The Last Gift (5 page)

‘He’ll have to retire now, won’t he?’ Hanna said, and then took a sip of wine. ‘Will you be able to get all his paperwork in order or do you want help with that?’

‘Yes, yes, he’ll have to retire now,’ Maryam replied. If he lives. The questions were meant kindly, but Hanna had taken to speaking to her in this insisting way, as if she was likely to be forgetful. ‘We’ll have to wait for the doctor, but I should think they’ll say he must retire,’ Maryam said.

‘All right, tell me if you need help,’ Hanna said. She stepped forward and gave her mother a quick embrace. ‘Nick sends his love. He’s sorry he couldn’t come. He’s commuting to Brighton and it’s wearing him down, but we’re moving in a fortnight. He’s found a place to rent and I’ve got some supply teaching all set up. It’s going to be hectic for a while, but I can come if you need me.’

‘Yes, I will, but now I just want him to get better,’ Maryam said, and could not prevent her voice from quavering.

The next day they went to see Abbas before Hanna returned to London, and afterwards Jamal stayed behind at the hospital while Maryam went to drop Hanna off at the station. He sat beside his father’s bed, looking at his face, tranquil and composed despite the tubes, and he smiled. He didn’t think he was going to die yet. He was breathing regularly, his eyes closed, silent and unreachable, as if he was in one of his distant places. But the ashy skin on his face, the wrinkled hands, the shallow rising and falling of his flaccid neck told him that he had been through pain, was going through pain. His father was often silent, and preferred solitude, so perhaps he was not in agony where he was. It was just a fancy, a bit of wishful thinking on his son’s part. Ma often said how alike they were in their love of silence, Jamal and Abbas, and perhaps they were, but Ba’s silences were sometimes dark and his solitariness had a feeling of menace, as if he had gone somewhere where it would not be pleasant to meet him. At those times, his face turned sour, turned down, frowning, his eyes glowing with a kind of ache or shame. When he spoke in that state, even when he spoke to Ma, his voice was harsh and his words were cruel. Jamal hated that, but most of all he hated that he spoke to Ma like that. It made him shudder with anxiety for what that voice would lead to, for the unhappiness he knew it must cause Ma. He sat beside his father’s bed, looking at his lean face, serene after suffering, and thought that he did not want to think about those dark silences and those growling words. He wanted to think about his other Ba, so that if he could feel his thoughts as he sat beside him, it would give him strength to fight off the assailant one more time.

When they were children, and Ba was in the mood and they were not being too boisterous, he loved to tell them stories. (He would think about that Ba, the laughing storyteller who lost himself in his tales.) He just started and they immediately fell in. He sometimes even shouted
fallen
to hurry them to their places.
Fallen
was what children said when they played soldiers, he explained. Fall in. What children? Where? But those were questions he did not bother to answer. He just hushed them and motioned for them to come closer. They sat as close to him as they could and stared with wide-open eyes while he revealed his little wonders. He told them the most absurd incredible stories, and they swallowed them whole, Hanna and he. He knew how to draw them in, and they could
see
in his face that the stories were true. They were not, but he told them like that and they believed him, and perhaps he believed them himself as he told them. There was one story in which he was chased for hours by a troop of laughing elephants. He described them to his children, the great beasts thundering behind him, lumbering leather-cheeked pachyderms laughing their trunks off, their double chins and their huge bellies swinging as they trotted after him, cackling and snorting. Do you know why they are called pachyderm? Because they have such thick skins. He outwitted them in the end by lying flat on the ground. They stood around him not laughing any more, but puzzled and sad, and then wandered away. You have to understand, their Ba told them, that it offends elephant sense of fair play to stamp on something lying flat and still on the ground. Only you have to lie
completely
still otherwise it’s curtains, the end, squelch.

