The Friendly Ones

by Philip Hensher

  Sharif went over to look at a letter in Steve Smithers’s handwriting.

  ‘Nonferrous, I think,’ he said.

  ‘Nonferrous,’ Mrs Browning said. ‘I wish your colleagues would take especial care to write difficult words clearly. Those children, I think they’re from Gower. That’s a school. Their sports lesson starts at nine, but they make their own way up here, apparently.’

  ‘I see,’ Sharif said. ‘Is it going to be every Wednesday, do you know?’

  He put it from his mind and certainly did not mention it to Nazia. The twins were nearly four, and exhausting presences, even now they had a big garden behind their stone house in Hillsborough for them to run about in. Nazia liked the Hillsborough house more than their last one, in Lodge Moor. There had been two or three days together, both winters, when there was no possibility of leaving the house, so deeply had the snow fallen. There was, too, the question of the neighbours in Sycamore Close, some of whom had never made any effort to greet or speak to Nazia or Sharif, even the single man next door with the little white dog. ‘You just have to accept it,’ Sharif said. ‘There are the unpleasant ones, who you wouldn’t want to know in any case. And then there are the friendly ones. It’s always going to be the same.’

  And certainly, down here in Hillsborough, the neighbours were more open. Nazia’s best friend Sally Mottishead knew some people who lived opposite, and they had introduced them to quite a lot more. When, two months after their moving into the house in Hillsborough, Sharif’s little sister Bina arrived, they had been able to take her round and introduce her to half the neighbourhood. She was going to marry this year, and move to Cardiff where her husband-to-be, Tinku, the son of one of Father’s student friends from Calcutta, was an industrial chemist. Then the fourth bedroom could be reserved for one of the twins when they grew a little older, or kept for guests. It was impossible to imagine anyone in Myatt Road shouting, ‘Paki,’ at them, or even thinking it.

  The Wednesday following, the same boys were kicking a ball about, and again their attention was drawn by Sharif getting out of his car. He wore a neat tweed jacket and polished brown shoes; a countrified checked shirt with a plain brown tie; his hair was thick and black still at thirty-seven; he was tidy and healthy-looking, his hands small and plump, his face open. He looked, surely, like a professor of material science at an English university, the joint author of a first-year university textbook for students that promised to be indispensable and highly profitable. ‘You’ll find everything you need to know about ceramics in Sharifullah and Burns,’ people were already saying to each other. Here, with his neatly shone shoes, was Sharifullah himself. His skin was unmistakably that of a person whose ancestry was from one part of the world. He did not think many people placed very high importance on that when they met him. But today, and last week, boys preparing to play soccer on the football pitch had shouted the word ‘Paki’ at him, and laughed when he had walked away towards the safety of the building at a slightly faster pace than was perhaps natural.

  He looked Gower School up in the departmental phone book, and noticed that it was in the same postcode as Wincobank, where last year, with the first of the royalties from the textbook, he and Nazia had bought two nearly adjacent terraced houses for almost nothing. They were going to renovate them and rent them out to students. He made a note of the school’s general enquiries number, and in his office began to dial it. He hung up, one digit short. There was nothing to be said, and he could not imagine that they would say anything to the children that would have any useful effect.

  This time he would say something at home. Wednesday was his heaviest day for work: a lecture and a seminar, and in the afternoon, when they were not supposed to teach by agreement with the Students’ Union, Sharif was ‘at home’ to any student who wanted to drop in. Today, too, one of his PhD students had to be seen to talk over some questions of properties on the nano scale – that was not a chore: that was something potentially rather exciting, Sharif felt. But it meant he did not get home until half past six, and Nazia and Bina were almost at the point of putting the shepherd’s pie on the table without him.

  He wanted to ask the question as soon as he came through the door, but Nazia would know that it had a cause, and that would affect the answer. He came in, and the boys were sitting on the stairs, as they liked to. Their faces lit up on seeing their daddy. In the sitting room, music was playing: Aisha’s latest pop band, a man who performed with a white stripe across his face and a pirate jacket on. Nazia came out of the kitchen to greet him, and Bina behind her. She scolded him that the boys could not wait for ever for their dinner and she had been on the point of putting the dinner on the table without him. Bina, a nice humorous presence in the house, pouted in amusement behind his wife. Sharif asked what was for dinner, although he knew; Nazia said that it was shepherd’s pie with peas. ‘Did you hear that, boys?’ Sharif said, raising his feet delicately over their heads as he went upstairs. ‘Shepherd’s pie with peas and ketchup.’

