You're Not Proper (18 page)

His arm froze mid-air, shoe in hand.

‘Never as long as I live, Dad, never,' I screamed.

Mum stepped forward, put her arm around me and said, ‘We have lied to Shamshad. We have lied to God.'

Dad dropped the shoe. He was so shocked he stumbled backwards. Regaining his posture, he let out a stream of obscenities. He no longer looked terrifying. Just pathetic. I put my hands on my ears and ran out of the room as their words lashed each other. ‘You will never hit me again!'

‘It is all your fault!' ‘You're seedless!'

‘Leave this house now, woman!' ‘It is mine!'

Their words chased me all the way up the stairs. I shut my bedroom door. I could still hear them, but the words were muffled now. I wanted to go back and ask them to tell me what I had done to bring this down on us. I waited for a moment and then opened my door to go down.

Mum was screaming at Dad, ‘Is there a bigger crime than what we have committed?'

I turned around and went back into my room. The snow had stopped. The world was frozen. I picked up my headphones and put them on my head. With my shoes still on, I jumped onto my bed, pressed the play button on my iPod and sang loudly along with Lady Gaga.

When the song finished, I took off the headphones and threw them against the door. The war downstairs was still on. I turned my head and buried my face into my pillow, cried and fell asleep.

I woke sometime later. My curtains were drawn. It was past 2 a.m. A cat was wailing somewhere, like a lost baby crying for its mother. Popping my head behind the curtains, I half expected the cat to be sat outside my window. There was no cat, only a world drowning in falling snow.

My stomach rumbled a hungry rumble. I put on my bedside lamp. There was a glass of milk next to it, along with some rotis wrapped in a cloth. I woke up late the next morning, and stayed in bed a bit longer, just to make sure Dad would have left for work, all the while trying to make sense of the words Mum and Dad had hurled at each other.

When I opened my bedroom door, the house was filled with the smell of roasting parathas and buttered rotis. I didn't bother cleaning my teeth or washing my face and went down.

Dad was still at home. He was sitting on his own, in the living room, staring at the wall in front of him. The door was wide open. His coat was still where he had left it. His shoe was where it had fallen the night before.

Mum called me from the kitchen, ‘Shamshad, come here.'

‘I'm late for the mosque, Mum.' ‘Come here,' Mum said.

I went into the kitchen, and said, ‘I'm not hungry Mum, honest.'

My stomach rumbled in protest as I walked into the kitchen, swallowing a hard lump in my throat. Mum smiled at me. She was holding an egg in her hand. She cracked it on the side of the frying pan and the contents of the egg sizzled in the hot oil.

Putting the fried egg onto a small plate, Mum placed it next to the paratha and a glass of orange juice. She stood there looking at me. I pulled the food towards me, broke a piece of paratha and dipped it into the yoke. The yoke broke and dribbled into the white. I ate in silence, drank my juice and walked out of the kitchen.

Dad stole a look at me as I went past the front living room and out of the door.

In the mosque, I didn't help with teaching the younger ones like I usually did. I squatted against a wall and stared down at the open pages of the Quran. I tried to remember the sounds in my head, the sounds of a language I didn't understand, but which was being recited by little children all around the room.

I kept hearing Mum and Dad's words going round and round in my head:
Is there a bigger crime than what we have committed? Barren. Seedless.

What had they done? Whatever else it is, ‘Girl,' I thought, ‘you are not wanted. And you're not a kid. You know what they're talking about.'

‘Stop now', I said to my thoughts inside my head. They were hurting me. I didn't want to know. I chased my thoughts away by reciting the Quran, but they clung on.

I would have stayed at the mosque much longer, but had to leave before the start of the boys' session. I walked home as slowly as I could, dragging my feet through the slush, oblivious to the falling snow. A snow flake went into my eye. I was burning up inside.

I thought about running away from home. But where would I go? I was not only hated at home, but I knew, deep down, I was hated by everyone, and even those who said they were my friends were just frightened of me. My mobile rang a few times. It was Mum. It had to be her. I didn't reply. When I got on our road, Mum was standing outside on the street, looking in my direction. She was wearing her white cardigan, which she had knitted herself. She also had on her black shawl, which was draped across her shoulders. It was peppered with white dots.

