‘We’re tidying it up because you made the mess,’ I said, throwing a dishcloth at her. ‘And we’d leave you to sort your own mess out if there wasn’t enough crap going on already.’
What was she on?
‘The feeling just came to me,’ she said. ‘This inspiration just took hold and I knew what I had to do. I don’t even remember what I was doing or how I did it.’
I rolled my eyes and opened my mouth to say something but Fatti shook her head at me.
‘Well,’ she said to Bubblee, ‘now it’s out of your system, let’s just tidy it all so it’s back to normal before Mum has a heart attack.’
Bubblee picked up the ketchup bottle and screwed the lid back on. ‘Normality,’ she said. ‘It’s the curse of us all.’
By the time Mum and Dad came down we’d managed to clear everything. Not that that would’ve made much difference to hawk-eye Mum who knows when a leaf’s fallen out of place, but when she came into the living room with Dad her eyes immediately fell on the new photo on the mantelpiece.
‘Do you like it there?’ Malik asked them. ‘I asked Fatima why you would hide such a lovey photo.’
He watched them, pointedly, as their faces began to look shifty.
‘Maybe a photo of you as a baby isn’t something they wanted to display,’ said Bubblee.
I waited for someone to say something but neither Mum nor Dad seemed to be paying attention to their rowdy daughter. Malik stood up and Dad seemed to look even smaller next to him.
‘Photo of me?’ he said, picking up the picture and looking at it before handing it over to them. ‘Yes. Maybe that’s it.’
Fatti’s gaze flitted between our parents and Malik, in confusion. Or contemplation. One of the two. Keys rattled in the front door and it was Farah who came in, throwing the daily paper down.
‘How is he?’ asked Dad.
Malik was looking at him in a way that, actually, was a little creepy and it seemed as if Dad knew it.
‘Same,’ she replied before walking out of the room and into the kitchen.
This weird kind of silence took place in the room. They say you could cut some kinds of tension with a knife, but I was a bit confused about where this tension was coming from. Malik then just took the paper, sitting down and opening it up. As his eyes began to skim some headline, he furrowed his eyebrows. His head seemed to be moving in pace with his eyes as he leaned forward.
‘Wha …’ he began. He looked up and then down, skimming through the article again. ‘Has anyone read this?’
Everyone looked blankly at him as he held the paper up.
‘What?’ asked Bubblee.
Mum and Dad had sat down and were looking at each other, not really paying attention to Malik’s question.
‘Social Media, Prize-Winning Poodles and The Man in a Coma,’ he said.
We all looked at him.
‘The car crash reported on Thursday night – which had an adverse effect on the neighbourhood’s prized poodle – resulted in an un-named party being taken critically ill and has taken a surprise soap-opera-like twist,’ said Malik, reading from the paper.
My heart began to pound.
‘A blog that’s had over eight thousand shares on social media platforms brings to light a local family feud in which the victim allegedly gave his brother-in-law access to his business accounts. The brother-in-law then took advantage of this and used an unspecified, but to be believed, large sum of money to invest in an unsecure business venture. The victim discovered the loss of this money over the phone while driving, thus causing a head-on collision, resulting in the victim’s hospitalisation where he’s still believed to be in a coma.’
I was going to be sick. Actually sick. It couldn’t be me, surely – there’s no way it could’ve happened. I used a pseudonym. How can you connect a blog with a fake name to a man in a coma? Everyone was staring at Malik as he continued to read, talking about the need to be stricter on banning the use of phones when driving, the role of social media in catching people who break the law and Mrs Lemington’s poodle. When he’d finished, everyone just looked at each other. Calm down, Mae. No names have been named. This could be about anyone. Anyone. But even as I kept telling myself that, I felt sick. How did this story get out?
‘Give me that,’ said Bubblee, snatching the paper from him.
She skimmed over the article and then looked straight at me. She knew. I didn’t know how or why, but she knew. Mum kept turning her head, looking side-to-side. ‘What’s happening?’ she said.
