‘I don’t know,’ said Billie. ‘I’ll probably be back late.’
But she did not come back at all and she did not call. I was full of apprehension, imagining the harsh realities Billie’s face was being rubbed into, imagining the cruel lashes that were being laid across my back. We know nothing about his family. Certainly he is no high-flier – the Sports and Leisure Department of Lambeth Council, for God’s sake. He will be a financial burden to you. You have a promising future at the bank. Look, they are already training you in investment and finance, why compromise that with dubious connections in your young life? A Muslim from Africa!
I rang Billie at work but she was unavailable. Later in the morning I had an email: Sorry about last night. I’ll see you later, which rather than reassuring me only worried me more. Why wasn’t she calling me? When I got back that evening Billie was already at home when usually she came in later. I embraced her but her body was limp in my arms and in her eyes I saw exhaustion and defeat.
‘What happened?’ I asked.
‘I’m sorry. I’m really sorry,’ she said.
I waited for a while before I asked again what had happened although I was beginning to think I knew.
‘They were all there,’ she said wearily. ‘Suresh came over from Madrid to lay down the law. My mother called him after our visit. She only wanted to meet you to confirm that she had the details right. After that she rang Suresh and told him that I was living with a Muslim nigger from Africa and that he was to come over the next day and talk me out of it. He already knew from Anand. It was all planned. They used that word freely: a nigger is a nigger however nice he is. I had thought religion would be the issue … I’m sorry. I have to leave you.’
‘No. You can’t do this.’
‘You don’t know … my mother said she would kill herself if I did not.’
‘She won’t do that!’
‘How can I be sure?’ said Billie, tears running down her face. ‘You don’t know what she can be like, how obsessive she gets. When I said, no, don’t talk like that, she said it would be an act of sacrifice, a sacred act to maintain the family’s honour. I don’t know if you can understand her idea of family honour.’
‘No, she only said that about … it’s to get your brothers working on you,’ I said.
Billie shook her head. ‘I am not sure she won’t do it if I disobey. When my mother is depressed she talks about suicide. I have heard her do that before. I have heard her say suicide looks you in the eye and draws you from birth and then lurks over you for all your life. She said that every moment I spend here with you is a torment to her, and if I don’t leave at once she will kill herself. How can I be sure she won’t do it? I have agreed to return home tomorrow.’
I tried to talk with her but she said she had no choice and talking was not going to do any good. When we went to bed, she lay silently while I talked and pleaded, and then at some point she turned her back to me. I must have fallen asleep in the end because I was woken suddenly by the sound of the early-morning traffic past our street. Billie was sleeping on her back, her right arm flung over her head as usual. I washed and dressed in a hurry because I was late, trying to be quiet so as not to wake her, although I suspected she was only pretending to be asleep. She had said she would call in sick so she could do her packing. I went through the day with the conviction that she would not be there when I got back, but she was. She was waiting for me to come home.
‘I was just waiting to say goodbye,’ she said, speaking quietly, unsmiling, determined.
‘There’s no need to do things this way,’ I said gently. ‘Let’s talk about what we can do. We can’t just throw everything away like this.’
‘I don’t want to talk about this or anything else. I need to get away and think about everything that’s happened. I think it’s best to do this quickly. That’s the only way I can do it,’ she said. ‘But it didn’t seem right to go without saying goodbye. It was not your fault. Please don’t say anything. I’ve called Anand, he’ll be here soon.’
I nodded and sat in the room for a few moments, silent in the face of so much determination, then I went to the bedroom to change out of my work clothes. When Anand came, he smiled his greetings and picked up Billie’s things but did not come back to say goodbye. A nigger is a nigger although not to his face. I exchanged the lightest of kisses with Billie before she left.
Out there in Acton the life she had chosen with me would have looked different from the way it felt to live it. It would have looked reckless, naïve, even treacherous. I guessed that in the brothers’ telling I would have seemed like a vagabond, snuffling and sidling into their family warmth, somehow tricking her into irresponsibility. In the end she could not resist her brothers, and there must be something more about the mother that Billie had not told me in full. Her threat of suicide sounded to me like a petulant declaration intended to manipulate and control. I did not understand how suicide could be a sacred act and did not fully understand its enormity for a pious Hindu woman, not at the time. Billie did not explain these things to me before she left so I had to guess at them as best I could and find out more later.
Billie did not make any of it easy, and afterwards, once she had made her escape from me, she rejected all my attempts to reach her or be with her again. It must have been what she had agreed with her brothers and her mother. She blocked my number after my second call so I could not get through to her mobile. She did not reply to my emails and in the end must have blocked my address. I rang her work number and persisted through all attempts to deflect me until she came to the phone. She listened to my greetings in silence then said quietly, ‘Don’t call this number again. You’re going to get me fired.’ I felt rejected and misused by this severity and, after the work call, I did not try to get in touch with her again.
