The Last Gift Read online

  ‘Slim, fair-haired, self-important,’ she said.

  He looked at her for a long moment, as if thinking through what she had said. ‘Not my type,’ he said. She smiled, waiting for him to smile with her, waiting for him to come over to her.

  That first evening in their new rented house, Nick cooked a roast lamb that he bought from the butcher round the corner. He had noticed that there was a butcher on the main road when they came to view the house, and a greengrocer and a baker, and spoke about their presence there as a kind of special piece of luck, an unexpected remnant of an extinguished way of life. As soon as he was done with the curtains, even before the movers had left, he had gone to make his first visit and had returned with a joint of lamb and a story of two elderly butchers who looked like brothers, and who served him with old-fashioned charm. She guessed he would have done his best to charm them in return, giving them that hard-to-resist grin of his, and that he would have shown them his almost boyish delight to see them there.

  Anna called her mother when she went downstairs, and her mother marvelled at everything she told her, how well everything had gone, what a lovely day, how efficient the movers were, how big the bedroom, how compact their little house, the lovely blue front door, that the phone was already working. She had not wanted to try the new number until she heard from them, her mother said, in case it did something funny to the phone line, or tripped something. Anna supressed her irritation. Her mother said tripped something as if it was a technical term for the unpredictable caprices of machines. She came out with strange anxieties like that sometimes, as if she was thinking of somewhere else, of another place where things were done differently and where simple matters were fraught with difficulty.

  ‘What something funny could it have done?’ Anna asked.

  ‘I don’t know. It might have made something go wrong with your phone line if I called before it was ready,’ her mother said.

  Tripped something, Anna thought. ‘What can a telephone call do to a telephone line to make it go wrong?’ Anna asked.

  ‘I’m sorry, I don’t know, Hanna, but it is such a bother when machines go wrong,’ her mother said. ‘Anyway is Nick happy? Does he like it there?’

  ‘Of course he does. We wouldn’t have taken it otherwise,’ Anna said tetchily. ‘Anyway, he’s happily cooking our dinner and playing Miles Davis at full blast. Can’t you hear it?’

  ‘Yes yes, that’s nice,’ her mother said, still not convinced, even though Anna told her the world was changing and that cooking could make a man happy.

  ‘How is he?’ Anna asked. She tried to resist a feeling of distaste as she asked, not only because she felt forced to do so but because of the answer that she was likely to get. What could her mother say? He’s better (he’s not worse), he’s worse (he’s not better). She would not say: Actually that second stroke may have finished him off. He lies there voiceless and incontinent, groaning for sympathy and bullying the life out of me. She could not say that, it would be too shocking, it would make her seem heartless, and perhaps she did not even think it. If it was up to Anna, and she would not admit to thinking this to anyone either, she would let the stubborn man go quietly, or at least leave him alone with his secrets and his silences intact. Jamal worried about what his silences contained, but she had tired of that, not from dislike of him but because of the pointless tedium of whatever it was he would not tell them about himself. She had given up trying to unravel her unknown mongrel origins, and interested herself in what she was in her life, not what she came from. But still she asked the question, for her mother perhaps, or for herself more likely, so she would not seem callous and uncaring in her mother’s eyes. ‘Is he getting better?’

  ‘Oh yes, he’s sleeping better and getting stronger every day,’ Maryam said. ‘That’s the main thing, for him to get stronger. The rest is doing him good, and the physiotherapy, and the medicines. You know, I had no idea what miracles physiotherapy can do. He’s very well looked after, really.’

  ‘Of course he is, by you. Can he do anything for himself, or do you still have to do everything for him?’ Anna asked, unable to resist a spasm of queasiness at the thought of what that really meant. ‘You don’t want to make yourself ill as well.’

  ‘Oh no, he looks after himself more and more every day. He’s doing well. Stop worrying yourself about me,’ Maryam said.

  ‘Can he speak yet?’ Anna asked.

  ‘No,’ Maryam said after a moment’s hesitation. ‘But he can make sounds, you know, not words at all, but sounds that are trying to be words. The physio says it’s very promising. I get him audio books from the library, and he listens to them a lot. It’s funny. He can’t bear the voices on the radio, but he listens to the books.’

