Brick Lane (88 page)

She squeezed at the pain, trying to make it hers, trying to keep it from him.

He let go of her hands.

'Karim—'

'You really don't?'

'It's not that I—'

He put his hands on his hips and leaned his head right back, as if he had a sudden nosebleed. It was unbearable. It was the worst thing she had ever done.

Karim brought his head down. He blew out, long and hard.

'Right,' he said. 'Right, right, right.' He rubbed his hands together.

Was there a little bit of a smile around his lips?

'Why do you keep saying "right"? How many times are you going to just keep saying it?'

'You don't
want
to marry me?'

'Don't you have ten thousand things to do? Didn't I just tell you the answer?'

She curbed herself. She had to remember she had hurt him.

'Right,' said Karim. He blew hard. The juggler took up three blazing clubs from his assistant. Karim clapped wildly, as though the man had suddenly become his hero.

'It would be too difficult,' said Nazneen, 'for us to be together. So I think we had better stop now.'

Karim began to say 'right' again, but caught himself. 'Yes, I see what you mean. With the children and everything.'

'I have to think of them first.'

'Exactly,' said Karim. He sighed.

Nazneen began to understand: how much she had lightened his load.

They watched the show for a while. Nazneen wondered if the man's cheeks ached. She wondered how his face looked when he stopped smiling, whether he looked sad, or just indifferent like everyone else.

'There's a cafe inside the market,' said Karim. 'Let's go and sit down.'

Nazneen wanted a baked potato, though there was no reason to be eating in the middle of the afternoon. The potato was enormous and covered in melted cheese.

'I've never seen you eat before,' said Karim. He put his elbows on the table and leaned over.

'Sit up straight,' she said. 'I'm not part of the show.'

She ate half the potato and worried about the waste of it. 'You eat it,' she told him, and pushed it across.

'It's going to be a good turnout tomorrow. Come if you can. Bring the kids.' He talked about the march, how many would come, what he planned to say in his speech, the route they would take. As he talked Nazneen realized that, though he was speaking Bengali, he was not hesitating. She thought about it and tried to remember if he had stammered the last time she saw him, or the time before that. She wasn't sure. Had he lost his stammer? He had gained control of his speech, but she had lost control of hers. She blurted out, 'But you're not stammering any more?' He widened his eyes, pretending to be shocked at being so rudely cut off. 'When I was a kid, I stammered. Now it only happens when I'm very nervous.'

'Nervous?'

'Yeah, you know,
nervous.'
He trembled his hands. 'Like when I met you.'

She laughed. 'Me? I made you nervous?'

'What's so funny? You made me nervous.'

Nazneen rocked in her seat. She tried to quell her laughter, but it spurted out everywhere. She put her hand over her mouth, but the laugh came down her nose, out of her ears, through her eyes, from her pores. 'Oh, oh, that's the funniest thing I've ever heard.' She tried to compose herself. 'But do you only get nervous in Bengali? Why don't you stammer in English?'

He raised his eyebrows. He stroked his beard. 'But I do. Maybe you don't notice in English.'

Nazneen wiped her eyes with a napkin. She smoothed her hair and checked her bun. Was it true? Did she not notice in English? Well, why would he say it if it was not true? She straightened up the salt and pepper. People said all sorts of things that were not true. But it seemed possible that she simply had not noticed, or – more than that – had decided not to know.

Karim leaned across to her again. 'What's the real reason? Why do you not want me?'

A waitress came to clear the table. She stacked the cups on top of the plate. Then she wiped the surface in long smooth strokes, each one perfectly placed so there was no wastage. Not an inch of the table felt the cloth twice. The blue-green veins on her hands stood up proud and the skin on her knuckles was rough. On her right hand she wore a ring shaped like a beetle. The nails of her ring finger and her little finger had been filed to a pretty shape and the cuticles pushed down to reveal little white crescents below the pink. The other nails were ragged. On her forefinger, just below the nail, there was a hard lump of skin. When Chanu had begun his Art History course and taken notes all day and long into the night – so many notes that Nazneen knew he was copying out entire books – he had developed a lump exactly like that. The waitress moved on to the next table.

Karim waited for her answer.

How did Karim see her? The real thing, he said. She was his real thing. A Bengali wife. A Bengali mother. An idea of home. An idea of himself that he found in her. The waitress stood by the counter. In her right hand she held a pen. Between her thumb and forefinger, she rolled the pen round and round. She spoke to a customer. The pen kept rolling.

How had she made him? She did not know. She had patched him together, working in the dark. She had made a quilt out of pieces of silk, scraps of velvet, and now that she held it up to the light the stitches showed up large and crude, and they cut across everything.

'I think I know.' Karim regarded her with great sympathy, as if she were a child, suddenly orphaned. 'If you were with me you'd never be able to forget what we did, when it all started. Technically, yeah, it was a
sin.
It bothered me too. So it's for the best. Really. Pray like hell. That's what I'm going to do. Allah forgives. "O My servants, who have transgressed against their own souls! Do not despair of the mercy of God, for Allah forgives all sins."' He nodded. He seemed to want her to join in. 'Is that what it is?' he said. 'The sin of it?'

She touched his hand for the last time. 'Oh Karim, that we have already done. But always there was a problem between us. How can I explain? I wasn't me, and you weren't you. From the very beginning to the very end, we didn't see things. What we did – we made each other up.'

At eight o'clock, when the bags were packed and the tension in the flat ran so strong that you could reach out and pluck it like a sitar string, Nazneen went downstairs to see Razia. She descended two flights, paused at Razia's level, and carried on down.

There were no boys in the stairwell. A blister of paint from the metal banister came off on Nazneen's hand. She stepped over an empty cigarette carton, a brick and a syringe. Outside, the estate was dead. A pile of turf squares stood on the scrubby grass at the centre of the courtyard. They had been delivered in summer. Then, they were bright and even. Soon enough, they blended into the environment. There were no kids out this evening. Nazneen walked around the courtyard and into the centre of Dogwood. Where did everybody go? Now that she had decided to stay, had everybody else packed up and left? Windows were lit; the air was dense with curry smells, but not a single body in the courtyard. The cars in the car park were not revving. Where were the boys who drove in and out, in and out, and played that music with the big, bulging beats? It seemed that everyone had fled, evacuated in an emergency of which she alone was ignorant. Where were the little lads who sat on the edge of the raised beds that once held lavender and rosemary and now cradled old cans and dog dirt, where had they gone to smoke and duck their heads like old hens?

She walked past the concrete valley that sheltered the meeting hut, past the destitute playground, over the car park, along by the raised beds, and back to the foot of Seasalter House. When Dr Azad greeted her, she screeched.

'I've been to see Tariq,' he said quickly, as though she would reprimand him. 'He's getting along, I'd say.'

'Yes,' said Nazneen. 'I was just. . . walking.'

'Good, good,' said the doctor. 'Excellent,' he added, having considered the matter thoroughly. He stood so stiffly, as if it cost him something dearer than money to bend a joint. His black shoes shone. The coat he wore was long and heavy. His shirt collar scratched the underside of his chin.