Sing Like You Know the Words (7 page)

-Oh you mean the funny little
Indian kid. He’s coming to the party? I thought it was just going
to be a select few.

-Well you know I got that ticket
for Matthew. Only you mustn’t tell Abbas that. The poor boy hardly
sees anyone. He never goes out and, well it was short notice. I
didn’t know who else would come on their own and I can hardly give
the ticket back.

-So he accepted your
invitation.

-Yes of course. I told him you
would pick him up at seven thirty. You know David; one of the
things I like about you is that you are so generous. Be a love and
bring him along.

***

-He’d better be ready when we
get there, said Tim.

-Don’t be mean, David replied.
He’ll have been ready for the last half hour. Though he might
change his mind when he sees us turn up in this thing.

David had thought that Tim was
going to let them down. The time when they were supposed to leave
passed and there was still no sign of him. Then at the last moment
he turned up, explaining that his own car had broken down. By a
stroke of good fortune, one of his fellow officer cadets had agreed
to lend Tim his own car. It seemed to be their lucky night. They
would arrive in a real car, not the one step away from the scrap
yard wreck that was usually either parked outside the house or away
somewhere being mended.

-He must be crazy giving you the
keys to this. What kind is it anyway?

-Ford Escort Mexico. Not many of
them about. And I wouldn’t expect a civilian like you to understand
why he gave it me. Brothers in arms you see. Do you like the noise
it makes?

-Not much.

A short time later they roared
into the sad little street where Ali Abbas had his lodgings and Tim
slammed the car to an abrupt halt, with just a small amount of tyre
squeal. The little Indian guy was outside waiting for them already.
He looked at the bright orange monster with an expression of
fascinated terror. David started to say hello, while Tim, in a
state of high excitement, practically bundled Ali Abbas into the
car.

On the way to the farm, David
kept turning round to the back, where Ali Abbas was cowering;
trying to engage him in conversation, but the boy was so painfully
shy and the car so loud that they only managed to exchange a few
words.

They arrived earlier than
planned. Handwritten signs had been posted in the neighbourhood to
direct the guests to the venue. Someone who might have been an old
servant, or possibly just a member of the girl’s family, pointed
them towards a field where a number of vehicles were already
stationed.

-If it rains now they’ll have to
get the Land Rover to pull us out, grumbled Tim.

Safely parked and following the
other guests inside, they soon met with Patricia, who seemed
genuinely delighted to see them. She made some introductions that
were instantly forgotten and then she had David by the arm and was
leading him off somewhere. Tim also had some definite objective of
his own in mind, because he was gone moments later, leaving Ali
Abbas worrying whether his suit was appropriate and wondering what
was expected of him now.

The next four hours were not the
worst of Abbas’ life, although for a short time it felt like they
would be. He stumbled into a marquee that was full of people and
noise, so dark and so loud that it would have been impossible to
have a conversation with anyone even if he had known how to begin
one. From there he passed to the buffet, where the guests were
being offered immense slabs of meat of various kinds. Ali Abbas did
not call himself a vegetarian, but the proximity to so much dead
flesh made him feel queasy. He fled. For a while, he was standing
in the dark outside hoping not to be noticed, but soon the party
activity spilled into the open air. It was the usual Saturday night
goings on, but speeded up by the availability of free alcohol.
Early on, the sort of men who thought that finding a toilet was too
much trouble started making their way outside to relax their
straining bladders in the shrubbery. Before long couples were
storming across the lawns in pursuit of one another as drunken
arguments began. It was barely dark when he saw two boys, looking
absurdly youthful in hired dinner jackets, crouching over to vomit
in the hedge.

He found sanctuary in the main
house, where a number of quiet rooms had been set aside for the
social use of family and friends of the family: persons of more
mature years who were obliged to attend, but could not be expected
to tolerate the volume and energy of the main event. He was offered
a cup of tea, and found that the guests seemed genuinely eager to
talk with someone who was studying for a degree, even if they were
a little confused by his earnest replies to their questions.