Another time their Ba was forced to play hide and seek with a hungry shark in a coral reef in Sulawesi. The sharks in Sulawesi are famous, he told them. They are big bullying brutes with a huge appetite. They just love their work, swaggering in the ocean and barging into whatever gets in their way. If you watch them carefully, keeping your distance, of course, you’ll see them smile as they open their huge jaws to chomp a little friendly parrot fish that’s swimming by. But they are not very clever, they can’t resist knocking into things, so as long as you don’t let those huge teeth get too near, you have a chance. In the end, after being chased by the Sulawesi shark for ages, their Ba tricked him by swimming through a narrow coral alley, and the shark barged in and wedged himself in there while Ba escaped.

There was another time when he spent a week in a tree while a pack of barking hyenas patrolled beneath him, raising their bums and firing streams of their poisonous shit towards him. Did you know that hyena shit scalds? It’s one of their deadliest weapons. Hyenas fire shit into the eyes of their prey and then pounce. Their Ba had no choice but to climb as high as he could on that tree and hope that the hyenas would empty their bellies and run out of ammunition. He did not even dare doze in case he slipped off the tree, because then those powerful hyena jaws would crack his bones with one snap.

Their favourite was the one about a talking camel. Their Ba was a sailor before he met their Ma, and he went everywhere, and in India he met a talking camel. Everything fabulous is to be found in India: unexpected and magical creatures, ladhoo and halwa badam, precious stones that hatch out of birds’ eggs, marble palaces and rivers of ice. The talking camel told their Ba stories, and they became such good friends that Ba invited him to come and visit. So maybe one day they might meet him, although India was a long way and it might take the talking camel a long time to walk all the way to England. In the meantime, Ba told the children some of the stories the camel had told him. They were endless, because the camel’s supply was infinite. There were no hyenas or sharks in the camel’s stories, but baby camels and monkeys and swans and other small friendly creatures.

Sometimes he told them proper stories, ones that he knew from childhood. He only told them on special occasions, when they were younger, on their birthdays or at Christmas. Birthdays were a problem at first, because Ba said celebrating birthdays was conceited, something foreigners did to spoil their children. What was so important about them that their birthdays should be celebrated? He did not celebrate his birthday. Their Ma did not celebrate her birthday. He did not know anyone apart from these European foreigners who celebrated birthdays. Were they more important than their Ma and Ba and everyone else in the world who was not a European? No birthdays. But he had to give in in the end, because their Ma made them a cake every birthday and put candles on it, and cooked them special meals, and one year he came home from work to find the kitchen decorated with balloons and a little party in full swing. So he had no choice but to grin in defeat and watch the solemn happiness of his children.
Yallah, we have become civilised
, he said. Christmas was just as troublesome at first, a wasteful festival of pagan drunkenness, he called it, but one year he secretly bought a small silver tree and some lights, and he laughed with them when they leaped around him with surprised delight. Then after the frenzy, they sat on the floor in a circle, their Ma, Hanna and Jamal, and he began. Hapo zamani za kale. In the old days of antiquity. He had different voices for all the characters. When the cruel man laughed, Ba was raucous and ugly, twirling his pretend moustache and swaggering his skinny shoulders like a brawler. When the beautiful young mother begged for help, he was piteous, wringing his hands and fluttering his eyelids. When the good man put the world to rights, he was commanding, his chin held up in determination and his eyes flashing. It was the crudest play-acting but they loved it, and when he finished he and Hanna applauded and showered him with kisses. He loved it too, their Ba, and smiled and chuckled and called to Ma to rescue him from the children.

Jamal smiled as he remembered the performance, and leaned forward to touch his father on the arm. What made these moments so funny was that their Ba was not a jolly or loud sort of person. He did not join in and laugh when they were playing their games as Ma did, and he did not like it when they were noisy. Perhaps that was because he was so much older than her. Ma did not mind playing the child, but it seemed a long way for Ba to come down to that. When it was time for TV, he left the room and went upstairs, although it has to be said that it was children’s TV or old musicals on weekend afternoons that drove him away. He stayed for the news. Often he was tired from work, and he was not at home during the day, so perhaps he was not used to having them around so much, yelling and tugging and bickering in the
sweet
way of children. But he was quiet anyway, and perhaps became quieter as time passed. As he grew up, Jamal sometimes felt that his father’s silences meant that he had disappointed him in a way he was not sure of. How tiresome offspring must be, so you can’t even sit quietly without them thinking that you disapprove of them.

