Dead Secret (9 page)

After dinner Shameena and I went up to her room, though to be honest, I was a bit reluctant to take my eyes off Tariq for one second more than I had to. Entering Shameena’s room was like walking into the very core of a jewel and being enveloped by the colour of it, the sparkle of it. It was warm and rich and intense, the walls a deep terracotta red, the bedspread purple with terracotta elephants marching round the edge. On the walls were gilt-framed pictures: a family photograph; an
illustrated
verse from the Koran… and a picture of Johnny Depp. Long gold chains and jewelled necklaces hung over the
mirror
on her dressing table. A purple salwar kameez etched with silver flowers hung on the outside door of the wardrobe,
half-covering
the mirror, and on the floor below, a discarded pair of Levi’s lay in a heap.

It was the mix of cultures that made the room so exotic, though it didn’t occur to me at the time that Shameena’s life might be a clash rather than a fusion of influences. It took time for me to understand how difficult things were for her, how much of an outsider she was too. I do remember a glimpse of it that night as I rifled through her music collection and stared in amazement at the amount of opera in it. It was then Shameena first confided her dreams of being a singer. She wanted to
audition
for the opera school in London but Khadim wouldn’t hear of it. He wanted her to be a lawyer or a doctor. Or an accountant like Tariq.

“He says it’s just a silly dream,” she said, and something in her voice upset me. Even back then I knew that dreams weren’t silly. Perhaps especially back then.

“I don’t suppose there are many Pakistani opera singers…” I said hesitantly. How did a Pakistani girl get to like opera? But of course she wasn’t a Pakistani girl. She was as Glaswegian as me. There wasn’t any reason why she shouldn’t like opera as much as me. Except I hated it. All that bloody fa la la stuff.

“There was this woman, right,” said Shameena, rolling onto her stomach and facing me, her feet banging off her headboard, “called Noor Jehan and she was a Pakistani singer and she was so good they called her the Melody Queen. That’s what I want to be. The new Melody Queen.”

“What happened to her?”

“She made all these films but in her very first film the young director fell madly in love with her and they eloped.”

“Did they live happily ever after?”

“Nah. They did what everyone who gets married does. Made each other miserable.”

We both laughed, and Shameena jumped off the bed then and took the purple salwar kameez off the back of the door and told me to just shove it on over my jeans and top. I was so skinny I’d need some bulk anyway, she said. She took out a kohl pencil and outlined my eyes carefully.

“You suit that,” she said, and then picked up the purple scarf that had slipped onto the floor from the hanger. “The dopatta,” she said, and threw it round my shoulders. Da was always asking
why I didn’t wear dresses more, but this felt amazing. I felt regal and mysterious and exotic.

“I feel like an Indian queen,” I told Shameena.

“Aye right,” she said. “A Pakistani queen, if you don’t mind.”

The purple was so intense that I felt richer and more alive, as if life had a colour switch like a television and someone had just turned it up full. I swivelled and twirled in front of the mirror and laughed self-consciously, and just then we heard Tariq
calling
us through the door to come for some tea.

“Tariq,” called Shameena through the closed door. “Come here a minute!”

“No!” I whispered vehemently, but the door opened and Tariq stood there in the doorway, slightly breathless just with the
effort
of walking up the hallway.

“What do you think?” said Shameena, gesturing to me with a malicious little grin, and I later wondered how she had known so quickly, and if it was me or Tariq who gave it away. Tariq’s eyes flickered briefly with surprise when he glanced at me, then quickly the veil came down on them again. But he smiled, that sweet, slow smile that has never left me.

“Nice,” he said, and softly closed the door.

The memories kept me awake on the long road, as the dark shadows loomed towards me then disappeared into the rear view mirror. I turned the memories over in my mind, like the pages of a photograph album. The forgotten images. The
treasured
ones you turn back to again and again. Da and Sarah and Charlie and Peggy. Shameena. Tariq. Nazima and Khadim. Our lives all touching and intertwining.

