I Am Heathcliff
‘Shut up Greg,’ I say. ‘Go to sleep. You’re being an idiot.’ He’s lurching after me, and I am out of bed and dodging him. Dodging him! A man I know, in a motel room, with my old buddy dead to the world in a bed right there. Greg has become completely stupid. He doesn’t see, he doesn’t hear. He’s a lumbering, huge, stupid lump of sexual hunger. He’s really disgusting.
I went into the bathroom and closed the door and locked it. Greg knocked, and knocked, and begged, and kicked, and shouted. I sat on the bog and shivered in my T-shirt until he was quiet, then I put a towel in the bottom of the grubby bath and lay there and shivered. I was really angry. Stiff with anger and discomfort and a sense of the ridiculousness of it in the bottom of the bath.
When it had been quiet outside the door for a while, I got up and gently pushed it open. Quiet. Moonlight on the cheap carpet. Two beds, each with a lump, each quietly rising and falling. I sneaked across and slipped into Steven’s, his friendly if comatose body between me and Greg’s bed, and my mind reached down again for sleep.
Weight beside me. Hands on my body, up my T-shirt, trying to turn me over. A nasty little erection pressing against my thigh. ‘Darling, darling …’
I shouted and pushed and I was back in the bathroom, door locked, my back against the door like someone in a film. Panting. Tired beyond belief. Pissed off. Scared? No. Angry.
‘Sweetheart!’ he was saying behind the door. ‘Sweetheart what’s the matter?’
Is there no end to this man’s stupidity? What kind of no would mean no to him?
‘Sweetheart, I’m sorry,’ he’s saying. ‘Come on out. I’m sorry, I know, you’re tired, let’s speak in the morning. I’ll go in with Steven. Come on, honey—’
The bathtub is cold. The floor is filthy. The towel is outside because I had had it around me when I came out last time. I sit. I sit cross-legged. I piss. I look at the bath. My head falls back against the cistern. I wake suddenly with a jerking nod, slipping sideways off the lid of the loo. I am swaying and shivering, teeth chattering with exhaustion.
Outside it’s quiet.
Hardly upright, I slip out the door. The near bed is empty, and I fall into it and sleep.
A while later I am disturbed. He’s on top of me, my T-shirt up, my knickers down, and he’s burrowing his way up me. Six-foot four, fifteen stone, German-Sicilian Greg, the physiotherapist from the Valley. ‘Get off me Greg, Greg, stop it, get off me Greg,’ I’m saying, as best I can, smothered, under, squashed, small, his chest in my face, his big arms holding me and his big body weighing me down – I’m immobilised. I shout – do I shout? I want to tell him to fuck off, to make my rejection as clear as it can be made, but I can’t say fuck – the word has become ambiguous. My face is all screwed up in disgust and my hands are pushing at him, but I don’t want to touch him, his horrible hairy chest all over me, on my breasts – MY breasts – and I’m shaking and shaking and angry. I would bite him, but I don’t want to touch him, don’t want any of him anywhere near me and yet he’s fucking me and saying oh baby oh baby. I’m so tense you’d think his body would just bounce off me, but it’s so big and stupid it doesn’t notice. A quick, sharp, clear thought appeared in the midst of my fury: he thinks I’m having sex with him. He thinks this is me joining in.
And I went limp. Just – died. Lay like a fish, dead and limp and nasty. I looked him in the face – his face swaying in some selfish ecstasy against the ceiling. Sarcasm caught me and made me hard and bright. ‘OK,’ I chirped. ‘If that’s what you want. Go on then. Don’t mind me.’ My cheeks stiff with fury, my belly quivering, my voice unspeakable, every word outlined in black sarcasm and hatred. ‘Go on,’ I said. ‘Go on. Since it means so much to you. You just carry on, why don’t you.’
And he fell on me, gentle, sweet, stroking and urging, kissing my neck, oh baby, oh baby, you know I love you, rolling my limp body around in his arms and heading in to kiss my mouth, as I turned my face away, my head sideways on the pillow. I began to weep, silently, coldly, about the time he started his blind, stupid, delirious, flailing orgasm.
And the next morning, he thought I was his girlfriend.
OK, who else?
