I think of Max, his pride at my success. I think of my siblings, how, though they’re all better off than me, they’ve always been in awe of my career.
Even Daddy will surely recognise how well I’ve done, through the mists of his decaying mind?
It’s all falling into place.
And in a way, I think, as I make my way home to see how Daddy got on today, it’s all possible now, because Mona’s come.
CHAPTER TEN
When the old man’s had his breakfast I go back to the main house, hoping to spend a little time in Dora’s bathroom, and come face to face with the son. For a few moments we stand and stare at each other, saying nothing. Now he’s standing I see he’s tall with broad shoulders and a large stomach. Dressed in a T-shirt, track-suit bottoms and thick socks. His eyes are cold and his face pale. A tide rises up – a fear that grips me though its origins are in the past. I’m alone in the house with a man I know nothing about. My body has a memory of its own. It reacts before I’ve time to register that I’m afraid. I break out in a fine sweat.
The best thing to do when confronted with someone you fear, Ummu once told me, is to stand your ground, look them in the eye. Disarm them with your confidence. Make friends with the dog, but don’t drop the stick, she said. And so I don’t move, but keep my wits about me.
I follow him to the kitchen, where he fills a mug with water and drinks it down. Fills it again. He takes a plastic bottle of pills, shakes two or three into his hand, swallows them. I wonder if perhaps he is ill. Is this why he was on the sofa all day yesterday, half-asleep?
‘Can I get you something?’ I ask. ‘Some breakfast? An egg? A little coffee?’
‘You can make me tea when I get up,’ he says.
‘You’re going back to bed now?’
He shrugs and walks out again, his head low. He does remind me of a dog! The kind with raised shoulderblades that hangs their heads, the sort you don’t trust at home for they’re sometimes rabid. I listen. Hear his heavy footsteps on the stairs, the click of his bedroom door.
The house falls silent.
I try not to make a sound as I go up to Dora’s bathroom. It’s a beautiful room, though it’s been neglected. There are wooden floors, in need of a polish, the curling carpet, and a huge bath with feet shaped like a large cat’s. Along the shelves are cubes of soap, glass bottles of oils and lotions. I turn the enormous brass taps, just to see the water flow. There are two taps, one hot and one cold. I let the water run for some time, discover the hot, enjoy the soothing feel of it upon my skin. Then I lean for a minute on the basin, in a pool of pale yellow sunlight, and gaze out of the window. Next door a woman moves down her garden with a basket of washing. I watch her peg it on a circular washing line, like a small tree. When she’s finished, the tree starts to turn circles, the washing swirling around in a kind of dance in the wind. It reminds me of the trees I’ve seen in the desert, where people tie coloured fabric as fertility offerings, and I feel a pang, and wonder when I’ll next stand on home soil.
Later I’ll make this room beautiful. Clean the bath and sink, polish the taps. One day when I have more time I’ll take a bath. Use a few of Dora’s luxury products. For now I just have a wash, dry myself on a thick towel, rub a little cream into my hands from one of the tubes on the shelf. Feeling fresher, I go down to Charles.
He’s wearing good clothes – a crisp shirt, wool jacket and trousers. Leather shoes that look as if a shoe-shine boy has just had his hands on them. I think of Ummu in her funny assortment of clothes that she’s worn for years and wonder who keeps his so pristine when Dora clearly hasn’t the time. I lean over him, catching the scent of his soap, a lemony smell, and a waft of something sweeter, the talc he keeps in his little bathroom.
‘I need to get to Billingsgate,’ he says. ‘Have you ordered my taxi?’
‘Dora asked me to take you to the market,’ I say. ‘To buy your oranges. Have you been to the toilet?’
The minute I’ve asked, I wish I hadn’t. He has pride. He has dignity. I’ve offended him. I take his arm. Lead him out of his front door and up the steep steps to the back garden.
‘I don’t understand why you live down there when there’s the big house that’s so much easier to get in and out of,’ I say, and he looks at me. He doesn’t ask me to translate.
