Homesick Page 8

  “You don’t have to be a tourist, Jen,” he says.

  “Let’s not talk about it,” she says.

  “Why? Why not?” She does not say anything. He drives up the last hill, in a culvert cut through orange cliffs. He knows at the top there will be the first sight of the ocean, navy and straight, the dash of a child’s loaded paint brush across this white day. They are on their way back to Sur. They will soon be passing the Sur lagoon, where young men play football at dusk. Sometimes he plays football with the office crowd in a park in Muttrah, a rowdy, good-humoured game where often he finds himself floored by a handsome Omani who picks him up and slaps his back. Football is the language here—even in the desert, a Bedouin served them coffee in a Beckham shirt. He could teach Lucas, he thinks, and then smiles at his optimism. “Shall we stop for a drink?” he asks, pointing to the hotel on the lagoon. Its door stands open invitingly. The tide is receding, and here the water is yellow with silt and glinting around the already stranded dhows lying on their sides.

  “Lucas is still asleep,” she says.

  “We can leave him in the car. It’s safe here. We can sit over there, look,” he says, pulling in through the gates. In England he is never so decisive. In England Jenny tells him where to park.

  “OK,” she says.

  They sit at the table, and he drinks a mango lassi, and she drinks lime juice through a delicate, opaque straw. Everything about her looks taut, as if about to break. They are Mike and Jenny, Jenny and Mike, who hold hands and drink in pubs by the river.

  “Please, Jenny?” he says. And just this question brings it all pouring out, the misgivings, the resentment, the torture of leaving her by herself in England, the “I will never …” that she has stored up for this occasion, the quiet reflection after the tears, the talk of divorce. And he hears it all, but it is as if it is something that can be dealt with in the morning, on a fresh day, like a bad Excel spreadsheet that has come in at five thirty. Tomorrow it will seem easier, and when she has finished her drink and takes off her sunglasses to really look at him (a technique he is wise to), he only says, “Oh, my, you are lovely,” and she smiles, she—smiles. At least, she smiles.

  Just down the road, he can see the men pulling up in their cars, in shorts and vests and mirrored shades. They don’t wear shoes but slip swiftly over the rocks onto the lagoon bed. Lucas’s scream, “My egg!” he greets calmly, and Mike walks steadily to the car, takes his son from his seat and the yoghurt pot from the front, and they stay for another drink and watch the sunset game.

  •

  Jenny wakes up abruptly on the beach. She watches a bird fly out across the waves. It has come to her, the sudden idea. It does not make her lift her head from the towel. She lies there, still, and thinks—if he is to drown Lucas, he must do it soon. Now. I will give him this moment.

  Just as suddenly as the idea has come, it becomes anathema, and she sits up, curling her legs beneath her. She feels the breath judder into her, her head twitching to the side. In the distance, Mike and Lucas walk along the sea edge, hand in hand, looking down at the water. They stop to silently watch an Omani family in the sea. A father struggles with a ball against the tide, and two boys run in and out of the water. She hears the boys’ laughter, and she turns away.

  •

  On their last day, they stop in Muttrah. He has taken them to the Grand Mosque and round the Sultan Qaboos University campus, should she be tempted to take up the provisional teaching post he has begged for. He drove past the International School. He did not need to point it out. She saw it: he saw her head turn.

  They sit at a juice bar opposite the bay, fanning themselves with menus, the heat swabbing them, getting between them. Will she launch into another tirade? Not yet. She sips. He hears the sigh.

  “You see, what I’m afraid of …,” she says. Here it comes. “You see me as some kind of catalogue bride. Bring me out here and I’ll facilitate for you. I’ll look after your fucked-up son …” His fucked-up son is playing with an ugly, black street cat under the next table. “… and be waiting at home with my sexed-up clothes under my hijab …” And so she goes on. He waits silently for her to finish. She can see his jaw twitch in patient frustration. “I don’t want to talk about it anymore,” she finishes.

