Tell No-One About This

by Jacob Ross

  She steps off the escalator, tosses the tail ends of her scarf over her shoulders and strides towards the exit.

  She feels a tap on her shoulder, shrugs and swings her handbag and her pass towards the woman who’s touched her.

  ‘Step aside, please!’

  Two men place themselves between her and the sliding doors. She hears hot intakes of breath behind, hisses of impatience. Ara steps aside.

  The woman who is looking into her face is the shortest of the crew. Her chest and chin are pushed forward. She shifts her shoulders like a man. The name on her badge is Claris.

  Claris jabs a finger at her bag, then swings her arm in the direction of the small white table to the left of the busy glass doors. Ara slips the strap from around her neck and drops the bag on the table.

  ‘Open it,’ the woman says.

  Ara twitches at her tone, looks back briefly, catches curious glances from the faces streaming past. She registers the quick avoidance in their eyes.

  Steadying her hand, she opens her handbag and stands back to watch the woman probe the inner pockets. There isn’t much in there: her red leather purse with her Visa and Oyster cards, a small bottle of hand-sanitising gel, the square of linen she kneels on at the back of her office twice a day, the packet of Lil-Lets she bought during her lunch break and the white, freshly ironed handkerchief her mother gives her every morning before she leaves for work.

  The woman’s cropped head is millimetres above the mouth of her bag. She runs her fingers around the lining, lifts it to her ear and shakes it. The Lil-Lets and the handkerchief fall onto the surface of the table. She scoops them up and drops them in.

  Ara locks eyes with her. ‘Looking for something?’

  She takes in the young woman’s low cut hair, the row of stud holes on the right side of her upper lip, the glassy blue-green eyes.

  ‘Doing my job.’

  ‘Job?’

  ‘Yes, job. J-O-B.’ The young woman narrows her eyes and twists her lips. ‘Like what I get paid for? Know what I mean?’

  Ara feels her mouth go dry, the hairs prickling the back of her neck. She glances at the men, then back at the woman in front of her. She shapes a word with her lips and follows it up with a slow sweep of her eyes from Claris’s booted feet up to her narrow face.

  The woman flushes, though she couldn’t have heard her, and if she did she wouldn’t understand – the word mouthed in her parent’s language. A small convulsion shakes the woman’s shoulders. Now her voice is low and conversational. ‘Nice scarf. Always wanted to know what it feels like with one of them other ones on.’

  Ara lifts her brows.

  ‘Know what I mean? Them whatchumacallit – them black ones with the little window in front your eyes.’ She snaps the bag shut, exposes a row of little tight-packed teeth and hands it over. ‘You’re free to go now. Cheers.’

  The doors sigh open and let her out. It is a sunny evening, leeched of its midsummer warmth by a chilly wind that lifts itself off the river and frets at her dress and scarf. There is a yellow glaze on everything. The high construction cranes fingering the London skyline glister in the sun like giant candles. She can see the great white belly of the Dome beyond them and imagines a pregnant spider thrown onto its back, its legs rigid in the air.

  For a moment she stands breathing heavily on the wide pedestrian walkway that will take her to the Underground.

  You’re free to go… The woman’s words are slinking down her spine. They settle heavy at its base. She wishes to find words for what she feels. But they are lodged in a bitter little knot in her throat. It isn’t just the words. It is all the things that khwajiah was telling her with her ratty little eyes and compact sneering body.

  Now Ara is thinking what she should have said – almost said: Why me; why none of the others; what do you take me for? And, at the risk of losing her job and displeasing her parents, she should have told her to fuck off.

  But then she would have had to face her mother’s soft-spoken condemnation – the hand raised just under her nose, her fingers splayed and rigid through the chattering prayer beads, reminding her of what happens to high-tempered daughters who bring shame on their family.

  She started the day with her mother on her mind – how she corrupts her acts of giving with insults. How readily a put-down comes to her. Like this morning. She’s standing before the hallway mirror settling her hair. She hears her name, looks up the stairs to see her mother on the landing. She follows the beckoning hand to her parent’s bedroom. Her mother sits her on the duvet and opens the ancient rawhide case which, thirty years ago, she said, crossed the Nile with them on their way to the airport in Khartoum.