  ‘What books?’ Anna asked. Her father used to read slowly, and the books he liked he read more than once. She used to buy him books sometimes, to broaden his reading, books that had excited her when she was at university, but she was not sure if he read them. She thought he preferred books that gave him information, that told him things he did not know, and did not get up to too many narrative tricks. ‘What books is he listening to?’

  ‘Some poems I got for him, classics something,’ Maryam said.

  ‘Poems! Why did you get him poems?’ Anna replied, unable now to prevent her impatience from showing. ‘Why didn’t you get him something he would like to listen to? Huckleberry Finn or something like that.’

  ‘He likes them,’ Maryam said, and despite herself, Anna could hear the smile in her mother’s voice. ‘He sometimes used to read me poems from books he took out from the library. I looked for those in the audio section and got them for him to listen to this week, and he likes it.’

  Anna grinned at the absurd vision of her father reading poems to her Ma. She wondered what his choice would have been: ‘If’ or ‘Daffodils’ or something to do with the sea. ‘The Lotus Eaters’ maybe, that would combine syrupy rhymes with The Odyssey, perfect. Once she had bought him a copy of Aimé Césaire’s Cahier d’un retour au pays natal, in a parallel text, because at that time she had recently come to know the poem herself and had been overwhelmed by it. Perhaps she also wanted to show off to him a little, look, this is the kind of stuff I read these days. She had no idea if her father read the poem, and in any case, she herself came to tire of Césaire’s booming self-indulgent language and the theatricality of its emotion. While her mother talked, listing the audio books her father was going to listen to in the coming weeks and the improvements the physio promised, Anna’s mind wandered to her and Nick’s lovemaking earlier in the afternoon, and she briefly stroked her left nipple where Nick had nestled for a while. She made encouraging noises to her mother but was not really listening any more.

  ‘I’ll come down to see you when we’re more settled,’ Anna said, getting ready to hang up.

  As if sensing that Anna was thinking of going and because she was perhaps not ready to let her go, her mother asked about Jamal. ‘Has Jamal got your new number?’ she asked. ‘Have you heard from him?’

  ‘Oh yes,’ Anna said, lying to save herself a lecture on keeping in touch. He preferred emails, and that suited her too, but she got the lecture anyway.

  ‘Well, you must keep in touch with each other,’ her mother said. ‘There are only the two of you. You have no other family. You must always look after each other because there is no one else to turn to in times of trouble.’

  Anna listened and offered comfort as best she could. She did not say that she also had Nick (had had him in full that afternoon).

  Maryam heard Hanna’s impatience as she hung up, and she shrugged. She had taught herself to make light of these slighting gestures. She went back to the living room and saw from the look in Abbas’s eye that he wanted to know.

  ‘Hanna,’ she said. ‘She was asking after you. They’ve just moved today, you know.’

  Abbas nodded slowly and turned back to the muted television, which was showing a nature programme. He too had learned to retrea
t from Hanna, who had once been so dear to his life. She turned against him after she went to university, not with anger or rudeness, not at first, but with sullen and withdrawn resistance. Maryam knew how that hurt him, Hanna’s withdrawal of affection, and how he had tried to draw her back in ways that had worked before, with teasing and questions and jokes. Only that no longer worked, and one day when Abbas was making one of his blunt jokes about her clothes, Hanna had said to him: Leave me alone, Ba, and had left the room and marched right out of the house to go wherever she was going. It stunned him. She had never spoken to him like that before. Abbas could not get used to that, or to the way she talked about boys she knew at the university, or to the fact that she slept so much of the day and did not disguise her boredom at home. Sometimes he said things. In the end she did not come back during vacations, just visited for a few days and then left. Perhaps that was what happened to everyone, and they all learned to swallow what hurt they felt as their children tired of them.

