She did so, saying, “Aren't you s'posed to be at work, Trev?”
“Yeah. I'm going. But I got to talk to you first.” He waited for her to join him. But he walked no farther than his motorscooter, and he straddled it, planting his bum on the seat. He gave his attention to the handlebars, and his hands twisted round them as he continued. “Lookit, you and me … I mean … last Friday night. When Querashi got chopped. We was together. You remember that, right?”
“Sure,” she said, although the growing warmth of her chest and neck told her that she was going crimson.
“You remember what time we split, don't you? We went up to the huts round nine. We had that booze—bloody awful, it was—what was it called?”
“Calvados,” she said, and added uselessly, “It's made from apples. It's for after dinner.”
“Well, we sort of had it before dinner, huh?” He grinned.
She didn't like it when he grinned. She didn't like his teeth. She didn't like to be reminded that he never saw a dentist. Nor did she like to be faced with the fact that he didn't bathe daily, that he never used a brush on his fingernails, and most of all that he was always careful that their meetings were private, beginning beneath the pier on the seaside of whatever pile was nearest the water and ending in that beach hut that smelled of mildew, where the rattan mats on the floor made a red lattice on her knees as she knelt before him.
Love me, love me. Her actions had begged. See how good I can make you feel?
But that was before she knew that Sahlah needed her help. That was before she'd seen the expression on Theo Shaw's face that told he intended to abandon Sahlah.
“Anyways,” Trevor said when she didn't chuckle at his lewd remark, “we were still there at half-eleven, remember? I even had to make a dash for it to get to work on time.”
She shook her head, slowly. “No, we weren't, Trev. I got home round ten.”
He grinned, still focused on the handlebars. When he raised his head with a nervous laugh, he still didn't look at her. “Hey, Rache, that's not the way it was. Course, I don't expect you to get the time exactly straight cause we was sort of involved.”
“I was involved,” Rachel corrected him. “I don't remember you doing much of anything after you pulled your prong from your trousers.”
He finally looked at her. For the first time ever in her recollection, his face was scared. “Rachel,” he said miserably. “Come on, Rache. You remember how it was.”
“I remember it being dark,” she said. “I remember you telling me to wait ten minutes while you went up to the hut—third from the end in the top row, it was—to … What was it, Trev? To ‘air it out,’ you said. I was to wait underneath the pier and when ten minutes were up, I was supposed to follow.”
“You wouldn't've wanted to go inside when it was all smelly,” he protested.
“And you wouldn't've wanted to be seen with me.”
“That is not the case,” he said, and for a moment he sounded so stiff with outrage that Rachel truly wanted to believe him. She wanted to believe that it really meant nothing that the single time they'd been in public together had been dinner at a Chinese restaurant conveniently located some fifteen miles from Balford-le-Nez. She wanted to believe that the fact that he'd never kissed her mouth meant he was only shy and working up his courage. And most of all, she wanted to believe that his letting her service him fifteen times without ever once wondering what she was getting out of the activity aside from the humiliation of yearning so openly for anything remotely resembling hope of a normal future only meant that he'd not yet learned from her example how to give. But she couldn't believe. So she was stuck with the truth.
“I got home round ten, Trev. I know cause I felt all hollow inside, so I turned on the telly. And I even know what I watched, Trev. The middle and end of that old movie with Sandra Dee and Troy Donahue. I bet you know the one: They're kids and it's summer and they fall in love and mess around. And they sort of finally realise that love's more important than being scared and hiding who you really are.”
“Can't you just tell them?” he asked. “Can't you say it was half past eleven? Rache, the cops're going to ask you cause I said I was with you that night. And I was. If you tell them you got home round ten, don't you see what that means?”
“I expect it means you had time to give Haytham Querashi the business,” she answered.
“I didn't do it,” he said. “Rache, I never saw the bloke that night. I swear. I swear. But if you don't back me up in what I said, then they'll know I'm lying. And if they know I'm lying about that, they'll think I'm lying about not having killed him. Can't you help me out? What's another hour?”
