A new Indian place had opened not far from my house, one of those contemporary restaurants where the waitresses were young Polish women studying English during the day. The food was made with fresh ingredients and was dry, not drowning in a pool of grease. The decor was disappointingly modern—no chains of undusted plastic flowers hanging from the ceiling.
The only relief from the eerie, suspended, and scared atmosphere of the city was to be with people you liked. The bad thing had already happened; we were in recovery. However, a week later there was another, failed, attempt at a bombing. Everyone was tense and despairing. We felt threatened and angry but, I guess, not as threatened and angry as the Iraqi people. I saw patients and Rafi, or Miriam and Henry. I watched the TV news continuously. I preferred not to be alone.
I was curious, too, about what Ajita and Wolf were doing at this time, and in this place, central London. I suspected it wouldn’t be long before Wolf told Ajita the truth about her father’s death and everything came out. It didn’t seem there was much I could do about it.
Ajita was late; I didn’t mind. I had become used to writing in cafés, which London was full of now—Henry called London “a city of waitresses.” Lately I had been reading everything about Islam, tearing articles out of the newspapers and keeping them in a file. Like many people, the entire time I had a debate going on in my head.
“You didn’t recognise me,” said Ajita, when at last she turned up, dressed like all the girls in a summer dress and flip-flops with a bag. “This might sound strange to you,” she said. “But I’ve been wearing the burqa and sitting over there, watching you send texts and talking to Josephine so warmly.”
“That was you?”
“There’s a verse in the Koran about it, which goes something like: ‘Tell thy wives and daughters to draw thy cloaks close around them.’”
“And that’s it?”
“It’s enough for the Hairy Men. I’ve been walking about the city in the burqa. The West End, the East End, Islington. To see how people regard me.”
“And?”
“There has been some curiosity and many hostile looks, as though people wonder whether I’m carrying a bomb. A man even said, ‘Your bomb looks big in that.’”
“Ha ha.”
“I am happy to be stopped by the police and searched, arrested even, like at the airport. I want to know what they think of us now. Don’t you get harassed?”
“The last time I went through Heathrow the guy at passport control said his wife had loved my last book.”
She said, “But this is what my father predicted. We would be victims, cattle, rounded up. We were never safe here. Now they have found good reason to hate us, to persecute us. I want to know what my people have to go through—”
“Your people?”
“Yes, the women you can’t see. People stare at you, they grunt and sigh—women mostly. The men don’t notice.”
I said, “Ajita, I liked you partly because of your colour—because it was like mine. But I’ve never thought of you as a Muslim.”
“Miriam and I have been talking about it.”
“You have?”
Henry had been talking about Ajita, and Miriam wanted to know her better. With my encouragement, Miriam had rung her at Mustaq’s and invited her for tea. I didn’t go, but I guessed they’d had plenty to say to each other. Miriam had shooed away the children and neighbours, and the meeting went on late into the evening.
Miriam had attempted to talk about me. She had shown Ajita photographs of Josephine and given her an account of our trip to Pakistan. Being Miriam, she’d also tried to find out what was between Ajita and me, but Ajita had given her nothing.
Miriam had told Ajita what she had told me: that the area where she lived was becoming more racist, with the victims this time being the Muslims. Muslim—or Mussie—was a new insult, along with ham-head and allahAllah-bomb. In our youth it had been Paki, wog, curry-face, but religion had not been part of it.
“I like Miriam’s,” Ajita said. “The noise, the animals, the whole family thing. Why have I never been able to create anything so lively?” She went on: “When we were together, you never talked to me about Miriam. You hardly mentioned her.”
When Miriam and Ajita had talked, Bushy drove her home. Apparently, on the way, Ajita wanted to see the Cross Keys. Bushy, being protective, refused to take her in. She yelled at him, resenting the fact that people wanted to save her from everything. She wasn’t fragile, for God’s sake: hadn’t she already seen the “worst things”! “I want to be included!” she said. “Everyone protected me. Dad tried to keep me at home so I’d be safe, and look what happened to me there!”
