Akram's War Read online

  The Mash Tun was quiet, its curtains drawn, its patio benches desolate. About a mile on, a fish-shaped neon sign flashed orange in the window of Ivan’s chippy. As always, the door stood ajar and pop music mingled with the reassuring sound of spitting oil. Like an actor spotlit on a stage, Ivan offered me his cheerful salesman’s smile while ladling chips onto a waiting spread of newspaper. I had no mood nor money for chips.

  After maybe another hour I was tired and nervous and no longer convinced I would welcome my father’s cane. I paused at the end of our street, resting my back against the tall factory wall, no longer afraid of it; robbed of its mystery, it was now just a wall. The brickwork was warm, as though borrowing heat from the furnace within, and the rhythmic beat of the hammer reverberated through my body. I closed my eyes, a gentle wind stirring across my face.

  ‘Carry on like that and your bones will shatter.’

  I opened my eyes and Mustafa offered me a nervous half-smile. He clutched the handlebars of a bike, its weight balanced against his waist. Perched precariously on the seat was his brother Faisal, a child of about six.

  ‘That’s what they tell little kids, but it’s not true,’ I said.

  ‘You look like you’re in trouble,’ said Mustafa.

  I nodded.

  Unlike his older brother’s, Faisal’s skin was a pleasant brown. He had a small cherubic face and big round eyes that stared intently at me.

  ‘Cold?’ Mustafa added.

  Again I nodded.

  ‘Come with us.’ He patted his back pocket. ‘I’ve got matches.’

  ‘Number eleven?’

  Faisal giggled and repeated, ‘Number eleven.’

  Mustafa and I each took one side of the bicycle with Faisal propped between us. We went a few yards down the street and turned abruptly to our right as though passing through what had once been the front door of number eleven. We found ourselves surrounded by the heaped remains of our neighbour’s house: roof slate, bricks, plaster, shattered windowpanes, and timber studded dangerously with rusty nails. Here and there a scrap of wallpaper or a decorative kitchen tile served as reminders that this had indeed once been a house.

  We built a small pyramid of timber and settled down on brick stools around it. There was plenty of paper and kindling left over from previous fires, and Mustafa tucked it expertly into the hollow at the base of the triangle. From his pocket he pulled out a handful of bent kitchen matches. ‘Our lad stole them when Mum wasn’t watching.’ He tapped his brother on the head and the kid beamed. ‘She doesn’t suspect you, does she, lad?’

  Faisal put a small pudgy finger to his lips. ‘Shhh.’

  Mustafa struck a match against a brick; it flared and he cupped it protectively in both hands, lowering it slowly into the hollow. The light flickered in the gaps between his fingers and the paper caught fire. He knelt low, his head perilously close as he blew air gently onto the tiny flicker of orange. The flames grew and licked at the kindling. Mustafa settled back on his stool, pleased with his work.

  I stared as closely as I dared into the fire, the smoke catching my eyes. One by one the faces of each of Dax’s assailants were consumed by the flames, first melting at the edges and then collapsing inwards and vanishing entirely. I rubbed my eyes with a knuckle, grinding in the stinging soot.

  Finally, I said, ‘In hell, you burn up only to be given life to burn up all over again.’

  Faisal pulled a frightened face and went to sit in his brother’s lap. Mustafa seemed at ease as his brother’s guardian, cradling the small body in his arms.

  I continued. ‘You beg Allah for a drink of water and he just laughs in your face.’

  Faisal’s head nuzzled his brother’s chest and after a long pause I could hear the faint rhythmic rustle of his sleep.

  ‘And it’s worse than that,’ I added. ‘Mum says imagine the most terrible thing you can and times it by a thousand.’

  ‘It’s my fire.’ Mustafa sounded irritated. ‘You’re not welcome talking like that.’

  ‘He brings you a cup of molten steel spiked with the hair of a pig and says, Drink this.’

  ‘God don’t talk.’ Mustafa looked up at the sky, orange changing to grey as his head tilted further up. He sighed. ‘Should get our kid to bed.’

  ‘If you die and you’re not a Muslim, do you burn forever?’

  ‘Nothing is forever,’ said Mustafa matter-of-factly.

  ‘I know one thing that is.’

  Still holding his brother, Mustafa got to his feet. ‘What?’

  ‘Infinity.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘It’s like counting upwards from one and never stopping.’

  ‘Until you die.’ Mustafa propped his charge onto the saddle, balancing the weight with his own.