Anyway, Ba did not like to talk that much. He never answered the phone, or almost never. If he was alone in the house, the phone could ring and ring without interruption until the caller got the message. There’s nobody here, my good sir. Their Ma devised a code to get him to answer when she needed him to. A couple of rings then hang up, another couple of rings and then hang up again, then the third time let the phone ring until he answered. He always answered that call. When they were all at home and having a bit of fun, he would sit there with them but did not usually join in. It was not that he grumbled or disliked it, or not much, he just sat there in his own place, sometimes smiling, maybe throwing in the odd remark, or occasionally grumbling. Unless he had one of his bees in his bonnet, and then you could not stop him until he had had his say. He just talked over any attempt to interrupt him or change the subject, the way you see politicians do when they are asked a question they do not want to answer. Otherwise he sat with his newspaper, or a crossword or a book, when it was quiet enough for him to read, not saying much. That was it, not saying much. He loved reading books about the sea, histories, novels, marine life, stories of wandering and travel and endurance. That was why they loved it when he threw himself into the stories and acted up. It was so funny when you knew what he was like at other times.

When they were little, up until about the time when Jamal was ten or eleven, they went on a lot of outings. Their Ba loved that. He found events in the local paper and said: Children, how about an outing to see whatever this Sunday? When Sunday morning came, they cleaned up and got dressed as if they were going somewhere far away, packing a spare blanket to sit on for their picnic, a towel to mop up any spills, and raincoats in case of rain. They never went far, but the previous evening Ba would have studied the road map as if they were headed for an expedition and he was the leader. They visited ornamental gardens, animal parks, old churches, market shows, even caravan exhibitions. Ma never contradicted his choice. Outings were his thing. She just packed some snacks, tomato sandwiches, which Ba loved but everyone else hated, cheese sandwiches and grilled meatballs and yoghurts and crisps and lemonade, and a thermos of milky sweet tea for Ba. They always had the same picnic, and Jamal knew that for the rest of his life he would always remember those outings whenever he ate a meatball. When all was ready, they got in the car and off they went. Sometimes they had to turn back after a few minutes because Ba asked one of his questions: Did you lock the back door? Is the heating switched off? Have you got my wallet? Once on their way, Ma always drove while Ba looked around him like a tourist, drawing the children’s attention to the most ordinary sights: sheep in a field, a windmill, a line of pylons marching across the countryside. Even if his choices of outings were sometimes strange, Hanna and Jamal made faces at each other and had fun anyway. There were always treats during an outing, sooner or later. Ma sometimes led them in raucous songs and Ba did his best not to mind the noise.

Hanna used to say to Jamal that they were a strange family, an odd family. Their mother was an abandoned baby who had no idea of her real parents, and their father never spoke about his. Jamal did not really think they were strange or odd, although he agreed with Hanna when she said that. She made them sound odd. He couldn’t remember when he first heard his mother’s story, and whether he heard it first from Ma or from Hanna. Hanna was always telling him things when they were small. He seemed to have known that story all his life though, and as time passed the meaning of it seemed to grow, as did the oddness of his father’s silence. He didn’t know if they were told not to speak about their mother’s story to other people, but he didn’t. He never told anyone about it. Over the years, their Ma spoke about it now and then, and sometimes he learned a new detail he had not known before. It was not told as one of those stories their parents returned to and recounted to each other as part of their shared history, laughing at memorable set pieces that may not have been accompanied by laughter when they happened, tales of their courtship and love, of fortitude and absurdities and near disasters. The stories of their Ma’s childhood came out in bits and pieces, an episode recalled or a feeling recollected in the middle of telling another story or driving home a scolding, or an incident she drifted into as her mind wandered. And Jamal too had his own way of listening, not one he learned or practised, but one which came to him without thought. He listened in silence. He did not ask for any details and he did not interrupt. He wondered now if that is how children listen to stories, or if he was just a docile and solitary little boy, and what his Ma was telling him was curious enough and did not require further questions. His mother sketched a moment and he pictured it, and found a place for the image among the others he already possessed.