‘Bubblee?’ said Dad.
Bubblee was still looking at me. ‘Oh, Mae.’
She dropped the paper in front of me and I saw the URL of my blog page available. I realised my sister follows my life more than I thought she did.
She sat back down, not taking her eyes off me. ‘You need to tell us everything.’
CHAPTER TEN
Farah
My head spun. Or the room did. Someone shifted off the sofa; I fell into it, my legs feeling as if they were about to give way. It didn’t make any sense. It was like watching a TV drama unfold, except it wasn’t on TV – it was my life.
‘I don’t … I don’t … what?’ Everyone stared at me as if I was on the verge of death.
Maybe I was. Maybe this is what the end feels like?
‘Jay caused the accident? He lost Mustafa’s money?’ I asked Mae again.
Because if I asked enough times, surely the answer would be the right one; the one that was logical. Mae nodded.
‘But it doesn’t make sense,’ I said.
Because how would Jay even have access to any money belonging to my husband? Then I remembered my last conversation with Mustafa. He’d hired Jay to help – because my parents had asked him. Jay had done this? My little brother?
‘Why didn’t you tell anyone?’ snapped Mum at Mae.
‘He told me not to because he was trying to get the money back,’ Mae replied.
Jay? The one I used to watch as Mum changed his nappies. I’d get him to eat when no-one else could – his chubby little hands holding on to the spoon and dropping half its contents on the floor, which always made me laugh. Mae looked at everyone who seemed to be looming over her, their eyebrows knitted, arms folded. Why wouldn’t the room stop spinning? I had to close my eyes. When I opened them again, Bubblee was flapping her arms at Mae.
‘How?’ she said.
‘I don’t know.’
‘You didn’t ask?’
‘Look, Mae’s not the one who lost the money,’ interjected Fatti.
There was a lot of noise. I wanted to put my hands over my ears just so I could hear my own thoughts. Just so I could understand what was happening: Jay lost my husband’s money; he told him this while Mustafa was driving; Mustafa crashed his car. And is now in a coma.
‘She shouldn’t be keeping secrets,’ said Mum.
Malik drew closer so that he was standing next to Bubblee. I stared at their arms that were touching. The grey of her T-shirt against the navy of his shirt. Grey and navy go well together.
‘How much money are we talking about, Mae?’ I asked.
Nothing.
‘How much?’ I pressed.
‘A lot,’ she replied. ‘Sorry, I don’t know, but he seemed pretty stressed about it.’
‘That’s good of him,’ said Bubblee.
‘I mean – I reckon it means your house … it’s in danger.’
I watched Mae’s little face – her fine nose and her eyes that were squinting at me, as if every word she said gave her a jab in the gut. I couldn’t even locate my gut at that time.
‘Reckon?’ I said.
She paused, biting her lip and looking at the floor as she nodded. I put my head in my hands. My husband was in a coma and we were in so much debt I could lose my house. It didn’t compute. Surely there was some kind of mistake. My brother couldn’t do this to me. My husband couldn’t.
‘And you’re saying that he was on the phone to Mustafa, telling h
im about this money he’d lost just before the accident?’
‘Mustafa hung up and that’s when … you know.’
‘Did Jay know what happened?’
I could feel my voice break. These past few days I hadn’t asked about my brother because there were too many other things to think about, but what if he knew? And he still didn’t come.
Mae shrugged. ‘No. He said he tried to call back.’
‘How much did he try?’
Once? Twice? Three times? Why didn’t he call every minute of every day and then call me?
‘I don’t know,’ she murmured. ‘He probably just thought Mustafa needed some time.’
‘Or he was burying his head in the sand,’ added Bubblee.
Wouldn’t it be nice to be able to do that for a change? I kept thinking I might wake up because it all seemed like too much of a nightmare to be true.
‘What are we going to do then?’ said Bubblee, looking at everyone; more specifically Mum and Dad.
‘We don’t know the full story yet,’ said Dad.