  ‘You don’t get it. The worst thing is . . you just never die. You just count and count and count.’

  Mustafa wheeled the bike away, quickly diminishing from view in the semi-darkness. I kicked at the fire, now about two feet high, watching gleefully as sparks flew. I pulled out a thin stick of wood still burning at one end and held it up to my face until I felt it burn the hairs over my forehead. I got to my feet, my chest beating tight and fast in anticipation of my father’s reaction when I got home.

  Our house was only a few doors down and nearing, I looked around for somewhere to dispose of the lit torch. A letterbox? A petrol cap on a car? A post box? Somewhere it would cause the most damage. My face contorted into a snarl, and then again, as though no matter how much I tried I couldn’t straighten it out.

  The next school day was Monday. I watched the year eights line up in the playground before class, laughing and joking, ribbing each other as they always did.

  ‘You seen Dax?’ I asked Maley as we joined the line for year seven.

  ‘Animals kill, but not in malice or wrath,’ he said angrily.

  ‘You shouldn’t talk like that.’ I felt sick in the stomach.

  ‘Told you we were a cruel species.’

  And then from the year eight line-up we overheard: ‘Mum was on the night shift. She says they brought some gypo kid in.’

  ‘Oh yeah.’ The words were accompanied by a nervous laugh.

  ‘Says doctors tried everything, says he was born with a weak heart.’

  I clenched my teeth as hard as I could and looked up at the sky. ‘Bismillah. Bismillah.’

  8

  Grace’s hands again make a clawing motion in her sleep, disturbing the duvet, and as I silently will it to do so it falls slowly like a furling banner to a point below her breasts.

  Her hands find my arm, gripping it tightly, and she awakens and looks at me. ‘There was a prostitute and a dog,’ she murmurs in a soft sleepy voice.

  I smile.

  ‘And someone who was kind to them called Allah.’ Her voice is broken and confused, and self-consciously she pulls the duvet up over her breasts.

  ‘You invited me up,’ I say.

  She says slowly, as though recollecting our meeting, ‘Soldier boy?’

  I nod. ‘Hush now, go back to sleep.’ I chant to myself almost inaudibly ‘La ilaha il Allahu. . .’ It is soothing for me, takes me to a place far back. I am just beginning to gather a coherent set of early childhood images and already she is fast asleep again. I would have liked to tell Grace about that distant place, lying in bed watching my mother’s lips inches from mine as she hummed my infant self to sleep, and for a moment I resent Grace for her slumber.

  I swing my feet onto the thick carpet. I look for my stick but cannot see it. How I got into bed I cannot remember, and I search for things to hold on to on my way to my clothes.

  But it seems too permanent a thing to dress, I am not ready to leave, and instead I find a towel and wrap it around my waist. Another towel I lay on the floor at the foot of the bed as a make-do prayer mat. Owing to the limits of the titanium articulation I cannot bend and prostrate, so I decide to pray seated on the edge of the bed with only my feet placed on the towel. From the
re I can bow my head to signify a deeper movement. Although it is not yet dawn and time for the first daily prayer, fajr, a Muslim can instead pray at any time, a simple prayer composed of two repeating sections. I say it once and then again, and each time I raise my head I catch, through the window, a patch of sky. After the second recital I cup my hands before my chest, and gazing through the window, seeking Allah, I wonder what it is I should say to Him. Behind me sleeps Grace, making barely a sound. I should pray for her. I bend towards the towel until the knee hurts. The towel is scented with soap and shampoo and lotions that Grace would have applied to her water-dripping body, and trapped between its fibres is also a scent unique to her, that of her body masked by the things she applies. These are impure thoughts I quickly block out, and as I stare at the blackish nothingness, grateful that somewhere up there is Allah, what comes to me is landscape – streets I have known. Like smoke I drift through them, taking in the details. At the end of a typical road two lanes run off, left and right. Down one is a series of prefab houses hurriedly put up after the war. They are clad with concrete blocks about a metre square, and between each block the joints have slipped and grown with age, rendering slits and gashes along the entire terrace as I view it from the street. Further on, the road curves out of view. The other lane is terraced with red-brick houses, and before each front door is a neat path and a patch of green. Outside one such house the path is gone, replaced by a gently sloping concrete ramp with a metal handrail on each side. The council installed it after the elderly occupant, Maley’s father, lost the use of his legs. There was no need for it. He had called time on his days at The Gate Hangs Well and, with his pride dented by incapacity, the old man no longer left the house. The handrail is cold and wet with dew. The green paintwork on the door is flaking, and a plastic sign reads Beware of the Dog. The windows are grimy, the curtains drawn. Mr Male has been moved into a home.