Kwa mpenzi Mama,
Salamu na baada ya salamu, I hope you and Munira are both well. In the quiet time I have to myself these days, I remembered that Munira is now seventeen. That was nearly the age I was when I left, and I cannot imagine what she looks like now. A young woman, of course, but it’s been such a long time since I saw a picture of her. I should have asked you to send me a photograph of her every year so I could keep track of how she grew, but I did not do that. It did not even occur to my neglectful mind. There are times when I still feel myself to be the same age as when I left home, not in a thinking way but if I catch myself by surprise and imagine myself, then I see that seventeen-year-old youth who came here so long ago, or at least I feel him. I am still here after such a long time when I never thought to be here long when I first came. Everyone says that: I didn’t think I would stay for so long.
I’m sorry to have been quiet for a while, but it’s not because I don’t think of you. You must not think that I neglect you because of lack of care. It just seems as if every day happens like this, coming and going with nothing to report at the end of it. But today I do have some news. I am going to buy a flat, the same one I live in in Putney. I wonder what you would think if you saw it. Maybe I should take some pictures and send them to you, with me sitting in my comfortable armchair reading Chekhov. You’ll probably find it shut in and wasteful of space – with just me in it. I often think of the little house we lived in, and how intimate and close everything was and yet it was not stifling or oppressive. Here in this place I sometimes feel drained. The air is thick with dust and clogged with human breath and there are times I feel as if I am suffocating.
It is summer now but the weather has turned stormy and unsettled, heavy rain and hail and then brief sunshine. The language people speak on the news and in public has changed too since those killings in New York, and the talk is all about Muslim fanatics and terrorists. They speak a familiar language of freedom but plan to enforce it with violence. I guess that is familiar too. You would not recognise the way some of the bearded ones speak either, how it was all a plot by Kissinger and the Jews, who planted the bombs to make it seem that Muslims had done it so that Ame
rica could take over the Muslim world and crush it. They are so full of rage and hatred and contemplate cruelties with such righteousness that it sounds nothing like those stories of our lives that we took in so avidly when we were young: the return to Medina, the Night Journey, the Dome of the Rock. I feel even more of a stranger here now. I hate it but still I stay. I feel like a traitor but I am not sure who it is that I am betraying.
Mama, some weeks ago I lost the woman I loved. I feel as if I have lost a life. I told her about you and Baba, and how things went wrong for us. She is the only person I have ever spoken to about you, and now I feel as if I have lost something of you so cheaply, given something away. Sometimes I feel unwell from loneliness. Sometimes I lose track of days, and on Wednesdays I think it is Thursday, although when I was younger, I always knew Wednesdays by heart because they felt so bad, with so much of the week still to go.
I don’t know what it is about buying the flat, but it makes me feel safe, as if I can’t now just float away unheeded into a vast dark nowhere. I have borrowed to the limit to buy it but it will be a necessary pain, a penance for a whole year and more of wanting too much. My notebook is filling up with unsent letters to you. I will have to get another one soon.
7
MOTHER
The shock of Billie’s going took a few days to reach every sinew in my body and by the end of that I was listless, weary, at times paralysed. I would not have believed it if it had not happened to me. I felt her rejection as a bodily nausea, a carnal sensation of revulsion and depletion. I had to force myself to do the simplest things, make the bed, have a shower, cook. Even when I cooked I often could not eat. I could not sleep for longer than two or three hours and then woke up in misery. I could not concentrate at work or on what I was reading. The silence of the flat was oppressive and there were too many objects around that reminded me of her. I thought of going home for a visit, to break the chain of events, to please my mother, to reassure myself. That would take my mind off her for sure but I did nothing about it. Weeks went by like that until I found ways to coerce myself out of that nerveless state. Buying the flat was one of those ways. The owner got in touch to say he wanted to sell and I agreed to buy and that occupied a large amount of head space and pushed thoughts of her away.
Taking long walks was another. I think that walk I did to stay out of the flat on the day of Billie’s mother’s visit started something. I enjoyed it so I began to take long walks through London on my own. Sometimes I set off in the morning and headed across the river, going west or east as I felt like, as far as Chiswick or Hackney. I stayed out all day, or until I needed to force myself to keep walking, then I caught the train or the bus and headed back to Putney. I always took a book with me and if I was in the mood and I found the right spot, I sat down to read. Sometimes I walked to Camberwell and strolled past the OAU house, or to Holland Park to see the house where I lived when I first came to England. In the spring, I sometimes came home from work and went out again to walk in the park or as far as Clapham Common, stopping at a café or a pub on the way.
One Friday I walked all night long, through Wandsworth, and Tooting Bec and Brixton and Denmark Hill and Lewisham as far as Greenwich. I passed clubbers and revellers and people like me walking through London streets in their sleep. Mostly I kept away from the major roads, and tried to find my way through the tangle of small streets, bearing left whenever I felt in doubt. I read how once Charles Dickens walked from Tavistock Square in central London to Gad’s Hill Place, his house near Rochester, a seven-hour walk through the night, because he had had a row with his wife. I read about a group who re-enacted the journey of Chaucer’s pilgrims from Southwark to Canterbury. I dreamt of taking that walk one day later in the summer when the sun had warmed up the ground a little more, carrying my pilgrim’s flask to refresh myself on the way.
