He lunged over me to tuck in the blankets. The bed was double but the blankets were single.
We’d get up some time in the afternoon, the curtains still closed and the rooms greeny-dim, as if we were wandering around on the floor of the sea.
He couldn’t bear me to put on my clothes, after all those hours in bed. He’d bought a paperback book of love poetry, he was romantic like that, and he’d read it out in a special sombre voice that made me blush. His favourite bit was by someone called Donne, a poem about eyes mingling on threads, and another one, which didn’t sound so gruesome. It went;
My face in thine eye, thine in mine appears,
And true plain hearts do in the faces rest;
Where can we find two better hemispheres,
Without sharp North, without declining West?
He said it hurt when I zipped up my skirt and pulled my jumper down; he was losing a part of himself. He’d press his lips, one last time, against my disappearing skin.
We’d wander outside. He’d flinch at the noisy traffic. It was so brutal, he said, after our silence . . . You see, he told me everything; he trusted me.
We’d cross through the traffic and wander down the Earl’s Court Road, doing our shopping. We’d buy some Vick Inhaler because we’d caught a cold off each other. He liked to come with me everywhere, he couldn’t let me out of his sight.
Bustling and cosmopolitan, they call the Earl’s Court Road. It’s always crowded; he’d hold my hand tight. There’s robed Arabs, and people in anoraks, just emerged from the Underground, bowed with rucksacks and looking as dazed as Ali. There’s plenty of take-a ways to choose from; that area never closes. We’d buy kebabs in a carrier bag and dawdle back to the flat. In the side street I’d see my Mini, yet another parking ticket on its windscreen.
Ali and I lived timelessly. I only knew it was April because Sketchleys had pasted a daffodil frieze round their window, to promote a spring cleaning discount.
Oh, yes . . . and there was the tree.
Out the back, way below, lay the bare earth belonging to the unknown being in the basement. Nothing grew there, though the students above threw stuff into it; once I remember opening the bedroom curtains and finding a chapatti on our window sill. Out on the front it was paved, with dustbins. But on the pavement the council had planted a tree. It was still young, just a sapling; I think it was a cherry. During our first weeks it was struggling into blossom.
I remember because it was the first time that I’d told him something about my past. I’d fended off the questions until then. But the night before, I’d had a violent dream about my mother . . . I’d been holding her and she turned out to be pieces of chalk in my arms, moaning chalk, her powdery legs squeaking together. She kept telling me she wasn’t, but I heard the squeaking. I’d woken up crying, with Ali’s arms around me. He’d held me for ages, he was sobbing too because he couldn’t reach what was happening inside my head. It was out of both our control. And then we got up and he gave me a bath, both of us frail, like elderly people.
The taste of my mother stayed with me, I couldn’t get rid of her, and the feeling that she was lost to me. At lunch-time we went out to buy some breakfast croissants. As we walked, arm-in-arm, I said,
‘My Mum brought us home cheese portions. Know something? I’ve been eating take-aways all my life.’
‘Why? Tell me why.’
‘She was busy, that’s why.’
‘Too busy to care for you?’
‘Oh, we managed.’
‘Tell me about them. All I know are their names, Coral and Frank.’ He went on quickly, ‘If you’ll tell me about them I can know you better . . . Then I can love you – well, more usefully. I might be able to stop you looking so sad.’
‘Do I look sad?’
‘Sad and empty. When you don’t think I’m noticing.’
‘Then you shouldn’t notice.’
‘Don’t be angry. Don’t close off like that, you always do. Just tell me – didn’t they love you?’
A silence. I held the warm croissant bag against my chest. ‘Of course they did. They were my parents, weren’t they?’
I shouldn’t have spoken. We crossed the main road.
‘You feel a bit better now?’ he asked, holding my arm. We were both wearing dark glasses because our eyes were sore. ‘Do your eyes still hurt?’
‘No.’
‘Mine do. That tree . . . that hurts.’
We stopped at the sapling. Its trunk was hooped with wire netting, to protect its growing. Trouble was, people had stuffed rubbish down.
