Akram's War Page 19

  ‘I put Britney on his couch and undressed her. He looked at the baby’s thigh for about one second, turned her over, ran his eyes over her and shook his head. “Nothing to worry about, Miss Booth, just keep an eye on her.”

  ‘On the way home, I put credit on my phone.’

  Grace nudges up to me for comfort. There is a bottle of water on the bedside table; I use it to wet the dried tea towels around her neck. She screeches at the cold water but keeps still. Slowly I peel away each layer, exposing a small clotted triangular wound bordered by multiple grazes. Like a child she gazes at me, grateful.

  I settle back so that we’re now lying side by side. Taking a lock of her hair, I twist it between my fingers until it pulls her scalp. She grits her teeth, unwilling to vocalize her pain.

  She kicks away the duvet, her legs rubbing against one another like scissor blades. She pulls her nightdress up to her waist, exposing the dark hairy triangle of her cunt. It might be an invitation but it amplifies her vulnerability. It cheapens her in some way. At the same time, I am grateful. It is an offer to my ego. She knows I won’t act on it, and so do I.

  Closing my eyes, I remember the moment when the cane vendor pulled the trigger. A slow-motion spark at the tip of his rifle. My knee buckles underneath me and I fall, and before I hit the dusty ground, I see a shower of glass tumblers ping into the air, and the flimsy wooden cart fall to pieces, and the cane vendor himself pinned to the spot with fire, peppered by Lieutenant Lovell and what remained of his troop. Trigger-happy ISAF and thousands of rounds of 7.62. ISAF hated to lose.

  Lieutenant Lovell was in love with Second Lieutenant Coates. She was a Black Country lass and had a soft spot for me, for Adrian too. Lovell, engrossed in his wireless conversation with his lover, had let Adrian and me detach ourselves from the troop and felt bad. You look after your own in Terry country, and that, combined with his soppy state of mind, meant that the worst he would say was that after the shock of Adrian’s death I’d had a moment of temporary insanity. I had paid for it too, with my knee, or so read his report. Recommend honourable discharge. With that, a wodge of compensation was credited to my bank account.

  I was in rehab for months. They depressed me, the cheerful amputees and flirty nursing staff. I mourned Adrian and blamed myself. I was the sergeant, and although Lovell’s report was kind, I knew I had been reckless and led him into danger. I lived mostly in a daze, lost day to day in my own self-recriminations, and so, when finally I came to leave rehab, naturally I went home with my parents.

  They had fixed me a bed in the guest room downstairs, but I wasn’t having that. I managed to hobble up and down the stairs. It was really only then, through the enforced exercise, that I learnt, albeit with my own peculiar gait, to walk again. I was tricked, but I was complicit, if not as a participant then at least as a silent observer. I had returned for want of a warm and familiar bed, and even that, my sole comfort, was soon to be shared with a stranger from the mother country.

  Of the ceremony I don’t remember much, except that it was conducted in our house, and that it was short, with only my parents and an imam present. We ate, the men in the living room and the women separately upstairs. I had hardly finished my meal when my mother came down. ‘Now you go.’ She pointed to the stairs. I looked over at the imam, who had just shovelled in a mouthful of biryani. He raised his eyes, the rice spilling from his lips.

  My new wife, Azra, still in her wedding dress, lay flat on her back on my bed. A veil covered her face, behind which her eyes were screwed tightly shut. For a minute I stood over her, watching the rise and fall of her small chest, barely perceptible, like a precious thing wrapped inside a blood-red shroud.

  Mum and I had been mesmerized at first sight by the dress Azra now wore. We had seen it on a mannequin in a shop window. Azra was still in Pakistan at the time. The dress was red with gold brocade around the neckline, cuffs and ankle-length hemline. It was studded with dazzling glass beads arranged to form roses. The owner of the shop wouldn’t haggle on the price, and in protest my mother had walked out, leaving me alone, surrounded on all sides by beautiful, alluring mannequin brides, their toenails painted red. I was alone with the shop owner, her foot tapping impatiently on the floor. I dug my hands into my money belt and reluctantly counted out the price she demanded.

  Now I slid into bed, nudging against my bride. The glass roses of Azra’s dress dug roughly into my chest. I pressed harder, defying the tiny pinpricks of pain, strangely hoping I might draw blood.

