Ibrahim & Reenie (14 page)

He heard Jackie come in, heard the kids shrieking and laughing. She came up the stairs and into the bedroom, gave him a peck on the cheek.

‘You smell nice,' she said.

‘Yeah. It's that stuff you got me last Christmas.'

‘Is it? It's nice. Have the kids had their tea?'

‘Yeah. Course.'

‘What did they have?'

‘Fish fingers, beans and chips.'

‘Oh, Si. They had chips yesterday.'

‘And?'

‘I don't like them having chips two days in a row.'

‘What else was I supposed to do them?'

‘There's rice there.'

‘Fish fingers, beans and
rice
?'

‘Course not. Something else.'

‘Well, sorry.'

‘No. It's fine. As long as they've eaten something.'

Ten minutes later, Robbo and the boys arrived. They made a fuss over the kids and the kids made a fuss over them.

‘Oh yeah, Si,' said Robbo. ‘I managed to get those, er,
tickets
you were after.' And he winked and tapped the side of his nose.

‘Cheers,' said Simon. ‘How much was it?'

‘Forty. Not bad.'

‘Bargain.'

Jackie was in the kitchen, making herself a cup of tea, but she looked through the open door at him and shook her head. Their rubbish attempt at code had failed miserably, and she knew he wouldn't get home until late. And when he got home she wouldn't ask him what time he thought it was, or where he'd been, and she definitely wouldn't ask him who he'd been with.

13

A narrow lane, cut down its middle by a thick white line. One side for walkers, the other for cyclists. Orange patches of light dotted along its length, but much of it dark. To his left were trees, some overhanging the path; to his right, a long white railing blistered with rust, brambles crawling through the railings, then a steep embankment and the dual carriageway and the night-time traffic of taxis and ambulances and police cars.

His leg was in agony now, every other step he took an ordeal.

If only the guy at the first hotel hadn't been such a prick. Must have had plenty of rooms. The sign in the window said there were vacancies. He saw Ibrahim coming through the door, decided he'd rather turn down business than have him staying under his roof. And it was the delay that gave it away; that couple of seconds pause between Ibrahim saying he'd like a room, and the man behind the desk saying, ‘Sorry… we're fully booked.'

Everything was in that pause. The way he blinked. The way he swallowed hard, making a big show of checking that yellowed, antique PC of his. Not even like it was a big hotel, the kind of place where you might lose track of how many rooms were free. There couldn't have been more than ten rooms there, if that. Just a B&B, really. And yet he had to check if there were vacancies.

After a second apology, no more convincing than the first, the man at the B&B pointed him in the direction of a large chain hotel in the town, and Ibrahim began walking again.

The hotel in the centre of the town was also fully booked, but at least that place looked busy enough. Guests milling around. Lots of suits, ties and name badges. Some sort of conference, perhaps. The girl on the reception – she looked Bengali, though he couldn't be sure – told him they had another hotel, on the other side of town, and that there were vacancies there. She offered to book him a cab, but he told her it was okay. He'd walk.

She printed a map, marking their current location with an X and the next hotel with a small circle, and for a moment Ibrahim entertained the idea that she was flirting with him, holding eye contact a second longer than she would if she were just being friendly or helpful. A smile that was more than just good customer service.

Yeah, she was flirting with him. And maybe she would call the other hotel, find out what room he was staying in, and once he'd got there and checked in…

As he left the hotel, Ibrahim turned around, looking back through the glass front of the hotel reception to see if she was still watching him, but she was already talking to one of the guests. One of the suit-tie-and-name-badge men. Smiling, and holding his gaze just as she'd done with Ibrahim.

She was just being polite. And perhaps the man at the B&B wasn't lying. Maybe he
was
fully booked and had simply forgotten to turn the sign around.
Vacancies/No Vacancies.
Easy mistake. Ibrahim just couldn't read people as well as he used to. Couldn't read anything. His eyesight was terrible, small print impossible. And people. People were something else. In trying to read other people, all he saw was himself. The man in the B&B; Ibrahim only knew what he
wanted
him to think.

He wanted him to be scared; wanted him to think about all those newspaper front pages showing blood-spattered pavements and screaming commuters, because then he was a racist and it was none of Ibrahim's fault. And when that girl smiled at him, he thought she would see him as he used to look. Not like this; scruffy and dirty and his beard a mess. He used to be good-looking. Bit heavyset, big-boned, but not ugly. Definitely not ugly. He wished she could have seen him like that. She
would
have flirted with him then, for real. But not like this.

The thoughts and feelings of others were another country to him now, but it hadn't always been this way.

He remembered a teacher, his history teacher Mrs James, explaining ‘empathy' to the class. ‘Imagine putting yourself in someone else's shoes.' What would it have been like to watch the Blitz, or the Battle of Hastings, or the Great Fire of London? All that stuff. And he always got good marks for those essays. Mrs James told him he had good
empathy
, and at the time he didn't think it that important. Remembering names and dates, the story of how it all fit together, that stuff was important, but empathy? Fat lot of use empathy would do him in the real world.

Then one day it was gone. He woke in the hospital unable to fathom the emotions of any other person, as if the world was now a picture in monochrome, or a dry scene being acted out before him. They told him it was a side-effect of the accident, his injury. He'd been crippled and the others, all of the others, were dead. Of course he was upset, of course that was going to affect him
e-mo-tion-ally
. He'd have to be inhuman not to be changed by it. If he viewed the world differently, with suspicion and fear, that was understandable.

