by Tony Salter
‘Hush boy. You’ve said your piece.’ The whisky appeared on the table along with two glasses and Hassan heard the golden liquid gurgling happily out of the bottle. ‘It’s time for me to explain how things are going to be.’
Hassan took the glass from his father and nodded. This was more like reality.
‘OK,’ his dad continued. ‘I’ve spoken to a few people and we can raise the money ourselves. There’s no need to get the government involved. After all, who knows when they’re going to change the rules?’
‘But Dad…’ Hassan was on the edge of his seat.
‘Let me finish. Didn’t I teach you any manners? What will they think of you at Oxford?’ His father sat back and sipped his whisky until Hassan slunk once more into the embrace of his chair. ‘So. As I was saying. We can raise the money. Not for a flash lifestyle, but enough. Your Uncle Sami has offered to cover your costs.’
‘Uncle Sami!’ said Hassan. ‘But he’s a drug dealer.’
‘Drug dealer? No. No. No. Don’t listen to all those nasty rumours,’ said his father, smiling. ‘He’s a successful businessman that’s all. He’s so proud of you. The first in our family to get a place at Oxford. Did you know that Benazir Bhutto went … and her father also?’
‘Yes, dad. I knew that,’ said Hassan. ‘But …’
‘But, “Thank you Baba” is all I need to hear from you right now.’ The world hadn’t really turned upside down and Hassan realised that this was the usual one-way conversation. He needed time to think.
His father continued without pausing for breath. ‘And all he’s asked from you is to work for him when you finish. Just for three years and he’ll pay you a good salary as well. How decent is that?’
After a lifetime of experience, Hassan knew when he was beaten. The euphoria of his success had dribbled away and things were back to normal; he was his usual pathetic, spineless self, being pushed around by everyone.
His plan had been a good one; give up the place at Oxford, stay at home, get a job and lead a normal life. But he should have known from the start that, once his father had set off to bray about his genius son, there would be no going back. That door was closed.
If he’d had the guts, he could have simply upped sticks and left to start a new life. Take control for once. Maybe even go abroad? To Canada or the US?
But he’d need to do that without family and, with his brown skin, having no family would mark him with the stigma of the black sheep every step of the way. He would have no friends, no family, no job and no money.
Maybe he was pathetic, but he didn’t have that sort of courage and, in any case, life as an exiled pariah sounded much worse than simply going to Oxford – drug dealing uncle or not. All he needed to do was to keep his head down, get a good degree and then he would see.
The six months before Hassan went up to Oxford had flashed by. Giving up and accepting the inevitable had been a much more comfortable place to be. The world was back on its axis, spinning away as usual.
He’d sat down with his Uncle Sami soon after his father had laid down the law and they’d agreed that Hassan would work for him until that October and during each of his summer breaks. He actually was a businessman (as well as being a notorious drug dealer) and had a medium-sized company which imported specialist fruit and vegetables from India and Pakistan. As Hassan was the genius in the family, he was put in the office and became responsible for sorting out the mess of paperwork – from order forms to VAT returns – that no-one else wanted to touch.
He had no idea what he was doing to begin with, but was a quick learner and soon got the hang of it – although he never shook off the belief that there would be a knock on the door one morning and Uncle Sami would be standing there, waving the keys to a battered brown-and-orange campervan which would be standing in the driveway.
‘Pack yourself a bag, boy. It’s time to earn your keep.’
In his dream, Hassan would be surprised. ‘What are you talking about, Chacha? What’s the old van for?’
‘Not just an old campervan,’ Uncle Sami would say, wrapping a burly arm around Hassan’s shoulders and giving him the tour. ‘I see a bright young chemist, a mobile laboratory and lots of shiny blue crystals.’ By then, his uncle’s bulging eyes would actually be glinting aquamarine in his dark face. ‘Crystal meth, boy. Lovely, pure crystal meth.’
