Ibrahim & Reenie (23 page)

Back in the car Ibrahim and Rhys did exactly as they'd done when they first left the party; they both tried their seatbelts and found the buckle ends missing, tucked beneath the seats.

‘What's the point of having seatbelts,' said Rhys, ‘if there's nowhere to put them?'

For some reason that line, or perhaps the way it was said – in Rhys's throaty, sing-song accent – made Ibrahim, Caitlin and Aleem erupt into laughter once more, and they were still laughing as they drove out of the car park and back onto Western Avenue.

‘Hey,' said Rhys, leaning between the front seats. ‘Fuck the party. Let's go to Barry Island.'

‘What?' said Aleem.

‘We've got beer,' said Rhys. ‘We've got weed. I've got a fuckload of pills. Why don't we go to the beach instead?'

Aleem smiled, and Caitlin looked at him, smiling but with her eyes communicating something else; hesitation or concern that he might go along with Rhys's idea. Ibrahim was thinking about Amanda, and how she was still at the party, and how maybe she was still talking to Tyrone or Tyrese or whatever his name was.

Then there was light.

That was the last thing he remembered. Later he learned how another driver on the road that night, a seventeen year old named Jason Bevan, had begun drinking earlier that afternoon. The car was Jason's – a Citroen Saxo he'd customised himself – and after draining several cans of lager and the best part of a bottle of vodka, Jason and two friends took to the roads. Nobody would ever know how or why he came to be on that side of the avenue – whether it was somebody's idea of a joke or dare, or a drunken lapse in judgement – but when he collided with Aleem Saïd's car Jason Bevan was driving at sixty miles an hour.

It was thought Aleem hadn't expected an oncoming car on his side of the road; the four lanes of the avenue were separated by a metal barrier. Others posited that he and Jason were engaged in a foolhardy, disastrous game of ‘chicken'. Certainly, Aleem's family – prosperous, and therefore deemed newsworthy – weren't spared the publishing of their dead son's toxicity report, the mere mention of cannabis hinting at something reckless on his part.

When eventually the police interviewed Ibrahim he could only tell them he remembered nothing, and it was the truth. The details of the crash he learned second hand, as if it was something he hadn't experienced personally.

Rhys was flung through the windshield, and died of head injuries.

Aleem and Caitlin were crushed to death in the front of the car, which buckled like a tin can.

In the Saxo, Jason Bevan and his two friends were killed instantly, and again bodies were flung through the windshield, so that in Ibrahim's mind the moment of collision became a violent exchange, the two cars merging and swapping passengers in one bloody instant. Robbed of any memory of it, he couldn't help but imagine the crash played out in balletic slow motion; shattered glass filling the air around their tumbling, weightless bodies in a blizzard of gemstones. In these mental re-enactments the event became almost beautiful, but the players remained faceless. He couldn't bear to put the faces of his friends on those flailing bodies, and so their features were lost in a shadowy blur. And as for him, he wasn't there at all.

Acknowledging his presence in the car as it crashed meant facing up to the damage done, to the impossible way in which his body was tested and broken within the mangled wreck. The crash had done its best to change the shape of his body, twisting his leg into a dozen fractures, staving in one side of his face, shattering so many other bones. In the moment of the crash he stopped being the functioning, corporeal form that carried his thoughts around each day, and became something malleable, to be moulded cruelly by the car's imploding frame. More than this, the crash created an abyss, splitting his life in two, into everything before and after it. Though he'd forgotten the event itself, he would carry on feeling the insane forces of the crash on an almost physical level, as if he was forever lurching forward, as if his whole world was now imploding and bending him out of shape.

He felt this more than ever when sitting in a car, a bus, or a train, but now Natalie was driving, and there was music, a different piece, and the soft fuzzy glow of the Valium, and his fingers still digging into the dashboard's spongy plastic, and country lanes, and an unblemished blue sky, and he thought about Aleem's humouring smile, and Caitlin's look of apprehension, and Rhys's gormless, stoned grin, and the sudden white light that ended it all.

