The Last Gift Page 7

  They seem such quiet, eventless times after all these years and all the things that happened to him later. He went to school, he worked on the land, and sometimes he roamed with the other boys. The most memorable thing that happened in that time was his sister Fawzia’s marriage. She was the eldest of them all, and was becoming rebellious and difficult under their father’s regime, complaining in a high-pitched whine the whole day long, storming away from any rebuke and disappearing without explanation for hours on end. She must have been seventeen then, and the disappearances must have hastened her wedding day dramatically. You can’t have a girl that age going off for hours like that. What else could she be doing but ruining her reputation and bringing dishonour on her family? At eleven years old, Abbas would have been too young to know how such things were done, but a husband was found for Fawzia and the arrangements were put under way.

  Their father never stopped complaining about the cost. The expense of the celebrations used up everything he had put away, he said. No one believed him, although it was true that weddings made families poor. Parents used up their savings or went into debt to provide silver and gold and money for the dowry. Then they laid on a banquet so their relatives and any other loafer who wished to, could come and fill their bellies with biriani and ice cream. They paid up to avoid being shamed by gossip. They would be called mean if they failed to satisfy the greedy stomachs of guests they did not even invite but could not turn away. Their father did not mind being called mean. He already was, and he did not care in the slightest. But he paid up as he was required to do. He had no choice, as his wife told him repeatedly, otherwise he would dishonour their daughter. So a big banquet was held, and cooks came in a team from town, bringing their own cauldrons and serving platters, and their ice-cream churns. There was incredible excitement among the youngsters. A calf was tied up a little distance from the house, bleating and bellowing as if it knew what was coming, and a crowd of boys sat buzzing nearby, waiting for the butcher to come and slaughter it. Only when he came he chased them all away before he started. Then fires of clove wood were built and the air began to fill with the aroma of a biriani. The drummers played and guests began to arrive from town and from other places. The women went to the area screened off with palm fronds while the men mingled under the shade and greeted each other, clapped each other’s shoulders and laughed. Their father Othman laid aside his short hoe, and wore a new kanzu especially made for the occasion, and a kofia that the groom’s father had given him as a gift. Across his shoulders he wore a silk shawl that smelled of camphor, which he brought out of one of the chests in his room. Somehow he managed to suppress the pain it caused him to waste so much of his money on this frivolity, and even to look a little dignified in his finery. Then later the biriani banquet was perfect, and the drumming and singing went on late into the night, and the boys crept in the undergrowth to peep in on the women dancing behind the palm fronds.

  Yes, Fawzia’s wedding was the most memorable event of that time, although that was not to say that the rest was intolerable. He loved the rains, and the way the ditches filled up, and the frogs multiplied, and all the trees and bushes dripped long after the rain had stopped. He liked school, and could even tolerate the work on the farm, and sometimes went to town with Kassim, as he had done for years, to take the produce to the man they supplied in the market. Then afterwards they wandered the streets for a while, and stopped at a café for a bun and a mug of sweet milky tea.

  In the end, at the age of sixteen, he passed the examinations to go to a teacher training college in town. Well, it was not exactly in town, it was six miles out. He had seen it from the road several times on their bus trips to the market. The buildings were painted white and had long verandas and red roofs. From the road, the college looked like a palace by the sea. Some of the buildings were dormitories for students whose homes were on the other island. Local students took a special college bus every day from town, and took the bus back at the end of the day. When he knew he had been selected to go there, he borrowed a bicycle and went from Mfenesini to the college. It was only about ten miles away. He wandered the grounds and walked on the beach and loved it. But his father would have none of it, the hard-faced bully. He told him that he had had his schooling, more than enough of it to last anyone a lifetime. He had had his fun and games, and now it was time to come back to growing okra and brinjal full-time rather than be thinking about bringing even more expense on them with fees and uniforms and books. The whole family turned against the old man, even his Ma. Kassim called him a miser to his face and said to him that he had ruined their lives with his meanness. Their father chased after Kassim with a stick, shouting at him for his defiance and his disrespect, but his brother did not stop arguing even as he ran. Kassim was then twenty-one, and strong enough to wrest the stick from his father’s hand and break it in half with one snap, but you can’t do that to your own father, not where he came from. You took a beating or you ran. The argument went on for days, with the brothers and their mother taking turns, trying to wear the mean old man down. They got nowhere.

