Admiring Silence Page 18
I remembered him from school now that I saw his face. He would have been in the senior form when I was starting, a tall, lanky boy (when I was a stumpy squirt) who seemed gentle and courteous compared to the swaggering prefects and house captains and head boy in the same year as him. Perhaps I should go and see him, and tell him how much I preferred that civil prefect to the hectoring Prime Minister. Isn’t it dry for the season? When are you going to get the toilets unblocked? He finished his address with a short prayer: May God bless our endeavours. And I in turn said a little prayer for him: May the donor deliver enough funding to make the burdens of office bearable.
The Prime Minister was followed by a man dressed as a sheikh of Islam, wearing a long juba with a silver lining and a thin turban wrapped round a hard cap. The studio was back-lit with a picture of the Kaaba, and the sheikh issued from that Holy Stone like an emanation. You could tell just by looking at him that he knew his lines. He had mean-looking lips, or in any case they looked as if they were used to saying hard words, and he had the regulation stubble around his chin. From the size of his ears I could tell that he wasn’t a listener. This man was not joking, and as soon as he opened that mouth you had to lean back as the authoritarian blast issued from it. And what he had to say was simple and implacable, like the heaving breath of a dying dragon. (Not that I have met many dragons in this condition, but I mean that these were gasps of spent might clinging to a memory of power and sounding only like terror.) God has chosen our rulers for us. That is why they are our rulers. Our duty before God is to obey them.
‘What shall we say to Safiya’s parents?’ my mother asked.
It was in this casual way that I was invited to put the noose around Safiya’s neck and drag her into the shambles of my life. In reality, my mother’s question was forcing the matter to a crisis, my crisis, not the resolution she thought she was bringing about by firm insistence. No escape. My audience waited: Rukiya, Akbar, my mother. Should we not fetch my stepfather? Should he not be here at the execution, to hear me ask forgiveness before submission? They waited, words of approbation lying coiled alongside sour words of blame.
I gathered myself and gave it to them, relishing the impact that I knew I was going to make. Here it is, this is how it really is, a lot worse than you could have imagined and nothing much can be done about it.
‘I live with a woman in England,’ I said. It sounded odd when I said it, so cruel. ‘Her name is Emma. We have been together for twenty years, and we have a daughter who is seventeen, Amelia.’
The man on the TV fell silent for a moment, and I looked at him to see if he had a view on the matter, but he just swallowed hard and continued. ‘I love her very much,’ I said. ‘And I can’t wait to return to her.’
Akbar laughed, as I might have expected, an ugly man-of-the-world bark. Rukiya made a face, something between disappointment and disgust. I forgave them both. My mother dropped her eyes.
‘Why didn’t you tell us this?’ Akbar said, his anger mounting as he spoke. ‘You could’ve saved us a lot of trouble. What did you mean by keeping silent while all this was going on around you? What are we to tell her people now?’
PART THREE
‘Wee goe brave in apparell that we may be taken for better men than wee bee; we use much bumbastings and quiltings to seem better formed, better showldered, smaller wasted, and fuller thyght, then wee are; wee barbe and shave ofte, to seem yownger than wee are; we use perfumes both inward and outward to seeme sweeter then wee bee; corkt shooes to seeme taller than wee bee; wee use cowrtuows salutations to seem kinder then wee bee; lowly obaysances to seeme humbler then wee bee; and somtyme grave and godly communication, to seem wyser or devowter then wee bee.’
