In Our Mad and Furious City

by Guy Gunaratne

  Just town. I’m sorry I’m late Ma.

  Get something down you. It’ll be cold now.

  Don sat and went to finish his plate of leeks. He looked up at me.

  Damian hasn’t come home yet either, he said. His expression was odd. Ma hadn’t turned at all from the kettle.

  Something was off. I took my usual seat next to Brian. He was swinging his short legs under the table, his mouth covered in ketchup.

  What’s going on with everyone? I asked it of Don but he just went on eating. I turned to Liam.

  Liam, what’s wrong?

  Liam looked up at Ma and I saw that his eyes were glassy.

  He looked then in the direction of Brian and then at me.

  It’s Cousin Eileen, he said, she’s in hospital.

  I didn’t really react at first. Eily was a slow girl, touched they said. Two years younger than me. I’d been fond of her growing up from what I remembered. She’d often have bruises on her arms from where she smacked the walls. She smacked me once or twice, and her own head even, I seen her do it.

  I looked over again at Ma stood at the kettle. I wished to say to her that she could stop pretending to make tea but then her hands came down to her waist.

  When was this? I asked. Why didn’t any of you’se tell me? I don’t know if it was the day I’d had or if it was my age but I could be a right hallion when I wanted.

  Will somebody tell me? Is she hurt? What?

  Ma turned to me then and I remember her cheeks were bleached white and she had a terrible coldness toward me. I couldn’t see her eyes, they were hidden behind her heavy glasses. I watched as she carefully took a chair, hands out like a blind woman, and then knitted her fingers as she sat, as if she were going to hold communion.

  We shan’t discuss this at dinner girl, she said.

  But I kept on, pushing my plate away like a child, insisting that she tell me. As if it were some playground secret that was being kept from me.

  Dinner’s over! I shouted suddenly.

  I shouted it with my heart in my throat. Ma stayed calm and looked to my brothers.

  Boys would you leave us for a moment? Don, have you finished?

  Aye Ma.

  Don stood up to leave and sent Brian a glare.

  Brian, come on now we’re heading out. Liam tapped him on the shoulder and Brian obediently stood to follow his brother out. Which was strange since Brian was anything but obedient back then.

  Leave the plates, I’ll do them, said Ma.

  My brothers left the kitchen and closed the door. I sat waiting as Ma kept an ear listening as they collected their coats. The heavy jingle of their keys and then the door shuddered closed. The sound shook the kitchenware around us.

  I stared at Ma. Sure I was never satisfied with being a daughter, that’s what it was. When Da passed he had left Ma to raise the five of us with only our aunts and uncles to help on weekdays. As it was, I was not too comfortable being alone with her. It was never a normal thing, being alone with Ma. There was Brian or Bella our dog to attend to or some such chore to get on with. On those occasions when I did have to talk to her I became so aware of myself, my dress, my hair. I remember thinking that maybe it was because it was a boy that’d made me late was why I was acting like such a child.

  Give me a moment, Ma said.

  She seemed gaunt somehow. It made me think of her age. I always thought she was old to be mother to me, and especially to Brian. I noticed her eyes darting along the tablecloth, some current running through her.

  Ma?

  Aye Caroline. I know, she said, look.

  She began to speak but then stopped short. When she was thinking of how to say a thing she’d often lift a finger to her lips and make a sort of semicircle out the corner of her mouth. She went on and told me that Auntie Celie had phoned. Now Caroline, you know about thon Eily. She is all but your age but she’s wanting, she’s slow.

  Ma always said that Aunt Celie used to blame herself for Eily being touched in the head. She said it was the smoking while pregnant that did it. Aunt Celie didn’t know how to take care of her own self let alone a slow child. Ma then said she’d received a phone call from a nurse she once worked with at Our Lady back when. There was this girl from Hannahstown that’d been admitted with cuts and bruises all over her body. They didn’t know who she was, the girl, and she’d just been dumped in front of the hospital.

  Ma told me all this while looking down into her palms, but she went on.

