The Darkening Hour (8 page)

Charles is saying something to me but I can’t hear him; everything has faded, the whole market recedes. All I can see are his strong brown forearms as he straightens up, talks to the
stallholder, holds out his money, the doll in one hand. He is planning to send it to her. He takes his change and then he turns towards us.

As quickly as my body warmed up, it goes cold. Charles is shouting at me to move on. He wants his fruit, he wants his chocolate and a cup of tea.

I curse myself for being so foolish. We’re in a tiny corner of one of the biggest cities in the world. I don’t even know if he’s in the country for sure. I feel the heat of
tears in my eyes. A group of men laugh and jeer as we pass, huddled together, smoking, sharing a bottle of whisky. Their eyes swing over me. I flinch, as I did at the sight of Leo, earlier.
Everyone drinks here, and the smell that catches in my throat and overpowers everything is the sickening stench of alcohol.

I lower my head.

‘Stop here!’ Charles raises his hand. He gestures towards a heap of shrivelled-looking clementines. I stare at the pathetic piles of fruit on the stall. Yearn for home, for the
mountains of gleaming oranges on the carts in the souks, walls of sunshine.

When we’ve bought the fruit there’s only six pounds left. The chance of buying credit for my phone fades.

‘We’ll get my chocolate from the 99p shop,’ the old man says, waving his stick towards the far end of the street. ‘Don’t tell Dora. She doesn’t believe in
bargains. Though it’s the same as she buys from her fancy shops.’

The 99p shop is a supermarket, shelves and shelves of food all costing less than one pound. Multipacks of tins of vegetables and beans and crisps. I’m amazed that the bigger the items, the
cheaper they are. Bars of chocolate the size of Ali’s leather babouches for 99p each! Yet small things cost a lot.

‘What are these, Charles?’ I point at rows of little jars of powder the size of coffee cups.

‘Herbs and spices,’ he says. I stare at them. I want to laugh to think that in this country they sell spices in such tiny quantities. I picture the mountains of cumin and paprika and
turmeric on the stalls at home, pyramids of bright colours, so tall you can hide behind them, and feel a rush of longing to be there. I yearn for the mountains of mint the boys at the café
used to sort through in the mornings, its fresh scent mingling with the salt air from the sea.

We pay for Charles’s chocolate and now only have four pounds left.

‘Charles.’ I squat in front of him. ‘Can we buy stamps here?’

‘Do I need stamps?’ he says. I notice how pale his irises are, clouded like pools of milk. How frail his old skin, like paper. His mind is going, he’s easily confused.

‘Yes, you do! Remember? Dora said when she left, “Don’t forget the stamps, Charles.” ’

He looks bewildered.

‘When she left this morning, she said, “Buy fruit. And don’t forget stamps!” You remember?’

The tears that came to my eyelids earlier threaten to spill over. Without stamps, without credit, Leila and even Ummu will believe I’ve disappeared like Ali. It’s so easy to vanish
when you’ve got nothing.

No wonder I haven’t heard from him.

‘Yes, now you mention it, I think she did,’ he says. I’d like to hug him. ‘There’s a post office here somewhere, but they’ve hidden it at the back of a
newspaper shop. No one seems to use them any more now there’s all this e-this and that. Over here, my dear – follow the direction of my stick.’

Back we go, down the street, past dark doorways and strange signs I can’t read, past a shop full of stone heads – made for English gravestones. I imagine them watching me, that they
have seen my lie.

Charles directs me into a newspaper shop.

‘Stamps for North Africa?’ The man behind the counter smiles at me incredulously. ‘You
writing
to North Africa? If you’re sending money, I can do it for
you.’ He slams the stamps down on the counter. ‘Electronically. It’s safer and it’s instant.’

I look at him. He’s handsome, with green eyes in his brown face and closely cropped black hair. His eyes twinkle as if he knows exactly what I’m doing, what he can get out of me.

‘How much does it cost?’

‘It all depends how much you’re sending. Say you send a hundred pounds, it’ll cost you a tenner. Two hundred, a bit more. But I can do you a deal. They’ll charge you more
up at the hairdresser’s. You ask them and I’ll undercut them.’

‘I’ll think about it.’

‘You won’t get it cheaper anywhere else.’

When we’ve left the shop I ask Charles if I can take him for a walk. I tighten his scarf around his neck. It’s cold out here and I don’t want him falling ill. I’m hoping
if we stay out a little longer, the stamp incident will fade from his mind. He mustn’t tell Dora I’ve used her money for my own needs.

‘Yes yes, a little walk. I’ll show you the river. A spot of fresh air. It’ll give us an appetite.’

I push him across the main road, and under tall trees that shed their golden leaves about our feet as we go. At last the noise drops. The busyness ceases and we’re in front of the great
brown river. It’s even wider than it looked when we crossed it at night from the bridge, the water a massive beast heaving its weight against the walls. On the other side, tall glass
buildings tower towards sky that’s the colour of stones.

I park the wheelchair and sit on a cold bench. A flight of steps leads straight down into the river, dark green and shiny with water that must have covered them earlier.

‘They never used to have those
Danger
signs in the old days,’ Charles says, nodding towards a jetty that stands like a many-legged monster out in the river. ‘They see
danger everywhere now.’

I shiver, feel another wave of homesickness wash over me.

Now the sun’s gone in, everything’s turned grey, as if the colour has simply drained away.

I feel a keen longing for our estuary. The day I saw Ali in the rocks.

I’m knee-deep in the water, my dress slapping me around the calves.

