by Monica Ali
'You fucking-bloody-bastard,' said the lad calmly.
The boy raised his hands, smiling. He shook his head. 'Shouldn't you be at school?'
No answer. The little brother put his headphones on.
The boy began to walk away, still shaking his head.
'Don't come around here again,' the little one shouted. 'If I see you again, you're dead.'
Nazneen reached the entrance. She stopped in front of the little brother and pulled off his headphones. 'Fanu Rahman! Does your mother know where you are? Get yourself off to school this second.'
As she bought her ticket, she wondered what she should tell Nazma about her fifth and most precious son. Then she remembered that Nazma was not speaking to her.
There were two other people on the platform. Nazneen stood close to the edge, watching the mice twitch in and out of the tracks and looking out for the eye of the train in the black tunnel. She willed the train to come. Two hours ago, she had dialled his number and felt her skin prickle at the sound of his voice. Since then, she wanted to knock down walls, banish distance, abolish time, to get to him. What she had to say to him could not wait. The electronic noticeboard said four minutes until the next train. Then it blinked and added another couple of minutes.
Somebody passed behind her on the platform. She turned round. A young woman in high-heeled boots and jeans, a denim jacket pegged on her fingers and slung over her shoulder, stalked towards the free bench. Her footsteps rang like declarations.
Nazneen fell in line behind her. The way the woman walked was fascinating. Nazneen watched her and stepped as she stepped. How much could it say? One step in front of the other. Could it say, I am this and I am not this? Could a walk tell lies? Could it change you?
The woman reached the bench. Nazneen almost collided with her. 'Sorry,' said the woman. 'Sorry,' said Nazneen. They both sat down.
The train took her to King's Cross. She had to change to the Piccadilly Line. Karim had explained it all. She got lost and walked for miles through tunnels and up steps and down escalators, across ticket halls, past shops and barriers and through more tunnels. A couple of times she was close to tears. She challenged the tears to come and they backed down. Eventually, she found the platform and entered the train. By the time she sat down she was sweating. She tried to think about what she would say to Karim. The urgency inside her began to fade. Only three more stations to go. There was not enough time.
A picture of him came into her mind. Karim in his jeans and trainers, sitting at her table, bouncing his leg. Karim with a magazine, feeding her slices of the world. Karim in his white shirt, rubbing his smooth jaw, telling her all the things that lay hidden just outside her window. He knew about the world and his place in the world. That was how she liked to remember him.
It was never so. Apart from where it mattered, in her head. He was who he was. Question and answer. The same as her. Maybe not even that. Karim had never even been to Bangladesh. Nazneen felt a stab of pity. Karim was born a foreigner. When he spoke in Bengali, he stammered. Why had it puzzled her? She saw only what she wanted to see. Karim did not have his place in the world. That was why he defended it.
At Covent Garden the carriage emptied. Nazneen rode in the lift. She saw Karim across the street immediately she came out. He waited by a clothes shop, as they had arranged. She did not pass the barrier but stood to the side and watched. A burger van greased the air with fatty smells. Cars jammed the road and people weaved in and out. On a plinth, a man who seemed to have been dipped in white paint stood still as a rock while a child poked his leg and was pulled away by her mother. A gaggle of girls walked with their arms folded beneath their breasts, clutching their purses and cackling at each other. As they walked they knocked shoulders, a friendship ritual. Two men came out of a pub and made a show of tucking their shirts into their trousers, trying to get back into shape after a long lunch. Nazneen watched Karim watching the people. He leaned against a strip of wall between two shop windows, and rested a foot up against the brickwork. Behind the plate glass white lights heated the faceless mannequins. It had rained, and the slick brown pavements bore a liquid print of the light inside and carried it down to the gutter.
People passed in front of Karim. The street was busy. All day long, people passed each other. Nobody spared a glance for the boy in the panjabi-pyjama and expensive brown fleece. Karim bounced his leg. He looked at his watch. She had seen what she wanted to see. She had looked at him and seen only his possibilities. Now she looked again and saw that the disappointments of his life, which would shape him, had yet to happen. It gave her pain. She almost changed her mind.
