In Our Mad and Furious City

by Guy Gunaratne

  Slowly we drifted. Rooms we were in together were no longer filled with the whoosh-whispers of our fantasies but with silence, save for the tapping of a keyboard and the scraping of a desktop mouse. My brother spent his time on forums instead, with avatars and faceless strangers. A world fit for secrets, ennet, made of pseudonyms and simulations, a closed world made for him and other men like him.

  It was that same summer that Abba seemed to change too. I’d hear him shouting at Amma about some minor thing and I’d hear her crying afterward from behind the bathroom door. Abba took it out on her, but wouldn’t tell us what was happening at mosque. Every Thursday and Sunday, the drive to prayer took on a sense of dread. It was as if my father had to absolve something to allow himself to drive through the mosque gate. I was always sat in the back seat with Irfan. He would be on his Game Boy until Abba told him to leave it behind before entering. I realize now that Irfan must have felt this shift in Abba as much as I did.

  I remember those things most vividly. Watching the small changes in both of them, this slow coming loose. It was as if Irfan resented having to deal with the real world, my mother, father, and me, flesh and blood not hidden behind a computer screen. And Abba, who had always devoted the best part of his time to God and to heaven, how could his sons have hoped to claim his attention from either?

  Riaf’s car turned into a side road and came to a stop at the mosque’s green security gate. Riaf wound his window down to press the buzzer. I watched the same invisible strings pull the gate open at the hinges, a sight I would have seen on so many occasions as a child. I felt as if I were now in a darker version of those memories. These changes, these estrangements, cast a shadow that seeped into everything. Fissures had opened between everyone, everything I loved, Abba and mosque, my brother and me, my mother too locked into a silent fury of her own. I was the only one that seemed untouched. But then, walking into mosque that day I felt the murmur in me.

  We parked and got out. We walked toward the side entrance, the trees straining through a gust of wind, whispering as we went in. Both of us followed Riaf and joined a line of younger Muslims making their way into the main hall. Riaf handed me a white skull cap and I placed it over my head.

  Imam said you can take your shoes off in the library. Imam Abu Farouk, I thought. My father’s successor.

  Go see him after you’ve done dhikr. Riaf’s voice was hushed now under the arches of mosque. Kassim’s too. Like everyone, they became a different version of themselves at mosque.

  I’ll drive you back after, yeah? Riaf then turned to Irfan, who stood staring, lost in the patterned roof, the Arabic glyphs and painted tiles, as if he had never noticed them before.

  Yeah brother?

  Irfan nodded yes.

  Men were in the great hall in prayer. Prostrate under the great dome. I took hold of Irfan and went past the others. They were all slipping their shoes off in the hallway. The smell of incense shielding the odor of steaming feet. This was not usual, to be invited to take our shoes off in the library. That was where mosque organizers and officials kept their shoes. It all pointed to some bigger purpose. I glanced down the corridor to where Abu Farouk would be in the office where my father used to sit, waiting. I submitted. What choice did I have other than to do as I was told and perform my dhikr?

  We made our way barefoot through the opened double doors into the washroom. Each time I came through here as a child I wondered at the shape of the vaulted dome above the disciples. It was bright white with slabs of buttresses apparently forced through the roof and into the walls on each side. We both stood at the doors near the great hall as if at a cliff overlooking a sea of people prostrate, rising, standing, falling, an ebb and flow. People here a single tide pulled toward the dome and heaven above and then back to earth. My brother stepped forward all of a sudden, compelled to wash his hands and feet, elbows, arms, and nape, to join the wave and the chorus echoes of Allah, Allah.

  part two

  BROTHER

  FANATIC

  CAROLINE

  There’s a photograph hung in Ma’s landing. They must have taken it six year or so before I left. It was before Da died. A photograph of Brian’s baptism. In the photo Ma’s hair is brown and around her shoulders. Her face is so young, neat, and stern even back then. Da is there too with his hand on Brian’s tiny head. We all looked so serious. There’s me standing in a cream dress cuddling Brian, who’s in his little silk frock and asleep. Ma’s behind us, hands together, so proper like. Her chin is to one side as if a draft has come in.