  Maryam returned to the household paperwork she was going through. For the twenty-five years they had lived in the house, it was always Abbas who did that. It had started when she became pregnant with Hanna. Before that they did not bother with bills until the threats arrived, but then they moved to Norwich for his new job and she became pregnant. As soon as she told him, he insisted they get married. He was appalled by the thought that someone might call his child a bastard one day. He became a saver, he scrutinised every bill and they had to give up all frivolous spending. They seemed to live like that for years, but one day, when they had saved enough, they bought this house in Hector Street. She remembered the day they moved in as if it was yesterday, and the memory made her smile. A friend from work drove the van for them because neither of them could drive. Abbas said they should hire a wheelbarrow and walk their few possessions round from their rented flat, but she said it was too far away, and Hanna was two years old and Jamal was already on the way. He said he was only joking, but she wasn’t sure. She looked up at Abbas, a smile on her face, and watched him for a moment as he stared woodenly at the TV. Her swaggering sailor man turned inspired householder. Because he was inspired. He wallpapered, retiled the bathroom, repaired what needed repairing, and turned out to be a tireless gardener. He planted vegetables and flowers and a plum tree. He built a paved terrace outside the back door. In time, that garden was full to bursting with roses and tomatoes and plums and fennel and jasmine and redcurrants, all growing anyhow as if they just found themselves there. It’s natural growth, Abbas said, not an army of plants marching in a line. One day she saw him building a small wooden house and asked him what that was. He said it was a chicken house for the run he was planning. She talked him out of that, and they bought a rabbit instead. The children will like that, she said. But the rabbit didn’t and very soon escaped. The house made its way into the garage as so many things had done, and it was still there. Neither of them liked to throw things away.

  Jamal loved playing with all that junk in the garage. He was such a quiet boy and so often played alone that Maryam worried, but Abbas said no, let him be. That is what he is like, kimya. Some people are just like that.

  He must have moved into the studio flat by now but she guessed he would not ring to tell them his address for a few days yet. He hardly ever called, and sometimes just appeared. They would be sitting down in the evening and would hear his key in the door and in he would walk. Hello Ma, hello Ba, how are you all? I thought I would come and visit for a few days. Abbas loved that, that he could just come home like that. She loved it too. Only she wished he would call and tell her where he was living and that all was well.

  The studio flat was roomy. It had what the letting agent’s details described as a kitchenette: a small fridge, a sink, and a short counter on which stood a toaster and a microwave oven. What else did a student need? A corner of the room was walled off for the shower and the toilet. A bed and a wardrobe occupied the other side of the room. The desk was under the window with a reading chair beside it. It was a compact, nicely organised student room, and its sparseness and the orderly disposition of the furniture pleased Jamal. The window overlooked the back garden, and out of it Jamal saw their neighbour painting his garden shed. It was just a quick glimpse of a white-haired man seen from behind, sleeves rolled up, standing beside a metal garden table on which stood a large tin of paint. He was leaning back from the side-panel he had almost completed painting. Jamal could see from the patch that remained that the original colour of the panel was green, and he was painting it cream. He had never seen anyone paint a garden shed before.

  The walls of his room were also newly painted, and bare. He would have to get some pictures to hang there, some new ones, not the ones he had in his previous room, which were clippings from magazines and newspapers he had accumulated over the years for their mischief and wit. Among them was a cutting of Junior Wells doing the cakewalk dressed in black silk. Wells looked as if he was loving it so much it made Jamal happy just to look at it. Another was a picture of Nelson Mandela and Thabo Mbeki in their expensive suits doing the toitoi on the viewing platform as the South African Air Force flew over to mark the handing over of power to the rulers of the new South Africa; doing that same mocking jig that the terror state had tried to stamp out with its guns and Caspir armoured cars. Then he had a print of an Inuit carving of a wounded and starving man, made out of whalebone. It was the most moving picture he had ever seen. He would put those pictures away now so that one day he would find them and remember how things looked to him at one time. Instead he would get a picture of a landscape, one with water and hills, and perhaps a distant tree, a view that was enigmatic and open, and which promised to yield something unexpected to the persistent observer. He felt that he was at an important moment in his life, although he was not sure of the source of this feeling. Perhaps it was a sense of impending decisions, that for the first time in his life he would be able to choose what he would do with himself. He considered this and decided that he did not think it was that. Perhaps it was to do with approaching the end of his PhD, a sense of completing a job, and it was this which made him feel grown-up, an adult, an agent in the world. He did feel that sense, but that was a plodder’s delight, satisfaction at (nearly) getting a job done, not any expectation of having arrived at transforming knowledge. Or perhaps it was sitting beside Ba while he lay slowly dying in a hospital bed, perhaps it was that which had given him this sense of imminence, of an approaching illumination he must attend to. In this frame of mind, he was drawn to austerity, and when he lay in the dark he pictured a landscape that was empty but not without meaning, whose clarity was deceptive and compelling and inviting investigation. It was not troubling, this sense of imminence, just present like a steady pulse when he allowed himself to feel it, and maybe it was nothing more than an illusory self-importance.