  It was Damian and I who went down there to Our Lady. What with everything going on, we thought it might be one of those McCaffery girls. Well anyway, the girl was Eily. You should have seen her. She’d been battered in. Her face was like pulp and her arms black and blue.

  I sat staring, not sure what to say. I hadn’t yet known what it was to be shocked and scared at the same time. All I could think of were the times I’d seen Eily, been with her, and how I was always so wary of her big empty eyes and simpleness.

  But who would do such a thing? I said.

  In that moment Ma looked right at me and told me so.

  They called me in after I saw her like that. She’d been raped by many men. So they said. They found semen inside her. She’d been bleeding. There were marks on her wrist and neck where she’d been pinned down. Her throat was swollen.

  I felt my stomach twist. I thought only of little Eily and her emptiness.

  I’d never heard Ma speak about such things before. I heard her voice change, as if she’d remembered something about herself that she’d forgotten. She looked off ways and kept speaking to me as if I were her past.

  It was a boy from the barracks near Finaghy. It was he that done it and led the others. His da was loyalist. That young Tom came here the day before last and says to me, he says, thon bastard enlisted just two weeks ago. Damian had seen him up Sandy Row, wearing a parka and with his SDA pals during the Twelfth. We know it was him.

  Ma leaned back in her chair, raised her finger to her ears, and pinched the place where her voices were kept. I used to think it was Da speaking to her when she did that. I’d catch her now and again whispering his name in the hallway, looking at old photographs.

  She looked toward me then in a way that made my breath snag. Those aul eyes ablaze with a deep sort of rage. She wanted to pin something onto me so she did, something I wouldn’t soon forget.

  Soldiers did this, she said.

  She said it just like that.

  My hands shake as I remember her say it so steady.

  * * *

  I collect the dry, fresh-scented clothes and gather the basket under my arm. I turn and head out the door into the road toward the Estate. I sniff my fingers. Try to wipe away the smell of cigarettes on my sleeve. Familiar faces are gone to me now. Even after all these years in London I’ve kept my head low. But some things feel as close to me as my own heart, don’t they? Oh leave the world to get on with, the past to the past. I’ll go home now and fold my clothes into the drawer. Perhaps I’ll put my feet up. And I’ll fix something to drink.

  Aye, that’ll be nice.

  YUSUF

  It was considered a proper honor for us to carry our father’s Qur’an into the hall. The text was heavy and bound with cloth and every page tapered and beautiful. There was a time when I used to be captivated by mosque and by my abba’s devotion to it. Both Irfan and I were taught tilawat. Abba used to have us recite onstage. My brother used to complain, having never made an effort with his Arabic. Neither did I to be fair, but Abba said it wouldn’t matter.

  Boys, every person performs tilawat differently. You need not understand the words to feel them. You Irfan will perform it differently than Yusuf, understand? You do not sing, or chant. You just recite with love from within, simple.

  Irfan and I had developed a juvenile competitiveness at this, seeing who could recite Qur’an best. I knew I felt it more, delivered my tilawat with more emotion than my brother. The decoration of the carpets, the flowing verses, found me in a w
ay that Irfan couldn’t figure. This appreciation, in my mind at least, made me the worthier servant.

  We were the imam’s sons though, ennet, so back then Irfan and I were set in orbit around mosque. We belonged to it, its walls and people, every bit as much as Estate. My father used to deliver sermons and guide prayer at local gatherings. He was respected inside those halls and the impression this made on us as boys was great. I felt it deeply, a sort of silent pride a son has for a serious father. When 9/11 happened I was bare young. But I saw how the years that came after it affected Abba, in ways he never got to reconcile. He became muted. Disturbed by a brand of worship that became less about history and art, the Islam he loved, and more about the hate curdled up in the present. I remember once when he made a sermon he was heckled down by another in the crowd. His face afterward was angry and sad that his sons had to hear it. Mosque too became cold and unforgiving after that. The place had changed hands, ennet. I began to notice raised voices between my father and those other men in kameez who would shuffle in and out East Block for prayer and tea. Those meetings became less frequent after a while, until they stopped altogether.