  Aye, that was Agnes Black, sensitive to the air in the room and which way it blew. I’d knit together stories of Ma after overhearing conversations between my uncles and aunts. I’d always thought of her as being right glam. She was thin when she was younger and long-limbed with her hair falling over her forehead. That’s the picture I have anyway. She’d pose this way in every photograph I’d ever seen of her, always with her chin just so. One of my earliest memories is of Da putting on a gramophone record, it was of Ma singing. She’d been a vocalist of sorts. The recording was of one of the nights at the Albernay Hall. Da said it’d been recorded for a wake of a fallen soldier, a brother-in-arms, as my da used to say. Young Aggie had sung for his safe passage.

  I heard it for the first time during a card game. Da used to play cards with a few family and a drop of whiskey to the side. They’d fill our downstairs with cigar smoke, I remember. I’d watch as Ma brought in that black disc like a pool of tar and set it on that old boxy gramophone. Then everybody would hush and I watched my father as he’d pinch the arm and set the needle. I remember it began tracing a crackle in the air. Till then I’d only ever heard Ma sing while hanging washing on the line or when she’d hum to calm us down as children. The voice that came out of that brass jaw sounded nothing like her. First came the sound of a hundred voices and then a single tiny voice lifted above them all. It was as if the past had wandered into the present. At first you couldn’t hear the voice so well but then it rose deep and dark and bounded around the air like nothing I’d ever heard. God, it was like a hammer. A right thunderous sound that I could scarce believe came out of my own mother. I remember looking up at her. Wondering how this could be. It was so weird like. My own ma singing for the dead souls of soldiers. And the faces of everybody else, silent and rapt in a sway, listening on as if it were a novena. Ma herself would stand listening with her eyes closed and her head moving with the sound of her own voice tearing the walls open. A song for a fallen soldier.

  I suppose that’s how I came to know my da was IRA. In the same way a child learns to be scared from hearing fairy tales for the first time. It’s the sort of knowledge that burrows into youse without anyone having to tell or confirm it. Family history sort of seeps in under the skin that way. It meant that my brothers were IRA too. And so was Ma. It wasn’t just the dead ones, mind you, that she sang for. Ma used to sing for the souls of living soldiers as well, to rouse their spirits before they went off to wherever. There’d even be times when I thought I’d met the ones that she sang for. Because whenever they’d see me they’d come over and tell me, Oh your ma’s a saint like, your ma, she saved my life. She was the one they’d all come to speak to after Da was killed. They’d come by our door like a caravan of pilgrims just to see her. As if she were a bleeding Madonna.

  After they buried Da my ma had sent me to Coleraine, to keep me out of trouble. I’d thought by the time I came back that all that stuff would keep to the past. I wouldn’t have known either way like. But then I’d think, what would it matter how far they’d send me? What good would distance do if something like that is in my blood? I suppose I was IRA too, wasn’t I? Because of whose daughter I was and sister, more than anything.

  * * *

  That night I couldn’t sleep but think of Cousin Eily. I kept seeing memories from when we were children and then imagining her in hospital with her skin torn and face blue. When it came time to wake I pulled out the bedsheet and found my skirt flatt
ened under my thighs. It was warm and speckled with grass and dirt from the riverbank from the day before. I hadn’t bothered to change. The house was still and the sun was shining through the open window. It’d been raining during the night. Odd how I remember that morning as being beautiful.

  I walked out of my room barefoot, along the hallway, down the stairs to the kitchen and the smell of breakfast. I lingered by the kitchen door listening to the voices behind it, opened the door a crack so I could hear. But then Brian, who I hadn’t seen follow me down, called from behind me shrill and girlish.

  Caroline!

  I saw his dumb little loaf shuffle down the stairs rubbing the sleep out from his eyes. Ma’s voice came next.