'What is it?' he said, as soon as she came near. 'I've got about one thousand things to do.'
'Let's walk.' He still smelled of limes. It made saliva come into her mouth. It made her feel that before she had been sleepy, and now she was awake.
They went towards the market and turned right into the square. A juggler collected his batons from the ground while a small group of Japanese clapped in a half-hearted way.
'Shall we watch?' said Nazneen. It occurred to her that they could have done this before.
'Are you going to tell me?'
'Yes,' she said. But she looked ahead, and said nothing more. It had been Karim's idea to meet here when she said she had to see him. Chanu was going to be at home. 'We'll have to go out of the village,' Karim had said. He sounded almost like her husband.
'Well.' He looked at his watch. He pulled his phone out of his pocket and looked at that. 'I've got to go now.' He began to turn.
She put her hand on his arm. He did not pull free but his arm was tense against her hand, as if he meant to move.
'My husband bought the tickets. The flight is tomorrow.'
His arm went slack. She took her hand away.
'All right,' said Karim. He watched the juggler. The juggler threw gold hoops in the air. Every few seconds he caught one round his neck and his assistant passed him another.
'But I am not going,' said Nazneen. It occurred to her that she could have done this before. What kept her tied to the corner of the room? 'The children are not going.'
'All right,' Karim said again. 'We can talk again after the march. I've got ten thousand things to do.'
'I know. I had to tell you.'
The juggler caught his last three hoops about his neck and flung his arms out to receive his ovation. He was a thin man with an enormous mouth. The mouth never stopped smiling.
'Call me on the mobile,' said Karim. 'We shouldn't see each other again before the wedding.'
The mouth was still smiling. It reached all the way up to his ears. He had no coat, just a thin shirt and plum velvet trousers and braces. The juggler spoke to his assistant and shivered. Nazneen wondered if he stopped smiling when he finished the performance. She imagined him at home, sitting in the dark in front of the television, and smiling.
'We can't get married.'
'Not straight away,' said Karim.
He shivered as well. Or perhaps it was just a yawn.
'Not ever.'
'What do you mean "not ever"?' He sounded irritated. He kicked his boot against the ground.
'I don't want to marry you,' said Nazneen, looking at the juggler. 'That's what I mean.'
He stood in front of her and took hold of both her hands. 'Look at me,' he said. 'Look at me now.' She looked at him. The triangle of hair that stood up at the front of his head, his beautiful long-lashed eyes, his straight nose, the beard which buried the little mole on his chin. 'If you mean it, you must tell me again, while you look at me.'
'I don't want to marry you.'
She squeezed at the pain, trying to make it hers, trying to keep it from him.
He let go of her hands.
'Karim—'
'You really don't?'
'It's not that I—'
He put his hands on his hips and leaned his head right back, as if he had a sudden nosebleed. It was unbearable. It was the worst thing sh
e had ever done.
Karim brought his head down. He blew out, long and hard.
'Right,' he said. 'Right, right, right.' He rubbed his hands together.
Was there a little bit of a smile around his lips?
'Why do you keep saying "right"? How many times are you going to just keep saying it?'
'You don't want to marry me?'
'Don't you have ten thousand things to do? Didn't I just tell you the answer?'
She curbed herself. She had to remember she had hurt him.
'Right,' said Karim. He blew hard. The juggler took up three blazing clubs from his assistant. Karim clapped wildly, as though the man had suddenly become his hero.
'It would be too difficult,' said Nazneen, 'for us to be together. So I think we had better stop now.'
Karim began to say 'right' again, but caught himself. 'Yes, I see what you mean. With the children and everything.'
'I have to think of them first.'
'Exactly,' said Karim. He sighed.
Nazneen began to understand: how much she had lightened his load.
They watched the show for a while. Nazneen wondered if the man's cheeks ached. She wondered how his face looked when he stopped smiling, whether he looked sad, or just indifferent like everyone else.