“Hour and a half,” she corrected him. “You said half-eleven.”
“Okay. Hour and a half. What's another hour and a half?”
Plenty of time for you to show you had at least one thought in your mind about me, she told him silently. But she said, “I won't lie for you, Trev. I might've once. But I won't do it now.”
“Why?” The word was a plea. He reached for her arm and ran his fingers up her bare skin. “Rachel, I thought we had something special, you and me. Didn't you feel it? When we ‘as together, it was like … Hey, it was like magic, didn't you think?” His fingers reached the sleeve of her blouse and insinuated themselves inside, up her shoulder, along the strap of her bra.
She wanted touch so bad that she felt the damp answer to his question. It was between her legs, on the backs of her knees, and in the hollow of her throat, where her heart was lodged.
“Rache …?” The fingers grazed the front of her bra.
This was how it was supposed to be, she thought. A man touching a woman and the woman wanting, needing, melting—
“Please, Rache. You're the only one who c'n help me.”
But this was also the first and only time he'd touched her with tenderness and not as a hurried and impatient stimulation that would ultimately lead to his own pleasure.
That bird needs a bag on her head!
You look like a dog's arse, Rachel Winfield!
Blokes'll have to roger her wearing a blindfold.
She stiffened under his touch, remembering the voices and how she'd battled them throughout her childhood. She knocked Trevor Ruddock's hand away.
“Rache!” He even managed to look wounded.
Yes. Well. She knew how that felt.
“I got home round ten on Friday night,” she said. “And if the cops ask, that's what I mean to tell them.”
N HER BEDROOM CEILING, SAHLAH STUDIED THE silhouette of tree leaves illuminated by the moon. They didn't move. Despite the proximity of her family's house to the sea, there was no breeze. It would be another night of smothering heat when the thought of having bedclothes touch skin was akin to the idea of trying to sleep enshrouded in cling film.
Except that she knew she wouldn't sleep. She'd bade her family goodnight at half past ten, after suffering through an evening of tense conversation between her father and her brother. Akram had been first struck dumb by the news that Haytham's neck had been broken. Muhannad had seized what advantage their father's consternation gave him, announcing everything else that he'd learned in his meeting with the police—which was little enough, to Sahlah's ears—and outlining what he and Taymullah Azhar had planned as their next move. Akram had inserted, “This is not a game, Muhannad,” and the dispute between them had grown from there.
Their words, spoken tersely by Akram and hotly by Muhannad, not only pitted father and son against each other but also threatened the peace of their household and the fabric of their family. Yumn sided with Muhannad, of course. Wardah reverted to a lifetime of acquiescing to males and said nothing at all, with her eyes cast down upon her embroidery. Sahlah tried to find a means of rapprochement between the two men. In the end, all of them sat in a silence so electric that the air itself seemed filled with sparks. Never one to deal with quiet in any of its forms, Yumn had jumped to her feet and seized the moment to slide a vid
eo into the machine. When the grainy picture appeared on the screen—an Asian boy following along behind a herd of goats, stick in his hand, as a sitar played and the credits rolled in Urdu—Sahlah said her goodnights. Only her mother responded.
Now it was half past one. She'd been in bed since eleven. The house had been still since midnight, when she'd heard her brother moving round the bathroom, preparatory to finally retiring. The floors and walls had stopped their nighttime creaking. And she waited fruitlessly for sleep.
But in order to sleep, she knew she would have to wipe her mind of thoughts and concentrate on relaxing. While she might have managed the second activity, she knew she wouldn't be able to manage the first.
Rachel hadn't phoned, which meant that she hadn't gathered the necessary information for the abortion. Sahlah could only school herself to patience and hope that her friend would neither fail her nor betray her a second time.