At first, Da thought it was Shameena who made me so keen to visit Khadim’s house again after that first visit. And partly it was. But it was Tariq too. It was so hard to talk to him because we were never alone. The first time was a night in August, a perfect night when we all sat out in their postage-stamp garden till nearly ten o’clock, Da and Khadim and Nazima on chairs at the back door, me and Sarah and Shameena and Tariq further up on the grass.

Shameena knew, though we never spoke about it. This night, we were all talking amongst ourselves, the adults and the young ones, and then Shameena winked at me and said to Sarah to come into her room and she’d show her these new earrings she’d bought. And dumb Sarah said, “Coming, Rebecca?” I wanted to hit her. But Shameena said, “Oh, Rebecca’s seen them; we’ll only be a minute.” She was at least twenty. I glanced up at her window while Tariq and I were talking and saw her looking out. She gave me a furtive thumbs-up sign.

Tariq was still in his first year of accountancy at university then. His health hadn’t yet deteriorated so badly that he had to give up. But he did have a date for his next operation, a month down the line.

“Do you mind hospital?” I asked him, picking the daisies round me carelessly and throwing them into a pile. I used my thumbnail to slice through a stem, feeling the juice on my finger, then threaded another flower through to make the
beginnings
of a chain. My self-consciousness around Tariq made me need something to focus on. He made me feel clumsy,
ungainly
.

Tariq shrugged at the question and plucked at a blade of grass. “I’m used to it. My whole life has been spent in and out of hospital.”

“Must have been hard watching your friends do things you couldn’t do.”

“I had to find quiet things to interest me. Music. Reading. Computers.”

The daisies were becoming limp and difficult to thread. It was getting late.

“Did you want to be like the others?” I asked.

“Of course I did. Every kid wants to be like the others. I
wanted
football boots. I wanted my dad to watch me play for the school team. I wanted to join in on the school sponsored walk and run at sports day. I wanted to be free. And I wasn’t free.”

“Maybe this operation will make you free.”

He shook his head. “Nothing can do that. It might buy me more time, that’s all. I’ll need a transplant to be free, and even then I would need medication for the rest of my life. I’ll never be free, not like you are.”

“That would be weird, having someone else’s heart,” I said, and instantly regretted it.

“Yeah.” He rolled onto his front and looked at me. “People are funny about the heart, like it’s more than just a heart. Like it’s the core of you.”

“I know. You know the composer, Chopin? Da says he died in Paris, but though his body was buried there, he asked for his heart to be taken back to Warsaw, where he was born.”

“Really?” said Tariq. The evening sun was casting shadows on his face as he looked at me. “I don’t know why there’s so much romance about the heart. People seem to think if you get someone else’s heart, you kind of… I don’t know,
become
them or
something
. But my specialist says it’s just a pump. A mechanical pump.”

“I suppose it’s because it’s supposed to be the feeling bit of you, the bit that loves,” I said, and then blushed. But I knew Tariq was right about reading too much into the heart. I had one that worked; I could afford to be sentimental. Tariq didn’t and he couldn’t. I threaded another daisy through my chain.

“I would probably get a white man’s heart if I got a transplant,” said Tariq, and looked to see my reaction. “Or a white woman’s.”

“Does that bother you?”

“No. It might bother them, though. Did you read the story in the paper about the man who didn’t want his son’s heart going to ‘a Paki’?”

I shook my head, studying my chain to avoid looking at him.

“He’s just ignorant,” I muttered, because I couldn’t think of anything else to say.

“His son had died in a motorcycle accident,” said Tariq. “I saw him interviewed on television. He was crying. He said he and his wife had been asked if his son’s heart could be used for
transplantation and he said no at first. He was too upset. Then doctors told him he could help prevent other parents feeling the way he was feeling right now. There was a young man waiting for transplant. So he said yes. It hurt, he said, knowing that his boy had to die for someone else but he wanted to help. He wasn’t a bad man. I watched him and I thought he was just like my dad. He loved his son.”

My glance up to Tariq’s face is instinctive. “So what
happened
?”

“He found out the recipient was to be an Asian. The
interviewer
asked him how he felt when he heard and he said, “I told doctors I didn’t want my Shane’s heart going to no Paki.”

