Twenty-five

People are stirring, now. We’ll be landing soon. The businessmen across the aisle are closing their briefcases, click-click-click. They do it in unison, like a music-hall routine.

The little boy has woken up. He’s jabbering excitedly to his mother. Perhaps he’s going home. It’s been ten years since my children were taken away but I still don’t know what he’s saying. He’s talking too fast. Kids who speak in a foreign language, they seem so experienced, don’t they? Even little ones like him.

I can speak well enough to bargain in a bazaar, though. Mr Ajazuddin, one of the people I do business with, we rattle along. ‘That’s not your last price!’ I cry in Urdu, throwing up my hands orientally. ‘Bahut! Bahut repea!’ It’s a ritual we both enjoy, a sort of Pakistani foreplay before I produce my wallet and we climax in a flurry of paper-signing. ‘Ah,’ he sighs. ‘What a bargain you have, memsahib Wainwright.’ He snaps his fingers for a cold drink; exhausted, we sip our Pepsis.

My neighbour, the little boy’s mother, fishes for her high-heeled sandals and wriggles her feet into them. Then she turns to me and starts chatting. People always do, don’t they, near the end of a flight? If you talk earlier, you feel obliged to make conversation all the way. So you come awake at the end, and talk, and then you disembark, and at the luggage carousel you feel slightly shy, meeting each other standing up, like you feel when you’ve been swimming next to somebody in the public baths and you meet them later in the street, fully-dressed.

‘So you’ve visited Karachi before?’ she asks.

I nod. ‘Lots of times.’ I don’t mention my kids. I tell her the other reason. ‘I’ve got a little business in Kent. A shop. I import stuff from Pakistan.’

‘How interesting,’ she says, in a cocktail-party sort of way. She’s one of these well-bred Pakistanis you never really get to know, shiny and closed as a conker. ‘What goods?’

‘Old embroidery. Clothes. Wedding pieces from Sind and Baluchistan. Mirrorwork kurtas, that sort of thing. Brassware. Pan boxes.’

‘People want these things, in England?’

‘If you lived in England, you’d want them,’ I reply. ‘If you lived in Ashford.’

‘Ashford’s a dump.’ I said to Salim, all those years ago. Well, it was a bigger one now. They call it the boom town of the Southeast, and you know what boom town means.

‘A bit short on oriental mystery,’ I say.

‘Agar turn mujhe chorogi,’ said Salim, ‘main tumhe maar doonga aur phir apney aap ko.’ He had touched my cheek, his face close to mine. ‘If you ever left me. I’d kill, first you, and then myself.’

He’d had a good try, I’ll give him that. And left me for dead.

Funnily enough, now we’re about to arrive I feel quite calm. Numb, in fact. For hours my stomach has been churning. Stupid, isn’t it, when I’m going to see my own flesh and blood? My darlings.

My own flesh and blood, who betrayed me.

There’s thousands of questions I want to ask them, but one especially. I’ll never dare. And anyway, haven’t I betrayed them too?

I wish I knew what they thought, these two great strangers. Smooth and closed as conkers. I’m getting nervous again. ‘Don’t be an eejit,’ Sonia would say.

Sonia’s had a baby, did I tell you? Four months ago. She fucked a big black Radio Rentals bloke, who came to deliver her video. And, hey presto!

Easy, isn’t it? Easy-peasy.

I’ve got a video too, now. So many things have changed since my kids have been in England. People have got videos and phone cards. They’ve build a Texas Homecare where Stacey’s dad used to keep his pigs. I’ve given up smoking. More sorts of crisps have been invented, but my kids are probably too old to mind. Pot Noodles have come and gone. My dad—their grandad—has died from lung cancer. Russell Harty’s dead too; my mum loved him as well. But Mrs Thatcher’s still here. She’ll always be here. And I’m still married to Tom. Just about.

After the court case Salim wouldn’t let me see the children for a long, long time. Tom was right about his reaction. It was a gamble, and I lost. Terrible damage was done, to all of us. I won’t tell you what I went through, because you can imagine that.

