The Pickup (25 page)

America. To him, beside her, it was a single concept: but America, its vastnesses, so many Americas, from the casinos in California to Idaho (where she had skied) to New York (where she frequented museums and theatres), Charlottesville (where one of her lovers came from, she remembered), to Seattle, to Florida …

Where is he, in America? What city would we go to?

Chicago. He's in Chicago. And his brother and a friend like a brother are in Detroit, there's work there. For a start, that's all right. They say they could find something for me. We might go to Detroit. You been there, you know it?

Her upper and lower lips are drawn, mum, into her closed mouth; her head moves as if she is searching.

He watches: ah yes, thinking back to another adventure.

She never was in Detroit but she knows, remembers, the other kind of distances in the vastness of America. From the houses of Sutton Place with their doormen attired as royal flunkeys (Daddy Summers had sent her to be received by his friends at an address) to the slums of Chicago and New York where a worn old man or blowzy woman sits on the broken doorstep of a decaying building where emigrants ‘of colour' find lodging, a bed-space, along with the black American poor, born down-on-their-luck.

For the first couple of weeks Ismail says we can stay with them, they'll make room for us in their place, Chicago. They have this janitor's apartment—I told you. They must be very nice, wonderful people—don't know us but of course we are family.

And then.

He rose, away from her, and began to walk about the room; so confined that only a few paces took him back and forth. Her eyes followed him to read what the movement might mean. His unaccustomed expansiveness had dried up; she was back to reading him in other ways, as she had learnt to. Was he pacing the cage of refusals for the last time, ritually, just before it was about to swing open wide, on America; never easy to read him.

Depends what happens. I'll go to Detroit. That's it. I think it will be.

Have they found a place for us? To live, in Detroit.

Well, I'll sleep somewhere, wherever they do. They are without wives, not been able to send for them yet. They've only been there a year… a bit more …

He had come back, to stand before her, his legs touching her knees where she sat. I'll look for something for us right away. An apartment. Even some rooms.

You. ‘You'. Was she understanding him. What d'you mean?

It will be good if you go to California. To your mother, just for some days.

She bent forward with the flesh over her cheek-bones lifted in anguished pressure against her eyes, her head tipped to him, trying to scrutinize what might be written for her on his smooth tarnished-gold forehead under the fall of black silk hair.

How did you think that.

He had come to know the power of his particular smile, she had made him conscious of it, so that what he had been unaware of, when the impulse to smile came, was now a tactic to be employed; this is one of the possibilities of power that come with what he had though he couldn't afford; what the privileged call love. The smile offered himself to her.

Julie. You are not always right about your parents. Of course they are not like you. Not in many ways. But in some ways they are there— He put the flat of his hand on her breast-bone, just above her breasts. It was touch, a gesture, very different from his seeking out her breasts in a caress; it brought him closer to her than any sexual advance.

It is like with my parents.

It's nothing like with yours. Your mother. What can I say. Then there came to her as a slap in the face, something that had been intended to be a pleasant surprise: How do you know my mother would want me there? Around-thirty-year-old daughter to prove to everyone that my mother is much older than her latest husband.

And then what there was to be read in him was deciphered: Have you been in touch with her? Have you?

On the phone, yes. The letters she sent, from her husband. They were a great thing—help—to get my visa. We won't ever know how much. Until I took those letters, nothing happened. You know that.

California. Take on the casino style, for my mother and her husband. Her voice was backing, away, away. California.

The smile had opened a flow in him again. It is good sense. You don't understand what it is like. Come in a country like I do. I have done—how many times? Even legal. It's hard, nothing is nice, at the beginning, Julie. Without proper money to live. You are a stray dog, a rat finding its hole as the way to get in. I know you don't mind, you even seem to like to live … rough … it's like a camping trip to you. But this is different, it can be bad, bad. I can't take you into it. I don't want you to experience… I don't mind for me—because this time I have the chance to move out of all that, finished, for ever, for ever, do what I want to do, live like I want to live. That is the country for it. There's plenty of chances again now, there; you don't read the papers, but the unemployment is nothing. Lowest for many years. Work for everybody.

And the meantime. —She seems to force herself to speak.

What is that?

Before the chances to live the way you want to. What work will you do.

Same as immigrants, always. Anything. If you have some brains and education, it doesn't matter. I tell you, you don't know what happens there. It isn't your country, never get out of the garage! You don't know—one of the biggest, the most important financiers in the whole world today was an immigrant from Hungary, he started there in New York as a waiter in a club. He was white, a Jew, yes. But people where I come from make it, there, even if not so high as that, they're in computers, in communications, that's where the world is!

Women here—his home—do what their men tell them to. Is that what is happening in the makeshift walls of the lean-to, are there listeners with ears to the clapboard door hearing
what is being said, is he who ‘runs away from home' (Uncle Yaqub) yet taking an assumption from all he abandons? He and she won't go on talking about it: California. That may mean anything. That he has accepted her rejection; that she has accepted her assent.

J
ust say the word

There was no strain between them and that cannot be explained. Better not. For either to try to. Not everything between two people can be laid before The Table for resolution.
That's it.
He was sorting out the contents of the canvas bag, there were things, time-fingered documents, to unburden himself of forever, now; legality is light to carry. He looked up to give her the smile as she opened the door … going out to his sister or somewhere about the house.

