The Last Gift (11 page)

Maryam returned to the household paperwork she was going through. For the twenty-five years they had lived in the house, it was always Abbas who did that. It had started when she became pregnant with Hanna. Before that they did not bother with bills until the threats arrived, but then they moved to Norwich for his new job and she became pregnant. As soon as she told him, he insisted they get married. He was appalled by the thought that someone might call his child a bastard one day. He became a saver, he scrutinised every bill and they had to give up all frivolous spending. They seemed to live like that for years, but one day, when they had saved enough, they bought this house in Hector Street. She remembered the day they moved in as if it was yesterday, and the memory made her smile. A friend from work drove the van for them because neither of them could drive. Abbas said they should hire a wheelbarrow and walk their few possessions round from their rented flat, but she said it was too far away, and Hanna was two years old and Jamal was already on the way. He said he was only joking, but she wasn’t sure. She looked up at Abbas, a smile on her face, and watched him for a moment as he stared woodenly at the TV. Her swaggering sailor man turned inspired householder. Because he was inspired. He wallpapered, retiled the bathroom, repaired what needed repairing, and turned out to be a tireless gardener. He planted vegetables and flowers and a plum tree. He built a paved terrace outside the back door. In time, that garden was full to bursting with roses and tomatoes and plums and fennel and jasmine and redcurrants, all growing anyhow as if they just found themselves there. It’s natural growth, Abbas said, not an army of plants marching in a line. One day she saw him building a small wooden house and asked him what that was. He said it was a chicken house for the run he was planning. She talked him out of that, and they bought a rabbit instead. The children will like that, she said. But the rabbit didn’t and very soon escaped. The house made its way into the garage as so many things had done, and it was still there. Neither of them liked to throw things away.

Jamal loved playing with all that junk in the garage. He was such a quiet boy and so often played alone that Maryam worried, but Abbas said no, let him be. That is what he is like, kimya. Some people are just like that.

He must have moved into the studio flat by now but she guessed he would not ring to tell them his address for a few days yet. He hardly ever called, and sometimes just appeared. They would be sitting down in the evening and would hear his key in the door and in he would walk. Hello Ma, hello Ba, how are you all? I thought I would come and visit for a few days. Abbas loved that, that he could just come
home
like that. She loved it too. Only she wished he would call and tell her where he was living and that all was well.

The studio flat was roomy. It had what the letting agent’s details described as a kitchenette: a small fridge, a sink, and a short counter on which stood a toaster and a microwave oven. What else did a student need? A corner of the room was walled off for the shower and the toilet. A bed and a wardrobe occupied the other side of the room. The desk was under the window with a reading chair beside it. It was a compact, nicely organised student room, and its sparseness and the orderly disposition of the furniture pleased Jamal. The window overlooked the back garden, and out of it Jamal saw their neighbour painting his garden shed. It was just a quick glimpse of a white-haired man seen from behind, sleeves rolled up, standing beside a metal garden table on which stood a large tin of paint. He was leaning back from the side-panel he had almost completed painting. Jamal could see from the patch that remained that the original colour of the panel was green, and he was painting it cream. He had never seen anyone paint a garden shed before.

The walls of his room were also newly painted, and bare. He would have to get some pictures to hang there, some new ones, not the ones he had in his previous room, which were clippings from magazines and newspapers he had accumulated over the years for their mischief and wit. Among them was a cutting of Junior Wells doing the cakewalk dressed in black silk. Wells looked as if he was loving it so much it made Jamal happy just to look at it. Another was a picture of Nelson Mandela and Thabo Mbeki in their expensive suits doing the toitoi on the viewing platform as the South African Air Force flew over to mark the handing over of power to the rulers of the new South Africa; doing that same mocking jig that the terror state had tried to stamp out with its guns and Caspir armoured cars. Then he had a print of an Inuit carving of a wounded and starving man, made out of whalebone. It was the most moving picture he had ever seen. He would put those pictures away now so that one day he would find them and remember how things looked to him at one time. Instead he would get a picture of a landscape, one with water and hills, and perhaps a distant tree, a view that was enigmatic and open, and which promised to yield something unexpected to the persistent observer. He felt that he was at an important moment in his life, although he was not sure of the source of this feeling. Perhaps it was a sense of impending decisions, that for the first time in his life he would be able to choose what he would do with himself. He considered this and decided that he did not think it was that. Perhaps it was to do with approaching the end of his PhD, a sense of completing a job, and it was this which made him feel grown-up, an adult, an agent in the world. He did feel that sense, but that was a plodder’s delight, satisfaction at (nearly) getting a job done, not any expectation of having arrived at transforming knowledge. Or perhaps it was sitting beside Ba while he lay slowly dying in a hospital bed, perhaps it was that which had given him this sense of imminence, of an approaching illumination he must attend to. In this frame of mind, he was drawn to austerity, and when he lay in the dark he pictured a landscape that was empty but not without meaning, whose clarity was deceptive and compelling and inviting investigation. It was not troubling, this sense of imminence, just present like a steady pulse when he allowed himself to feel it, and maybe it was nothing more than an illusory self-importance.

Later, when he looked out of the window again he saw that the neighbour’s shed was fully painted, and he saw how tenderly it glowed in the twilight. He had noticed, in that passing glimpse of him earlier in the afternoon, that the man was dark-skinned. Was that why he was painting the shed, a cultural impulse that was still unlearned? He tried to remember if his neighbour’s front door was painted. They were always splashing paint on everything, his uncles, always trying to brighten up England’s gloomy stone walls. They did not realise how much their hosts loved their stone walls. A slim white-haired man in a checked shirt and grey corduroy trousers. His garden was neat and planted with bushes and some kind of a climber, none of which had yet opened. In the border, some daffodils and snowdrops were flowering. He wondered where he was from. Always, when he saw someone like him, someone dark, someone as old as his neighbour, he wanted to ask, where are you from? Have you come a long way? How can you bear to be so far away? Was it so intolerable there, wherever it was? It must have been, for you to choose to live in this ugly northern city. How has it been here in all these years? Have you come through?