Sir John Harington, ‘Treatise on Playe’ (about 1597), in The Letters and Epigrams of Sir John Harington together with The Prayse of Private Life, Edited with an Introduction by Norman Egbert McClure (1930)
1
My flight from home was frantic. The taxi was late, decrepit, and at every road-block sounded as if it would judder to a terminal halt, but somehow struggled and dragged its knackered hulk to the airport. The check-in was crowded and chaotic, everyone pushing and jostling from every direction, stumbling over luggage to reach the one official who sat calmly behind his podium, unhurriedly scrutinizing the documents which were presented to him, looking every inch a man contented with his work. Customs were awkward, wanting luggage unpacked. (I got through after only a brief interrogation to which I responded with beaming smiles.) Immigration studied my health certificates with great care, perhaps out of concern about whether I was well-enough protected from the pest-ridden land I was heading for. Then Security insisted I hand over all the local currency I had on me, since it was illegal to take it with me and since it was no longer possible to get out again to the bank counter and change it. As we waited in the crowded departure lounge, people sat in silence or paced the edges of the herd, smoking and looking out of the windows. It was as if we were waiting for the last plane away from an approaching disaster.
There was more frenzy on the plane itself, with arguments over seats and luggage space. The boarding cards showed every passenger’s seat reservation, so it could only be a habituated fear of being short-changed and screwed by officials that prompted the anxiety, though perhaps some of the more obstinate contestants were in it just for the love of hassle. The staff of the Kenya Airways flight kept well out of it for a while, then moved in with ruthless courtesy and managed to get everyone seated in a little less than half an hour. I found myself in a middle seat with a beautiful Indian woman on the window side of me and a plump man in his sixties (I’d guess) in the aisle seat. When I sat down next to the man, he gave me a long, unwelcoming stare, and punished me throughout the flight by releasing a series of foul-smelling farts. After a while I could see them coming. He would make a small shuffling movement, and that would be the signal that something was on the way. It seemed that every small adjustment he made to his body released poisonous fumes. As you may imagine, life became even harder after he had had his airline meal. I learnt to respect that man’s quiet assurance over the next seven hours.
The Indian woman was much more interesting, though when the farts began I was afraid she would think I was the perpetrator of the evil deed. I must say that until I located the source of the pollution unmistakably, I did wonder if she might be the culprit, so she must have wondered the same about me. Her name was Ira, and as I quickly found out when we began to exchange a few remarks, she lived in Ealing and worked as a systems designer for an international communications firm. So I told her that I lived in Battersea and had been working as a drudge in a school in Wandsworth for all my adult life. I had a sense in our exchange that we were two strangers meeting up a long way from home.
‘Were you here on business?’ I asked her, just making conversation, for I couldn’t imagine that anyone would think to construct a system on our little island that required such dedicated design. I would guess that the usual practice is to set up whatever comes as a job lot from a Scandinavian cultural foundation.
‘No, visiting relatives,’ she said.
‘Relatives! Are you from here?’ Her hair was cut short and styled, though I couldn’t tell you what the style might be called, not being familiar with such things. She spoke firmly and unhurriedly, and her face had a look of assurance and cultivation, the kind of face that you would expect to know how to get about in a theatre, or an airport, or a restaurant.
‘No, I was born in Nairobi, but I have an aunt who still lives here,’ she said. That still hung in the air for a few seconds, then she picked it up. ‘All the family has left Africa now, except for her, gone to England and Canada. She says she is too old to start again, and she doesn’t like the sound of the cold.’
It was a face that had seen something of life, by which I simply mean that I guessed she had known some pain. I must have been studying her unawares, because after saying that about her aunt not liking the cold, she looked back
at me for a longish second and twitched her eyebrows the slightest fraction, which was the most elegant demonstration I have seen of the question What are you staring at? I retreated in confusion.
‘When did your family leave Nairobi?’ I asked, when a moment presented itself to reopen the conversation.
‘A few years after independence,’ she said. ‘When I was about ten.’ That made her about thirty-eight, though she had the kind of face that could have turned out five years either side of that. ‘My father trained as a geologist. In England. I think he hoped to work for a mining company or something like that, but when he came back to Nairobi, his father needed him in the business. Selling farm machinery, motors and so on. It was a big concern but it wasn’t really what my father wanted to do. He felt it was his responsibility to the family. Then when my grandfather died, he ran the business until after independence. It became much harder then.’
