Ibrahim & Reenie (15 page)

Three weeks later Ibrahim tried to take his own life. It was an act borne neither of melancholy nor desperation, but of an absence of feeling. Amanda's leaving didn't upset him, not as it should have. Rather, it shone a light on how absurd, how utterly without purpose, life was. What was he, but a lump of damaged flesh and bone? What was life but a long and drawn-out death; a process of atrophy and decay? If others wanted to cling to it that was up to them, but to Ibrahim there seemed little point in delaying the inevitable.

He took an overdose of painkillers, knocked back with a hipflask-sized bottle of vodka; the first alcoholic drink he'd ever bought. He drank half the bottle, tipped a handful of pills onto his tongue, and washed these back with the second half. The vodka was horrible; there was something perfumed and noxious about it that made him gag. He drank it so quickly he didn't even begin to feel drunk until a few minutes after he'd drained the bottle. After another minute or so he felt nauseous and his mouth filled up with saliva. He ran from his living room to the bathroom, regurgitating a vile slurry of vodka and half-dissolved pills into the bowl, and he was sick another three times, until all that was left was bile. Then he passed out, waking the next morning with an aching stomach and a thudding headache.

The next day he visited his doctor and told her what had happened. In a calm and quiet voice he told her about the months of apathy, the strange disconnect with others, and she asked him questions, made notes, and when the session was over referred him to a specialist.

Later, there were tests and scans. He was given the address of a charity for those with brain injuries, and encouraged to attend meetings. He walked from one side of Cardiff to the other, a round trip of almost eight miles, and met others who'd been injured. With some, the injuries were clear; their scars unmistakeable. Others had been left with no outside clue to the damage done, but damaged speech, or their personalities dismantled and carelessly reassembled. At first, Ibrahim refused to believe he was like these people, these clearly damaged people, but then the results of many tests came back.

The scar was so small it would be invisible to the naked eye, they said. It was in the right prefrontal cortex of his brain, and just a fraction of a millimetre in length, but into that microscopic abyss his empathy, the very thing that won him so many red ballpoint ticks in school, had vanished.

He spent hours looking at computer simulations of the brain, studying the canyons of the frontal lobes. The experts never mentioned the soul, but Ibrahim was sure that if there was such a thing you'd find it there, buried deep inside that soft grey jelly. Only now he understood that the soul was neither immortal nor indestructible. It was just as mortal, just as fragile, as every other part of a man. You can lose your soul, the thing that makes you human, and yet carry on living.

The next time he saw Amanda was six months after the moment when he had no real answer for her, and even then it was only through chance. Their paths crossed on Ninian Road, as he walked home from the park. She stopped and talked to him, but the conversation stalled more than once, the silences drawn out and uncomfortable. He spent much of it looking at his shoes and the pavement, and Amanda smiled falsely; a crumpled, sad, defeated smile. She told him she was moving away after graduation, to London at first, then maybe Paris for her masters. He remembered dimly how they'd discussed visiting Paris some day – he wanted to see Notre Dame, she wanted to visit the Louvre – but they never did.

She looked so beautiful that day, but in looking at him what could she have seen but something empty, a sketch of what he'd been before?

They parted with a muted, solemn goodbye, and he said ‘See you later', though he knew even then he wouldn't.

There had been no one since. By the summer when he should have graduated, his university friends had fanned out into the world, back to their hometowns or on to other cities. Ibrahim came to view the world beyond his flat as one of danger and hostility. He no longer understood other people, and it was clear other people didn't understand him. He lost nothing by shutting out the world.

Walking through Gloucester that night was a stark confirmation of this belief. It was a student night, he guessed. The crowds queuing up to get into bars and pubs looked young; seventeen, eighteen, not much older. Girls in tiny skirts staggering zigzags down the high street, heels like castanets against the paving slabs. Gangs of men in a standardised uniform of checked shirts, jeans and brown shoes bellowing tuneless, incoherent anthems. The gutters filled with polystyrene trays and plastic forks. On a Thursday night in Gloucester they were singing songs made unrecognisable by karaoke microphones and dancing in garish lightning storms of dry ice and disco lights.

This was what he and his friends had hated most of all. The oblivion. No self-control, no self-respect. Just noise. Acting like beasts and dressing like whores. Pissing and puking in the streets. Poisoning themselves and dirtying themselves with such intent. It was hard to believe they weren't doing it on purpose, a strategic insult to God, who had given them their bodies and their lives, the ultimate gift, only to be repaid in drink, piss and puke. It made sense to them, to Ibrahim and his friends, that these people could rain bombs on foreign cities without compunction.

There were no innocent civilians in a culture like this.

Moving from London had shifted his view. Meeting new friends from outside the community, realising they weren't the mindless, complicit
kuffar
of his East London friends' tirades. They drank, smoked weed and partied like any other teenagers. They were, in many ways, everything he'd been taught to hate. But they were his friends. And with Amanda, she was so different from the girls he'd known before – the veiled, unavailable sisters who helped them campaign; too fervent, too involved to be thought of in
that
way. It didn't take long for him to realise he loved these new friends, loved Amanda, precisely because they weren't like the friends he'd had before.

Even so, after however many years had passed, a high street bustling with drunks still left him feeling an outsider, and an indignant one at that. He was glad to reach the far end of the high street, to leave the music and the noise of pubs and clubs behind him.

With the evening getting darker, he navigated his way across the city, walking around the edges of a vast industrial estate, until he came to the long path running parallel to a dual carriageway. The path cut in two, studded by orange patches of light. Overhanging trees. A white railing blistered with rust.