‘Yes, Abba, we do,’ Bubblee retorted, waving the paper around. ‘It’s right here for everyone to see. If you’re willing to see, that is.’
‘It can’t be this bad,’ said Mum. ‘There will be an explanation.’
I couldn’t sit there listening to them talk any longer. I got up, ran up the stairs and into the bathroom, slamming the door behind me. Looking around, I wondered what exactly I was meant to do in there. It’s the only place I seemed to be able to get away from everyone. There was a bottle of Cif that I picked up, along with some rubber gloves and I began scrubbing the bathroom tiles. Barely five minutes passed when I heard Fatti and Mae, hovering outside as I flung the door open.
‘Would you just get on with what you’re doing? And let me get on with what I’m doing?’
So, that’s what my voice sounds like when I shout. It’s not something I do very often. They both looked at me, alarmed as I slammed the door. Ignoring the muttering from outside, I suddenly felt drained of energy and sat back, leaning against the bath tub, the Cif and sponge laid by my side.
It wasn’t my husband I thought of, lying in hospital, or my brother – wherever he was. It wasn’t even the idea that my life was in financial crisis and that, potentially, we actually had no money at all. It was me. I was thinking about the person I was and had become. And how it happened. Was I always this trusting? Did I ever question things or did my lack of curiosity come about slowly? Day after day of content marriage? You can’t complain about having had a decent life with a man who loves you and who you love, but something happened in between. I wanted children and it never happened – never was going to happen – and so everything just became a blur. I didn’t quite get it. Just like I didn’t get Jay. Just like I didn’t get my husband.
Someone knocked on the door before Bubblee’s face peeked through it.
‘We’re going to the hospital,’ she said.
I picked up the Cif, squirted the dusty edges of the bathtub and began scrubbing. She lingered at the door.
‘We’ll just wait downstairs. Until you’re ready.’ She waited for me to answer. ‘We should see how he’s doing,’ she added.
‘So, now it matters to you whether he lives or dies,’ I replied.
Why couldn’t everyone just leave me alone? They don’t care when Fatti hibernates in her room. Why couldn’t I hibernate in the bathroom?
‘Jay’s just as much to blame here as Mustafa,’ she said.
I wondered: how can two people split from the same egg be so different? And why didn’t my eggs work? If I had twins, I’d bring them up differently – they wouldn’t be me and Bubblee because I’d do the opposite of everything my mum and dad did. If I had a boy he’d be on the stage with the rest of them, not on a pedestal, watching the show. The tiredness came in waves and this time it made me want to cry. All I needed was for my twin sister to sit next to me in silence. But people never do live up to your expectations of them. I just never thought mine were so high. Isn’t honesty and loyalty the bare minimum of any relationship? I rubbed away at the polished ceramic.
‘Can I … can I come in?’
I looked up to see Malik standing behind Fatti and Bubblee. There were just too many people in this house, but it’s not as if I could shout at him. He was a guest, after all, and not nearly as annoying as everyone else at that moment. He seemed to take my silence as a yes and squeezed past my two sisters as they both watched him standing over me. As he closed the door behind him, Bubblee had never looked so outraged. He perched on the edge of the tub, clasping his hands and pursing his mouth into a sympathetic smile. My graciousness towards him was waning quite fast.
‘On a practical level, we don’t yet know what this means,’ he said.
Looking back on all my conversations with Mustafa about bills and payments, I could tell Malik what it meant – exactly what Mae said it did: that we could lose our home.
‘We know enough,’ I said.
He nodded and paused. ‘I wasn’t sure whether to say anything to you before because I didn’t know …’ He brushed his hand through his hair. ‘I didn’t know how bad the situation was. The truth is, I spoke to Mustafa a week before his accident and he said he was having some financial troubles. He didn’t tell me how bad they were, or the details, and I didn’t ask, because it wasn’t my place. He needed to borrow money, but I didn’t have the kind that he needed.’
