The Darkening Hour (3 page)

It’ll be her bedtime.

I’d be reading to her from one of the books I bought when I was working at Madame Sherif’s, my chin resting on the top of her warm head, my fingers playing through her silky hair.
She’d be staring up at the ceiling, her thumb in her mouth. Or doing that thing where she pulls my fingers as if she were milking a cow. Ummu would be clattering about behind the curtain.

Ummu’s never learned to read, but she might be telling Leila one of her stories now, the ones she used to tell me, her hands dancing and fluttering, making djinns and princesses.

I reach for my mobile. It takes me a few seconds to work out what the recorded voice is saying. Then the distance between me and Leila expands.

You do not have enough credit to make this call
.

I’m alone, in a strange dark country, with not a dirham to my name, and I can’t even contact my daughter. Now the worries move in. How long before I can send money home? School
commences next summer. Will I have earned enough for Leila’s books by then? To pay for Ummu’s cataracts? Will I even earn enough to buy the food they need, to pay for the gas supply,
the electricity?

I remember Ummu’s words, when things had become tough; I’d lost my job at Madame Sherif’s and we hadn’t heard from Ali.

‘It isn’t this that hurts.’ She swept her fingers down over her eyes. ‘Or this.’ Her hand moved in an arc, indicating the one room we had turned into two by means
of a curtain. It was noisy and we were surrounded by people whom Ummu considered beneath us.

‘It’s none of this. It’s the way people
look
at us since Ali left,’ she said. ‘As if we’ve somehow brought it upon ourselves. They see that we live
all together here –’ once more, she splayed her fingers to indicate our rooms, the thin walls separating us from Hait’s place next door, the washing strung out in spare gaps
between buildings, the children playing out on the alleys, the piles of rubbish that the council refused to collect ‘– and they don’t see the jobs we once had, or the men
who’ve died. The men who’ve left.’

She was in her stride now. She lowered her voice. ‘They see deviance,’ she hissed. ‘They think we’re inferior. They see people with no morality.’

‘Who’s “they”, Umma? Who are these people you’re talking about?’

‘The people who look at us with contempt,’ she said. ‘The wealthy.’

I didn’t point out that this was how she looked at our neighbours, that she was as guilty as the rest of them.

When Ali had been gone six weeks I went to talk to Yousseff, his oldest friend, up at the Café des Jeunes where he waited on its clientèle of old men.

‘Look,’ he said, ‘my hunch is Ali’s gone to Britain. It was what he always wanted – to get there, finish studying.’

‘How could he? He doesn’t have a passport. He told me he was going off to help his Berber brothers in some territory dispute.’

‘Maybe. But I bet that’s where he was heading. No doubt, once he’s settled, once he can, he’ll call you. Ah,
salaam alaikum
!’ He turned to a regular
customer and I knew I was dismissed.

And now I’m here. My spirits are unpredictable, rising and falling as the floor seems to, after my first ever journey in a plane.

I recall the flight, the distance the plane has carried me, crossing from the warmth of the south to this raw cold of the north, and I realise nothing will ever feel the same again now I have
flown. The world is not, after all, as I thought. The air is not empty space; it can hold up even the vast bulk of iron and steel that is an aeroplane full of people. At the same time, I have
learned neither is the ground solid; people can disappear into it the way Ali has done. And now I have the most terrifying feeling that, although I’m back on the ground, I, too, could vanish
without trace.

I reach out a hand and rest it on the cool of the wall, so that I feel rooted again. And I think about where I am.

This house couldn’t be more different from Monsieur and Madame’s house in Rabat, with their automated sliding gates, their gardens and hallways the width of streets and sitting rooms
as wide as a mosque. This is a tall house squashed up against others, like a poor woman on a crowded bus.

When I arrived, Theodora opened the door herself. She’s a few years older than I am. Tall with amber-coloured hair. She smiled, though I know from experience that looks can lie. I think of
Madame. How sweet she seemed until I was forced to leave.

Beyond the door, a narrow passage. Paintings on walls, cobwebs on ceilings, bare wood floor, steep stairs rising up to hidden rooms. I could see straight away that ‘Dora’, as they
call her, hadn’t looked after her house. It was clear she needed me. This is good. Need creates opportunity. It gives me power.