Ali Abbas was a good speaker
when he had something to say, and it was obvious that the elderly
ladies in particular were charmed by him. One of the men wanted to
have a serious conversation with him about life in Africa, and it
turned out that the man was neither a racist nor a fool. Abbas
started to forget where he was and even to enjoy himself.

A number of his present
companions seemed to be quietly drinking themselves into a polite
stupor, which Abbas found puzzling, but he reasoned that if they
were prepared to make allowances for the extraordinary discovery
that he did not drink alcohol at all, he should extend a reciprocal
open-mindedness to them, even the ones who appeared to be snoring
where they sat.

It was well after midnight when
he returned to the marquee. The crowd had thinned out and he easily
spotted Tim. He was relieved to see that whatever the strange young
man had been doing, he seemed to be in possession of his faculties,
even if he was rather red in the face.

The music was not so much dying
as fading away. Clearly it was the end of the night and time to go
home. They found David and Patricia in a small group of people
talking in what seemed a fairly coherent way.

Patricia suggested that David
should stay the night if room could be found. He replied that it
would be wrong to abandon his mates. David said a few words to Tim,
obviously trying to assess his condition. Tim seemed fine, though
uncharacteristically quiet.

-What have you been doing all
night, I hardly saw you?

-Lots to do. Charming ladies to
discuss matters with. I been dancing mainly. Don’t worry, haven’t
touched a drop.

-God you’re wet through. Must
have been dancing all night. I didn’t realize the music was that
good.

-Shit music. Doesn’t matter once
you’re on the floor.

-What about you Abbas?

-I have enjoyed a most pleasant
evening, thank you. And my thanks to Patricia for inviting me.

The car park had emptied quickly
and they soon found Tim’s friend’s car. Once they had bumped across
the field and edged out of the gate, Tim put his foot down and the
noise of the engine cocooned each of them in his own private
thoughts. No one spoke as the car sped through the curves and over
the humps of the country roads.

David was musing about Patricia,
considering what would be the right way to tell her of his feelings
and plans. He supposed that a girl would be more receptive to a
proposal when her friend was already getting engaged. All the girls
had seemed to glow with excitement when wedding plans were being
discussed. Thoughts and impressions from the party and plans for
the future were washing back and forth in his mind as the darkness
enveloped them. His attention drifted.

Suddenly, he was called back to
the moment. It happened so quickly that the boundary between
reality and imagination seemed not to exist.

The car had been accelerating
gradually without David noticing. Now he saw that they were
travelling much too fast for the condition of the road. After that
everything happened in a blur.

For some reason he looked first
to the back seat where Ali Abbas was sitting very upright. The
boy’s face only wore the same expression of resigned terror that he
had shown on the way to the party. When it came to driving, Abbas
had no way to differentiate between too fast, and certain to
crash.

Next David turned to his right
and was shocked to see Tim holding the steering wheel loosely,
eyelids half closed, his shoulders sagging forward against the
resistance of the seatbelt.

-Tim, are you asleep?

There was no time to grab the
wheel. They heard and felt a hard impact. David whirled round to
face the road in front of them and thought he saw something big
that could have been a body thump into the windscreen and over the
roof.

It was already too late to save
the car. Tim came to with a start and pressed all the pedals hard,
dragging the wheel hard to his left, but the car steered itself
neatly into the ditch running alongside the road on the driver’s
side, the nearside wheels remaining on the tarmac and the underside
of the car scraping along the ground and complaining horribly. A
combination of road camber, the depth of the ditch, and the
absolute lack of further intervention by the driver, who seemed to
have passed out, ensured that by great good fortune the car skidded
to a halt, half buried in undergrowth, but without turning over or
hitting one of the many trees that lined the way.

The engine had stalled and for a
moment the night was very quiet; impossibly so after the noise of
the previous moments.

