The Darkening Hour (17 page)

I look around to make sure no one can hear this sentimental appeal, though I know there’s no one but us present.

‘Hold it, Daddy, please. Look after it, and try to remember who I am. I’ve got to go to work, but I’d be here if I could.’

He looks at the chain at last, takes up the ends in his two hands, stretching it out so he can read the name curling across it. At last he sighs, ‘Ah yes, Theodora,’ and looks up at
me. I feel a flood of relief.

‘What are you going to work for on a Sunday?’ he asks.

‘It’s not Sunday, it’s Thursday. And Daddy, I’d like you to keep an eye on Mona, while I’m at work.’

‘Oh, she doesn’t need an eye on her. She’s a very hard worker, you know.’

‘I’m sure she is, Daddy. But I want you to make sure she doesn’t buy things for herself with your money.’

‘Oh no, she’s very generous. She spends it all on things for me. Now, you and Mona,’ he says, examining me, ‘I can’t quite understand it. You must be the same age,
yet she looks so very young, while you . . . Oh dear. You do look tired.’

I mustn’t take these comments to heart. Daddy’s condition means that he sometimes says hurtful things – it’s what’s known as ‘disinhibition’. I know
this. I’ve read about it. Nevertheless, when he’s like this, it seems as if all the things that made Daddy sweet and lovable are crumbling away. As if a shiny veneer has eroded with
age, leaving only the crude under-surface on show.

I leave him, my feelings veering from concern to relief that I no longer have to deal with him.

Mona is, after all, here to take some of these tumultuous feelings away.

The Clipper’s full, people commuting, using laptops and smartphones, on iPads and on iPods. I buy a coffee – I need a good caffeine fix after last night – and
go to stand on deck to get some air. I inhale the sludgy scent of the river. As the engine starts up, churning the murky water below us, the jetty starts to move away, and I stare down into the
hurtling tide, racing along with the boat. When I look up, church spires and office blocks that were, a few seconds ago, in front, are vanishing behind us into the distance.

I need this commuting time to think about Max, to unpack what I’ve felt since last night. I lean on the railings. I can’t get Daddy’s voice out of my mind, crying out for Mona.
It’s hurt me more than I like to think. My thoughts are interrupted by a conversation going on beside me.

‘I know, darling. I know you want feedback, but it’s impossible for me to be objective. I love everything you do. I’m dizzy with pride.’

A man and a woman lean on the railings. He’s maybe in his fifties, she twenty or so. They have the same eyes, the same low-slung eyebrows.

Father and daughter.

The girl sighs, says something that’s snatched up by the wind and tossed downstream. Maybe it’s lack of sleep, or a surfeit of caffeine but time seems to collapse. It’s as if
I’m looking at my future, not my past. Gaping at the girl I dream I’ll become, lanky with adolescence, on the cusp of adulthood, basking in the undiluted approval of a doting father.
Then as fast as the image appears, it’s gone. I’m catapulted back to now. Just as the spires and landing stages on the banks vanish, Daddy and I as we were, as we might have been, slip
into the distance until we’re not even dots on the river bend.

A memory comes. One of our early-morning trips to Billingsgate by car through the Blackwall Tunnel to buy fish for the restaurant. Daddy always chose me to go with him, to keep him company, and
I treasured these excursions, especially the leaving at dawn to cross a London that was still sleeping.

There was always a salty stench outside Billingsgate, like a mouthful of seawater. I was fascinated by the layers of dead fish in the boxes, the gaping mouths, the milky eyes. I hung onto Daddy
as he picked up fish and sniffed them and squeezed them, and their unseeing eyes stared up at him, their mouths turned down as if they said, as they died,
How could you do this to me?

I wasn’t officially allowed on the wet market floor. So Daddy took me into the café in the corner where the fish merchants and porters in their bloodied white aprons ploughed
through bacon and eggs and haddock and chips. And Daddy bought me a bacon roll and had his cup of coffee with two sugars. Then he disappeared to barter with the stallholders with their bare arms
and tattoos and bloodstained overalls. I hated being left there alone. Tinny music mingled with the intermittent hiss of steam from the urns, and I’d long for Daddy to loom through the door,
with his sea food for the restaurant.

I distracted myself trying to finish songs in my head before all the little lights lit up on the front of the fruit machines. If I didn’t reach the end of a song in time, Daddy would never
come back to me. I would be left here and kidnapped by one of the fish men and taken on a boat to somewhere far away and strange, sold into the white slave trade.