  After Abba died the mosque took over the responsibility for my family. Irfan and I were presented to the Umma to raise. My mother too, depressed and absent mostly. She wasn’t up to it. I remember Abba used to handle all the bills at home, paperwork, passports, and that. Amma was kept away from it all. She hadn’t even taken the Tube on her own until after he died. So now everything came under the claim of those frowning uncles at mosque. We were theirs lock, stock.

  As for my brother? The change I saw in him worried me most. When we were boys I’d idolized him more than I did my father. Irfan, being only one and a half years older than me, had always been a ready source to listen and learn from. I imitated him, nagged him, and aped his language. He was bookish like Abba, but practical with his hands. I spent my days floating along behind him and we were both, until a time, enamored of each other. Up until the age of five we lived in our own collective spaces, separate and contained against our parents’ lot. Cousins of the same age would come by, but their scene was dull compared to our inner adventures. Irfan and I used to act out battles under the dining table, hidden from the eyes of uncles and aunts who would pack our flat with their smells and foreign voices, fat bellies, and heavy woolly jackets. Under their noses we played out childhood myths, we scrapped as Thundercats and Turtles, acted wily tales from Anansi and Nasreddin. Later we were twin Indiana Joneses and Marty McFlys, scheming within our childhood bedrooms where the outer world never mattered. We’d turn household objects into magic, carpets into lava, duvets into sea monsters, tinker with toilet rolls and cereal boxes making them into supercars and skyscrapers. We were epic children. I remember once my father’s desk lamp became a searchlight and his heavy wooden desk became Alcatraz. I’d be on the run while my brother would never fail to search for and find me.

  Abba would be shuttered away the whole time, a scholar surrounded by his work. My mother was a softer presence, but always in the background somehow, her slippered feet pattering across our tiled kitchen readying my father’s dhal or raita. Every so often we’d be taken along to get-togethers held at one of my uncles’ houses. These were evenings that would only be enjoyed by the grown-ups. The children would scurry about in the corridors and stairs or the landings. Not much thought was given to our entertainment, and so Irfan and I, perhaps because our lives together were so rich in imagination, turned inward and became silent wallflowers among other kids. We would refuse to play, our hands stuck behind our backs, dressed in whatever Amma had forced us to wear. We’d watch as the other kids would enjoy board games or card games, ghost stories or jokes. We would remain co-conspirators throughout, unwilling to reach out or let others in.

  I try to remember when it was that we strayed so far apart, but I could just as easily say that we were still close, in a space lost and muddled up. We still belonged to one another, but we lived our separate lives, he bound up by his screens and me with my breddas on road. And now after Abba’s death, my brother’s unraveling, the city’s anger, it all felt like it was simply part of the same slow collapse.

  I was standing next to Ardan with my hands in my pockets doomed and done up. My feet didn’t want to budge, dense with acid swilling around my legs after the match. My heart was beating heavily, pumping debt as every step of theirs drew nearer.

  The crowd were moving away as I watched my two cousins Riaf and Kassim approach. It was Riaf who spoke first.

  What you doing down here Yusuf?

  He stared at me like a djinn, his tight skull cap emphasizing the hostility of his face. He was tall, angular, and walked with a vicious bop. He wore his kameez like a uniform. Kassim, dressed identically, stood grazing behind him.

  Riaf had been part of the cabal of little cousins my brother and I refused to play with as children. He had not been born in London but in Lahore. Uncle Hussain had brought him and his brother Muhammed over to the Ends when young. Riaf I remember as being too sharp for me, he’d snap back my fingers when no one was looking, pinch my arm. We all had to be wary of the fucker if he walked past us alone. Once, I remember my brother and I walked in on him going through our parents’ closet. He was looking for my mother’s underwear while our parents were downstairs. All Irfan and I could do, since we were much younger, was look on confused. His brother Mo had been more soft-spoken, proper disapproving of Riaf, who acted out regularly. This was the bredda though, grown up now and spiked with the same severity, he’d be out with the local Muhaji patrol with Kassim and the like. Roaming around August Road holding up East Block stairways on decency patrols. It always seemed stupid to me. I had seen these Muhaji lot spit in the direction of girls coming home from clubs and calling them slags from across the Square. They’d even rough up Muslim youngers who weren’t dressed in kameez around mosque. Fucking hypocrites. These were the same boys I’d seen bunn in park and jack other youngers for their money. They were Muhajiroun though, ennet, so nobody would touch them or say anything to offend. They were supposed to be defending mosque from the threat from around Tobin Road, the skinheads, the thugs. Standard, since the area had a history with it. But now East Block on Estate, Market Road, and Chapter Street were Riaf’s territory. This was where our community lived, where cornershops were kept. A Muhaji road colony, and theirs to do with as they pleased. Those of us who saw them on road knew them for what they really were. A grown pack of bullies wearing skull caps and holding Qur’an.

