Asna watched Salimah, who was slumped in her armchair and staring at the floor. It was difficult; they had spent so long apart. She had left as a seventeen-year-old bride when her sister was just eleven. So many years when they could only talk on the telephone, miles apart, when they could have been together. Not enough visits back home, not enough to assuage the ache of missing her mother, not enough to keep her going through the grief after her mother died. Asna was proud of her marriage and her husband who now ran three successful shops, her stylish house and her kids. Her eldest daughter was at secondary school now and doing really well, and her boy was good at maths like his father. She wanted the same things for her sister.
‘What does Ibrahim say?’
‘Oh, he’s working every night, I hardly see him and he’s so tired. I think he is angry with me’.
The Curate was busy putting his notes together to prepare for the latest local history walk he was leading that Saturday. He loved to explore architecture, the traces of life lived hundreds of years ago that still survived unacknowledged in the modern chaos of the city. He loved the city farm, with its collection of hardy-looking Gloucester Old Spots, and went there often to visit the ruins of a mediaeval monastery that sat there unnoticed and unvisited except by a herd of athletic miniature goats. He would personally scrub away sprayed-on tags proclaiming the might and dominance of the Stepney Massive, or the same sort of graffiti he remembered from his own school days in Surrey, differing only in the types of names and the breadth of knowledge and inventiveness of the sexual techniques described, when they appeared on the walls of his beautiful church. He felt a thrill of pleasure when he looked around the stone building that sheltered his flock as it had done for centuries, withstanding even the Blitz. It had been a bit of luck to get a challenging, inner city parish, that had a church at its centre as old and beautiful as this. The Curate knew God didn’t care about architecture, but was honest enough to admit to himself that he did.
The Curate’s latest walk would start on Cable Street. He would explore the Ratcliffe Highway, where sailors from all over the world could once buy wild beasts of all descriptions, from lions and hyaenas to parakeets, moving on to the boundary stone marking the borough of Ratcliffe or ‘Sailortown’ notorious for its taverns, drug dens, brothels and general debauchery for hundreds of years. He would show them Stepney Causeway, where Dr Barnardo asked that one of the doors be kept permanently open after one child came looking for shelter, was turned away and died two days later of starvation on the streets. He thought how a historical distance could make a world where anything or anyone could be bought and sold and life itself was cheap seem exotic and fascinating while in fact the reality must have been – and was still – terrifying.
The Rector approached him as he was rearranging his notes.
‘I have something interesting for you, Andrew,’ he said cheerily. ‘An infestation, you might say.’
‘An infestation?’
Andrew, a serious man, had never understood the Rector’s donnish mixture of learning and levity.
‘A supernatural infestation. A young lady who lives in one of the old houses over there.’
He gestured towards the row of Victorian terraces opposite the graveyard.
‘She has what appears to be a djinn problem. They’re more common than you might imagine’.
‘A djinn?’
‘It’s the same as the word for a genie, but it’s not really a case of Scheherazade Aladdin, rubbing the lamp and three wishes. This is something more complicated, like a spirit that can do good or evil. She believes it is a Christian djinn, or ghost, or whatever you want to call it. You can come with me when we go to see her.’
‘Isn’t this more likely to be a case of something psychological?’
The Rector sighed.
‘Of course that’s something to consider. But in this case, if it will ease the anxiety of someone in our parish it is seen as worthwhile to say a few prayers of protection or peace, bless the house, that kind of thing. Deliverance, we call it. Besides, what is psychological, and what is not?’
‘I don’t follow you’.
‘Non-believers would have us locate everything that does not fit into their scheme of things in the human imagination. “The sleep of reason produces monsters”, as it says in the wonderful etching by Goya. But if you are willing to accept the possibility of an immortal, why not a monster, too? The Islamic belief is that djinns or genies are a separate part of creation, neither angels nor humans but beings created from fire and possessing free will, so capable of both good and evil. In the Judaeo-Christian tradition there are references to creatures similar to genies, too, the Mazikeen, who were children of Adam. These are centuries-old beliefs’.