Not for the first time since suspecting she was pregnant did Sahlah bitterly regret the lack of freedom imposed upon her by her parents. Not for the first time did she despise herself for having lived so docilely under the benign and loving but nonetheless implacable thumbs of her father and mother. She realised that the very womblike environment that had long kept her feeling so protected in an often unfriendly world was what stymied her now. The restrictions her parents had long placed upon her had sheltered her, indeed. But they'd also imprisoned her. And she'd never really known that till now, when more than anything she wished she had the coming-and-going lifestyle that English girls had, that carefree way of living in which parents seemed to be faraway planets orbiting only peripherally in the solar system of their daughters’ lives.
Had she been a tearaway, Sahlah realised, she'd know what to do. In fact, had she been a tearaway she'd probably announce what she intended to do. She'd tell her story without a single face-saving digression and without regard for anyone's feelings. Because her family wouldn't mean anything to her if she were a tearaway, her parents’ honour and pride—not to mention their natural, loving belief in their offspring—would be of no account.
But she'd never been a tearaway. Consequently, protecting the parents she loved was paramount to her, more important than her own personal happiness, dearer to her than life itself.
Dearer than this life certainly, she thought, automatically making a cradle of her hands to encircle her belly. But as quickly as she'd made the gesture, just as quickly did she force herself to reverse it. I can't give you life, she told the organism within her. I won't give life to something that would dishonour my parents and bring destruction upon my family.
And disgrace upon yourself, Sahlah dear? she heard the implacable voice of her conscience asking in that mocking tone she'd been listening to night after night and week after week. For who is to blame for the position in which you now find yourself if not yourself?
“Whore, slag,” her brother had cursed her in a whisper so violent that she shuddered from the simple memory of having heard it. “You'll pay for this, Sahlah, the way all whores pay.”
She squeezed her eyes closed tightly, as if the complete darkness provided by doing so could somehow rid her mind of memory, her heart of anguish, and her conscience of the enormity of the act in which she had found herself a participant. But doing this only served to shoot flashes of light across the backs of her eyelids, as if an inner being over which she had no control were attempting to illuminate everything that she wished to keep hidden.
She opened her eyes once more. The flashing light continued. Perplexed, she watched it flicker and halt, flicker and halt at the point where the wall of her bedroom met the ceiling. It was a moment before she understood.
Short, short, long, pause. Short, short, long, pause. How many times had she seen that signal in the last year? It meant Come to me, Sahlah, It told her that Theo Shaw was outside, using a torch to announce that he was in the orchard.
She closed her eyes against it. Not so very long ago, she would have risen quickly, signaled with her own torch, and slipped quietly from her bedroom. Careful in slippers that muted the sound of her footsteps, she would have slid past her parents’ room after hesitating at their closed door to listen for the reassuring sound of her father's thundering snore and her mother's accompanying, gentle one. She would have descended the stairs and made her way to the kitchen, and from there she would have flown into the night.
Short, short, long, pause. Short, short, long, pause. Even through her eyelids, she could see the light.
She sensed the urgency behind it. It was the same urgency she'd heard in his voice when he'd phoned her the previous evening.
“Sahlah, thank God,” he'd said. “I've phoned you at least five times since I heard about Haytham, but you never answered, and the idea of leaving a message … I didn't dare. For your sake. It was always Yumn who answered. Sahlah, I want to talk to you. We need to talk. We must talk.”
“We've talked,” she told him.
“No! Listen to me. You misunderstood. When I said I wanted to wait, it had nothing to do with how I feel about you.” His words were rapid, hushed. He sounded as if he believed she'd ring off before he had a chance to say everything he'd planned and probably rehearsed. But he also sounded as if he feared being overheard. And she knew by whom.
“My mother needs my help with dinner,” she said. “I can't talk to you now.”
“You think it was because of you, don't you? I saw it in your face. I'm a coward in your eyes because I won't tell my grandmother I'm in love with an Asian. But the fact that I haven't told her has nothing to do with you. Nothing. All right? The time just isn't right.”
“I never believed it had anything to do with me,” she corrected him.