Charles walks so slowly it takes us over ten minutes to cross the garden with its fallen fruits and go along the path round to the front. He waits while I go into Dora’s hallway, tug the wheelchair from under the stairs, pull it down the steps and help him in.
The woman I saw hanging out the washing next door is sweeping her front steps. ‘Morning, Charles,’ she calls out.
‘Good morning, Desiree,’ Charles says, and I nod too and smile, but she doesn’t notice.
There’s no one else around. The doors along the street are closed, the cars that were parked when we arrived, gone. Only the little stone figures watch as we pass.
The minute we turn the corner at the end of the street, however, everything changes. A market’s in full swing. The smell hits me in the face. Foreign odours mingle with those so familiar – griddled meat, hot leather – that when I screw my eyes tight shut, I could be at the souk.
Drunks lounge openly on upturned buckets or crates, chatting idly, holding cans of lager. Women march past in groups, their hair corn-rowed, or shaved, or dyed bright colours, pink or white or blue. They glance and laugh, reminding me of my friends in the medina when we were young and would have done the same, gossiped and giggled as we walked along, thinking we were the centre of the world.
Music blares out of doorways.
It’s like entering a party I have not been invited to.
Snatches of languages I recognise – French, Arabic. Others I’ve never heard before. Signs on shops in Arabic and Roman script and Chinese. Shops filled with bright fabrics, a window of mannequin heads in different-coloured wigs, purple and yellow and green. Things I didn’t expect to see here: halal meat stores, and moolis and a whole stall of eggs. There are beauty parlours, supermarkets. Shops with watches and jewels in the window. Women in African dress, and in burkas, men in turbans and in djellabas, teenagers in denim and leather and shell-suits or Rasta colours. A man with no legs goes past in a wheelchair.
This is not the England I pictured or that Ummu dreamed of.
This is a cross-section of the whole world.
And somehow it lifts my spirits.
If the whole world is here, why not Ali?
We’re moving through stalls of mobile phones, pans, cakes and hairpieces, nuts and bolts, bags and scarves. Round piles of rubbish and discarded boxes. Through racks of lovely long dresses and jackets and trousers and out again into the light. That’s when I see him. My fingertips fizz, my knees buckle. He’s at a toy stall, bent over a doll, its eyes blinking as it moves back and forth on a battery-operated swing. I know that black hair, the white djellaba he wears over baggy trousers, a leather jacket over the top; his hands, the hands I love, holding the toy so tenderly. Only the trainers look different, new. He’s thinking of Leila. I stare, feeling a warmth spread all over me.
Charles is saying something to me but I can’t hear him; everything has faded, the whole market recedes. All I can see are his strong brown forearms as he straightens up, talks to the stallholder, holds out his money, the doll in one hand. He is planning to send it to her. He takes his change and then he turns towards us.
As quickly as my body warmed up, it goes cold. Charles is shouting at me to move on. He wants his fruit, he wants his chocolate and a cup of tea.
I curse myself for being so foolish. We’re in a tiny corner of one of the biggest cities in the world. I don’t even know if he’s in the country for sure. I feel the heat of tears in my eyes. A group of men laugh and jeer as we pass, huddled together, smoking, sharing a bottle of whisky. Their eyes swing over me. I flinch, as I did at the sight of Leo, earlier. Everyone drinks here, and the smell that catches in my throat and overpo
wers everything is the sickening stench of alcohol.
I lower my head.
‘Stop here!’ Charles raises his hand. He gestures towards a heap of shrivelled-looking clementines. I stare at the pathetic piles of fruit on the stall. Yearn for home, for the mountains of gleaming oranges on the carts in the souks, walls of sunshine.
When we’ve bought the fruit there’s only six pounds left. The chance of buying credit for my phone fades.
‘We’ll get my chocolate from the 99p shop,’ the old man says, waving his stick towards the far end of the street. ‘Don’t tell Dora. She doesn’t believe in bargains. Though it’s the same as she buys from her fancy shops.’
