Dead Secret

by Deveney Catherine

  “I suppose it’s because it’s supposed to be the feeling bit of you, the bit that loves,” I said, and then blushed. But I knew Tariq was right about reading too much into the heart. I had one that worked; I could afford to be sentimental. Tariq didn’t and he couldn’t. I threaded another daisy through my chain.

  “I would probably get a white man’s heart if I got a transplant,” said Tariq, and looked to see my reaction. “Or a white woman’s.”

  “Does that bother you?”

  “No. It might bother them, though. Did you read the story in the paper about the man who didn’t want his son’s heart going to ‘a Paki’?”

  I shook my head, studying my chain to avoid looking at him.

  “He’s just ignorant,” I muttered, because I couldn’t think of anything else to say.

  “His son had died in a motorcycle accident,” said Tariq. “I saw him interviewed on television. He was crying. He said he and his wife had been asked if his son’s heart could be used for transplantation and he said no at first. He was too upset. Then doctors told him he could help prevent other parents feeling the way he was feeling right now. There was a young man waiting for transplant. So he said yes. It hurt, he said, knowing that his boy had to die for someone else but he wanted to help. He wasn’t a bad man. I watched him and I thought he was just like my dad. He loved his son.”

  My glance up to Tariq’s face is instinctive. “So what happened?”

  “He found out the recipient was to be an Asian. The interviewer asked him how he felt when he heard and he said, “I told doctors I didn’t want my Shane’s heart going to no Paki.”

  “Don’t think about it. Most people wouldn’t think that way. The guy’s just…”

  “Just a dad who lost his boy,” finished Tariq. “He wasn’t evil. He didn’t seem it, anyway. He wanted to do something good. But then he wanted me excluded from the good. I don’t really understand… Part of me hated him and part of me felt sorry for him, you know?”

  I didn’t know what to say to Tariq. Then I remembered something I had heard Da say and I said, “Good and bad aren’t as black and white as people think.” Now that I think about it, I wonder what he was thinking about when he said that.

  “No,” Tariq had replied. “I suppose not.”

  He lay back on the grass and closed his eyes and I looked at the shadows underneath his eyes and the fine line of his mouth. His lips had a faint purplish-blueish tinge, as if they were bruised.

  “Why aren’t they doing a transplant for you now?” I asked.

  “They want me to be stronger. They think doing this operation will help in the meantime, buy me time to get stronger.”

  “I think you’re very brave,” I said. “I’d be frightened.”

  Tariq said nothing.

  “How long will you be in for?”

  “A week maybe. Or maybe this time I won’t come back,” he said.

  I looked up quickly at him but his eyes remained closed.

  “Of course you’ll come back. What are you talking about?”

  “It’s a big operation.” He opened his eyes and turned to me. “I said I don’t mind about hospital and usually that’s true. I always feel better when I come back from hospital. For a while. But this time…”

  “What?”

  “I… I feel… a kind of bad… I don’t know… like this time it won’t make me better. That maybe this is it…”

  I put my hand on his where it lay on the grass and then quickly withdrew it and looked down to where Da and Khadim and Nazima were sitting. Nobody had noticed, except maybe Da. He looked away so quickly I wasn’t sure.

  “I can’t say to anyone in the family,” continued Tariq. “It would upset them too much.” He looked down at Nazima and smiled faintly. “You see the way my mother is.”

  It would be impossible not to see. Nazima adored Tariq. It was Tariq who kept her breathing. She flew round him like a sparrow round an eagle, flittering and fluttering and paying homage.

  I wanted to throw my arms round Tariq but I didn’t know what to say to him and I felt a lump in my throat in case what he was saying was true. It was difficult to swallow. I was hopelessly out of my depth.

  “I think,” I said, “that everything will be fine.”

  It sounded trite, even to an almost sixteen-year-old.

  “Why?” said Tariq. “Why will it be fine?”

  “Because I want it to be.” I threaded another flower through a loop and didn’t look at him. “And I’m a madam. I get what I want.”

  I was aware Tariq was looking at me and when I finally dared glance up, he was smiling.