Tom battled on with all the other cases, as well as mine. In the end, though, he despaired too. He felt he’d failed us. I told him it wasn’t his fault, it was mine, but we both knew the damage was done. Neither of us admitted it, of course. In the end he gave up his practice in London and set up an office in Ashford. It’s near Talacre Road, where Salim and I had our flat. But I haven’t told him that.

In a dream I’m digging a trench. Above me is a row of kids in yellow T-shirts. They’re standing on the rim. They’re black kids—West Indian black, I think. I don’t recognize any of them. And then, as I go on digging, the edge of the trench starts to crumble. I try to shout, to warn them, but no sound comes out of my mouth.

The trench walls collapse. But instead of falling in, the kids take to the air. Off they all fly, with a curious noise as if somebody’s shaking silver foil. They’re making that noise in their throats, helping themselves along.

And then I realize that the earth is falling in on me, where I’m standing in the ditch. But it doesn’t hurt at all.

There’s so much to tell you. There’s so much stuff. About when I started up the business, for instance, and came to Karachi. I hadn’t seen the kids for nearly two years by then. But when I arrived in Pakistan I worked on Salim’s mother, I appealed to her as a woman; it took a long time but I managed to fix a visit. I didn’t see Salim—I never saw him—but from then onwards I came to Karachi twice a year and saw Yasmin and Bobby. In hotel rooms, those sorts of places. It was the only thing that kept me going. I hope it meant something to them, too. I could never ask them. There was so much I couldn’t ask. Practically everything. Every question was too painful. So you end up asking, ‘What did you have for dinner last night?’

Once, when I phoned from England, this gruff voice came on the line. For a moment I thought I was speaking to a stranger. Then I realized it was Bobby, and his voice had broken, without me.

There’s so much to say. I don’t know what you want to hear. What can I say about all those years? They passed. I’ll tell you how this whole thing started, why I’m flying to Karachi tonight.

Yasmin has grown up, that’s why. It was her eighteenth birthday a few months ago. I had been waiting for this moment for ten long years, the only light at the end of our tunnel. I knew I had to wait until my children were old enough to come back, of their own free will. Once you’re eighteen you can do what you like, you’ve come of age. That was my only hope.

Yasmin has grown up artistic. Heaven knows where she got her talent—not from either of us, that’s for sure. She had done a diploma course in Karachi, but she wanted to go on to do Graphics, like her Uncle Aziz. I had investigated Canterbury College of Art—they had a good Graphics department there. I had got them to send her a prospectus; I had got her to send them her portfolio. I told her not to let her father know—not until her birthday. This was my plan, my gamble, and this time I was determined to win.

Shortly after her birthday, Salim phoned. I remember exactly what we were doing, that evening. I was squatting on the living-room floor of the cottage, unpacking a bale of kurtas—sort of tunic things.

‘Phew,’ said Tom. ‘Bit whiffy, aren’t they?’

‘They’re antiques!’ I said.

‘Something’s certainly authentic.’

The doorbell rang. It was Marjorie Something, a loud, horsey woman. She ran the East Kent Rural Trust, and she wanted him to chair some meeting about a new development—some new housing estate or something. Probably Salim’s old firm was building it.

‘We’ve got the facts on the threatened pondlife,’ she whinnied. ‘Great Crested Newt and so on.’

‘I’m in court all morning,’ he said. ‘Why don’t you drop in after lunch? You know where I am—between Tescos and Allied Carpets.’

She brayed. ‘Sounds like one of the circles of Purgatorio Dante forgot about.’ Pretentious old bat.

‘The whole of Kent will be soon,’ he said, ‘if we don’t get a move on.’

She gleamed at him, showing her teeth. ‘You’re a treasure!’

He saw her out. When he came back, I said, ‘It’s the Great Crested Tom she’s got her eye on.’

‘She hasn’t!’

‘It’s you who’s an endangered species. Nice heterosexual bloke, all in working order, under sixty, does the washing-up. Half the women in Kent are pretending the High Speed Rail Link’s going through their back garden, just to get you round.’

He sighed. ‘Wish you felt like that.’ He poured us a drink. ‘Trouble is, your mother likes me. Women’s mothers have always liked me. It’s a death knell.’

