Akram's War Read online

  ‘I left Britney with Betts and Alfie and put on my Sunday best. I was told to wait in a waiting room. I was the only person there. It was obviously important, but where were the others? There was a sign on the wall – CCTV IN OPERATION – and leaflets advertising firms of solicitors.

  ‘I was shown into this room with a long polished table. There was a bottle of water and an empty glass in front of each seat, and a pad and pen branded with the council logo. The wooden chairs were proper old-fashioned and heavy, and the same logo was also on the padded backrests. The room was almost full. My social worker pulled out a chair and beckoned for me to sit next to her. The rest of them sat opposite us: the health visitor; the chief social worker; my GP, Dr Moxham; the chaperone woman I had met once. There was also another doctor with a long title and a short name, Dr Ali.

  ‘I began by writing down the names of all the people. I hadn’t finished when the chaperone, seeing what I was doing, started up. “For the benefit of everyone, I remind those here that this meeting is recorded.” She then thanked me for coming, saying it was a good sign that I was engaging.

  ‘The chaperone started reading from a report: “Miss Britney Booth has been taken to see her GP Dr Moxham twelve times in as many months, and has had the benefit of the opinion of the community paediatrician, Dr Ali.” I could see they each wanted to smile as their names were read out. “I have visited her on one occasion – sadly, professional time constraints limited me to that – and the combined visits made by other health professionals here present,” she looked around the room with a grave expression, “amount to thirteen.”

  ‘The chief social worker took a single piece of paper from the pad in front of her and began to fold it. I watched her fingers work.

  ‘Dr Ali was invited to speak next. “I’ll cut to the chase and try to use language that we can all understand,” he said. “I have reviewed Britney’s notes, kindly supplied by my colleague Dr Moxham and others. Britney is otherwise fit and well, but I have recorded bruising to her extremities consistent with NAI.”

  ‘“Non-accidental injury,” my social worker whispered in my ear.

  ‘The chaperone spoke. “We are not so much concerned with Britney’s current injuries but, as covered in the Children Act 1989 and fully consistent with more recent safeguarding directives, those injuries that the child might be expected to sustain in the future.”

  ‘I slid down in my chair, my ears ringing. The chief’s piece of paper was now one-sixteenth of its original size.

  ‘The social worker nudged me. “Miss Booth, would you like to say something?”

  ‘I stood up. “There’s nothing wrong with Britney. Them bruises, maybe they’re something to do with the blood she got when she was born. These things happen, don’t they? On account of my condition, I don’t get out as much as some mothers might, but I sit Britney by the window so she can look out and get her vitamin D.” My cheeks felt hot, and as I talked I was choking on my own spit. “I don’t know what you’re all on about. Can I get a solicitor? Am I entitled?”

  ‘“Miss Booth.” It was the chaperone. “We are here looking for a compromise. All these professional people around the table want only what is best for Britney, as I know you do. You may hire a solicitor – although as I am sure you have been told you don’t need one – but such an instruction would have to be entirely at your own expense. You are on benefits, are you not? There is no point in me adjourning this meeting – and therefore delaying what would be deemed to be in the best interests of Britney – if the instruction of legal counsel is unlikely.”

  ‘Defeated, I shook my head and sat down. I noticed that the piece of paper wouldn’t bend into a sixty-fourth.

  ‘“We will take a short break. I am sure you would welcome that, Miss Booth. It might allow you the opportunity to get some fresh air, and perhaps we can reconvene” – she looked at her watch – “in twenty minutes’ time and proceed on a more conciliatory basis.”

  ‘I took a seat in the waiting room. After a few minutes the social worker came and sat next to me. She whispered, “Grace, I’m on your side, but they want something out of you today. They want you to give something up. They want your agreement. If they don’t get it they’ll apply to the court.”

  ‘I didn’t know what she was talking about. “They want me to take her out more?”

  ‘“They would settle for an agreement on a care order. You’d still get to see Britney, I’d make sure of that. Britney would live with someone else and you would visit. Supervised, of course. If you agree today,” she paused and looked at me sympathetically, “I could try and convince them to give you two hours a week.”’

