The Last Gift Read online

  He remembered how one Christmas he told them about rosewater. This is how we greet each other in our celebrations. On the first day of Idd, people called on each other to offer greetings and share a cup of coffee and, if they were well off enough, a small bite of halwa. In some houses, the host sprinkled his guests with rosewater as they arrived, shaking it out of a silver fountain into their hands and sometimes lightly showering their hair with it. When Hanna asked for more, because she wanted to know about these people and which houses they visited – as did Jamal but he did not have her fearlessness about asking – he told them about how rosewater was distilled from rose petals and how it was used in various foods as well as in religious ceremonies in all parts of the world from China to Argentina. He told them about Idd and gave them a travelogue: how Idd was celebrated in that country as opposed to another one, in which month of the lunar year it occurred, what a lunar year is. When they asked him about his home country, he said he was a monkey from Africa.

  It did not take very long for them to learn not to ask him certain kinds of questions. Jamal could not bear the look of irritation on his face when they persisted with their questions. It was Hanna mostly, because she felt the deprivation more than he did. She preferred to pin down details, and sometimes she found Ba’s evasiveness so intensely frustrating that she had to leave the room.

  ‘No, not evasiveness, evasions, Beautiful One,’ she said later when they were old enough to talk about such things with bitterness, and when the undergraduate Hanna had acquired enough language to analyse what she called her dysfunctional family. Long ago he had asked his father what the name Jamal meant, and he told him it meant the Beautiful One, and so that became the name Hanna used as his ironic nick name. She herself preferred to be called Anna, and that was the name she used outside the house.

  ‘They are lost,’ she said. ‘Ba deliberately lost himself a long time ago, and Ma found herself lost from the beginning, a foundling. What I want from them is a story that has a beginning that is tolerable and open, and not one that is tripped with hesitations and silences. Why is that so difficult? I want to be able to say this is what I am. Yes, I know, so has every human being who has ever given the matter any thought, but I don’t want to crack the mystery of the soul or the nature of being. I just want some simple boring details. Instead we get snippets of secret stories we cannot ask about and cannot speak about. I hate it. Sometimes it makes me feel that I am living a life of hiding and shame. That we all are.’

  Jamal recognised the feeling she described. It came to him at unexpected moments when he too felt he had to dissemble and fudge. That feeling – that there was something to be ashamed of – had been with him most of his life, even when he did not know of its presence and had only slowly begun to understand its several causes. It added to the sense of difference and oddness that he had grown up with, a sense of strangeness. He had learned to recognise that feeling in many ways, and not just in response to hostility and unkindness and the teasing at school. He saw it in the stilted and careful smiles he received from some of the mothers of other children he knew, in the way people tried hard to prevent him from noticing that they had seen something to notice, in the ingenuous and sometimes insistent and cruel questions the children asked about his country and its customs. It was years before he learned to say this is my country, and it was Hanna who taught him to say that.

  Even when they tried to, they could not forget his difference and nor could he, even though he pretended to. How could it be otherwise? After two or three centuries of unrelenting narratives about how unalike one another they were, how could it be otherwise? Sooner or later, the meaning of their difference would be there in a look or a word or the sight of someone walking across the road. The teacher might be talking about poverty in the world and would not be able to resist a quick glance in his direction. Poverty is to be found in places where people like him lived, and we, who have redeemed ourselves from this condition, must learn not to despise those who have not yet found the means to save themselves. We must do what we can to help them. That is what he took the teacher’s pained look to mean, Jamal (and Hanna and those others who look like them) is one of those poor wretches but we must not despise him or say cruel things to him.

  Whenever someone old and dark-skinned came shuffling along the pavement in the way of old people, hair dishevelled perhaps or a grubby coat buttoned up askew, they chuckled, the children he grew up with, and glanced at him, embarrassed for him. He pretended that he did not feel any discomfort, pretended he was not any different from the chucklers.

  ‘There are times when I hate that they brought me here,’ Hanna said. ‘That they did not find another place to have me and to have you. Not because other places are free from cruelties and lies, but just to be saved from so much demeaning pretence. Not to have the chore of pretending to be no different from people who are full of shit about themselves. But I suppose they did not have any choice in the matter, really, only an appearance of choice. They could have chosen not to have me, but after that the matter was out of their hands.’

  It was after they both left home that Hanna raged like this, about the secrecy and their suppressed and dissembling lives. For a while, the matter seemed to possess her, then somehow she found some way of coping with it. It was university that did that, and the new friends she met there, and the love affairs, and academic success. As she made her way in the big world, the frustrations of being Hanna Abbas, growing up in a small modern house in Norwich with parents who seemed to her to be out of their depth, became less urgent. She was fully Anna now, and hardly ever talked about her difference in the same way. Instead it became an embellishment of her Britishness. Once he teased her and said that perhaps he should change his name to Jimmy, and maybe that would make him less fretful. He saw that he had hurt her, that he had made her seem treacherous to herself.

  ‘I hate the name Hanna,’ she said. ‘I don’t know where they got it from. Anyway, you’re the one who called me Anna.’