Ali was so sensitive; he was always telling me how he noticed much more, now he was in love with me. He said he’d been half blind before.
‘Poor little tree.’ He touched its buds. The pink blossom was all bitten away and browning. ‘It’s trying to flower . . .’
I replied, ‘It’s got blight.’
I went home for a night, to see Teddy. They made me tea, like a visitor. They felt obliged to switch off the telly, as they had when I came back from my first trip to New York, and we sat around in hopeless silence. I wondered if either of them ever dreamed about me, in the upsetting way I’d been dreaming about them. My mother wasn’t made of loose bits of chalk . . . there she sat, thinner than ever; recently she’d dyed her hair a brighter blonde which didn’t suit her sallow, ageing skin, though none of us would ever dare tell her. Outside it seemed odd that the sheds were in their same old positions, when I’d known them widened and shifted in the soupy mist of my nightmares.
Dad came out and stood beside me.
‘Respectable, are they?’
‘Who?’
‘Girls you’re staying with. They take you off to night-clubs, places like that?’
I shook my head.
‘Harmful places, night-clubs,’ he said. ‘Dangerous.’
I gazed across at the cow parsley, a froth against the piles of timber. Beside me, I heard him scratching his stubble.
‘They’re not dangerous!’ I said loudly.
Most of the time I stayed in the flat with Ali. I wasn’t flying that month, because I was due some leave. Down in the hall the phone never rang for us.
A chill wind blew and we sat close together on the floor, propped against the storage heater.
‘Two orphans,’ he said. ‘Marooned.’
I’d leaf through Honey and he’d do sums, working out his dwindling finances. Scattered around us lay the foil containers from our take-away tandooris. I’d told him about packing the airline meals; I’d tell him safe things like that. Once he’d tried to work out, on a chart, whether he’d eaten one prepared by my own fair hand. Being Oriental, he believed in fate. He was sure we were destined to meet, at some point in our lives. We’d sit there for hours, speculating; I worked out airline routes but he called them predestined paths, as if the flights were planned by God. We read each other’s horoscopes in the newspaper.
Otherwise, looking back, I can’t remember how we passed those days. He took ages brushing my hair, he marvelled at it, brushing it until it crackled. I’d sit between his legs, facing the blocked fireplace, and hear his breathing as he plaited it, then unplaited it, and then held it bunched in his fist as he turned my head sideways to inspect my profile.
I was less relaxed about the other parts of my body being put to this scrutiny. I hated being looked at, with the light on. I pinched my stomach, holding the rubbery fold between my fingers. I wanted him to be shocked.
‘You can’t love this.’
‘I love it.’
‘I used to be even fatter. You wouldn’t have loved me then.’
‘I wish I’d known you. It pains me, the years of you I’ve missed.’
I liked it better with the sheets pulled over our heads. Everything’s so simple then. He was wonderfully ardent. He said he was inexperienced – there had only been a couple of girls before, a French one from the consulate and a Pakistani one from the Hyatt-Regency Hotel camera shop, and he’d felt as
hamed afterwards, for them and for himself. With me he was desperately loving – yes, desperate. Sometimes I felt a sort of despair in his passion. Once he’d said he was battering at my soul to get in . . . was there anyone at home?
In these moods I tried to joke him out of it, but he had no sense of humour; he couldn’t laugh at himself, that was one of his faults. He was also proud and touchy. And inflammable too . . . oh yes, he was that.
What I liked was his openness. He stroked my face in the street, he openly sobbed. Some people wouldn’t like that but I was flattered; nobody had ever revealed themselves to me before. We were together all the time. The only moments he left me were for prayer. I told you how religious he was; his whole family was devout. It was odd, though, after he’d been bending over me, to see him bending down to the carpet. He’d press his forehead down, again and again, amongst our scattered magazines. I gawped the first time, but I stopped when he saw my face. He prayed so naturally – that’s what made him suddenly a foreigner. At that moment he wasn’t mine at all.