The campervan hadn’t appeared and Hassan found himself, almost by accident, sitting in a huge lecture theatre, half way through the first year of his biochemistry degree at Oxford University. He was smiling. He seemed to be smiling a lot of the time.
It had turned out that he was easily smart enough for Oxford, although he was probably a little too brown, a tad too Yorkshire and he definitely didn’t have enough money. But even that wasn’t a disaster; there were plenty of people just like him and, with the best will in the world, most biochemists weren’t exactly fashionistas, anyway.
The first weeks had been lonely and confusing for all of them. Most first-year students wandered through quads and along cobbled streets with an identical transfixed-rabbit look while they tried to get to grips with strange and complex timings and locations. Adding in a baffling set of social options, fuelled by the heady first flush of freedom, was almost guaranteed to drive criminally poor decision-making on every level.
Excessive alcohol and ill-advised one-night-stands were simply the inevitable cherries on the cake (unless you subscribed to the school of thought that believed student sex couldn’t be categorised as ill-advised by definition). In Hassan’s case, the cherry wasn’t metaphorical, the alcohol was fortunately not too excessive, and he definitely didn’t think the sex was ill-advised.
Her name was Mona, and she was the most beautiful and amazing thing that Hassan had ever seen. He had no idea at the time how much finding Mona would transform his life.
If he’d never met Mona, there was no chance that he would have been praying under a tree in London’s Hyde Park. Without Mona, he would have been working for his Uncle Sami, waiting for the imaginary campervan to appear. Without Mona, he wouldn’t have come to know God and he wouldn’t have understood that God had a purpose for him. Without Mona, everything would have been much simpler.
But, somewhere back in time, a young student sat in an Oxford lecture hall and smiled. His world would never be the same again.
The people were still scurrying along and Hyde Park’s trees loomed tall above him but, until Hassan rose after his final Salaam, he wouldn’t have noticed if they’d all vanished for ten minutes.
He rolled up his mat, tucked it carefully into his bag and set off towards the toilets. They were next to the park entrance and, being linked to a cafe and tennis club, would definitely be open.
He felt closer to Allah than ever after his prayers, light-headed and floating, almost like he had cotton wool stuffed in his ears. Everyone around him was moving more slowly than usual. A crowd of Japanese school kids ran into the park as he cut across the main path, but he found himself weaving effortlessly through the jostling, chattering youngsters as though they were standing still.
Hassan had never liked public toilets; even if they were well looked after, the smell of stale piss was ever present, catching at the back of the throat like chlorine or nitric acid and dragging back teenage memories which were best forgotten. The toilets he’d chosen were not strictly public, but they still reeked.
The farthest cubicle was for disabled users and was luckily unoccupied. No, not luck. As Hassan locked the door behind him, he understood that he was no longer alone. From now on, God would be by his side. He needed him now more than ever.
Momentarily filled with certainty, confidence and calm, he hung up his jacket, opened his holdall and took out the plastic-wrapped bundle which didn’t feel so heavy after all. There was even a baby changing table in the corner; he could unroll the package without touching the floor tiles which, however well scrubbed, must hold the memories and homeopathic traces of each drop of urine (or worse) whi
ch had ever contaminated them.
Stretched out in front of him, the white cotton vest looked pure and harmless, but that didn’t prevent his instant of peace and tranquillity vanishing as quickly as it had appeared; Hassan’s pulse started racing as fast as a tapping finger and he felt cold beads of sweat popping out, one by one, on his forehead.
The rollercoaster had reached the top of its climb. There was no point in looking to his parents for ways out any more. He was locked into his seat. There was only one way forward. This was happening. No more talk. This was happening.
Shuna
As she put the holiday folder back in her bag, Shuna looked at Zoe and Anna who were already walking ahead of her back down Exhibition Road. They were muttering in each other’s ears. Stupid children. She overheard the words ‘bloody taxi driver’, but she already knew what they were talking about. They understood perfectly well why she needed to remember to book a car back from Heathrow.
