Homesick Read online

  Basit takes his knife from his pocket—it is a single-flick knife, ebony handle, blade like silver—and presses the button. “Oi,” Bullseye says and looks straight at him. No trust between any of them.

  “It is all right,” Basit says. “Here, watch,” he says. He puts the knife into the gap and levers gently. A nail creaks against the wood. He can smell tea. He is transported briefly … and then back again, to this strange nether place. He can feel Bullseye’s breath on his mouth: the warmth disgusts him, he hates this boy-man, so small and useless, who stands still, stuck, like a ship waiting for Tower Bridge to open.

  Basit proposed to Rita by Tower Bridge. Rita was young, vibrant. His first wife had died in Sri Lanka the year before he came to England. His teenaged son, Ali, looked like he was becoming his father: skipping school to go to the cinema, quiffing his hair like Elvis, staying out late and drinking. They put him on a boat to England with an old friend of Basit’s. As if the last of him was eradicated from the island, as if they didn’t want a trace of him left to remind them. And then Rita came along, little Rita, with her curly hair and her Burger pale skin. She was Sri Lankan, a cousin of the friend who accompanied Ali to England. She cooked at a hotel in Fulham, brought home tasty treats for them both. Rita agreed to marry him the night England won the World Cup. As the city erupted they held close to each other: it seemed their city celebrated them, shouted for them, beeped their horns, and yelled for them.

  The last nail comes out of the box. Bullseye has said nothing. Basit levers up the nail and the lid comes off. There is newspaper on the top. He sees the date on The Times is 1944. Bullseye holds his breath. Basit pulls the paper off. Inside there are guns. Maybe ten or twelve.

  “German,” Bullseye breathes dramatically. Basit stares. He hates the sight of them, their liquorice lustre, their power to mesmerise. He reaches for a wrapped object and tears at the newspaper: it is a bottle of Johnnie Walker, Black Label, the lead seal intact. It looks old.

  “Hurry up,” Bullseye says. And suddenly Basit is all action, leaning into the crate, unpacking each weapon and resting it on the stairs. After each gun is lifted, he tries to unjam the crate. It is only when he takes out the last gun and then the bottle that the crate can be shoved back and forth. Eventually he pulls the crate upward, away from Bullseye, and then up the steps of the cellar.

  The boys at the Jamaican club got him this job. He tried to set up a proper gambling den with Jules, his Jamaican friend. But Jules was more interested in music, and Basit won too many times. Jules had a friend who knew the bosses. They asked Basit to come to their club on the Old Kent Road, watched him shuffle, deal. Hired him on the spot. Quick fingers, Freddie the Pony said. They couldn’t call him Quick Fingers, because there was a famous croupier up Golders Green way called that, a Jew boy. Basit thought he was in, but he was never really in, though if an outsider called him coon or nigger, they’d get it from one or other of the bosses. He was all sorts, yes, but he was theirs, too. And they were fair to their own. He had taken Ali with him on one job, lifting job, taking goods from one lockup to another, and Freddie and some others had given him a bag of chips, told him he was a good-looking boy. One of the bosses looked at him funny, so Basit asked Rita about jobs at the hotel. No funny stuff for Ali.

  As the box comes away Bullseye starts to yell. He’s not swearing at Basit, just swearing, shaking his feet, his hands. His voice is loud, so loud that Basit, who is supposed to be the lookout, doesn’t hear the key being tried in the lock. He has a habit of shifting the catch down on Yale locks from the inside. The key is being tried, and he only realises when people start swearing outside the door.

  “Terry,” he whispers fiercely. He pushes his hand down into the boy’s face.

  “Oh, fuck, oh fuck,” Bullseye says. “What about the back door?”

  Basit runs, grabbing a chair, fumbles with the bunch of keys to lock the door, and jams the handle with the chair. He runs back to the cellar steps. Bullseye is handling the guns. He looks up at Basit, and Basit sees how young he is, how frail.

  “What d’you think?” Bullseye says, pointing a weapon at Basit.

  “Put it back. Come on, put it back and come, will you?” It will take the others five minutes to get to the back of the building; they’ll have to go round the promenade of shops and down the alleyway at the back. They can make it out the front.

  “What, leave it here?”

  “Yes. Come on.”

  “Nah, mate. We may as well stay and be killed. Bosses will have us.”