'There's a cafe inside the market,' said Karim. 'Let's go and sit down.'
Nazneen wanted a baked potato, though there was no reason to be eating in the middle of the afternoon. The potato was enormous and covered in melted cheese.
'I've never seen you eat before,' said Karim. He put his elbows on the table and leaned over.
'Sit up straight,' she said. 'I'm not part of the show.'
She ate half the potato and worried about the waste of it. 'You eat it,' she told him, and pushed it across.
'It's going to be a good turnout tomorrow. Come if you can. Bring the kids.' He talked about the march, how many would come, what he planned to say in his speech, the route they would take. As he talked Nazneen realized that, though he was speaking Bengali, he was not hesitating. She thought about it and tried to remember if he had stammered the last time she saw him, or the time before that. She wasn't sure. Had he lost his stammer? He had gained control of his speech, but she had lost control of hers. She blurted out, 'But you're not stammering any more?' He widened his eyes, pretending to be shocked at being so rudely cut off. 'When I was a kid, I stammered. Now it only happens when I'm very nervous.'
'Nervous?'
'Yeah, you know, nervous.' He trembled his hands. 'Like when I met you.'
She laughed. 'Me? I made you nervous?'
'What's so funny? You made me nervous.'
Nazneen rocked in her seat. She tried to quell her laughter, but it spurted out everywhere. She put her hand over her mouth, but the laugh came down her nose, out of her ears, through her eyes, from her pores. 'Oh, oh, that's the funniest thing I've ever heard.' She tried to compose herself. 'But do you only get nervous in Bengali? Why don't you stammer in English?'
He raised his eyebrows. He stroked his beard. 'But I do. Maybe you don't notice in English.'
Nazneen wiped her eyes with a napkin. She smoothed her hair and checked her bun. Was it true? Did she not notice in English? Well, why would he say it if it was not true? She straightened up the salt and pepper. People said all sorts of things that were not true. But it seemed possible that she simply had not noticed, or – more than that – had decided not to know.
Karim leaned across to her again. 'What's the real reason? Why do you not want me?'
A waitress came to clear the table. She stacked the cups on top of the plate. Then she wiped the surface in long smooth strokes, each one perfectly placed so there was no wastage. Not an inch of the table felt the cloth twice. The blue-green veins on her hands stood up proud and the skin on her knuckles was rough. On her right hand she wore a ring shaped like a beetle. The nails of her ring finger and her little finger had been filed to a pretty shape and the cuticles pushed down to reveal little white crescents below the pink. The other nails were ragged. On her forefinger, just below the nail, there was a hard lump of skin. When Chanu had begun his Art History course and taken notes all day and long into the night – so many notes that Nazneen knew he was copying out entire books – he had developed a lump exactly like that. The waitress moved on to the next table.
Karim waited for her answer.
How did Karim see her? The real thing, he said. She was his real thing. A Bengali wife. A Bengali mother. An idea of home. An idea of himself that he found in her. The waitress stood by the counter. In her right hand she held a pen. Between her thumb and forefinger, she rolled the pen round and round. She spoke to a customer. The pen kept rolling.
How had she made him? She did not know. She had patched him together, working in the dark. She had made a quilt out of pieces of silk, scraps of velvet, and now that she held it up to the light the stitches showed up large and crude, and they cut across everything.
'I think I know.' Karim regarded her with great sympathy, as if she were a child, suddenly orphaned. 'If you were with me you'd never be able to forget what we did, when it all started. Technically, yeah, it was a sin. It bothered me too. So it's for the best. Really. Pray like hell. That's what I'm going to do. Allah forgives. "O My servants, who have transgressed against their own souls! Do not despair of the mercy of God, for Allah forgives all sins."' He nodded. He seemed to want her to join in. 'Is that what it is?' he said. 'The sin of it?'
She touched his hand for the last time. 'Oh Karim, that we have already done. But always there was a problem between us. How can I explain? I wasn't me, and you weren't you. From the very beginning to the very end, we didn't see things. What we did – we made each other up.'
