Homesick Read online

  I sit next to Tania and her mates all the time now, and I don’t know if that makes me a girl, like a sissy, or whether it’s because she thinks I’m cute. I know girls think anyone that does things different is cute. Like I’m a bird with a broken wing that they find on their moors, and they bring me home and put me in a cage, and every time they see me they smile and say, “Oh, look, he’s trying to fly!” I wonder if Tania says to her mates, “Mumtaz tries to talk to me,” but thing is, I don’t. She looks like Paulette Goddard. I don’t show her any Charlie moves in case she think that I’m cute—for real. In case she fall for me, because Mumtaz mean excellent in all directions. I look in the mirror, and you know, what stares back is GOOD (and I mean, for real). I don’t want to break no hearts. I’m like Charlie, I have a lot of love in my heart, but nah—girls are girls, innit? I loved my mum. That’s enough. I could love a kid, though. Like Charlie did. If someone give me a baby in a big old pram, and on his nappy there was a note and it says, “Please love and care for this orphan child,” I would take that pram home to Uncle’s, and we would feed him and clothe him and I’d teach him Charlie tricks. I’d have a lot of love for a baby. But not a girl.

  •

  I hear the speaking before I get there. I hear Uncle’s voice and a woman. They murmuring like they in love or they have a secret. A secret. It makes me stop in the corridor. Tania is with me. “I’ll show him, Miss,” she said to the teacher when the teacher said there was a woman to see me. I know my way around now, I want to say to Tania. She getting on my wick. I want to say, “You think I’m dumb?” That my joke, and I say it all the time to people in my head. I love that joke. When I get to the door, I see my fat uncle sitting in one of our school chairs, and that make me smile. I turn to Tania, tell her to go with a nod of my head.

  “I’ll wait for yer out here,” she says. She sounds like she from Germany or something, talking her funny English. I shake my head, point away. She shakes her head, points at the ground, and slumps back against the wall. I don’t want her to hear. I don’t go in the room, just stand there and wait. See, don’t need words, just need to be alive. She sees my eyes. She go.

  Woman says, “Hello, Mumtaz,” and she say my name like my mum used to say it. It hits me like a punch in the stomach. It hurt, I tell you. She talk to me about the whys and the hows, and she a this and a that. I nod, look over at my uncle, and he look so funny I start to smile.

  “What’s funny, Mumtaz?” she asks, smiling. I point at my uncle in his school chair. His big old beige trousers and his beige dress and his waistcoat and his hat, they look like his arse swallowed the chair. I smile and smile. He sniffs at me, a full, swallowing-your-snot sniff.

  “I used to go to this school, you know,” he says to me. That make me really laugh.

  The woman says, “Do you not speak because of what happened to your mum?” She says it just like that, and do you know what happens? Because I’m not thinking and I still laughing at my uncle, I just go, “No.” The sound comes out normal, like one of them coughs, the little ones you do when you nervous.

  Uncle and the woman both look at me. Uncle sits straight in the chair, and the chair creaks a bit. The woman just smile. I shocked. I know I look shocked, I can see my face in my head. If I had taken down my trousers and shown her my dickie, I wouldn’t have been so shocked.

  “Why, then?” she asks. But because I heard myself, because that noise of my voice sounds so strange and so familiar, I can’t say anything else. That voice is my father’s voice. I can hear it, and when I think that, when I hear it again and again in my head, I feel sick.

  I crumple into myself, on the chair, and my uncle stands up and he comes over and he holds my head against his big belly, and he kisses my hair and he says, “You know, Mumtaz …,” but he hasn’t other words. The woman says, “I’ll be seeing you next week, all right, Mumtaz?” and her voice sweet, like blackberry juice, her voice strong, like liquorice. I like her voice: I start to stir, to uncurl, and I think—I wonder what my voice sound like next to her voice. I wonder if it would stop sounding—wrong.