That guy in Mumbai who grabbed my tit in the crowd, crying out ‘Mrs I want you!’
The far-right Tory who decided because I was blonde and zaftig I’d make him a great Nazi wife, who sent me greetings cards with pictures of Valkyries on and the message written in that zigzag SS-style old German font.
The guy on the boat on Dal Lake who thought because I was on a boat with him he could tear my shirt off. ‘But I lent you my jacket,’ he said. ‘You wore it.’
Every man who shacked up with a woman and swore he loved her and was unfaithful and lied about it.
Every arse who ever said, ‘But I want you’, in that puzzled way, as if his wanting was the only thing in the world. His wanting delineated the world. He wants me? Then I must be his.
Every controlling bullying man who any woman ever thought she loved.
Every husband who comes on to a woman who is not his wife, assuming – knowing! – that because she’s a decent person, she’s not going to tell his wife about his proposition. Getting the woman to carry his misbehaviour – so whatever she does, she’s somehow in the wrong. Though she didn’t do anything. He did.
The dark and brooding man who felt I should have sex with him because his father died young. I said, ‘No.’ He said, ‘Why?’ I said, ‘Because your wife is pregnant.’ He said, ‘Oh God don’t tell me you’re one of the sisterhood.’ I said, ‘If that means I care more about your wife than you do, well yeah, OK.’
When I read Wuthering Heights, I wished afterwards I had taken notes and just added up his crimes. I wanted to draw up his charge sheet. Assault, assault, assault. Hanging a dog – because he’s in love. Interfering with a corpse – two corpses! – because he’s in love. Assault, assault. Trying to destroy her marriage, he loves her so much. Destroying her chances, he loves her so much. Being a violent controlling drunk, a bully, a narcissist, psychotic, but it’s OK because he’s in love.
I wish I was in his anger management group. I’d give him fucking borderline personality disorder. Not that borderline, is it? I couldn’t read it again though, to make notes, for the Recording Angel and the Charge Officer. Too revolting.
And I’d like to be in Emily’s creative writing class. Read your sister Anne’s book, I’d say. Read a bit of honest truth about nasty men, and women who try to get away. Don’t leave us this image and call it love. Sure, Cathy, he loves you. That’s why he torments your daughter and kills your sister-in-law’s pet and digs up your grave to look at your poor dead face and wants to get his dead body put in between yours and your husband’s. That’s quite the romantic overture, isn’t it? What girl could resist? Yes, he was practically the only boy you’d ever met, yes you were only nineteen when you died, but you were a mother—
I’d like to be in your CBT session when they talk about co-dependency. ‘I am Heathcliff,’ you say. No you’re not, love. You’re really not.
Listen, when you come tapping on that window whining your Kate Bush lyrics, you’d better be coming for him. Coming to torment him for how he treated your daughter. Because, you know, she is yours. Made of the same stuff. She is you.
AMULET AND FEATHERS
* * *
LEILA ABOULELA
TODAY I SET OUT to avenge my father’s death. I took his dagger, the one with the two points, and I filled a pouch with poison leaves. I put on my brother’s clothes and his turban so I would not be recognised. I hid the shells, feathers, and cowries deep in my pocket – I would only need them when I arrived in Gobir. I looped my amulet on a cord and tied it around my neck. I did not feel afraid.
My mother was alone in her room. She would mourn my father for months, not scenting her body or wearing gold. From outside, I heard her praying. She wanted to dream of him, to see how he was in his new life. But he had not yet visited any of us in a dream. I did not
go into her room to say goodbye. She would stop me. She would say a young girl had no business travelling beyond the outskirts of town.
In our courtyard, I looked at everything – at one of our goats heavy with kid, our water pots with their reddish-brown colour, and the coop where the pigeons fluttered and cooed. I looked at the ashy remains of yesterday’s cooking fire. I picked up my little cat. She knew who I was, she was not fooled. I kissed her and said, ‘I will not play with you today or give you milk. Even tomorrow I will still be away.’
In the marketplace, I pulled down the sash that was wrapped around my turban and covered my mouth. I walked fast so that no one would recognise me. I bumped into my friend Aysha, her hair in corn rows. I almost cried out, ‘Aysha, you have plaited your hair at last!’ But she brushed past me and did not notice who I was.