‘This confirms in me my belief that practical religion is a lot more straightforward than theoretical.’
The Rector smiled at him.
‘Well, Andrew, in this case we’ll be doing a little of both.’
At Salimah’s house, the Rector introduced Andrew to the two women. Salimah had opened the door very swiftly, as though she had been watching out for them.
‘My husband doesn’t know you are coming here,’ she said. ‘He doesn’t approve of all this, he thinks I am imagining things.‘
She gestured vaguely, her hand taking in the small hallway and the stairs. They went to sit down in the front room, directly overlooking the graveyard.
‘What will you do?’ Asna asked.
‘I will say a few words, in each room. I will be asking for a blessing, and protection, on the house and its inhabitants. You do not have to join in the prayers, but we will both give responses. You can remain silent, if you wish.’
The Rector smiled kindly at the two sisters, Asna in smart salwar kameez and a bright headscarf, Salimah more disheveled, as though the high standards of housekeeping apparent around them did not extend to her own appearance. He stood up and started speaking. There was no preamble, no book or candle. The Curate listened to the words and hoped that they would bring the listeners some reassurance.
‘Visit, Lord, we pray, this place and drive far from it all the snares of the enemy.’
They continued from room to room, the small procession seeming overly large in the little house. The Curate admired the garden from the hallway window.
‘Let your holy angels dwell here to keep us in peace, and may your blessing be upon it ever more; through Jesus Christ our Lord.’
It was in the children’s upstairs bedroom that all of a sudden the Curate smelt it. It was a terrible stench, something with such an intensity of decay and horror in it that he almost gagged and rushed to the window.
‘What is it?’
‘You smell it, too?’ asked Salimah.
‘I can’t smell a thing’ said Asna. She was staring at him.
‘It’s horrible! Have you got mice, or rats? I’ve never…’
As he struggled with the old sash window, the smell disappeared.
‘It’s gone!’
Salimah shrugged. ‘That’s how it is, I smell it, my boy smells it. The little one, I don’t know, but she wakes up at night sometimes screaming in her cot. My husband can’t smell anything. I’ve done everything I can, I keep all the food hidden away, the council says there’s no mice, there isn’t anything’. She sounded weary rather than afraid.
The Curate noticed for the first time that there were cans of air freshener in every room.
The Rector looked at both the women. ‘Excuse me. Shall we continue?’
Salimah was finding it hard to sleep after getting Farihah to settle down. She had tried taking the little girl into her own bed at first but it had not comforted her. None of the household had had much sleep for the last few nights and she had tried teething gel and painkillers in case that was what was causing the problem but it didn’t seem to help. Farihah would be upright in her cot, shrieking and shrieking with real fear on her face.
‘Night terrors,’ Asna would tell Salimah on the phone.
But Salimah found that after one of these night-time episodes she would lie awake for what seemed like hours, staring at the cracks in the ceiling or watching shapes form and then disappear again in the patterns of the net curtains.
She heard Ibrahim’s key turn in the lock. She knew his movements as well as her own. He went to the kitchen to put away his things and she heard him clattering about, opening and closing the cupboards. Then he came upstairs and went to the bathroom where she heard him washing. However, after that there was silence. Normally, at this point he would go to say his early morning prayers. Salimah got out of bed, wrapped a shawl around herself and went to look for him. The house was empty. She rang his mobile in panic.
‘Where are you?’ She told him what she had heard. He sounded sleepy.
‘I’m coming home. I just finished my shift. Don’t be silly, there’s nothing to be afraid of.’
‘It sounded as though someone else came into the house.’
‘Well, no one did, you said the house was empty. Look, I’ll be home soon, alright?’ He cut off the call.
