Homesick (15 page)

“Yes, yes!” Nil was animated by this idea. Wesley edged her toward the church door, but was pushed back by Mohan poking his head through questioningly. Wesley shook his head at him, and he pulled back in, then pushed out again to wolf-whistle his sister. Nil ignored him.

“I mean, why do I have to get married to do that, Dad? I mean, you’re absolutely right. Come on, we’ll go back to the car, and Mo can get Ian, and I’ll tell him that you think it’s fine that we live together.”

She started to walk away, but in the direction of the newsagent. She was thinking about Jelly Tots, and white chocolate buttons, which she and Mo always bought for Vita. But what would Mo have, she wondered? Wesley pulled on the veil accidentally. Nil shrieked as the comb in her hair tugged at her scalp. Her whole body now felt taken over by the veil, the sari, the materials of this day. There was an ache in her chest, she thought, an ache from near her lungs—could it be her heart? Her heart was beating so fast it hurt.

“I’m sorry, darling. Come, now, come. Let us go in, and we can talk about it inside.”

“No, Dad. If I go in there, someone’ll convince me to get married to Ian, and I’m really not sure I want to.”

“Come, now.” Wesley was suddenly firm. He had clicked his fingers. She followed. She didn’t know why.

They went into the lobby of the church, where Mohan and Ian’s brother Michael stood with Orders of Service. Vita smiled nervously from the doorway leading into the main body of the church.

“What’s up?” Mo said cheerfully. Wesley made a small gesture with his hand toward Michael. Michael turned solemnly away. Mo felt in his pocket.

“Here,” he said, and he undid and thrust a small hip flask under the veil over Nil’s face. She took the bottle and sniffed. “It’s arrack,” Mo said. “S’all I could find at home.”

“Ooh, can I have some?” Vita asked.

Nil swigged a small nip. It buzzed into her, flowing down into her belly, and then she swigged a larger amount, handing it on to her father.

“Not in
church
! I’m a Methodist, for goodness’ sake!”

“Go on, Dad,” Mo said. “Just once in your life. Jesus would forgive yer.”

Nil passed the bottle back to Mohan, who drank a little and passed it to Vita. “Only a
little
,” he commanded.

“All right, Grandad.”

Michael turned, and Mohan offered him the bottle. He smiled and refused gently. Nil thought how alike he and Ian were. With the arrack inside her empty belly, she felt stronger, she felt ready to marry. She thought, I could marry anyone now: Milton the travel agent; Michael; Reverend Joseph, who christened me, waiting there at the end of the aisle; any man carrying a packet of Jelly Tots. I now feel in the marrying mood. I mean, what’s the use of wasting all this, she thought, and she looked round at it all, this grand design of her mother’s. Swathes of white lilies and mauve roses stood in every corner of the church. The women on her side of the church all sat in searingly bright saris—greens, blues, pinks, reds—and on the other side, more muted women in their pale blues and yellows and creams, suits, dresses, and hats! Nil thought, Christ, they’re all wearing hats!

“Do you remember Mum singing last night?” Mohan asked.

“Yes,” Vita said.

“D’you remember the chorus, Nil?” Mo said.

“You tell me,” she said.

“Love is all you need,” her father said. She took a deep breath. Wesley and Vita dispersed her veil around her, and Mohan squeezed her arm and, as an afterthought, gave her a quick slap on the bottom. Her father smiled, kissed her.

“Come on,” he said, and “Arrival of the Queen of Sheba” began to play as Michael and Mohan opened the doors fully.

•

It was when she was kneeling, she and Ian looking at each other, that she became aware of the photographer. She had specifically said to her parents that there should be no photographs during the wedding. It was the thing, the one thing, she had asked. And there he was, this little man in a grey dress coat and a lopsided toupee tiptoeing down the aisle, taking a shot of Ian leaning in to tell her he was about to faint. “I didn’t know I would be this nervous.”

“Oh, shit,” Nil said. “And everyone can see how much my shoes cost.”

“Have you been drinking?” Ian asked, and his eyebrows arched in that way she hated.

She smiled sweetly. “Did you think I could marry you sober?”