  From the stacks of folded fabric and yeasty fragrances of bakhoor, her mother lifts a shimmery square of blue cloth, white-patterned at the edges. The headscarf looks weightless in her hand, like a weave of cloud and sky. She hands it to her and dips into the case again, coming up this time with a wooden box that she tips onto the bed. Three beautiful gold bracelets settle on the sheet, and a chain, so fine and polished, sits in Ara’s palm like amber liquid. Its pendant is a Hamsa hand with a pale blue opal in the middle.

  Ara takes the gifts with both hands, nods her thanks before handing it back for safekeeping – that is until Rasheed takes her to their new home in six weeks.

  Her mother rises to her feet. ‘And this,’ she says, holding out a dress. It is a pale olive green with cream trimmings along the hems. There is a soft gloss to the fabric. Ara knows it’s worth much more than her father’s monthly wage. Her mother asks her to put it on.

  She stands in the dress, feeling light and somehow cossetted by its embrace. She imagines herself at her henna party, smiling at the lovely things her friends will say when they see her walking in it.

  Her mother’s movement breaks her musing. She’s gathering the fabric from around Ara’s ankles. Now she is holding up a handful of the cloth to Ara’s face. Slow words issue from her barely parted lips. They have the sibilance of a secret. ‘Let no man lift this above your head, Ara, except the husband you will sit beside next month.’ Her mother drops the hem of the dress and turns her back on her.

  The rest of what she says comes over her shoulders. ‘We couldn’t choose the country you grew up in, but you don’t have to learn their ways.’

  Ara does not know how long she’s been standing on the walkway looking across the city at nothing. She thinks back to the searching of her bag and suddenly feels observed.

  She glances at the cameras overhead. They are everywhere, on the top of every other lamppost that lines the walkway. They hang hooded over doorways. She spots them on the supporting poles of wire fences and against the side of every rising edifice. The city’s compound eyes.

  She imagines little rat-faced women with men’s shoulders concealed in windowless rooms inside these towering hives of concrete, steel and glass, peering at their screens and noting every flutter of her headscarf. She wants to hide her face.

  She suddenly remembers Sirah. Her friend will be waiting for her at the barrier beside the station entrance, where the fat tobacconist narrows his eyes at them and mutters under his breath. Sirah works in her brother’s jewellery store a short walk from the Underground and always waits for her.

  The station is a hurried ten-minute walk away. When Ara arrives, Sirah is not there and a prick of betrayal runs through her. She allows the human tide to suck her down the gaping maw to the trains, barely registering the slap of Oyster cards against the yellow sensors, the staccato slam of the automatic gates as she breaches her barrier and descends with the crowd for the westbound.

  The platform is packed. There is a shifting wall of dark suits spread almost to the lip of the platform, just above the tracks. She hears the whine and stutter of the rails, feels the tepid, muggy rush of air the arriving train pushes ahead of itself, and decides to take the next one. But then, between several shoulder-gaps further up the platform, she glimpses a flare of yellow and knows that it is Sirah’
s headscarf.

  The crowd is rearranging itself, preparing for the push on board once the doors slide open. Ara gets a fuller view of her friend’s profile and guesses, by the clenched activity of Sirah’s mouth, that her husband has summoned her home, or something is up with her child.

  Perhaps little Asfa’s condition has worsened. Sirah has shown her photographs of the boy – a grey-faced six-year-old with eyes so hollow and dark-rimmed it’s as if their sockets are smeared with kohl. Sirah won’t say exactly what is wrong with him, but Ara knows it is an illness he could die from without warning. Sirah says he’s already outlived the time the doctors gave him.

  If they are lucky they will find two empty seats together. They are almost always lucky.

  She is looking forward to the familiar sinking into conversation with her friend that becomes less inhibited as the train eases itself out of the city, worming its way deeper into Harrow Weald.

  She ignores the flat Nigerian accent telling them to ‘Mind da doze, pliz’ and squeezes her way inside.