  ‘We know, Daddy,’ Raja said, but with pleasure and excitement. It was their favourite meal.

  He let the conversation go its way. Bina had gone to the library to borrow some books with Nazia’s ticket; she had taken the boys with her. Nazia had gone over to Wincobank to see how the building works were going on. Sally had come with her again. The kitchen at number eighty-two was looking very nice, and she really thought – Sally thought so too – they could put some furniture in number fifty-seven. They would have student tenants there by September. Joe was a real treasure – he’d suggested today that she’d find it would work out cheaper to get him to make and fit cupboards and shelves, rather than buy them from Habitat.

  This was perhaps Sharif’s chance to ask the question that had been in his mind in a general way.

  ‘What do you think they think of us?’ he said.

  ‘Joe and the boys? I think they like me very much,’ Nazia said. ‘It’s my project, after all, and they’re getting paid for it. I don’t know what they think of you.’

  ‘The English. The whities. When they look at us, what do they see?’

  ‘The whities?’ Bina said. Her nephews, seated side by side on the opposite side of the table, raised to shepherd’s-pie height with cushions, looked at her brightly. They had learnt to recognize and enjoy the first stages of an argument brewing: that was their main claim to being Bengali. It was in the blood.

  ‘The whities?’ Nazia said, and she began to laugh.

  2.

  She went on laughing. She could hear it in her throat, coming up and choking her, like bile. An aura of heat and glowing colour was in the room, radiating out from the table with its peculiar burden. What did they think of us what did they think of us. She laughed. A woman passing a remark and walking away. Out there the gaze and the hidden opinion. There they were and they were like no one else. A man in his office behind his desk asking a question and looking at them with distaste, the crinkle in his lip. What did they think of us. This man at the table looking at her, who was he who was he. She laughed. He was married to her. She said the word to herself marriage marriage marriage and then the word for what she was, stri stri stri. Wife. The gaze falling on her and on him and on those around the table, the children they had together, the big one the medium one the small one the other small one.

  What did they think of us.

  She was laughing. They looked at them from the outside of that house and the outside of this house. They were not like them. They had come here but why had they come here. To be the topic of interest. The room was full of heat and a light that came from the table, green yellow. They had come from somewhere but that somewhere had gone now. They could not go back, they were looked at there and they were looked at here.

  What did they think of us.

  What did they think of us.

  She was laughing and laughing and out of her it came an ugly ugly noise and they stared and she did not know how to stop and outside there were people who had been born
here who stared at her and said why are you here what are you thinking look at you and look at your children and. Out there somewhere there was Brother. There was Mahfouz she knew his name and he was stared at and they said to him why are you here but no one would they ever would. They could see that difference and that was enough and they would never be part of any of this. She laughed and laughed and laughed and laughed.

  3.

  Later that evening she spoke to Sharif. She had gone to bed and he was in the bathroom attached to their bedroom, washing with the door open.

  ‘I don’t know what happened,’ she said.

  ‘You were overtired,’ he said. ‘It happens, sometimes.’

  He took those fifteen minutes at the table to himself, to consider alone. He would never speak about the episode again. He had asked how they were thought of, and the laughter she poured out was the laughter of one with a knife to their throat. Anisul had laughed like that when he turned and he saw what few seconds remained to him. He was sure of it.

  The next Wednesday he drove into the car park with a firm idea in his mind. The children from Gower were there. He made a small performance of shyness as he got out of the car. They would not shout if they thought he was likely to turn round.

  ‘There’s that fooking Paki,’ one cried out. Was it the same one every time? ‘Paki! You fooking Paki in your fooking shirt and tie! Fooking look at the little Paki!’

