Minaret: A Novel (11 page)

She continues, 'My set of keys has to remain in the flat - for Najwa to use whenever she goes. There it is.' She plonks the set of keys on the shelf near the door. The key chain is a flat green picture of Harrods.

`Don't forget Najwa, to take it with you if you go out.'

`I don't need it today,' I say. `Today we won't go out because of the rain.'

'If it stops raining.' She is irritated now. And tomorrow and the day after - if you don't take the key with you, you and the girl will be stranded outside.'

Tamer groans and heads for the stairs. They are both obviously fed up with my stupidity.

`Look after the house,' Doctora Zeinab says more gently, `I will be coming back again, insha' Allah, and I will be phoning. This girl is your biggest responsibility.'

`Insha' Allah, you will come hack to us soon, Doctora,' I say knowing I will not kiss her goodbye, knowing she does not expect me to.

I watch her walk briskly down the stairs. Only when she is out of sight do I close the door of the flat.

I take Mai to the window and we watch Tamer and Doctora Zeinab get into the taxi. They look up at us and wave. Tamer pushes down the window and grins up at us. Mai starts to cry. She bawls and stamps her feet on the ledge and, though I am propping her, she loses her balance and tumbles. I grab her in time and hold her up again to the window. We must be a sight - Mai having a tantrum, and me with a dumb expression on my face, incompetent.

he train comes out of the underground tunnel. There is sunlight and grass now, the houses of outer London. Every time the train stops more people get out and hardly anyone hoards. We are nearing the end of the line. I am closer to Omar now.

A bus takes me from the station to the prison. It is an ordinary building set well hack from the road with spacious grounds and a car park. Omar has not always lived here. There were other prisons before, ones that were darker and rougher. Now this benign one is a graduation. Inside the building I show my VO to the guard. He takes my handbag and keeps it. I am on time. Already a small group has started to gather: a blonde women with her two black sons, several middle-aged couples, another woman with a baby. We are ushered into a lift by a jolly guard in a dark blue uniform. He chats with the small boys and their mother laughs. She is excited, looking forward to seeing her man. As I do every visit, I reach out for a sense of shame, for a sense of guilt or even sheepishness but there is nothing. Everything is ordered and ordinary - we might as well be visting innocent patients in an asylum or teenagers in a hoarding school.

The room we are led to has a snack shop along one side. The little boys and their mother head there. There are round tables surrounded by immovable stools - three white stools for the visitors and one blue stool for the prisoner. We sit on our white stools and wait; the guards stand in pairs along the doors, chatting. It is only a few minutes but it feels like a long time. They come out individually, not in pairs nor in clusters nor in single file but aloof as if there is neither camaraderie nor shared experience between them. Yet they all wear the same pale blue shirt, slight variations in trousers. A man in dreadlocks struts into the arms of his sons. He and the mother kiss. This family is noisy while the rest of us are more subdued.

When I see Omar I know I must have aged too. Time has passed, taken us by surprise. `Hey, Nana,' he says, the only one in the world now who still uses my nickname. We shake hands, pat each other on the back and eventually hug. Over the years his hair has thinned, his hairline receded. Now he is almost bald and I can remember luxuriant curls greased in imitation of Michael Jackson on the cover of Off the Wall. He wears glasses now - unfashionable ones that the prison services have given him. His health isn't very good. He has stomach ulcers, kidney problems, colds that take ages to clear up.

`It's been ages since you sent me an invite. You know I would come and see you every weekend. You know that.' It irks me that I cannot visit him whenever I want to, that the initiatives have to come from him.

He shrugs, `It's too far away for you.'

`I don't mind.'

`You were here a couple of weeks ago, weren't you?'

`No, a whole month.'

`Has it been a whole month?' He looks confused. His memory is not as accurate as it used to he. Sometimes I think he is not well, not himself, will never he. As if to reassure me, he leans forward. 'So, what's your news?' His interest in me is highest at the beginning of the visit. It will dwindle as if I disappoint him, as if I don't bring him what he needs. I tell him about my new job. I describe St John's Wood High Street where the clothes in the shops are so expensive that they don't even display the prices in the windows. I tell him about Doctora Zeinab, Mai and Lamya. `Her brother,' I say, 'is only nineteen and is so devout and good. No cigarettes, no girlfriend, no clubbing, no drinking. He has a beard and goes to the mosque every day.'

`What a wimp!'

No, he isn't a wimp!' I sound possessive.

Omar shrugs as if it doesn't matter to him either way. He changes the subject. `Do you have any news of Uncle Saleh?'

`I've just got a letter from him. He sends you his regards.'

`How is he?'

`Fine, alhamdullilah, getting used to being a senior citizen in Toronto.'

`And Sarnir? He's dropped us like a hot potato.'

`He's not the only one, Omar.' But I wonder if our old friends have dropped us or merely drifted off, lost touch.

`I expected more of him, being a cousin and all.' His voice is a little hitter, only a little.

Once, when Samir was still in Britain, Omar had sent him an invite. Samir had not visited him, nor sent an apology, nor written.

`Well, he's very high up in ICI now. His children are getting big - Uncle Saleh sent me a few photos. The eldest girl looks like Mama so much you wouldn't believe it.'

We talk of the past, before Mama died. We talk of the pop music we liked and how nowadays the new hands are no good. We remember a Bob Marley concert we went to in Earls Court. We remember buying vinyl records and the evening Baba took us to see the musical Oliver in Shaftesbury Avenue.