  Earlier she had sat resplendent beside me on our sofa as the imam had conducted the short ceremony. Before that I had seen her once only, covered from head to toe in her black burqa. Trembling beside her on our wedding day, I dared not look at her, staring instead at the row of gold bangles on her arm. As she leant forward to sign the documents, a dot of gold glinted on her nose but the rest of her face was obscured by a long silken veil. Her long slim hands were clad in thin white gloves, and her feet in narrow sandals protruded from beneath the dress, the nails painted red.

  But in bed with Azra now, the dress took on a new meaning. It represented a cold scratchy barrier between my new bride and me. Through the barrier I reached for the soft bulge of her breasts, and felt her chest arch with a long intake of breath. I felt myself harden, every muscle in my body contracting towards my groin, and from the tip of my penis I felt an escape of something wet. Was I supposed to help her out of the dress? It must hurt, I thought, the beaded fabric pressed between her body and the mattress. My hand ran down her flat belly, pulled up the skirt and reached for a drawstring that tied under-trousers at her waist.

  Azra turned towards me, pushing her knee up against my groin. Her nose stud glittered like a distant star. Then she shrank away towards the far side of the mattress, pulling the bed sheet tight against her body.

  ‘It’s normal,’ I stuttered in Urdu. ‘Don’t be frightened.’

  I reached for the light switch on the wall and clicked it off. In the darkness I fumbled again for the drawstring, my fingers slipping underneath the waist of her trousers. I could feel the rapid rise and fall of her diaphragm and between her legs she felt hot. She seemed to tremble and I could hear her laboured breath. She jerked awkwardly away from my touch once more. I no longer felt in control; afraid I would come in my trousers, I pulled away. I switched on a bedside lamp, a softer light that cast an elliptical illumination against the wall.

  ‘It’s okay, Azra. I won’t force you.’

  ‘I don’t believe you,’ she replied.

  ‘We’ve got the rest of our lives,’ I said.

  ‘You swear on Allah?’

  ‘I swear on Allah.’

  Slowly she sat up, the bangles falling to rest at her wrist. Her face, in profile, was shielded by the veil.

  ‘Won’t you look at me?’ I stared ahead at the window, the curtains drawn against the night. They were new and pink. Mum had said that all brides liked pink. Azra shook her head, her headscarf rustling loudly against the headboard.

  ‘Why not?’ I asked softly.

  ‘I can’t.’

  ‘You’re my wife, you can.’

  Azra laughed drily. ‘Is that what English wives do?’

  ‘I wouldn’t know,’ I replied quietly. ‘I’ve never had an English wife.’

  ‘Ten years ago,’ she said, ‘I was given a picture of you. It was when I was in my final year at school.’

  ‘I wasn’t ready for love,’ I said.

  ‘You looked kind. I praised Allah.’

  ‘I was too young. We both were.’

  ‘I stared at it every day, wondering what you would be like. And then one day I came home from school to find my father had torn up the picture.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘No, you’re not. Saying sorry is feeble and too easy. It’s like love, a word you’ve borrowed from the English. My father,’ she continued, ‘sent me to a madrasa. There I would be useful. I could repent my shame, the shame of having my betrothed fall into th
e arms of the infidel army.’ She shook her head ruefully. ‘In Pakistan such rejection falls like sin on a woman’s honour. I became a teacher at the madrasa. I had eighty students and I was happy. Now, so many years later, in Pakistan I am considered an old woman; only now you pay the dowry, and my father, he comes for me. For once he is happy. He comes to the madrasa bearing papers from England. He says when I am settled I should send for him.’

  ‘All I know is what my mother told me. She said you were patient and would wait.’

  ‘So you could do what you liked and I would just pray and wait?’ She shook her head again.

  ‘You’re a beautiful woman – you should have married someone else.’

  Azra put her hands to her face as though she was about to cry. Floral-patterned henna tattoos wove around the backs of her hands. They twisted and turned, branching threadlike down each finger.

  Suddenly I understood. ‘My mother didn’t tell you, did she? Nor your father. No one told you I was crippled.’

  She shook her head but said nothing.

