Ibrahim & Reenie (31 page)

‘What's this?'

Between his forefinger and thumb, Ibrahim held a creased and worn piece of paper; a single page taped to the dashboard.

‘That?' said Vincent. ‘It's a poem I learned in school.'

‘But it looks like it's in English.'

‘I know. I learned it in English.'

‘What's it about?'

‘Read it if you like. It's not the whole poem, only a few lines. Read it.'

‘I can't. It's too dark, and my eyesight's rubbish.'

‘That's okay,' said Vincent. ‘I can remember it.'

‘What, the whole poem?'

‘Yes. I remembered all of it. Learned it all.'

‘Don't believe you.'

‘No? The part on that piece of paper says,
“For always roaming with a hungry heart, much have I seen and known; cities of men and manners, climates, councils, governments, myself not least, but honoured of them all, and drunk delight of battle with my peers, far on the ringing plains of windy Troy.'''

Ibrahim said nothing, but peered at the scrap of paper, struggling to make out the words in the irregular flashes of copper light that filled the cabin. What words he made out matched, almost perfectly, those said by Vincent.

‘How'd you remember all that?' he asked.

‘I told you. I learned it in school.'

‘Who's it by?'

‘Tennyson. He was a famous English poet.'

‘Yeah. I've heard of Tennyson. I just… it's not really my thing, you know? Poetry, I mean. What's it about?'

‘Ulysses. It's about Ulysses. Odysseus. He's looking back on his life, as an old man. It is a very good poem, I think.'

‘I'll take your word for it.'

He looked again at the piece of paper. They were driving on another dark stretch of motorway, and the printed words were now little more than hieroglyphs.

‘So why've you got it in here?' he asked.

‘Because I like it,' said Vincent. ‘Because it reminds me of my life, maybe. I don't know. We live in these things. Drivers, I mean. They are our homes.'

‘And who's this?' said Ibrahim, pointing at a photograph next to the scrap of paper.

‘That is my sister,' said Vincent. ‘Her name is Zoe.'

‘She's pretty.'

Vincent scowled at him. ‘She is my sister.'

‘Sorry.'

‘But yes,' Vincent laughed. ‘You are right. She is very pretty. But that photograph, it's quite old now. There, she is maybe twenty, twenty-one. Now, she must be thirty. I haven't seen her in a long time.'

‘How long?'

‘Seven years, maybe.'

‘Does she live far away?'

‘No. Not really. In Nanterre. Just outside Paris. Do you know it?'

‘No.'

‘Well, that is where she lives. But she has a family now, and they don't know me.'

The radio played quietly enough so as not to stir Reenie. Jazz mostly, and sometimes low, ponderous voices talking about the music. The Valium had calmed Ibrahim enough for him to sit in a moving truck, not enough for him to forget everything before that night, but he didn't want to forget.

He had spent years forgetting, had structured much of his life around forgetting, and so while Reenie slept he revisited a single moment over and over, reviewing it as if it were videotaped evidence. He replayed clips that lasted seconds, flashes of unhinged violence; single, blunt moments of barbarism. He heard the dull, stony crack of breaking marble; the rattle of a ball bearing inside a can, the snake's hiss of spray paints. He heard Jamal and the others laughing, cheering, goading him on. Ibrahim, the youngest, was also the quietest in their group. If there was doubt about anyone's conviction, about anyone's courage and nerve, it was his. He was too bookish, too academic, ever to take it seriously. And yet there they were, on that night, with their hammers and their chisels and their paint, and he was more crazed than any of them.

‘Check it out,' Jamal squealed with delight. ‘Brother's gone
pagal
!'

And again he heard the cold hard smack of hammer against stone; the dry rustle of flaking chips and splinters. Sweat running down his face. Another smack, and another chunk of marble fell away. He enjoyed the weight of the hammer in his hand, the way it gathered its own momentum when he swung it. It felt good, destroying something. The others tried, but he was bigger and stronger than them. At last, his sheer bulk served some purpose, and now his friends saw that beneath him, beneath bookish, awkward, lumbering Ibrahim, was something brutal. They'd mocked him so many times; for the books he read, for his love of history. Told him he was studying lies and propaganda, written by
kuffar
bastards. Believe their lies and you may as well be one of them. But no one ever took to vandalism as enthusiastically as Ibrahim, and this wasn't just vandalism; the scrawling of another declaration of lust or an insult on the inside of some bus shelter. This was absolute destruction. With his hammer and his chisel he was scratching a name from history, chipping away at history itself. As good as killing someone, that was how he rationalised it. Take a man's name and he might never have lived at all. And now a name was broken and chipped and lying in a hundred or more slivers of shattered marble, while the nameless man lay six feet beneath. They'd chosen him at random, for no other reason than that he was buried in
this
cemetery, and Jamal and Yusuf and Ismail made similar attempts on other gravestones, but none were as accomplished, as absolute, as Ibrahim's. He'd gone to town on that inscription, on the Latin and Hebrew letters carved into the marble, until there was almost nothing left of it. For just those few minutes he had hated the dead man, a stranger, more than anyone who'd ever lived.

When they had vandalised perhaps a dozen or more headstones, with spray paint and chisels, they heard the sound of barking dogs from the far side of the cemetery and made a run for it; climbing the far wall, using an old rug to clear the barbed wire, landing painfully and awkwardly in the darkness of Brampton Park before laughing all the way home.

The irony, almost seven years after that night, was that Ibrahim had never forgotten the name carved so elegantly into that headstone. He'd forgotten the names of people he had met and known – old school friends and university acquaintances, friends of his parents – but had never forgotten the name on that headstone, and he saw it now as clearly as he had before taking to it with a hammer and chisel.