-Tim, you fucking stupid fuck
up. Tell me you’re not dead.

-No

-Good, I’m going to kill you
now.

-I’m okay, said Ali Abbas, from
the back. We should get out now though. I think the wheel at my
side came off and the bottom was scraping along the road. There
could be a leak in the fuel tank.

He did know something about cars
after all or at least about the theory of them.

They dragged Tim, still
semi-conscious, away from the vehicle to what felt like a safe
distance. David checked his friend’s pulse, which was racing. His
eyes looked funny, but it was difficult to see them properly in the
moonlight. David thought that he might have had some kind of fit.
He was grinding his teeth and now David remembered that he’d
started doing that earlier in the journey home.

-I thought he’d had a heart
attack.

Ali Abbas shrugged
helplessly.

-We need to find him a
doctor.

Tim put a hand on David’s
arm.

-No Doctor. Speed, he said.

-What?

-Pills, speed.

-You’ve taken drugs? Tim
nodded.

David looked at him with
disgust.

-Well you’re more stupid than I
thought, and you’ve wrecked your friend’s car and almost killed
us.

-We should find some water for
him, suggested Abbas.

-And drown him in it, David
agreed.

-Not friend’s car, Tim struggled
to say.

Tim wasn’t making any sense. Ali
Abbas was in the habit of carrying mineral water wherever he went.
He jogged back to the car to retrieve the bottle. Tim drank
greedily once they had forced the bottle to his lips, and gradually
they were able to piece together the story of the night from his
fragments of coherent speech: how he’d planned to have only soft
drinks but spice them with the pills, which he now thought maybe
he’d overdone; how he’d decided to borrow a nice car for the
evening, something better than his own heap, but there was no
friend who had offered the keys. He saw a car he liked and took
it.

-But you had keys, I saw
you.

-Brought my own keys for the
look of the thing. It’s a Ford. Easy enough.

He seemed exhausted beyond
measure.

-David, I think you’ve probably
got everything useful he can tell us, Ali Abbas said gently. We
can’t stay here all night.

-And in the morning, we’ll be
charged with taking a vehicle without consent, at least; and who do
you think will believe that the two of us didn’t know what was
going on? I get a conviction and I can say goodbye to my legal
career. Probably the army puts it down to youthful high spirits on
Tim’s part; unless the drugs part comes out. You, I don’t know.

-My mother will die if she hears
about this.

David had no reply for that.
They were silent for a moment.

-We hit something, or someone,
he said He had been avoiding saying it for some time.

-I don´t know, Ali Abbas
claimed, miserably.

They listened. The night was
completely silent. No moans of pain or cries for help.

-I was looking at Tim, when we
hit, David said after a while. You must have seen something.

-I thought there was a person,
Ali Abbas admitted. I have an image of someone; an old lady. But I
must have imagined it. I was so frightened. What would an old lady
be doing on the road at this time of night?

-She could be walking her
dog.

-Wouldn´t we hear the dog?

-We have to check, David said.
He walked back to the car. Ali Abbas stayed where he was. He felt
unable to move.

He strained to watch a vague
shadow walk back to the car. He lost sight of the figure against
the dark bulk of the wrecked vehicle; then he saw David’s shape
pacing up and down the road for a while. In his own mind, Ali Abbas
felt only a strange calm, surprising to himself, and an absolute
reluctance to do anything but remain exactly where he was.

Eventually David returned.

-There´s nothing on the car that
looks like we hit a person, he announced.

-You mean no blood, Ali Abbas
asked him?

-I couldn´t see anything at all.
They left it at that. And I couldn´t see a sign of anyone along the
road. There´s no sound.

-That may not mean anything, Ali
Abbas felt obliged to say. An impact at that speed could send even
something heavy a long way. Impossible to calculate the direction.
If it was something. If it was a person who... couldn´t make a
noise. Maybe you wouldn´t find them till daylight, even with a
proper search.