by Tim Pears
‘I’ll be happy on my own today,’ she said.
Akhmed watched his trainers land pigeon-toed on the pavement. He glanced across at her, and away. ‘You want me to help you with maths again?’ He shrugged. ‘I don’t mind. It’s the same stuff we did.’ He put his hands out to the sides, palms up in modest solidarity. ‘I didn’t like it, either.’
They paused, while on the pavement ahead of them a driver manoeuvred her red car, in sideways instalments, into a tight parking space in front of a house. Half the inhabitants of the road had converted what had been tiny front gardens; their cars sheltered against the walls.
‘I think I’ll just go home,’ Blaise said.
‘I know there’s nowhere to go,’ Akhmed said. ‘We could go to Alexandra Park, I suppose. That bench by the tennis courts.’
Blaise turned to him. Akhmed seemed to be studying the final precise movements of the crablike red car. It was a mystery, why he followed her around with quite such persistence. Why he demanded her company. Once they were together he had little to say. No, that wasn’t quite right: they chatted easily enough. It was more like she had the constant feeling that there was something else he wanted to say, and was about to. But never managed to. Even now, pretending to look at the car that had been blocking their way, there was something in his bearing which suggested that any moment now he’d turn to her and say it; tell Blaise the thing that had been, that was always, on his mind. She knew plain enough what it was. What Akhmed wanted was to reprise the long, dry kiss they’d shared three weeks before, leaning against the trunk of the weeping beech in University Parks.
‘Did you tongue?’ had come into her mind at the time, heard from the mouths of other girls. ‘Did he tongue you?’ So Blaise had poked her tongue tentatively through Akhmed’s closed lips, only to wonder what she was supposed to do with it once it got there. Taste his gums? Slide it over his teeth? Then she felt the tip of his tongue, and wondered whether that was a mistake, and withdrew. Blaise had little appetite to repeat the experience. She suspected that Akhmed did.
‘I know!’ she said, suddenly. ‘Let’s go to your house.’
‘Yeh, right,’ Akhmed said, with a colluding chuckle.
‘No, really,’ Blaise said. ‘Take me to your house for tea.’
Akhmed frowned. ‘No way,’ he said, looking down the street.
Blaise waited. After a while, Akhmed glanced at her, for just long enough for her to spot the anxiety in his eyes.
‘Okay,’ Blaise said, and she resumed walking.
‘We can’t,’ he called after her.
‘Fine,’ she called back, shrugging her shoulders. ‘I’m going home.’
‘You’ve no idea,’ Akhmed complained, as much to himself as to her. ‘Wait,’ he said quietly. Blaise was twenty yards off now, and walking further away from him with every step. ‘Hang on,’ he pleaded. He only wanted time to think, but she wasn’t even giving him that. Still, he had long enough, he realised, in which to wonder why it was that the sight of her strolling away from him actually made the hunger he had to be with her, to see her, more intense. That wasn’t right at all. The craving sharpened and swelled inside him, in a yawning gap somewhere near his heart and his lungs that needed to be filled, and could only be filled by one particular person on this planet. Blaise Pepin, who’d appeared two years earlier in the class below him. Had he asked her to?
‘Okay,’ Akhmed yelled. He scurried after Blaise, and caught up with her along the wooden fence outside the Baptist church. ‘Come on, then,’ he said. They turned the corner, heading south, Akhmed shaking his head. ‘You don’t know what you’ve asked,’ he said, as if the course of action upon which they’d now embarked were an immutable compass bearing, that neither he nor Blaise could dream of changing now.
‘What on earth is the matter?’ Blaise wondered. ‘Don’t you think your dad’d like me or something?’
‘Dad?’ Akhmed asked. ‘Dad?’ He squinted at her as if she were unbelievably stupid. ‘Dad wouldn’t mind,’ he said, in a tone that suggested anyone in Oxford would know that. He kicked a pebble into the road. ‘This is so not a good idea.’
‘Take your shoes off,’ Akhmed hissed, as they entered the house. He closed the door and glanced nervously along the hallway, and up the stairs. ‘Quick,’ he said. ‘In there.’
The air smelled of onion. Cumin. The hallway led to the kitchen, through whose half-open door Blaise caught a glimpse of a brown-clad figure. Coriander.
‘Go on,’ Akhmed urged. ‘In the sitting-room. Sit down. I’ll be back.’
Blaise sat on the sofa of a sky-blue three-piece suite, which had a fringe of gold tassels brushing the carpet. On the coffee table in front of her was a gold-patterned plastic box, containing a cardboard box of pink tissues.