Washing was another part of it. He didn’t wash like normal people; he had to gargle and spit, it was part of the ritual, and those bathroom noises came from someone I didn’t know. And then there was the diet. Pork’s forbidden, of course. You can’t even mention the word, it’s worse than swearing. And there I was, brought up on Spam. No alcohol either. He wouldn’t have forbidden me to drink, but I didn’t in his company. He even disliked the odour of pubs. Walking with him, I realized how foul pubs smell if you’re not inside them: that stale sourness as you pass the door, as if my Dad was breathing out.
It disturbed me, how deeply he believed. He told me to take no notice, but this hunched foreigner made me awkward. He prayed at dawn, and when he climbed back into bed his body was cool. When this chill man climbed in beside me I realized: here am I, presuming to live with someone. I don’t know why it struck me then; I suppose I felt so hopeless.
He asked me whether I believed in God and I remembered my Bible book, with its golden clouds. I didn’t tell him about it, though. That was another one of my secrets.
The only time he went out alone was on Fridays, to the mosque. This being Earl’s Court, there was one a few streets away. I’d passed it: an ordinary terraced house, it was, as seedy as the rest. It had a plastic sign above the door. Nothing to get spiritual about.
When he came back, one day, I asked him if he’d mentioned me. After all, he’d asked me to marry him and I’d refused.
‘Is it like confession?’ I asked with a stupid, prodding voice. ‘Do you have to say you’re living in sin? Are you ashamed?’
He paused, in the middle of hanging up his jacket, and gazed at me sombrely: ‘Ashamed? My feelings for you are one of the few things I’ll never be ashamed of.’
I was flying to Hawaii in early May. I had to get up at four in the morning. My suitcase lay on the carpet, gaping. I felt detached, putting on my uniform in the artificial light, with the world asleep. I felt like an arrangement of moving limbs. I often felt this.
He sat in his underpants on the bed, watching me. He was trying to stop smoking, but I heard the click of his lighter.
‘Will this flat seem unreal, once you’re away?’
I couldn’t answer because I was putting on my lipstick. I was sitting at the chest of drawers, with the mirror propped in front of my face.
‘Or will it seem unreal there, in Hawaii?’ he asked.
I blotted my mouth with a Kleenex.
‘Will you become a different person?’ His voice was as edgy as mine, when I asked him about his religion. We were both jealous. ‘Do I know you at all?’
‘Ali, I’ve done this before, you know.’
‘But who were you leaving behind?’
‘Nobody much.’
‘Do you mind now?’
‘Of course I mind. I’ll miss you.’
‘It’s watching you putting on your face . . .’
‘I have to look attractive or I’ll lose my job.’
I brushed my hair – he didn’t rise to help me – and slotted in a tortoise-shell band.
‘You look so beautiful. When they see you, they must feel the same as I do. They’d be mad if they didn’t.’
‘They don’t. Only you do.’
I snapped shut my compact. I wished he wouldn’t probe me . . . pick, pick, tweezers picking into my soul. He was always asking me questions.
I did mind leaving him. But somewhere, well hidden, I felt the old excitement rising. I was already gone, I was already in my Mini, speeding past the first lit windows. Into the airy, anonymous outside world. Nothing closed and trusting about the sky out there.
I went outside, into the chill. I was behind the wheel, my passport in my handbag. I’d be caught for speeding soon, if I didn’t watch out. I was always speeding away from something or other.
I did have a dalliance, under the tropic stars, with the MC at the hotel. Well, under the tropic stars of the Ballroom Annexe, when he’d finished his patter. He was a middle-aged alcoholic from Teddington, not too far from my home, and we ended the evening like long-lost friends. We didn’t do much; by that stage he was only capable of swaying and lengthy cuddles. I was swaying from sleeplessness anyway. But he wrote me a rambling note, including his address, on the back of my cheque book. The season was over and he was coming back to England soon; he kept on saying how homesick he was. For blooming Teddington? I asked, adjusting my bra. I’d had three vodkas and orange, after my month’s denial, and I was swearing like my Dad.
Ali and I spent the Monday in bed. I’d forgotten how beautiful he was, with his polished, hard skin; he seemed so delicate compared to the soft, freckled Americans I’d been meeting. We lay clasped together, motionless.