  Basit and Bullseye wrap the guns in the newspaper. They look around for something to carry them in, and there is nothing. They were told to move a box, so they came in their suits with a Ford Anglia Estate that belongs to Bullseye’s dad. Basit is now sweating, but he is also cold. He suddenly hates the boy, Terry. Hates his whining and his surrender and his wilful waste of his life: why would he do this work in this country when he is white? He could be anything. He is inside the big, wide, gleaming world, and all he needs is education and to work hard. Basit’s hands shake. He hates the boy for his wasted opportunities, the way he hates his own banishment from the world where he could have been something if he hadn’t squandered it all.

  He puts the guns back into the crate, throws them in so they thud and fall like bodies. He takes the whisky and wraps it three, four times in paper, and places it on the top of the pile. He stops to listen: are they there at the back door? What can he hear? He’s not sure. He begins to lever the box by himself to the door. Bullseye is inanimate, and when the back door handle is tried, Bullseye wets himself.

  Rita, he thinks. Rita.

  He is at the front door, turning the latch, when they finally burst through the back door. Only two of them, but they’re big fellows.

  “Well, well,” one of them says. They don’t say anything more. One takes the box away from him, gently, politely. The other punches Bullseye, but there is a graciousness about the way he lets him fall back onto a chair. And so begins a long afternoon, where they are beaten, questioned, beaten again. They are both tied to chairs. Neither of them says anything. They have nothing to say: the information wanted is unknown by anyone but the bosses.

  He thinks of his other life, his good life.

  On a Friday, if he has the night off, he takes Rita out dancing to Jules’s club. She’s one of those Portuguese black Burgers, the sort his mother would call “fast.” In Sri Lanka, her family would have had a party every Friday and Saturday, cooking small eats all day and serving bottle after bottle of arrack. The baila music would be played by her uncles on guitars and drums and accordions, and they would sing and dance under the stars, in the garden. He could imagine her, the soul of her family: it was strange to them both that they had never known each other there, in Colombo—such a small place compared to London. But here they were each other’s, and here their dancing, to calypso beats, with stronger drinks and wilder friends, this was their own. Though they were both scared, they drove each other on, as if it made them bigger, as if the glass palace they wanted to enter, this great Britain, which hated them and found them dirty and disgraceful, would see them dancing through their windows and want to come out and join a more joyous, raucous party: because they were the new great.

  Rita, he thinks. That is all he thinks. Bullseye lies wasted and used on the floor of the club, bleeding from his face, which is mushed like a stubbed-out cigarette, his glass eye rolling gently under a chair. As he regains consciousness Basit sees the men are postcoital after their day’s activity and are resting at the bar. They have their backs to him. He is worn, too, and angry, with Bullseye and the men but mostly with himself. He gave up too easily. His hands are tied to the sides of his chair. He feels for his knife in his Chelsea boot and flicks it open. He easily slits the tufted rope from his left hand and, watching the backs of the men, he cuts the rope from his right hand. He has done it all silently. The gentle material fall of the rope is too loud for him, and he puts his hands back into the p
osition they were tied in. He gathers strength, thinks of the prayers of his youth, before he stopped going to the mosque. Recites one in his head and then, before finishing, he stands, walks swiftly to the men, stabs one, withdrawing the knife from muscle with effort, and then punctures the other before they have time to turn around. One swivels to him as if to ask for the time, and falls. The other says: “You fucking coon, fucking coon,” but slumps forward. He thinks it should take longer for someone to die. He turns to Bullseye. He seems dead. He kneels by his side.

  “Terry! Terry.” He prods his arm, pulls it back and forth. The boy opens his good eye. “Come on, we’ve got to go.”

  “I can’t,” the boy whines, “it feels like they’ve broken me legs.”

  “Come on, I’ll get you to the car, and we’ll get you patched up. Come on, now.”

  But the boy won’t try, won’t make any effort. Basit looks at him. Stands and looks around him and catches a glimpse of himself in the mirror again. His shirt is bloody, his suit torn; his face is swollen, bruised. The men lie dying or dead about him, and Bullseye moans. He can suddenly see clearly the life he is living. It isn’t shame that makes him plunge his knife into Bullseye’s heart. Not anger, either. Maybe nothing but the whining pettiness of the boy. Perhaps the line that he has to cross to do it is the line he crossed before: from the place he loved to the other side of the world.

  He takes the keys to Bullseye’s car, takes the bottle of whisky, and leaves.