I look up. Ali is on the natural jetty, staring at me. He catches me looking at him, and instead of smiling and waving as I’d expected, he turns away, lifts his fishing rod, a long bamboo
pole, and casts it into the tide. Is he ignoring me? I’m surprised by how much it hurts. Worse than a slap in the face.

I walk up the beach, my heart aching.

I sit with Hait and Amina in the shade of the town wall, and we chat and watch the waves lick the sand. And I try to pretend I don’t care.

We’re about to leave, to go home to start the evening chores.

A shadow falls over me. He stands above me, his face dark, the sun behind him. The blue of his eyes like kingfishers over the river. He’s holding a silver fish in his two hands, cradling
it. Gives me the fish, placing it on the rock beside me. It’s only just dead; its eyes are bright, the flesh still shiny.

And he walks away. Hait and Amina burst into excited giggles. ‘Mona and Ali,’ they sing. ‘Mona and Ali.’

My heart has stopped hurting and is soaring instead.

We were teenagers by then, still young, but too old to be friends. After that look I caught him giving me, before he turned and walked away – after that was when I swore that once
we’d got together, we would never part.

How could you leave me, Ali?

How did I end up here, in London, with an old man, lying for a book of stamps so that I can write home, instead of staying with you by the estuary forever? And an enormous remorse washes over
me.

I turn Charles, who is nodding sleepily now, in his wheelchair, and push him slowly back to his underground home. I install him in his sitting room. Then, as he’s half-asleep, I look
around and find some paper, a pen. I go back up to the house.

I spend the afternoon cleaning, and don’t stop until it’s beginning to get dark.

I check on Charles again, make him some tea and go back up.

The TV is on in the drawing room, Leo has shut himself back in the dark.

And then, when everyone is settled and the house gleams, I go to my room and write to Leila.

How to explain that while her daddy vanished without trace, I will come home? How can I make her understand that not everyone disappears?

I hear the key in the lock and realise Dora has come home. I see myself through her eyes. The quiet housemaid, having completed her chores, taking a few minutes to herself to write home, because
she cannot even afford credit on her phone.

I cover the paper with my arm because I don’t want her to know I took it from the old man or that in order to send it, I needed to take her money to buy stamps.

Daddy’s in his chair, a little sleepy, when I get back from work. I’m eager to see how his first full day with Mona went.

‘Daddy.’ I sit down close to him, speak into his ear. His eyes flash open.

‘Hello, Daddy. How are you?’

He stares at me, waiting to surface from his dreams.

‘Theodora, God’s precious gift,’ he says, smiling. My heart warms.

‘Yes – hi, Daddy. I just came down to see if you wanted anything.’

‘I have everything a man could wish for. I don’t want for anything, my dear. Though you might like to be a darling and bring me a whisky.’

‘You had a good day with Mona?’ I ask as I pour him his ‘two fingers’ and add a little soda, the way he likes it.

‘She’s a lovely girl, you know,’ he says. ‘An excellent cook. Generous too. She bought me clementines. And chocolate. And we bought something else . . . oh, I don’t
remember now . . .’

I squeeze his hand. Tell myself it’s fine that he should believe she bought the fruit with her own money; it’ll help them to establish a good relationship. I’ll let his mistake
pass this time.

I leave Daddy with his whisky and go up to the house.

It smells fresher than it’s ever been when I get in. Of lemon and bleach and polish.

Even the air feels cleaner, as if it’s been allowed to flow again after being shut in for a long time. I push open the door of the drawing room. There’s still the faint smell in here
of stale cigarette smoke, and Leo’s on the sofa, but the debris that surrounds him after a day of TV gazing has been cleared away.

Goodness! I don’t know how I stood it before! Mona has done an excellent – an amazing – job. I go over to the mantelpiece and run my finger along it. Yes, she’s dusted. I
didn’t expect, when I employed her to look after Daddy, that I’d have the cleaning thrown in.

I peer into the kitchen. Clean and tidy. Even the quarry-tiled floor – one of the things Roger and I loved about the house when we bought it, but that had got grimy over the years –
gleams. It’s a beautiful kitchen. It attracted us straight away, with its built-in dresser along one wall, and its window out onto the garden at one end, onto the street and the church
opposite, at the other, its Rayburn and the large table I like to sit at in the mornings. But I’d lost interest in its aesthetics recently, since Leo didn’t seem to care. Mona’s
arranged the crockery on the dresser, placed lemons on a dish, even put some of the Chinese lanterns from the garden in a vase. It looks like something out of a magazine.

There’s a light shining beneath Mona’s door. She must have retreated to her room in time for my arrival, and this discretion is something I approve of too. Something Zidana was very
bad at, knowing when to make herself inconspicuous.

I put the kettle on, take a piece of sliced white bread and a cheese triangle, fold the bread over it and bite. This is a secret pleasure. One I would never admit to my friends who are obsessed
with the latest organic ingredients, all glued to cookery programmes in the evenings, or on diets. Give me a slice of white bread and some processed cheese, and I’m in heaven.

I go up to the bathroom. It’s clear Mona has done more than a superficial clean in here, as well; she’s polished the taps so they shine. She has even dealt with the limescale in the
toilet bowl. How? The limescale has been defeating me for years, a rough brown scum that looks as if I’ve given up caring, but that has resisted all my attempts to tackle it.

Full of appreciation, I knock on her door.

She’s at my bureau. Writing on a pad of Basildon Bond paper, with a Parker pen I recognise instantly as one of Daddy’s.

‘What are you writing?’

‘A letter home.’ Her hand cups the sheets of paper, as if she’s afraid I’ll try and read it. There’s no need, it’s in Arabic script, though I have to admit to
being a little taken aback that she can write at all. I’d assumed that if she was literate she wouldn’t have chosen domestic work.