I remember everything we said that evening. My senses were alert; my skin tingled. I knew something was going to happen; it was only a matter of time. I remember looking at Tom, as he sipped his whiskey. He was ageing well; good stock, of course. A distinguished touch of grey around his temples, but not an ounce more flesh on him. There was just a strained look around his eyes, as if he was squinting against the sun, searching the horizon for a train that never came.

He put down his glass. I knew he wanted to talk but I didn’t want to hear it. And just then the phone rang.

I rushed over and picked it up. It was Salim.

‘Marianne?’ he said.

My heart thumped. I hadn’t heard his voice for years.

‘How are you?’ he asked.

What the hell did he expect me to answer? ‘Fine,’ I said.

‘I’m flying to London on Thursday,’ he said. ‘Do you think we could meet?’

I dreamed that night that I was trying to board a bunder boat in Karachi harbour. The plank kept rocking. Bobby was sitting on the boat, with his back to me. He was wearing dirty white shalwar-kamize pyjamas, and smoke drifted up from his cigarette. When had my son started smoking? Behind him the sky was stained red; the oily water swelled and subsided. I tried to call his name but no sound came.

And then he turned around and looked at me. He wasn’t Bobby at all; he was the pock-marked man who sold nuts in Empress Market. I woke. I’d stuffed the edge of the duvet into my mouth, and I was sucking it like a baby.

‘And tell Elaine I don’t know when I’ll be back,’ I said, flustered. Elaine was the girl who ran the shop for me. ‘Does this look all right?’

It was early Thursday morning. Tom was sitting in bed, and I was opening the wardrobe and trying on various clothes.

‘Why do you have to go?’ he asked.

‘And that woman—forgotten her name, split veins—she’s coming for her cushions … oh, I think I’ll wear my black skirt.’ I zipped it on, hopping on one leg. I was dead nervous. ‘Oh, and that bloke’s delivering the lawnmower—’

‘Why can’t you just talk on the phone?’

‘But he’s mended it, he’s got to deliver it—’

‘Not him,’ said Tom. ‘Salim. Don’t see why he’s got to summon you like this. Bloody cheek.’

‘Something’s wrong,’ I said. ‘Perhaps he’s going to get married again. He’s going to marry a marine biologist and they’re all going to live in Australia and the kids’ll love her better than me.’

‘You’ll make yourself ill again,’ he said. ‘Doesn’t he understand what he’s doing? Still, he’s always been an impulsive chap, hasn’t he?’

‘Wonder what he’ll look like?’ I said, pausing in front of the mirror. My face was flushed.

‘Fatter,’ said Tom. ‘All those curries.’

And then I heard the crunch of gravel outside; my cab had arrived.

I went to the station and took the train up to London. The moment I stepped into the carriage everything was wiped from my mind—my husband, the cottage, the past eight years. It was as if they had never happened. It scared me rigid. I tried to concentrate on the face of my kids, like you concentrate on the face of some beloved pet before you go to have your teeth drilled. Trouble was, I could only picture them when they were young. Their teenage faces were confused with my dreams—I dreamed about them most nights, and usually in some unlikely setting. They kept dissolving back into the kids I’d brought up, back in Harebell Close.

I arrived in London, and took a taxi to Salim’s hotel. It’s better, arriving in a cab; if gives you confidence. The Kensington Hotel was a white, stucco cliff above me, rearing up. Was he watching from one of the windows? It was chilly for June. I shivered in my pink sweater. I told myself: I’m thirty-eight, I’m a mature woman. What can he do to me now?

I went into the lobby. My guts had turned to water and I had to use their toilet. Shaking, I stood in the cloakroom. I tried to reapply my lipstick but my hand wouldn’t stay still. I looked in the mirror. My bleached hair had grown out a lifetime ago; I had a brown bob, to my shoulders. Maybe he wouldn’t recognize me. How could he possibly harm me? What else was left for him to do?

‘Come in,’ his voice said. I opened the door and went into his room.

He was standing at the window, with his back to me. He looked like a stranger. He could be a consultant who was about to tell me that the growth was malignant.