  Sirah is already in and seated. Ara’s eyes are on the vacant seat directly facing her. She heads for it, gets there quickly and turns to lower herself. She is aware of the heavy abrupt press against her left shoulder, the smell of sweat and something faintly industrial, but she is there first; is gathering her dress and turning to lower herself when she feels the body under her.

  She pulls up sharply, stumbles. An anonymous hand steadies her from behind. The broad red face of a very large man is looking down at her, smiling. The woman on her right is absorbed in her Kindle reader.

  The man who’s stolen her seat is adjusting an old canvas bag between his feet. His boots are imitation Timberlands. He’s rolled up the sleeves of his dark blue overalls to his elbows. The black, lopsided woolly hat on his head matches the colour of his arms exactly.

  A throb of rage surges through her.

  ‘Ibn kalb!’ she snaps. The curse has left her lips before she’s formed it in her mind.

  Sirah gawps at her, then at the man, before she looks down and begins fiddling with her ring.

  Ara might have left it at that, knowing that by the time they leave the city and emerge into the Edgware suburbs, the train will be almost empty. But not only has the man almost knocked her over in his rush to take her place, the powdery stuff that covers his overalls has rubbed off on her dress.

  She unzips her handbag and retrieves her handkerchief. ‘Fi ginitaak!’ she hisses. She keeps her eyes on his face as she dabs at the side of her dress.

  If he understands the insult, he does not show it. His eyes are flat and uninterested. They are focused on the placards above her head advertising holidays and health cures.

  Ara wipes her dress more carefully as her mind conjures her mother’s admonishing hand.

  She nudges Sirah’s leg, hears herself speaking in her father’s irritated tone.

  ‘Abid! No wonder they kill off each other and run to people’s countries.’

  ‘Not here, Ara… not…’ Sirah’s Arabic is as soft as it is appalled. A film of sweat has broken out on her face.

  ‘It is the truth,’ Ara says. ‘There is no dishonour in the truth.’ She realises that she’s raised her voice.

  Sirah rests a soft hand on hers. ‘A little soap and water, inshallah. That’s all. Let’s talk about Rasheed, or your posh translating job…’

  The rest of Sirah’s words are chewed up by the clatter of the train switching tracks. The intercom crackles – a metallic voice announces the next station. Bodies rouse and rustle, followed by the scuff of hastily gathered suitcases.

  Ara’s armpits are damp from the heat and the strain of holding herself upright. She throws a contemptuous sidelong glance at the seated man, but his eyes are closed, his chin pressed into his chest. She can barely distinguish his lashes from his skin. The powdery stuff that stained her dress is all over his boots. Building site, she thinks. Then she revises it. Warehouse – one of those windowless tin boxes hugging the highway or hidden under some dirty railway bridge. That, she thinks, would explain the dust.

  ‘Ibn kalb!’ she mutters, then turns to look down at her friend. ‘Couldn’t wait for me, Sirah?’

  Sirah widens honey-coloured eyes at her. ‘Asfa,’ she says, and brings her palms together. Her friend’s answer is mild and apologetic with a lilt of the Bedouin inflection that Ara envies. Sirah raises her voice as the train rattles over the tracks. Sirah’s eyes are wet, her gestures animated. The clatter of the carriage mangles the rest of her words and all Ara hears is ‘serious… very… this time.’

  The young man sitting on the other side of Sirah rises to his feet. He smiles at Ara and nods at the empty seat. He is very handsome. Ara watches him squeeze himself and his bag through the packed aisle. Moments later, she feels the rush of air as he opens the adjoining door and crosses to the next carriage.

  The young man makes her think of Rasheed and the wonderful accretion of secrets between them from the moment her parents accepted him. She would not wait out the months in silence, for a man she did not know, to come to her and take her to his house. From the time her parents said his name and asked her to trust their choice, she went out of her way to find his number, phone him from the secrecy of her bedroom and insist that he speak to her, so that she could begin to feel something for this stranger to whom she’s meant to submit her life. When at last she asked to see his face up close, just him and her alone, he came and waited where she told him.

