Should We Fall Behind, page 9
‘You fucking cunts,’ he shouted as two tall boys in tracksuits ran down the path shrieking; both stuck middle fingers up at him.
He made his way to the toilet block behind the cafe, removed his shoe and peeled off his damp sock. He rinsed his piss-soaked leg under the cold tap. The hand dryer was broken so he attempted to dry himself with paper-towels. Blobs of green paper stuck to the hairs on his leg and when he tried to brush them away he stumbled off balance and fell, bashing his shoulder on the stainless steel sink. He managed to compose himself, squeezed as much water as he could from the fabric, rolled up the trouser leg and stepped outside, one foot still bare, hobbling through the park with his shoe in his hand. Ahead of him, the old woman disappeared into her front door and when he reached the car he realised she’d left him gifts on the driver’s seat. He removed his wet trousers and put the thick tartan blanket over his knees before picking up the book she’d left. The title was one he recognised and, as he held it in his hands, he suddenly felt tearful. He stroked the cover. It was a copy of his mother’s favourite novel by a Chilean writer whose name he could never pronounce. For years it had sat on Nan’s mantelpiece like a family heirloom.
‘Your mam thought books were magic,’ Nan once said.
When he asked her to tell him more, she told him the story of how his parents first met in the library.
There was a rainstorm late in the afternoon; not everyday drizzle but a deluge, flooding the streets within minutes. People didn’t know what hit them. The library was a place to flock to. Linda was already there, after school, unaware of the storm except as a distant rumble. She thought the noise was from the empty belly of the thin fella in the seat beside her. Frank came in for shelter with many others. The library hadn’t been so full in ages. He was older than her, ten years exactly, and he wore a suit to his job, not like anyone else we knew. He looked smart, I bet. He was different. On wedding photos, our Linda looked as tiny as a sparrow next to him: paper-white skin and all that beautiful red hair she had, flowing over her shoulders. He must have thought she was an angel from the way he looked at her in those pictures. She was an angel, our Linda. My Linda.
‘But why did she love him?’ Jimmy asked her. It was easy to see why someone would love his mother but he really couldn’t fathom how anyone could love Frank.
‘He wasn’t always this way, Jimmy. I mean, he was always a bit sombre, you know, inclined to get a bit moody, but it hit him hard when she went. He loved her, that’s for sure. She was everything to him. And now he doesn’t know how to exist without her. I don’t think he had much happiness before your mam came into his life.’
‘Yes, but why did she marry him?’
‘You’ll understand one day, Jimmy. You’re too young to know everything just yet.’
He was just eleven at the time. Later, he asked Ant the same question and his brother said, ‘Blimey, Jimbo. Birds and bees, facts of life and all that. Don’t be a muppet, do the maths. There’s only one reason she married old misery guts and it’ll be yours truly.’ Jimmy goaded him and Ant explained, adding in the graphic detail for effect. Jimmy felt sick at the thought of it but Ant said, ‘Sex is everywhere, Jimbo. Wait until you’re as old as me and you’ll know what I mean. Don’t let the thought of him spoil everything.’
As all these thoughts careered through his head, Jimmy sat in the car clutching the book and wiping his dripping nose with the edge of the clean blanket.
9. EBELE
Ebele first fell in love the week the planes crashed into the towers in New York City. She was nine years old. All around her adults were locked in shock: wide-eyed, aghast in front of televisions, glued to the horror as it unfolded in front of them. One minute huge buildings full of office workers existed as normal, the next they disintegrated, collapsing to the ground as the inhabitants of the tower blocks were lost in great plumes of smoke and ash and the world shifted on its axis. She watched people leap through flames from upper floor windows, unsure whether it was the news or a film she was seeing. When her mother realised she was in the room she quickly shoved her into the hallway.
‘No child should see this,’ she declared.
Instead, Ebele listened with her ear pressed against the door while her mother wailed out her disbeliefs to an empty room. How can this be? What the hell…? Poor bleedin’ sods.
Over the following days, while her mother continued to be gripped by the news, Ebele spent time after school watching the new boy next door through her bedroom window, concealed behind calico curtains and surrounded by the discarded books and toys she was meant to be occupied with. The boy scrambled around the bushes in the back gardens, retrieving lost balls like a puppy. She watched as his untamed hair accumulated stray leaves and feathery dandelion seeds, becoming speckled in green and white. He looked mythical, like the strange bird in the Trinidadian stories Papa told her, passed down from his own father and his grandfather before that. She watched as the boy delighted in a recovery, throwing his prize into the air and catching it over and over. His hair was the colour of fire and the exact same shade as her father’s first car, an old Ford Escort proudly acquired sometime after he first arrived in England. The car was long gone now just like Papa, but both were captured in a photograph hanging in the hallway next to the front door, a reminder of his existence which was once as present in Ebele’s world as she was herself.