  ‘I know, I know,’ he said, placating her. ‘When I was a baby and couldn’t say the whole thing. Only teasing.’

  Jamal had not got to where she was yet, but perhaps prudence led inevitably there. He could not quite make himself say home, when he meant England, or think of foreigners without fellow feeling.

  He used to think that there were not many people who knew as little as he did about his parents. He used to imagine that other people knew who they were, and who their grandparents were, and where they lived and what they did. They would have uncles in Ireland and cousins in Australia and in-laws in Canada, and perhaps an awkward and disreputable relative who had cut himself off from everyone. They had obligations and get-togethers and tiresome relations. That was what normal family life was like, from what he could tell, whereas they were a vagabond family, wanderers without connection or duties. He had learned different since he started his doctoral research on migration movements to Europe, had learned something of how precarious, how mean, how resourceful the lives of these strangers were, how blood-soaked some of their stories were. He learned to be patient for the story that he knew his Ba would tell him one day. He looked at his father, breathing regularly in his drugged sleep, so recently close to departure, and thought perhaps the time for the telling was not too far off. If you stop struggling so hard against it, life can be quite tolerable, he whispered to his father, but he was not sure if he believed that himself. Why didn’t his Ba do more with his life? Why didn’t he want more? But was it so little what he did and what he wanted? It was not so little to spend so many years waiting in patient silence, knowing that one day he would be struck down just like this.

  What did you do? Jamal whispered to his father. Did you kill someone? Were you a torturer? Were you a crusher of souls?

  Maryam came back from dropping Hanna off at the station, and Jamal gave her the chair he had been sitting on. She touched Ba’s hand and Jamal expected the eyes to fly open again, but nothing happened.

&n
bsp; ‘He opened his eyes while you were were away,’ he told her.

  ‘What! Did he speak?’ she asked.

  ‘No, he just opened his eyes wide and then shut them again,’ Jamal said. ‘I don’t think he woke up. I think it was like a twitch.’

  Maryam went to tell the Sister who came to have a look and assured them that he was sleeping and was doing fine. Why didn’t they go and have a rest themselves and come back tomorrow? The way he was going, the doctor may well let him wake up tomorrow. On the way home, Maryam asked Jamal how long he was staying for and he said for three or four days. He’d see how things went. He was moving to a studio flat in a few days. He said studio flat with a self-mocking inflection. It was just an upstairs bedroom with a partitioned shower and toilet, but it would be a change from living in a small room in a house with two other students he had come to know too well: less interruption, and more work and emotional space.

  When they got back to the house Maryam went upstairs and brought down a photograph of Abbas in a frame. It was taken in Exeter by the friend that Abbas was staying with, and in it he was wearing a light-coloured, polo-neck sweater and short denim jacket. Maryam put it on the shelf above the gas fire and then turned to Jamal. ‘So handsome. You look just like him,’ she said. ‘Except for that craggy beard.’

  He thought she meant scraggy but he did not correct her. It was disconcerting, the way she mispronounced certain words, as if English was a language she had learned imperfectly when in fact she had lived in England all her life and only spoke English.

  ‘Where was that taken?’ he asked. He knew, but he sensed that Ma wanted to talk about the old days.

  They went to Birmingham first. Abbas said they were more likely to find work there and she did not know any different. If he had said Newcastle she would have gone, and that was as far as she could think of then without crossing the sea. Somehow Scotland was not a place you went to but came from. That’s what she thought in her ignorance. He was the one who had roamed the world and knew its ways and knew where was safe. Birmingham was as exciting to her as anywhere else because it was far from Exeter, and because she was with him for company. Sometimes she was fearful about what she had done, at other times she could not understand why she waited so long. But maybe she did understand; she would not have known how to run away on her own. She would have been too frightened of what life could do to her, without money, without charm or daring. Without. Abbas had a little bit of money, so they were not completely broke and were able to find a room and look for work. It wasn’t too bad. Work wasn’t easy to find in those days of inflation and strikes and trade-union wars. She found work as a cleaner in a hospital because it was the kind of work no one wanted, and he got work on building sites at first, and then found a factory job. It was confusing to live in a big city, and to do that kind of work, but it wasn’t too bad, and it was too late to think about what she did not like about it.

  Her life became completely different. She felt nervous at times because she was not sure how things were done and Abbas was not always there for her to ask him, but he was always there at the end of the day and she could not have imagined the pleasure of living with a loving companion. The company. He was full of talk and laughter . . . well, when they were on their own. He was more careful when they were with other people, but he wasn’t shy, he wasn’t afraid. At least that’s what he said: I’m not afraid of anybody or anything. The first time she heard him say that, she did not believe him. She thought he was swaggering for her, trying out those words to see if she liked him more for it. She must have done because he kept saying them for several years. Honestly, though, he was such a battler in those days. No one was going to bully them or take advantage of them, he said. She thought he talked like that to give both of them courage and confidence, and it did, it did. When he was not doing his big talk, he was so gentle and perhaps a little bit anxious, although she did not know what of, or even if it was of anything in particular. She was young enough to take everything in her stride, and she did not worry too much about anything, not when she had Abbas telling her hilarious stories about his journeys and some sad ones too, and on weekends they could stay in bed until early afternoon. They went to the cinema when they felt like it, and had a roast meal at the café round the corner if they wanted. She thought he would miss the sea, but he said no, he’d had enough of that. They were so lucky, she thought, to have found each other like that, just imagine the chances.