He heard the five men before he saw them; heard their voices, loud and raucous, laughing and cheering. The sound of an empty can thrown to the ground. He saw their silhouettes coming out of the orange light, five dark shapes; wraiths of smoke trailing behind two of them. Orange cigarette tips floating in the shadows, growing brighter when they inhaled. Another puff of smoke. He heard their footsteps. Hard shoes, formal shoes, the kind of shoes that would get them past surly nightclub doormen. But they were still silhouettes, and they remained silhouettes until they were almost upon him, and he saw their faces, and their eyes were all fixed on him.

He veered to the right, to step out of their way, but the man on the far side of the group moved at the same time and when passing clipped Ibrahim's shoulder with some force. There was no mistaking the intention behind it.

‘Oy. Look where you're fucking going.'

But he had looked where he was going, made a conscious effort to look where he was going. He had stepped out of the way, and still found himself in their path.

He looked back at them. ‘Sorry.'

The five men stopped walking.

‘What you fucking say to me?'

‘I'm sorry,' said Ibrahim, this time a little louder.

‘You fucking staring at me?'

There was no answer to that. He was
looking
at him, yes, but only because he was being spoken to. What answer was he meant to give?

‘He is, Si,' said one of the others. ‘Look at the way he's looking at you.'

Ibrahim shook his head and carried on walking.

Drunks. Just drunks. Mouthing off. Confident with their mates around them. Walk away. They'll get bored with this.

‘Oy. Don't you fucking turn your back on me.'

Oy. That word again. He hated that word, more a grunt than a word, but he carried on walking. If he carried on walking maybe they'd just shout something – an insult, a vague threat – and go on their way, leave him alone.

‘Are you fucking deaf? I said don't turn your fucking back on me, you fucking Paki.'

He bit his lip. They wanted him to turn around, wanted him to react, but he wouldn't. He carried on walking.

‘Where you from, anyway?'

The voice was louder, now, and closer. He heard footsteps again, not just one set but the sound of all five men coming towards him. If he hadn't walked twenty miles that day, if his right leg wasn't throbbing with pain, he would have run. Forget shame. He would run away from them and not stop running until they gave up.

‘I
said…
Where. Are. You. From.'

‘London.'

‘London, eh?' said the man, and Ibrahim could hear the sneer in his voice. ‘You don't
look
like you're from London. London's in England, mate. You English?'

There was no right answer to this, but they didn't want an answer, or if they did, they didn't care what it was.

‘Look,' he said. ‘I'm just trying to get to my hotel, so leave it out.'

‘What did you say?'

He stopped walking. He was tired. His heart beat at a gallop so intense he could feel it in his throat, and his mouth was dry. ‘I'm not looking for trouble,' he said.

‘Look at the way he's looking at you, Si.'

The first man, the one who'd clipped Ibrahim's shoulder, stepped forward.

‘Why don't you just fuck off home to Paki-Land,' he said. ‘This isn't your fucking country.'

The blow came from nowhere, and a dark kaleidoscope erased his memory of it. It took a second or two for him to realise he'd been punched, and when he felt something trickling down the left side of his face, Ibrahim's first thought was that maybe the man's hand was wet, and there was a split second's dazed revulsion when he thought maybe that hand had been drenched in a drunk man's piss, but when he put his hand to his face his fingers came away red.

The second punch smashed into his nose with a crunch that seemed to echo in his head, like the splintering of a tree being felled, and his limbs were unstrung. He fell to the ground, landing awkwardly on his backpack, and something – the sharp toe of a shoe – hit him in the ribs and in the side of his head. The sound of the other four cheering on their friend grew faint, drowned out by a high-pitched whine and the thunder of his own pulse. Each new blow sounded as if it were being delivered under water.

Ibrahim curled up into a ball, his arms around his head, knees tucked in as close to his chest as he could get them, and he had a single thought as dark and final as any he'd ever had.

Maybe this won't end.

And now the pain was coming through, as the fog of adrenalin began to clear. He felt his body being pummelled from all sides – there was more than one man kicking him now – as if the whole world had closed in and was mauling him.

Maybe this won't end.

The air kicked out of his lungs. The taste of copper on his tongue. Something gritty (bits of broken teeth?) floating around in his spit.

Maybe this won't end.

A final, sharp blow to his back, then a moment of quiet. The ringing in his ears faded, and he heard the traffic on the dual carriageway, and their footsteps getting quieter. When he dared to open his eyes again he saw the five men walking away, and he heard them laughing.

He waited until they were gone before sitting up, and he spat a mouthful of blood onto the path. His body tingled in the aftermath of violence, different morse codes of pain ringing out from his torso and limbs. It took an effort to stand, an even greater one for him to walk. He placed his hand over the ruptured flesh of his eyebrow, and felt fresh blood leaking out between his fingers. The bleeding wouldn't stop.

The path ended where it met with a busy road, and further along he saw the large illuminated sign of the hotel. If he could just get that far. But what then? If he staggered, bleeding, into the hotel, then what? They might call for the police, or an ambulance, and he couldn't go to hospital, or rather he
wouldn't
go to hospital. If he could just stop the bleeding, he'd be fine. Rest a little, carry on. No need for hospital. No need for the nurses' practised sympathy and the doctors' arch concern. And the police. What would he say to the police? They were five
gore
, dressed like every other
gora
he saw tonight. And what was he even doing here? A long way from either city he'd call home, and if he told them he was walking to London they would think him mad.

His left eye was closing up, the flesh around it swelling and pushing his eyelids shut. When he touched his face the skin felt distended and spongy, obliquely numb, as if it weren't his own. He felt a rising nausea and a dizziness, the orange lights at the roadside dancing like sparklers around a bonfire. The weight of his backpack drew him to the ground, pulling him back, and he landed heavily, rolling onto his side. His mouth filled up with more blood and spit, and the congealed blood inside his nose turned every breath into a rattle. Though it was late summer and the day had been warm, he felt a crystal cold creep through his limbs, and he passed out.