  “Have you thought,” he says suddenly, “that Lucas may benefit—” But she does not let him carry on. Off again, the het-up, angry words, female and hot. He talks over them: “Maybe a new country … maybe it is not stepping backward. Maybe a new culture … Maybe you’ll be free to be you …” But Jenny does not see the new culture, the new life. She sees a turtle, in a hole, flapping its back flippers to bury its eggs, its head nodding this way and that in exhaustion. She sees the lady at the next table, her hijab-ed head nodding this way and that.

  “No, Mike. I can’t. I can’t be trapped …,” but as she says it, she thinks of the turtle climbing out of her hole, walking down to the foam, swimming out to sea.

  “Oh, Jen. I hate to say it, but you have got to—shut up!” He sees she is shocked. He has spoiled her, being so polite, so gentle. “I’m sorry, but you have to listen.” She will not, and she stumbles up, he knows in tears, and takes Lucas’s hand roughly, so that as he stands, he glances his head against the corner of the table. He shouts and begins to cry, but a painful, ordinary child’s cry.

  “Be quiet, Lucas,” she says in anger, and Lucas is quiet. She starts to march away, pulling at his wrist. Lucas drags back, and they tug at each other.

  Lucas says, “I want Daddy. I want to stay with Daddy.” Mike takes three Omani real from his wallet and tucks them under the ashtray. He picks up Lucas’s rucksack and takes his hand. Lucas shakes Jenny away.

  They walk back into the soukh, Jenny ahead of them. Around them, men offer pashminas, perfume. The smoke of frankincense carries them through.

  “You know you’re going on the aeroplane tonight, don’t you?” Mike says.

  “Yes. Can you check my egg?” It is a ritual now. Where is the egg? It is in the main pocket on the right side. It is in the dark, under your muslin. Mike opens the bag, makes a pantomime one-eyed probe, and Lucas giggles. Jenny has disappeared around a corner into the gold soukh. He saw which way she went, but he is in no hurry to find her.

  “Lucas. So you know you’re going home, don’t you?” He wants to appeal to the logic in the child, make it easier, the way things were made easier when he was a child, by teachers at boarding school.

  “Yes,” Lucas says. But unexpectedly he says, “And when will you come for us?”

  “Come for you?”

  “Yes,” Lucas says. “When?” And he has learnt that use of a deep, direct look into Mike’s eyes.

  “I don’t want you to go,” Mike says, and he looks away, toward Jenny.

  •

  At the airport, they are dreadfully alone. Mike has kissed Lucas again and again, and Lucas has kissed Mike tenderly and carefully. Jenny allows him to kiss her cheek. It is night, almost ten. Lucas is tired as Mike picks him up, holds his full length against him as if to memorise it. Lucas walks backward through the security doors. Jenny looks back once, sees Mike brush a tear away. She and Lucas have to become a team again. She pushes the trolley, and he carries his rucksack. She tries to check in, but they have not opened the desk yet, so she sits Lucas on the trolley and they wait, watching the men and women in their flowing robes. She is grateful for the air conditioning, the vacuum of the airport. An Omani manager is kind and beckons them to a different desk. The bags are on the conveyor belt when Lucas says, “My turtle.” It is a low-pitched gurgle of a noise.

  “Did you pack these bags yourself?”

  “Yes.”

  “Mummy,” he whispers. “My turtle.”

  “Lucas,” she says sharply. “Wait!” She has learnt that his feelings are not always precious, and that he will not break.

  “Did anyone ask you to carry any packages for them?”

  “No,” she says, talking to both of them. Lucas
looks as if he needs the toilet. “Do you need to go?”

  “Yes,” he says urgently. “Mummy, my turtle. It’s hatching. It is.”

  The man at the desk smiles at Lucas.

  “It isn’t, Lucas,” she says chattily. She wants to get through this, get back to England, and the cold and dark, which make her safe. The taxi is booked to meet their flight. The old shuffling George, who takes them to Lucas’s appointments, will be there, white bristles on his cheeks, hair unkempt and the black anorak pervading smoke and Fisherman’s Friends. Lucas jumps from one foot to the other. He is going red.

  “He needs toilet?” the man says.