Bushy agreed to park outside and fetch Wolf for her. When he came out, the Harridan came out too, wiping her hands on her pinny, saying, apparently, “I would never have employed her!” Out of Wolf’s earshot, of course.
Now Ajita said to me, “You know what I did to Miriam? I tested her. One afternoon I went across London on numerous public transports. You know,” she said with incredulity, “they go so far!”
This diminutive covered woman, drifting through the dangerous city, watching carefully, while not being seen herself.
“I went to her house anonymously. It’s awful wearing the bag on the tube. It is hot in there, and it is difficult to see out. But Miriam came to the door and invited me in—before I revealed myself. She is the only person I can talk to now.” Then she said suddenly, “I know why you didn’t want me.”
“You do?”
She tapped her nose. “I know where your heart is.” Then she put her finger across her lips. “Miriam knows.”
“Miriam doesn’t know everything,” I said. “Ajita, you go across London, you wear the black bag, and what does it prove?”
“We were a secular family, Jamal. Father never went to the mosque or had a beard or moustache. What use would religion be to him? But I feel ignorant, Jamal. My parents deprived me of our family past. We know nothing of Muslim culture, of Western culture—which Father ignored—or indeed of African culture. We were only rich trash, and probably still are.
“You acquired a culture for yourself, Jamal, through reading and study. At least you are connected to the history of psychology and all that.
“So now I am studying. There is an Algerian woman who comes to the house. Azma speaks good English, and she’s teaching me the Koran. She talks of her life, politics, the condition of our people, my brothers and sisters, the oppressed of Afghanistan, of Iraq, of Chechnya. I wouldn’t blow up anyone myself, but this is a war.” She said, “What did you think of the DVD I showed you?”
“I was moved and upset by it.”
“And?”
I said, “What does Wolf think?”
“Wolf? Yes, okay, I see. Did he tell you?”
“No.”
“Mustaq then. He had no right to. Oh well, it was bound to come out. Maybe I should have told you straightaway.” She bit at her nails. “Did you always know?”
“Why would it be a secret?”
“I thought you might feel left out.” She looked at me with some annoyance. “But you’re not even thinking about that, are you?”
“No, I have my own preoccupations.”
“About your wife?”
“I’m not sure she would call herself that now.”
“How come?”
When Ajita and I had finished our meal and were walking together, I told her that Josephine had been working as a secretary in a college department of psychology. It should have been obvious to me that she would be taken up by someone from there, particularly as I had so little time for psychologists. I had wondered if this new relationship might have unsettled Rafi; it was unsettling me. I had already guessed something was going on when I wanted to take Rafi to the pictures and discovered he’d already seen the film.
“You have?” I said. “But it’s one of your favourites, a black gangster picture featuring hair-trigger niggaz and hos. Your mother would nev
er watch that.”
“I saw it with Eliot.”
“Who?”
“Mum’s friend.” His eyes narrowed. “Mum said she never minded you going to bed with your clothes on, so you could get up and go out straightaway, but she didn’t like you wearing trainers in bed. She said you always had a musty smell.”
“She’s a fussy woman.”
A little later I began to understand even more: I had to meet him.
Normally Rafi would come to my house on his bike, but as he couldn’t carry his weekend bag too, I had to go fetch it. It wasn’t only that he considered his parents to be his servants but that at times he still wanted to be a baby, which he was, with adult gangster elements overlaid: one moment he’d be in tears, and the next he’d be pumping his arse up and down on my head, wanting to “burst” it because I was “a bastard.”
To her credit, Josephine had warned me that her “new man” would be at the house. Now Rafi opened the front door, saying nothing for once, but his eyes darted about nervously. His mother must have told him to keep quiet. This wasn’t a meeting I welcomed, but I supposed that the reality of this guy—whatever it was—would keep my paranoia down.
I followed Rafi downstairs, whispering, “Many are the trials of being an adult, my son.”