  She is there again with him in the tree-shadowed space behind her father’s garage. He is bolder than she expects, more demanding. There is one thing, he tells her, that he wants before they sit together in the presence of their families and make their marriage vows. He’s taken her hand in his and is drawing her to him. He looks into her eyes and asks permission to uncover her head.

  She sees the desire in his gaze as he edges back her scarf, eases his fingers beneath the fabric and slips it past her ear. His breath is like a soft brush on her face. And even as something inside her rears up and drags her back, she finds her body leaning towards his. She lifts quick fingers to her lips, looks up through the branches of the blossoming mayflower at her parents’ bedroom window.

  ‘Tell no-one about this,’ she whispers, her own voice quivering and urgent in her ears. ‘Not ever in your life, Rasheed.’

  Rasheed places a hand against his heart and swears.

  Ara settles herself in the seat the young man has just vacated. A drawn-out snore returns her attention to the low-life in front of her. His own snort wakes him up. He plants his hands on the armrests as if about to launch himself to his feet. He looks around him blinking – a sweeping dark-eyed gaze – then eases himself back down.

  ‘Khenzeer!’ she mutters in Sirah’s ear. ‘See that look? I bet my salary he’s illegal.’

  ‘A little soap and water,’ Sirah says. This time her friend’s wet eyes are looking directly into hers and her brows are pulled together.

  *

  There’s a muffled effervescence of shuffling feet and adjusting postures as the wheels of the train begin a juddering, jittering dance along the tracks. Ara knows this bit of the journey well and likes it.

  The jittering doesn’t stop, or if it does it becomes something else. A roar, then a thundering so bone-deep it feels as if it has its roots inside her guts.

  The thundering is above her and beneath her. She is aware of her seat convulsing, her body lifting, then the head-darkening jolt as something strikes her on the shoulders and darkness falls around her.

  And then the screaming. Her own screaming followed by a space of silence – brief, yet so protracted it seems to have no end.

  She does not know where her feet are. Something sharp is pressing against her rib cage. She is dimly aware of the grinding wail of metal, the caustic choke of burning rubber, the snap and grate of things.

  When Ara lifts her head, a greenish phosphorescence surrounds her. She is looking up the incline of what used to be the f
looring of the carriage. A slow dark creep of fluid fans down the sloping metal towards her face. She watches it come and cannot move.

  She is groping for an anchorage in her mind, something recognizable in this topsy-turvy, buckled gloom; some concrete point from which she can navigate her way back into a sense of where she is and what is happening.

  She realises that her face is pressing against glass, and in slow adjustment to this greenish twilight, her eyes rest on shapes piled at the lower end of the tilted carriage. The large man who stood above her is a folded sack in the far corner. A burbling sound comes from him. At her end, bodies lie against each other in a tangled heap. A bare foot – pale as paper in the old light – sticks out in the air.

  Beyond them, from the narrow doorway that leads into the adjoining carriage, comes the crash of falling things. She thinks she sees movement, but she is not sure.

  Ara turns her head, sees that she is on the fractured edge of the reared-up carriage. Down below the rails are grey metallic scars against the darker bed of oil-soaked wood and gravel.

  She cannot find her feet. She slips her hand along her body and realises that she is still attached to them. A tear runs up the length of her dress to the stitching at the waist. She raises a hand to her head, feels for her scarf. It is not there.

  Ara sits up slowly. The carriage rocks, then settles abruptly. She imagines it balanced like a seesaw on something precarious. She begins edging her body backwards.

  There are sounds around her – human sounds of pain so muffled it is as if they are buried underwater. Ara hears herself cry out.

  Now she looks about her and tries to make herself believe that this is not as she is seeing it. Is it a nightmare punishment – some out-of-the-blue rebuke for her transgressions with Rasheed? She’s broken every prescript of her mother’s from the moment they accepted him for her.

  It is a thought that nails a wedge of terror in her heart. It comes to her as a rush of regret – that Rasheed’s promise of himself, of his warm breath on her face, will never be fulfilled. She has no doubt that she is going to die, or that she is dead and does not know it yet.