now yellow with age, and placed them on the landing. I vacuumed both sides of the satin mattress, the silver metal of the head- and footboards, the V, R and I and the metal frame, then wiped it with polish. The vacuum cleaner sucked in the cobwebs in the corners of the ceiling, the dust on top of the antique wardrobe, which was on Natasha's list of furniture that must be kept in the family, the mouldy food crumbs under the bedside cabinet, Liz's web of straight grey hair on the carpet by the chest of drawers where she used to put on her make-up and comb her hair looking at her reflection in her grandfather's oak barley-twist shaving mirror. I shampooed the carpet, polished the furniture, cleaned the window frames and panes and the door, dusted the William Morris wallpaper and hung the new curtains.
When I finally lay down next to John under the duvet covered with cotton of the Nile, a wedding gift from Sadiq, a half-moon like a slice of lemon was shimmering through the curtains, promising to be full soon. I slept soundly as if Elizabeth's bed, which she inherited from her grandfather, who inherited it from his grandmother, was a thick handmade mattress, stuffed with sheep wool combed with a Bedouin card, and covered with colourful handloom wool rugs made by the women of Hima in the dusk.
Last time I was pregnant it was out of wedlock and this time it was with a foreigner. I placed my hand over the stretch marks waiting for a kick from his tiny feet. In prison I lay on my back on the mattress hoping that my swollen tummy would disappear, hoping for the pregnancy to dissolve like sugar in hot mint tea. When shame lay heavy on my chest I dreamt of an earthquake, similar to the one my grandmother described. `The earth began cracking, then split wide open. First it was thirsty then it was hungry. It began eating dry and green. It was as if the Almighty had hit the ground with his force splitting it right open. What is left of it are the Dead Sea and the Red Sea," she said. So I dreamt of drowning in the Dead Sea or disappearing down a ravine. Then the crack would heal and I would be no more. But one cold morning the skin of my tummy stretched out and I felt a kick against my womb. I began eating after that because the baby was blameless, but I was the one who deserved to die. I imagined her swimming blindly in the dark waters of my womb and suddenly my heart was overwhelmed. How could I die myself without killing the baby inside me? But how could I bear to live with all that shame?
When they scanned my tummy they told me that it was a boy and it was in good health. Perhaps we would call him Imran, harmonious cities and civilization. `Imran,' I whispered, `the light in your mother's eyes, the air she breathes, her heart pumping, pumping love and pain, land safely on a carpet made of silk, in a jar full of honey, in a garden covered with fragrant white jasmine flowers. Come to this world safe and whole for your good English father and your Arab Bedouin mother are eagerly waiting to see your moon face.'
That Sunday King Edward Street was full of cars being washed, clothes being hung on lines and children playing frisbee and cycling in the middle of the street. Last week our offer for number 15 was accepted. I unscrewed the two rusty nails, freeing the wooden sign that says `Swan Cottage' and waved it at Sadiq. He raised his index and middle finger in a victory sign then hastily stuck his arms to his sides and bowed his head. He must be sad because Elizabeth was not only his friend, but his best customer. He looked like a ghost gesticulating in his white shalwar kameez behind the dusty glass of his shop window
`I will buy curtains, neither of here nor of there,' I said.
Parvin fluttered her eyelashes and said, `I don't know what you mean?!'
John and Mark were negotiating the antique rosewood wardrobe down the stairs. Parvin said that Mark would like to help and that his amputated hand never stopped him from carrying on normally with his life. He could hold on to things even better with the metal hook.
She was sipping her herbal tea slowly. When she got pregnant she gave up tea and coffee. Imran was sucking his thumb and babbling in the baby carrier, strapped to my chest, when the doorbell rang. It was Gwen, flushed and breathless, carrying a small suitcase.
`Are you OK? You're not going to hospital, are you?' I asked while kissing her on each cheek.
`No, no, my hip is fine," she said and put the suitcase on the kitchen table, sat down on one of the chairs, wiped her forehead and sighed. We could hear John and Mark's grunts as they struggled with the wardrobe. `You have two strong men out there,' Gwen said and giggled.
`Hands off!' said Parvin and winked at me. She had finished eating the slice of fruit cake I offered earlier. With her fine fingers she chased the leftovers on the kitchen paper towel then put them in her mouth.
I ran my hand over Imran's head, over his thin dark hair, counted his fingers, his toes, his eyes, and placed my hand gently over the tender cavity in his skull.
Filling the kettle with water I said loudly,
`Coffee, anyone?'
`Yes please," sang John, Mark and Gwen.
Gwen's coffee was the way she liked it, strong, with little cream and one coffeespoon of brown sugar.
The winter sun was feeble, but it managed to light up part of the corridor and hall. Gwen fiddled with the drawbolt locks, pressed them open and lifted the top of the brown leather suitcase.
The old dusty suitcase was full of baby clothes: some white, embroidered with shiny fuchsia threads, some pink, some lilac, with ducks, horses, bears running or flying on the yokes, lace-trimmed briefs, cotton bodysuits, white and blue knitted cardigans, one with picot edging and a satin ribbon, and the other with netted jasmine-shaped flowers sewn to the edges with a matching hat, a flowerprint dress set with smocked yoke and matching knickers, socks with lace trim, booties with a bear design and bibs with clowns and fairies embroidered on them.
`I bought some, made some for your Layla. But she must be sixteen by now, grown up, perhaps even engaged to be married,' she said and bit her tongue.
The white dress which I made for Layla with its zigzagged hem, the flowery collar, the small rose-like pockets, the tiny puffed sleeves was in the suitcase on top of the wardrobe upstairs together with the return rail ticket Minister Mahoney had given me, my mother's letter, the lock of hair, Noura's mother-of-pearl hair combs and bottle of perfume, Francoise's turquoise silver necklace, the Qur'an, the Mary Quant lipstick from Madam Lamaa and a black madraqa. I spent hours trying to imagine what a water lily would look like on a luminous jolly night, Layla. I tried to make the shape of the dress similar to that of a lily.
When Gwen shook the yellow and red baby duck plastic rattle and said, `It used to belong to my prodigal son. I kept it all these years," I walked out to the corridor, biting my lip, pretending to look for John and Mark. So many cardigans, bodysuits, dresses for her, but where was Layla? What did she look like? Was she dead or alive?
The rosewood wardrobe, pine display cabinet, two mahogany chests of drawers, two antique side tables, Indian mirror, bedside cabinets and dark domed travel chest full of Elizabeth's clothes and personal belongings were lined up on the pavement, waiting to be picked up by Natasha's boyfriend.