  Their lives were good in Birmingham. They both had work, even if it was poor work, and those first three years just flew. She thought of Ferooz and Vijay at times, and felt guilty and sick for running away without a word. When she said this to Abbas he said nothing. He did not sympathise or discourage, not in those days. He just looked down and waited silently until her hurt went away, as it always did after a while. There was so much pleasure in such ordinary things: buying pots and pans for the kitchen, decorating the bathroom of the flat they rented, learning to listen to music that she thought she despised. He loved reading, which was not something she could take to. It took too long when there were so many other things which did not. Sometimes he told her about the books he was reading, and that was enough for her. She loved to hear him talk about places he had known, about his experiences, which sometimes sounded impossible enough to find their way into books. She noticed that he always stopped short at some point, that he was holding part of the story back, and she soon worked out that he was not telling her about his childhood or about his home. When she asked him about that, he found a way of slipping away without explaining himself and she let him do so when perhaps she should not have done. After all these years, when so much of their lives had happened to them together, she did not know how to make him speak about what she had allowed him to keep silent about so long ago. It did not seem so important then, before the children came. That was what she wanted in those years in Birmingham. She really wanted her Hanna straight away but Abbas said she was too young and that they should wait for a few years. They argued about that. She knew that he was older than he had told her, that he was really thirty-four when they met in Exeter, and she thought that he did not want children any more, that he had become used to his roaming life, but he said no, it was because she was too young to burden herself with children yet.

  After three years in Birmingham – it did not feel anything like three years, it went so fast – they moved to Norwich. Abbas applied for a job in a new electronics firm and he got it. He had to do training for it and then they sent him there. It was a much better job with good pay and a pension scheme, and by then they both decided they would prefer to live in a small town. Abbas liked the water being nearby too. At first they called him a fitter, and then as times changed he was called an engineer, and then as even more time passed he advanced to chief engineer.When she went for work at the Job Centre, the man asked her what work she did in Birmingham. She said she was a hospital cleaner and he smiled and said you are in luck, so she ended up as a hospital cleaner again. She told herself that being a cleaner had its own satisfactions, you cleaned things, and she took the job. When she was a child living with Ferooz and Vijay, she wanted to work in a hospital, to be a psychiatric nurse like Ferooz. Well, she ended up working in hospitals most of her grown-up life, even if not as a psychiatric nurse.

  Maryam looked at the picture for a while and then she said: ‘What do you think? He still looks quite good, doesn’t he? He was almost never ill, you know. But it happens like that, you’re fine all your life and then one day everything descends on you.’

  He thought he would probably never get better. Years ago he had dreaded this coming, the coming of this dread, dying in a strange land that did not want him. That was years ago, and the country still felt strange. It still felt like somewhere he would one day leave. In some of the port cities he found himself in all that time ago, there were whole neighbourhoods of Somalis or Filipinos or Chinese, and it was possible to forget that he was in England for a short while. Despit
e their ragged appearance, these neighbourhoods were watchful and alert for strangers. They were people who were a long way from home, now huddled together for safety, and they had to keep a sharp lookout to protect their honour, which is to say their women and their property. But away from the big old ports, he sometimes passed dark-skinned old men on their own (old men more often than not, not usually old women) and he felt sorry for them. They looked so strange, those old men with their crinkly white hair and leathery dark skins walking English streets, like beasts out of their element, pachyderms on concrete pavements. I’ll never let that happen to me, he said to himself then, I’ll never let myself die in a strange land that does not want me, and here he was, more or less on the crematorium trolley.

  The doctor, Mr Kenyon . . . He thought at first that he said his name was Mr Kenya, and thought how funny, they get everywhere this lot, and feel no shame about naming themselves after land grabs, but he had said Kenyon. Why do they call themselves Mr and not Dr as they get more senior? Mr Kenyon told him he would lose some function. Paralysed. But some of it might come back. Physiotherapy and a good attitude. Did he say a good attitude or a good diet? Hearing is not one of the lost functions, speech is. He can make sounds but not words. Makes you wonder at the cleverness of it, making words out of these gurgles and whistles, making sense. We’ll get it back, Mr Kenyon said. Yes bwana, you and I.

  He had never known such fatigue. He felt as if a vital fluid in his body had been drained out, and when they first sent him home, he sat for hours without energy or volition, unable to lift his arm or rise to his feet or even close his mouth. He could not always keep his eyes open, and his mind wandered in and out of stupor. To his astonishment he found that hours had gone by in the blink of an eye. He could not bear voices or music on the radio, and so a silence enveloped him and oppressed the air around him.