He went along with this, agreeing with each diagnosis, for almost a year; which was as long as the sympathy of others lasted, as if he was on some kind of clock, counting down to the point when he was expected to ‘pull himself together'. From that point on tolerance for his quirks, his idiosyncrasies, wore thin.

When out in public – which, generally, he tried to avoid – he found himself insulting strangers without realising it. Only the appalled expressions of friends suggested he'd said anything wrong, and even then he had to be told. Telephone conversations with his family back in London became stilted and awkward, but he never quite understood why. Sometimes he'd become enthused by a subject, and would talk for several minutes before realising the person he was speaking to understood neither the subject nor the point he was trying to make.

His interests became increasingly obscure. He told people he was thinking of returning to his studies, but as a free agent, away from the constraints of university. He would write a book, he said, about Saladin, or Al-Hakim. Jerusalem fascinated him, this city, this frontier town where everything meets, a constant city refusing to die in the imagination of millions; from Dawud to the Prophet, from the Prophet to Saladin, from Saladin to William Blake. To this end, he filled countless books with scribbled notes and made endless trips – on foot – to every library within three miles of his flat. The weighty hardback volumes he brought home stacked up, unread. His ability to concentrate was not what it had been.

Others worried about him. He learned this in time, but not until it was probably too late, and the person who delivered this message of concern, a message that felt more like a betrayal than sympathy, was Amanda.

For two years she had been his friend and lover. ‘Girlfriend' was too trivial a word for what she was, and ‘partner' was too passionless, too formal. There had to be a whole new language for how he had felt about her, the existing words had been cheapened by too many love songs.

In those two years, she had met his family only once before the accident, when Ibrahim's father and sister came to visit him in Cardiff. The four of them went for dinner at a Chinese restaurant in the Bay, but while Aisha and Amanda chatted away like old friends, or even sisters, Ibrahim's father ate in silence, tight-lipped, his expression grey. He didn't say anything that day, wouldn't say anything for some time to come, but Ibrahim knew he wasn't pleased. Nothing needed to be said.

Yet it was Amanda who kept visiting when others stopped. It was Amanda who drove him home from hospital when he was discharged, who bought him groceries and kept him company in those long, immobile early days. He knew that she'd been there, in the hospital, after the accident; that she had been driven there straight from the party. He knew that she would never cry in front of him, except for those few helpless tears that escaped when she first saw him conscious. He knew she did most of her crying alone.

A few days after his return from the hospital, it was Amanda who kissed him, and stripped him of his clothes, and made love to him for the first time in more than six months, making every effort not to hurt him. But something had changed. He knew it from the moment he first woke and saw her looking down at him, wiping away her tears with the back of her hand. The memories of their life before the accident – the early dates, the daytrips and dinners, their first kiss – seemed the property of other people now. He felt an imposter, a stranger who'd somehow stepped into the life of this man, this Ibrahim Siddique, taking everything from him – his life, his possessions, Amanda – without wanting them.

To begin with, he made a good show of playing the part, and Amanda was patient. When visiting, she'd tidy up the chaos of his flat, clearing the reams of notes from the floor and stacking them tidily on his desk; moving the unread books from the sofa to a coffee table. She washed the dishes and cups that had been mounting in the sink, and swiped the thin grey layers of dust from his shelves. She tried bringing order to his world, tried encouraging him to go out each day, but she was fighting a losing battle. He saw himself as a victim of chaos, of random chance, and that chaos had spread out from his accident like dry rot, infecting every part of his life.

And the worst thing was he didn't care. He didn't care if the dishes and cups were cleaned, or if the shelves were dusted; if his bed was made or if his clothes had been washed. He didn't care if Amanda visited him at all.

Her visits grew further apart. Where once he would see her daily, now it was every other day, then twice weekly. She had other things to do – she was preparing for her third and final year, her diary to be crammed soon with studying and then the end-of-year parties. She suggested moving in with him – she needed somewhere to stay in the summer between the last semester of her second year and the first semester of her third, and wouldn't leave him alone in Cardiff – but he dismissed the idea outright. His flat was too small for the two of them, he said. They'd get on top of each other. It would be too much. It never occurred to him that this would upset her, but it did, and for the first time since the accident she cried in front of him; not just silent tears but a mess of sniffling sobs and barely coherent anguish.

He'd changed. He wasn't the same person any more. Sometimes it was as if he didn't even love her. As if she didn't even know him.

‘Do you still love me?' she asked, her face blotchy and red, her eyes bloodshot. She expected a blunt ‘no' or an apologetic ‘yes, of course I love you'. She couldn't have expected the answer he gave, almost instantly, with no discernible emotion.

‘I don't know.'

‘What do you mean?' she said. ‘You don't know? How can you not know?'

‘I mean I don't know.'

‘It's not a hard question, Ib. Do you love me? Yes or no? You either do or you don't.'

‘I don't know.'

He wasn't being evasive. Truth was, he didn't know. He thought he could remember loving her, remember the moment when he'd fallen in love with her, but in searching for the emotion itself he felt nothing, as if he had opened the door to a familiar room to find it stripped bare, ransacked.

Then came the recriminations. She told him she wasn't the only one who thought he'd changed. Others had noticed. She listed the things they'd said, without attributing them to any one name, and reminded him that the accident had happened more than a year ago, that they'd both lost friends, that he wasn't the only one hurting. She apologised for the last point within seconds of making it, but by then it was too late.

Through all this he had listened to her, impassive. She wanted a reaction – tears, anger,
anything
to tell her he was still in there, that he cared about
something
– but there was nothing. She'd lost him, just as surely as if he'd died in the car, or on the operating table. In the hours and days after she left him, he waited for a response, for the emotion that would tell him this meant something, but nothing came.