Akhmed came back into the room. He peered at Blaise with a suspicious frown, as if worried she might steal something.
‘Where’s the bathroom?’ she asked.
‘What?’ Akhmed replied, his face contorting with incredulity.
‘I need to use the toilet?’ Blaise said, turning the statement into a question with a sarcastic lilt.
Akhmed directed her upstairs. ‘Do you actually want a cup of tea?’ he asked her in the hallway. His tone hinted at how much he’d prefer her to say no.
Blaise smiled. ‘Sure,’ she said.
Akhmed sniffed. ‘Milk and sugar and stuff?’
By the time Blaise returned to the sitting-room, her heartbeat had slowed, and quietened. Akhmed came in, looked at her with distrust, and said, ‘I hope you didn’t wake Yusuf.’
Blaise felt a quick surge of panic. ‘I couldn’t help needing to …’ she began, but trailed off as Akhmed left the room again. She heard voices in the kitchen, hushed and indistinct. There was a glass cabinet behind one of the chairs. Blaise could see glasses and cups and crockery. She heard the front door open and close: someone entering or leaving. So many people in one house, with three tiny bedrooms. On top of the widescreen TV – it seemed bigger than her family’s television, though this was a smaller room, so perhaps it was an illusion – stood a model of a building. A church. It could have been Italian, Blaise thought. Or Iranian. Or Spanish. Actually, she acknowledged, she had no idea; was too ignorant even to make it worth hazarding a guess.
It had a dark-roofed, bulbous dome, which seemed to have been painted with a different –
‘Don’t touch that.’
Blaise jumped. She turned round. Akhmed’s elder sister, Taslima, stood in the doorway.
‘I was just looking,’ Blaise said. ‘I didn’t know –’
‘It’s the Al-Aqsa Mosque,’ Taslima said. ‘In Jerusalem.’ She wore a headscarf. Blaise had seen Taslima often enough at school, never in hijab: Akhmed told her his sister put it on or took it off at the end of their street. Blaise hadn’t quite believed him. Taslima looked slightly insane, as if afraid on this hot summer’s day of non-existent rain.
‘It gives the azan,’ Taslima said. ‘The call to prayer.’
Blaise stared blankly at her.
‘Five times a day,’ Taslima said. She waited long enough for the first glimmer of understanding to break across Blaise’s face, then left the room.
After a minute or two Akhmed came in carrying a blue plastic tray with a teapot, two cups and saucers and teaspoons, a small jug of milk, a bowl of white sugar.
Taslima came back in after him. ‘Speak Bangla to Amma, you little toerag,’ she said.
The tray banged on the table, china teacups rattling against their saucers. Akhmed knelt on the floor, his face tightening with anger. ‘Don’t you disrespect me,’ he told his sister, without looking up at her.
Blaise realised that a woman was now hovering in the doorway. She was staring at Blaise. Their mother, she assumed, although a brief glance told her that she looked nothing like either Akhmed or Taslima: her facial features and her body, clothed in a loose brown tunic and trousers, were much broader than the others’ fine-boned slenderness. She s
poke, in brief, emphatic sentences. Taslima answered her. Akhmed knelt on the carpet, bent over the table, waiting for the tea to brew. Blaise kept her head down, too. She could feel when the women were looking at her from the direction of their voices. When they spoke, the syllables sounded solid in their mouths, morsels of plain, sticky rice they rolled on their tongues.
‘I won’t hear the last of this,’ Akhmed whispered, as he poured the milk.
Taslima addressed him. ‘You are so full of it, you.’ She left the room, and Blaise heard her footsteps on the stairs. Their mother hovered still, a few inches further back from the doorway, into the hall.
‘I know!’ Blaise said.
Akhmed was shaking his head. His hand trembled as he poured tea into the two cups.
‘Ask your Mum if white girls are allowed to go to the mosque school.’
Akhmed flinched, as if he’d scalded his hand. He lifted his head a little. Blaise could see his eyes dart right towards her, and left towards his mother.
‘The madrassah?’ he said, and frowned. ‘You shouldn’t make fun of our religion, Blaise,’ he complained.
‘I mean it,’ Blaise said. ‘I’m serious. Go on. Ask your mother.’
‘I’m in deep enough,’ Akhmed said, in a petulant tone of voice, before shaking his head. ‘I’m so stupid,’ he admonished himself.
Her father’s voice had come to Blaise. A sentence of his, spoken to her inner ear with the clarity of a bell: You can’t understand people from outside their culture.
‘How else are people like me supposed to learn?’ she demanded of Akhmed. ‘Ask her.’
