Ibrahim & Reenie

by David Llewellyn

‘Right,’ said Natalie. ‘And you’re sure about that? You’ll be okay?’

  He shrugged, sure of nothing.

  ‘Okay,’ said Natalie. ‘Well, I’ll go and get the Valium. We can be out of here in ten, if that suits you.’

  Ibrahim nodded and asked if he could use her phone, and Natalie took him through to the hallway where, at the foot of the stairs an orange Bakelite phone sat on a small wooden table.

  ‘Bit old fashioned, I know,’ she said. ‘Takes ages to dial anything these days.’

  With Natalie upstairs, Ibrahim sat on the bottom step, the telephone resting in his lap. It took an age to dial his sister’s number – waiting for the dial to grind its way back from all eleven digits – but then he heard the dialling tone, and he waited.

  ‘Hello?’ She sounded sleepy. It was still early.

  ‘Aish?’

  A long silence, nothing but burbling dead air between them, until his sister spoke again.

  ‘Ib? Is that you?’

  ‘Yeah, it’s me.’

  ‘Fucking hell. I mean… Fucking hell. Ib. Where are you?’

  ‘I’m in Gloucester.’

  ‘What are you doing in Gloucester?’

  ‘I’m coming to London.’

  ‘Via fucking Gloucester?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘How? I mean… Gloucester? Are you getting the train or something? Has it been… I wrote to you a week ago. It’s Friday.’

  ‘I know, Aish. Listen. I am coming. It’s just. It’s taking me a while. But I am coming.’

  ‘Cardiff’s two hours away, Ib. What the fuck are you doing?’

  ‘Please, Aish. Just listen to me. I’m coming, okay?’

  A sigh and the line grew quiet as she placed her hand over the mouthpiece, but swore loud enough for him to hear.

  Taking her hand away again, she said, ‘Ib. I can’t do this on my own. He’s in there on his own, and I’m doing this on my own, and you’re not here.’

  ‘How is he?’

  ‘How do you think? He’s ill. Really ill. And he tries asking where you are, but what can I tell him?’

  ‘Tell him I’m coming, Aish. Tell him I’ll be there soon.’

  ‘Really? And how soon is that? Next week? Next month?’

  ‘I’ll be there soon.’

  ‘Please, Ib. Just hurry, okay?’

  ‘Okay.’

  He said goodbye to her, and his sister muttered something too fast and angry for him to understand before hanging up. Ibrahim placed the phone back on its table just as Natalie came down the stairs, a blister pack of tablets in her hand. It wasn’t clear whether she had been waiting at the top, listening to the call, and if she had what she could have gleaned from it.

  ‘Shall we?’ she said.

  Ten minutes later they were in her car, but Natalie took her time – fiddling with the rear-view mirror and her seatbelt, allowing him time to settle, to get used to it. He sat up front with her, back straight and hands cupping his knees to stop them from fidgeting. When she turned the key and the engine stirred into life he felt an icy sweat break out on his shoulders and he held his breath.

  ‘Relax,’ said Natalie. ‘I won’t drive fast, I promise.’

  She turned on the radio and the car was filled with the latter half of a piece that had been playing in the kitchen, in the final moments before they left her house.

  ‘What is this?’ asked Ibrahim.

  ‘This? Vaughan Williams. The ‘Tallis Fantasia’. Why? Do you like it?’

  ‘I don’t know. I think so.’

  He closed his eyes and focused on the music, allowing it to drown out the sounds of the car. What began so understatedly, something quiet and serene, the kind of music he had heard in countless TV adverts, built up, minute by minute, as if in layers, into something so incredibly rich it overwhelmed him. The strings breathed, loud then quiet, and swept into the air. With his eyes shut he saw wintry, leaf-bearing spirals, vast clouds of migrating starlings, like black smoke, the crashing silver foam of impossible waterfalls, great cobalt glaciers stretching out to the horizon, until the music reached a climax of almost unbearable poignancy; a moment of such emotion that it stole his breath, and this moment was sustained, so that each time he thought it might end it came back, like short, ecstatic gasps, or shallow waves at low tide, and these waves ebbed and flowed, and he felt the weight of every season that had passed, and as the climax began to fade and subside Ibrahim breathed out, and this breath was given voice by a sudden chord that came from nowhere, acting almost as an exclamation point before giving way to strings as delicate as cobwebs.