Try as she might, Shuna couldn’t see the joke. It should have become old history by now, the whole story passed into dinner party legend; each telling and retelling building up the characters and dialogue into a cod-Dickensian tragedy with the story tellers competing for the best (or worst) cockney accents.
Objectively, even the final scene hadn’t been such an enormous deal – nothing had actually happened – but Shuna struggled to find perspective. The anger and fear were consigned to memory most of the time, but the grubby feelings of guilt and shame persisted and she still refused to take a black cab.
Most people saw black cabs as one of the few remaining pillars of civilised society; the moment you entered a cab, you were stepping into a sanctuary and were protected from the mid-day mayhem of the West End or the sinister shadows of a misty London night.
Not Shuna. Until just a few weeks earlier, whenever she saw that orange cyclops eye hovering above its stubby black nose, she would stop breathing and her muscles would tense reflexively in an overwhelming urge to run.
It wasn’t as bad any more – taxis were back to being a part of the landscape –but the story still wasn’t actually funny.
It had never been funny.
The “bloody taxi driver” had first entered their lives a few years earlier. They’d just landed at Heathrow after an amazing three weeks in Australia. Simon was a great holiday organiser and the Sydney trip had been the best ever. They’d swapped their South Kensington flat for a stunning house in Double Bay – six en-suite bedrooms with balconies looking out over Sydney Harbour, a huge infinity pool and beautiful, modern designer furniture everywhere. Shuna had been in seventh heaven and the kids had spent the entire time pretending they were film stars.
They’d flown club class and on the way home had stopped over for a day in Singapore, but it was still a fifteen hour flight and she remembered how dazed she’d felt as they flowed out of the airport into the alien chill of a black London evening. A wet, sleety rain was softening the streetlights, and she shivered. As she turned to Anna, Zoe and Simon, she saw their happy holiday bubbles also popping one by one.
‘Good to be home, eh?’ she’d said, doing her best to produce a rueful smile.
‘Yeah. Great,’ chorused the girls, suddenly looking small and helpless. No more Sophia Loren sunglasses for them for a while.
‘But it was an amazing holiday, wasn’t it?’ said Simon, his big, cheesy smile lighting up the dank walkway. ‘Come on. Let’s grab a cab.’
The biggest problem with house swaps was matching dates and flight times and they weren’t due to get their flat back until eleven o’clock on the following morning. It wasn’t the end of the world to spend a night at an airport hotel but, after all the travelling, Shuna was impatient to get back home and her heart sank at the thought of checking in to some faceless, bland hotel room. Unfortunately, there wasn’t a better option; if they’d flown a day later, it would have cost two thousand pounds more.
The taxi queue was mercifully short and Simon gave the black cab driver the name of their hotel.
‘Never heard of it,’ said the cabbie, looking down at his feet. ‘You’ll have to give me the postcode.’
‘It’s an airport hotel,’ said Simon. ‘I think it’s fairly new, but you must know where it is.’
‘Naah,’ said the cabbie, still looking down. ‘Give me the postcode and I’ll look it up.’
Shuna could remember thinking that, if cabbies were going to be that rude, black cabs would definitely lose the fight with Uber. And, on top of the rudeness and aggression, he didn’t even know where the hotel was? Wasn’t that what “The Knowledge” was all about? She was tired, and the guy was already pissing her off. He had that East London swagger which reminded her of one of those UKIP supporters who’d been all over the TV since Brexit.
Simon, as always, was biting his tongue and trying to be pragmatic. He’d learnt patience the hard way. He searched for the hotel on his phone and told the cabbie the postcode. ‘Google says it’ll take thirteen minutes,’ he added.
The driver stopped looking at his own phone, put it back in his pocket and stepped towards Simon, shoulders hunching and fists clenched. ‘Are you bloody telling me how long it’s going to take now? I don’t give a toss what Google says. We don’t use Google, and it’ll take as long as it takes.’
Shuna was amazed at Simon’s self control and could see that he was still trying to find a practical resolution to get them from the cold, rainy pavement to their comfortable beds. But she’d had enough.