  Later, when he looked out of the window again he saw that the neighbour’s shed was fully painted, and he saw how tenderly it glowed in the twilight. He had noticed, in that passing glimpse of him earlier in the afternoon, that the man was dark-skinned. Was that why he was painting the shed, a cultural impulse that was still unlearned? He tried to remember if his neighbour’s front door was painted. They were always splashing paint on everything, his uncles, always trying to brighten up England’s gloomy stone walls. They did not realise how much their hosts loved their stone walls. A slim white-haired man in a checked shirt and grey corduroy trousers. His garden was neat and planted with bushes and some kind of a climber, none of which had yet opened. In the border, some daffodils and snowdrops were flowering. He wondered where he was from. Always, when he saw someone like him, someone dark, someone as old as his neighbour, he wanted to ask, where are you from? Have you come a long way? How can you bear to be so far away? Was it so intolerable there, wherever it was? It must have been, for you to choose to live in this ugly northern city. How has it been here in all these years? Have you come through?

  He knew the answers to some of thes
e questions. It was what he studied, migration trends and policies in the European Union. He could describe the patterns and provide the historical context, locate this wave from the Maghreb and its destination and that one from Zimbabwe and how it dispersed. He could construct tables and draw graphs, yet he knew that each one of those dots on his chart had a story that the graphs could not illustrate. He knew that from his Ba, and he knew that from the faces he saw in the streets, and from the silent spaces in the reports he read. He knew that it was a clutter of ambition and fear and desperation and incomprehension that brought people so far and enabled them to put up with so much. And that they could no more resist the coming than they could the tide or the electric storm. So much had to be given up for life to go on. That was not science though. To be scientific, you must first give the trend a name and then study it, never mind the aches. You can leave that to someone else.

  But perhaps he was maligning his white-haired neighbour, turning him into a tragedy before his time, or wishing him ill when he was content, growing his garden and living with his family, painting his shed and feeling proud of his achievements away from his home. South Asian, he guessed from that quick glimpse, or South Arabian, Yemeni maybe. There are millions of them like that, millions of us, who do not fully belong in the places in which they live but who also do in many complicated ways. You could find happiness in that.

  Their own back garden was the usual student house patch of overgrown lawn, with little mounds of debris scattered about, a broken chair, empty bottles and rotting piles of weeds. The mess of it made Jamal smile, made him feel comfortable. He imagined the pain with which his Ba would look on that neglect. One of these days, when it was not so cold and the sun was out, he’d see if the people in the flat below would give him a hand clearing up the rubbish. He had met them already. They had come to introduce themselves, Lisa and Jim. He was a student in statistics, modelling avian migration patterns for his research, and she was working in the library. He guessed they would be willing to help. They looked like that kind: people who would love to join in and share a feeling of community. They might even plant a few flowers, something fast-growing and colourful, petunias and daisies and marigolds. The person occupying the flat across the landing had not yet come back from the Easter vacation, but she was nice, Lisa said. When she came a few days later, Jamal found out her name was Lena, short for Magdalena, and that she was a beauty. She had dark-blue eyes, which were bright and smiling in the excitement of meeting. Her complexion was deep, like a light tan under the skin, and her dark hair had a hint of red in it. She was writing on nineteenth-century Irish women’s poetry. It cheered him to be sharing a house with such attractive people, like living in a landscape that pleased the eye.