“You got any other conversation?” Ness asked.
“I know what I speak of. Do not show the mouth to me, young lady.”
She marched on, Ness in tow. They passed Kensington and Chelsea College and finally turned into the southern part of Wornington Green Estate. This was one of the less disreputable housing estates in the area. It offered the same kind of vistas as the other estates: blocks of flats looking out upon other blocks of flats. But there was less rubbish strewn about, and a sense of the house proud was evident in the lack of discarded objects like rusting bicycles and torched armchairs sitting on balconies. Majidah took Ness to Watts House where her departed husband had purchased a flat during one of the Tory periods of government. “The one decent thing he did,” she informed Ness. “I confess that when the man died, it was truly one of the happiest days of my life.”
She went up the stairs beyond the entry door, leading Ness to the second floor. Some twenty paces along a lino corridor, where someone had scrawled “Eatme Eatme Eatme Fuckers” in marking pen, Majidah’s front door was an oddity. It was done up in steel like the vault of a bank, with a spy hole in the centre.
“What you got in here?” Ness asked her as the Asian woman inserted the first of four keys in the same number of locks. “Gold doubloons or summick?”
“In here, I have peace of mind,” Majidah said, “which, as you will learn eventually, one can only hope, is more valuable than gold or silver.” She opened the door and ushered Ness inside.
There was little to surprise within. The flat was tidy and redolent of furniture polish. The decorations were sparse; the furniture was old. The carpet squares were covered by a worn Persian rug, and—here was the first discordant note—on the walls hung coloured pencil sketches of a variety of headdresses. There were photographs as well, a collection of them in wooden frames. They were grouped together on a table by the sofa. Men, women, and children. A great number of children.
The second discordant note in the flat consisted of a collection of pottery. This was of a particularly whimsical nature: jugs, planters, posy holders, and vases all characterised by the presence of a cartoonlike forest creature. Rabbits and fawns predominated, although there was the occasional mouse, frog, or squirrel. Shelves on either side of the entrance to the kitchen displayed this unusual collection. When Ness looked from it to Majidah—the Asian woman seeming the person least likely to be collecting such things—Majidah spoke.
“Everyone must have something that makes them smile, Vanessa. Can you look upon them and fail to smile yourself? Ah, perhaps. But then, you are a serious young lady in possession of serious problems. Come set the kettle to boil. We shall have tea.”
The kitchen was much like the sitting room in its neatness. The electric kettle sat on a work top perfectly free of clutter, and Ness filled it at a spotless sink as Majidah put her meat in the fridge, her fruit and veg in a basket on the little kitchen table, and her flowers in a vase. This vase she set lovingly next to a photograph on the windowsill. When Ness had the kettle plugged in and Majidah was bringing teapot and cups out of a cupboard, Ness went to examine the picture. It seemed out of place in here instead of in the sitting room with the others.
A very young Majidah was the subject of the photo, and in it she stood next to a grey-haired man with a deeply lined face. She looked ten or twelve years old, solemn and decked out in any number of gold chains and gold bracelets. She was wearing a blue and gold shalwar kamis. The old man had a white one on.
“Dis your granddad?” Ness asked, picking up the picture. “You ain’t looking so happy to be wiv him, innit.”
“Please ask before you remove an object from its place,” Majidah said. “That is my first husband.”
Ness widened her eyes. “How old ’as you? Shit, woman, you must’ve been—”
“Vanessa, profanity ceases at my front door, please. Put the photograph down and make yourself useful. Take these things to the table. Do you wish to have a tea cake or are you able to consume something more interesting than you English generally eat at this hour?”
“Tea cake’s good,” Ness said. She wasn’t about to try anything else. She replaced the photo, but she continued to eye Majidah the way one might look at a species of animal one has never seen before. She said, “So how old ’as you? What’re you doing marrying some granddad, anyways?”
“I was twelve years old when I first married. Rakin was fifty-eight.”
