Landing Gear (20 page)

NUCLEAR FAMILIES

AUTUMN 2014

1

Before Yacub arrived, Emily made sure the room was spotless. She cleaned the window for the first time in a long time, sitting on the sill and leaning back carefully to spray and wipe the glass outside as well. She removed evidence of her own life, so as not to distract him. Sofa, empty side table. Camera on the tripod, clip-on microphone ready. The big lamp on its stand. Earlier, she had gone to the supermarket to pick up tea, milk and biscuits to offer him, to make him feel welcome. As she paid for her purchases, she listened to the many tills beeping, and remembered the day Yacub landed in the car park. A lot had happened since then. And now she had a whole week off work to film the interviews. Emily couldn’t bring herself to add up the number of years it had taken for her to reach this point; her friends had long since given up asking about “Me, Myself and I.” But she was nearly there now. Nearly.

What was this film about, exactly? Family. Sort of. Belonging. Not belonging. Harriet. Her film was about Harriet, really. And the falling man.

She’d rehearsed them a bit, over dinner at their house, tried to give them a few tips on how to talk to the camera. Not Harriet, of course, she was a pro, but everyone else.
She’d told them to talk freely, to open their mouths and let the words fall out. “I’ll edit,” she said, “I’ll cut and crop and make sure you look and sound your best.” They’d looked at her, en masse, from around the table—Harriet, Michael, Jack and Yacub—their faces grave. “Oh come on!” she said. “It’ll be fun!” She could see they did not believe her.

But now everything was ready. She stood by the window. Winter was closing in and the trees across the swath of southwest London were mostly bare. Yacub was coming on his own today; she’d have to wait till he arrived before she could finalize the lighting. She moved around the room, adjusting and readjusting.

The doorbell rang. She buzzed to let him in.

He was dressed neatly, everything ironed, his button-down shirt looking brand new. He kept swallowing hard as though his throat was dry, and he couldn’t seem to look her in the eye. These days, most people were keen to be filmed—people filmed each other all the time—and she’d forgotten that not everyone felt comfortable sitting in front of a camera.

She filmed him standing beside the window. She pointed out the supermarket and asked him to look in that direction. He obliged. Her efforts to help him relax with tea and biscuits and chatter did not work. So she sat him down. He was sweating under the strong light, so she offered him a bit of powder and makeup, and he submitted to her ministrations. He looked good on camera. She framed him through the viewfinder, his brown skin
and black hair, his white shirt contrasting well against the burnt red of the sofa, the dark green of the wall, the whole thing warm and serious. They were ready.

“I’m going to turn on the camera and keep filming while we talk. You can say whatever you like, you can tell me whatever you want. Don’t worry if you make a mistake—just start over again. I’ll edit the film and cut out any mistakes. All right?”

He nodded.

“Let’s test the sound levels.”

“What?”

“Say something to me so I can check the sound.”

He looked around the room. He looked at the floor. “That’s a nice carpet,” he said.

“It’s a flying carpet,” she said. “I’ll lend it to you if you like.”

Yacub laughed.

“Okay,” she said. “Let’s start at the beginning. How do you like living in England?”

He took a deep breath, looked at the camera and began to speak. “England is kind of a … a funny country, but I’m getting used to it. It’s not as funny as Pakistan, mind you.” He smiled.

Emily smiled back, encouraging him.

“Actually, to tell the truth, I steer clear of ‘England’ and stay in London. Michael took me to Leicester with him once, on business, a day trip. Have you been to Leicester?”

“I’m going to try to keep myself out of this,” Emily replied.

“What?” said Yacub.

“I’m not in the film. It’s just you talking. Anything I say will be edited out.”

“Oh.”

Yacub looked pained, so Emily decided she’d better reply to his question, try to get him to relax. “I’ve been to Leicester, for work,” she said, “but I’ve never spent any time there. On the last series of
Ginger
we had two Asian girls from Leicester, so I went up to talk to them before we started filming. But I don’t know the city.”

“Why do you take people who dye their hair red as well? Their hair was hennaed.”

“I know,” said Emily, “it doesn’t seem right. But otherwise it is very … well, culturally limiting.”