Ibrahim’s presence once he was finally home in bed, his back turned to her and his eyes firmly closed, wasn’t as reassuring as she had hoped.
Later, deep in sleep, Salimah awoke in confusion and terror with Ibrahim’s hands fastened tightly around her neck. She wanted to cry out, but couldn’t. It was like the worst sort of dream, but the pain and fear told her she was awake. Why were his hands so cold? His eyes were open but seemed glazed, not like those of the man she knew. The sense of something evil in the room was very strong now, so strong that Salimah could almost see it. His hands were tightening and Salimah was about to pass out, but she could see her mother’s face flash brightly before her eyes. ‘There will always be someone watching over you.’ With a huge effort she managed to get her hands up to his and pulled at his fingers, pulling them back until his hands loosened their grip for a second, enough for her to pull her upper body from under his and then, kicking and scratching in terror, roll from the bed onto the floor. He got up and started walking towards her, his eyes still with that absent and terrifying stare.
Andrew found Salimah outside the church as he was locking up after the morning service. She was standing looking at the stained glass window. She smiled at him.
‘It’s beautiful. I’ve never really looked at it properly although I used to walk through the churchyard all the time.’
‘How are you?’
‘Much better. I wanted to come and say thank you for your help. I’m staying with Asna now, with my children.’
‘And your husband?’
A shadow passed over her face. ‘He has moved away from us now. He is living with his brother. I had to hit him with the bedside lamp, when the djinn took him over. I told the police he was sleepwalking because he’d been sleeping so badly. He didn’t believe in the djinn, but it came to him.’
‘I want to show you something. I only found this out recently, when I was researching for the history walk and came across a book about crime in the East End of London.’
He walked with her over to a grave that stood by itself at the edge of the churchyard. ‘The occupant of this grave was originally intended to be a Mr Samuel Reed, a surgical instrument maker. He was a regular churchgoer and lived alone. He was discovered as a suicide in 1810 – he had hanged himself. A letter was found among his effects that confessed to the murder of a young woman ten years previously. The worst of this was that the body of his poor victim, a Miss Lizzy Barnes, who was identified by a locket he had kept among his papers, had been buried in his own home, under the floorboards.’
‘Who was she?’ asked Salimah, her eyes on the grave, where little could be seen except the name and the date, 1800. The inscription read simply ‘May She Rest in Peace’.
‘She was of uncertain occupation, and may have been what they called in those days a fallen woman, or a woman looking for work as a maid or housekeeper, it’s hard to tell. He did not explain why he killed her in his letter, only spoke of “a need and compulsion so strong that it took hold of my mind, despite all efforts to tame it through prayer and good works. A need so strong that I almost fear it will outlive me.” His confession asked that his victim be given a Christian burial in the plot that he had reserved for himself, where we are standing. He also asked forgiveness for his crime. His own body, as he was a self-confessed murderer and a suicide, was buried with a stake through his heart at a crossroad on Ratcliffe Highway’.
‘Where did he live?’ said Salimah, still looking at the gravestone.
The Curate pointed towards the row of Victorian terraced houses where Salimah’s old house stood, now with metal shutters on the windows while the council found a new tenant.
‘There.’
Salimah took a break after she had finished weeding the raised beds in the city farm and went to sit in the arbour she had created above the bench. All around her she could see the fruits of her work: squash whose ripe, plump flesh seemed to invite touching, bright chillis, plump aubergines with purple flesh, okra, spinach plants. All around her was beauty, calm and order. In the distance a cock crowed. Salimah herself was no longer thin and pinched, her skin glowed with health and her eyes shone. Sitting by herself in the garden, she thought: now I am home. Now I can live in peace.
