Souls in the Twilight Read online

  You have to give it to Fareed. He can hold his own in any conversation. I’ve heard him take the floor on every subject that people talk about: pop-stars, football, all the soaps on telly, politics, even serious things like maths and bridge-building. Now he’s telling Granddad Anwar about his days in Birmingham, studying engineering at the University, doing night school in Business Studies, helping out in his uncle’s kebab house, saving every penny. No Wasted Time Club for Fareed: and he even managed to relax, go dancing, get himself a girlfriend, play football on Saturdays.

  Anwar listens, stroking his goatee beard and sceptically cocking his head. Education, he says, means books, books, and more books. In Baghdad, they read the classics in Farsi, in Arabic, in English. They were aiming to be citizens of the world. Fareed laughs at that. Education, he retorts, means diagrams, flow charts, figures, facts. And the proof of it is there in Fareed, with three businesses to his name, a smart house in Kensington, and not yet thirty-five. Not that he mentions his successes. That’s not Fareed’s style. No, it’s all said in a spirit of kindness, and if Anwar regrets his poverty—and all of a sudden I saw that it is poverty surrounding us, that kitsch is merely wealth imagined, that the ghada’ is the best the family can do and probably a whole week’s budget—it is not Fareed who reminds him of it but he himself, with those memories of a place to which he will never return and from which he has escaped with only useless knowledge. A shadow passes across Anwar’s features, and he looks sadly at his son. It’s clear that Fadil is an invalid. Once or twice he has got up from the table and gone out with slow shuffling steps, his hands held slightly to each side as though supporting himself on an imaginary Zimmer frame. I picture him sitting about all day in a state of depression, listening to that awful music from back home, or watching the telly in the heat of the day. Zeynab’s smiles and embraces are not a sign of happiness at all, but a policy, a way of coping with the fact that they are not coping.

  I am overcome with pity. Here and now I resolve to help these people. I will work for Fareed in textiles or road-building. Maybe the recording business since he has a line there too. And when things are right, I could buy a big house in a smart suburb, Richmond—I have always liked Richmond—or maybe Greenwich. Halima’s family could come to live with us there. Abba too would come, of course. Everything within our walls will be bathed in kindness as by the light of the sun. Fantastic! I lose track of the conversation. I want to jump up and pace outside, to wait there for Halima who will come to fetch me. I am rehearsing what I shall say to her. How marvellous it will sound, spoken in that concrete yard, with all the signs of poverty around us, and our two young faces feeding on each other’s hope!

  Suddenly Fareed is standing behind my chair, his hand on my shoulder. I have no idea how he got there, or how it is that Qasim, too, is standing next to him. Anwar and Fadil are muttering somewhere out of sight, and there’s no sign of the women. The meal is over, and a finjan of un-drunk coffee stands on the table.

  “O.K.,” I say, “let’s go.”

  There are only the three of us in the living room. I can’t attend to their words, and besides, I know exactly what’s expected. Only the size of the Gift surprises me—you could carry it in a pocket. Not like the clumsy boxes that Ginger Wilcox used to make at school. This is a real professional job; but then, what would you expect with Fareed in charge? He keeps frowning at me, because my mind is wandering.

  “Fine,” I say at last. “I know all this. Just trust me.”

  Fareed responds with a long cool look, and then hands me the bag. I push in the clothes I am carrying, and replace it on the floor.

  “Excuse me a moment.”

  I rush from the room. Fareed and Qasim stare after me, but make no attempt to follow. Yes, she is standing there in the hallway. She beckons to the back door. We are in the garden, in the shadow of the house; a few bushes push up through the gravel. An old tin shed divides the garden from the yard next door. Not to touch her, not to look at her wrongly, not to let anything be spoiled. She is smiling though, and I can’t help stealing a glance at her eyes.

  “That’s a cool T-shirt,” she says. She speaks English, carving a little space outside the family.

  “You like it?”

  “Oasis: cool.”

  “You listen much?”

  “When I can: my friend Aysha has everything.”

  “Halima...”

  She turns, looks at me, and takes a step away.