  •

  In his shop, Uncle has Arabic books and leaflets. I walk past them all the time. I think of all the stuff on the news, and I wonder what my boys would say about where I ended up: Mumtaz, you a terrorist now? You a suicide bomber? I can hear them. I want to see them, Jared and Isaac, I want to tell them I said a word. I could text because they give me numbers, but me crap at that. Me think they think I dead. I point at Uncle’s cell phone, and he give it me. I try to think of something to say. Nothing comes. I just write HOW R U? MUMTAZ because I know that enough. Nothing come in return, and I give the phone back to my uncle. He sitting on a plastic red chair at the counter, his feet bare, and I think his toenails so long, they ugliest thing I ever seen. He sees me looking.

  “Get the clippers! You cut them,” he says, and I laugh and tap the side of my head. He laughs, too. He not serious. He a good man, not a terrorist, even though he ugly. He just pray every day, and run he shop and make food for us both and sleep. That’s all he do. He ain’t nothing scary. Jared and Isaac would see. In London, everyone the same after awhile. After awhile, when you live in the same neighbourhood, you take on each other’s stuff, you take on each other, whether you can speak or not. The world: everyone the same eventually. That’s what I think. That’s the Mumtaz lecture for today.

  •

  The woman called Sara, nice name. I like her smile and her face, gentle, like a breezy day, like a moment come and almost gone. I like the way when she walk in, she talk to me like we having a conversation. “How are you? Yeah? Yeah, I’m fine. Rushing around, you know?” and all I have to do is nod. Sometimes when I walk down the corridor and she walking the other way, I break into a Charlie walk, I twitch my mouth like my moustache itching, and she coming the other way laughing. When I see her laugh, it feels warm inside me. When she talk to me, I say one word, two words. The words I say are yes, no, maybe, day. I love the word day. I love the word love, but I never say it. No one to say it to.

  Today she says, “Mumtaz, do you keep in touch with your friends in London?”

  “Yes. No,” I say, because she looking serious. Jared never texted me back. Uncle walks in out of nowhere. I look at him, annoyed. Don’t want him hearing my voice, because where it end? I talk here, he say at home why you don’t talk to me, Mumtaz? He never been back here until today, and I been seeing her half a year or more.

  “All right?” Uncle says to Sara and me. He look sad, so does she. I know something happen. Like when I come out from the duvet, like when the police standing there in our bedroom and I come out and no one’s faces I know.

  “Mumtaz, I’m going to tell you something, and I want you …” She doesn’t know what to say. I can see her face saying, “Don’t stop talking, not now we’ve come this far,” her face like a little bird, flapping in and out of my face, visiting me with the breeze of her breath, like the wings of the little bird so near, so near, like her breath kisses. “Mumtaz,” she says gently, “Jared was seriously hurt in a fight yesterday. We heard this morning that he didn’t live. I’m sorry, Mumtaz,” and she comes and kneels next to me, her face right there, next to my elbow. I feel the duvet over my head and my mum holding me down, and her screaming and Dad hitting, and her saying, “The baby, the baby,” over and over. And then she stop. And then she heavy on me. Enough. Enough, I can’t talk about it no more. I can’t think about it, I can’t breathe, I can’t breathe, I can’t breathe about it. I can’t … And then I start to cry, really cry, and I’m crying out loud, and Uncle come and hold me, and Sara hold me, too, and I hear my voice, all them bad things coming up through my sobbing, like water gushing out a river mouth, like all the bad things washing away to the wide world, to the sea in the sky, like Jared and Mum up there, waiting for the waves come from me, and they wash away, away from me, away.

  •

  Jared killed with a knife. I think about that a lot. I think about the knife going in
his flesh, the colour of his blood, the colour of the white bone under the muscle, the blue-grey of the sinews and tendons. I think about his heart all the time, a single wound to the heart that killed him, but he bleeding from multiple stab wounds. Wrong place at the wrong time. He on the way back from a wedding with his brother. They go past a fight and wham, they in the fight, trying to get out from all them arms and legs and weapons. All the wounds I seen and not seen, and all the dead people I know, and all those wounds hurting me every day, like they fresh every morning, the minute after I wake up.