  Don’t you know it’s dangerous for you to be here Yusuf? Why you fucking around for? Playing footie when the Ends is popping off. Come here!

  The crowd around the Square began to look our way. I jumped forward toward Riaf and Kassim, wanting to hurry, wanting to move them away as quickly as I could. But then a second sense of dread overcame me as I heard Ardan’s voice, thin and uncertain.

  You all right Yoos, yeah?

  Ardan, the sort of neek to have his head rushed daily at school, who should have known better than to be heard in moments like this, called out to me. I turned in disbelief. In spite of everything we knew from growing up in Stones Estate and its rules about what to say and when, he spoke up. I willed Riaf not to turn. He did turn though and his eyes met with Ardan’s.

  Why the fuck are you speaking blood? Riaf said.

  Was anyone talking to you blood? Now Kassim weighed in, relishing this act of stupid assertion. Kassim moved toward him, his black beard moored to his neck.

  Leave him man, I called out weakly. Ardan was braced to receive blows. His arms were twitching to come up to his stomach in defense of a punch he knew was coming. Riaf was standing beside me goading with a side eye.

  You the one that tex my cousin to come down here? You tex him? he said.

  Ardan said nothing. His eyes locked on Kassim and his balled knuckles. There were faces all around us now, some shouting, others silently watching. Kassim leaned in until his face was inches from Ardan’s. I couldn�
�t see from behind the bulk of Kassim’s shoulder but I had seen Ardan in enough situations like this at school, I had rescued him from a few. He would be terrified and would just accept it. I clenched my teeth waiting for the first blow. Suddenly Kassim jerked his body toward Ardan, feinting a smack. Ardan shook, buckled on his feet, and fell to the ground. Kassim’s jerk was enough to send him to the hard concrete. There was laughter around us. Ardan made no move to get up.

  See this dickhead? Never even touched him! Kassim gave out a laugh like a hyena. You weak little pussyo, he said.

  I watched on helpless. Ardan on the floor, his head down and face burning.

  Give me your phone, prick, Kassim growled; he’d spent the last of his laughter. Ardan immediately reached for his pocket. His humiliation was too much to bear and I reached out to tug at Riaf to stop all this, to rein in Kassim, get away from Square and go to mosque.

  Another voice then came from behind us both.

  Oy, what’s goin’ on?

  I spun and saw Selvon walking wide strides, his face fixed on our boy on the ground. He had not seen the feinted punch.

  You all right, Ardan? Selvon looked from Ardan to me. Now Kassim stepped to Selvon.

  Anyone talking to you bruv? Kassim spat the words at him. Selvon ignored him, his attention on Ardan once more.

  You deaf blood? Kassim was louder now, baring his teeth and black eyes. Selvon kissed his teeth and moved closer to Ardan.

  Ardan? Selvon said again. You good mate?

  I watched Ardan look up at him and nod yes. Selvon extended an arm to help him to his feet. Kassim then moved and smacked the arm away.

  I said are you deaf blood? he went.

  Selvon was silent. It seemed to me that he knew what the situation was and could become if he opened his mouth. He also knew that, as big as he was, he could hold his own against Kassim. But Selvon was not going to cower to the Muhajiroun the way the rest of us did. Myman stood unmoved, set to his own measurements.

  Then Riaf turned.

  Come Kassim, bunn this. Riaf spat on the floor. Kassim, his eyes still on Selvon, backed away like a mad dog, restrained by his master.