“Too many Scottish people.”

“Yes,” Emily said.

Yacub was satisfied.

“Start your sentence again.”

He looked puzzled.

“You were saying you went to Leicester with Michael?” Emily prompted.

He adjusted his posture and began to speak once again. “I went to Leicester on a day trip and was shocked by all the
desi
midlanders, their clothes grey and black, none of the colours of their homelands—or their parents’ homelands, grandparents’ homelands, great-great-great-grandparents’ homelands either.” He stopped, as though momentarily awed. “Anyway, I decided against going to study in Leicester and stayed in London, which as far as
I’m concerned is a good thing. London is the place to be.”

Emily held her breath, willing Yacub to keep talking.

“The Smiths took me in. They have been so kind to me. It’s as though because they were at war with each other—” Yacub stopped himself and looked annoyed at what he’d said. “Despite Jack almost drowning, and the whole business with you—”

Emily interrupted Yacub. “Don’t mention me.”

“Why not?”

“Just try not to mention me. If you do need to mention me, refer to me as Emily.”

“Oh,” said Yacub. “Okay.”

“Okay. You were talking about the Smiths and how kind they were despite the fact that they had troubles of their own.”

“Did I say troubles? I don’t think I said that.” Yacub adjusted his posture, doing up the top button of his shirt, then undoing it again. “It was as though they had to focus their kindness somewhere, and so they focused it on me. While they were busy being …” he paused to choose his words, “cross with each other, they were nice to me.”

He opened his mouth to continue to speak, and then stopped. He rearranged himself on the sofa, sitting up straight, lining up the creases in his trousers.

“My mother used to tell me tales of djinn and faeries. I loved her stories. Although I’m young, I’ve already had many lives—my father’s village, Karachi, Dubai and now London, England. And that’s just me. If we add in my sister, and Mrs. Harriet, and Michael and Jack and,” he
paused again and blinked slowly, “Emily—already that is too many stories. There is no room for all these stories.

“I’m studying now, which is what I’ve always wanted to do. However, because my education was so …” he turned toward the window, “brief, I have a long way to go before I will arrive at that splendid day and qualify. In the meantime, I am catching up, taking exams, working on my English. Michael knew a lawyer and they helped me sort out my papers. I have a job now. I send money home to Raheela—that’s my sister. I pay my rent to the Smiths. I’m a good worker. I work at a coffee counter in Heathrow, Terminal 5. In fact, I’m a manager there now.” A look of amazement flitted across his face. “A manager.”

“That’s great, Yacub, really great. Thank you.”

“We’re stopping?”

“No, no, I just want to change the direction of the conversation a little.” Emily looked at Yacub through the camera’s viewfinder. The lighting was still fine. “Let’s start from the beginning.”

“The beginning?” Yacub asked. “I—I’m not sure—I—” He cleared his throat. “The first person I met when I arrived in London was Mrs. Harriet.”

“Pakistan,” said Emily. “Your life in Pakistan before you arrived in England.”

“Mrs. Harriet and Jack’s father have been exceedingly kind to me. They could not have been any kinder.”

Emily calmed herself. Let him talk, she thought. Let him say whatever he wants, whatever he needs. Edit later.

“I did not want to come to England. I thought I was
travelling to the USA. I wanted to go to America for a new life.”

“What’s wrong with life in Pakistan?” Emily asked.

Yacub gave her a look of disbelief.

“I love my country,” he said. “It is dear to me. The mountain valley where I grew up is very beautiful. Our lives were hard, but our lives were good as well, at least they were before, when I was a child. I would have been happy to have stayed there, to have taken care of my sister, to have married.”

“But instead you are here. Why?”

Again, that same look.

“Tell me what it is like where you come from. I’ve never been to Pakistan. Where did you grow up?”

“My family grew red onions in the Swat Valley.”

“Red onions?” Emily said in a tone she hoped was encouraging.

“When you think about Pakistan, all you think about is disaster and terrorism, the American raid on Bin Laden who we were either too stupid or too corrupt to catch ourselves, blasphemy trials and forced marriages, floods and earthquakes, religious murders, our politicians gunned down by their own bodyguards.” Yacub stopped.