  Grace pants, her breath hot on my face, and her eyes search mine for an answer I cannot provide. I draw warmth from her, skin on skin, brown and white. Without warning, my knee jerks, and agony shoots through me. Automatically, but with no real hope of relief, my fingertips search for the pain. Wordlessly, Grace pulls my hands away. Her fingers lightly knead and press the knotted joint; to my surprise, the pain subsides. As it goes, I relax back against the pillow. Then her fingers begin to walk up my thigh under the duvet, and I stiffen, raising myself off the bed a little. Her hand reaches the elasticated waist of my underpants and she pulls them down. Slipping her head under the duvet, she applies her mouth to me. I tense, every muscle centring to a knot in my gut. I climax quickly, and she comes up for breath, resting her head on my chest. I caress her prickly hair. Small, scrambled bubbles of oxygen burst in my brain as though bringing life to previously dormant nerve tissue.

  As I stare down at our bodies pressed together, a picture swims up in my mind. A brown man in a dusty village, clad in rags with a dirty turban on his head. A memsahib walks past and he bows before her, careful not to look at her directly, his hands pressed to his chest in supplication. She is dressed in an unblemished white frock and behind her walks a servant holding a large bleached cotton umbrella. Following the memsahib, of course, were men. Always chaperoned by men, and in this particular case, an ample, moustached English fellow, a recruitment sergeant no less.

  It is the only image I have ever been offered, from where I don’t know, perhaps a relative, that might represent my father’s father. This, what Grace and I are doing now, they would have called it mixing. The white man’s greatest treasure was his memsahib, and yet I feel no desire to exert power over Grace. In a fantasy, I would have grasped her hair tightly and held her down, hard, in vengeance for my grandfather.

  It shames me that this is all I can think of, and I am thankful that her eyes are closed, as though now, after what has occurred between us, she could read my thoughts from my face. Inside my head something drains away, like the fluid from a lanced abscess, and as the euphoria fades, it is replaced by something tighter, more whole, as though the two hemispheres of my brain are more closely integrated, have reached some sort of understanding.

  And for reasons of food and foolish bravery, the allure of the memsahib still clouding his thinking, hearing the recruitment sergeant call out his name, my grandfather would have taken one step forward and stood to attention: ‘Yes, Sergeant Major, sahib.’ My grandfather, one Sepoy Khan, would all his life, even during the torturous years as a prisoner of the Japanese, before he succumbed to typhoid, remember the day of the passing by of the memsahib. The English brought law and the drought abated and the crops grew from grains purchased by Sepoy’s salary; the family thrived, and the generations flourished until food was no longer an issue, and it was only once we were fed that we Pakistanis remembered that old grandpa was buried in an unmarked grave in Burma near an embankment where a railway line was once dug. As my mother always said, hunger is the worst thing. And we were angry. But we are a patient culture that bides its time.

  From what Grace has related, it seems that the gora have turned in on themselves, and as though the fate of the gora and that of the Pakistani are diametrically opposed, right now I feel happy, strangely content. The sum of everything that has occurred bef
ore is somehow distilled, and more than that, balanced, as though all negatives and positives have been cancelled by each other, and in this moment, my head comfortable against the pillow and the weight of Grace’s head on my chest, I feel a peace I had not thought possible.

  Still now, six months later, I do not know why I agreed to marry Azra. Waking up the morning after our wedding night, I turned over in bed and spread out and for a moment I forgot that Azra was there. Then I felt my thumb throb as though the skin might burst. A bright shaft of light through the open curtains caught my eyes. Startled by the sound of someone rapping on the front door downstairs, I sat up against the headboard. I heard the door open and the voice of my mother and that of a man. She showed him in, seating him in the front room, and called up the stairs, ‘Akram, your brother for you.’

  I dressed and with a sense of foreboding made my way downstairs.