“But it’s all your fault, Dad.”
Eliot was sitting at the table Josephine and I had bought on the Shepherd’s Bush Road, before all the shops became estate agents and mobile-phone dealers. He was drinking from my Ryan Giggs mug and correcting my son’s homework with a pencil.
Inevitably I had imagined a tall, charismatic god, but Eliot had longish greying hair, an open-necked shirt, an old worn jacket, academic wear. He was boss-eyed too, looking in at least two directions at once, which must have amused Rafi, as well as being useful at parties.
He was a fuzzy, badly photocopied version of me, more or less the same age, width and height, except with more of a concerned “hospital” look, though maybe I had that at times. A phrase occurred to me: “sullen charm.” It took me a while to recognise its origin. Years ago I’d been so described by an interviewer, who might as well have added “sulky,” “opinionated” and “self-absorbed.”
I thought: The place of the dead is soon taken by identical others—as at some of the movie award ceremonies I’d had the misfortune to attend with Henry, where if you left your seat, bow-tied students would steal into your place so as not to reveal an absence to the cameras. Eliot had stolen from me all I didn’t want, and it felt like theft.
I was looking at Eliot and looking at her, wondering what there was between them. Maybe she had found what she wanted: a psychologist and, through him, twenty-four-hour care, like marrying a doctor.
I didn’t want to hang around. I declined tea, extracted a shot of vodka I’d left in the fridge a few days earlier, asked about the university department where he worked and shook his hand.
Leaving, I turned to see him wiping sweat from his upper lip with the back of his hand. My shadow would always darken his life; I would be his ghost. Wouldn’t she always love me? My son’s face could only remind him of me. What, he could only wonder, was he getting into?
“What do you think?” Rafi asked, as he accompanied me to the front gate.
“He’s brave, but I don’t envy him,” I said. “Being in your own family is hard enough. Joining someone else’s is scary work.”
“Is he a different kind of psycho-thing to you?”
“He’s only a psychologist. One of those people who says it’s all biology, or all in the brain. I bet he talks about animals without realising you can find an animal to justify any intellectual position. What do you want? Snakes? Donkeys? Insects? Except that there is no animal capable of being grief-stricken, for years, like man.”
“They know nothing,” said Rafi supportively, adding for good measure, “Fuckers. Don’t worry about him, Dad. You should hear him talk. I’m snoring. He says all your stuff—it’s only specu—…Specu—”
“Speculation?”
“Yes. Speculation,” he said in a Jamaican accent. “An’ it’s all been dissed.”
“Yes?”
“Discredited. Years ago.”
I said, “Probably the only true psychologists these days are advertisers.”
“I have to tell you, Dad, we’re going on holiday together. To Malaysia.”
“You are?”
“Him, me, Mum and his two daughters. I’ve got two new older sisters—even if we’re not related and they’re teenagers!”
“He’s got money, has he?”
“You’ll be paying quite a bit towards it, Mum says. Does that hurt you?”
“It’s beginning to.”
“I’ll tell Mum I don’t want to go.”
“I’ll be here when you get back, exactly the same. I have Miriam and Henry and other friends.”
“Mum says, when we go away, will you feed the cat? I hate it when you’re sad,” he said, resting his head against my shoulder and nuzzling into me, as he did as a child. “But Eliot does have an Arsenal season ticket.”
“This fucking boyfriend too? Is that what she advertises for?”
“It’s very bad luck, Dad. T, those Gooners are everywhere.”
After I had told Ajita this, she said, “I’m glad you’ve spoken to me. We thought we liked each other, but were really only interested in other people. Do you want to carry on seeing me?”
I said yes, but like her, really wasn’t sure about it.
I had no idea how soon it would be necessary for us urgently to talk.
CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR
It was when Rafi, Josephine and Eliot went on holiday that I rang Karen. I emailed her occasionally, but it had been a while since I’d heard from her. It turned out she was alone too. Her daughters had gone to stay with their father and Ruby, along with the twins Ruby had just given birth to.