HACKNEY
The Hackney Factor
Ricky Oh
Eva hated how selfish people could be. Fucking hated it. And she didn’t swear. Not out loud anyway. The other day, she was trying to get on a bus at Liverpool Street. She was there with a stuffed-to-the-gunnels bag full of nappies and wet wipes and spare trousers and juice and raisins and rice crispie-encrusted picture books and various plastic items in primary colours. But the hundreds of people, people without buggies or children or changing bags, didn’t seem to see her. Everyone seemed to barge past her to get on. One person actually kicked Milly, her two-year-old, as she trampled over her buggy to swipe her Oyster while she barked into her Nokia. It was as if Eva and Milly and the buggy and the bags were invisible. But then she was SEP – somebody-else’s problem – and, as such, pretty much something to be ignored.
When she did eventually get on – thank god there weren’t any more people with buggies already on the bus, as she wouldn’t have been allowed on at all – besuited business men tutted as she politely asked if they minded moving a little to let her into the designated space for buggies and prams. Then, when it felt like it couldn’t get any worse, a middle-aged and slightly snotty-looking woman started holding onto the handles of the buggy for balance. Eva asked her, again politely, to let go as, if she fell over she would simply pull the buggy over with her and hurt her child, but the woman simply let lose a blast of abuse. Eva got off at the next stop and walked home.
But it wasn’t all like that. In fact, it wasn’t like that at all where she lived. And she was eternally grateful for that.
Okay, it had a bit of a bad reputation, murder mile everyone called it, but she had never seen anyone get shot. She had seen a car with police, do-not-cross tape around it and a bullet hole in its windscreen once, but that was all. No, Hackney was an ace place to live. And buses were brilliant, especially compared with trying to negotiate the Tube with a buggy and its associated paraphernalia. And the people who lived in Hackney were a pleasure to associate with.
The ‘Hackney Factor’ Eva called it. And it made her smile.
The nightmare journey was long forgotten now. Washed away by another day’s duties and responsibilities. She had decided to take Milly to the library to get her her first library card. Which made her smile too as the new library in Hackney is on Reading Lane, a pun lost on Milly at the moment, but one Eva hoped to share with her daughter as soon as she might understand. She had handled the logistical nightmare of ferrying a small person around with aplomb today and the sun was shining and all was well with the world.
At the Millfields Road stop on Lower Clapton Road, Eva put the brake on the buggy a
nd handed Milly a piece of banana. Milly dropped the fruit and pointed at the JCB that seemed to have been digging up the road for as long as she’d been alive. Today, instead of chug-chug-chugging at the macadam it sat empty and motionless as the blokes from the council or the gas board or electricity or Thames Water or whoever’s turn it happened to be to cause traffic chaos in E8 today smoked rollies and laughed.
Behind her in the bus shelter old women sat down clutching their tartan wheelie trolleys for dear life and she smiled to herself some more as Milly stopped pointing at the digger, pointed at the old women and shouted ‘twirly’. The word twirly was an anachronism from her childhood back in Nottinghamshire. Back then the old age pensioners’ bus pass didn’t allow anyone to travel before 9.30 in the morning and at 9.25 or so random old women and flat-capped old blokes would climb aboard the buses waving their passes asking in that peculiar north Nottinghamshire accent that still made Eva cringe a bit: ‘Am a twirly to use me bus pass duck?’ It still made her smile though.
As she and Milly waited for the 48 she couldn’t help but think that no-one had called her ‘duck’ for a very long time. Even her mum, who had got the courage up to get the train from Nottingham down to St Pancras to visit her for a few days a couple of months back didn’t use it any more. At the thought of her mum Eva stopped smiling and sighed a little sigh.
The long-awaited visit started out as a bit of a disaster actually. Eva had been telling her mum, now at a bit of a loose end after her dad had died the year before in a car accident, that Hackney was great and her new flat was ace and she should come down and see the sights and her granddaughter. Eva booked the tickets online and they had only cost a few quid, which Eva paid. Her mum got a lift to the station in Nottingham with someone from church and Eva had decided to get a taxi from St Pancras, to her flat. It was all sorted and it was going to be a lovely break for all three of them.
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