  As I walked into the room and our eyes met, the visitor put down his tea and sprang up from the sofa. He smiled a broad, pink, gummy smile that contrasted with his paper-white albino skin. He was a large man, rotund, the skin stretched smoothly over his cheeks, giving him a boyish appearance. His upper eyelids were crisscrossed with fragile veins enlarged through the thick lenses of his spectacles, and he blinked frequently as though even the soft indoor light was too harsh for his milky eyes. A white turban covered his forehead, the odd pink tendril slipping from underneath. He had a sparse straggly beard with a pointed tip.

  ‘You remember me, brother?’ he bellowed. His eyes seemed to veer back and forth as though struggling to focus. In one hand he carried a large bunch of mixed flowers wrapped in gold cellophane. He thrust them at me and congratulated me, telling me that the big news all over town was that dear Brother Akram has taken a wife.

  Smiling, I produced the expected response: ‘Mash Allah, it’s you, Mustafa – Mustafa, my old friend!’ I hadn’t seen him since I had left at the age of sixteen, but underneath the extra weight he was immediately recognizable. I put the flowers on the coffee table next to the bronze vase containing the plastic roses, then leant on my stick.

  ‘I am sorry.’ He glanced at my left leg, suspended an inch off the ground. ‘I heard about your injury. But you,’ his gaze lifted, catching mine, ‘you look strong.’

  ‘If I squint my eyes I don’t see my bad leg,’ I laughed.

  ‘I see you have finally given in, family and wife. Fine thing. No life without wife.’ He laughed and elbowed me in the side. ‘No life without wife!’

  ‘Sit down, brother,’ I said, gesturing towards the sofa.

  Ignoring my offer, he nodded deliberately and said, ‘Inshallah, I will pray that your wife will soon bear you a son.’

  I nodded, feeling myself blush. ‘Inshallah.’

  ‘It’s good you have returned, brother. I have also. . .’ He paused. ‘I have, so to speak, also returned.’ He looked around the room as though sweeping for unseen listeners. Then he clasped both of my hands in his, warm and chubby. ‘It’s time we were reacquainted, you and I.’

  I extricated my hands and dug one into a pocket, seeking my cigarettes. Mustafa’s eyes followed my hand, and for some reason I took it out, leaving the cigarettes undisturbed.

  ‘Come, Brother Akram,’ he said, ‘spare me a few hours of your time. I beg forgiveness from your good wife’ – he pointed towards the stairs – ‘but I will not detain you for long, and you can get back to business.’ He winked, and added confidently, ‘You and I, brother, we will now go out.’ He turned towards the door. Over a long white shirt he wore a British army-issue combat jacket. His baggy white trousers were pulled up to his ankles, above green Adidas trainers.

  Once outside he walked slowly, and I was able to keep up. Like me, he too seemed to have difficulty walking. Mustafa spoke all the time, hardly pausing for breath. We soon reached the high street, where the traffic crawled bumper to bumper. I had to laugh as we passed a small orange car clad in a sporty body kit. From it emanated loud Punjabi music, its solitary male occupant nodding vigorously to the drumbeat. He turned towards me and snarled self-consciously through the open window, a gold front tooth and his mirrored sunglasses both reflected in the car windscreen.

  Amid the noise of the street, I intermittently lost the precise words but kept the thread of Mustafa’s conversation, which focused on his children, three boys attending a madrasa in Birmingham and two daughters sent to be educated in Pakistan. Mustafa and his wife now lived in a council house next door to his mother, who had also been rehoused, and had knocked out the dividing walls to create, as he put it, a four-bedroom mansion. Burqa-clad women pushed toddlers in buggies. Following Mustafa’s lead, I sidestepped onto the road to create a respectful distance between us as they passed. Mustafa had another wife – or were there several others? – and further children, in another mansion, in Pakistan. The boys were fed on the milk of cows in the yard: it would make them strong, he said. He talked about bringing them over to the UK, and I pointed out that polygamy was illegal here. Mustafa, with a glint in his eye, said it was perfectly possible, indeed the British authorities respected it. On the footpath, little boys rushed boisterously between their mothers, while their little sisters clutched each other as they trailed behind, heads covered by a simple scarf pinned below the chin. The aroma of frying jalebi and curry spice filled the air. Young women with short fashionable hairstyles appeared quite natural and at ease in colourful kurta-pajama as they sauntered past, their hips swaying and painted lips moving fast as they talked with each other or into their mobile phones.