When I was close enough to hear, she smiled and said, ‘You are a little late, my daughter.'

Vapour came out of Mum's mouth as she spoke.

When she said this, I stopped in my tracks. I just melted inside. I wanted to scream, ‘Why have you never called me daughter before?' but instead I kept quiet and glared at her.

A cracked line of red ran through the whites of her eyes.

Something rumbled on the roof of our house. Suddenly an avalanche of snow crashed to the ground by the side of our house.

She stepped forward, wiped the snow off my hijab and said, ‘I was just worried.'

I said, ‘Sorry!'

Mum's hand slid down my arm and brushed against mine. I began to feel really shaky inside. I thought she was going to hug me. I wanted so much for her to hug me and tell me what was going on. To make me feel we were a proper family, just for once, rather than what we really were, two people living in different prisons in the same house.

Mum held my hand, and said, ‘I've cooked your favourite,
koftay
.'

‘I don't want
koftay
,' I thought, ‘I just want a hug.'

Snatching my hand from her, I went into the house. There was a school photograph of me from the infant's school. I was taken aback. A photograph in my house and of me!

Dad was sitting on his own in the living room, staring at the wall.

Mum shut the door behind me, and said softly, ‘And I have lived behind hidden feelings for long enough.'

I walked straight into the kitchen, brushed the snow off my coat and hung it on the back of a chair. There were more, newer photographs on the walls. There was one of me and Mum, standing outside our house. Steam from a pot on the cooker was being devoured by the extractor, and the air was filled with the scent of cooked daal. Mum came in after me, lifted the lid off the pan and turned the gas off. She chopped some fresh
dhania
, some coriander, and sprinkled it over the daal in the pan. Putting her nose close to the rising steam, she inhaled, and said, ‘The scent of the daal just after the
dhania
goes in always reminds me of the fall of the rain on the dry summer soil of my village.' I gritted my teeth, unsure of what to say. If I could have, I would have said, ‘Damn your village.' But I said nothing.

Now that I was inside the warmth of our house, I felt cold. After putting the lid back on the pan, Mum took a rolling pin out of a drawer. She rolled a ball out of some freshly made dough, dipped her hand into a bowl of flour, sprinkled it on the worktop, and rolling a roti out said, ‘Make some salad, daughter.'

Her voice was soft. A voice I had not heard before. ‘Just tell me what's going on, Mum,' I thought. ‘Or whoever you are, just tell me.' But I kept quiet. I got up, stood on the other side of the sink, close to where she was and started preparing the salad.

The floorboards of Dad's bedroom, above the kitchen, announced his arrival into his bedroom. Mum looked up, looked at me and let out a little laugh while placing the rolled roti onto the hot
tava
, a hotplate, which had been placed on the cooker. She flipped it over after a few moments, then lifted the
tava
in her left hand, and with the other hand she placed the roti onto the naked flame. It began to puff up and up. When it was fully inflated, she tapped it on the top and quickly withdrew her hand as steam burst out of the roti. She picked it up and placed it on a cloth.

I made a bed of lettuce leaves. Then chopped the cucumbers and tomatoes and put them onto the lettuce.

Dad was moving about in his room.

After putting the salad plate on the table, I sat back down and watched Mum as she made more rotis. She washed her hands after she had finished the final one. Letting out a deep sigh, she looked at me. Her face was sad again. The wrinkles were back. She was looking through me with her dark eyes. She let out another sigh. A smile had flown in from somewhere and landed on her face. Her eyes were sullen, but they were no longer the ones that were glazing over me, not the ones I had grown up with. These were calm. Her gaze was so intense, as if she had not seen me for a long time. The wrinkles on her brown face were gone again.

‘What is it, Mum?' I asked, unwrapping the rotis from the cloth.

Mum snatched her eyes away, put some daal into two bowls, put one in front of me and one in front of her. She then placed a plate of
koftay,
meat-balls, in front of me and said sitting down, ‘You've grown up so quickly.'

The scent of fresh coriander rose up in the steam from the daal on my plate.

‘I'm fourteen, Mum,' I said, dipping a piece of roti into the daal and putting it into my mouth. I didn't feel like eating.