The 99p shop is a supermarket, shelves and shelves of food all costing less than one pound. Multipacks of tins of vegetables and beans and crisps. I’m amazed that the bigger the items, the cheaper they are. Bars of chocolate the size of Ali’s leather babouches for 99p each! Yet small things cost a lot.
‘What are these, Charles?’ I point at rows of little jars of powder the size of coffee cups.
‘Herbs and spices,’ he says. I stare at them. I want to laugh to think that in this country they sell spices in such tiny quantities. I picture the mountains of cumin and paprika and turmeric on the stalls at home, pyramids of bright colours, so tall you can hide behind them, and feel a rush of longing to be there. I yearn for the mountains of mint the boys at the café used to sort through in the mornings, its fresh scent mingling with the salt air from the sea.
We pay for Charles’s chocolate and now only have four pounds left.
‘Charles.’ I squat in front of him. ‘Can we buy stamps here?’
‘Do I need stamps?’ he says. I notice how pale his irises are, clouded like pools of milk. How frail his old skin, like paper. His mind is going, he’s easily confused.
‘Yes, you do! Remember? Dora said when she left, “Don’t forget the stamps, Charles.” ’
He looks bewildered.
‘When she left this morning, she said, “Buy fruit. And don’t forget stamps!” You remember?’
The tears that came to my eyelids earlier threaten to spill over. Without stamps, without credit, Leila and even Ummu will believe I’ve disappeared like Ali. It’s so easy to vanish when you’ve got nothing.
No wonder I haven’t heard from him.
‘Yes, now you mention it, I think she did,’ he says. I’d like to hug him. ‘There’s a post office here somewhere, but they’ve hidden it at the back of a newspaper shop. No one seems to use them any more now there’s all this e-this and that. Over here, my dear – follow the direction of my stick.’
Back we go, down the street, past dark doorways and strange signs I can’t read, past a shop full of stone heads – made for English gravestones. I imagine them watching me, that they have seen my lie.
Charles directs me into a newspaper shop.
‘Stamps for North Africa?’ The man behind the counter smiles at me incredulously. ‘You writing to North Africa? If you’re sending money, I can do it for you.’ He slams the stamps down on the counter. ‘Electronically. It’s safer and it’s instant.’
I look at him. He’s handsome, with green eyes in his brown face and closely cropped black hair. His eyes twinkle as if he knows exactly what I’m doing, what he can get out of me.
‘How much does it cost?’
‘It all depends how much you’re sending. Say you send a hundred pounds, it’ll cost you a tenner. Two hundred, a bit more. But I can do you a deal. They’ll charge you more up at the hairdresser’s. You ask them and I’ll undercut them.’
‘I’ll think about it.’
‘You won’t get it cheaper anywhere else.’
When we’ve left the shop I ask Charles if I can take him for a walk. I tighten his scarf around his neck. It’s cold out here and I don’t want him falling ill. I’m hoping if we stay out a little longer, the stamp incident will fade from his mind. He mustn’t tell Dora I’ve used her money for my own needs.
‘Yes yes, a little walk. I’ll show you the river. A spot of fresh air. It’ll give us an appetite.’
I push him across the main road, and under tall trees that shed their golden leaves about our feet as we go. At last the noise drops. The busyness ceases and we’re in front of the great brown river. It’s even wider than it looked when we crossed it at night from the bridge, the water a massive beast heaving its weight against the walls. On the other side, tall glass buildings tower towards sky that’s the colour of stones.
I park the wheelchair and sit on a cold bench. A flight of steps leads straight down into the river, dark green and shiny with water that must have covered them earlier.
‘They never used to have those Danger signs in the old days,’ Charles says, nodding towards a jetty that stands like a many-legged monster out in the river. ‘They see danger everywhere now.’
I shiver, feel another wave of homesickness wash over me.
Now the sun’s gone in, everything’s turned grey, as if the colour has simply drained away.
I feel a keen longing for our estuary. The day I saw Ali in the rocks.
I’m knee-deep in the water, my dress slapping me around the calves.