‘What’s wrong with you?’ she shouted. ‘First you don’t know where an airport hotel is even though we’re at the bloody airport, and then you’re giving my husband a hard time because he told you where it was and how far away. If you’d known where it was in the first place, we’d have been there by now.’
He turned to Shuna with a snarl. ‘Look lady. I’ve been doing this job for twenty years. I work bloody hard and I don’t need to take this sort of grief from anyone. If you don’t want a cab, that’s your problem. I’ll take whoever’s next.’ He turned and walked back over to his cab, followed by a young couple who clearly wanted no part of the argument. They just wanted to get home.
Shuna wasn’t finished, but Simon put his hand on her shoulder to hold her back. ‘Leave it,’ he said. ‘We’ll get another one.’
There was a man in a Day-Glo jacket managing the taxi queue and he turned to Simon. ‘The thing is, sir,’ he said. ‘If one cab’s refused to take you, then the others will refuse too. It’s how it is. I’m sorry.’
By this time Shuna was ready to explode. ‘What! This is ridiculous,’ she said. ‘First that guy starts a fight with us for no reason and then we can’t get another cab. I’ve got two young kids. I’ve been on a plane for fifteen hours. I don’t believe this.’
‘I’m sorry Madam,’ said Day-Glo man. ‘It’s just the way it works.’
Shuna had been on the point of tears when she felt a tap on her shoulder. A youngish man in a white polo shirt was standing there, smiling. ‘Don’t worry,’ he said. ‘I’ll take you.’
They’d had to wait for three other taxis which were ahead in the queue, but were loaded up and on their way soon enough.
‘Thank you,’ said Simon. ‘I don’t believe that guy.’
‘No problem,’ said the driver. ‘He gets up everybody’s nose. He does it all the time. If someone only wants to go a short distance, he starts a fight, uses that as an excuse to refuse the fare, and moves on to the next punter.’
‘You’re saying that was all an act?’ said Shuna. ‘Bloody hell.’
‘It’s sort of understandable,’ said the cabbie. ‘Most days, we have to wait for three or four hours at Heathrow before we get to the pick-up zone.’
‘So you’ve waited four hours and then you offered to take us even though it’s a small fare?’ said Simon. ‘That’s unbelievably kind of you.’
‘It’s not that bad. They give us an hour’s grace, so as long as I’m back within the sixty minutes, I won’t have to wait a
gain. That’s why that other bloke’s so out of order. He’s got no real excuse.’
‘I’m surprised that some of you don’t take him aside and straighten him out,’ said Simon. ‘As you say, he’s not doing the rest of you any favours.’
‘Some guys have come close, but he’s a hard bugger. Ex-army. No-one wants to mess with him … and besides, we stick together as a rule.’ The taxi stopped for a red light and the driver turned to Simon with a half-smile. ‘He’s had a few complaints made to the public carriage office, but nothing’s come of it. No-one wants to take away a man’s livelihood.’
‘Of course not,’ said Shuna. ‘But he shouldn’t be allowed to keep behaving like that. If you hadn’t been there, we might’ve waited ages. I wish I’d been smart enough to note down his number.’
The girls had been quiet throughout the entire incident, wide-eyes flicking between the various actors, unsure what would happen next. As Shuna voiced her frustration, Zoe pulled on the sleeve of her coat.
‘We have got it, Mum,’ she said, holding out her phone. ‘I took a photo when you were all arguing. It’s got his number on it.’
Dan
Dan had toyed with the idea of not answering the phone that day, but it would have bugged him all morning and he wouldn’t have been able to concentrate.
‘Dan?’
‘Hey Mom. What’s up?’
‘Nothing much. Just thought I’d call my boy and see how he’s doing.’
If Dan had put aside a dollar each time his mother had called him in the six years he’d been in Texas, he’d barely have enough saved for a blow-out breakfast at McDonald's; when she eventually did get around to calling, it was never about “nothing much”. There was always a drama to share.