The Last Gift (15 page)

Anna was surprised by the service. It seemed such a fake. She so much wanted to be moved by the evocation of the drama of the resurrection, to witness an affirmation of faith, to feel the solemnity of the moment, but Nick’s Uncle Digby made the words seem exaggerated, and his delivery had a practised piety that gave them a hectoring tone. Anna even wondered if Uncle Digby was a believer, despite his pious words and his clerical costume. She thought a believer would have a certain stare – ardent, manic, furious, or even just kindly – but Uncle Digby’s eyes, even from a distance, were blank and irritably preoccupied. She did not think Uncle Digby was a good advertisement for his vocation.

It was nearly three by the time they all sat down to eat lunch. Anna sat with Nick on one side of her and Anthony, the boyfriend of Nick’s sister Laura, on the other, silently chewing his food for the most part. Laura, who had met them at the church, and Anthony, who had pointedly spent the service in the pub, had both greeted Anna with the same hard, unabashed look, as if weighing up a judgement for later. It made her shiver. They both worked in an architect’s practice where Anthony was a senior partner. Anthony spoke in a loud impatient voice, his manner that of someone who would not hesitate to lose his temper if things did not go his way.

Uncle Digby the vicar, when she met him at close quarters, was a soft-looking man with lush dark hair sprinkled with grey. He no longer looked irritable, and was already a little mellow. Initially Uncle Digby and Ralph shared command of the conversation, but Uncle Digby soon gained the upper hand, especially as his wife Florence seemed in the middle of a long story, which she was telling to Ralph in a lowered voice. Uncle Digby asked, in his ceremonially kindly voice, to hear more about what everyone was doing, and how remarkable that was, and just the other day he had heard something interesting about that on the radio. It was clear that he had frequently refilled his wine glass while waiting for lunch. Anna caught Jill’s eye, and Jill, her face shiny with rushing to get the food on the table, smiled with just a touch of mischief, as if something slightly comic was going on, and she guessed that Uncle Digby was going to make a fool of himself before too long.

At some point Uncle Digby, who was sitting across from her, turned towards her with a pungently benign smile and asked her, ‘And where do
you
come from?’

‘Anna’s British,’ Nick said curtly, answering for her. Anthony made a soft snorting noise.

‘Yes, of course Anna’s British,’ Uncle Digby said. ‘But what was she before she was British?’

They were all looking at her, waiting for her to speak, to tell them what her real nation was. She wished she could get up and leave, and walk quickly to the train station and travel to wherever her real nation was. She wished she had more panache and knew how to charm people she did not like.

‘Where are your parents from, Anna?’ Uncle Digby asked, still kindly but smiling less fully, perhaps made suspicious by Anna’s silence.

‘My father is from East Africa,’ Anna said, hating Uncle Digby for being an oily old fake and hating herself for being intimidated into a disclosure that she had no faith in. She had almost said
I think
but she had managed to suppress that. It turned out that Uncle Digby had lived in Kenya for several years, and that Anthony had been born there, and everyone perked up to engage in this new development. They had a beach house on the south coast, Anthony said, smiling and suddenly eager to talk. He had an old photo of the beach house at home.

‘To look at you, I’d say your father was from the coast,’ Uncle Digby said, announcing her origins with authority.

‘We left when I was quite young, but I still remember it,’ Anthony said, cheered by his childhood memories, his clean-shaven head glowing.

‘Where on the coast was he from?’ Uncle Digby asked, raising his voice a little to force Anthony into retreat.

She noticed that the tempo and the drift of the conversation was making everyone smile, anticipating a little biographical sketch of distant but not unfamiliar origins. ‘I don’t know,’ Anna said.

After a puzzled silence, Uncle Digby said, ‘You don’t know where your father comes from! Well, I find this hard to believe.’

‘I don’t know,’ Anna repeated, unable to think of anything else to say.