  “I’ll bet you are,” he said, and I grinned at him.

  I heard Shameena and Sarah’s voices at the back door. Tariq glanced up at them, and then at me, as if he was considering. Then he whispered to me.

  “You know Roberto’s, the café on Paisley Road West?”

  I nodded. It was the café I hid in when I should have been at mass.

  “Meet me there. Thursday. 4.30?”

  I didn’t have time to reply. I felt my stomach lurch. Sarah threw herself down on the grass beside me.

  “Shameena’s earrings are gorgeous, aren’t they?” she said.

  “Yeah,” I replied, as convincingly as I could. “Gorgeous.” I’d never seen them.

  CHAPTER THREE

  I could barely wait till Thursday. The best thing about being in a single-parent family was the freedom. Peggy helped a lot when we were wee of course, but by the time I was fifteen and Sarah eleven, we were in that no man’s land between needing watched and being allowed a little freedom. Da thought it reasonable for me to look after Sarah for a few hours after school. But she’d be fine while I met Tariq. There was no way I was missing that. “Where are you going?” Sarah asked me that Thursday.

  “Out,” I said importantly. “With a boyfriend,” I added, purely for effect and it worked, because her eyes widened. “So keep your trap shut.”

  If it had been me, I’d have extracted some gain for me in keeping my trap shut but Sarah, she was such an innocent.

  “Don’t do anything stupid while I’m out,” I warned her, “or I’ll get found out.”

  I was five minutes late for Tariq that Thursday because of going home to change. There was no way I could meet him in my school uniform. I ran and ran, till my heart thumped and I could hardly breathe. My legs felt shaky. Near the café I slowed down, took huge deep breaths. I fished out a baby-pink lipstick, peered into a shop window to apply it. Took hooped earrings from my purse, ran a comb through my hair. Scooshed the last of my perfume Peggy had given me last year for my birthday. Never mind. It was my sixteenth in a week. Somebody would give me more.

  Tariq was already there when I arrived, sitting with a fresh orange juice at the back table of the café and watching the door.

  “I didn’t know if you’d come,” he said. “You never said.”

  Not come? Was he mad?

  “You smell nice,” he said.

  “Thanks.”

  It seemed an intimate thing for a boy like Tariq to say, somehow. I reached out and touched his hand briefly as it rested on the table and then glanced up. The waitress had caught the gesture and was staring at me. She turned and said something under her breath to the owner behind the counter. He looked over when she spoke, saw me looking and shrugged, looked away again. I went up to the counter and ordered a coffee from the man but it was the waitress who brought it back and she slopped it down carelessly on the table without a word, so that the coffee spilled into the saucer and then splashed onto the table. I glanced up at her and she looked hard at me and then at Tariq. “Anything else?” she said, looking back at me.

  “Yeah,” I said dryly. “A cloth.”

  Tariq looked uncomfortable.

  That first afternoon set a pattern. We met most days, spinning out one drink each to last a couple of hours. By the end of the first week, the waitress hardly glanced at us any more, but there was a deter
ioration in Tariq. He was getting weaker, I could tell. He hadn’t a puff, and he was even thinner, his shirt hanging loosely round a neck that was slender as a lily stem. He had deep shadows under his eyes and his cheeks were sunken. The doctor was trying to get his operation brought forward.

  I remember the last day we met in the café. He was quiet and subdued and he said, “Rebecca, what do you think happens when you die?”

  “Dunno,” I said. I was using my finger to sweep a trail of sugar on the table top into a little pile.

  “It frightens me to think about it,” said Tariq. “I think about hell sometimes.”

  “Do Muslims have hell too?” I was surprised. Wasn’t it only Catholics that had hell? I always thought we understood hell better than heaven.

  “There’s a description of it in the Koran.”

  He began quoting, without hesitation, his voice soft.

  “Garments of fire shall be cut, and there shall be poured over their heads boiling water, whereby whatsoever is in their bellies and their skin shall be melted…”

  “That’s a bit gory, isn’t it?”