“Don’t think about it. Most people wouldn’t think that way. The guy’s just…”

“Just a dad who lost his boy,” finished Tariq. “He wasn’t evil. He didn’t seem it, anyway. He wanted to do something good. But then he wanted me excluded from the good. I don’t really understand… Part of me hated him and part of me felt sorry for him, you know?”

I didn’t know what to say to Tariq. Then I remembered
something
I had heard Da say and I said, “Good and bad aren’t as black and white as people think.” Now that I think about it, I wonder what he was thinking about when he said that.

“No,” Tariq had replied. “I suppose not.”

He lay back on the grass and closed his eyes and I looked at the shadows underneath his eyes and the fine line of his mouth. His lips had a faint purplish-blueish tinge, as if they were bruised.

“Why aren’t they doing a transplant for you now?” I asked.

“They want me to be stronger. They think doing this
operation
will help in the meantime, buy me time to get stronger.”

“I think you’re very brave,” I said. “I’d be frightened.”

Tariq said nothing.

“How long will you be in for?”

“A week maybe. Or maybe this time I won’t come back,” he said.

I looked up quickly at him but his eyes remained closed.

“Of course you’ll come back. What are you talking about?”

“It’s a big operation.” He opened his eyes and turned to me. “I said I don’t mind about hospital and usually that’s true. I always feel better when I come back from hospital. For a while. But this time…”

“What?”

“I… I feel… a kind of bad… I don’t know… like this time it won’t make me better. That maybe this is it…”

I put my hand on his where it lay on the grass and then
quickly
withdrew it and looked down to where Da and Khadim and Nazima were sitting. Nobody had noticed, except maybe Da. He looked away so quickly I wasn’t sure.

“I can’t say to anyone in the family,” continued Tariq. “It would upset them too much.” He looked down at Nazima and smiled faintly. “You see the way my mother is.”

It would be impossible not to see. Nazima adored Tariq. It was Tariq who kept her breathing. She flew round him like a sparrow round an eagle, flittering and fluttering and paying homage.

I wanted to throw my arms round Tariq but I didn’t know what to say to him and I felt a lump in my throat in case what he was saying was true. It was difficult to swallow. I was hopelessly out of my depth.

“I think,” I said, “that everything will be fine.”

It sounded trite, even to an almost sixteen-year-old.

“Why?” said Tariq. “Why will it be fine?”

“Because I want it to be.” I threaded another flower through a loop and didn’t look at him. “And I’m a madam. I get what I want.”

I was aware Tariq was looking at me and when I finally dared glance up, he was smiling.

“I’ll bet you are,” he said, and I grinned at him.

I heard Shameena and Sarah’s voices at the back door. Tariq glanced up at them, and then at me, as if he was considering. Then he whispered to me.

“You know Roberto’s, the café on Paisley Road West?”

I nodded. It was the café I hid in when I should have been at mass.

“Meet me there. Thursday. 4.30?”

I didn’t have time to reply. I felt my stomach lurch. Sarah threw herself down on the grass beside me.

“Shameena’s earrings are gorgeous, aren’t they?” she said.

“Yeah,” I replied, as convincingly as I could. “Gorgeous.” I’d never seen them.

I could barely wait till Thursday. The best thing about being in a single-parent family was the freedom. Peggy helped a lot when we were wee of course, but by the time I was fifteen and Sarah eleven, we were in that no man’s land between needing watched and being allowed a little freedom. Da thought it reasonable for me to look after Sarah for a few hours after school. But she’d be fine while I met Tariq. There was no way I was missing that. “Where are you going?” Sarah asked me that Thursday.

“Out,” I said importantly. “With a boyfriend,” I added, purely for effect and it worked, because her eyes widened. “So keep your trap shut.”

If it had been me, I’d have extracted some gain for me in
keeping
my trap shut but Sarah, she was such an innocent.

“Don’t do anything stupid while I’m out,” I warned her, “or I’ll get found out.”