  Two months later, after he thinks it is all over and done with, Freddie comes into Jules’s club, where he works intermittently, in between the hotel jobs.

  “No hard feelings, Allsorts,” Freddie says, shaking Basit’s hand, squeezing his shoulder. “But the bosses are wondering what happened to the bottle of whisky.”

  “The bottle of whisky?” Basit said. “Those men drank it. Then Bullseye got free. He untied me, and he ran them through with a knife. But there was a terrible fight, and they killed Bullseye. His last words were, ‘Run, Allsorts, run.’ So, I didn’t know what else to do. I ran,” Basit told Freddie. Freddie took that story back with him to the bosses.

  A few days later, Freddie came back. No one found the bottle there. That was 1930s whisky. The bosses were saving it. Expensive, best whisky.

  “What are you saying?” Basit asked.

  “Where is it?” Freddie said.

  “I’m a Muslim. I don’t drink. I don’t have the whisky,” Basit said. It stood, in a cupboard of their flat in Fulham, next to Rita’s London snow globe. The Tower, Big Ben submerged and glittering, as far from Basit now as they had always been.

  Rita called from work two days later. Ali had fallen down a lift shaft. A dreadful accident. He was at the hospital, but his neck was broken. Basit went to the hospital, identified the body. Funny thing, among Ali’s belongings was a miniature bottle of Johnnie Walker Black Label. The boy had never been a drinker.

  The bitterness of seeing Ali’s carcass never left Basit. Everything in the world dulled. When he thought of London, he thought only of the colour grey. Rita was already pregnant with their daughter, Jenny, and he went to work on the buses and then at the council. Freddie gave up with the clubs a year later, and Basit got him a job at the council, too. He was Freddie’s boss for twenty years, but he realised not even being a boss would let him in. He and Rita would always be on the outside, looking at it all: the beauty, the greatness. He had never had any idea why he kept the bottle. So many years later, when Jenny was a teenager and Rita dying of cancer, he gave the whisky to an acquaintance at a party. After all, he had paid for it. It was easy to give it away.

  The Clangers

  Her grandmother is the Soup Dragon, and they are the Clangers, she thinks as she wakes. Her mother goes out to work before Archee, the Soup Dragon, wakes Preethi and her brother. They walk about the cold house in housecoats made by Archee and slippers bought at the market. It is Preethi’s first day at nursery school today. Her mother has left written directions, and Archee will walk there with Mrs. Cullen from across the road. She has Darren starting today.

  Rohan, Preethi’s brother, talks loudly and without need of a reaction. The Soup Dragon, picking the cereal spoon up and plunging milky Weetabix into Rohan’s open, talking mouth, makes noises in the back of her throat in reply: “Hmm, hmm.” Preethi watches them both from her chair, solemnly, eyes wide. She likes her Archee, and Archee smiles her a quiet answer. Preethi picks up her oversized spoon and inserts the mash of wheat into her small mouth, feeling it spill to her chin, and leaving it there because Archee has heated the milk and it is warm. Yesterday the Clangers had visitors on their moon; it was spacemen, Rohan says, but they did not seem like visitors, because everything on that moon is normal and everything is also strange.

  They get dressed quickly, because of the cold. They have no central heating, and although it is April, just after the Easter holiday, it feels as if it will snow today, and there is icing on the inside of the windows. Preethi scrapes at it, reaching up above the Edwardian sill, taking black sooty dirt under her nail and wiping it on her trousers. Archee has watched her, and again the “Hmm, hmm, hmm.” She makes Preethi brush her teeth, admonishes Rohan into allowing his hair to be tugged and mauled with a brush. Rohan goes to the toilet, gets his coat. Preethi suddenly wants to go for number twos but is worried because her daddy is not here: he always washes her. Rohan says, “Preethi wants a jee-ya,” and Preethi starts to cry. Archee leads her to the toilet, and she sits there, looking at the man in the paint whom only she can see. When she is finished, she tries to wipe herself, but Archee walks in with a plastic jug of warm water and washes her just as well as her daddy.

  Archee ties Preethi’s pink fur hat on her head, does up her coat, buckles her red shoes. Rohan has already gone out the front door, as if it were not a portal into a large, frightening world but a simple step into a new day. He is sitting on the front wall. “Preethi!” he calls. “Preethi! I’ve decided this part here is my garden, and you can have that part.” He is pointing at the clusters of ugly yellow flowers on the opposite side of the front steps. Preethi says nothing. She waits behind the front door for Archee to put her mother’s old coat on. It is pale green with large cream plastic buttons. It is familiar, a friendly coat.