‘You okay?' asked Natalie.

Ibrahim closed his eyes and nodded.

‘You're looking a little pale. Do you want me to pull over?'

‘No. No. I'm fine.'

Because he had to get through this. He was back at the abyss, standing on the edges of the great black gulf, and if he could hold his breath and bear it he might reach the other side through force of will alone. And he thought about Aleem's smile, a smile that said ‘Yeah, sure,' but didn't mean it, and Caitlin's look of apprehension because driving to Barry Island was
exactly
the kind of thing Aleem might do on a whim, and Rhys's gormless grin because he knew this too, and the white light on the other side of the windshield that meant nothing at the time because there really shouldn't be anything oncoming that side of the avenue, and he tried to remember what happened next but there was nothing.

Ibrahim screwed his eyes shut and shook his head and dug his fingertips a little deeper into the dashboard, and when he opened his eyes again he saw the same country lane and the same boundless blue sky, only now he was calm and the world was coming into focus. He took his hands away from the dashboard, his fingertips leaving behind two dimpled arches, and he watched these indentations vanish slowly until there was no trace of them at all.

19

Mrs Ostroff could make dishes from next to nothing, whole meals cobbled together from the contents of a larder kept half empty by the ration book. Reenie's foster mother was a miracle worker that way and Mr Ostroff would joke that his wife could stretch a penny into copper wire.

Nothing went to waste. Chicken soup with lokshen or kneidlach; kreplach and varnitshkes. A piping-hot English roast dinner. Sumptuous toffee puddings, the toffee made by boiling a can of condensed milk on the stove. Moist and delicate Victoria sponges. The best, most delicious, most mouth-watering home-made chips Reenie had ever eaten, showered and drenched with salt and vinegar. Mrs Ostroff made them all with so very little.

Reenie would have given anything for a meal like that now. Her mouth watered and her stomach issued burbles of complaint. If she had thought she could sustain herself on birdseed, she would have helped herself to Solomon's rations without a shred of guilt.

Looking at him, through the gilt bars of his cage, she wondered how the world must look through his eyes. When she fed him she liked to think he recognised her, but there was no way to prove it. She was the only person Solomon ever saw. If he seemed to perk up at feeding time, flapping from the floor of his cage to his perch, or scuttling along the bars, clinging on with his tiny grey feet and his beak, it might have nothing to do with her. Any other person might get the same response.

Solomon wasn't her first cockatiel, nor was he the first to be called Solomon. In all, she had owned three such birds, all with that name. At the house in Penylan the different Solomons were often let out of their cages – in fact, the same cage, now practically an antique – and allowed to fly around the sitting room or Jonathan's study. If Reenie regretted one thing about bringing the present Solomon on this journey, it was that he had to stay in that cage, viewing with envy or longing the trees and fields through its bars.

The first Solomon was a wedding gift from husband to wife, back in the days when people kept things simple; none of this getting married abroad and weddings costing tens of thousands. The newlywed Mr and Mrs Glickman were affluent enough, but their wedding was modest. Jonathan had little in the way of close family – no brothers and sisters, his parents had died young – and Reenie hadn't seen her father in over ten years. What's more, there was still a faint whiff of scandal around them. Cardiff's Jewish community was sizeable, but closely knit, and some disapproved of Dr Glickman settling down with a woman they still thought of as a waif, and one of rumoured ill repute at that.

The way in which they met hadn't helped. Though never Jonathan's patient, Reenie was being treated at Cardiff's Royal Infirmary, the hospital where he worked. A cold and unforgiving winter and the damp conditions of a Tiger Bay boarding house had given her an agonising bout of pneumonia – not her first, but certainly her most severe – and even then it took three days for her landlady to call a doctor.

Through the haze of her fever Reenie saw the doctor's expression as he entered her small, dank bedroom, and realised for the first time the utter squalor of it. She'd grown accustomed to it in the ten years since East London, these rancid bedsits, and had slept in places far worse, but the doctor took one look at the room – the mildew-shadowed corners and woodworm-riddled skirting boards – with such disgust that she now saw the room through his eyes and to her fever was added shame and regret.