I was five minutes late for Tariq that Thursday because of
going
home to change. There was no way I could meet him in my school uniform. I ran and ran, till my heart thumped and I could hardly breathe. My legs felt shaky. Near the café I slowed down, took huge deep breaths. I fished out a baby-pink lipstick, peered into a shop window to apply it. Took hooped earrings from my purse, ran a comb through my hair. Scooshed the last of my
perfume
Peggy had given me last year for my birthday. Never mind.
It was my sixteenth in a week. Somebody would give me more.

Tariq was already there when I arrived, sitting with a fresh orange juice at the back table of the café and watching the door.

“I didn’t know if you’d come,” he said. “You never said.”

Not come? Was he mad?

“You smell nice,” he said.

“Thanks.”

It seemed an intimate thing for a boy like Tariq to say,
somehow
. I reached out and touched his hand briefly as it rested on the table and then glanced up. The waitress had caught the gesture and was staring at me. She turned and said something under her breath to the owner behind the counter. He looked over when she spoke, saw me looking and shrugged, looked away again. I went up to the counter and ordered a coffee from the man but it was the waitress who brought it back and she slopped it down carelessly on the table without a word, so that the coffee spilled into the saucer and then splashed onto the table. I glanced up at her and she looked hard at me and then at Tariq. “Anything else?” she said, looking back at me.

“Yeah,” I said dryly. “A cloth.”

Tariq looked uncomfortable.

That first afternoon set a pattern. We met most days, spinning out one drink each to last a couple of hours. By the end of the first week, the waitress hardly glanced at us any more, but there was a deterioration in Tariq. He was getting weaker, I could tell. He hadn’t a puff, and he was even thinner, his shirt hanging loosely round a neck that was slender as a lily stem. He had deep shadows under his eyes and his cheeks were sunken. The doctor was trying to get his operation brought forward.

I remember the last day we met in the café. He was quiet and
subdued and he said, “Rebecca, what do you think happens when you die?”

“Dunno,” I said. I was using my finger to sweep a trail of sugar on the table top into a little pile.

“It frightens me to think about it,” said Tariq. “I think about hell sometimes.”

“Do Muslims have hell too?” I was surprised. Wasn’t it only Catholics that had hell? I always thought we understood hell better than heaven.

“There’s a description of it in the Koran.”

He began quoting, without hesitation, his voice soft.

“Garments of fire shall be cut, and there shall be poured over their heads boiling water, whereby whatsoever is in their bellies and their skin shall be melted…”

“That’s a bit gory, isn’t it?”

“I can’t stop thinking about it. What if it’s true?”

“You haven’t done anything bad.”

“I’m here, aren’t I?”

“Is that bad?”

“Yes… no. I like being here but… but I know my parents wouldn’t approve of me being alone with a girl.”

“There’s at least ten other people in here.”

“You know what I mean.”

We lapsed into silence.

“I’m supposed to marry my cousin in Pakistan. When I get better.”

It was a shock. “What, someone you don’t know?”

“I’ve got a picture.” He brought out a snap from his wallet and put it on the table in front of me. I didn’t want to see it. I hated her, whoever she was. I glanced at it cursorily, aware only
of huge dark eyes set deep into a fragile, fine-boned face.

“Do you like the look of her?”

I didn’t look at him but my heart pounded. Tariq ignored the question. Or maybe he didn’t. “The thing is,” he said slowly, “I don’t feel Pakistani.” He said it as if he should be ashamed.

“Why should you? You weren’t born there. Do you feel
Glaswegian
?”

“Yes… no… well, a bit. I don’t really feel I belong anywhere, to be honest. It’s like… I’m really, really proud of my Pakistani background but I don’t feel completely part of it. But I don’t feel completely part of here, either. I am not Pakistani and I’m not Glaswegian. I’m a Glaswegian Pakistani, and that’s different, separate.

I glanced down at the snap on the table.

“Will your parents make you marry her?”

“Not make me, no. If I don’t like her…”

I said nothing.

“I try to do the right thing,” he said, looking at me, his voice almost pleading for understanding. “To please my parents and please Allah.”

“You believe in Allah?”