Akhmed watched Blaise with that suspicious expression: she really was about to steal something. Then he turned to his mother, and spoke to her in Bengali. As she listened to what her son said, she looked at Blaise. Her eyes lit up; eyebrows knitted together in a mimicry of Akhmed’s frown; eyes darkened. It was as if, without words, she was trying to communicate to this impudent girl what was going through her mind. She ended up smiling, briefly, then nodding in solemn acknowledgement of whatever Akhmed had told her, before disappearing back down the hallway towards the kitchen.
Blaise took the mug of tea from Akhmed, and leaned back on the sofa. Her dad, she thought, would be proud of her. She drank the sweet tea in small gulps; felt it going down her gullet and into her stomach in warm and pleasant draughts.
6
Ping-pong
Tuesday 24 June
On Tuesday morning Sheena Pepin’s family left the house before her: Ezra was going to drop Louie off at the nursery and ride back down the canal towpath to work; Hector had gone round to the Carlyles’, was going to cycle to school with Jack. Blaise, Sheena thought, had left too. She was in the hallway, making to leave, when she heard the door of Blaise’s room open. Blaise rattled down the stairs and headed for the front door.
‘Where are you going, sweetheart?’
‘Out, Mum,’ Blaise replied, opening the door. She wore her new indigo top, and jeans whose frayed hem almost disguised the fact that she’d grown an inch since buying them a fortnight earlier.
‘Me, too. You want to look in at the Wasteland?’
Blaise’s hand rested on the door handle. ‘To cheer the bulldozers, Mum?’ She turned round. ‘Yeh, okay.’
‘I know, Bee,’ Sheena said, nodding. ‘You’re right. A bit futile now. No, but just in case there’s someone on the vigil at the gate.’ Sheena zipped shut the compartments of her rucksack. Something she’d forgotten snagged at her mind.
‘I mean it,’ Blaise shrugged. ‘I will cheer them.’
‘You will?’
‘They’re doing the right thing.’
‘The right … ?’ Was Blaise feeling off-colour this morning? her mother wondered. ‘What do you mean, sweetheart?’ Sheena asked. ‘What about our action?’
Blaise shook her head at the ground. ‘The action was stupid,’ she said. She smiled indulgently. ‘The whole campaign was stupid. I can’t believe I took part.’ Blaise turned and walked out into the sun.
‘Hey, hang on there a moment, young lady,’ Sheena demanded from the porch. ‘What are you talking about? We’ve spent the last two years working together, you and I, with a hundred other people, to protect the Wasteland. You’ve been amazing, Blaise.’
‘Oh, I’ve been an idiot,’ Blaise told the sky. She’d reached the back bumpers of the cars, and she remained looking up at the blue sky, as if in the wispy strands of white cloud high up there were words she might, with a good deal of concentration, decipher. She turned round, and stared at her mother. ‘Why did you get me involved, Mum?’ she asked.
Sheena was too surprised to think of what to say. ‘Well,’ she tried. ‘I don’t know. I mean …’
‘No,’ Blaise said, shaking her head. ‘No, Mum. I’m not blaming you. It’s my fault.’
‘It’s nobody’s fault,’ Sheena attempted.
‘How come it didn’t occur to me,’ Blaise asked herself, ‘who those flats and houses are going to be for?’
‘We know the arguments,’ Sheena mustered. She put a hand out to her side, as if to indicate some list pinned up by the telephone. ‘We have heard them about a thousand times.’
‘Yes, Mum, but was I listening?’ Blaise wondered. ‘Social housing. Affordable homes. Like, poor people who can’t afford the prices people like us can, can have somewhere to live, maybe? What was I, deaf?’
Sheena could feel a kind of prickling sensation in her stomach; tolerance of Blaise’s attitude turning to irritation. ‘But it’s not the issue, Blaise,’ she said. ‘You know that.’
Blaise looked away, down the street of near identical sandcoloured brick houses, as if pondering them, and their outrageous value, anew. ‘I think it is the issue, Mum,’ she said quietly. ‘The only issue. I mean, it’s not you, don’t worry,’ Blaise added, abruptly. ‘It’s just me,’ she said, planting her left hand on her chest. ‘But all the rest is disguising the issue. It’s hiding a rich hippie NIMBYism behind all that nature bullshit.’