The boy always played alone. She guessed he was like her, without brothers and sisters. After watching him for two consecutive afternoons, she leaned out the window on her elbows and sucked in air plump with the aroma of fried meat and a sweet scent of the dusty pink roses growing beneath her window, and she waited for the boy to notice her, heart pounding, throat dry. When he didn’t look up she heard herself shouting out before she could think twice.
‘Is that your new house?’
He jumped and looked around.
‘No,’ he said when he spotted her. ‘It’s where my dad lives. I’m only here while my mom’s having another babby.’
‘Oh,’ Ebele said. ‘I live with my mom too,’ and so concluded their first conversation.
The following Saturday she leaned out the window after breakfast. The day was heavy with moisture and it was hard to catch a breath. The boy told her his name was Michael and asked if she knew how to play football.
‘No, but I can play cricket. Papa taught me,’ she said.
They took it in turns to bat and bowl. Four days later Michael left.
‘I’m going home,’ he’d said with a big grin across his face.
‘If this was your home we could play cricket together all the time.’
‘Nah, I wouldn’t like to be here all the time,’ he said. ‘Home is where my friends are.’
‘Aren’t I your friend now?’ she replied, and when he shook his head she swallowed hard to push away the lump in her throat. Later, she watched as he bundled his bags into the back of his father’s white Transit van. When he climbed in she lifted her hand to wave but he was looking the other way. She let it drop down quickly before anyone else saw her. After the van pulled away, she felt her stomach plummet. The last time she felt so bad was the day Papa died by crashing into a wall on the ring-road junction near Kebble Lane, smashing both the car and his own head into an unrecognisable mess.
The night Michael left, Ebele’s mother climbed into her bed and patted her hair as she sobbed into the pillow. She eventually fell asleep with her mother’s voice whispering in her ear.
‘Boys are trouble, Ebele. They come into your life like a whirlwind and then they’re gone. You’ll forget Michael in a week or so and I’ll tell you what, he’ll have forgotten all about you in less than half that time. Don’t worry, you’ll soon find some friends your own age to play with.’
Michael didn’t come back to his father’s house until the following summer. He was taller, almost as tall as his dad, and he’d developed a shadow of maroon hair above his upper lip which made the edges of his mouth look dirty. She only realised he was back when she saw him sitting on the wall in the garden occupied with something he held in his hands. She skipped out to meet him.
‘Wanna play cricket?’ she asked, as if she’d seen him the day before.
‘Nah, boring. Got this now.’ He waved the Gameboy in her face.
By the end of the summer he was taller still, and his voice was different; it squelched like her trainers in the rain; it made her skin prickle like nettle-rash did.
Near the end of the long school holidays, he finally let her have a go on the Gameboy as he stood close behind her looking over her shoulder, his breath hot on her. Then, all of a sudden he shoved his hand down the back of her shorts and into her knickers. She was stunned. She struggled to free herself but he crooked one arm around her neck and groped around her private parts with his other hand. She kicked his shin and managed to wriggle enough to loosen his grip, but before she could escape he grabbed her and pulled her to the ground. He sat with his full weight pressing down on her stomach, moving his snakey hands over the bare skin beneath her vest-top. She screamed as loud as she could manage and, before her mother came running out the back door, Michael jumped up and leaned against the wall, nonchalant, Gameboy in hand, seemingly oblivious to her screaming.
‘I don’t like boys,’ she told her mother later in the day.
‘I don’t blame you,’ her mother said off-hand. Ebele wasn’t sure if she was joking or not until she added, ‘They always let you down.’
‘Papa didn’t let you down.’
‘He got himself killed by driving his damn car too fast. That was a letdown, for me and for you. You’re too young to understand these things. When you’re older you’ll know what I mean.’
Ebele avoided the garden for the rest of the holidays despite the unbearable stickiness of the long summer days. By the time she turned ten later that year, she and her mother had moved from the estate to a small flat near the big school and she never saw Michael again.
It was some time before she knew what her mother had meant that night after the incident in the garden, and it was only when she sat in the window with Tuli asleep on her lap, watching Jamal as he walked across the park, that she recalled the conversation. She wished she could pick up the phone or send a message and let her mother know she now understood her words but she knew it wouldn’t be that simple. The gorge which had developed between them would be hard to narrow; far too much had happened since that summer long ago, and it wasn’t only boys who’d let her down.