Ian threw his head back and laughed. He reached for her hand and squeezed it. He’s doing it for show, surely? It was this photograph—the one she had specifically asked her parents not to be taken, the one where Ian’s synthetic laughter screwed up his features and combined with her simple yet meaningful smile—it was this photograph that was to become everyone’s favourite. It would be the photograph that filled an antique silver frame at Longacre, Ian’s family home; it would be hung in a dark mahogany frame
in Siro and Wesley’s sitting room; and indeed, in their own Clapham castle it would sit on a mantelpiece, dutifully dusted for the eighteen years they were married. Nil walked past it most mornings of her married life and did not register it, because if she did, out of the corner of her eye she would see the tiny patch of red at the bottom corner of the picture, the sale sticker on the bottom of her right shoe, and she would remember the things she had left undone in her life, the things she had simply, carelessly forgotten.

•

As they were blessed, as they turned to walk up the aisle, as they waited for the organ to start Handel’s “Trumpet Voluntary,” Nil felt the weight fall upon her again, but now as a foreboding, an awe. She glanced at Ian, and he smiled back. I do love him, she thought. I love him as much as I think is necessary. He was not the reason for this feeling. He was not even part of the feeling. He seemed to be a distant, smiling force, representative of the future. She glanced behind her, and there was her father, and on his arm, Ian’s mother. Behind them, her mother, escorted by Ian’s father. She felt a lack of breath, a panic rising, as she looked at her mother, who unsmilingly looked back. She hadn’t noticed this morning because Mum had been a wedding automaton, she hadn’t noticed that Mum looked—what? Disappointed? Afraid? Siro nodded her head forward. Her hand holding a silver clutch bag pointed ahead of Nil, and yet Nil stayed, poised at the head of the church, shrinking back behind the altar. Following her mother were Vita and Mohan, arm in arm, giggling. Siro turned and hushed them, and they looked up and forward toward Nil. Mohan’s eyes sparkled. He was never afraid, never worried, Nil thought. And then she looked at Vita, and it was Vita who understood it all.
Vita’s stare of incredulousness made Nil afraid. She had married on a feeling, a tenuous emotion. She had needed to move forward. But here, back here, behind her, there was an old country, an old world, that she had not finished inhabiting yet. Why could she not have stayed and been a grown-up with these people she loved instead of jumping into freefall, into the air she felt all about her now?

“SMILE, darling,” Ian said, and he clutched her arm too tight, held it clamped between his elbow and his ribs, a rugby ball that needed to be touched down at the other end of the aisle.

Nil smiled. She looked back, and Wesley nodded a small sideways nod, jutting his chin forward for her to walk. She had had enough of walking. She wanted to sit, kneel if need be, but not take this walk in this way.

When they reached the church doors, the photographer took another photo, and this one Nil destroyed. No one saw it, not even Ian, and he deserved to see it. Her eyes were cloudy, but his shone, and behind them both were Siro, Wesley, Mohan, and Vita, all in focus and all grave, saddened, feeling her fear, feeling her loss.

M
y name means “excellent,” right, and if I said “I’m excellent” in front of the class or whatever, my teacher couldn’t say anything, because that’s who I am, and that’s it.

But I say nothing a lot instead. I say nothing all the time, and it gets to people, if they don’t know me. It makes them small, angry, like you put them in a chair shorter than yours, and you sit at your desk, and they sit in that chair and look up to you. And you laughing, yeah? I say nothing all day. No one, including me, knows why. I laugh at the jokes, and when the boys fall out their chair, it makes me laugh, so I laugh, but no sound come out. It’s like farts, when they silent but deadly. But the opposite effect. When I laugh, this big smile is on my face, and my friends say it’s like the sun shining.

I watch Charlie DVDs. When I want peace, when I’m on my own. I watch Charlie. And when I walk, I look around first, and then I walk down the road, and I do Charlie’s walk, like my hair curly and my clothes holey and especially I like
The Kid
when he has the little boy, and I walk down the road holding the kid’s hand. Sometimes I borrow my uncle’s shoes, and I walk in them, around the living room, my feet sideways and
shhooo
, it hurt your hips, sitting back on them so your legs go bandy-bandy, like a monkey. My uncle says if I talked, I would talk like a black kid, ’cos
I grew up in Peckham, and I would suck my lips and knife people, he says to his friends, all sitting there looking at me in the living room. But I don’t speak, so he don’t know, do he? I hear my friends, the ones I left behind, and they never suck they lips. They never talk like what black kids are supposed to. They talk quiet, about different things, and they talk quiet to me, because I don’t talk.

•

When I come up here, my uncle beat me once. I came to the morning prayers, and washed and all that, even though I didn’t know how, because no one taught me. I just watched him, and I did what he did, and then when we went in the mosque, he prayed, and I stood up and knelt and stood and bowed like he did, but because no words come out, he hit me. It weren’t hard, but he hit me with his hand on my head. And anything on your head hurts, but I thought it wasn’t hard like he meant it.