But the house, though grand, isn’t comfortable. It’s cold in this room, with a damp that doesn’t go, however far I wriggle down under the covers. I’ve put on a fleece
over my T-shirt and tracksuit trousers to keep warm, but still my fingers are numb. There’s a lamp by my bed, a vase of old roses, gone brown. The room smells of cat.

The bed sinks beneath me. Fatigue pricks at my eyelids. I tug the quilt tighter around me, shut my eyes to the damp, to the cold, to the strange sounds of the night. To whatever lies ahead of me
beyond that door.

I yearn for Leila’s warm body, to pull it up against me. The way she slots into the curves in my body the way tiles tessellate on the walls of the mosques at home.

There’s always a way, I remind myself, to get what you need if you put your mind to it. Focus. That’s what you must do. ‘When money is short,’ Ali used to say, ‘we
use our ingenuity.’

I will get Leila into school. I will find Ali. And then,
inshallah
, we will go home together and I’ll never have to clean up another woman’s mess again.

I was the only one of my siblings prepared to bring Daddy to live with them.

Their true natures emerged as we lowered Mummy’s coffin into the ground. As if a watchful deity had taken its eye off them. They were like children who believe that as long as they are not
caught, they can be as mean and feckless as they want.

The final tossing in of a solitary dahlia – Mummy’s favourite flower – the scrunch of earth falling on the oak coffin, all seem now the first steps of a moral descent that the
other three were embarking upon as soon as they turned their backs on the blackened graves.

It was the end of October, one year ago.

We hadn’t realised that by the time we lowered her into the ground it would be dark. We hadn’t predicted either, after the Indian summer, that it would be raining. We stood, a
forlorn group, caged beneath the branches of plane trees in the churchyard. The first yellow leaves of autumn span down and stamped themselves on the surface of her coffin like parking tickets.

Simon and Anita assailed me as I leaned on the river wall. I was gazing across the dark water thinking about my name.

Theodora.

Daddy chose it, so I had been told, when I was born. God’s Gift. He’d given me a gold chain with the name on it, that I wore always, the metal warm against my throat. I was
Daddy’s Gift from God. Siblings are always assigned labels in families, roles that define them. I was the the Selfless One. And so it fell naturally upon me to take responsibility when our
mother fell ill, to organise her funeral, and to take care of Daddy.

I stared over the river wall, letting my tears fall into the murky depths. It felt like an affront that the world could carry on as normal when we had just buried our mother. Pleasure cruisers
ploughed upstream, music blaring, sending waves slapping against the pilings. There was a narrow stairway on the opposite bank. I thought how one could walk down those stairs straight into the
shift and swell of the Thames, and how this would be a relief in some ways. A reprieve from the dull ache of grief which was made all the more weighty by the mantle of provider I wore.

Simon’s arm was around his latest fling. Simon was the Fun One. The Footloose and Fancy-free One. He taught English to foreign students. I suspected he only did it in order to pick up
women. He enjoyed his single life far too much to get attached to them. I wondered whether this one liked my little brother or if she was hoping he would be her ticket to British citizenship. What
on earth was she doing at our mother’s funeral?

‘So,’ Anita began, ‘Terence has taken Daddy over to the pub. We need to decide where he can stay until we sort something out.’

‘He’s staying with me, of course. I’m hardly going to evict him the night of Mummy’s funeral.’

‘I’m not suggesting you would,’ said Anita. ‘But is he OK in the flat? Can he look after himself?’

‘I don’t just leave him there. I do keep an eye on him.’ Anita’s failure to understand just how much I’d been doing for Daddy astounded me.

‘Yes,’ she said, ‘but you were going to let Leo move into the flat, I thought, and—’

‘To be honest I wouldn’t trust Leo to live on his own, the way he is at the moment,’ I said, immediately regretting it.

She raised her eyebrows, exchanged a glance with Simon. Anita was the Pretty One. She skated over life, unaffected by the obstacles and demands that the rest of us had to deal with.

‘Look,’ she said now, ‘all I’m saying is, we’re aware you’re working, and you’ve got Leo to worry about, so if needs be Richard and I could have Daddy
– well, not for too long, just until we sort something out. But he could stay . . .’ she shrugged ‘. . . a few nights.’