  Archee looks about for the keys, and Preethi notices the worn-out quality of her unsmiling face. Archee wraps a scarf about her neck, then takes it off and ties it about her head. Looking at herself in the hall mirror, she unties it again and wraps an end around her neck, around her head, and tucks the end back around her neck. She seems satisfied with this. “Come,” she says, and offers her hand to Preethi. Preethi stands and takes the hand, and Archee, patting her hand on the coat pocket where the keys are, pulls Preethi out into the day and single-mindedly closes the front door.

  Mrs. Cullen and Darren wait outside. Rohan has started to walk up the hill with Matthew, Darren’s brother. Matthew and Rohan are seven, old enough to lead the way. When they get to the top of the hill, they walk by themselves the rest of the way to school. Even though it was cold in the house, once they are halfway up the hill, Preethi feels the sun. She takes her pink hat off and hands it to Archee. Archee can’t take it because she is holding her bag and the skirts of her sari in her other hand. Mrs. Cullen does not speak, and Archee does not either. Preethi holds the hat as she walks. She and Darren walk in between Mrs. Cullen and Archee. She wants to say, “Isn’t it a funny thing that the spacemen came to the moon,” but she’s not sure if it is funny or if it is normal. Is it normal for people to go to the Clangers’ moon? They walk slowly, so when Preethi looks to the top of the hill, she sees Rohan hopping and scotching, and Matthew looking at bigger boys walking past.

  “That’s enough, Darren,” Mrs. Cullen says. Preethi looks sideways at Darren, and he is crying. She looks up at Mrs. Cullen’s face, and then up at Archee’s face, and Archee is looking solidly ahead. Preethi looks to where Archee looks, and they walk on, silently. At the top, Rohan says, “I’
m going. Bye!” and just runs down the road, away from her, away.… Rohan is Preethi’s first thought in the morning, her last conversation at night. She presses Archee’s hand with her fingers, and a surprise: Archee pulls her closer, clutches her hand tighter. They turn in the opposite direction and walk down toward town, where nursery is.

  •

  Darren cries and cries. Preethi waits until the teacher finishes talking to him. She waits, holding Archee’s hand. The two of them are silent as the other children bustle around them, and the mothers talk to each other and with loud voices say, “I’ve found your peg! Shall we hang your coat here?” Preethi wonders at their loud voices: do all other mummies talk in loud voices? Is it only her Ammi who talks quietly, feeding her and undressing her and reading to her as if they were friends, as if they were exchanging ideas?

  The teacher turns to her.

  “And this must be Pree-tti?” Archee moves her head from side to side with a small, puzzled smile.

  “This is your peg, dear,” the teacher shouts. Preethi places her hat on the top part of the peg, and Archee removes her coat and hangs it on the bottom part. The teacher has made a card with Preethi’s name on it, and under her name she has drawn a picture of an angel with a white dress, white wings, and yellow hair. The teacher says slowly to Archee, “Back at twelve fifteen.” She shows Archee her watch and says, “Twelve fifteen,” even slower.

  Archee waits outside the door and watches Preethi walk in and sit at a small table where blocks of glossy paper have been laid next to plastic pots of crayons, each standing in its own ray of sunshine. After the initial thrill of pure white paper and the huge chunks of unsullied coloured wax, Preethi looks around for Archee, but Archee’s face is not behind the glass at the front door.

  •

  Mr. Cullen is a plumber, always out and about, so when he gets back home for his elevenses and the school calls simultaneously to say that Darren needs to come home because he’s distraught, Mr. Cullen puts the paper down, sighs leisurely, finishes his fag, and tells the mother-in-law to tell Betty that he’s gone for Darren and should be back in fifteen minutes, mind, so coffee better be poured and ready, he’s got a twelve o’clock. At twelve fifteen, Archee is outside the glass doors, has to step backward for the doors to open, while the other mothers wait in the yard beyond. Preethi has drawn the Soup Dragon, in purples and oranges, even though the Soup Dragon is green on the television, Rose and Olive told her, but her television is black and white. (They said, “Is your telly black and white?” and she said it was brown, and they laughed, and explained, and she thinks they are now her friends, but they have already told her they are cousins and are each other’s friends. But Preethi is good at playing, and she knows secretly, she can be a cousin, too.)