  ‘Smell that,’ I said brightly as we passed Ivan’s chip shop. ‘Smells of old England!’

  ‘Rendered pig fat,’ said Mustafa sharply, ‘what they call lard.’

  ‘Ivan might deny that.’

  ‘You have been away longer than I. There is more.’ He pointed to a Malik’s Halal Poultry. ‘The chickens they slaughter are bought from an English farm. They share a field with pigs and feed on their excrement.’

  I shook my head and tutted.

  ‘Brother, it is very difficult to keep clean in this country.’

  ‘You know that for sure?’ I replied.

  ‘All I know is that over there’ – he indicated across the road – ‘is a budget beer shop belonging to the treasurer of Best Street mosque.’ He looked up at a swirling orange bulb outside a taxi office, Royal Cars. ‘And that our minicab driver brothers hose down the drunken vomit of their passengers every Friday and Saturday night.’

  The warm rays of the sun bathed my face and arms, and tilting my head up I saw a cloudless blue sky. I took a big breath in and exhaled long and hard as though the warmth of the air would cleanse me of Mustafa’s cynicism.

  Mustafa squinted hard at the sky, putting his hands together. His lips barely moved, the hum of a rapid-fire prayer alternating with the sound of his tongue pressing it against the roof of his mouth.

  ‘What is the prayer for?’ I asked.

  Mustafa swiped his hands vertically down his face and nodded, sucking air through his teeth. ‘My brother,’ he replied. Did he mean me?

  As though suddenly drained of energy, Mustafa shuffled on, taking short steps. When confronted with a kerb or a protruding paving stone he seemed to take great care in how and where he placed each foot. He reminded me of a child learning to walk.

  Men and women stopped to smile at Mustafa, then did a suspicious double take when they saw me. My parents would never have openly admitted to my career but, just the same, everybody would know what I had done. An Afghan perched cross-legged on a mobile phone kiosk gave Mustafa a knowing nod, a gesture Mustafa reciprocated by placing his right fist over his heart and making a deep respectful bow.

  ‘You say you’ve been away?’ I asked.

  ‘Same place as you, brother.’ Mustafa put out his right hand, inches from my eyes. ‘Three is a sacred number.’

  I drew back to focus on his hand. The three digits between his thumb and little finger were missing, the stubs gnarled, some longe
r than others but none progressing beyond the middle joint. The nails on his thumb and little finger were paper-thin and brittle, the faintest pink blush showing through them. I shivered involuntarily.

  Mustafa smiled, exposing perfect white teeth. ‘As long as it takes, brother, we will bide our time. We will have justice.’

  ‘You were a jihadi?’

  ‘Sunshine out there played havoc with my eyes,’ he joked.

  I laughed nervously. ‘You didn’t get a tan.’

  ‘Worked mostly at night.’

  ‘You were the enemy?’

  ‘I was good with my hands.’ He smiled and wriggled his stubs. ‘And can you believe it? I had to blacken my face; just like your British soldier friends I painted streaks of camo across my face.’ Carefully he mounted the steps of the Kashmiri Karahi House and Sweet Shop.

  A brother, not looking where he was going, brushed between us on his way out of the store, a carrier bag swinging at his hips. A few feet on he stopped, swivelled on his toes and exclaimed, ‘Brother Mustafa, it is you! Mash Allah. Mash Allah.’

  The stranger rushed back, clasped both of Mustafa’s hands in his own and said, ‘Allahu Akbar, brother, you are safe, Allahu Akbar.’ The speaker glanced at me with penetrating eyes before returning his attention to Mustafa. ‘Anything you need, Brother Mustafa, please call upon me. My brothers and I, we await your call, don’t forget us.’ The man had a long black beard. In the centre of his forehead was a thick circular patch of skin, dark and slightly raised – a third eye, a marker of a true believer.

  Mustafa made a deep bow. ‘I will, brother, I will, but right now,’ he pointed to the stranger’s carrier bag, ‘your wife will be cross if you let those sweetmeats melt in this heat!’