She spent her first day in hospital in a daze. Doctors and nurses came and went, but she was only vaguely aware of them. She was in a room with seven other women, and across the corridor from them was a children's ward. It was a week before Christmas, the corridors decorated with garish tinsel and cardboard stars patchy with glitter, and on the third day the children in the neighbouring ward were more boisterous than usual. They were expecting a visit from Father Christmas and, despite their illnesses and ailments, shrieked and hollered for much of the morning.

In the early afternoon a doctor and nurse came into Reenie's ward, closing the door behind them. The doctor was young, no older than thirty, but stout, almost burly; pale-skinned with dark hair in tight curls and his eyes a deep blue, almost indigo. With the door closed he turned to the nurse and smiled, and there was something about the smile, something conspiratorial and mischievous, that Reenie found appealing. She made a show of pretending to read a newspaper, all the while listening to their conversation.

‘So, how can I help you?'

‘Well,' said the nurse, bashfully. ‘You know how we were expecting a certain visitor this afternoon…'

The doctor laughed. ‘It's okay, Nurse Gait. I think we can say his name in here. The ladies are a little old to still believe in Father Christmas, don't you think?'

‘Right. Yes. Well, the thing is… our Father Christmas is stuck.'

The doctor doubled over, letting out a long, helpless wheeze, and Reenie thought for a moment he was having some sort of seizure. Only when he was upright again, face red, his whole body shaking, did it become clear he was laughing.

‘Don't tell me,' he roared. ‘Up the chimney?'

The nurse shook her head, smirking. ‘Very funny, doctor,' she said. ‘But no. He's in Merthyr. His car's broken down. He just rang us from the garage.'

Thumbing the tears from his eyes, the doctor stopped laughing and frowned. ‘Right. And?'

‘Well. Sorry. This is embarrassing. We were just wondering… we were… What we were wondering. We were trying to think of a replacement. You see, there's a Father Christmas costume in one of the stock cupboards up on B12…'

‘Why is there a Father Christmas costume in the stock cupboard on B12?'

‘It's from last year, I think. It has the beard and everything. So, we were wondering…'

‘If I'd try it on for size?'

An awkward pause. The nurse closed her eyes and nodded, expecting the worst.

‘Well,' said Dr Glickman. ‘You do realise that as a Jew I don't celebrate Christmas, and that to dress as Father Christmas would, therefore, be highly offensive to me, on a very deep and personal level…'

‘Oh, I'm sorry,' said the nurse. ‘I am so, so sorry. I didn't mean… we just…'

Dr Glickman laughed. ‘I'm joking! I'm joking! If it fits,' he patted his belly, ‘I'd be more than happy to play Father Christmas. A Jewish Father Christmas. First time for everything, I suppose.'

It was then he saw Reenie watching them, and he smiled at her, a smile that made her blush, and Reenie looked down at the open newspaper in her lap. Later, many months later, Jonathan told her he'd asked the nurse for Reenie's name the moment they left the ward.

‘I knew you needed something,' he said. ‘A helping hand. A chance. Don't ask me how. I just knew.'

Within weeks of the New Year he had found her a job, working in the offices of the solicitors, Leo Abse & Cohen. Nothing fancy – tea and filing, mostly – but it was a job and money at the end of each week, and soon enough she was sharing a flat with two other women on Cathedral Road. Much posher than her old digs down on Loudoun Square. A million miles away from all that. And it was there Jonathan first paid her a visit, a proper visit, bringing with him a bunch of flowers and the offer of dinner.

So that was it. Oh, he was a crafty one; she had to give him that. Some men would have tried their luck the minute she was back on her feet. Taken her to the pictures and tried getting frisky. But this, this took determination and patience. Finding her a job. Finding her a flat. Making himself seem all charitable and respectable. But no different to those crafty buggers who try groping you in the back row before the Pathé newsreel is over.