When Daddy did come, the relief was so warm, such a release, I would sing out loud all the way home.

It’s that relief, that beautiful warm gush that followed his appearance that I long for today. As the Clipper draws into Bankside Pier, I realise I’m waiting for
Daddy now. I feel tears come to my eyes, hot and pressing. I’m waiting for the Daddy I used to love to come back to me.

Knowing that this time, I didn’t reach the end of the song in time.

‘I want you to make those cakes,’ Dora says, her back to me. ‘The ones you told me about.’ She’s gathering things – her mobile, her keys
– dropping them into her bag. ‘Here’s some money for today.’ She slams a ten pound note on the table, crosses the kitchen to the cooker, and turns suddenly to face me.
‘The ones with almond and honey. Leo likes them.’

I nod, aware that her kitchen is an armoury of domestic weapons – its shiny set of knives, the meat hammer, her blender with its blades of steel. Its iron.

‘And I’d like you to make up all the beds with fresh sheets. Leo needs cigarettes, he’s run out, but don’t neglect Daddy.’ She bangs the rolling pin down on the
work surface, and I watch her back as she stalks down the hallway, leaving me wordless, in her kitchen.

Charles refuses to come out with me today, says he’s busy planning menus.

‘I’ll tidy your room. Then I’m popping out to get Leo’s cigarettes. I’ll be back soon.’

‘Yes, yes – be off with you. I need to get on.’

On my way down the street I phone Ummu.

‘I’m much better, thank you, Mona,’ she says straight away. ‘The medication is helping, alhamdulillah. Thanks to your money I’ll soon have enough for the scan. The
doctor says he’ll arrange one for me – to make sure, you know, that there’s nothing nasty going on.’

‘Of course there’s nothing nasty going on. You mustn’t think like that, Ummu.’

‘No. OK, Mona, but just to be on the safe side . . .’

I wait.

‘I meant to tell you’ – another coughing fit – ‘Leila’s been to see the school. She’s so excited, Mona, you should see her face. She’s growing up
too. Lost a tooth last night, first top one.’

‘Is she OK?’

‘Of course! She ran around showing it to everyone.’

‘She must look funny, with a top tooth missing.’

‘She looks cute as ever, Mona.’

‘Good. That’s good.’

‘So we’re doing fine.’ Cough. ‘It’s all working out very well. Thanks to you. Your wages.’

‘No news?’ I barely mention Ali’s name for fear of setting her off on another nagging session about finding an Englishman instead.

‘No, Mona. Nothing.’

I don’t tell her I feel homesick. That hearing about Leila’s tooth has brought a lump to my throat. How Theodora, who I thought I would grow fond of, seems to be subtly changing, the
way a fruit slowly darkens until it is no longer good to eat.

I imagine my mother and the other women of the neighbourhood, sitting together on someone’s steps sharing a cigarette, and long to be there with them so badly it hurts. Where are all the
women in this street, with its closed doors and its curtains? Don’t they need to laugh and chat together in this city? Don’t they ever open the doors of their homes? The doors seem
permanently shut, as if they have their backs to the world.

And my hopes of finding Ali are fading. Already the weeks are turning into months. It’s mid-November now, and my chances of finding better work, of living a better life seem to be
diminishing along with Ummu’s health.

‘Can I speak to Leila?’

I hear Ummu calling to my daughter. She must be playing out on the street. I wait a minute, two minutes. In the background far off, I can hear children’s voices, some Arabic music, and my
longing to be home increases.

At last Leila’s voice comes down the phone.

‘Hi, Ummu.’

‘How are you, darling?’

‘I’m fine. I’ve just been out to get Tetta’s medicine. She’s too ill to go on her own. She’s gone back to bed now.’

‘Really?’

‘It’s OK,’ Leila’s saying. ‘I’m looking after her. I’m doing the shopping and the cooking and she says I’m a very good nurse.’

Leila
, I want to shout,
you’re six years old. You shouldn’t have to be a good nurse!
I swallow.

‘Good. That’s good,’ I say. ‘And I hear you’ve lost a tooth?’

‘Yes, and I have another wobbly one. When are you coming home, Ummu?’

‘As soon as I can, darling.’

‘Got to go, Ummu. Ahmed’s here.’

‘OK.
Salaam alaikum
. Love you.’