  Sharif turned. His expression was forcibly mild. He walked up to the fence. The children stood exactly where they were, not moving and not quailing. They had the right to this land: that was what was in their minds. He had not looked at them closely before now. There were seven of them. The one who, he thought, had shouted was short and sharp-featured, with very dark hair that stuck up at the back and paper-white skin. They all wore shorts and T-shirts; one or two wore those drapes of wool around the ankle called legwarmers.

  ‘Did you call me a Paki?’ he said.

  ‘Paki’s come over,’ the boy shouted, with something like affected glee. The others were less sure.

  ‘Did you call me a Paki?’ Sharif said again. ‘I am not a Paki. I am certainly not a Paki. If anything, I am a Bangi.’

  ‘You’re a Paki,’ the boy said, but not shouting now, speaking with derisory contempt to Sharif on the other side of the fence. ‘Look at you in your shirt and tie.’

  ‘That is because I teach at the university here,’ Sharif said. ‘And I am not a Paki. If I were Pakistani, I could understand your shouting “Paki” at me. I would not like it, but I would understand it. Do you know what I am? My country was Bangladesh. I have more reasons to hate the Pakistanis than you do. They ruled my country for twenty-four years. They robbed us. They forbade us to speak our own language. When we voted for one of us to run the country, they annulled the election. They murdered people I knew and loved, and they murdered my brother. How old are you?’

  ‘Paki’s asking how old we are,’ the sharp-featured boy said. He was intelligent-looking. He could have done well. The other children were dull in their faces. They had no spark or interest; they could not even walk away through self-awareness. Towards them was coming a larger person, a grown man.

  ‘It was only ten years ago,’ Sharif said. ‘You weren’t born then.’

  ‘Fook off,’ the boy said, and some of his friends started to laugh. ‘I’m fooking fourteen, I am.’

  ‘I’m fifteen,’ another boy said, his hair almost white, his jaw square, like a hero’s, his eyes empty of anything.

  ‘There was a war,’ Sharif said. ‘I had a brother two years older than you. You would have called him a Paki too. But he wasn’t a Paki. He was fighting the Pakistanis and they took him away. We never saw him again. My mother never knew what had happened to him.’

  ‘Ay, but if he were in war, fighting as soldier, like,’ a boy offered from the back.

  ‘They tortured him,’ Sharif said. ‘The Pakistanis tortured him and they killed him and he was much the same age as you are. So I am not a Paki. You can shout out at me and call me a Bangi. But do not call me a Paki. Do not call me a Paki.’

  The man was here. He was brisk and ginger and thirtyish; he looked as empty as the boys. His head was shaved around the back and sides and his shoulders bulged from the sleeveless T-shirt he wore. ‘Are you talking to my boys?’ he said. ‘What do you want with them?’

  ‘I am not talking to your boys, as you call them,’ Sharif said. ‘They shouted inaccurate abuse at me and I was correcting their inaccurate misapprehension.’

  ‘You little bastards,’ the man said, but affectionately. ‘What they bin shouting?’

  ‘They called me a Paki,’ Sharif said. ‘I am not going to be insulted when I am parking my car at my place of work, and your boys –’

  ‘They called you a Paki? It’s not exactly wrong, though, is it?’ the man said. ‘Are you Pakistani? I don’t see there’s much wrong with –’

  ‘I was explaining precisely what is wrong with what they were shouting,’ Sharif said.

  ‘If you called me a Brit –’

  ‘I don’t care to be called what they called me,’ Sharif said, with a level gaze. ‘If you are in charge here, you will see it doesn’t happen again.’

  ‘I’ll see they don’t indulge their animal spirits in your direction again,’ the man said un-seriously. ‘They’re good lads. This is our first team. They’ll be looking at trials for clubs in two years.’

  ‘You should teach them how to read,’ Sharif said, walking away. He was not quite sure what the man meant. He understood that it was a world of no significance that he spoke about, in which his boys would in any case fail. ‘That,’ he turned his head, ‘would be of more benefit to them than the ball in the net.’