Bello was buying guava from a seller, but he happened to glance my way. Unlike Aysha, he stopped and looked again. He started to follow me, and I pretended not to hear him. ‘Maryam,’ he said, ‘it’s you, isn’t it, Maryam?’ He looked like the village idiot, gaping and shadowing me.
At last I said, ‘Bello, go away and don’t tell my family that you have seen me.’
He started to ask one question after the other. ‘Where are you going? Why are you dressed like that?’
Bello and I had left the marketplace by now and were at the outskirts of the town. There was hardly anyone around. I stopped under a tree and we sat down. I moved the wrapper from my mouth and said, ‘I am going to Gobir to avenge my father’s death.’
‘But he has already been avenged. The man who killed him was stabbed immediately by your father’s men.’
‘I know all this,’ I said, and started to remember when my heart hurt so much that I couldn’t breathe, that bad bad day when my father’s body was carried back from the mosque, his robes wet with blood.
I said to Bello, ‘Do you know the name of the man who killed my father?’
‘Yes, Ibra. He killed your father because in a land dispute your father ruled against him.’
‘No,’ I said, ‘Ibra was sent by someone else.’
‘Maryam, you can’t know this. You have never set eyes on Ibra or spoken to him.’
‘I saw him after he was killed. I went specially to see him.’
‘Why?’ Bello’s eyes were wide.
I did not answer his question because he would not understand. Only my father would have understood because he was the Shehu, and a Shehu could see inside people, he was blessed. People came from far away to consult him because he could answer any question put to him. Sometimes my father made decisions that others didn’t understand, but, because they had faith in him, they accepted his judgement. When he betrothed me to Bello, my mother wasn’t happy – she complained to her friends, ‘He teaches his daughter how to read and write. He takes her with him to the mosque. He says she is the best girl among the Fulani, and then he gives her to Bello!’ There was nothing special about Bello. His family were neither skilled, nor high in position. I too was surprised at my father’s choice because I had thought my future bridegroom would be a grown man and that I would be in awe of him. Instead Bello was a boy my age.
Now I brushed away his question. ‘It does not matter why I wanted to see Ibra’s face. What matters is that he told me he was sent by someone else.’
‘Oh,’ said Bello. ‘He woke up from the dead and spoke to you! Maryam, you are not making sense. No one gave Ibra a chance to speak.’
‘Don’t mock me. Ibra came to me in a dream. He said Hind from the tribe of Gobir sent him to kill the Shehu.’
‘Why would she do that?’
‘I don’t know, but tomorrow I will reach her and find out. And tomorrow I will avenge my father’s death.’
It was not easy to get rid of Bello. He wanted to come with me, but at the end I threatened him that I would break off our engagement. He didn’t argue with me. He knew it was my right. This was the dowry my father had decided upon – that Bello would give me freedom to do whatever I wanted. ‘He is giving you away for nothing,’ my mother grumbled. But my father was patient and explained. He said, ‘Ambitious, proud men mould women and shape them as they wish. But no man could mould my daughter, he would break her if he tried. She needs someone modest and solid, someone who would encircle her but not come too close.’ I understood my father’s words, but my mother didn’t.
At night I camped near a stream. The moon was yellow and bright. The wind was gentle, and nothing was still, not the grass, not the djinns, nor the tigers and hyenas who breathed and listened. I was not afraid because my amulet with the sacred verses protected me. But I could smell the animals’ hunger. The djinns twisted and bounced around me, their breath warm against my face. Because they were so many I felt lonely and small. I missed my father. He was my mentor, and I shall never have that again. An ant bit my foot, and I guessed it was a viper that the amulet had reduced into an ant. ‘We can never be fully protected,’ my father used to say, ‘we belong to this earth and we live by its rules. But prayers and amulets can make a calamity small and soften the blows that fall on us.’ So instead of a deadly viper’s bite, I had an ant’s bite to scratch. Instead of hyenas and vultures, I only heard frogs and bats. All because of my amulet.