He knew the answers to some of these questions. It was what he studied, migration trends and policies in the European Union. He could describe the patterns and provide the historical context, locate this wave from the Maghreb and its destination and that one from Zimbabwe and how it dispersed. He could construct tables and draw graphs, yet he knew that each one of those dots on his chart had a story that the graphs could not illustrate. He knew that from his Ba, and he knew that from the faces he saw in the streets, and from the silent spaces in the reports he read. He knew that it was a clutter of ambition and fear and desperation and incomprehension that brought people so far and enabled them to put up with so much. And that they could no more resist the coming than they could the tide or the electric storm. So much had to be given up for life to go on. That was not science though. To be scientific, you must first give the trend a name and then study it, never mind the aches. You can leave that to someone else.

But perhaps he was maligning his white-haired neighbour, turning him into a tragedy before his time, or wishing him ill when he was content, growing his garden and living with his family, painting his shed and feeling proud of his achievements away from his home. South Asian, he guessed from that quick glimpse, or South Arabian, Yemeni maybe. There are millions of them like that, millions of us, who do not fully belong in the places in which they live but who also do in many complicated ways. You could find happiness in that.

Their own back garden was the usual student house patch of overgrown lawn, with little mounds of debris scattered about, a broken chair, empty bottles and rotting piles of weeds. The mess of it made Jamal smile, made him feel comfortable. He imagined the pain with which his Ba would look on that neglect. One of these days, when it was not so cold and the sun was out, he’d see if the people in the flat below would give him a hand clearing up the rubbish. He had met them already. They had come to introduce themselves, Lisa and Jim. He was a student in statistics, modelling avian migration patterns for his research, and she was working in the library. He guessed they would be willing to help. They looked like that kind: people who would love to join in and share a feeling of community. They might even plant a few flowers, something fast-growing and colourful, petunias and daisies and marigolds. The person occupying the flat across the landing had not yet come back from the Easter vacation, but she was nice, Lisa said. When she came a few days later, Jamal found out her name was Lena, short for Magdalena, and that she was a beauty. She had dark-blue eyes, which were bright and smiling in the excitement of meeting. Her complexion was deep, like a light tan under the skin, and her dark hair had a hint of red in it. She was writing on nineteenth-century Irish women’s poetry. It cheered him to be sharing a house with such attractive people, like living in a landscape that pleased the eye.

The dream came back to Anna for the first two nights in their new house. She had not had it for a while, not for two or three weeks. Before that, it came every night for days on end and lasted for hours. After some days it stopped, then started again following an unpredictable pause. The dream was of a house. She lived in part of the house and the rest of it was derelict, with sagging roof beams and creaking, half-rotten wooden windows. There was someone else in the house, not someone she saw but who was there in the vicinity, just out of the frame. It was not Nick, or it wasn’t most of the time. Sometimes, after she woke up, she thought it must have been Nick, and at other times that it was one or other of the several men she had known. It was not a house she recognised, even as a picture. Everything about it was unfamiliar. The ruined part was barnlike and empty, and visible from every part of the rest of the house. In a strange, unsettling way, she felt she was always visible to the dereliction as well, as if it was something living. That part of the house was brown, not a real colour but more like a colour of exhaustion. The paintwork was peeling, and its beams and bannisters leaned slightly from age and fatigue. Its dereliction was malign, watchful, accusing.

The dream sprawled for hours, and in it she was ridden with guilt. She climbed narrow stairs and forced open dusty doors on rusty hinges to have a look at the work that needed to be done. She explained their plans to someone who remained invisible, who listened without reply. She explained what was needed to be done, when they might be able to do it, about a builder she knew who would do a good job, or a carpenter who would offer them a good price. It was all lies, for she knew no builders or carpenters, and even in the dream she was aware of that, that she was lying to whoever was there listening to her. And even if she did know builders and carpenters and could have them for a good price, she knew that they would not be able to rid the house of its malign decay or relieve her of her guilt. In the dream she knew the cause of her guilt and pain, when awake she was not sure. She imagined it was to do with the repair of the house, that it was her responsibility to see to it and she had failed to. But she could not be sure if this was the reason for the insistent feeling of wrongness she felt in the dream. She could not be sure that some suffering or pain had not occurred in that derelict house, or was not even occurring at that moment. Nick never fully appeared in the dream, although he was there sometimes, she was sure of that, maybe. Nor was Nick the invisible person she sought to explain herself to. She did not know who that was, or why she had to explain herself to her or him.

Nick was distressed by the dream when she first told him. She did not tell him at once but only when the dream became recurrent. She was not sure why she delayed telling him, if it was simply that the right moment did not come up, or if the feeling of the dream was too painful, the sense of guilt too real, or if she thought he would laugh at her concern about its meaning. It was how they were together, laughing at each other whenever one of them became solemn about
life’s tragedies
(the words spoken with a comically downcast face). They liked to keep things light between them, and it gave Anna a mature sense of proportion that she could refuse to see her pain as exceptional. She laughed at
life’s tragedies
to avoid the lure of solemn self-importance, which is what she thought a sense of the tragic implied. She thought Nick’s laughter was similar but with its own difference. His was to do with wanting to seem relaxed, to seem a man of sophisticated temperament who had no need for self-pity, officer class, although that did not stop him from being full of himself about his
work
.