`Do you remember ice skating in Queensway?' Omar smiles. 'I loved that place. There was a jukebox in the cafeteria. The first jukebox I had ever seen. We would put in ten pence and press a button, choose the song we wanted.'

`How did we learn how to skate? I can't remember!' I laugh - children from hot Khartoum coming to London every summer - walking into an ice-skating rink in Queensway as if they had every right to be there. Money did that. Money gave us rights.

`I wanted to stay here the whole year,' he says, `I wanted to stay in London for ever.'

I am relieved that he is relaxed today and talkative. Sometimes he never unwinds, stays moody until the end of the visit. I say, `You used to get ill on the last day of the holiday when we were due to fly back to Khartoum.'

`Did I? I don't remember.' There is pleasure in his voice as if he admires his childhood love of London.

`You would get a stiff neck. You wouldn't he able to move your neck. Mama said it was psychological.'

He laughs a little and starts to tell me the prison library has improved and he spends more time reading books. He likes books about pop music and the biographies of film stars. I tell him he should read the Qur'an. It is the wrong thing to say. He shrugs and says, `These religious things - they're not for everyone.' He takes his glasses off to clean them on the edge of his shirt. One of the guards turns to look at him and then away.

I start to speak but he interrupts me. `Don't nag me, Najwa.' There are dark shadows under his eyes.

'I'm not nagging.'

`Every time you visit me you go on about the same thing.' He is right. For twelve years now I have been trying to tell him the same things in different ways. Ever since I started to pray and wear hijab, I have been hoping he would change like I've changed. He puts his glasses back on. The guard's eyes flicker over him again.

'Look,' I say, 'I know how you feel. We weren't brought up in a religious way, neither of us. We weren't even friends in Khartoum with people who were religious.'

`The servants,' he says, `I remember them praying. Musa, the driver, and the others - they would be praying in the garden.'

Our house was a house where only the servants prayed. Where a night-watchman would open the gate for our car arriving late after a night out, then sit reciting the Qur'an until it was time for the dawn prayer. I remember him sitting cross-legged in the garden, dark as a tree.

'If Baba and Mania had prayed,' I say, `if you and I had prayed, all of this wouldn't have happened to us. We would have stayed a normal family.'

'That's naive ...'

`Allah would have protected us, if we had wanted Him to, if we had asked Him to but we didn't. So we were punished.' I cannot talk fluently, convincingly. Always I come on too strong and fail.

'Don't he daft. You make it sound like Baba did something wrong. They lied about him. Where were the millions they claim he embezzled and took abroad? We came here and there was nothing.'

`You're right but that is all in the past now. It's you I'm worried about. I care.'

`I know,' he says but he sounds distant.

`Those people who put you in prison - they don't care about you. You think that if they forgive you they will let you out of here, but it's more important that Allah forgives you. Then He will do wonderful things for you and open doors for you. Doors you didn't even know existed.'

`This is way over my head Najwa, way over my head.' He shakes his head from side to side. `I don't have a clue what you're on about.' He puts on an accent now, continues to shake his head, pretends to look awed. `Doors I didn't know existed. This is deep, man, real deep.'

`You're hopeless.' I can't help but laugh. He wants me to laugh.

Then he looks straight at me. `Najwa, listen, you obviously feel happy being devout - that's your business. But I'm fine as I am.'

How can he he fine as he is? His youth wasted and he tells me he's fine.

like my new job. As the days pass, ,Mai warms to me. She takes my hand as we walk from her room to the bathroom, she smiles when she first sees me in the morning. The days follow a rhythm. Lamva's grumpiness in the morning, her barely whispered greetings, and how she comes hone in the evening radiant, refreshed. She must love her studies. I take pride in ironing her elegant clothes, in arranging the bottles of lotions on her dressing table. She has many necklaces, which she hangs on a special stand shaped like a tree with hare branches. I hold up a string of multi-coloured heads and admire them. I hold her pearl necklace in nay hand. I once had one too but Omar took it and sold it to buy drugs. Her silk scarves are for her neck not her hair - but sometimes I try them on as headscarves, look at my face in the mirror. There was a time when I looked good and it didn't matter whether I was ill or not or what time of the month it was. Now my looks are inconsistent as if they are about to slide away.

Every morning I face a mess in the kitchen. It has worsened since Uoctora Zeinab's departure and a considerable part of my day is spent cleaning up the kitchen from the misuse of the night before. It saddens me when they leave cooked food out all night. More often than not it spoils and I can't eat it. I have been eating their leftovers ever since Lamya said, `We don't eat food unless it's freshly cooked - you can have it.'

The light in the sitting room changes every day as the trees in the park become more hare. When Mai has her nap, I sit on the armchair where Doctora Zeinab used to sit and enjoy the light in the room or watch the Arabic channels on TV. I see the Ka'hah and pilgrims walking around it. I wish I were with them. I see teenage girls wearing hijab and I wish I had done that at their age, wish there was not much in my past to regret. The religious programmes make me feel solid as if they are telling me, `Don't worry. Allah is looking after you, He will never leave you, He knows you love Him, He knows you are trying and all of this, all of this will be meaningful and worth it in the end.' I learn from these programmes. Bits and pieces: everyone in Paradise will he thirty-three years old regardless of what age they were when they died. Eve was the most beautiful woman Allah created; the second most beautiful woman was Sarah, Abraham's wife. The Prophet Muhammad, peace he upon him, stopped in the street to chat to a mad woman. They spoke for a long time and everyone was surprised that he had time for someone as insignificant as her.