I’ve reached the shops, am paying for my paper in such a daydream I don’t hear the voice at first. ‘You thought about using Unibank yet? I can do you a deal.’

I look up. ‘I don’t want Unibank, thank you. I can send money home by post.’

‘That’s crazy, man. It’ll get lost. You wanna send it electronically, much safer.’

‘But much more expensive. Just the cigarettes, thank you.’

‘How many do you smoke then?’ He bangs the Marlboro I’m buying for Leo down on the counter.

‘They aren’t for me.’

‘Who for then? I see you buy twenty every day. You should warn whoever it is they’re smoking too much, man.’

‘And your job is to sell, not to tell people what to buy! They’re for my employer’s son.’

‘Ah! Now I know who you work for. They live on our street up the other end!’

He grins, and his green eyes light up. With his brown skin and black hair I can’t help it, he makes me think of Ali. Those clear eyes like jewels in that dark face. Everyone commented on
Ali’s eyes. ‘It’s my Berber blood,’ he would say proudly. He knew how gorgeous he was, he knew how to use it.

‘You what, a cleaner or something?’

‘I do as I’m asked.’ Ummu’s warning not to say too much rings through my head.
‘The walls have ears, Mona
. People are suspicious. They’ll think
you’re trying to sneak into the country, to live there illegally. There are ears everywhere,’ she said. ‘Keep as much to yourself as possible.’

‘She’s got that old man in the wheelchair.’ Another man has joined him at the counter. This one’s white, his skin so pale it’s almost transparent. He’s
dressed in a T-shirt as though it were warm outside. A snake is tattoed on his arm. People here don’t seem to feel cold the way I do. The damp seeps into my bones so my fingers and toes feel
permanently numb, my joints ache dully.

‘I’ve seen you in here before. Buying stamps, buying a newspaper. This is Sayed, by the way. I’m Johnny.’

The tattoo on the white man’s arm uncoils as he holds out his hand to shake mine.

‘You come here for what?’ he persists. ‘Work? Asylum?’

I’ve already said too much, and so I purse my lips together. Shake my head.

‘Oh come on!’ says Sayed. ‘Everyone round here – Johnny, me, Costas at the café, Pearl over there in the fabric shop, all the guys at the cab office, they’s
all from somewhere else. Some is legal, some is illegal.’

‘Where are you from?’ I ask.

‘Afghanistan,’ he says. ‘Johnny’s from Albania.’

Something about Sayed, his green eyes, weakens my resolve. Maybe, amongst this crowd of immigrants, people desperate to get away from desperate situations, to start again or to improve their
lives, they might have links? It’s possible someone has met Ali. But as I open my mouth, Sayed speaks.

‘Listen,’ he says. ‘You ever need help, like a British passport – you ask me, right? I know where to get documents, and I got people who can help you.’

‘It’s OK. I don’t need documents. I have documents.’

He shrugs. ‘Just letting you know I’m here.’

On my way back to the house, the worries start up, along with a dull pain in the pit of my stomach. I’ve said too much, I should never have told them anything. If I get
caught up in illegal practices I’ll be putting all of us at risk, Ummu, Leila, me. Even, possibly, Ali. Ali. I’m no nearer to finding him. Ummu. How sick is she really? Should I go
home, get her to a hospital? Should I forget Ali, the money I’m earning? That’s impossible. The money’s essential. Dora. Something’s changed, she’s working me harder
every day. She owes me, for the nightwork I’ve done. For the weekends I’ve worked. If I object, she might bring up the things I’ve had to take for Ummu, the little things that
I’ve taken for myself, or that Leo’s given me to sell. Things I’m certain she knows I need, but that so far, she’s overlooked out of a mutual understanding.

I’d like to ask Dora for time off to make a short trip home, to see Ummu, to ensure she’s not got anything serious, that she’s getting the treatment she needs. And to see the
gap in Leila’s front teeth.

Then the vision of Dora the night she woke me to get Charles from the street comes back to me, unsettles me. And this morning, the way she turned, the rolling pin raised as if she was
threatening me. I’ll have to bide my time, wait for the right moment.

I’m in the kitchen making the almond pastries Dora has asked for when Leo comes in. He’s in his tracksuit and socks, his hair unbrushed.

‘Don’t you feel guilty, lying about while other people work?’ I hand him his cigarettes.

‘What are you making?’

‘The almond and honey cakes you like.’

‘Hmmph.’