  It was a small place, and even a family quarrel was soon known to everyone, especially as Othman the miser did not mind describing his grievances to other people there under the tree. Eventually his sister Fawzia came to hear of what was going on. The life in town suited his honourably married sister, and after her move she became bold and independent, meeting new people and going out daily to visit with them. She turned out to be naturally gifted at small-town scheming and intriguing, with an ear finely tuned into rumour and gossip, and with a sharp wit that made her popular and daunting at the same time. When she heard about these arguments she came home to find out what could be done. It was she who found the solution that allowed Abbas to go to his college. She pawned some of her dowry gold for the fees, so perhaps the dowry was not such a waste of money after all. Then, because his sister and her husband only lived in one rented room themselves and cooked in the shared yard, and so did not have space to spare, she persuaded her husband’s relatives to take Abbas in while he studied. Abbas was not sure what arrangements were made, or if the relatives took him in out of kindness. It was not always polite to enquire into such details, but it meant he went to study in town and lived with the relatives of his sister’s husband. They gave him a small storeroom, so he had somewhere to sleep and somewhere to work. A small storeroom with a view of the sea. No, don’t go that way, don’t go that way. He couldn’t think any more about that. He didn’t want to think about that any more. Not now, no, not now, go to sleep, you cowardly old man. Picture a brightly lit number: 1. Then picture another, glowing silver: 2. And another in flashing magenta: 3. And out of thin mist emerges another: 4. Mashaallah, keep going.

  Maryam worried that Abbas was becoming a stranger to her. He was unpredictable, still for long periods and sometimes staring at her as if he had no idea who she was. Then he was tender, holding on to her hand as if he was afraid of allowing her to move out of sight. Dr Mendez had warned her that he might forget things or appear to lose his memory but this would probably be temporary. She did all the checks the doctor required her to do, and fed him the medicines she had prescribed. Abbas did as Maryam instructed, left it all to her, most of the time. At other times be became abrupt and difficult, sobbing with pain and pushing her away.

  She worried about the children, that they should not come to think ill of their father, that they should not see him again until he was calmer. As the days passed, Abbas grew a little stronger, although not strong enough to walk to the library as the doctor asked him to do every week. That doctor! Abbas wouldn’t even know the way to the library in his state. She went to the library for him and borrowed audio books that she thought he would be able to listen to. At night she lay on her camp bed, listening to Abbas fidgeting on the bed in the dark, dreading that her children might stumble and lose their way in life, that they might lose their father. Abbas slept better in those early weeks of spring. The doctor had given him some
thing to help him sleep, and perhaps the heaps of warm bedding helped. The sleeping medicine made him confused when he woke up but at least he slept, and the rest was bound to make him stronger.

  Moving

  2

  The first time Anna saw their neighbour, she was in her garden, moving in and out of sight with an air of someone who was oblivious to everything but her work. Anna caught sight of her from the back upstairs window while she was showing the movers where she wanted the boxes. It was a quick glimpse – or rather several quick glimpses – of a slim woman with long fair hair, in jeans and boots, her shirt sleeves rolled up, digging plants into her garden bed from a tray of little yoghurt pots. After a few moments she rose from her haunches and strode in the direction of her house, hurrying a little, urgent to get those plants in. Anna guessed that she was putting on a performance, as if she was aware that she was being watched and wanted to give an appearance of courteous indifference, just getting on with her work. It went through Anna’s mind that they might have a neighbour who was a fusspot. Anna moved away from the window just as she came out again, and she sensed that her neighbour looked up seconds after she had moved out of sight.

  That was on the day they moved in. For once it was not raining and was, in fact, a mild and sunny March day. With every other move she had made it had rained all day, making everything messy and awkward, adding to the shambles of it all. This was the first move with Nick, or the second if you counted when they had decided to share a flat. At that time, she had moved out of a room in a housing association flatshare into Nick’s flat in Wandsworth. It was more Tooting than Wandsworth, but Wandsworth sounded better. Not just sounded better when anyone asked you, it sounded better to live in. Tooting sounded like a repair yard for trains, or an abattoir or a psychiatric hospital. The room she had moved from was in Tottenham, which if you were naïve and generous, made you think of a glamorous football team. It surprised her, when she made the move that time, how much she had accumulated and squeezed into her one room; when she arrived in Wandsworth the van that Nick had hired for the day was packed and bursting. He was determined to make only one trip, for some reason. He made this into a joke, a kind of dare, but she could see his determination. When they unloaded the van her plants were mutilated, a leg was broken off one of her old chairs, the ironing board was twisted. Fortunately, nothing valuable was damaged. Not that she owned anything valuable, she just said that to tease Nick. The mess was all right, though, even if it was sad to see useful or tender things damaged. It was what you would expect moving to be like, the sweating, the grumbling, the manhandling, and then chaos subsiding into order. She loved that, the moment late in the evening when all that was urgent was done and you could clear a space to have the first meal in the new place. Damp hair and muddied newspapers on the floors only added zest to the baked fish or whatever you might have put together between cleaning the bathroom, or switching on the boiler, or unpacking the essentials. They, this time with Nick, could then smile over the irritations and laugh about the worst moments, and begin to look around with some satisfaction at what they had done. She guessed that on this occasion, (she felt like that), even the bed, with its tired old mattress and sagging springs, would feel a little bit like a sophisticated adventure when they lay in it in its new location.