  My left knee instantly throbbed. The lower leg, mutilated by entry and exit holes, had healed like a withered branch on a tree. When I stood, it hung like a dead appendage. Now, in bed, I straightened it, approximating its true position. I kneaded at the joint between titanium and flesh, my face screwed into a knot of pain, feeling for the ridges of cold metal beneath the skin.

  She shrank away a little. ‘I saw it at the airport.’

  ‘When I’m lying in bed,’ I said, ‘and there’s no weight on my knee I feel like any other man. Sometimes I dream that I’m walking like I used to. It can’t be fixed, and as my wife you should know that. At the hospital they wanted to cut it off and give me a prosthetic leg. They said I’d be able to run with a metal leg. I don’t want it cut off.’

  ‘Maybe you want it this way,’ she said.

  ‘When it hurts really badly I’m happy because I think the life is coming back to it.’

  ‘You have two arms and one good leg. I’ve seen worse.’

  ‘Yeah, but you didn’t marry them, did you.’

  ‘I wouldn’t have minded. If he was kind.’ Her lips, thick with red gloss, were just visible at the edge of her veil.

  ‘All these years they had you wait for a cripple.’ I felt like a grotesque medical specimen.

  ‘My father had even purchased my wedding gold, and to everyone in our sector he had boasted that he would send me out clad in a lakh’s worth of gold. The day we learnt of your defection, my father swore, he beat me, he cried.’

  ‘Your father’s anger should have been at me.’

  ‘He has forgiven you. And your knee, to me it is of no consequence.’

  ‘Azra,’ I said loudly, ‘you lie.’

  ‘I throw myself on Allah’s mercy, but I do not lie,’ Azra sobbed. I listened to the noise from downstairs. The TV was on loud, the familiar opening tune of the nine o’clock news. From the kitchen I could hear the clatter of pans as my mother tidied up after the wedding feast.

  ‘Allah?’ I said. ‘Which Allah? Every Muslim I ever met had a different Allah. They fight over Allah. They die over Allah. But here’s the funny thing, no two of them could ever agree on what or who Allah is.’

  She clamped her hands over her ears.

  ‘Mercy?’ I continued undeterred. ‘In the name of Allah they make war that has no end. The Taliban killed and we killed but there were no martyrs. There was only maiming and death.’

  Azra moved towards me and took my chin tightly in her fingers. Through an opening in her veil I saw her face for the first time, slim, angular and beautiful. Her irises were brown, her gaze penetrating, and the whites of her eyes were as opaque as paper. Her thick lashes had been painted with mascara and a faint pink blush dusted her cheeks. She had a thin, pointy nose and a gently curved chin, and I knew, I knew she was out of my league.

  Azra spoke forcefully. ‘I married you and I will accept your body as it is.’ She took a deep breath and went on. ‘But an infidel who has fought for the enemy? Allah, no! Not an infidel. I cannot have married an infidel.’

  ‘I may not know much about women but it is not right that a thing of beauty like you should speak such hard words. I am not what you say, but you cannot measure me against the imams and students of your madrasa.’

  Azra slumped back against the headboard, breathing heavily. I stretched out a hand and touched her shoulder. She shrugged it off.

  ‘Why aren’t you married?’ I said. ‘Are the men in Pakistan so stupid?’

  ‘My father dictated it had to be a cousin and it had to be England. Is that a precise enough answer for you?’

  ‘Well, now that you are here, what is your decision?’

  ‘You have not denied that you are an infidel. Only through Allah do we understand our lives.’

  ‘You need not worry. I am a believer. But I do not believe blindly.’

  ‘You either believe or you don’t. Which is it?’ she asked.

  ‘From what I’ve seen, the believers are intoxicated with belief. They seem to have no responsibility beyond prayer and sacrifice. For them that is enough, but it is not enough for me.’

  ‘A true believer is not living for this life. Rather, the next.’

  ‘Maybe,’ I said, ‘but for some believers the circumstances of this life are not so great, and while they’re preoccupied with the hereafter they’re not prepared to change the present. There is no honour in poverty.’

  ‘Things are so much better for you, are they?’

  ‘I used to believe that you create your own luck, but now I’m not so sure.’ I pulled my bad knee to my chest, kneading the knotty scar, and added gently, ‘Let’s not argue,’ my voice almost a whisper, ‘not on our wedding night.’