But she might not have spoken. She couldn't divert him from the course that he had apparently determined to take, because he hurried on. “She isn't well. Her speech is getting bad. She practically can't walk. She's weak. She needs nursing. So I have to be here for her, Sahlah. And I can't ask you to come to this house—as my wife—only to burden you with taking care of a sick old lady who might die any minute.”
“Yes,” she said. “You told me all of this, Theo.”
“So for God's sake, why won't you give me some time? Now that Haytham's dead, we can be together. We can make it happen. Sahlah, don't you see? Haytham's dying could be something that was meant to be. It could be a sign. It's as if the hand of God is telling us—”
“Haytham was murdered, Theo,” she said. “And I don't think God had anything to do with it.”
He'd been silent at this. Was he shocked? she wondered. Was he horrified? Was he sifting through his thoughts to fabricate something with just the right ring of sincerity: tender words of compassion that offered a condolence which he did not feel? Or was something altogether different going on in his head, a fervid search for a subtle means to portray himself in the most positive light?
Say something, she'd thought. Ask a single question that will serve as a sign.
“How do you know …? The newspaper … When it said the Nez … I don't know why, but I thought he had a heart attack or something, or maybe even a fall. But murdered? Murdered?”
Not, My God, how are you coping with this horror? Not, What can I do to help you? Not, I'm coming to you this instant, Sahlah. I'm taking my rightful place at your side, and we're putting an end to this bloody charade.
“The police told my brother this afternoon,” she'd said.
And another silence ensued. In it, she heard him breathing and she tried to interpret his respiration as she'd tried a moment earlier to gauge the meaning behind the delay between her revelation and his response.
He finally said, “I'm sorry that he's dead. I'm sorry about the fact that he's dead. But I can't pretend to be sorry that you won't be marrying at the weekend. Sahlah, I'm going to speak to Gran. I'm going to tell her everything, start to finish. I saw how close I came to losing you, and the moment we have this redevelopment project up and running, she'll b
e distracted, and I'll tell her.”
“And that's what you want her to be? Distracted? Because if she's distracted she might not notice when you introduce us that my skin is a colour she finds offensive?”
“I didn't say that.”
“Or is it that you don't intend to introduce us at all? Perhaps you hope that her project for the town will take enough out of her to finish her off. And then you'll have her money and your freedom as well.”
“No! Please! Listen to me.”
“I don't have the time,” she'd said, and she'd rung off just as Yumn came out of the sitting room and into the hall where the telephone sat on a stand at the foot of the stairs.
Her sister-in-law had smiled with such specious solicitude that Sahlah knew she'd heard her side of the conversation. “Oh my goodness, that phone hasn't stopped its ringing since word got out about our poor Haytham,” Yumn said. “And how kind it is of all his closest friends, phoning to offer their sympathies to Haytham's pretty young bride. But she wasn't quite a bride, was our little Sahlah? Just a few days short of it. But never mind that. It must soothe her heart to know that so many people had a love for our Haytham that equalled her own.” Yumn's eyes laughed while the rest of her face formed an expression of funereal suitability.
Sahlah turned on her heel and went to her mother, but she heard Yumn's quiet laughter following her. She knows, Sahlah thought, but she doesn't know everything.
Now in her bed, she opened her eyes to see if the torch outside still flickered its message. Short, short, long, pause. Short, short, long, pause. He was waiting.
I'm asleep, Theo, she told him silently. Go home. Go to Gran. It doesn't matter anyway, because even if you spoke—proud of our love and unafraid of your grandmother's reaction to it—I still wouldn't be free to come to you. You're like Rachel at heart, Theo. You see freedom as a simple act of will, a logical conclusion to recognising one's needs and desires and merely working to fulfill them. But I haven't that sort of freedom, and if I try to grasp it, we'll both be ruined. And when people who love find themselves and their fragile world in shambles, love dies quickly and blame takes its place. So go home, Theo. Please. Go home.
Deception on His Mind Page 38