“Twelve years old? Twelve years old an’ hooked up permanent to some old man? What in hell’re you t’inkin? Did he…Did you…I mean…Wiv him?”
Majidah used hot water from the faucet to heat the teapot. She took a brown paper packet of loose tea from a cupboard. She went for the milk and poured this into a small white jug. Only then did she answer. “My goodness, isn’t your questioning rude. This cannot be the way you’ve been brought up to speak to an older person. But”—she held up her hand to prevent Ness saying anything—“I have learned to understand that you English do not always mean to be as disrespectful of other cultures as you seem to be. Rakin was my father’s cousin. He came to Pakistan—from England—when his first wife died because he believed himself in need of another one. He had, at the time, four children in their twenties, so one would think he might have proceeded throughout the rest of his life in the company of one or all of them. But this was not Rakin’s way. He came to our house and looked us over. I have five sisters, and as I’m the youngest, it was naturally assumed that Rakin would select one of them. He did not. He wished to have me. I was introduced to him, and we were married. Nothing more was said of the matter.”
“Shit,” Ness said. And then she added hastily, “Sorry. Sorry. Slipped out, innit.”
Majidah pressed her lips together to quell a smile. “We married in my village and then he brought me to England, a little girl who spoke no English and knew not a single thing of life, not even how to cook. But Rakin was a gentle man in all ways and a gentle man is a patient teacher. So I learned to cook. And I learned other things. I had my first child two days before my thirteenth birthday.”
“You d’i’nt,” Ness said in disbelief.
“Oh yes. Indeed I did.” The kettle clicked off and Majidah made the tea. She toasted a tea cake for Ness and took it to the table with a square of butter, but for herself she brought forth pappadums and chutney, both of which she declared to be homemade. When she had everything assembled, she sat and said, “My Rakin died when he was sixty-one. A sudden heart attack and he was gone. And there I was, fifteen years old, with a small child and four stepchildren approaching thirty. I could, of course, have lived on with them, but they would not have that: an adolescent stepmother with a toddler who would have become their responsibility. So another husband was found for me. This was my unfortunate second husband, who remained alive for twenty-seven interminable years of marriage before he had the good sense to pass on from liver failure. I have no pictures of him.”
“You get kids from him?”
“Oh my goodness, yes. Five more children. They are all adults now with children of their own.” She smiled. “And how they disapprove of a mother who will not live with any one of them. They inherited, alas, their father’s traditional nature.”
“Wha’ ’bout the rest of your fam’ly?”
“The rest…?”
“Your mum and dad. Your sisters.”
“Ah. They remain in Pakistan. My sisters married, of course, and raised families there.”
“You get to see ’em?”
Majidah spread a bit of chutney on a sliver of pappadum, which she broke off from the larger piece. She said, “Once. I attended my father’s funeral. You are not eating your tea cake, Vanessa. Do not waste my food or we shall not have tea together again.”
That didn’t seem like an altogether bad idea, but Ness was sufficiently intrigued by the Asian woman’s history to butter her tea cake and begin to consume it. Majidah watched her disapprovingly. Ness’s table manners were in need of adj
ustment as far as she was concerned, but she said nothing until Ness took up her tea and slurped it.
“This will not do,” Majidah told her. “Has no one taught you how to drink a hot beverage? Where is your mother? Who are the responsible adults in your life? Do they slurp as well? This is common, Vanessa, this noisy drinking. This is vulgar. Watch me and listen…. Do you hear my lips flap against the tea? No, you do not. And why is this? Because I have learned the method to drink, which has nothing to do with sucking and everything to do with—” Majidah stopped because Ness had put her cup down so abruptly that tea sloshed into her saucer, which was an even greater offence. “What is the matter with you, you foolish girl? Do you wish to break my china?”
It was the word. Sucking. Ness had not expected it. Nor had she expected it to produce a series of images in her mind: mental mementoes that she preferred to forget. She said, “C’n I go now?” Her voice was sullen.