She glanced at me, to see if she should continue. She had spoken easily, as if talking about banal everyday matters, about a visit to a garage or the virtues of Swissair over British Airways, not about intimate family history. I have no great experience of travel, but I did wonder if sitting together on an anonymous aeroplane has that effect on people. I had done the same thing with the grinning man on the flight from London. ‘You mean because of all the petty persecution of Indian businesses?’ I asked.
She nodded. ‘There was a lot of restrictive legislation, that’s true. But it was also difficult to get the stock, and every official, right up to the top, wanted a cut. Three years after independence my father developed a heart problem from all the stress. He was only forty-three. It was then that he and my mother felt it was time to get out.’
I wanted to tell her, I’m only forty-two, and I have developed a heart problem. A buggered heart, no less, with unstated consequences which I’ll hear about in due course upon my return to civilization. Do you hear me moaning? Do you hear me planning to leave?
‘How did you get on when you first went to England?’ I asked, suppressing my ridiculous irritation for the pleasure of Ira’s unforced voice and her lovely face. There was plenty in my head which was waiting to burst out, and I was happy to keep it in check for as long as I could.
She grinned at the memory. ‘He got a job with a mining company at last,’ she said. ‘I can’t remember how many jobs he applied for. His age was against him and he had no experience, but he got one in the end. It was an Indian company that mined phosphates in West Africa and had its headquarters in London. My father just handled equipment orders and supplies, administration work. So he never got to be a geologist, but it was a mining company. That was when we moved to Ealing.’
‘Oh, do you live with your parents then?’ I asked.
‘No, I live alone,’ she said, casually, but I thought to myself, that’s the pain that I saw, sharp-eyed blighter that I was. ‘My father died about ten years ago, but my mother still lives in the same house they bought all those years ago. My elder brother and his family live there too. But here, you let me go on about myself and you say nothing.’
‘I’m not interesting,’ I said. God, haven’t I got enough trouble without also being interesting? ‘I meant, how did you get on yourself when you first went to England? Honestly, you’re not going on at all. I’d love to hear some more.’
The fat man next to me must have had an opinion on all this, for he silently released a stunner. He must have had something rotting in him. Conversation was quelled, perhaps we both instinctively shut our mouths to prevent the poisonous fumes from entering our gullets. We sat helplessly gasping and choking in this swamp effluvium for a while, until airline business took us all in hand: a small tray packed with tiny tupperware dishes containing grandly named but evil-looking portions of food, a nasty sharp wine which was none the less welcome, followed by the dimming of the lights and the in-flight movie. Ira hardly touched her tray, and I made common cause with her, two sophisticated metropolitans spurning the crude, processed garbage intended for undiscriminating, beastly plebeians. I was to regret this as the night wore on, especially when I discovered that Ira was vegetarian, and had not been hungry enough to make a fuss when she was given the non-veg tray. My other neighbour methodically refuelled for further exploits in the early hours of the morning.
Anyway, after the lights were dimmed and the video was switched on, Ira curled herself up and shut her eyes. I tried to do the same, but as soon as I did so all the memories of the last few days, which had been squatting patiently in my darkened brain, began to stir.
I didn’t mind Akbar’s anger or Rukiya’s despising looks. What did I care? I listened to Akbar’s frothing spite with some astonishment, watched him build himself into a rage. I had misled them all. I had misled the young woman and brought shame on both families, but especially on my mother and father. Is this what England had made me into? An ill-mannered, heartless, dishonourable barbarian? An enemy, that’s what I was. Adui. And now after all this, I announce the grotesque state of affairs. An English woman! My mother said nothing at first, but I imagined her thinking that I had left her before and then it seemed I had come back, and now I was leaving her again, as my father had done. When she spoke at last, it was to say that I had been wrong not to tell them about this English woman I had married from the start. She did not know what she thought about the idea. Something in her felt revolted, ill. How could I do it? I couldn’t have done worse if I had married a Jewish woman. But I should still have told them from the start. Perhaps after they had had their fill of revulsion and disappointment, they would have sent their blessing, or at least sent word of their feelings. Now what did the poor woman think of them, for their silence to her over all these years? That we were people without civilization or decency? That I was some pitiful vagrant, without home or family? And what about the child, who has not known her people and to whom she, my mother, would never be able to speak with understanding? What did she think of them for their silence to her? All these years they had worried, or at least she had worried, that I was living alone and dejected in a strange land because my home had turned into such a nightmare. But I had already found another home, and perhaps had already forgotten them for an English woman. And through all the blame and the hurtful words her name was silently screaming inside me. Emma. Emma.