  Sara comes twice a week, but I still only say few words. Can’t take any more out, can’t give them air and sunshine they need, to breathe out of me. Nothing worth talking about. Sara bring me books, about dying and poetry books, and once she brought chocolates for us to share. She a nice person. She tell my uncle to take me to the funeral, but he say it no good for me, I only fourteen. But all my mates will be there, I think. I don’t say nothing, and I know she phone him twice, but he say no. I think about going by myself, just take some money from the till and go, but I don’t. Sometimes I catch myself in a shopwindow as I walk down the street, and I don’t know who it is: I am a Muslim boy now. The clothes just a costume. I grow a moustache, and my uncle think this great, but it so I can be Charlie. I walk down the road like Charlie, but a sad Charlie, after the kid taken away. And sometimes I sit down on the doorstep and hope I fall asleep, and that everyone come to me as angels, my mum, my mum’s baby, Jared, all the people I know in London who all seem dead now. And then they’ll dance, like they do in the film, and we’ll laugh and sing.

  Sara bring me The Great Dictator. She says, “Let’s watch it together?” So we do, and Charlie speaking in it all the way through. He playing two parts. He a barber who lost his memory, and he the Dictator, supposed to be Hitler from the war. It is a really funny movie. I think about it after, and Sara say, “What do you think?” and I say, very quietly, “I like it,” and that my first sentence.

  Be nice, innit, if I say Uncle got married to Sara and everyone happy in old England Muslim land up here in this cold place full of people who talk funny? And it be nice if I say—listen friends, I become an imam when I grow up, singing out the prayers, and in the evening I a stand-up comedian, peddling my words for money, letting them shoot out of me like pounds from a slot machine. But see, life ain’t like that. Charlie takes this balloon shaped as the world in The Great Dictator, right, and he the baddie, and he trying to say in a funny way that he want to rule the world, and maybe he think he do rule the world, and he bounce it in the air and do ballet with this big ball world. But I think that what we all trying to do, balance the world in the air, in the plain air, like Charlie. And when he walk down the road, a little tramp with a little boy, when it make us laugh, it make us forget the balancing the world in the air. And forgetting is all we can do. Forgetting and remembering. So ends the final lesson. Mumtaz has spoken.

  The Comfort, the Joy

  So, we’re at a work thing, and I’m not really there per se, because this is four years after everyone died. I say it like that because it gives it its own import, its own purpose—and why wouldn’t it? Everyone died, didn’t they? And we’re at this thing, with the drinks, and the people talking animatedly though their eyes are dimmed, like they’re happy to be there, but behind the eyes there’s that knowledge that the person they’re talking to told them to do something during office hours that was the equivalent of wiping dog shit off their shoe, and they’re all thinking, I’ll talk to you like I want to fuck you, but I really don’t want to fuck you, I just want a pay rise—and we’re at this thing, me and Bunny, I call him Bunny because he has a cute behind, sort of perky and womanly and lovely to run your hand over (even though everyone died), and Bunny says, “That guy over there keeps staring at you.” Which guy, I think, which guy, because, hell, that would be nice, wouldn’t it? A guy staring, a stranger staring and making the first move, and I look over where Bunny has tilted his head, and sure enough, there’s a guy, this guy, grey-haired and thin, not too tall, his hair sort of quiffed but short, like a throwback, like a teddy boy—does anyone say “teddy boy” anymore? He looks at me and I smile and he smiles.

  The hotel is the same as last year and the year before. I’ve come to three of these, one before everyone died and two since. I like these things: I like to watch. I especially like it if people get pissed and behave badly. I like to watch the bosses smiling and scheming. This is the first time I brought someone, and I like to look at people being encouraging, and their faces, their faces—because I’m nearly forty-three, and Bunny is young (he says twenty-six, but he’s probably twenty-three) and he’s black, which is neither here nor there, because everyone’s black deep down inside, everyone’s got something about them that other people notice first. Black is just skin, but if you’re Irish, someone’ll say to your face, “So you’re Irish,” like it’s a discovery. Like people say, “So, you’re married?” and I say, “No, a widow,” and they say, “Do you have children?” and I say—often with a curt little laugh, a winning smile sometimes—“No, they’re dead, too,” and it’s fine because sometimes, when I’m feeling charitable, I explain, and sometimes, when I’m not, I slug back a vodka and reel about on my heels, feeling the waft of moral high ground about my ankles. When I totter, when I fall, when I’m drunk again (in mitigation, it happens less frequently now that Bunny’s on the scene), I still feel that punchy, frozen air about me as I fall through it, as I fall.