He didn’t go to sleep; he seldom did. As usual I had the feeling that something in him wasn’t satisfied. He said it was wonderful but he stayed propped up on one elbow, gazing at me. I wished he wouldn’t. I remembered his words about never having reached me, and hoped he’d forgotten them. Wasn’t this enough, this filled, sticky langour, the heaviness of our limbs as if we were filled with soup?
Later that afternoon I had to go to the dry cleaner’s. He stayed in because he was expecting a phone call about a job. I took an armful of clothes and my keys, that was all.
Walking to the traffic lights, I remembered the message on my cheque book. Ali wouldn’t find it, would he? He wasn’t devious enough to rummage.
Five minutes later I was standing at the counter. On either side hung clothes ready for collection, sheathed in plastic skins. The woman was heaping my dirty clothes – sundress, Am-Air uniform – on the counter, when I felt the door opening behind me. A draught made the plastic shiver, like silver.
‘Heather!’
His hand on my shoulder.
‘Wait a moment.’ I turned to the woman. ‘Is that it?’
Outside in the street he raised his hand to hit me, then he burst into tears. This was Earl’s Court, so the pedestrians just carried on walking.
‘You’ll hate me now!’ he moaned.
I put my arms around him and stroked his hair; outdoors it shone blue-black.
‘I shouldn’t have looked,’ he mumbled into my jumper. ‘When I read it, I could’ve killed you . . . You see, you never tell me anything . . . so I start imagining . . . Then, seeing that man’s name . . .’
‘He doesn’t mean anything.’
Ali moved me back. ‘But what does mean anything to you? What’s been happening to you?’
‘In Hawaii?’
‘Not in Hawaii.’ Jostled by the passers-by, he stayed gazing at me. ‘Has somebody hurt you? I never ask, because I don’t dare. You know, you never talk to me.’
In my brain, the muscle locked. I gazed at him, not hearing. It was as if he were mouthing at me through glass, from inside an aquarium. This was happening more often nowadays.
‘You seem so cold,’ he was saying, ‘so closed off from me. Was it a boyfriend, who hurt you?’
>
‘Yes, a boyfriend.’
‘Let me heal it . . . give me the time.’
He pressed his scarred face against mine. We kissed. A dog sniffed my skirt; it was dragged away, its claws scraping. Ali held me tight, for a long time. I stood still as a statue.
A woman stopped.
‘Disgusting,’ she muttered.
Chapter Fifteen
ODDLY ENOUGH, I can see it from Ali’s point of view now. It is odd, considering what he’s done.
But it must have been the most enormous shock, coming to live with me in London. His whole life was turned upside down. Apart from the emotional rift with his parents, the culture shock and all that, for the first time in his life he was poor. Until then he’d lived such a privileged life with his family, his servants, his money and his government contacts. People like Ali live that way, in the East. Sometimes I thought of my mother, taking down the biscuit tin and counting the notes, one by one, as if by some oversight she’d missed one the last time.
In Earl’s Court he was cut off from all that. He never complained – he never said he regretted it – but the flat was expensive and he wouldn’t let me pay for it. He was too proud for that; he said he wanted to care for me. I suppose, being Oriental, he felt more manly that way.
By the end of May he’d found himself a job. After jet-setting around the world, Bahrein one day, Singapore the next, it must have felt cramped to sit all day in a cupboard. Actually, three cupboards. That was Savewise Travel. In one sat the boss, Farouq. He was a Muslim from Uganda, with oily hair and a smooth telephone manner. In another cupboard sat Eileen, the secretary, her fingers smudged from thumbing through timetables. And now in the third sat Ali. He didn’t fly any more; he planned other people’s journeys. Savewise was down the Cromwell Road, and near his beloved mosque.
From then on, the tempo changed. Though the flat still had a temporary air, with my suitcases half-packed, the week settled into a shape, with five working days and then the weekend. I’d forgotten about weekends just as you forget, when you’re grown up, how the year used to be shaped around the school holidays. When he was out, I slept. I slept a lot of the time nowadays. You’d think I had everything to get up for, wouldn’t you? But I slept.