  Because moving is like starting again, like making something new out of bits and pieces, like having another go at getting it right this time. She had in mind the tame moving from one flat to another, which people do when they are young and not too weighed down: because they know someone who is moving out of a nice place in a better area of town or one that has more space, and which incredibly was charging the same rent or only a little more. A lot of moving is not like that at all, as Jamal was sure to have told her in several of his moments of passion about the injustices heaped on his beloved immigrants and asylum seekers. It was not as if she did not know herself, but Jamal lost himself in his zeal sometimes. For millions of people, she could hear him say with that tremulous intensity of his, moving is a moment of ruin and failure, a defeat that is no longer avoidable, a desperate flight, going from bad to worse, from home to homelessness, from citizen to refugee, from living a tolerable or even contented life to vile horror. She felt sympathy for what he said, but she was not sure what else was expected of her. Everyone got on with things as best they could. It would not do to say anything, of course. She would only come out with clichés that made her sound hard-hearted and smug, but her sympathy could never go out fully to Kosovan sex trafficers and North African body smugglers as his could. So her moving with Nick was not that kind of life-shattering moving, and probably it was not even like starting again, but it was still a big decision, to give up her job and sign up as a supply teacher and follow him here like a partner in waiting.

  She had said to him, ‘Are sure you know what you’re asking me to do?’ What she meant was: Do you realise how much you are asking me to give up and what I will take it to imply about you and I?

  He said, ‘Yes, I do know. This will work out for both of us.’

  Their shared smiles made her certain they understood each other.

  The reason for moving was because Nick had just taken up his first academic post, taking his first unequivocal step in the career he had coveted for so long. Normally he would not have been expected to start until September, but because of illness and study leave and other shenanigans that she could not fully comprehend, the department was unexpectedly short of staff and had asked him if he would start as soon as possible. He had started immediately, commuting from Wandsworth to Brighton during January and February (right through those early weeks when Ba fell ill) while she went through the formalities of resigning from her job. It was a job that suited her, but she was also curious about what lay ahead, to see how things would turn out. You see, Nick said, it’s exciting, isn’t it? It was not as if giving up her job was going to leave them penniless. He would be getting a salary right through the summer instead of having to look for a job in a café, and there was plenty of time for her to find a permanent job for September. In the meantime, they began looking for somewhere to rent.

  They hired a house removal firm, all paid for by the university’s Human Resources department. It was her first encounter with removal men. They arrived at eight o’clock in the morning and had packed everything in the truck in two hours, the furniture, the boxes, the plant pots. They were courteous and friendly, making just the right amount of conversation without becoming tiresome. It was a surprise. She had expected them to be gruff and resentful at having been reduced to such menial work for a living, instead it was they who politely put her at ease. They graciously accepted cups of tea while they worked, managing to seem pleasantly surprised at this unexpected civility, and they were so efficient that it made her feel sorry that there was not more for them to do, that it was not possible to give them a fuller opportunity to demonstrate their expertise.

  She had thought it would be frustrating to have people fussing around their things when they were perfectly capable of moving themselves. She had always moved herself, with a little help from whoever was available, and why did they need to move everything? What was the point of taking that broken-backed old bed? Why not buy another one there? She thought hiring a removal firm was one of those corrupt little habits they had acquired from their betters, who were too lazy to do anything for themselves and would pay someone to do their breathing for them if they could. But it was not frustrating at all, in fact it made her feel good to be deferred to in so many small decisions. That was part of the courtesy of the men, to make it seem that she could instruct them to do whatever she wished and they would do it. It made her appreciate the thrill of being rich enough to pay for deference, even though it was Human Resources that was doing the paying. She knew that Nick was pleased to be the provider of these new perks. The university doesn’t treat you too badly, does it? he said. If they had offered you a company car, then I would really have felt that we were moving
up in the world, she said, teasing him.

  It was a small house, its walls rendered white and its front door painted blue, and she thought their furniture clumsy and bulky, but the sofa and chairs were manoeuvred in with the minimum of fuss. The bed went upstairs like a lamb. The desk, the cooker, and the fridge marched obediently to their allotted places. If she and Nick had been doing it themselves, there would have been talk of taking down doors, passing things through windows, even considering removing banister rails to get the desk upstairs, and certainly plenty of exasperated instructions and irritable debates. Instead Nick was on a stepladder, in noisy good humour, making a comic art out of hanging curtain after curtain, as if it was important they secrete themselves behind carefully arranged cover at the earliest opportunity. When they toured their house in the silence that followed the men’s departure, his arm was heavy on her shoulder, and the weight of it aroused her because she knew they would soon make love. She glanced out of the back window into their neighbour’s darkening garden and saw the scattering of plants she had been putting in earlier in the afternoon.

  ‘Did you see the neighbour?’ she asked, leaning against him, her voice lowered as if she might be overheard. ‘She was fussing about in the garden, planting things. She looked so busy.’

  His other arm came round her waist, and she was enveloped in him. She shut her eyes for a few seconds and felt herself heating up, drifting into the beginning of lovemaking. He let her go after a moment and walked past her to the window. He glanced out briefly, then drew the curtains as if to keep out the offending view. ‘No I didn’t see her,’ he said, but as if these were words just for the sake of speaking. She knew that his mind was on other matters. ‘What did she look like?’