At eight o'clock, when the bags were packed and the tension in the flat ran so strong that you could reach out and pluck it like a sitar string, Nazneen went downstairs to see Razia. She descended two flights, paused at Razia's level, and carried on down.
There were no boys in the stairwell. A blister of paint from the metal banister came off on Nazneen's hand. She stepped over an empty cigarette carton, a brick and a syringe. Outside, the estate was dead. A pile of turf squares stood on the scrubby grass at the centre of the courtyard. They had been delivered in summer. Then, they were bright and even. Soon enough, they blended into the environment. There were no kids out this evening. Nazneen walked around the courtyard and into the centre of Dogwood. Where did everybody go? Now that she had decided to stay, had everybody else packed up and left? Windows were lit; the air was dense with curry smells, but not a single body in the courtyard. The cars in the car park were not revving. Where were the boys who drove in and out, in and out, and played that music with the big, bulging beats? It seemed that everyone had fled, evacuated in an emergency of which she alone was ignorant. Where were the little lads who sat on the edge of the raised beds that once held lavender and rosemary and now cradled old cans and dog dirt, where had they gone to smoke and duck their heads like old hens?
She walked past the concrete valley that sheltered the meeting hut, past the destitute playground, over the car park, along by the raised beds, and back to the foot of Seasalter House. When Dr Azad greeted her, she screeched.
'I've been to see Tariq,' he said quickly, as though she would reprimand him. 'He's getting along, I'd say.'
'Yes,' said Nazneen. 'I was just. . . walking.'
'Good, good,' said the doctor. 'Excellent,' he added, having considered the matter thoroughly. He stood so stiffly, as if it cost him something dearer than money to bend a joint. His black shoes shone. The coat he wore was long and heavy. His shirt collar scratched the underside of his chin.
Nazneen resisted the urge to reach over and undo a button.
'I'm going to Razia's now,' she said.
'She needs the support. Until, of course, you' – here he coughed discreetly, as if the matter were a delicate one – 'urn, go.'
Nazneen sucked the soft walls of her cheeks betw
een her teeth and chewed them. Why had Dr Azad lent the money? Did he expect to get it back? She would return the girls' tickets and her own and take him whatever she could get for them. As far as he knew, they were all going away. Why did he lend the money? Was it a cure? For that special Tower Hamlets disease that he had discovered and named and which would never get into the medical books. What had he called it? Going Home Syndrome. Did he, with his own marriage broken, want to save another marriage where he could? Did he simply want to get rid of Chanu? Get rid of this ridiculous man who claimed him for a kindred spirit?
'Dr Azad, did your wife leave you?'
A shadow passed over his face.
Wasn't it obvious enough long ago that she had left? Nazneen bit into her tongue.
'No,' he said softly. 'She is still there. In a manner of speaking.'
'Of course,' said Nazneen. 'Yes.'
A wind blew in over the courtyard and fetched up a crisp packet at her feet.
'Dr Azad,' she said. 'Why did you give my husband that money?'
The end of his nose was pitted with age, his cheeks had given way to jowls, pockets of air puffed the skin around his eyes, when he smiled the corners of his mouth turned down, and it was a big, generous smile. 'It's very simple. Because he is my friend. My very good friend.'
The day had come. Nazneen sat on Bibi's bed. The girls stood by Shahana's desk looking as though they were waiting to be shot. Nazneen had not heard Shahana speak since yesterday morning. All her features seemed to be pulled together at the centre of her face, as if by a drawstring. Everything was locked up. Her face had shut down. Bibi had gone beyond desolation, to indifference. On the broad canvas of her face nothing was written.
'Shall I tell you a story? Which one would you like to hear?'
Bibi lifted her shoulders slightly and dropped them. Shahana remained frozen.
'Shahana, Bibi, listen to me.' Nazneen stopped. What could she tell them? If she revealed everything now, how could they hide it?
The flight went at two o'clock in the morning. Chanu had calculated that they would have to leave at ten. Nazneen decided on nine o'clock as the time to tell him. It would give them an hour to talk things over, to say goodbye.