Dear Mama,
I am so glad you are pleased to hear about the flat but I should tell you that it is only a small one and it does not mean that I am now well off. In fact, the very opposite because I have to pay a lot of money back every month. It must be very frustrating to keep having these tests and not get any firm results. Maybe it does mean that there is nothing to worry about. Here the days (years) pass. I’m surprised how easily and swiftly they do. When I add them up I am astonished how long I’ve been here. I think you are right, it is time I came for a visit before you forget what I look like. I’ve made a plan to come after the New Year. I’m due some leave from work then and I’ll take a month off and come and see the old homeland and my old Mama.
Thank you for Munira’s photo. It was wonderful to speak to her and to you just recently. I enclose a photo of the flat.
Love,
Salim
*
The following New Year’s Eve I went down to Folkestone in Kent to stay with a friend. I met her on a training course and things worked out, and after that she called me when she was coming to London and felt like meeting and a couple of times she stayed with me. Her name was Rhonda. I make the relationship sound casual but Rhonda was a troubled woman and I told myself this New Year’s Eve would be the last time I met her.
The morning of New Year’s Day was mild, with heavy clouds and a thin, almost invisible haze. The ashy light had an unexpected brightness at the back of it, like the silvering in a mirror, and it made me feel sad, as certain kinds of light do for inexplicable reasons. I was sitting on the back porch of Rhonda’s ground-floor flat, overlooking the lawn that sloped towards the surgery next door. There was no fence or hedge to mark a boundary between the two because all the lawn belonged to the surgery. It was Saturday and quiet at this end of the town with its rows of gabled Victorian houses, some of them three storeys high and still occupied by single families. The streets were avenues of huge leafless trees, which I knew in the summer made the pavement as gloomy as a forest floor. From where I sat, I could see the surgery building and I wondered if the house Rhonda lived in would have been the doctor’s house perhaps, and it and the surgery would have been one property.
Every so often I heard a car go past, a faint, wet whispering noise as if the road were some distance away when I knew it went past the front of the house. There were no other sounds even though it was New Year’s Day and a Saturday. Rhonda was still in bed, wearing her eyeshades to indicate that she was not to be forced awake, and her daughter Susannah was sleeping over at a friend’s house. A few days before this Saturday, Rhonda telephoned me in the early hours of the morning. I knew it was her because that was the kind of time she rang. The first time she did it, I thought it was a call from another place, and now every time she rang in the middle of the night I had to suppress a spasm of guilt that I did not call my mother more often.
By the time I was awake enough to reach for the phone, on that early morning some days before New Year’s Eve, I knew it was Rhonda. I did not want to see her but I also did. I said hello and waited for the ritual gap that Rhonda liked to leave in our conversations, then after a few seconds she told me that she could not sleep. She hated it. Was I alone? Did she wake me up? I said yes and left it at that. After another moment, she said that she was going to be on her own on New Year’s Eve as well and she knew she would not be able to bear that. She couldn’t, not on New Year’s Eve. Was I doing anything? Did I want to come and stay for a day or two? I left my own pause then, and in those silent seconds images of Rhonda rushed in on me: her eyes with their luminous grief, her warm nakedness beside me, her anguishes. There was something not quite right about her. Her jaw was slack, her eyes quite small, but she carried herself as if she was a beauty and her self-love made her provocative.
Her call came after weeks of silence. The last time we had been together had been an evening of bitter talk, and long before we stopped and decided to call it a night we had heaped scorn on each other and on whatever it was that brought us together. When she was in this bitter mood she spoke with incomprehensible assurance, in a language that made me think of abstraction in its ruined
temple, of fantasy taking flight. I hesitated for a long moment, wondering if I should allow myself to be drawn into being with this woman who spoke as if words meant something different to her, as if she knew a language with an emphasis all her own. After a while, as the memory of her came surging back into my body, I said, yes, I would come. A moment later the phone went dead and she was gone.
That was how she did things, abrupt, unsettling, inviting outrage, all intended to demonstrate her wacky independence when to me she often seemed on the brink of sadness. Every time I left her, I thought that would be the last time. I smiled at the thought as I sat in the back porch on that mild Saturday morning, waiting for Rhonda to wake up. I smiled a little sad self-pitying smile because I was not sure which of the two of us was more in need.
*
My mother died on New Year’s Eve. I did not find out for four days because I only returned from Folkestone on Monday afternoon. By then my mother had been buried for that number of days and the khitma prayers and readings had been said. There was nothing left to do but grieve. It was Uncle Amir who rang on Monday night to tell me.
‘Salim, is that you? I have bad news,’ he said. Then after a short pause he continued, ‘Your mother has passed away.’
A wail ran unbidden through my body but no sound came out. When I said nothing he continued speaking, his voice solemn and deep.
‘I called your number on Friday morning from Delhi in case you could get back in time for the funeral, or at least for the readings in the days that followed, but there was no answer. I even began to wonder if Munira had given me the right number or if you had moved and changed it. I myself was able to get an Oman Air flight that got me in by late afternoon and so I was able to be here in time for the funeral. I called you every day, two or three times, but there was no reply until today. I even asked someone at the embassy to check that you were still listed as living there.’
Gravel Heart Page 16