  There was a soul to this music, something inside it, something between the notes, greater than the man who wrote them down or the musicians playing them. This wasn’t music; this was something else, like a voice communicating something, telling him something that couldn’t be said in words. No, not telling him something; quite the opposite. This music had found something in him, something he could never describe, and translated it into the only medium that made sense. Anyone could hear this, listen to this, and know what it meant to be him, what it had always meant to be him.

  ‘Don’t look now,’ said Natalie. ‘But you’re in a moving car.’

  He opened his eyes and stared out through the windscreen at the road ahead, and yes, she was right; he was in a moving car. Ibrahim took another deep breath and held it. He stretched out his arms and braced himself against the dashboard, his fingers digging a little into its soft, foamy plastic.

  ‘You okay?’ asked Natalie.

  ‘I think so,’ he said, honestly. Perhaps it was the Valium. Perhaps all this was the Valium; from the slight pleasure of feeling the dashboard submit to his touch to the waves of emotion the music stirred in him. Perhaps without the Valium he’d feel none of this.

  ‘If you want me to stop and turn around at any point, just say.’

  Hadn’t Amanda said something like that, once? Towards the end. He had, by that point, told her about his panic attacks, and they were driving somewhere, some party, and she had used those very words. They were driving and she told him if he wanted her to stop and turn the car around she would, and minutes later he did just that and realised she was only being nice, that she’d had no intention of turning the car around, not when they’d come this far, and it ended in an argument, because by this point he’d scorched away all her patience and sympathy with his silences and his inattention and, yes, his lack of libido, and in that argument he reminded her again that she hadn’t been there, in the car, that she couldn’t understand, but as usual he felt a fraud, because for him the most terrifying thing of all was that he remembered nothing of the crash.

  He remembered everything before it, with a clarity that was almost disturbingly banal. There was a house party in Cathays, and the hosts borrowed lighting gels so that each room was lit a different colour – the kitchen a sub-aquatic blue, the hallway and stairs a coniferous green, the lounge a promiscuous shade of red – and the furniture in this last room had been pushed up against the walls, and people were dancing to Northern Soul.

  They ran out of ice. That was it. The clock hadn’t yet turned ten, and they had run out of ice. The big Tesco on Western Avenue would still be open, but it was miles away. They needed someone sober, who could drive, and that was when Aleem stepped in and volunteered his services; Aleem Saïd, with his practically-new VW Golf.

  A rich kid from what he called West London but what everyone else called Middlesex, Aleem was the nearest thing Ibrahim had to a best friend in those days. More swaggeringly confident than Ibrahim, and always dressed more like a gora, with his rock band tour t-shirts, skater jeans, and his wallet on a chain. The first time he ever visited Ibrahim in halls, he took one look at the volumes of Sufi poetry on his bookshelf and laughed, saying, ‘From one extreme to the other’. It was one of the only conversations they ever had about religion, their friendship based instead upon a mutual love of hip-hop – Aleem introducing Ibrahim to all the tracks and albu
ms he’d missed these last two years – and afternoons spent playing Grand Theft Auto.

  With Aleem driving, it was inevitable Caitlin Corby would tag along; the pair of them had been caught in a maddening routine of flirtation and mutual rejection practically since Freshers’ Week. Rhys ap Hywel, meanwhile, was of a type found in every university; the small town boy from somewhere rural, remote – in Rhys’s case, Anglesey – who, let loose in the city, had smoked, downed and snorted every drug available, usually on the same night. To Rhys the very idea of ‘going shopping’ this late was hilarious, and he was quick to volunteer.

  Then there was Ibrahim. He’d spent much of the night out in the garden, smoking weed – there were no Surahs or Hadiths against cannabis, so it had become his only real vice – but this in turn made him paranoid, and it was this paranoia that took him from the party to the back seat of Aleem Saïd’s car.