He turned. ‘Hello,’ he said, stepping forward.

‘Hello.’

For a moment we hesitated. Were we going to shake hands? We paused, and stood there awkwardly.

Two things jolted me. How handsome he was—beautiful, really, the bastard—and how little he had changed. His shiny black hair had receded, that was all. More of his polished forehead showed. He wore a blue, open-necked shirt and pale trousers; he looked quite casual, for Salim. But then I didn’t know him anymore, did I?

‘Sorry it’s early,’ he said, ‘but …’

‘It doesn’t matter.’

‘I’m going to visit Aisha and I’ve got a bit of business to do. Then I have to go back to Karachi.’

‘When?’

‘Tomorrow,’ he said.

I sat down on a chair. ‘They’re great,’ I said.

‘What?’

‘Her kids. Aisha’s. I saw them last month.’

‘Ah.’

There was a silence. Then he said: ‘Would you like some coffee?’

‘Yes, please.’

He went to the phone. I got up and looked around the room.

‘Coffee for two,’ he was saying. ‘Room 607. Thank you.’

He put the phone down. I stood beside the TV, fiddling with a leaflet. It had a list of video films on it.

‘Wow, you can get films and everything,’ I wittered. ‘Arthur 2. Roger Rabbit. You seen it?’

He shook his head. There was a pause.

Then I asked: ‘How are they?’

‘Fine.’

‘I spoke to Yasmin last week, but Bobby was out.’

‘He’s in the junior tennis team at the Gymkhana Club,’ he said. ‘Did he tell you?’

I shook my head.

‘When he can spare time from his beloved computer,’ said Salim. ‘A real video-age kid.’

‘Not a kid anymore,’ I said.

‘No.’

There was another pause. I went on fiddling with the leaflet.

‘I heard your father died,’ I said.

He nodded.

‘So has mine,’ I told him.

‘Oh,’ he said. ‘Good old Frank. I’m sorry.’

‘They didn’t tell you?’

He shook his head.

‘Well,’ I said, ‘they hadn’t seen him for years.’

‘No.’ Salim cleared his throat. ‘I really wanted to talk to you about Yasmin.’

‘What’s happened?’ I asked, alarmed.

‘I just wanted to ask your advice.’

‘My advice!’

He sat down on a chair. I stayed standing. ‘You see, she’s being very …’ He stopped. ‘Bobby’s easy, he’s just a chap. We understand each other. But Yas.’ He pushed the ashtray away. ‘She doesn’t know what she wants.’

‘What does she want?’ I asked.

He looked up. ‘I think you know that. You wrote to her about the art school.’

‘What about it?’

‘She’s so confused. One minute she wants to stay in Karachi, the next minute she wants to come here. Something’s up.’

‘Well, I wouldn’t know, would I?’ I said. ‘I haven’t seen her since October.’

‘I think she ought to stay in Karachi.’

‘Look, she’s half-English!’

‘She’s happy there,’ he said. ‘She’s lots of friends. Since Benazir Bhutto, it’s a transformed country; it’s much more liberal—’

‘She obviously doesn’t think so.’ I took a breath, trying to gather my strength. My plan had worked, but now I was here in this feminine bedroom, with its flounced, flowery curtains and Salim sitting there, I needed to concentrate. I sat down on the other side of the table. ‘Look, why do you make her feel guilty?’ I asked him. ‘Hasn’t she had enough of that?’ I took another breath. ‘Salim. She’s grown up. Look, you can’t paint, I can’t paint. She can. She’s separate. Let her do what she wants!’

He looked up. ‘You’ve been influencing her.’

‘What the hell do you mean?’ I shouted. ‘Eight years and I’ve hardly bloody seen her, you stole her from me—’

‘I didn’t! The court decided that—’

‘I’ve lost their whole childhood, my own kids! You stole their childhood from me!’ My voice rose, I couldn’t stop myself. ‘Can you imagine what it’s been like? Never putting them to bed, never taking them to school, never knowing their friends, never making their supper, never even quarrelling with them? Never touching them? Never touching them? My own kids? God, I’ve hated you!’

There was a frozen silence. Just then there was a tap at the door.