‘I’m shocked. Do you mean you don’t know, or you don’t want to know? It makes me sad to hear you speak with such little interest about your home, Anna,’ Uncle Digby said, his eyes lowered and his mouth turned down wretchedly.

‘I am British,’ Anna said, and heard the strain in her own voice as she spoke.

‘Please stop bothering her, Digby,’ Jill said.

Uncle Digby waved her words away. ‘We see families falling apart because children do not want to know about the world their parents came from. To keep communities together, host and stranger need to know each other, but we cannot know each other if we don’t know ourselves. We who care for the welfare of immigrants work as hard as we know how to get that message across, to encourage people to know. Those words
I am British
feel like a cold tragic blast to me sometimes.’

‘Hold on, Digby,’ Anthony said, grinning. ‘You are about to make our jungle bunny cry.’ Anna looked at him with a kind of wonder, taking in his grinning, thick-skinned muscular face and the mockery in his eyes. She could not think of anything to say and was afraid she was going to do something abject. She could already feel her eyes stinging. ‘It’s all right,’ he said, leaning forward, grinning and lightly touching her hand. ‘Digby didn’t mean anything. It’s all just words to him. He gets sanctimonious when he hits the bottle.’

‘Anna, please come and give a hand for a moment,’ Jill said, rising to her feet.

Anna stood up and followed, but she walked past the kitchen door and into the bathroom instead. She stood at the sink for some seconds, staring at herself in the mirror, until she felt the stinging in her eyes recede. When she came out, she saw Jill standing by the kitchen door, waiting for her. She nodded at Anna and they went back to the table.

She stopped her unpacking and stood suddenly still at the thought that she had been unkind to her father in what she had said to Nick that weekend. How could she speak about him like that? She knew that he struggled with the lives they lived, that not all of it was to his liking. Sometimes he talked bitterly about the ignorance of the people they lived among, about their wilful content with the wrong that was done and was being done in their name. He spoke about events at work, and the abuse he had to put up with there, but he was a tough, stubborn man and had somehow kept his balance and advanced himself. If his love was clumsy, it was also devoted. And he was not even the tragedy that she described. She should have remembered that and not spoken of him so slightingly. She wondered if it was to make Nick see that she was unlike them, that she was not one of those immigrants. At times she thought she understood how difficult it must be for her father, still a stranger after all these years, coping with that strangeness all his life, so much older than Ma and unable to share the enthusiasms of his children or to make them truly share in his. She stood still for a long moment, thinking about him and begging pardon.

Anna sat down at the computer she had just switched on and typed: I am British. She waited for the Digby cold tragic blast to blow, and it did as always. A dog in breeches.

On Wednesday evenings, Jamal stayed late at the university to attend an Islam Reading Group. On his way home, he stopped at the corner grocery store to get some milk. The store was poorly lit and cramped with shelves and merchandise. It was empty except for its owner, who remarkably enough was not a Pakistani but an Englishman of European ancestry. He was leaning against the counter, reading something he had there. He had a small Union Jack pennant beside him on the counter and another one on the notice board for messages and advertisements. When Jamal came in, the store owner twisted his upper body ostentatiously to look at the clock on the wall behind him. It was a few minutes before eight, and he usually shut at eight. Whenever he came to the store and was met by its owner’s hostility, Jamal was reminded in a small way how dangerous every day was. But he came anyway because the nearest other shop was some distance away, and he did not mind that pulse of danger. Lena from the flat across the landing had come with him once and was so surprised by the man’s silent rage at her that she swore never to return. He smiled at the angry man as he paid for the milk in silence, and left.

Jamal had started attending the Islam Reading Group meetings soon after he began his PhD, to fulfil the need to understand more about a religion he was nominally part of. One of the students he shared a house with at the time persuaded him to attend. He was not sure what to expect when he went to the first seminar: prayers, sermons, prohibitions. He feared that there would be communal prayers and he would be shamed by his ignorance. He did not know the words and only had a vague idea of the sequence of the gestures. Ba never prayed, nor taught them anything about prayers. But when he went to his first group meeting, there were no prayers, and no one exposed him or hectored him. Several of the reading group were not even Muslims. Instead they listened to a paper on the inadmissability of apostasy in Islam. Jamal did not even know what apostasy meant, let alone its inadmissability in any religion.