The floor seemed to spin and blur. This would’ve been before Jay had taken Mustafa’s company’s money. Not only was Mustafa already in trouble, but he was stupid enough to trust Jay with access to the company account.
‘I wanted to help him, Bhabi, but he was so vague about it and wouldn’t give me any straight answers.’
I took a deep breath and exhaled, trying to calm my nerves.
‘I was worried about him, but I thought you would’ve known. He told you everything,’ he said.
‘Not everything,’ I replied. ‘Clearly.’
‘I’m telling you all this because when I spoke to him he would say how he wanted to make you happy because …’
‘Because what?’
He cleared his throat. ‘Every couple has their problems.’ He lowered his eyes, refusing to look straight at me. ‘He just wanted to find another way to make you happy. He kept telling me that he’d create an app and that you’d have so much money, you’d never have to worry about anything again.’
As if money bought babies. As if that would somehow make it all better? Why did Malik think this was helpful? Why didn’t he see, that if anything, it made me want to smash every single item in this bathroom; in this house?
‘Because cash is a great substitute for a baby?’ I said.
He looked at the ground again. ‘I’m sorry, I just want you to know that he was only thinking of you. Nothing mattered more to him.’
I sighed and leaned my head back, closing my eyes. ‘He’s not done a very good job, has he?’
Just then there was another knock on the door as Mae looked in. She didn’t take two seconds to fall on to her knees.
‘Far, I’m so sorry I didn’t tell you, but Jay was right in a way, and I wasn’t sure, and Bubblee had left, so it all felt, like, mental.’
She glanced up at Malik as if he were spoiling her whole speech, but he didn’t move.
‘Announcing it like that to the public, though, Mae,’ I said. ‘I mean, for everyone to see. Everyone to know.’
I wondered how long it’d take for our neighbours to find out and for everything in my life, which seemed to be spiralling out of control, to be common knowledge. It probably already was. It’s not as if much else happened in this town.
‘They didn’t mention any names,’ she said. ‘And my blog’s under a pseudonym.’
‘Mae, how many people had a car accident last week, aggravated Mrs Lemington’s prized poodle, and then ended up in a coma?’
Malik was still perched on the tub, watching the two of
us. I did wish he’d leave us alone.
‘Stupid poodle,’ she said.
‘You need to think about the things you say sometimes, Mae. The things you do. Not everything that happens in life is a potential project for you; something to put online and tell the world about. Especially when that life is someone else’s.’
My legs were beginning to hurt from sitting in the same position for too long but I didn’t have the energy or will to move. Mae was still kneeling next to me. I couldn’t quite see her face that was lowered, probably for the shame she felt. When I turned around I saw Dad standing at the doorway, glancing at Malik before looking away as soon as their eyes met.
‘Faru. Come on, Babba. Your husband needs you,’ said Dad.
I let out a small laugh. So, Dad, I wanted to say, if the roles were reversed and I’d squandered all our money on some venture cooked up by my brother-in-law and never told my partner about it, would I get the same understanding? Would you say, Your wife needs you? Typical. I sounded like Bubblee. I pulled myself off the floor, chucking the Cif and sponge to the side and taking off my pink rubber gloves.
‘Fine, Abba.’
With which I walked past everyone so we could go and visit my husband who, I realised, I hardly seemed to know any more.
*
‘People make mistakes,’ said Dad as we got in the car. Fatti, Mae, Malik and Bubblee left in a separate one.
I gripped the steering wheel as I saw Dad look at me from the corner of my eye. My jaw clenched.
‘And you know Mae – how much she exaggerates.’
If it was possible, I felt every muscle in my body tighten.
‘Faru,’ spoke Mum from the back. ‘You know your brother – how much he loves you. Things are harder for boys. They have different characters. They don’t think about things the same as girls do.’
Dad was nodding. ‘We’re not saying he was right, Faru. He’s made a mistake and he should’ve told you.’
‘And my husband?’ I said, looking at Dad as we stopped at a traffic light.
The Secret Lives of the Amir Sisters Page 10