When I entered Gobir, I was no longer dressed like a boy. My braids were long on my shoulder, and I displayed my shells, cowries, and feathers. I walked about the marketplace, calling out that I had fortunes for sale. People looked at me because I was a stranger, and they smiled their welcome. I found a tent where two hairstylists were plaiting women’s hair. While their hair was being pulled and twisted, I tossed shells and read their fortunes in the sand. Soon a lot of women gathered around, pleased with what I was saying. I pretended to study the position of the shells when they fell, how they clustered or separated and which side they lay on – but I was really using my thinking. I could guess at a woman’s personality by looking into her eyes. I could feel her anxieties and wishes by the way she sat and the payment she promised. I tossed my shells on the ground, and all the time my ears were ready to hear the name Hind. I was in Gobir, so she could not be far now. I had already spat on the poison herbs, kneaded a paste and smeared it onto the blade of my father’s dagger.
Noon came and went, but no one mentioned Hind. I could not accept the Gobirs’ hospitality. I could not swallow their food, and their water tasted sour. My mind hurt from making up lies and from the effort of guessing. I sat cross-legged on the ground, encircled by three young girls my age. They giggled as I told their fortune one after the other. They were only interested in who they were going to marry. I touched the shells on the ground and said, ‘You will marry one of three brothers – see how these shells are close together – one, two, three.’ I made up stories about their future. The silent, beautiful one would travel with her husband across the sea. The strong, fat one would prosper in the marketplace. The one who had a rough voice and was as restless as a boy would one day give birth to many sons. Now she said, grinning, ‘There’s Hind! Hind, come and have your fortune told.’
I looked up and saw the white light of the sun and the flutter of a large fan made of ostrich feathers. Hind was the most beautiful girl I had ever seen. Out loud I praised the Almighty for creating her and she smiled her thanks, her voice low and pleasant. She looked like she was older than me, her skin was clear, her hair plaited with gold beads. It was when her friends made room for her and she moved to sit down, that I noticed her slanting wary eyes, her nervous manner. Her movements were not smooth. Her head dipped forward as though she was an awkward bird, as if she were ill. I had expected her to be strong and smooth, and that was how she first looked, but now I saw that deep inside her was a kind of weakness that couldn’t tell right from wrong. She sat hiding her mouth behind her fan, it made her eyes look bigger. Her turn now to have her fortune told. I shook the shells in my hands and tossed them onto the ground. They didn’t cluster together, they broke apart.
‘You
have blood on your hands,’ I said and my voice didn’t break. ‘You sent a man named Ibra, south to Soketo, to kill the Shehu.’
There was a hush in the gathering. None of the girls contradicted me. They were in awe of what they imagined to be my magical powers. Hind didn’t stop fanning herself. I looked at the sway of the black-and-white ostrich feathers, smooth and pretty. In her eyes there was nothing, no guilt or sadness, just nothing.
My head throbbed and I felt sweaty. I blinked, but everything seemed blurred. I caught a vision of that day, when I lost the one I loved most. I saw how it had all happened. There was my father in the mosque just as he was about to lead the prayer. He turned first like he always did, tall and smiling, saying, ‘Straighten your lines and stand close. Don’t leave gaps for Satan to come between you.’ Then Ibra, who was standing in the very front row, stepped forward and stabbed him in the neck.
I heard my voice, careful and soft, ‘Tell me, Hind, why you wanted to kill the Shehu.’
She stopped fanning herself and instead held the fan in her lap, stroking each feather. Her voice was almost flirty, and her eyes shone with mischief and pleasure. ‘Ibra was courting me. He asked me to set a sum for my bride-price. He was ready to give me everything.’ She laughed, and her friends looked at her with admiration. I could imagine Ibra under her spell, wanting her at any cost. She went on, ‘But I already had wealth, I told him, give me something more precious than wealth, give me life, not any life, but a mighty life, a life of a chief or a saint or a warrior. Ibra was meant to escape, I didn’t want him captured or hurt, but he was stupid. He asked me, “Who should I kill?” I could think of five big men, but I couldn’t choose which one. So I gave each a colour …’ She giggled and shrugged. She was like a little girl describing a game.
‘I dyed three of my feathers. I dyed one green and one red and one blue. I left one naturally black and one white. So I had five altogether, five men, five feathers. I put them all in a sack and closed my eyes. I put my hand in the sack and took out one feather. It was the green one – green for the Shehu.’