They were perhaps halfway between Bristol and London when, out of nowhere, Vincent slammed his hand down on the horn and cheered.

‘One million miles!' He said. ‘I have travelled a million miles!'

Reenie stirred, but was too tired to wake fully. Ibrahim asked the driver what he meant, and Vincent told him that in his life as a truck driver he had driven a million miles, that they were now driving through his millionth. He smiled at Ibrahim across the cabin, and took in a long, shuddering breath.

‘I am glad someone was here to see this,' he said, still smiling.

And just as leaving London had always felt like a take-off, so entering it again from the west was a landing; the road elevated above the suburbs, flying in between oversized billboards and glass-fronted offices. Reenie woke up as they neared Hammersmith; a sudden stop at traffic lights jolting her awake. She sat upright and looked out at the road ahead.

‘Where are we?'

‘London,' said Ibrahim, as if even he didn't quite believe it.

So many times when he was a student the drive between Cardiff and London had dragged, the silences between father and son painfully acute, but that night, despite the scene he'd revisited, over and over, and the twin drones of nausea and anxiety underlying every moment spent in the truck, the journey seemed to have lasted minutes. It felt as if they had cheated the laws of physics, bent the fabric of time to get here, but now that they were in London he wanted nothing more than to get out and start walking again.

Vincent took them off the carriageway at the Hammersmith flyover, and kept driving until he had found somewhere to pull in. There, he let Ibrahim and Reenie out of the cabin and offloaded the trolley.

‘Well, this is it,' he said, smiling. ‘I would say
‘à bient
ô
t',
but I think we will not see each other again.'

As the truck drove away and turned a corner, and the sound of it faded into the city's rumble, Reenie turned to Ibrahim and said, ‘It's funny. I think I've met more people in the last week than I have in the last ten years.'

And now the unreal city sprawled before them, an immense patchwork of towns and villages stitched together with roads and train tracks, but it was getting late. The Tube stations were closing, the bus services winding down; just a handful of night services carrying the gaunt, the tired and the drunk back to their homes.

Ibrahim would have to cross the city, and possibly on foot. Though he'd conquered, at least in part, his terror of travelling by car, he couldn't face the claustrophobia of the Tube. Newham was more than ten miles away, as suburban as Hammersmith, and between the two suburbs lay the noise and danger of London.

He could always call his sister. Now that he was in London, she couldn't object to coming out, no matter what time it was. He imagined they would drive across the city in near silence, neither of them daring to speak. Perhaps she'd drive him straight to the hospital and he'd see his father for the first time in almost four years. He created and recreated the scene with different emphases. In one version he and his sister argued in a hospital corridor, or rather he stood silent and sullen as his kid sister yelled at him. In another he broke down crying the moment they entered his father's room, as the weight of all human mortality bore down on him in one crushing moment.

Then he thought of Reenie. It was a Saturday night, and the streets of Hammersmith were busy with drunks – incoherent songs sung loudly, the harsh music of glass breaking on concrete, the sirens of police cars and ambulances overlapping to form a single, atonal wail. Even if they found somewhere for her to pitch up for the night, she wouldn't be safe.

He asked her where she was going.

‘Mayfair, to start off,' she said. ‘I've got to see someone there. Too late to see them now, though. How about you? Where are you going?'

‘Newham,' he replied.

‘Newham!' said Reenie. ‘That's where I grew up. Small world, ain't it?'

And though she was grinning at him with a kind of nostalgia, he didn't smile back, because it was another confirmation of something he already knew, something nauseating and dreadful. He was from Newham, she was from Newham. In Cardiff they had both lived near Roath Park. He wasn't superstitious, but he believed in patterns, in the almost astronomical beauty of chance. There didn't have to be a reason, or some great force behind the coincidences that brought them together like the pieces of a puzzle. All it took was a world of billions to allow those fragments to be carved just right, for two people, two strangers, to be mirrored in that way.

They walked through the night; heels dragging, trolley rattling; their pain and tiredness almost transcendental, as if they had become their agony and exhaustion. It took almost two hours for them to reach St James's Park, and it was a walk neither of them needed. Even so, as they passed Harrods, then Buckingham Palace, he sensed her joy at seeing each landmark, each one a confirmation that they were getting there.

Halfway along The Mall they left the road, and with some difficulty pushed the trolley out across the park until they'd found a point some distance from the roads and paths where they could set up camp. This place, midway between The Mall and the lake, was dark enough to be almost invisible to anyone driving by, but with just enough light from the roads and from the ochre night-time clouds for him to see what he was doing as he unpacked and pitched the tent. Reenie set up her camp stove and the kettle, and in the darkness and the noise of the city they sat on deckchairs drinking tea. Reenie laughed.

‘What is it?' he asked ‘What you laughing at?'

‘Us,' said Reenie. ‘Look at us. It's gone midnight and we're having a picnic in the middle of St James's Park, like a couple of tramps.'

Ibrahim peered at her through the dark, and could just make out her face, and her helpless grin, tears glistening in the corners of her eyes. He looked out across the park, at the silhouettes of distant trees, the London Eye lit up like a crescent of gemstones beneath dark, infernal clouds, and the glowing, yellow clock face of Big Ben. He latched on to these as the proof, if it were needed, that they'd made it, that they were
here
, and though his legs were in agony and his bruises and scabs were still sore, he felt the skin along his shoulders and arms rise up in gooseflesh, and that night-time postcard of the city began to blur and sparkle through his tears.

Big Ben was halfway through its hourly rendition of Portsmouth Bell when the shower began; the raindrops whispering on the leaves of nearby trees, the subtle droop of each leaf causing branches to dip and rustle. Reenie began packing away the camp stove, the kettle and the mugs, but as she climbed inside the tent Ibrahim stayed outside, sitting in the rain.