  “I think so.” She is embarrassed, the way she always is, in a matter-of-fact, my-child-is-special-needs way.

  “Go—go,” he says with a smile, and points toward the lavatories across the hall. She takes Lucas’s hand roughly, and they go through the double doors.

  “See?” Lucas says, unzipping his rucksack. Inside, clambering over his muslin, his colouring pencils, and his shells is a small black creature. It is comical, its head bobbing about, and it tries to climb up the black nylon interior. Its eyes look up at her, and Jenny yelps. Someone is coming in. Jenny pulls Lucas into the toilet and locks it.

  “Oh, God, what are we going to do?”

  “I want to take him home,” Lucas says stoutly. He slides to the floor with the bag on his lap. Jenny looks at him and sees Mike. She thinks of Mike carrying the yoghurt pot through Oman, and it makes her cry, the suddenness of the turtle’s appearance. Oh, Mike, she thinks.

  “We have to take him home,” Lucas whines. He is looking at Jenny, the way he looks at her when she is to say no—no, Lucas, we can’t.

  “Take him home? Where to?” she asks him. She will not say no.

  “To the beach, of course,” he says. She was sure he meant his little room, with its dinosaur mural and plastic animals on the floor.

  “Lucas! We’re just about to get on a plane! We’re going home!”

  “No! Jenny.” He calls her Jenny in moments of crisis, like an old man, like a friend. “We need to take him to his beach.”

  “Lucas …” As Lucas begins to shout, she realises she had never imagined a time when Mike was not part of her, when she was simply Jenny again.

  She calls Mike from the desk, but he is not home. She cannot remember his mobile number in her fluster. She takes the bags off the conveyor belt, tells the man they are not going. They fight their way out of security, and all the while Lucas laughs and is manic, allowing his rucksack to be held safely by his mother while he runs up and down the concourse, skidding on his knees, getting in the way of busy men and tourists. It is nearly midnight. She should take a cab, but instead she goes to a desk and hires a car.

  She asks the man for a map, pays by credit card, loads the bags in with no help from anyone, straps the rucksack into the seat next to Lucas. “You do not touch him, understand? You allow him air to breathe, but you do not touch him, OK?”

  “I won’t hurt him—”

  “Lucas. I’m warning you … what did the man do when you saw the baby turtle?”

  “He guided him down the beach with his torch.”

  “Exactly. We will do the same.”

  “At Ras Al Jinz?” Lucas’s eyes are wide, excited.

  “No. I don’t know,” she says. “We’ll ask Daddy.”

  •

  They stand at Ras Al Haad, watching the sea. Lucas’s shoulders still heave from the crying, and the singing of the muezzin is unexpected and disturbs them. The sun will come up soon. Lucas holds Mike’s hand, and Jenny stands apart from them. It will take time, she thinks. And later, months and years later, when Lucas and her daughters are willowy and stand tall next to her, she thinks of this moment, on this beach, as the moment of knowledge. The moment she covered what was exposed. The moment she opened what was shut away.

  Sophocles’s Chorus

  At Cassie’s party, Preethi stood and watched Ollie, the beautiful boy-man, golden, crisp from their day in the sun—all of them ringed with blurred lines of sweaty light as day transformed to evening and then to night. His hair was short but out of shape, in need of a cut, its thick fronds jutting out from behind his ears. She had talked to him once before today, at the cast party for Midsummer, when Freddie and Preethi had been the glorious two, the ones to watch, comedic and loud-mouthed on stage, gangly and shy in a corner of the party where others kissed and drank and sang around them. Ollie had joined them, sat quietly with them, told Freddie how great he was, adding, “You, too,” to Preethi, with a simple twinkle.