“That’s right,” said Emily. “We don’t know any better.”

“Or the so-called Pakistanis that you have here in Britain, with their mashed-up slang and their curries and their gold chains and their low-slung jeans.”

Emily looked out from behind the camera and nodded.

“When I think of Pakistan, I think of red onions, the piles of red onions getting bigger and bigger as we worked on the harvest, the smell of them, the stains from their skins and flesh on my hands. And the tall trees in the wide valley where my family laboured, the mountains towering over us, keeping us safe, and my father, and my mother, and my sister.”

He looked at the window again. “I sent her a new phone. Raheela. We talk online. Our uncle is working on getting her married. I’ll go home for the wedding.”

He looked up as though there was something to see other than the grey London sky. “The seasons progressed in a regular rhythm in our village, and in the spring you’ve never seen a sharper contrast between the green of the fields and the blue of the sky. Our village was so small that when I was a child, there was only one phone, but no one could afford to use it, so mostly it sat there, forgotten. We didn’t need phones. My sister used to run down the road ahead of me—she was always faster than me, even after I grew taller than her …” He stood up abruptly, the unit for the wireless mic falling out of his pocket, pulling the mic off his lapel. He walked rapidly across the room to the window.

Emily could see he was doing his best not to cry. She wondered if the mic would still pick up what he was saying.

“I do get homesick,” he said, “even though I’m happy here.”

Emily nodded.

“I miss my sister.”

“I miss my father,” said Emily. “He’s been dead for four and a half years but I still think of him every day. You would have liked him. He’d have liked you.”

Yacub, pulling himself together, turned toward her. “My father would have said you were a harlot infidel beyond all imagining.”

“Inshallah,”
Emily replied.

2

Emily and Jack got on well, mainly because of the effort that Emily had made to put him at ease. She never presumed with Jack—she never presumed with any of them—but it wasn’t long before she could see that Jack did presume with her, and this made her happy. He presumed that she’d have time to see him, he presumed she was interested in his life, he presumed that their relationship didn’t require a lot of effort and energy and thought. He was eighteen, ten years younger than Emily. He had finished school and was working for a year before heading off to university, but he maintained a lucky child’s assumption that he was loved. He considered Emily to be part of his family, and this made Emily happy as well, regardless of the tensions and stresses in her dealings with other members of the family, regardless of the fact that they were not related. With Jack, things were easy.

She set up the room carefully, as carefully as she did for Yacub, though this time she left things much as they were normally, stuff piled on the side table—bound books, a couple of print magazines, her tablet—and her laptop on the floor. It was a small flat, and she was not fond of clutter; most of her stuff was digitized anyway. She’d bought two packets of those sticky Belgian waffle
biscuits she knew he liked, and a big carton of smoothie, and a couple of beers for later.

He was at the door. She put on her lipstick before she let him in.

He was reluctant to take his coat off, keeping his hood up over his head, and he wouldn’t sit down. “What do you want me to talk about? Is this about the adoption thing?”

“No, not at all.” She hadn’t expected him to be defensive. “I want to hear what you think.”

“About what?”

“Your family.”

“My family? Oh jesus. That’s boring.”

“I don’t think so.”

“You’ve never lived with us.”

Sometimes when she was over for supper and she watched them—Harriet, Michael, Jack, Yacub—and how they got along, despite or because of everything, she did wonder what it would be like to live there. She could occupy one of the many rooms; she could leave her shoes by the front door. She wouldn’t be alone. No, she liked being alone. Well, most of the time.

Now Jack looked ashamed at what he’d said. Emily couldn’t help but smile at him. The thing about Jack was that he was sweet, he was sweet-natured and kind, and she saw that now he was worried he had offended her or upset her in some way by pointing out the obvious. She got up and went into the kitchen, leaving him to stew for a few moments. She returned with the biscuits and
the smoothie. When food was on offer, Jack was a pushover—mainly because he was always hungry. He’d do anything for some biscuits and a smoothie.

“Have a snack while I sort out the lighting,” she said.