10. RAYYA
Rayya didn’t know the name of the young man in the car. On the second day of feeding him she thought about asking but what did it really matter? Names were not so important. She was hardly ever addressed by her own given name: sometimes people called her Rita or Ruby but she existed beyond and between those monikers. These days, she felt she hardly existed at all. For many years, she’d not been the Rayya her mother shouted for across the mounds of amber rubble and broken glass which were her playgrounds in the neglected Delhi back streets. Then she was Rayya, daughter of Raju, labourer; never daughter of Chitramala, maid. To Satish she was always darling when they were not in company, and he was darling to her; they were equally treasured. On their wedding night, he made it clear she was not a possession; she belonged only to herself and not to her father nor to him. She trembled with excitement at the thought of her world being shaken up like this; it made her heart soar. She thought Satish brave to be challenging all that had been and continued to be around her. It took her some years to realise his bravery stemmed from her; she made him brave by giving him the reason to be so. Later, after they’d been married for a short time and she was able to have conversations with strangers and read the newspapers and magazine articles by the bedside, she realised his interests in equality extended far beyond their small unit and she loved him all the more for it. He was a proud autodidact and he encouraged her to be one too; together they read about the work of Baba Amte and reforms of Mohan Roy and, on arriving in England, they enrolled in an English language course and attended it religiously, sitting side by side in a blank, soulless classroom before completing the homework soon after in their neat and cozy little house on Shifnal Road. On weekends, they visited the library and within a year were reading Orwell and Steinbeck out loud to one another in the language in which the texts were written, stumbling at odd words and giggling at their own heavy English accents. Evenings were spent drinking beer and talking at length about the student/worker demonstrations in Pakistan and the outcomes of the Liberation War in Bangladesh. They were on the exact same footing in all pursuits of the mind. In the bedroom, Rayya was more spirited, surprising herself as their first fumbled liaisons became less hurried and more satisfying with her coaxing. Beyond the house, she was mostly Mrs Banu, wife of Satish Banu, but they both knew the truth of it; he was her equal, her co-conspirator, her lover, this man who now lay inanimate in the bedroom where once she and he had never felt more alive.
When Satish first became ill, Rayya thought it would pass; a momentary lapse of well-being, a wicked virus which would soon peter out, exhaust itself and disappear as if it never existed. It didn’t happen like that: a stagger or a slip soon became a wobble and then a fall; a bruise became a break and then a paralysis. Satish once asked for a cup of tea not realising she’d only just placed one on the table beside him, and then he made the same mistake again and again. When the post office where he worked advised early retirement, the illness took hold very quickly and she knew he couldn’t be left alone all day so she too gave up her job in the infant school, leaving behind the laughter of children which gave her so much joy.
It took many months for Satish’s illness to be diagnosed. Months quickly became years wherein his quiet deteriorations surfaced as micro-rages, and Rayya’s own guilt-ridden irritability became weariness and grief for the man she loved with all her heart but who was fading away in front of her eyes, slipping into a chasm neither knew how to bridge.
On the day the illness was named, she squeezed Satish’s hand reassuringly as they walked slowly from the bus stop to the hospital to receive his test results. The GP who’d sent them had known Rayya and Satish for many years but not since the infertility tests decades earlier had they seen him so regularly. Dr Razak was a very young man then, not long qualified and keen to escape the arduous night shifts associated with hospital work. Now he’d been a regular face at the surgery for over thirty years, but only on more recent visits had she noticed how grey his hair had become and how his shoulders had started curving inwards making him seem much smaller than he used to be, He had aged in tandem with her. When he spoke, he didn’t tilt his head condescendingly or speak in the wispy tones of forced concern. She always appreciated that.
Before sending them to the specialists, he said, ‘It looks like Parkinson’s, but I can’t be sure.’ He handed them a bundle of leaflets. ‘To be frank, Satish, the symptoms are not conclusive; the signs could mean a lot of things. I will refer you. Hopefully, whatever the diagnosis, it can be managed effectively.’
‘Managed? Not cured?’ Satish replied.
‘It’s just words, my friend. Managed. Treated. Let’s see what the test results show.’
The doctor shook Satish’s hand. He bowed courteously towards Rayya and ushered them out of the room.
During the consultation, Rayya had noticed a picture of a very young child on the doctor’s desk. The photograph perplexed her until she realised it must be a grandchild; this was the age they were at now. Years ago, when it became obvious she would not conceive herself, the photographs of Dr Razak’s own children, which once sat proudly on display in his surgery, disappeared from his desk. The void of them upset her more than their presence ever did. She always wanted to tell the doctor this but she could never find the courage. On this latest occasion, as she and Satish were leaving, she said,
‘Your grandchild is beautiful, Dr Razak. It makes me very happy to see the photograph of her.’
The hospital they were sent to was anodyne but confusing. Pale green and salmon-pink corridors alternated between sets of heavy double doors. Corridors with direction lines in bright primary colours appeared to lead back to the same starting points and Rayya only realised they were going around in circles when, for the fourth time, they found themselves in front of a wall of naive paintings of seascapes and boats.
‘Same damn jolly pictures again. This place is a maze,’ Satish complained. She squeezed his hand again.
‘Darling, it will be fine,’ she said. ‘Have faith. They will find out what is causing the eye problems and the falls. It will be a simple thing and will pass like sickness always does.’
‘I’m an old man. I lost my faith in medicine many years ago. It’s been a long time since faith featured in any equation of mine, Rayya. What is there to have faith in?’
She let go of his hand, steered him by the shoulders to face her and said, ‘Have faith in me, darling. Have faith that whatever is going on with your health, I will be by your side to look after you.’