  The Grey Hair keeps staring. I slug back the champagne. Gareth from sales, charming guy, stands squarely, suddenly, in my face. “All right, Clare?” he asks.

  “Ooh, yes, Gareth,” I say, because I like a flirt with Gareth. He has that sort of stocky body that seems to be made of gunmetal. The sort of musculature suited to silk.

  “Pacing yourself, are you, darling?” he says.

  “Darling?” I say, startled. Grey Hair has turned away. I see he is a little hunched. “Why ‘darling’?” I drawl.

  “No need to get all feminist, darling,” he says, and a girl titters at his elbow.

  “Oh, not feminist, Gareth. Be careful what you start, though,” I say and move a little forward, adjusting my weight so, the cleavage taking centre stage. Purple silk gown, like God, present in its absence; my body, present in its intimation—my body, always present, always real, always—and oh, of course he notices.

  “Steady,” he says, like a jockey—like a jockey already harnessed.

  Bunny has wandered. I watch him, at this thing, this ironic xmas fest, and I wonder how he can be with me with all these other gypsy girls, their curly hair and falling bustiers displayed toward him, and I think it is inevitable that he will leave—and no, it’s not anything to do with (everyone dying), though of course the bereavement counsellor would say that it has everything to do with that. I’m no fucking Holly Golightly, I think. I’m no flibbertigibbet, smoking with a holder, wearing kooky numbers, playing the guitar type girl. I’m a woman. With a 36D bust that needs to be handled expertly at times. Bunny does that, and then I don’t need him, because simply: love is over, love is past.

  And there he is, old Bunny, little Bunny, Buns-a-go-go, charming that gorgeous girl who sat crying with me the day I came back, sat there saying “devastating” and “blah blah”—I call it “blah blah” because those words are just words, words blah. And turns out she was crying because the guy, the one—you know, the one who is the inevitability, whose sperm will meet your egg, the one whose chemicals will turn your life into more life—he just upped and left, going blah fucking blah on her everything, just like the (everyone dying) thing.

  He is so casually, brilliantly flirtatious. He is a triumph, my Bunny, placing his hand above her head on the pillar she’s leaning against. Gareth is moving away, and I am sipping my drink and watching Bunny, and Gareth, I think, may have tried to pinch my arse, because the tittering girl has looked behind her in an annoyed way, and I see my reflection in her face, I see
my full worth there: she’s thinking “over the hill”—she’s thinking—bitch with feelings, she’s thinking “devastating”—and I raise my glass to her and turn away.

  We’re at this thing, and again the feeling of rootedness. It comes when I’m not in the middle of it all, when I’m on the sidelines and I’m sober or semisober, I suddenly feel how a tree feels. I suddenly feel—oh, shit, I can’t move—and I try, but my feet are just there, solid, lumpen rocks. Move forward, I tell them, and they do not. Stay still, then, I say, and look about to find some help—would it be ridiculous to seek help? This time, at this thing, I am more canny. I lift my empty glass to a waiter, I look him in the eye, and he moves forward with the champagne, filling the glass, flirting with his eyes. Would I? Of course, I think I’d have him against the pillar now—be easy enough. There’s no underwear. And if it made a baby, at least there’d be a baby, and I contemplate the whole making-of-a-baby process, but in front of the boss, in front of the boss’s wife, in front of my secretary, Ann, and the myriad others in this rainbow thing, all watching me fuck a waiter against a pillar, against the pillar Bunny leans against on the other side. I laugh when I think of my face, the face Bunny complains about, the face that thinks of fucking but is dead. The face that cannot lie in the dark, the one Bunny kisses and kisses when it cries, this dead face, the one that died when everyone died.

  Grey Hair is suddenly here.

  “Hello,” he says.

  “Hello,” I reply. “Have we met?” I want to be kind to him. He is still hunched.