The Last Gift (7 page)

What did you do?
Jamal whispered to his father.
Did you kill someone? Were you a torturer? Were you a crusher of souls?

Maryam came back from dropping Hanna off at the station, and Jamal gave her the chair he had been sitting on. She touched Ba’s hand and Jamal expected the eyes to fly open again, but nothing happened.

‘He opened his eyes while you were were away,’ he told her.

‘What! Did he speak?’ she asked.

‘No, he just opened his eyes wide and then shut them again,’ Jamal said. ‘I don’t think he woke up. I think it was like a twitch.’

Maryam went to tell the Sister who came to have a look and assured them that he was sleeping and was doing fine. Why didn’t they go and have a rest themselves and come back tomorrow? The way he was going, the doctor may well let him wake up tomorrow. On the way home, Maryam asked Jamal how long he was staying for and he said for three or four days. He’d see how things went. He was moving to a studio flat in a few days. He said
studio flat
with a self-mocking inflection. It was just an upstairs bedroom with a partitioned shower and toilet, but it would be a change from living in a small room in a house with two other students he had come to know too well: less interruption, and more work and emotional space.

When they got back to the house Maryam went upstairs and brought down a photograph of Abbas in a frame. It was taken in Exeter by the friend that Abbas was staying with, and in it he was wearing a light-coloured, polo-neck sweater and short denim jacket. Maryam put it on the shelf above the gas fire and then turned to Jamal. ‘So handsome. You look just like him,’ she said. ‘Except for that craggy beard.’

He thought she meant scraggy but he did not correct her. It was disconcerting, the way she mispronounced certain words, as if English was a language she had learned imperfectly when in fact she had lived in England all her life and only spoke English.

‘Where was that taken?’ he asked. He knew, but he sensed that Ma wanted to talk about the old days.

They went to Birmingham first. Abbas said they were more likely to find work there and she did not know any different. If he had said Newcastle she would have gone, and that was as far as she could think of then without crossing the sea. Somehow Scotland was not a place you went to but came from. That’s what she thought in her ignorance. He was the one who had roamed the world and knew its ways and knew where was safe. Birmingham was as exciting to her as anywhere else because it was far from Exeter, and because she was with him for company. Sometimes she was fearful about what she had done, at other times she could not understand why she waited so long. But maybe she did understand; she would not have known how to run away on her own. She would have been too frightened of what life could do to her, without money, without charm or daring. Without. Abbas had a little bit of money, so they were not completely broke and were able to find a room and look for work. It wasn’t too bad. Work wasn’t easy to find in those days of inflation and strikes and trade-union wars. She found work as a cleaner in a hospital because it was the kind of work no one wanted, and he got work on building sites at first, and then found a factory job. It was confusing to live in a big city, and to do that kind of work, but it wasn’t too bad, and it was too late to think about what she did not like about it.

Her life became completely different. She felt nervous at times because she was not sure how things were done and Abbas was not always there for her to ask him, but he was always there at the end of the day and she could not have imagined the pleasure of living with a loving companion. The company. He was full of talk and laughter . . . well, when they were on their own. He was more careful when they were with other people, but he wasn’t shy, he wasn’t afraid. At least that’s what he said: I’m not afraid of anybody or anything. The first time she heard him say that, she did not believe him. She thought he was swaggering for her, trying out those words to see if she liked him more for it. She must have done because he kept saying them for several years. Honestly, though, he was such a battler in those days. No one was going to bully them or take advantage of them, he said. She thought he talked like that to give both of them courage and confidence, and it did, it did. When he was not doing his big talk, he was so gentle and perhaps a little bit anxious, although she did not know what of, or even if it was of anything in particular. She was young enough to take everything in her stride, and she did not worry too much about anything, not when she had Abbas telling her hilarious stories about his journeys and some sad ones too, and on weekends they could stay in bed until early afternoon. They went to the cinema when they felt like it, and had a roast meal at the café round the corner if they wanted. She thought he would miss the sea, but he said no, he’d had enough of that. They were so lucky, she thought, to have found each other like that, just imagine the chances.