‘Come in,’ said Salim.

A maid came in with a tray of coffee things.

‘Thank you,’ said Salim.

She put them down on the table; we moved back politely, to give her room. Then she went out.

There was a long pause. We didn’t touch the coffee.

Then I spoke, more gently. ‘Please let her come.’

I gazed at him. I had to try a new tack; I had to unlock something in him, something I unlocked all those years ago.

‘Don’t you remember?’ I said. ‘Can you remember? You were young and rebellious once. You said your parents were stuffy and old-fashioned, you longed to get away. They disapproved, just like you’re disapproving now.’

He nodded. ‘Of course I remember.’

‘I thought you would.’

We sat there in silence. I was breathing heavily. The room was so stuffy; I was sweating like a pig.

Finally he spoke. ‘I’ve tried to be a good father,’ he said.

‘I’m sure you have.’

‘I didn’t want to live at home. Not really.’ He turned the sugar bowl round and round in his hand. We weren’t looking at each other. ‘I could’ve got married,’ he said. ‘There’ve been, well, lots of friends, family friends; they brought their daughters for tea …’

‘I bet they did.’

‘But I thought it would be bad for the kids. Confusing for them.’ He stroked the rim of the sugar bowl. Down in the street, a car hooted. The double-glazing made it seem a long way off. ‘All these years,’ he said, ‘I’ve been looking after my parents, and the kids … The way my father lived—the Rotary Club, the Sind Club, the dinners … oh, those dinners! I seem to have spent my whole life at the Holiday Inn, shaking hands with somebody’s uncle who wants a bit of business put his way.’ He looked at me. ‘It’s so boring!’

There was a silence. ‘You want your kids to only know that?’ I asked. Then I took a breath, and spoke urgently. ‘Let them come! Let Bobby come too.’

‘Bobby?’

‘He’ll keep her company, he’ll keep an eye on her. He’ll love it. You loved England—well, let them find out for themselves! He can come to a sixth-form college for a year—just a year!’ I looked at him, breathlessly. He was gazing at me. ‘Let them come, Salim. But let them come freely. With your blessing.’

He didn’t reply. We sat there, on either side of the table, gazing at each other over the cooling coffee pot.

That night in bed I put my arms around Tom, pulling him against my bare skin. I squeezed my eyes shut and wrapped my leg around his thigh. He grunted with surprise; we hadn’t made love for weeks. I slid my tongue into his mouth.

The mattress creaked as I moved him over. I slid my hand down, under the duvet, and cupped his balls. They felt loose and cool. I held his cock, and stroked it. It stayed soft in my hand.

He spoke into the darkness. ‘Seems like you’ve fallen in love with him all over again.’

I jerked back. ‘I haven’t!’ Then I said: ‘I only want to get my kids back.’ He didn’t reply. I rolled off him, and we lay there in the blackness.

It worked. Now she was eighteen, Yasmin could legally come anyway—but I knew she wouldn’t come without her father’s blessing. She’d been brought up as a dutiful Pakistani daughter. She’d needed him to approve. And he had. I had persuaded him.

There was a phone call and some letters. The arrangements were made. Two months later, and I’m coming to fetch them home.

The ‘No Smoking’ sign has come on. I look out of the window, into the black night. With a bump, we land on Pakistani tarmac.

‘Please keep your seat-belts fastened,’ says the pilot’s voice, ‘until the plane has come to a complete standstill.’ He has a faultless British accent.

You might wonder why I’ve come all this way to fetch them. If you were the Pakistani woman I’d just say it was a buying trip.

I’m coming to fetch them because, now I’ve got them, I can’t bear to be a moment without them. I want to be with them, freely, in Karachi. I want us to spend one more day in this hot, dusty city that I’ve grown to know so well. That I’ve hated so violently, but that has become more dear to me than anywhere on earth.

I want to help them with their suitcases, like a real parent, and I want to sit next to them on the plane all the way back to England. We can talk, or we needn’t talk at all. We can sit side by side, the three of us, with our plastic dinner trays. I can fiddle with their headphone dials so they can hear the film. I can be a mother.