She walked as a somnambulist slowly down the street to its end, the desert. The bean rissole vendor must have seen her, the man with a donkey cart hawking melons must have passed her, the nasal harmonies of house radios and the electronic call of the mosque trailed round her familiarly unfamiliar figure. The dog was waiting. If there is not The Table, there is always someone. She sat on the clump of masonry that had once been a house and the dog stood on its splayed thin legs a little way off. The desert.
Always.
The true meaning of the common word tripping off every tongue to suit every meaning, comes from the desert. It is there before her and the dog. The desert is always; it doesn't die it doesn't change, it exists.

But a human being, she, she, cannot simply exist; she is a hurricane, every thought bending and crossing its coherence inside her, nothing will let her be, not for a moment. Every emotion, every thought, is invaded by another. Shame, guilt, fear, dismay, anger, blame, resentment at the whole world and what it is—and names come up, names—for the sight of him as he is going to be. Again. Living in a dirty hovel, a high-rise one or a shed behind a garage, what's the difference, with Christ knows what others of the wrong colours, poor devils like himself (as he used to say), cleaning American shit—she has seen the slums of those cities, the empty lots of that ravaged new world, detritus of degradation—doing the jobs that
real people,
white Americans, won't do themselves. At least in her home, that city of the backward continent, lying under a car's guts was a better human grade. And then the assault comes at her: in
your
city? Your country? All
real people
by law now, but who still does the shit work, neither Nigel Ackroyd Summers nor his daughter Julie. And even the ‘better human grade' was denied the grease-monkey there, he was kicked out of that better grade, wasn't he, right out; of your country.

And again: America, America. The great and terrible USA. Australia, New Zealand—that would have been something better? Anywhere would be. America. The harshest country in the world. The highest buildings to reach up to in corporate positions (there he is, one of the poor devils, the beloved one, climbing a home-made rope ladder up forty storeys); and to jump off from head-first.
That's where the world is.
He thinks
I
don't know;
he
doesn't know. He is standing before her, conjured up by her rage against all that threatens him, waits for him: so young, his slender hands hanging ready for anything, at his sides, his defiant elegance—that silk scarf round his neck with its strong tendons, the black hair down his breast and again round his testicles
and proud penis she sees beneath his clothes whenever she looks at him, the black eyes that never reveal what's going on behind that face she discovered comes from his mother, as the traits of an ancient Greek, Egyptian or Nubian image may be rediscovered in far-removed living descendants.

But there is no-one. Nothing imprinted on the desert. It is
always;
and what is thudding inside her like a road-worker's stamp in a street is
now.

She is at one with the woman, his mother, to whom she should have been able to run, at one with the woman with whom she could not exchange, did not have, the right words for what she now shared with her. Only she herself, who had discovered him disguised as a grease-monkey—not the father, not Maryam, not anyone at all in the family where people were so close to one another—only she and the mother could experience the apprehension of, the rejection of what every emigration, this emigration, was ready to subject the son to. But the mother was at prayer; his mother had prayer. She should not be interrupted. Even if one were to have had the words in the right language.

The dog went silently away. She sat on until the tumult slowly cleared within her, disentangled. The sands of the desert dissolve conflict; there is space, space for at least one clear thought to come: arrived at.

When she came back to the house the prayer rug had been folded away. Mother and son were together in their privacy on her sofa. He looked up and signalled—come. Where he sat, he put an arm round her waist; Where have you been? A walk. Fresh air is good if it is not too hot, the mother said to her, speaking slowly so that she would understand. They looked at one another for a moment; she thought his mother knew—if not where she had been—where experiences were taking her.

They retired to their lean-to together—that was the formal
feeling of it before the following eyes of the mother. He had her by the hand, it was a gesture more for his mother than for her: as if to say, my foreign wife is with me, I am not alone.

She dumped herself on the bed that had complained so much under the weight of love-making.

I'll write to Archie. My Uncle.

D
ear Archie,

You won't be too surprised to hear from me, and you'll know that it probably means I'm coming to you—for something. Because you've always been the one I could ask. This time it's money. Ibrahim has been granted a visa for America. It was never a problem to get one for me, but it has taken months and endless hassle to arrange for him. He's been turned down by every other country he's tried. I still don't know how he's done it—better not ask! You'll understand that, after his experience in S.A.

So we have the green light for the USA. But my dollars have run out. We couldn't have and wouldn't have expected his family to keep us. His earnings here (work he's had as a favour from a relative) and the small sums I've been able to add by having the nerve to teach English, are not enough to pay our airfares and give us a breather when we get there. Could I ask, I
am
asking, could you possibly, somehow, let me have the equivalent of about 5,000 dollars? I know exchange control regulations may make this difficult, but any currency you could arrange to come to me from your contacts anywhere, would be fine. Ibrahim has a friend at a bank in the
capital who will take care of the draft and get us the proper rate of exchange at this end. I am enclosing a sheet with all details of the bank for the transfer, however you can do it.

Dear Archie, I would hope to pay back some time. I wanted to write to you, anyway, not long ago, about the possibility of a pre-inheritance from the Trust you know was set up—but that's no doubt something complex that would take time, and we really have to have cash right now. So to be honest, I won't be able to meet the debt too soon because we don't know what our situation will be in the USA. But eventually, I'll write again for your advice on how I could perhaps draw on that Trust. I suppose in America I could most likely get the same kind of work I used to do. I could contact the principals there, of the people I worked for in Johannesburg, it's an international spider, legs down all over the place. If they make some sort of in-house request to employ me apparently a work permit won't be a problem. For the moment, Ibrahim's been granted one, I'm just the wife he's supposed to provide for while she sits and watches TV.

Archie, I don't know how to say how grateful we'll both be to you.

You know I can't ask my father.

With much love, as it's always been,