  “I can’t stop thinking about it. What if it’s true?”

  “You haven’t done anything bad.”

  “I’m here, aren’t I?”

  “Is that bad?”

  “Yes… no. I like being here but… but I know my parents wouldn’t approve of me being alone with a girl.”

  “There’s at least ten other people in here.”

  “You know what I mean.”

  We lapsed into silence.

  “I’m supposed to marry my cousin in Pakistan. When I get better.”

  It was a shock. “What, someone you don’t know?”

  “I’ve got a picture.” He brought out a snap from his wallet and put it on the table in front of me. I didn’t want to see it. I hated her, whoever she was. I glanced at it cursorily, aware only of huge dark eyes set deep into a fragile, fine-boned face.

  “Do you like the look of her?”

  I didn’t look at him but my heart pounded. Tariq ignored the question. Or maybe he didn’t. “The thing is,” he said slowly, “I don’t feel Pakistani.” He said it as if he should be ashamed.

  “Why should you? You weren’t born there. Do you feel Glaswegian?”

  “Yes… no… well, a bit. I don’t really feel I belong anywhere, to be honest. It’s like… I’m really, really proud of my Pakistani background but I don’t feel completely part of it. But I don’t feel completely part of here, either. I am not Pakistani and I’m not Glaswegian. I’m a Glaswegian Pakistani, and that’s different, separate.

  I glanced down at the snap on the table.

  “Will your parents make you marry her?”

  “Not make me, no. If I don’t like her…”

  I said nothing.

  “I try to do the right thing,” he said, looking at me, his voice almost pleading for understanding. “To please my parents and please Allah.”

  “You believe in Allah?”

  He hesitated. “I try.”

  I hate docile people. But Tariq was not docile. There was something almost noble about his quiet restraint. Maybe I admired it because I am not restrained, couldn’t possibly be. I couldn’t help thinking how much more like Sarah he was than he was like me. But there was no chemistry between Sarah and Tariq. You cannot dispute chemistry.

  I tore the discarded sugar packet from my coffee into strips.

  “What… no, who… is Allah?” I asked Tariq.

  “Allah is the supreme being who has power over the universe.”

  Tariq answered automatically, the way we used to answer our Catholic Catechism in primary school. Who made you? God made me. Why did God make you? God made me to know him, to love him, and to serve him in this world, so that I may be happy with him forever in heaven. Same idea, whatever the creed.

  “Mmm. God or Allah?” I said to Tariq. “Maybe they are both the same. Maybe we’ll find out we’re worshipping the same God.”

  “I’ll find out before you.”

  “Don’t talk like that.”

  “I’m scared,” he said.

  The words are so stark.

  “Oh Tariq.” I took his hand. I could feel tears burning at the back of my eyes for the rawness of those words, for the cost to him of saying them out loud. Shit. I couldn’t, mustn’t, cry.

  “Don’t be frightened,” I said, digging the nails on my left hand into my palm in a vain attempt to stop the tears that were welling in my eyes from spilling over.

  Tariq’s hand brushed the tear lightly from my cheek, and I resisted the urge to grab his hand and hold tight.

  “We’d better go,” he said.

  I feel ashamed when I think of that conversation now. It was Tariq who brushed my tear away, not me who brushed his.

  Outside the café, a gang of white boys were hanging around, lolling against doorways, fags in hand. I came through the door first and saw their eyes swivel to me. There was one boy whose eyes looked the meanest. He was dressed in dark jeans and a black t-shirt with a narrow stripe across the chest, and he looked at me in that thin, predatory way teenage boys do when they first discover sex. Like foxes foraging through dustbins for a bone to gnaw. Like they’re permanently hungry, and will eat, no matter the meal.

  Tariq followed me out and I felt, rather than saw, the gang stiffen. The one with the striped t-shirt stepped right in front of Tariq, blocking his way. Tariq moved to the right. The boy stepped with him, blocking him still. Tariq moved to the left. The boy moved too, like their bodies were locked in some macabre, magnetic dance. Tariq simply stood still then and looked at him, not in defiance, not in fear. He simply looked. Slowly, slowly, the boy moved aside, never taking his eyes from Tariq. “Black bastard,” he muttered.