‘And you know I’d have him if I had my own place,’ said Simon.

‘It’s fine,’ I said. And it was. One of us could and should take Daddy. It was a duty. A privilege, even. Not a sacrifice. If they couldn’t see this, it was their
loss.

‘Good,’ said Simon. ‘That’s great, Dora. He’s best off with you.’

‘And as long as you make sure he gets out and about,’ Anita added. ‘He mustn’t be allowed to languish now Mummy’s gone.’

‘What are you saying?’

‘Just that he can’t sit all day in the flat doing nothing – he needs stimulation.’

‘You’re suggesting I might neglect him!’

‘No, Dor, but you can’t meet his every need while you’re working.’

‘I think I’ve done a pretty bloody good job so far,’ I snapped.

Anita held her hands up, and Simon gave her a look. Luckily Terence, our elder brother, came over then. He was the Successful One, occasionally metamorphosing to Ruthless when he strayed too far
from the family fold.

‘The sooner we get Dad’s house on the market, the better,’ he said. ‘I’ve researched the cost of care homes and we’re talking a grand a week. Looks as though
selling’s the only way of funding it.’

‘There’s no need for a care home,’ I said. ‘We can talk about the future when we’re not all ragged with the funeral. It would upset Daddy to mention it tonight. It
would throw him completely. He’s staying with me for the time being.’

I was Theodora, the Selfless One, doing the right thing and I could hear the relief in their sighs.

‘Has anyone checked that the pub has put out the food?’ Anita asked.

‘Yes. Terence checked earlier,’ said Simon. ‘Perhaps it’s time we made a move.’

We gathered in the Mayflower in Rotherhithe, Daddy’s favourite pub, passing round sandwiches and discussing how Mummy would have enjoyed this reunion – something we had failed to
arrange in recent years. We’d all been blinkered by relationship crises, worries about our children. It was only when Mummy fell ill that we noticed how she and Daddy had aged, how it was too
late for the family gatherings our mother had spoken of, the holidays she’d planned.

How ironic that it had taken her death to bring us all together at last.

What I didn’t appreciate at that moment was how her death would also smash us apart.

We shook the hands of her old friends and some distant relatives who had turned out, thanked them for coming. Leo slouched out to the deck for a cigarette.

Daddy was agitated about the time, as if he had an important appointment to get to.

‘Dora,’ he said, ‘it’s high time we were off. We don’t want to be late. It’s frightfully dark.’

‘It’s OK.’ I put my hand on his arm. ‘There’s no rush. There’s nothing to get back for.’

And he gave me that bewildered look, the one that said,
Are you trying to fool me? Or am I losing my mind?

Anita was battling with her two young children, arguing with Richard about who was the more exhausted. As soon as the whisky had been downed, they’d strap Jack and Jemima in, plug them
into the screens installed in their Audi Estate and be off to their cosy life in Muswell Hill.

By seven o’clock, as I predicted, they were saying their farewells.

‘If we go now, we’ll make it to Ben’s for dinner,’ I overheard Richard mutter. Did he lack any shred of sensitivity, or was this his way of ‘dealing’ with his
mother-in-law’s death?

Terence and his new partner Ruth were checking they had enough cash for a taxi.

‘Dora,’ Terence said, placing his hand on my shoulder, ‘Daddy needs to get home. He’s shattered.’

‘I know.’ I tried not to sound irritated. ‘I’m going as soon as I can prise Leo from the bar.’

He raised his eyebrows, but didn’t say anything.

My siblings refused to understand Leo. They thought, as Roger did, that I indulged him, that if I spoke to him firmly he’d go out and get himself a job instead of spending all day every
day smoking and gazing at car chases on screens. Right now he was back on the deck with a Red Bull and a Marlboro. It would be a battle to get him away. But I didn’t want to leave without him
– I never knew where he might end up.

Simon was chatting to his companion. They had snuggled into an alcove and were settled in for the night.

I helped Daddy into his coat, playing for time, avoiding the confrontation with my son.

‘I know,’ I heard Simon chuckle. ‘In your language you say “open” and “closed”. Here we say “dark” and “light”. Yes, even when
we talk about colours. So what is it now, light or dark?’

‘It’s closed?’ she said, and he laughed and I heard the smack of his kiss on her cheek.