  ‘Hey!’ the man was shouting, but Sharif went on walking, into the faculty. He walked with a certain buoyancy in his stride. Those children would dream of football and kick balls around until they could kick balls into nets six or seven times out of ten. Then they would fail in their dreamt endeavour and would have to be sent off to learn how to read. Sharif knew that they could not read, or not much. No person who could read looked like that, so animal in the gaze, either docile or blankly raging. They didn’t know what they were here on earth to do. That was the future for the English.

  There was ten minutes before his first student, and he could hear the shouting and whistling from the pitch behind the building. He picked up the telephone and dialled an internal number. In four minutes he had extracted a commitment from the registry that they would speak to the headmaster of Gower School and extract a number of commitments in turn, before the school was allowed to use the university facilities again. Sharif put the telephone down. He had ruined a child’s life – somewhere, one of those sharp-featured boys in the crowd had a talent with the unlettered ball and an instinctive understanding of the spatial dimensions of a trajectory that needed no marks on paper. A dog could catch a thrown ball, after all. The brilliant moron, somewhere in that crowd, would have to do without the support of the university’s facilities, and he would fail in life because of it. Sharif was glad. And in a moment Mr Wentworth and Mr Tan knocked on his door, and he welcomed them in and began to explain, yet again, about ductile fracture equations.

  4.

  How had Nazia’s friendship with Sally Mottishead come about? She was her first white friend, she believed – the only one she would say anything to as if she were talking to a sister, without restraint or worrying about the effect it would have. Now she felt, indeed, that she talked to her in ways that she did not talk to Bina. Sally had offered to take the children and look after them overnight when they had driven to Heathrow to collect Bina. It would be a lovely adventure for them, she said. And there were seven at home: what would three more be, especially since two were so small and really only halves of the same small one anyway?

  A kind of shyness, it turned out, had sprung up between her and Bina, the shyness of five years and the gap before adulthood. The small unt
idy person, just recognizable as Sharif’s little-sister, had fallen asleep in the back seat of the car after her long flight. They had come home to the surprisingly quiet house and put her to bed. In an hour Sally Mottishead was there with the three children, holding the hand of one each of the twins, Aisha walking in a very ladylike way up the Hillsborough path, wanting to make a good impression on Aunty Bina, as Sally observed from behind. Nazia had melted with gratitude, and made Sally a cup of tea.

  At first the mothers and the daughters had been an indeterminate mass, all much the same; the daughters, glimpsed in their finery on Saturday afternoons and hardly to be identified with the small figures in brown and mustard and navy blue hurrying into or away from school on weekdays. The mothers, too, had a kind of careful finery for those Saturday afternoons, and for the longest time Nazia could not be sure which was which. There was the mother with an amber brooch whom she pictured surrounded by an arbour of white clematis; the mother in a cottage with the flagstoned path running up to it in a disorganized, charming, overgrown way; there was the mother whose garden gate had a sunray pattern and whose house had no net curtains, the one who was plump and jolly in a red party dress, who laughed a lot when she was saying hello, somehow laughing at a point beyond Nazia in exactly the same way she would laugh beyond someone she didn’t know and didn’t know how to engage with. That last one was Caroline’s mummy, Nazia knew for certain.

  Where had Sally Mottishead fitted in? Her daughter was Sam, short for Samantha, and Aisha must have gone to her party. It was incredible, but Nazia had no memory of walking up to the Mottisheads’ astonishing house that first time. It was a fantasy of turrets and chhatris, balconies and encaustic-tiled buttresses smothered by a forest of Himalayan rhododendrons. From the road you could glimpse only the princely peaks of the house, red-tiled and story-like. Nazia had met Sally when Sam had come to Aisha’s birthday party. Therefore she must have taken Aisha to Sam’s birthday party, because she knew that Sam was only invited out of obligation – Sam was not one of Aisha’s intimates, for deplorable reasons to do with breathing through her mouth when she read and always being the first to put her hand up in class. But she had no memory of taking her there. Sally was one of a crowd of mothers for most of that summer. It was only at Aisha’s own birthday party that she had extracted herself with a galumph and a breaking of the rules that Nazia thought she had understood. After that, Nazia started to recognize the other mothers, to tell them one apart from the other and to want to talk to them. But Sally Mottishead was first.