Their lives were good in Birmingham. They both had work, even if it was poor work, and those first three years just flew. She thought of Ferooz and Vijay at times, and felt guilty and sick for running away without a word. When she said this to Abbas he said nothing. He did not sympathise or discourage, not in those days. He just looked down and waited silently until her hurt went away, as it always did after a while. There was so much pleasure in such ordinary things: buying pots and pans for the kitchen, decorating the bathroom of the flat they rented, learning to listen to music that she thought she despised. He loved reading, which was not something she could take to. It took too long when there were so many other things which did not. Sometimes he told her about the books he was reading, and that was enough for her. She loved to hear him talk about places he had known, about his experiences, which sometimes sounded impossible enough to find their way into books. She noticed that he always stopped short at some point, that he was holding part of the story back, and she soon worked out that he was not telling her about his childhood or about his home. When she asked him about that, he found a way of slipping away without explaining himself and she let him do so when perhaps she should not have done. After all these years, when so much of their lives had happened to them together, she did not know how to make him speak about what she had allowed him to keep silent about so long ago. It did not seem so important then, before the children came. That was what she wanted in those years in Birmingham. She really wanted her Hanna straight away but Abbas said she was too young and that they should wait for a few years. They argued about that. She knew that he was older than he had told her, that he was really thirty-four when they met in Exeter, and she thought that he did not want children any more, that he had become used to his roaming life, but he said no, it was because she was too young to burden herself with children yet.

After three years in Birmingham – it did not feel anything like three years, it went so fast – they moved to Norwich. Abbas applied for a job in a new electronics firm and he got it. He had to do training for it and then they sent him there. It was a much better job with good pay and a pension scheme, and by then they both decided they would prefer to live in a small town. Abbas liked the water being nearby too. At first they called him a fitter, and then as times changed he was called an engineer, and then as even more time passed he advanced to chief engineer.When she went for work at the Job Centre, the man asked her what work she did in Birmingham. She said she was a hospital cleaner and he smiled and said you are in luck, so she ended up as a hospital cleaner again. She told herself that being a cleaner had its own satisfactions, you cleaned things, and she took the job. When she was a child living with Ferooz and Vijay, she wanted to work in a hospital, to be a psychiatric nurse like Ferooz. Well, she ended up working in hospitals most of her grown-up life, even if not as a psychiatric nurse.

Maryam looked at the picture for a while and then she said: ‘What do you think? He still looks quite good, doesn’t he? He was almost never ill, you know. But it happens like that, you’re fine all your life and then one day everything descends on you.’

He thought he would probably never get better. Years ago he had dreaded this coming, the coming of this dread, dying in a strange land that did not want him. That was years ago, and the country still felt strange. It still felt like somewhere he would one day leave. In some of the port cities he found himself in all that time ago, there were whole neighbourhoods of Somalis or Filipinos or Chinese, and it was possible to forget that he was in England for a short while. Despite their ragged appearance, these neighbourhoods were watchful and alert for strangers. They were people who were a long way from home, now huddled together for safety, and they had to keep a sharp lookout to protect their honour, which is to say their women and their property. But away from the big old ports, he sometimes passed dark-skinned old men on their own (old men more often than not, not usually old women) and he felt sorry for them. They looked so strange, those old men with their crinkly white hair and leathery dark skins walking English streets, like beasts out of their element, pachyderms on concrete pavements. I’ll never let that happen to me, he said to himself then, I’ll never let myself die in a strange land that does not want me, and here he was, more or less on the crematorium trolley.

The doctor, Mr Kenyon . . . He thought at first that he said his name was Mr Kenya, and thought how funny, they get everywhere this lot, and feel no shame about naming themselves after land grabs, but he had said Kenyon. Why do they call themselves Mr and not Dr as they get more senior? Mr Kenyon told him he would lose some function. Paralysed. But some of it might come back. Physiotherapy and a good attitude. Did he say a good attitude or a good diet? Hearing is not one of the lost functions, speech is. He can make sounds but not words. Makes you wonder at the cleverness of it, making words out of these gurgles and whistles, making sense. We’ll get it back, Mr Kenyon said. Yes bwana, you and I.