He hesitated. “I try.”

I hate docile people. But Tariq was not docile. There was something almost noble about his quiet restraint. Maybe I
admired
it because I am not restrained, couldn’t possibly be. I couldn’t help thinking how much more like Sarah he was than he was like me. But there was no chemistry between Sarah and Tariq. You cannot dispute chemistry.

I tore the discarded sugar packet from my coffee into strips.

“What… no, who…
is
Allah?” I asked Tariq.

“Allah is the supreme being who has power over the universe.”

Tariq answered automatically, the way we used to answer our Catholic Catechism in primary school. Who made you?
God made me.
Why did God make you?
God made me to know him, to love him, and to serve him in this world, so that I may be happy with him forever in heaven.
Same idea, whatever the creed.

“Mmm. God or Allah?” I said to Tariq. “Maybe they are both the same. Maybe we’ll find out we’re worshipping the same God.”

“I’ll find out before you.”

“Don’t talk like that.”

“I’m scared,” he said.

The words are so stark.

“Oh Tariq.” I took his hand. I could feel tears burning at the back of my eyes for the rawness of those words, for the cost to him of saying them out loud. Shit. I couldn’t, mustn’t, cry.

“Don’t be frightened,” I said, digging the nails on my left hand into my palm in a vain attempt to stop the tears that were
welling
in my eyes from spilling over.

Tariq’s hand brushed the tear lightly from my cheek, and I resisted the urge to grab his hand and hold tight.

“We’d better go,” he said.

I feel ashamed when I think of that conversation now. It was Tariq who brushed my tear away, not me who brushed his.

Outside the café, a gang of white boys were hanging around, lolling against doorways, fags in hand. I came through the door first and saw their eyes swivel to me. There was one boy whose eyes looked the meanest. He was dressed in dark jeans and a black t-shirt with a narrow stripe across the chest, and he looked at me in that thin, predatory way teenage boys do when they first discover sex. Like foxes foraging through dustbins for a
bone to gnaw. Like they’re permanently hungry, and will eat, no matter the meal.

Tariq followed me out and I felt, rather than saw, the gang stiffen. The one with the striped t-shirt stepped right in front of Tariq, blocking his way. Tariq moved to the right. The boy stepped with him, blocking him still. Tariq moved to the left. The boy moved too, like their bodies were locked in some macabre,
magnetic
dance. Tariq simply stood still then and looked at him, not in defiance, not in fear. He simply looked. Slowly, slowly, the boy moved aside, never taking his eyes from Tariq. “Black bastard,” he muttered.

Tariq never even flinched. His body did not stiffen. His face
remained
neutral. For a moment I thought of Davie Richardson in the park when we were kids, and I had the same desire to lash out. But I knew the consequences for Tariq if I did. “You want to watch the company you keep, darlin’,” one of them sneered at me as Tariq and I walked slowly past. I thought of Tariq’s words in the café. Not Pakistani. Not Glaswegian. A Glaswegian Pakistani.

I suppose there would have been a lot of stuff like that ahead. I never got the chance to find out. Tariq was too ill to meet after that. He never went back to university. We visited the Khans as a family the night after my sixteenth birthday, which was the night before he went into hospital. Everyone was there so we couldn’t talk alone. But when I came out of the toilet, Tariq came out of the sitting room. He must have been waiting, listening for the flush, trying to time it. He pressed one of those friendship bracelets into my hand, the kind you get in Indian shops. It had pink beads on it, with tiny little red flowers painted on them.

“Happy birthday,” he said.

We’d never kissed before. Never done anything other than
hold hands across a table. But Tariq kissed me then, in the hall of his house, and maybe the danger of discovery added to the thrill of it. It wasn’t a deep, passionate kiss. It was over in seconds. He held my face in his hands and his poor blue lips caressed my top lip, then my bottom lip, light and swift as a butterfly. And never, never in all the years that followed, did any one of that succession who followed Tariq in my life, not Mr Mad or Mr Bad or Mr Dangerous, ever touch me the way he touched me, ever come close to the sweetness of that moment…