  Caroline? You out there girl?

  I opened the door and said good morning to them. They all looked right tired. Don sat with his bearded chin in his hand, baggy-eyed and shirt open. Liam’s hair was a mess too and he sat scratching the back of his neck as I went to sit next to him. And there’s Damian with his fork over his eggs looking straight at me. He must’ve returned in the night. There was always comings and goings in the night. I must’ve slept through it. Ma stood leaning against the counter.

  Did youse sleep in your clothes again? asked Damian. I said nothing back. His eyes were red bloodshot and his hands were gigantic like next to the wee cup of tea he was holding. They were all staring at me now. I looked at Brian, who was about to pour milk over his cereal. Ma snatched the milk from his hand.

  Brian you’re to wash your face before you sit down to breakfast.

  Poor Brian looked baffled.

  Since when? he said half asleep.

  I said go on, now!

  Go on with you Brian, do as Ma says. Damian set his hand on his shoulder the way Da used to do with me. Brian’s legs became lead, stomping up the stairs in a hump.

  Don got up and closed the door.

  I felt my ears get hot and I sat staring back, fiddling with a knot in my skirt.

  What’s this about then? I said it to Ma but she just looked down at the table. Damian, as if he’d been chosen to do it, sat back down and leaned in on me.

  Carol listen, we need to have a wee chat, he said.

  It’d be anything but, I knew. They were all staring so hard at me, as if I’d done something wrong. No one else would say a word.

  You’re to go to London, Carol. We’ve decided it’ll be for the best.

  I felt the blood run to my chest.

  What? What do you mean?

  Damian didn’t reply. I searched their faces for an answer.

  You can finish your schooling there, said Liam, you’ll have a time. Plenty of other girls have gone.

  Liam’s voice wavered a little as he said it. Sure I knew other girls had gone. Cousin Romy, Nora, and my auntie Else. Fucken all scholars who went to university. What would I be doing there? I shook my head, staring at each one in turn, crushed with confusion.

  I don’t understand, what have I done? I was tearing up now, looking down at my hands. I hadn’t a clue. Why not send me back to Coleraine, if they wanted rid of me? What was I supposed to be doing in London? Away from my home, my family. But they kept silent. They expected me to just accept it and be done with it.

  Damian reached over a hand.

  You’ve done nothing at all. But it’s for the best.

  I stared at his muddied knuckles. A fierce anger burned in me at the sight of his hands. Something in me was rising as I sat there, staring at their faces. It was the finality in my brother’s voice that got the stirring in me. I thought of Eily. The image of her face burned hard and gave me courage, more so an easy anger, at the Prot boys that had done it, at the world. I felt a sudden urge to resist all of it.

  Youse all making plans for me, now? Deciding what’s best for me? Well I’m not going anywhere and that’s that, especially if you can’t even be bothered to tell me why.

  Listen to me girl, Damian cut in abruptly, though his voice stayed low and measured.

  I closed my mouth, my wee spit of courage snuffed for the moment. His eyes were glaring and round.

  You’ll go, he said, that’s all there is to it.

  You can fuck off.

  Caroline!

  I hadn’t known I’d said it aloud until I did. It was among the handful of times I’d sworn in front of Ma. I daren’t even look at her. My mind was going a hundred mile, searching for a place to root my feet under the table. I sensed Ma look over to me now but I wanted to keep on talking.

  Is it Eily? I know it, youse all so scared something like that’ll happen to me? You needn’t, nothing like that will happen to me with youse all around me.

  Then I did look at Ma, who was glaring back.

  It isn’t what’s happened to that Eily, Carol, she said, it’s what’s going to happen because of her. You’re not to be here when it does, do you hear?

  I’m not a child Ma!