I look up. Ali is on the natural jetty, staring at me. He catches me looking at him, and instead of smiling and waving as I’d expected, he turns away, lifts his fishing rod, a long bamboo pole, and casts it into the tide. Is he ignoring me? I’m surprised by how much it hurts. Worse than a slap in the face.
I walk up the beach, my heart aching.
I sit with Hait and Amina in the shade of the town wall, and we chat and watch the waves lick the sand. And I try to pretend I don’t care.
We’re about to leave, to go home to start the evening chores.
A shadow falls over me. He stands above me, his face dark, the sun behind him. The blue of his eyes like kingfishers over the river. He’s holding a silver fish in his two hands, cradling it. Gives me the fish, placing it on the rock beside me. It’s only just dead; its eyes are bright, the flesh still shiny.
And he walks away. Hait and Amina burst into excited giggles. ‘Mona and Ali,’ they sing. ‘Mona and Ali.’
My heart has stopped hurting and is soaring instead.
We were teenagers by then, still young, but too old to be friends. After that look I caught him giving me, before he turned and walked away – after that was when I swore that once we’d got together, we would never part.
How could you leave me, Ali?
How did I end up here, in London, with an old man, lying for a book of stamps so that I can write home, instead of staying with you by the estuary forever? And an enormous remorse washes over me.
I turn Charles, who is nodding sleepily now, in his wheelchair, and push him slowly back to his underground home. I install him in his sitting room. Then, as he’s half-asleep, I look around and find some paper, a pen. I go back up to the house.
I spend the afternoon cleaning, and don’t stop until it’s beginning to get dark.
I check on Charles again, make him some tea and go back up.
The TV is on in the drawing room, Leo has shut himself back in the dark.
And then, when everyone is settled and the house gleams, I go to my room and write to Leila.
Dear Leila
I am in England now.
We arrived at night and all the lights were on, orange in this street. The city all lit up, lights everywhere, filling the sky with their beams. Beautiful, but you cannot see the stars as we can at home.
Theodora, my new employer, has red hair, the colour of paprika, the colour of amber – you remember the stones I showed you in the medina? Quite beautiful, like a princess from The Arabian Nights.
London is the biggest city I’ve ever seen. It took us over an hour to drive from the airport to the house! On our journey here we passed some beautiful buildings, like palaces, all lit up too and lots of stone people and horses and lions.
You wouldn’t believe the shops – some as
long as whole streets with windows full of puppets and mannequins dressed in lovely clothes. When you come, you will see them with your own eyes.
There are trees with leaves the shape of hands that fall onto the soft black road surfaces and form a pattern as if you had done golden handprints all over the ground!
I have a room that is full of books and other piles of things I haven’t had time to look through yet. As soon as I can, I will send you something. We are lucky I have found this work. It means things will get better for all of us! Look after your grandmother for me, and keep smiling until we’re together again. I think of you all the time and send you all my love.
When I have charged my mobile and put credit on it, I promise I will call.
Your loving
Ummu.
How to explain that while her daddy vanished without trace, I will come home? How can I make her understand that not everyone disappears?
I hear the key in the lock and realise Dora has come home. I see myself through her eyes. The quiet housemaid, having completed her chores, taking a few minutes to herself to write home, because she cannot even afford credit on her phone.
I cover the paper with my arm because I don’t want her to know I took it from the old man or that in order to send it, I needed to take her money to buy stamps.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Daddy’s in his chair, a little sleepy, when I get back from work. I’m eager to see how his first full day with Mona went.
‘Daddy.’ I sit down close to him, speak into his ear. His eyes flash open.
‘Hello, Daddy. How are you?’
He stares at me, waiting to surface from his dreams.
‘Theodora, God’s precious gift,’ he says, smiling. My heart warms.
‘Yes – hi, Daddy. I just came down to see if you wanted anything.’
‘I have everything a man could wish for. I don’t want for anything, my dear. Though you might like to be a darling and bring me a whisky.’
‘You had a good day with Mona?’ I ask as I pour him his ‘two fingers’ and add a little soda, the way he likes it.
The Darkening Hour Page 6