He had never known such fatigue. He felt as if a vital fluid in his body had been drained out, and when they first sent him home, he sat for hours without energy or volition, unable to lift his arm or rise to his feet or even close his mouth. He could not always keep his eyes open, and his mind wandered in and out of stupor. To his astonishment he found that hours had gone by in the blink of an eye. He could not bear voices or music on the radio, and so a silence enveloped him and oppressed the air around him.

He did almost nothing for himself. Maryam cleaned him and fed him and medicated him, and he paid no attention. She took him to the surgery once a week, dressing him and then taking him downstairs one step at a time, and then driving him there. He sat silently while she debated his symptoms and his treatment with the doctor. They had been adversaries for years, and Abbas smiled as he watched them battle over his sick body. He expected that it was an inward smile, which did not show on his face. The doctor wanted him to do exercises, take a walk every day.

‘You like reading,’ she said, speaking each word clearly as if he had trouble hearing her. Hearing function not impaired. ‘Walk to the library and read there for a while. Exercise is very, very important for you. You must make more effort. You must tell yourself that you will get better. Attitude is very important in therapy.’

Mr Kenyon must have said attitude, then. ‘I can’t sleep,’ he wanted to say to her, not properly, everything is uncomfortable, my head, my throat, my belly, but when he spoke only thick slurred noises came out of his mouth. He lay on the bed with eyes open, keeping as still as possible. Maryam slept on a camp bed, which she wedged between the wardrobe and the window, and left him the whole bed to himself. It was to give him room to sleep in comfort, she said, but perhaps it was also to get away from his smell and his decrepitude. Even then, he often could not sleep. The smallest sound woke her up so he had to lie rigid until he heard her breathing change. But sometimes he could not help himself, and the nausea and stomach pains overcame him and he heard his voice shrieking in the underground chambers of his mind, on and on like an animal dying. Then on other nights he lay still, unable to sleep, and in the corners of his mind he saw pulses of red and green light where the pain lurked, waiting for him to draw near.

There was a tangled path from the road, easy to miss when you did not know what you were looking for. He was on his way home from school. It was a long walk on the narrow country road, stepping into the verge now and then to allow a cart or a passenger lorry to drive past. The verge was dense with palms and trees, and gave him shelter in the early afternoon heat. It was an hour’s walk from school to home. He was the only one in his family who was sent to school. What a battle that had been, going to school. His father saw him as he came out into the open. He was weaving a basket for the vegetables that would go to market the next day, and he paused in his work to shout at him. ‘Get to work, you maluun. Do you think you have slaves here?’

That was his father. His name was Othman, a hard mean man who gloried in his toughness and who always spoke in a shout. Now, as Abbas lay there in the dark, broken by disease in a stranger’s land, he saw his father standing in the yard in the afternoon sun, his saruni rolled around his thighs, a half-woven basket on a tree stump in front of him. The short hoe that he always took everywhere with him lay at his feet. His short, muscular body was as hard as a fist, and he stared at Abbas with careless ferocity. That was how he looked at everything, ready to scrap with everyone, animal or human, and his appearance of rage was not diminished by the large thick-rimmed spectacles he wore at all times except when he went to sleep. Whatever he did, his father managed to look dangerous and comic at the same time. Abbas had been looking forward to his lunch, but he knew that to say anything would be to provoke his father intolerably. Instead he asked if he could say his prayers first, thinking he would be able to sneak a few mouthfuls of whatever his mother had put aside for him. He saw his father grin at his wiliness, but he was a pious man, and could not refuse anyone his prayers. ‘Hurry up,’ he said. ‘Don’t keep God waiting, and don’t keep me waiting either.’