He don’t beat me no more, because teachers told him it was in the reports that I don’t speak but I hear, and I can write and I understand and I cle-e-ver! They say it to him face. I can do everything because I am clever.

In Peckham there was this English teacher, we called him Fnar Fnar, because when he speaks, that what come out. He says stuff like a man on
News at Ten
who talk about people in other countries like they a bad thing. Even white people are a bad thing to the English if they don’t talk English.

“Ah, the English language!” the Fnar Fnar would say. He walk around the classroom, his smile on, and my mate Jared would force one out, and the girls would run to the window and scream and me smile, and the boys in the back row laugh and five each other and punch Jared like it a
good thing. But Fnar Fnar would read from he books. And then, you know, then people are quiet, and people are laughing, but I always listened, because he read the English the way the English was written. He could hold you still, like he holding your beating heart. He could still all the hearts in the room, and he say—

—and I know he showing off. He was sad, like a shambling clown, like a man who live in a cardboard box, his clothes spattered with food and his teeth caked with slime. His face had red veins, like the blood congeal in his head and the rest of him dead. Charlie better off than him. Sometimes Fnar Fnar try to trap me with his voice, he would ask a question, suddenly, “Mumtaz!” and the class, all loud, would quieten to a whisper, like they in a wider world, and trees waving above they heads, like nature all around and they want to hear the voice of a mouse, they want to hear, creeping by their feet. And Fnar Fnar would look at me, his sadness eyes on my face, and he say, “I have lost my voice most irrecoverably …,” and laugh, and the class would talk again. My friends in the back row, my boys, would breathe again. They look after me, they grip the table and knock it over if I look sad. With them, I almost
want
to speak. But if I tried, only grunt-grunt, shameful voice would come, like I am an animal, like I am a dog growling.

I tried it once, before the social moved me up here, I tried to say goodbye, in the park. But only strangle noise come. I wrote “I going away” on a piece of paper. We all on the
roundabout, going round and round, and little kids kicking the ground watching us, and their mums watching from farther back, not saying nothing, and we enjoying our ride. I stopped the roundabout, got off, and the boys joined me, and I went to lift a kid onto the roundabout and a mother came running forward, and I wondered if my mum tried to save me. I did my Charlie walk for the kid, and Isaac laughing, laughing, says, “Mumtaz, do it again, do it again,” all the way home through the park and I walked away from them while they still laughing, my hand in my pocket, my shoulders shrug-shrug, twirling my imaginary cane.

How I got to Leeds was one of my teachers told someone else that I was living on my own. My aunt went away, I don’t know where, and I just stayed at the flat because I know how to do stuff. She left the keys and the child benefit book, and I just got the eleven quid out and I ate stuff like tortilla wraps and chicken. I can cook a chicken, like it’s really easy, man, just take it out the wrapping and put it in the oven and that’s it. That’s it, when the oven works, but it started not to work after two weeks, and I never told no one, and all my mates ask me to theirs, so I ate sometimes, and the rest of the time, cereal and bread. But I think Jared told our tutor, and I could say I never talk to him no more, but that would be a lie, right? I talk to Jared in my head. I talk to him with my eyes, and I smile at him, even though I knew him telling the teacher meant I was on my way. Away. When I see them, my boys, in my head, I don’t see them faces. I see an empty roundabout, going round and round.

•

Teacher says, “You on your own, Mumtaz?” I nod yes, what I’m going to say—no? And she says, “You hungry?”
and I nod yes, and you know, she was nice, she asked if I want a kebab, and she took me out at lunchtime and buy me a kebab with everything on, I mean
everything
—chilli sauce, salad, them yellow peppers the English call chilli and eat to look hard, and she give me a can of Red Bull and watch me eat. I eat it big, man. Then she buy me ice cream. She says, “You going in a home, you understand?” She black like my friends, so she talk like them when she talk to us. I like her voice and her smile. I like the way she don’t try and touch me or hug me like she want to be my mum. I like her just standing there, saying, “It’ll be hard in there, you get me?” I nod. And I remembered my uncle, my aunt says when this situation come up, tell them about Uncle Mazoor. I didn’t say nothing, because I would rather take my chances with a home and stay in Peckham, where Mum used to take me to the library and where the roundabout and the park and the trees I know is. But they know where my uncle is anyway.