  “I really wanted to talk to you,” she says.

  “Yes,” is all I can manage.

  “Just to say I think you’re great!”

  She says it in a whisper, but the whole world seems to shake from the force of it. Then she runs into the house, not waiting for my reply. I go after her. There she is in the hallway, Zeynab’s arms around her like a mandil, both of them smiling. Qasim puts the hold-all in my hand and Fareed comes with me to the door. He points the way to the station: I am on my own now.

  “Don’t worry,” he says. “God is with you.”

  The cat’s still there on the gatepost. We box together for a bit, and I sing ‘Street Fighting Man’. The sun is warm on my neck and arms, and the cat and I are alone. I think of going back to the house, asking for Halima, making everything plain between us. But isn’t it plain already? A little breeze comes playing towards me, shaking blossom from the cherry trees, ruffling the fur on the back of the cat. Suddenly it jumps from the post, arches itself angrily and dashes away.

  I get lost, straying into a street of factories and repair shops. There’s a little patch of grass with a bench on which a frail-looking man is sitting. He has a thermos flask in a canvas bag, a folded copy of The Mirror, and a walking stick that he has propped against the arm of the bench. A few pigeons have assembled in front of him, waiting for scraps of his lunch. He wears a tattered blue pullover above his trousers, and his head is almost bald. I want to go up to him, put my arm around him, tell him of my happiness, make the world smile for him as it smiles for me. Then he turns quite suddenly, and looks at me with a suspicious scowl. I ask him the way to the station. He answers with a shrug, like he is ridding himself of an unpleasant thought.

  Further down the street I catch up with a young mother pushing a pram. She points me back the way I have come, and wishes me luck. I tickle the baby’s soft cheek and go away laughing. How pleasant the sun is, and the wild flowers along the embankment! Soon I am climbing the steps to the platform, the bag in one hand, gripping the wooden rail with the other. There’s a warm breeze blowing off the shingles, and a slight smell of engine oil. It reminds me of Abba’s tools, and I am filled with love for him. That house in Richmond—or Greenwich—will repay him for everything. I amuse myself on the platform, furnishing the house in my imagination, designing a sitting room for Halima, a workshop for Abba, and a quiet study somewhere for old Anwar to lose himself in books.

  Then I remember. What’s the time? Four o’clock, late by half an hour. I look around me: nobody stands on the inbound platform apart from me and an old woman with a wheelie bag. Should I approach her? Probably not. Fareed said the trains run every twenty minutes; Sally won’t leave the flat until half past six. All the same, I begin to get nervous. What if I don’t make it? I stand to lose Halima, marriage, the house in Richmond, the chance I long for and which has never come my way before, to put everything right with Abba and with Ami too, and to show them my love. I stamp my feet impatiently. Maybe there has been an accident on the line, a strike, a power-failure. Then the rail begins to vibrate from the approaching train: the whole world is vibrating with it, and I can hardly control my trembling as I step aboard.

  I find an empty place, pick up the paper that someone has left on the seat opposite and bury my head in it. It is an article about rock-climbing; it describes the writer clinging to the cliff face as the colleague above him falls into space, to swing above the void on the writer’s harness. It is really gripping, and for a moment I am so lost in the story that I don’t notice
the ticket inspector looking down through bulbous lenses at the top of my head.

  I search for a ticket. Then I remember it was Fareed who paid for us, and who is still holding the returns. What a stupid oversight! I have no money, only my pass for the tube. I try to explain everything, how I got on at a station whose name I don’t remember, after visiting friends whose address I have never known, now travelling home without money to a place I would rather not disclose. I keep the discussion going for a while, but the sweat is gathering on my brow. Disaster is travelling towards us down the tube of time. We stop at a station, and I contemplate a dash for the platform. And maybe that would be best—simply to run as I have always run to Abba’s workshop, to abandon everything and to cry once again in his arms. Except that Abba is working in Leeds, and I am on my own.