His then housemate, Monzoor, who was doing an MA in Law, must have thought he had launched Jamal on the road to safety, and pressed him to come to the mosque with him for Friday prayers. Jamal said maybe, but first he would learn a little more. Manzoor was disappointed, but determined. ‘It is not learning that comes first, but recognition of God’s oneness and completion. We are Muslims. God has favoured us with the gift of this knowledge and He has promised us many wonderful things. He has required obedience and submission in return. You have not been obedient and you have not submitted. There isn’t much time,’ he said. ‘Your sins have been mounting for years. Ignorance is no excuse. You must begin putting your account right otherwise you will be denied all the good things God has promised us. Come to prayers with me, and you will please God and He will reward you.’

Maybe, Jamal said, and managed to resist salvation. He would first learn a little more.

Then not so long after that first meeting came
the 9/11 bombings
in New York, and the wars that followed, which made knowing more imperative. He would have attended the group anyway, but now he did so with the need to hear different voices on what was happening in the world. He went diffidently, and he thought the others did too, not to find solutions or to hold forth against the hatreds released by these events, but to understand what little it was possible to understand. The Islam Reading Group, despite the anxiety it no doubt caused the university authorities, was just another academic seminar, a talking shop. Their subject that Wednesday evening was the Zaydis Shia in Yemen and their doctrinal differences with other Shia sects, the Ithnaasheri and the Ismaili.

Jamal’s first thought before he knew anything about the casualties, was: Let it not be the Palestinians. All they had at first were the deceptively familiar images of a plane flying serenely across the New York sky before ramming into one of the towers and bursting into flames. Moments later they saw the other plane, flying unhurriedly, so it seemed, into the other tower. And his first thought was let it not be the Palestinians who have done this, because if it is, they will now lose everything as the Americans turn their wrath on them. Then he thought, let the buildings be empty. Let it not be Muslims who have done this. Let it be maddened drug barons or crazed criminals. But of course it was Muslims, and they were proud of what they had done. And the towers were not empty but crowded with people.

In the days that followed came the stories of senseless deaths and terrifying near misses, of people hurling themselves from the burning towers, of heroic rescues and anguished loved ones waiting for news. The images of the planes exploding into the towers played again and again on television, and he felt that he had witnessed them before they happened, and in a way he had, in all the disaster movies that had rehearsed these moments like a foul prophecy. What those movie images had not foretold was how unpredictably dangerous and fragile the world they lived in had suddenly become, how they all felt in danger of attack now. It had not occurred to him before to imagine what living in danger of attack felt like, as thousands of people must feel in many parts of the world. He had thought of the rights and wrongs of what they endured: in Palestine, Chechnya, the Congo, but he had not even tried to imagine what living in that danger felt like. Perhaps it did not feel like much after a while but became something pervasive and crushing, and you trusted to instinct and luck, just hopping from one near miss to another, resigned to terror. It made him realise how safe he had believed the world they lived in to be.

Those planes exploding into the towers, the hard-headed brutality of that act of terror, whatever its rationale, changed that. He understood that such desperate acts of violence were the response of the weak against the strong, and that what made them repulsive was also part of their impact, their unpredictability, their indiscriminate destruction. Those planes exploding into the towers, and the death of three thousand people and near deaths of many others, released a rage and panic that would lead to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of other people, to the destruction of countries, to mass arrests, to torture, to assassinations and to more acts of terror. He did not know this as he watched the images and listened to the stories, but he knew that retribution would follow because that was what it meant to be a powerful state, and that what was to come would be worse than what they were looking at.