Homesick (23 page)

Since coming to England in the sixties, Gertie had always used buses. Sometimes trains, never the tube. So there had been many bus journeys, too many to even estimate. There were a few memorable ones: with Reggie, when he had his heart attack, and with her foster child, May. May was still there, in her mind’s eye, forlorn and afraid, begging, “But why? Why?” She was twelve years old on that journey back to her mother, and every day Gertie took a bus, she remembered her. Occasionally she surveyed the crowds from her perch on the backseat, looking for a grown-up face that could be May’s. Sometimes she would see a beautiful half-black girl with cream skin painted just so with foundation, the eyes blackened with eyeliner, and she would wonder. She would smile, nod from her seat, try to catch the girl’s eye, hoping that May would recognise
her, move to her, sit with her as she used to. It was an unrequited passion, a love lost but always hoped for.

•

Mumtaz entered the bus at twenty past nine, at Euston. The confusion outside, the sirens: it was a quiet haven inside. He remembered London buses, rides with his mum. It was not his first time back to London—he came with his uncle a few years ago, to a solicitors’, to talk about his parents and about his uncle becoming his proper father. It seemed a long time ago now. Mumtaz still dreamt of his mum sometimes, although there was nothing of her face: just the touch of her, an essence, a smile. And when he daydreamed, he imagined being married, like some of his friends, and having a little girl called May.

His backpack was heavy. He reminded himself: he was a soldier for Allah, like a sixth-century man, brave and upright, his purpose clear, robustly fervent. He thought of Faisal’s preaching, and instead of making him breathe deeper, stand stronger, he felt dismayed.

“Bomb Indian businesses,” Faisal had said. “As for Jews—you kill them physically.” All spoken in the warm Jamaican accent of his old London friends’ parents. Indian businesses: but Uncle’s shop was the same as any Indian’s. He had never met a Jew, but were they so different from everyone else?

Mumtaz moved to the back of the bus, hoping to take two seats so he could rest his backpack. He sat down next to an old smiling woman, who nodded her head as he lowered himself into the seat. He turned to the window, away from her.

•

A few days before she took May back, Gertie asked the girl if she remembered how she had been abandoned. She was not supposed to have asked a question as bald as this. No going back to the past, the social worker said. Only positive ways into the future! It upset her, the idea that her history, the generations who had gone before her, could be whitewashed away. What anger she would boil with if she did not know the name of her grandmother, her great-grandmother, the acreages of land in Sri Lanka that had belonged to her family and had been lost to debts or sold. This knowledge of land and people far away was what made her. May knew nothing, her mother had never told her, so Gertie told May
her
history, gave it to her over the four years they lived together. It seemed only fair to ask: tell me your minuscule moments, tell me about before I was in your life. Tell me it all.

May had told of a bus journey. A simple one that haunted Gertie for years but now only disappointed, as if the retelling of it diminished her memories of the child.

“I remember the colour of the bus was green and the seats were scratchy,” May had started. Gertie’s consternation was already rising, but she said nothing, simply nodded. An innocuous beginning. “They said it was a surprise,” May had continued. On the bus now, Gertie could see the small twelve-year-old, her hand resting by Gertie’s own on the same brown velvet settee, in her sitting room in Poplar.

“They?” Gertie had asked.

“My mummy and her friend Jim. They both took me. They said we were going to have a picnic, but they didn’t take any food. We went to the very end. You know?”

“To the bus depot?”

“Sort of. It was in the country. There were no buildings
or people. Just trees. And then we walked, and I held their hands.”

Gertie could imagine her little eight-year-old legs, thin as a bird’s, skipping perhaps: May had always skipped in the park when
she
took her. Skipping between them.

“And then they opened a gate. I remember the gate, it was really big and there was a metal bar that you pulled to open it, and Jim pulled it hard—he used both hands and pulled. And we went into the field, and Mum said to be careful to look out for bulls—to Jim, I mean. But there weren’t any bulls.” Gertie remembers the little shrug, the small smile.

“And then?”

“Mummy told me to be a good girl and stay in the field where they said.”