“What do you mean with this ‘Can I go now?’ This is not a gaol. You are not my prisoner. You may go whenever you wish to go. But I can see that I have hurt you in some way—”
“I ain’t hurt.”
“—and if it has to do with your tea drinking, I must tell you that I meant no harm. My intention was to educate you. If no one bothers to inform you when your manners are not what they should be, how are you to learn? Does your mother never—”
“She ain’t…She’s in hospital, innit. We don’t live wiv her. Haven’t done since I was little, okay?”
Majidah sat back in her chair. She looked thoughtful. She said, “I apologise to you. I did not know this, Vanessa. She is ill, your mum?”
“Whatever,” Ness said. “Look, c’n I go?”
“Again I say: You are not a prisoner here. You may come and go as you like.”
At this second expression of liberation, Ness might have got to her feet and departed. But she did not, because of that photo on the windowsill. Little Majidah in gold and blue on the arm of a man the age of her granddad kept Ness in her chair. She looked long at that picture before she finally said, “You scared?”
“Of what?” Majidah said. “Of you? Oh my goodness, I hope not. You do not frighten me in the least.”
“Not me. Him.”
“Whom?”
“Dat bloke.” She nodded at the photo. “Rakin. He scare you?”
“What an odd question you ask me.” Majidah looked at the picture and then back at Ness. She took a reading off her, making an assessment that grew from having brought up six children, three of whom were female. She said quietly, “Ah. I was not prepared. This was a sin against me, committed by my parents. By my mother, especially. She said to me, ‘Obey your husband,’ but she said nothing else. Naturally, I had seen animals…. One cannot live in a village and escape the sight of copulation among the beasts of the field. The dogs and the cats as well. But I did not think men and women did such strange things together, and no one told me otherwise. So I wept at first, but Rakin, as I have told you, was kind. He did not force anything upon me, which made me far luckier than I knew at the time. Things were very different when I married again.”
Ness pulled on her upper lip, listening. Within her was a tremendous stirring, a begging to be spoken. She did not know if she could manage the words, but she also did not know if she could hold them back. She said, “Yeah. I ’spect…,” but that was all she could say.
Majidah took the leap. She said quietly, “This has happened to you, has it not? At what age, Vanessa?”
Ness blinked. “Summick like…I dunno…ten maybe. Eleven. I forget.”
“This is…I am very very sorry. It was not, of course, a husband chosen for you.”
“’Course not.”
“This is very bad,” Majidah said quietly. “This is very wrong and bad indeed. This dreadful thing should not have happened. But happen it did, and I am sorry.”
“Yeah. Well.”
“Sorry for you, however, will not change things. Only how you view the past can alter the present and the future.”
“How’m I s’posed to view it?” Ness asked.
“As something terrible that happened but was not your fault. As something that was part of a larger plan that you do not yet see. I have learned in this life not to question or fight the ways of Allah—of God, Vanessa. I have learned to wait in quiet to see what will come next.”
“Nuffink,” Ness said. “Tha’s what comes next.”
“This is hardly the truth. That very terrible thing that was done to you led to this moment, to this conversation, to you sitting in my kitchen having a lesson on how to drink tea like a lady.”
Ness rolled her eyes. But she also smiled. Just a curve of her lips, but that was the last thing she would have expected, having just told Majidah part of her darkest secret. Still, the smile meant her armour had been pierced, which she didn’t want. So she said roughly, “Look. C’n I go now?”
Majidah didn’t correct her this time. Instead she said, “Not until you taste my pappadums. And my chutney, which is far superior, you will find, to anything a supermarket will sell you.” She broke a piece off of her large pappadum and passed it to Ness with a scoop of chutney. “Eat,” she instructed.
Which was what Ness did.
JOEL’S OPPORTUNITY TO have a talk with Neal Wyatt came sooner than he expected, on a day when Toby required Joel’s guidance to complete a small assignment for school. London had wildlife—in the form of urban foxes, feral cats, squirrels, pigeons, and other assorted birds—and the children in Toby’s new year at Middle Row School were asked to document the close sighting of one of them. They were to make a sketch, create a report, and, to prevent their fanciful manufacture of either, they were to do this in the company of a parent or guardian. Kendra’s schedule precluded her doing this duty, and Ness wasn’t around to be asked. So it fell to Joel.