  ‘I believed that together with my husband we would each grow closer to our faith.’

  ‘If it’s my leg, I don’t blame you.’

  ‘No, really not your leg.’

  ‘Prove it.’

  Turning away, she said, ‘I am sorry.’

  I shrank back against the headboard, unable to think what to say next. There was a long silence. I reached across with one hand, feeling her firm thigh and upwards to where it joined her belly. I slid my hand past the drawstring, inside her trousers. She had shaved, it seemed, the tips of my fingers reaching deep into territory that was moist. Azra shuddered, her breathing heavy. Once, twice, she swayed, as though her body in its entirety was in rhythm with the movement of my fingers. I turned, clutching the back of her neck in my free hand, and pulled her towards me. She relented, her body going soft, and allowed herself to face me. Briefly, Azra’s eyes met mine, but then her hollow gaze dropped to her lap. She wriggled free of me and retreated until her body hung partly over the far edge of the bed.

  ‘It’s normal. It’s what we’re expected to do. We’re husband and wife,’ I pleaded.

  ‘You don’t understand.’ She clutched a pillow to her chest.

  ‘Didn’t anyone tell you what you’re supposed to do?’

  ‘Your mother, she said just close your eyes and let him do what he wants.’

  ‘I mean, it’s natural. It’s what we’re expected to do, and once we’ve got it over with it will all be okay.’

  With her chin cupped in her fists, Azra stared at me. Gently, she began to cry. The tears ran like grey raindrops across both cheeks. Her mascara spread around her eyes like a blot of black ink. Finally, still sobbing, she spoke. ‘Together we will shame the sanctity of marriage as it has been written. Release me and marry an English woman.’

  ‘You love someone else?’ I had not thought of this before and suddenly I was gripped by certainty of its truth.

  ‘A real man must lead a family. A man of strength, and none is stronger than he who fears Allah.’

  ‘You do, don’t you? You love someone else?’

  ‘My father, he didn’t believe in free will.’ She turned to face the wall and sobbed. ‘All he could ever think of was England, but your England i
s cold and its heart is dark. What use is this land of infidels?’

  I stretched across and touched her shoulder. ‘It’s okay.’

  ‘Okay?’ cried Azra, swinging abruptly around, tearing off her veil and throwing it to the floor behind her. ‘You are my husband but you’re ignorant.’ She lay down and shuffled on her back into the middle of the mattress. She undid the drawstring, pulled down her trousers and opened her legs, her foot grazing mine. A shudder of adrenaline passed through me, but I was unable even to look at her. She continued. ‘Okay, now do what your mother told you to do. My faith is strong and it’s only my body you despoil. Have your pleasure.’

  My hand extended a little way towards her, shaking uncontrollably. I withdrew it, brushing against a glass bead that had fallen off her dress onto the mattress. I picked it up, turning it over in my fingers. Pulling the sheet over me, I turned around to face the wall and switched off the lamp. In the darkness I rolled the bead between a thumb and forefinger. It was poorly cut with sharp edges. I thought about my mother and what she would be expecting. It was silent now downstairs, but I had not heard my parents come up to bed. Perhaps they were listening out for us? The cry of a virgin’s pain mixed with the grunt of their son’s pleasure. I rubbed a sharp edge of the bead against the soft pad of my thumb. I dug it in deeper, my pain somehow amplified in the silence of the house, Allahu, and then again, Allahu, and again, Allahu, and again and again until it bled. It took all my effort not to cry out my prayer. I reached my hand back into the centre of the bed and smeared the blood across the sheets.

  15

  Grace drains the last of the whisky, contorting her face like a child fed medicine. Gradually her body relaxes, her eyes half close, but a scowl remains on her lips.

  ‘It went on for over a year. A health visitor replaced the midwife, and later I got assigned a social worker. It wasn’t wise to ask a lot of questions; plenty on the estate were having to deal with the same, and besides, they had a job to do. The last thing you wanted to do was rub them up the wrong way.

  ‘And then I got a letter inviting me to something called a child protection conference. The letter explained that we would be discussing Britney’s best interests, and that there was no need of a solicitor. I had never been to a conference before, and I expected there would be lots of people, all listening and learning. I bought a new folder and pens and paper.