  Stupid, really. Amanda was talking to an exchange student from Baltimore. Tall black kid. One of those black American names, like Tyrone or Tyrese. They were both studying English and Philosophy. She’d introduced them, Ibrahim and Tyrone-or-Tyrese-or-Whatever, but Ibrahim slipped away from them and stood out in the garden with the other smokers, and looked in through the kitchen window at Amanda and Tyrone-Tyrese-Whatever, and simmered as he analysed each smile, each blink, each reciprocal laugh.

  Out in the garden, Aleem Saïd said, ‘Me and Caitlin are going to Tesco. Anyone else want to come?’

  Caitlin – big-boned Caitlin with the streak of purple in her hair and her raggedy dress and Dr Martin boots – looked devastated. Why did anyone else have to join them?

  ‘Fuck it,’ said Rhys ap Hywel. ‘I’ll come. Might be a laugh.’

  ‘Yeah, I’ll come,’ said Ibrahim, waiting for Amanda to look at him, as if she was psychic and knew he was about to leave, but she didn’t.

  The journey to the supermarket took them past crowds all dressed up for a Friday night, staggering in and out of pubs and clubs through a cacophony of police sirens and dance music. The whole world was a carnival that night. Spring was giving way to summer, and even at this hour there were still the last watery traces of sunlight in the west.

  ‘We should do this more often,’ said Rhys ap Hywel.

  ‘Do what?’ asked Caitlin Corby.

  ‘Go out. I don’t mean clubs or anything. I mean just go out. Go for night drives. I mean, think about it, while we’ve been getting stoned and, you know, dancing and stuff, there were people doing their shopping. How mad is that?’

  Shopping for ice cubes and beer became a field trip that night, the four of them stumbling and laughing helplessly down each aisle in the supermarket’s harsh fluorescent light. They created elaborate, often cruel backstories for the other customers – loners and serial killers, most of them – and took detours through the aisles filled with toys for no other reason than to play with things they had no intention of buying. Away from the party, away from that dark mood, Ibrahim laughed until tears streamed from his eyes and he could hardly breathe.

  Back in the car Ibrahim and Rhys did exactly as they’d done when they first left the party; they both tried their seatbelts and found the buckle ends missing, tucked beneath the seats.

  ‘What’s the point of having seatbelts,’ said Rhys, ‘if there’s nowhere to put them?’

  For some reason that line, or perhaps the way it was said – in Rhys’s throaty, sing-song accent – made Ibrahim, Caitlin and Aleem erupt into laughter once more, and they were still laughing as they drove out of the car park and back onto Western Avenue.

  ‘Hey,’ said Rhys, leaning between the front seats. ‘Fuck the party. Let’s go to Barry Island.’

  ‘What?’ said Aleem.

  ‘We’ve got beer,’ said Rhys. ‘We’ve got weed. I’ve got a fuckload of pills. Why don’t we go to the beach instead?’

  Aleem smiled, and Caitlin looked at him, smiling but with her eyes communicating something else; hesitation or concern that he might go along with Rhys’s idea. Ibrahim was thinking about Amanda, and how she was still at the party, and how maybe she was still talking to Tyrone or Tyrese or whatever his name was.

  Then there was light.

  That was the last thing he remembered. Later he learned how another driver on the road that night, a seventeen year old named Jason Bevan, had begun drinking earlier that afternoon. The car was Jason’s – a Citroen Saxo he’d customised himself – and after draining several cans of lager and the best part of a bottle of vodka, Jason and two friends took to the roads. Nobody would ever know how or why he came to be on that side of the avenue – whether it was somebody’s idea of a joke or dare, or a drunken lapse in judgement – but when he collided with Aleem Saïd’s car Jason Bevan was driving at sixty miles an hour.

  It was thought Aleem hadn’t expected an oncoming car on his side of the road; the four lanes of the avenue were separated by a metal barrier. Others posited that he and Jason were engaged in a foolhardy, disastrous game of ‘chicken’. Certainly, Aleem’s family – prosperous, and therefore deemed newsworthy – weren’t spared the publishing of their dead son’s toxicity report, the mere mention of cannabis hinting at something reckless on his part.

  When eventually the police interviewed Ibrahim he could only tell them he remembered nothing, and it was the truth. The details of the crash he learned second hand, as if it was something he hadn’t experienced personally.

  Rhys was flung through the windshield, and died of head injuries.