  Then, rummaging in my back pocket, I come across a ten-pound note pressed against the lining. Sally gave me the money to buy supper since she’ll be coming back late. For some reason, I have forgotten all about it. After I have paid the fare, only three pounds fifty remains—not enough for supper, but enough for a couple of drinks. The conductor nods contemptuously as he hands me the ticket, and I want to say “woe to the unbelievers, for the day that they are promised.”

  I cheer up though, because Halima is waiting for me and will surely send me a sign. By the time I am out of the tube and turning the corner towards Sally’s flat, I am singing “Be Here Now” and smiling at the sun as it sets behind the chimneys on St Michael’s Street.

  Sally is working on the agenda for her meeting. I put down the bag in the corridor and say hello. She doesn’t reply, but when I turn on the TV she looks up and says “I thought you were out for the day.”

  “I was. Only I’m back.”

  Sometimes Sally can make you feel really unwanted.

  “Where did you go?”

  “Friends,” I say. There’s this amazing thing on the news—a train crash in Turkey, with carriages hanging over a precipice and one of them upside down in the river below. The carriages have old-fashioned wooden doors with brass handles, and one of them is open with a body hanging out. I am trying to catch what the announcer is saying, but Sally says to switch the thing off and talk to her like she existed at least. This isn’t the kind of trouble I want, so I do as I’m told.

  Sally has beautiful hair: long, fair, with golden lights and a straw-coloured fringe across her brow. Without it, her face would look too broad and flat, on account of a snub nose and eyes that drift off to either side of it. But the hair makes her look great: the brainy librarian when dressed, Lady Godiva with her clothes off. She likes you to stroke her hair, which is how we got together, when I tried those evening classes in philosophy and she was the girl in front. Not that we have ever been together, except for the sex and her feeding me when Abba is working up in Leeds. And anyway, she has this boyfriend who got her involved in the Anglo-Jewish thing, which was what made me remember my promise to Ami.

  So I switch off the telly—right in the middle of a great shot of the upside-down carriage in the torrent—and go across to stroke her hair. She looks up at me with half a smile, and starts gathering her papers. When she has gone, I can sit down here and write the letter to Halima—nothing florid or romantic or perfumed, but plain speech from the heart. Not marriage-broker Arabic, but ordinary English between boy and girl. Then I remember I hadn’t got her address. I’ll have to ask Fareed for it, and maybe Fareed wouldn’t want to be in touch just yet, and wouldn’t give the address in any case. And I find myself staring into the tunnel down which disaster is approaching, seeing shapeless things that move and grow and rearrange themselves in the dark.

  “Where did you get that moronic T-shirt?” Sally asks.

  I’m glad she doesn’t like it.

  “You shouldn’t have got involved in this thing,” I say.

  She sighs loudly.

  “I mean, you don’t have to be there tonight. We could go out for a pizza.”

  “Look Yusuf, I’m a grown woman, who makes choices and who tries to live by them.”

  “But why choose to be a Jew?”

  Because that is how it seems to me.

  “Yusuf, I sometimes think you’re a racist.”

  She puts the papers in her brief-case and goes angrily to the bathroom. It’s only a moment’s work, to take the Gift from the hold-all, twist down the top, and hide it in her papers. She’s still looking angry when she comes back. Her boyfriend is an American Jew called Milton—Milt for short. He’s married, with kids, and spends his life commuting back and forth between London and Chicago. I know this because she told me one day, after a bottle of wine, when she was missing him. Sally may be a grown woman, but she can make really stupid choices. But I suppose it’s not my business, and besides she’s hurrying away now, snatching up the briefcase and saying she has left it all so late she would have to get a taxi. At the door she turns and looks at me. Something cold runs through me like a knife.

  “Don’t go,” I say.

  Then she smiles, blows me a kiss, and says “you fool.” In a second she is down the stairs and in the street, running away from me.

  The sun has almost set, and long shadows lie across the pavement. I wander around Sally’s neighbourhood. I have a beer in the Three Feathers, and then a whisky in the Crown and Anchor. I think of Halima, and I am sad that Abba is away in Leeds, staying in that cheap hotel where he can never be reached. I ring Fareed from a call box but his mobile is switched off. Then I decide to go to the Union Meeting Rooms.