Running a finger over the lettuce in the salad plate, Mum said, ‘I don't know where it went.'

‘What?' I asked. ‘Time.'

‘I'm not that old,' I said. ‘You're all grown up, a woman.'

Nodding to the ceiling, I let out my first little laugh in days, ‘He's not thinking about a goat herder for me is he?'

I knew I shouldn't have said what I said, even as I said it. But it was too late.

Mum's cheeks sank. She looked right through me. The pupils in her eyes shrank. Colour left her face. And with another sigh she was back, ‘He will never hurt us again.'

My throat dried. The roti in my mouth refused to go down.

Dad dropped something upstairs. He took a few heavy steps, and then took a few more and slumped onto his bed.

I felt cold all of a sudden, a chill that went deep into my bones.

Mum stood up, came round the table and kissed me on each eye. She whispered, ‘No one will ever hurt my angel. No one.'

She sat down next to me, broke a piece of roti, dipped it in my daal and put it in my mouth, saying, ‘Shush, now. Eat.'

I was trembling.

She stroked my cheek. The lump in my throat became bigger. Drier. I chewed slowly. Scared of the volcano rising inside of me.

After a few moments in which the clock ticked, in which a blaring police siren from somewhere close by invaded the room, in which someone laughed in the back alley, in which music came in through the walls of the house next door, Mum took my hands in hers, held them tightly, and said, ‘You need to know everything. Soon. But I've not been a good mother, have I?'

‘It's alright, Mum.'

‘I wish I was…'

‘You're my Mum, and that's all that matters.' ‘I wish I was.'

That night after talking to Dad in Pakistan I kept tossing and turning in bed, falling in and out of sleep, cursing him in my dreams, ‘Lucky, I hope you die.' In the morning when Mum came downstairs, she was dressed in her long, black winter coat. Her hair was tucked into a woolly hat and she was wearing her red gloves. She opened the door and left.

She didn't tell me where she was going or when she would be back, and I didn't ask her.

I watched her leave the yard and turn left.

I was going to find out what was under her bed. I didn't really care even if she came back early and caught me in the act; but when I got to her door, I got scared. A chill ran down my back. This small room suddenly felt so big, like a huge, terrifying cave. I could feel her presence. I could smell her.

The quilt on Mum's bed was folded back at the corner from where she'd got out of bed. The rest of it looked as if it hadn't been touched. The main light bulb was fused. I put my hand up her lacy bedside lamp and turned it on. As the light came on, shadows from the moving tassels bounced off a picture of Mum and Dad. It was a picture of when they were young. They were standing together yet seemed so far apart. Mum had that lost look in her green eyes. Dad had a
saycheese
type of a smile. Turning away from the picture, I sat down and looked under the bed.

Apart from a few coins, there was nothing else under the bed. There was no place anything could be hidden. Maybe she lifts the bed up and gets under the floorboards that way? I thought. I tried to lift the bed up. It didn't budge. I thought of calling Jake, then I looked a bit closer. The carpet was covered in a layer of dust and the corner next to the leg of the bed had finger marks on it. I touched the carpet there. It moved. It was cut at the point where the leg of the bed sat. I peeled it back. The underlay was also cut. I peeled that back too. One of the floorboards had a long, thin cut in it. At one end, there was a small hole. I put my finger into the hole and lifted the wood. Blood pumped around my ears. A damp, musky smell came out from under the floorboards. There was nothing there. I put my hand inside and rummaged about under the floorboard. I felt the box and took it out.

I took it over to the lamp and looked at it. It was a carved brown wooden box similar to the one we had in the kitchen for the tissues. Everyone in Dad's family had one of these. This was like the jewellery boxes but unlike the tissue boxes, it had a lid on it, with a small brass hook.

I brought the box downstairs. My heart was pounding. Why would she hide it? What was in it? For a moment, I felt guilty. This was her secret, secret world and I was rummaging through it. I felt bad. But then I flushed with anger. How dare she hide it from me! I put the box down on the kitchen table and stared at the flowers carved into it. I hoped it's little bronze lock would just flip off and the lid open by itself. I waited and waited for the lid to open by itself but it didn't. ‘Please open now,' I cried. But it would not.