Gertie knew the rest. They had walked away from the field, got back onto the bus, which, she imagined, had waited long enough for the driver and conductor to have a cup of tea and a fag. And they had driven back to town, to their reality without May. As it was Sunday, they had waited until the next morning to use the phone box opposite their flat to phone the adoption agency to tell them where May was. Gertie did not push the child to say more. But May had continued:

“A farmer found me in the morning. He put his coat around me. It was lovely and warm. They had puppies in their kitchen, and I thought I would stay there forever. But they didn’t want me. Nobody but you wanted me,” Gertie remembered her saying. And Gertie had clucked at her and got up to turn the light on because it was evening.

The bus juddered suddenly, and Gertie was thrown forward. The lady in front turned and smiled embarrassedly,
and the Muslim man next to her flung himself sideways onto his large bag.

“What’s happened?” he said hoarsely.

“Happened? Happened—nothing has happened, has it?” Gertie asked the lady in front of her. The lady nodded, pointed out toward the front of the bus, where a stream of people were walking. Some were running. One person seemed to have soot on his face.

“What is it?” Gertie said to both her neighbours. Farther down the bus, people were fumbling with their mobile phones. The man next to her said nothing, sitting up and righting his bag carefully, checking something in it, and then placing his hands in his lap. He stared ahead at the people.

“Something has happened,” Gertie said, and she realised her voice carried through to everyone, as instantly the bus filled with noise of people trying to talk on their mobiles and to each other.

•

Mumtaz heard someone say, “It’s a power surge, they’re saying on the BBC—my mum says. A power surge on the tube lines. Six stations, apparently.”

The woman next to him was old, her white hair in a bun. She looked about her for help, he thought, and he looked steadily ahead. He didn’t want to get involved or start talking. He needed to get to his destination as quickly as possible, as agreed. He could not be looking after stray old ladies. But he stole a glance at her: the white bun was collapsing around her ears, and her broad dark brown face, although concentrating now, seemed kind and jolly. When she spoke, her peggy teeth caught on her upper lip. She sat
with her hands folded on her belly-chest. She looked like a grandmother in a story.

You and your stories
, his friends would say. For every moment of truth, of disappointment or disaster, there was a story he could tell. For every rule, for every statement made at his group, there was—in his head—a dream of associated words turned into flesh.

“We’re a generation of Muslims who have woken up,” a leader at a meeting said, and when he thought of the Muslim young men waking up to perform the great jihad, so that
we
will rule the whole world, Mumtaz remembered a story from school. He remembered Arthur and his thousand soldiers, buried under a Welsh mountain, waiting for someone to ring the bell that would awaken and summon forth their might. When he first heard the story, it had kept him awake that night: the idea that there were men, real men, asleep but ready, men who had given up life, and given up their death, too, for the cause of what? Their king, their country. It had scared him but made him long for the same purpose. To be
part
of something. More than anything, that was what he wanted.

The bus started again. It had let some passengers on, and consequently people had walked to the back, were trying to squeeze in next to him and the old lady. He moved his backpack out of the seating and into the aisle, placed it between his knees. He looked around at the old lady, and she gave him a smile, a sideways shake of the head.

•

Renee Chatterjee had told Gertie about the tribes of Britain. She remembered a few of them: Iceni, the tribe of Boudicca; Caledones; the Parisi of Yorkshire. When she
looked at crowds of white faces, she thought of them as descendents of these tribes. Sometimes there would be a face that Rembrandt had painted, or Irish blue eyes, and it gave her satisfaction to place them. They were geographically classed, and this pleased her. We are all products of our geography, Renee would say, and more than any religion,
this
had made sense. Culturally, we are made by the mountains or the streams that we live upon, and our composition is as much a product of these natural influences as of our genes. Her friendship with Renee had given Gertie longevity, for it had given her a purpose. Travel became her passion, and soon she embarked on package tours to African deserts and waterfalls, basking in their alien sun and swallowing their cultural mysteries whole, laughing with their laughter. When she travelled in Sri Lanka, it was easy to understand people in just one look: this one comes from the hill country, that one is from Jaffna, this one is fisherman caste—each one classed, clearly defined, knowing his place. In Britain, it was more difficult. When people got on the bus now, she thought of the modern tribes, the different Asian countries all represented in this crowd, the people from African countries, West Indians, and Europeans. She played a game as they waited in the chaotic traffic for police and ambulances to go by, guessing, guessing.