  The place is cordoned off, police barring the entrance. I stand across the road in a kind of dream. The evening is getting chilly, and I still have nothing on save the jeans and the T-shirt. I remember Jenny and look in my pockets for her phone number. It’s no longer there. For some reason this makes me feel really lonely.

  I go back to Sally’s flat. I am hungry now, but I can’t find anything in the fridge save a few tomatoes and a piece of stale cheese. The ten o’clock news is all about a taxi that has exploded in Central London. The occupants—the driver and an unidentified female—were killed. A few bystanders injured by flying debris, one of them seriously.

  I watch for a while, and then switch channels, hoping for the rail crash in Turkey. But now I remember: I am to meet up with Fareed at ten thirty in Trafalgar Square. I arrive there breathless at ten thirty-five, still in my Oasis T-shirt. Now it’s really cold, and I walk up and down between the waterless pools shivering and clutching my arms across my chest. After five minutes I discover Fareed walking at my side. How long he has been there I don’t know. He is dressed very smartly, in a dark suit and tie, and his face is gathered in a frown.

  “I fucked it up, didn’t I?”

  “Look Yusuf,” he says, “you were supposed to wait until she was at the door. I told you it was primed for twenty minutes.”

  I nod, though I have no such recollection.

  “They’re all going to think badly of me, aren’t they?”

  “When we get to the corner,” he says, ignoring me, “I shall give you an envelope. Use the money to get away, O.K.? And don’t try to be in touch.”

  “But Fareed...”

  My heart sinks in dismay. He is my hero, my commander. Without him I’m lost.

  “I shall be abroad, in any case,” he went on. “We are leaving tomorrow.”

  “We?”

  “I mean, me and Halima.”

  I continue to walk briskly, although my heart is dead.

  “And her family?” I manage at last.

  He shrugs.

  “They’ll cope. After their fashion.”

  We’re at the corner. He slips me the envelope and walks on without a word.

  Veronica

  THEY WERE SITTING BESIDE THE POOL, the steam rising above their knees, and in each of their faces was a light of hilarity and adventure. The small man had taken some bananas from the basket on his knee and, peeling them one by one, he handed the glistening sticks to his companions, laughin
g from his large brown eyes as they reached out to grasp them. One of the girls said “yuk!” in a childish voice, and the man leaned across to whisper in her ear. She screamed and fell backwards into the pool, her brown legs scissoring as she went. The man gave a bark of satisfaction, and closed his mouth with a banana.

  Veronica watched as the fruit disappeared between his large red lips and resolved itself into mounds of cheek-flesh. The man was her new uncle, and she didn’t like him. She didn’t like him at all, and had made up her mind to tell mother at the first opportunity, even though mother would be cross. Uncle Gerald would have gone sooner if Veronica had said how much she hated him. And that’s what she intended to do with Simon. There was no point in waiting when you were sure. Just look at the way he was chewing on that banana, how amusing he thought he was, and all that swank when he couldn’t be more than five foot six on the outside.

  It was due to Simon that the pool was so warm. He had turned up the thermostat, giggling like a naughty boy, as Aunt Jerry and the twins scampered at his heels thinking what a laugh he was. Now the water was steaming and drops of condensation were forming on the steel girders under the roof. One of them fell on to Veronica’s neck. It was cold and unpleasant and she pulled her T-shirt across to absorb it. Both the twins were in the water now, Anna splashing and blowing spray from her puffed-up face, Julie standing in the shallow end, looking at her mother and Simon. Simon’s friend was laughing too. He was eighteen and good-looking, with long black eyelashes and almond eyes like the Italian waiter in the Swan Hotel. His name was Tony, and he was still at school. Veronica planned to leave school in three years time when she was sixteen. She would go a long way from Ingleton Court, maybe even as far as Burston, to work in the hairdresser’s there and stay in a bed and breakfast. Then, when she had enough money, she would go to Paris, and be the mistress of a famous man. Quite which famous man was not yet decided. She supposed there would have to be negotiations first.