  I shouted at her. Screamed loud, so I did. I stood up, my dress crumpled with ground-in dirt and streaks of riverbank mud. I might’ve been naked for all I cared. But I saw that Ma was wavering. Sat there having never seen such defiance in her daughter, as if I were a newly conscious thing before her now. I had to hold her there, I thought. I couldn’t let her speak, not yet. It was as if all the outrage I felt from those images, coarse stuff that I’d conjured up in my mind, tousled grass and dirt-ridden cloth, grasping flesh and cruel eyes, Eily, it was she that was in possession of my tongue now, and my lungs. I wanted to have a hand in it. And, for the first time, I was speaking and they were listening. As they listened I knew I was earning my own place at that table. All because I was letting them have it.

  I’m staying. I am. And what’s more I’ll stay for her. For Eily. And you know what else Ma? Whatever it is that youse all are planning to do to get those Prot bastards, I want to be there to see it. Hear me?

  I can see their faces even now. Their arms folded. Looking at me, then one another hearing me loud and so clear.

  Show me, I said to them. And then said not another word until Damian stood and rested his hand on Ma’s shoulder.

  NELSON

  They say he will stand again.

  Stand for repatriation, send we darkies back home, they say.

  So let him come. Let him try send we back, let him come! They was rile over a newspaper cutting. The fellars them.

  All Association pins and caps worn now. They and I, uniformed and charged, standing with a fist in we mouths and reading. It was that rat Oswald Mosley that have we hot. The papers had reams on the old fascist, that beetle-eyed duke, hair oiled back like a crow, see the photograph. Mosley rearing him bastard head back from under a rock we read. Standing for election again. England’s disgraced politician. For at least he was, one time back. After he had a howl against the Jews before the war. Now he was returning as a white savior, a bloody saint. Come back to turn him hate on the blacks for a profit. And the papers rumor he plan to stand for Kensington North. Under we very nose. As if there was not enough to feel offense by. Mosley Speaks! was the new slogan that replace all others around the Grove. Speak for whom? Speak for them. See now, the white mob have a gentleman to speak for them. That evening all the chatter in Chapman’s was about what Mosley’s return would herald for we.

  Mosley calling himself a union leader now? said Jimbroad as he read.

  Nothing but a fascist, man. Plain as day, said Claude.

  Is him what have them Teddy boys under him watch, said Curtis, they bark if he ask for it.

  Teddy boys does more than bark. They beat, said Shirley, smoking a cigarette by the window. She husband Dicky was at home now, resting and recovering. Jimbroad kissed him teeth as he put down the paper.

  It cannot go on no longer, he said, you see how all them working-class whites flock to hear him? He have numbers with him now. But we have numbers too.

  * * *

  The tide was terrible low by then. In them months we spend all hours at Chapman’s bar. We was no longer drinking, that
fare was for a lighter time. Now it was speeching and planning and action for a common cause, upright and organized. And as for me, I not worked a proper wage in weeks, choosing instead to commit my duty to the Association. I find myself sleeping on a spot on the floor at Jimbroad’s flat, free of rent and offering my labor for it. Jimbroad told me it was more important to help with the cause than earn a living. And I agreed. I was a true recruit now, wearing my pin with pride and anger.

  Time had come to lay claim to the street, they say. Far too many boys had come back bleeding. We was hearing about them Teddy boys weekly. White hooligans, thick-headed goons who want follow their Keep Britain White and Mosley Speaks! words with them fists and dogs. The assaults was a regular story. Teddy boys fueled with drink and rage was coming out to hunt down we spades by the night. We heard the same stories from them East Indian families near Shepherd’s Bush. Colored boys from all across the borough was getting it. And after Dicky Boy was half dead in the street, after Shirley’s demand that we act, time had come to push back, to scheme ourselves and barricade our yard from whoever try run we out.

  * * *

  Slowly like that, I feel a change in myself too. It come creeping, come inside out. The fury come from hearing them stories all over, sound of suffering from the people around we. Hearing how them Teddy boys would harass my lot, faces like my own. I begin to feel I was being pulled farther away from why it was I had come here, but I could not help that. Maisie was far from my mind. The Association had me running errands all over, going door to door with a pamphlet in my hand asking for solidarity and a donation.