  Tariq never even flinched. His body did not stiffen. His face remained neutral. For a moment I thought of Davie Richardson in the park when we were kids, and I had the same desire to lash out. But I knew the consequences for Tariq if I did. “You want to watch the company you keep, darlin’,” one of them sneered at me as Tariq and I walked slowly past. I thought of Tariq’s words in the café. Not Pakistani. Not Glaswegian. A Glaswegian Pakistani.

  I suppose there would have been a lot of stuff like that ahead. I never got the chance to find out. Tariq was too ill to meet after that. He never went back to university. We visited the Khans as a family the night after my sixteenth birthday, which was the night before he went into hospital. Everyone was there so we couldn’t talk alone. But when I came out of the toilet, Tariq came out of the sitting room. He must have been waiting, listening for the flush, trying to time it. He pressed one of those friendship bracelets into my hand, the kind you get in Indian shops. It had pink beads on it, with tiny little red flowers painted on them.

  “Happy birthday,” he said.

  We’d never kissed before. Never done anything other than hold hands across a table. But Tariq kissed me then, in the hall of his house, and maybe the danger of discovery added to the thrill of it. It wasn’t a deep, passionate kiss. It was over in seconds. He held my face in his hands and his poor blue lips caressed my top lip, then my bottom lip, light and swift as a butterfly. And never, never in all the years that followed, did any one of that succession who followed Tariq in my life, not Mr Mad or Mr Bad or Mr Dangerous, ever touch me the way he touched me, ever come close to the sweetness of that moment…

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Shit. The car swerves as a lorry thunders past. That was bloody close. Last thing I remember my eyes were glued to the white line, but I must have drifted, silently, dangerously. My hands shake on the wheel. The photograph album in my mind kept me awake at first, then slowly, seductively, it lulled me too deeply into its pages. The indicators tick-tock rhythmically as I stop the car in the next layby, close my eyes. Just for a moment. Just a rest.

  Mr Mad… best forgotten. Mr Bad… well there were a few of him. I threw myself away on Mr Bads, deliberately I think now. Useless, disposa
ble Becca who came from nowhere and was going nowhere. What did it matter?

  And then there was Mr Dangerous, the only one I came close to loving. That’s why he was Mr Dangerous. He wasn’t free, of course. I see now that I never chose anyone who was free. Not after Tariq. Not even Tariq.

  Maybe I thought I wasn’t worth it. And I learned that if you think you aren’t worth it, men don’t think you’re worth it either. If that sounds self-pitying, forget it. I am not a victim. I don’t want anyone’s pity, not yours and not even my own. Certainly not now. It’s just that after Tariq, nothing was worth it. Love, sex, lies, games… it was all the same to me. Tariq was my one shot at purity. After that, I didn’t believe in purity any more.

  I see Mr Dangerous as I drift into a short, intense sleep in the car; see him standing naked in the half-light of the hotel bedroom, the smooth line of his back skimming into neat, muscular buttocks. He always stood by the window afterwards, drowning in the choppy waters of his own despair, while I lay watching him from the bed. He would lean his arm against the wall and lay his head on it, then he’d lift the curtain just a fraction with his free hand and peer through the crack into the world, like he couldn’t make up his mind whether to join it or not.

  In my memory, it is always half light, constantly falling shadows. It was winter and he was never free except in the afternoon. By the time we drove well out of town where he could be sure he wouldn’t be recognised, darkness was already closing in.

  He’d stand there with his back to me as the last of the light melted into darkness, like ice melting into water, until there was nothing left to illuminate the room but the insipid, dusty glow from the desk lamp.

  The first time I ever saw him he had his back to me. I thought he looked like Tariq from behind: the same wiry, black hair that kicked out at the collar when it needed a cut; the same ascetic thinness. I fell for him then. People say women always fall for men they know they shouldn’t. It’s the challenge. If they can make the ones who mustn’t fall in love with them want them, how powerful is that?