I wanted to tell my mother that Emma and I were not married, that I had been lying to her for years about them, and that I was a pitiful vagrant, living a life of bondage and unfulfilment, a stranger, an alien, without any particular distinction or use in that place, but that I no longer had any choice. It was the only life I knew how to live now, and that more than anything in the world I wanted to get back to her and put right what could still be put right. But my mother’s words of anger and hurt silenced me. There was more, and it seemed that her words of blame were endless, though afterwards I knew she could not have spoken for that long. In the end my mother said that since I had managed to forget about her for so long, she would have to learn to forget about me. She would have to learn to think of me as no longer her son. I was forty-two years old and she was disowning me, for Christ’s sake!
Then the three of them left and went to my stepfather’s room. I heard the transistor being turned off, and the door being shut and bolted. It would have been a good time for a walk, to get away from the distasteful drama that was brewing up, and to give thought to all the words that had been said, to feel the unavoidable potency of what had been delivered and received in a spate. Words are like that. Even taken in in bulk, they lodge themselves in the infinite corners of recall, and then return in their full regalia in ones and twos and threes, each little bunch stepping forward to corrode the heart with venom again and again.
But it was late in the evening, and the night outside was dark and empty. I had gone out on my own on an earlier night, when the TV was showing yet another episode of Dallas and everyone in the room was abandoned to its improbable seductions. It could only have been about nine, and I walked the open r
oads, not the coiled and insinuating alleys, yet everywhere there was a tense and anticipating silence, as if the assailants who throng the darkened path of our petty existence were waiting in the dimness of those gloomy streets. Now and then a figure slid into the open, silhouetted by the secretive shadow which followed it along the wall, and I knew without knowing anything for sure that these stalking figures were hard-hearted connoisseurs of human pain, prowlers after the flesh of the poor and the destroyed. A man staggered towards me, and even in that light he looked young and familiar, perhaps someone I had once known, but his face was puffy with old bruises and his body was soiled and reeking. When he opened his mouth to speak I saw that his front teeth were missing. Beloved, he said, reaching out for my arm. Beloved, my beloved. Don’t just walk past me. I stiffened and glared at him, my body trembling with offence and abhorrence, and some anxiety. Please, I said, and hurried away, and heard him break into loud sobs behind me.
I returned to the house to find that my absence had not been noticed. I had not taken a key and had to knock for admission, which caused consternation. No one called at that time of night. When I was allowed in, I had to listen to lectures about the dangers of the streets at that hour. Nightmarish images came to me that night. Not grotesque or frightening shapes, but often faces, that appeared, sudden and looming, the moment I shut my eyes. Not familiar or especially menacing or mocking, but intense and hard, unforgiving, promising pain.
So while my misdemeanours were being discussed with my stepfather, I only considered the possibility of a walk as a desperate option. They might not let me back in this time, and I might have to walk the streets with those other looters of humanity. On the TV was another American soap, but I was too ignorant of these things to recognize it, and for a moment the absurd luxury of the set seemed loathsome and deliberately mocking. But only for a moment. It was nothing to do with me. And perhaps the reason why that fantasy world seemed real and engaging to everyone was because it was removed in every respect from the deprivations of existence in that place. Or perhaps it simply put that existence out of mind, turned it into something impossible and absurd.