Sheena gasped. It felt as if she’d received an underhand punch to the stomach. ‘Who’s a hippie?’ she blustered. ‘NIMBYs? Us?’ Sheena paused, took a conscious swallow of air, and breathed out. ‘Bullshit?’ She stepped forward, facing her daughter along the tunnel between the Saab and the Golf. Blaise kept saying she wasn’t criticising her mother, so how come Sheena could feel her blood thumping around her veins, a bulging behind her eyes? ‘For God’s sake, Blaise,’ she said, more harshly than she meant to. ‘Be serious. There are fifty brownfield sites in Oxford marked for housing development. They can build anywhere. The Wasteland is – it was – a precious wildlife reserve.’
Blaise shrugged, and smiled sweetly. ‘But Mum, since when was I so interested in green woodpeckers? Blaise Pepin the Twitcher. Yeh, right. How often did I take my binoculars to look at reed warblers? Oh! Just since the council tried to build some dwellings for poorer people across the canal from us. Wow. What a hypocritical coincidence, eh?’
Sheena realised she was confused herself. She couldn’t work out whether or not to agree with her daughter or to defend herself from disguised assault. ‘Well, sweetheart,’ she said. ‘I’m awfully sorry I ever got you involved.’
Blaise produced a grin so full of irony it might have choked her. ‘Don’t be silly, Mum. Parents are supposed to try and brainwash their children, aren’t they?’
Sheena tried to control herself, but her raised voice bounced towards Blaise off the shiny glass of the car windows. ‘How dare you!’ she spluttered.
Blaise made a grimace of comic indignation. ‘I’m joking, Mum,’ she said. ‘I’m only kidding.’
Before Sheena could say anything more, Blaise turned and strolled away – in the opposite direction, Sheena was relieved to see, from the canal. She stared after her daughter as she walked along Wellington Drive, and long after she disappeared into Spencer Street. Sheena’s heartbeat settled. Why did that ungrateful girl say those things? What on earth was going thro
ugh her brain: was she being insidious and cleverly critical as Sheena’s heart told her she’d been, or actually as innocent as she was making out? This day of all days. Today was Blaise’s birthday. Sheena’s breathing slowed. It struck her suddenly that she was standing outside. That she had yelled at Blaise not behind the privacy of double-glazed sash windows but in the open air. Sheena became aware of her surroundings: there was silence so absolute in the immediate vicinity that all she could hear was the whine of cars on the distant ring-road. It was as if their neighbours, having been forced to listen to an ill-tempered mother, were now lurking behind their windows with a kind of horrified tact.
Sheena rushed back inside, and closed the door firmly behind her. With the back of her hand she wiped perspiration off her forehead, and her upper lip. She regretted that she hadn’t responded to Blaise’s disguised attack with some subtlety of her own. Sheena pushed herself away from the door, and made for the kitchen. She cleared the table, filled the dishwasher, wiped surfaces, regaining her equilibrium. The truth was that whatever game Blaise was playing, it was her adolescence, no one else’s. Her turmoil, her hormonal volatility. All parents could do was to stand steadfast in their position at the helm of the family; it was more important to remain there, offering stability and leadership, than to try and get inside her mind.
Sheena fetched her bicycle from the lean-to behind the house. She pressed the back tyre of Blaise’s bike: almost flat, the front one, too, confirming her guess that Blaise had stopped using her bike many months before. She walked or bussed everywhere. Maybe it wasn’t cool to ride a bicycle any more – apart from those tiny stunt bikes a couple of boys had visited Blaise on a few months ago. Sheena pictured them riding away, jumping their bikes on and off the pavement, standing on the pedals like jockeys, their lean youths’ arses high up in the air. Rare visitors.
Sheena tried to jounce her hybrid on and off the kerb, but the bike mocked her attempt at girlishness, and only bounced itself back at her.
Over the canal bridge the vigil, at the high new steel-mesh gates to the Wasteland, was unmanned. Which meant that it did not exist. Sheena wasn’t surprised: it had been a spontaneous afterthought to the final action of the campaign, there was no rota organised, and it was too late now to change anything. The dead embers of the campfire at the side of the towpath looked like the aftermath of some unhappy picnic. Mourning a small wildlife site had not sustained the vigil beyond the weekend, and why should it? Maybe, if Sheena were honest, Blaise was right. The roar of the contractors, flashes of yellow metal moving through the branches of the willows, the crackle and groan of trees falling. Maybe they should be cheered. Maybe that’s what you did, you fought with all you had for what you believed in and then, if your adversaries won, you shook hands and cheered them on their way – through a door to the future. The future was theirs, and it was only yours too if you followed them. Nature reserve or social housing, after all: weren’t both desirable projects? Just because a developer would make a lot of money out of one did not, as some of Sheena’s more fundamentalist fellow activists chose to believe, render it immoral.