  Aleem and Caitlin were crushed to death in the front of the car, which buckled like a tin can.

  In the Saxo, Jason Bevan and his two friends were killed instantly, and again bodies were flung through the windshield, so that in Ibrahim’s mind the moment of collision became a violent exchange, the two cars merging and swapping passengers in one bloody instant. Robbed of any memory of it, he couldn’t help but imagine the crash played out in balletic slow motion; shattered glass filling the air around their tumbling, weightless bodies in a blizzard of gemstones. In these mental re-enactments the event became almost beautiful, but the players remained faceless. He couldn’t bear to put the faces of his friends on those flailing bodies, and so their features were lost in a shadowy blur. And as for him, he wasn’t there at all.

  Acknowledging his presence in the car as it crashed meant facing up to the damage done, to the impossible way in which his body was tested and broken within the mangled wreck. The crash had done its best to change the shape of his body, twisting his leg into a dozen fractures, staving in one side of his face, shattering so many other bones. In the moment of the crash he stopped being the functioning, corporeal form that carried his thoughts around each day, and became something malleable, to be moulded cruelly by the car’s imploding frame. More than this, the crash created an abyss, splitting his life in two, into everything before and after it. Though he’d forgotten the event itself, he would carry on feeling the insane forces of the crash on an almost physical level, as if he was forever lurching forward, as if his whole world was now imploding and bending him out of shape.

  He felt this more than ever when sitting in a car, a bus, or a train, but now Natalie was driving, and there was music, a different piece, and the soft fuzzy glow of the Valium, and his fingers still digging into the dashboard’s spongy plastic, and country lanes, and an unblemished blue sky, and he thought about Aleem’s humouring smile, and Caitlin’s look of apprehension, and Rhys’s gormless, stoned grin, and the sudden white light that ended it all.

  ‘You okay?’ asked Natalie.

  Ibrahim closed his eyes and nodded.

  ‘You’re looking a little pale. Do you want me to pull over?’

  ‘No. No. I’m fine.’

  Because he had to get through this. He was back at the abyss, standing on the edges of the great black gulf, and if he could hold his breath and bear it he might reach the other side through force of will alone. And he thought about Aleem’s smile, a smile that said ‘Yeah, sure,’ but didn’t mea
n it, and Caitlin’s look of apprehension because driving to Barry Island was exactly the kind of thing Aleem might do on a whim, and Rhys’s gormless grin because he knew this too, and the white light on the other side of the windshield that meant nothing at the time because there really shouldn’t be anything oncoming that side of the avenue, and he tried to remember what happened next but there was nothing.

  Ibrahim screwed his eyes shut and shook his head and dug his fingertips a little deeper into the dashboard, and when he opened his eyes again he saw the same country lane and the same boundless blue sky, only now he was calm and the world was coming into focus. He took his hands away from the dashboard, his fingertips leaving behind two dimpled arches, and he watched these indentations vanish slowly until there was no trace of them at all.

  19

  Mrs Ostroff could make dishes from next to nothing, whole meals cobbled together from the contents of a larder kept half empty by the ration book. Reenie’s foster mother was a miracle worker that way and Mr Ostroff would joke that his wife could stretch a penny into copper wire.

  Nothing went to waste. Chicken soup with lokshen or kneidlach; kreplach and varnitshkes. A piping-hot English roast dinner. Sumptuous toffee puddings, the toffee made by boiling a can of condensed milk on the stove. Moist and delicate Victoria sponges. The best, most delicious, most mouth-watering home-made chips Reenie had ever eaten, showered and drenched with salt and vinegar. Mrs Ostroff made them all with so very little.

  Reenie would have given anything for a meal like that now. Her mouth watered and her stomach issued burbles of complaint. If she had thought she could sustain herself on birdseed, she would have helped herself to Solomon’s rations without a shred of guilt.

  Looking at him, through the gilt bars of his cage, she wondered how the world must look through his eyes. When she fed him she liked to think he recognised her, but there was no way to prove it. She was the only person Solomon ever saw. If he seemed to perk up at feeding time, flapping from the floor of his cage to his perch, or scuttling along the bars, clinging on with his tiny grey feet and his beak, it might have nothing to do with her. Any other person might get the same response.