Toby was all afire for foxes. It took some work for Joel to talk him out of that. Foxes, he explained, weren’t going to be just swanning around Edenham Estate in convenient packs. They’d probably be solo and they’d be skulking around at night. Toby needed to choose something else.
Joel’s brother wasn’t willing to take the easy way out and document the sighting of a pigeon, so he switched to waiting for a swan to appear on the pond in Meanwhile Gardens. Joel knew that seeing a swan on the pond was about as likely as seeing a pack of foxes goose-stepping in an orderly formation along Edenham Way, so he suggested a squirrel instead. It was no infrequent sight to see one climbing the concrete face of Trellick Tower in search of food on the balconies. It shouldn’t be the least bit difficult to come across one elsewhere. Squirrels and birds being the tamest of London’s wild creatures—likely to alight on one’s shoulder in the hope of finding food on offer—this seemed a decent plan. What a fine report it would turn out to be, Joel enthused, if they had a close encounter with a squirrel. They could go into the nature walk just above and beyond the pond. They could make themselves a spot off the boardwalk that wound beneath the trees and through the shrubbery. If they sat quite still, there was every chance a squirrel would come right up to them.
The time of year was propitious. Autumn and instinct demanded that squirrels begin foraging and storing food for the winter. When Joel and Toby settled themselves in a clump of blue bean not quite ready to produce its distinctive and eponymous pods, they had to wait less than ten minutes before they were joined by an inquisitive and hopeful squirrel. Seeing the animal was the easy part for Toby. Sketching both him and where he saw him—snuffling on the ground right next to Joel’s foot—was rather more difficult. Toby got through it by means of plenty of encouragement, but he was nearly defeated by having to fashion a report about the sighting. Just write how it happened was not a direction that Toby found even moderately helpful, so it took forty-five minutes of laborious printing and rubbing out before he had something that resembled a report. By that time, both of the boys needed a break and the skate bowl seemed the perfect diversion.
There
was generally action in one of three bowls, and on this day, seven riders and two cyclists were doing their stuff when Joel and Toby came up the slope from the duck pond and out onto the towpath just above the gardens. Spectators sat on a couple of the hillocks watching the action, while a few others gathered on the benches nearby. Toby, of course, wanted to get as close as possible, and he was set upon doing so when Joel saw that among the spectators were Hibah and Neal Wyatt.
He said to Toby, “Headhunters, Tobe! You ’member what to do?”
To his credit and because of the many times they’d practised for just this moment, Toby stopped in his tracks. But he was overly used to rehearsals by now, so he said, “For reals? Cos I want to watch—”
“Dis is for real,” Joel said. “We’ll watch ’em later. Meantime, what’re you going to—”
Toby was, gratifyingly, on his way before Joel could finish the question. He trotted along the towpath and made for the abandoned barge beneath the bridge. In a moment he had hopped upon it. It bobbed in the water, then he was gone from sight. He was gone specifically from Neal Wyatt’s sight. Hibah there or not, Joel didn’t want Neal to get close to his brother until they had a satisfactory truce.
Joel took in a breath. It was a public place. There were others present. It was daylight. All of this should have reassured him, but when it came to dealing with Neal, nothing was a certainty. He approached the bench on which the boy and Hibah were sitting. He saw they were holding hands, and from this he understood that they’d somehow—and unwisely on Hibah’s part as far as Joel was concerned—arrived at a rapprochement after their previous altercation in the gardens. He was wise enough to realise he wasn’t going to be welcome—especially from Neal’s point of view—but he couldn’t see any help for the matter. Besides, he had the flick knife with him if things became dicey, and he doubted even Neal would take on a flick knife.
What Came Before He Shot Her Page 38