  Today they were aware of each other, as Freddie’s friends. They were aware of each other’s sexuality, too. It is the way it happens at their teenaged parties: eyes meet, few words, but mouths fall on each other after a preparatory glass of wine, and if the beanbag fondling goes well and you’re a softy and he’s a softy, you’ll be walking through Dulwich Village holding hands soon enough. If it goes even better, and a condom is found or you are one of those miraculous girls who has put herself on the pill for such an occasion, and penetration has been achieved on the bundle of coats in a bedroom, then you may be walking through the village clutching books to your chest as he walks with you, smoking behind sunglasses. Definitely not soft; serious, to the point of a small death, serious. Preethi was aiming for the second status with Ollie. His beautiful face, his knowing eyes, his wiry arms too tight for his school uniform shirt, the way he smoked a fag that remained pinned to his lips as they played football in the field, his right eye strained closed at once to deflect the smoke and aim the ball to score yet another goal. He played barefoot. When they had a grass fight later, they both played dirty, rugby tackling, holding each other down, intimate, knowing; knowing nothing of each other.

  They had played on the rugby field, opposite the boardinghouses just below the tollgate. Then Cassie said her parents were expecting them all at their house in the village. There had been some argument among the girls and some of the Hong Kong boarders, because Judi’s parents were also expecting them, and the large group divided into scientists and artists, the soon-to-be medics and engineers walking off toward Alleyn Road with Judi and the rest of them sauntering slowly, pushing their bikes with their sweaters slung over shoulders. One or two of the girls walked barefoot in the dusk, Ollie and Freddie and Preethi lagging behind, enjoying the peace of the huge buildings of the college. The first group up ahead went in through the gates of Blew House: J.D. needed to pick his camera up from his bedroom. They took the detour through into the courtyard at the back of Blew and walked into the car park and then across to the playing fields in front of the college.

  “Will you miss it?” Preethi asked Freddie. He stared up at the red and black bricks, the shining windows, the whole building, burnished and pompous.

  “No,” he said, and turned away, shrugging. There was an element of Freddie that no one could really know, Preethi thought.

  Cassie had spent the last two years studying and, having done seventh term, was off to Magdalene to read medicine. She was that sort. Preethi and her friends thought her rich, spoilt even, but felt sorry for her, for she was on a trajectory that would never give her the self-knowledge and peace that they knew already—the peace that came from failing a little, failing enough for highly strung parents and teachers not to have too high expectations. Cassie had never had a party in her house (neither had Preethi, but for different reasons). When they had arrived at the front gate, Cassie had looked about her at them all, worried, Preethi could see, and unable, because she lacked experience, to make the self-deprecating joke, the easy “Don’t break anything” or “It’s all inherited,” that others in the same position would have. Cassie’s father was a banker from up north, and sometimes her cut-glass was muddied with a Yorkshire smudge: everything in front of them was self-made, not effortless, paid for with resentment and sweat and pride.

  The white house was three storeys tall. One of Cassie’s friends, Suzie, had once told a
hushed sixth-form common room that she had delivered maths homework to Cassie, lying in bed with shingles in a flat of her own at the top of the house: “She has a little red sofa, and a kitchenette with a toaster and a kettle and a mini fridge!” Preethi and the other girls looked at one another, standing outside the white house, and wondered which one of them would ask to see the flat. When they went up the stairs into the hall, Cassie nervously volunteered a walkabout tour of the house but refrained from showing them her quarters.

  When they walked into the basement kitchen, their supper had been laid out on gold-rimmed white plates: slivers of ham and tomato salad and crusty baguettes and pâté and cheese. And a case of wine. They all gasped, and Cassie looked embarrassed. The tour upstairs had already made her falter: glass-fronted bookcases in the library, the wood-panelled sitting room, each shrinking her more. Preethi, in the spirit of the day, linked her arm with Cassie’s.

  “It’s all right, posh girl. We’ll still talk to you on Monday,” she whispered, and Cassie squeezed her arm closer.

  Ollie sauntered into the kitchen, picked up bread and cheese, and ate it as if it were a normal moment in his day.

  He stood now, in the dark, with a bottle of beer on the veranda, and lit another cigarette. Freddie and Preethi were in the kitchen with the others, Freddie with his back to the French doors, Preethi facing him, joining in the conversation, allowing Freddie to stare at her. Occasionally she would look at him, then blur her gaze beyond him, as if to stare into the distance, understanding his need to drink her in, as she watched Ollie.