We were in Sheekey’s. She looked tired, and she was wearing a wrap on her head.
“You’re not drinking,” I said.
“Order whatever you want,” she said. “I’m paying and I don’t care.”
“Antibiotics?” I said.
“You know,” she said, “I was invited on a date. It must have been around the last time I saw you—”
“You were going to meet that guy.”
“Yes.”
“I went to meet him. Just before, getting ready, I was in the shower, luxuriating with my favourite French bath gel, Stendhal it’s called. As my hand moved across my breast, I felt something that didn’t move like the rest. I tried to find it again, but couldn’t.
“We had supper at the Wolsey. He’s talking, I’m talking. But all the time there’s this other text running through my head: Breasts change all the time. They’re more fluid than people think. They get bigger, smaller, rounder by the hour depending on men’s hands, babies, menstruation. But no one will ever touch me again.
“I have my checkups once a year. I worship my doctor. He’s South African, he likes women, our bodies, our breasts.
“At the end of the dinner, the date and I take separate cabs, he’s going somewhere else for drinks, he invites me but I’m too spaced to go. The last thing he wants to hear about is my lump. That’s going to make him hard and wanting me, right?
“The next day my hand seems to hit it, sort of smack into it.
“I froze. It was the end of me being what I still hadn’t become—desirable. Like Hepburn or Binoche. Just give me a chance, I’d think to myself, a moment, a week, a year, and I’ll get there. In fact, I’m more mature, smarter in every way. Less afraid of everything.”
“Why wouldn’t it be a cyst?”
“Exactly. Why not? Mammograms are full of them and they mean nothing. The mammogrammists send you off for further tests—sonograms, nonograms. Then more doctors mash you with cold plates or warm, humming probes and peer into scopes and monitors—and it’s nothing.
“Fool I might be, but I did the responsible thing and made a
n appointment with the doctor-hero. When he asked if I’d come for any reason, I said no, just a regular checkup. My man likes to see ‘his women’ every six months, but I managed to make it once a year. I didn’t want to determine his observations, give him an agenda. If he found something during the usual routine, well, okay. If not, what is there to talk about?
“He did the right breast, then the left. Slender, cool fingers. His touch is elegant, not arousing. You feel like a piano being stroked by a genius. Do they study it?
“Both hands on my left breast. Suddenly I couldn’t hear and I couldn’t breathe. But it was important to act natural. If he wanted to get me into the cancer thing, then he’d have to do his own damn work.
“His hands were off my chest, and he was pulling up the white disposable paper gown and saying, ‘Fine below and above, one of the lovelier uteruses, see you next time.’ I was free. I’d got through. ‘You mean,’ I said, ‘you didn’t find anything?’
“I shouldn’t have said that. He’s stopped washing his hands, and turning round to look at me again. He says, ‘Why don’t we just check again, to be sure? You think you’ve found something, don’t you? Which one, right or left?’
“When he says ‘left’ I blush and I feel my eyes widen to the size of the screen at the Sony Imax theatre. His hands are immediately on the left. He’s watching me, my eyes. ‘Am I getting close? Going to give me a hint?’
“I don’t say a thing. You went to medical school, you’re on your own, pal.
“He finds it. ‘Aah.’ His fingers, both hands, passing and passing again over the thing, moving it, isolating it, angling it.
“He’s not looking at me now. He’s not my breezy, older, attractive, cool, flirty doctor anymore. He’s a lookout for the cancer team, and he’s going to put me into the system, the system that finishes women. Once you’re in, you’re out. You’re not a woman who counts in the world.
“How could I endure it—the obliteration, the ugliness, the havoc, of having no breasts or hair? I saw different doctors and they all had their disclaimers. It could be a cyst, a blocked duct or a tumour which wasn’t cancerous. I believed every one. I can’t even keep a husband. Who would look after me? I couldn’t work. Who would look after the kids?
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