She turned to the Muslim boy to her left. After some study of him, she could not place him. The structure of his face was Western. He was brown, yet white. His face was sallow in the way May’s had been; his hair was silkier than hers, though, and darker. He wore it short, with a long, thin beard and moustache. He wore a kufi cap and the customary long shirt, like her father’s pyjamas. He was a devout Muslim, no doubt. Strange, she thought, how much these people had become the main complaint for everyone
in Britain, even her own people. They made it difficult for the rest of us, imposing their rules, making people believe that they were
all
brown immigrants. She tutted to herself. What are we to do if a war is fought between Muslims and white people? Where would
we
be? She would ask Renee next time she saw her.

•

Mumtaz looked at his watch. It was nine thirty. The bus had been diverted, apparently. He could hear people talking on their phones. Some said the signals were jammed, they couldn’t get through. He thought of calling Uncle, to tell him he was OK. But then Uncle would have his new number; he had said his final goodbye, he was now a grown-up, eighteen, in the world. It would be mad to phone just because other people were. But Uncle would worry, because Uncle was always anxious if he was even ten minutes late.

“I worry you’ll be knifed,” he said once.
In Bradford?
Mumtaz wanted to say. He still didn’t speak much, didn’t say out loud the things that came into his head—he just couldn’t say them in case they were wrong. Learning to speak again had been like speaking in a foreign language. He was still a mute in some ways: he never spoke of his feelings, of his mother, of his life before this life. He never told anyone the truth of himself. The stories he spoke
were
him. When he had started to tell stories, he had no longer any need to mime his feelings, and Charlie Chaplin, his muse, had been left at home, as if there were a too-small suit, too-large shoes, and a bowler hat and cane neatly hanging in his wardrobe next to his black puffer jacket and his grey hoodie. He had given up his past, and since Uncle had taken him to see Faisal, he had known what he
belonged to, known that jihad meant that he would end in paradise, that his reward would be there. Everything in his life would be linked back to Allah, and the great prophet, but … always
but
.

When he thought of paradise, he thought of arriving in a sunny place, like his mum had told him it would be. She had said it would be like that storybook from the library,
The Green Children
.

“We’re like them, Mumtaz. We’re always looking for our realness, where everyone is like us. And one day, one day, you’ll climb up, through a cave, and the sun will shine, and everyone will look like you and me, they’ll all be
us
.”

And he had said, “Will they all be green, like us?” And she had laughed. He remembered her laughter, not the sadness later, not the way his father had killed her. When he woke from nightmares of the noises of her windpipe being pressed upon, the gurgling last breaths, he learned to think of her laughter and her voice as she sang him to sleep. She was so young, his mum, barely sixteen when she had him, only twenty-two when she died.

“Oh, Mum,” he whispered, and Gertie looked at him sharply.

“You are scared?” she said to him quietly.

Mumtaz looked back steadily. “No, not scared,” he said. He pulled his backpack closer to him, tried to heft it onto his lap, then let it fall gently to the floor. The only connection to his old life was in his jacket pocket: his torn picture of his mother as a little girl, with her scrawl “MAY” on the back. She was a talisman. She and her baby were waiting in paradise. Everything else was in the backpack. Everything that would deliver him to paradise.

•

Gertie thought of her house in Poplar, the back garden where the wooden swing still swayed desolately in the wind. She had had it installed for May, but that was years and years ago, in the early eighties. It was eaten up by brambles now, at the end of the garden where foxes prowled and the neighbours’ cats fought for territory. She loved her home. She loved its neatness: everything had its own place, simple and calm. She loved the two chairs in the living room: Reggie’s high-backed, winged easy chair, so underused, and her slovenly low chair, grey and worn, a dent in the cushion shaped like her bottom. The pile of children’s books on the corner shelf, bought for May. She loved the barred electric fire and the green and gold floral carpet. All of it paid for with hard work, and Reggie’s life insurance. She was worth a pretty penny now, and no one to give it to. If she could find May, she would give it to
her
, but she had never tried to contact her. The social worker had told her that that would be out of the question. It would be up to May to find Gertie, if she wanted contact. But May had never written or turned up at her door. How could this little girl be so important and then disappear? It was as if the child she had been was a ghost above Gertie, around her, and the grown-up that she now must be existed in a different time. The grown-up who had never knocked on Gertie’s front door.