  I speak quietly so as not to wake Grace. ‘I stood here once, with Maley. He opened that green door, newly painted then, a foul unhygienic smell emanating from within, and then he said a strange thing, brightly, with a smile on his lips. He said, “I don’t feel pain like normal people.”’

  I thought about his dead mother. ‘I know that, pal.’

  We were sixteen years old and it was the last day of school. While our classmates were signing each other’s shirts with thick marker pen, we had slipped away.

  ‘You’re lucky you got one of these new places,’ I said to Maley, wrinkling my nose at the smell.

  ‘It’s not that new,’ replied Maley. ‘We moved here when I was born.’

  Inside, the smell of boiled cabbage and cigarette smoke clung to the air. We passed quickly into the living room, wallpapered in an orange and brown geometric design, the sort of thing you would usually only find once you had removed several layers of existing wallpaper. Placed against the walls were two heavy-set armchairs and a matching sofa with roughly textured brown cushions and thick sweeping arms. Between the chairs was a steel coffee table, one his father had welded out of steel plates, Maley told me, and tidily at its centre sat a thick glass ashtray, a packet of cigarettes and a lighter. The room was square and cold; it had a low ceiling and on the mantel was a line of empty brown beer bottles. A glass-fronted cabinet was crammed with miniature drink bottles and on top of it stood two framed pictures. One picture showed a chubby thin-haired infant maybe a year old; on each side of him, leaning into the shot, were a mum and dad who looked more like grandparents, dressed as though from an earlier generation. In the other picture the same boy, now about four, sat atop a horse, a cowboy hat on his head.

  ‘That’s me,’ Maley said proudly.

  I followed him up a steep carpeted staircase into his bedroom. The window was open and the smell was different there, of damp and perspiration. Save for a single bed and a small table there was nothing to see. I stuck my head out of the window, observing how the grassy bank at the rear swept in a graceful railway-like curve before disappearing behind the houses.

  Back in the room, now that Maley had flung open the doors, I saw that two walls had concealed floor-to-ceiling cupboards. Inside them were shelves stacked to the top with boxes of toys and puzzle sets. In places the cardboard had coloured like rust but otherwise the boxes appeared pristine, as though unopened. One large box caught my eye. It bore a picture of a steam locomotive painted green. Other pictures in shadow showed what else was in the box: trees, a signal box, people, and a village railway station.

  Maley, seeing my interest, offered to assemble it for me, but then seemed to abruptly change his mind and said there wasn’t time. He said I could have it, and I declined. As a Pakistani I knew it was polite to decline twice but on the third offer I could accept. I waited but he didn’t ask me again.

  I didn’t often get toys when I was a child, and to compensate I had learnt the toy section of the Littlewoods catalogue by heart. On Christmas Day, I would jealously observe from our window the gora kids wobbling on their new bikes and racing battery-operated vehicles, and I knew precisely the maximum adjustable seat height of a Raleigh Chopper and what batteries a Milton Bradley Big Trak required. Even then, aged sixteen, I would have liked a toy train set.

  Maley slammed the cupboard doors shut. He pulled a green rucksack out from under the bed and beamed. ‘Got it on sale from the army and navy shop.’

  We went back down the stairs into the kitchen, where the mustiness, mixed with the smell of frying lard, was most intense. It was the coldest room in the house and the cabinets were made of plastic-coated metal. Against one wall stood an upright cooker, the sort I remembered my mother throwing out a long time ago. A latticed window was cut into the back door, and a thin black dog sat with its nose squashed up against it.

  Maley saw me looking at the greyhound. ‘Races it sometimes, my dad. She’s called Betty.’

  ‘Does she win?’

  ‘Hate dogs, no substitute for nature.’

  I couldn’t imagine Maley hating anything, least of all something belonging to the animal kingdom.

  Shaking his head, he peered into the fridge and pulled out a thick yellow slab wrapped in cellophane. I laughed. ‘Bloody hell, look at the size of that!’

  ‘Cheese, equal parts protein and fat, keeps me going.’ He stuffed it into his pack. I watched as he tied a bow in the drawstring on the backpack. His fingers seemed to work opposite to how it was normally done, his left hand twisted into the string while his right trembled as it swept around to make the knot.

  ‘One more thing before I go,’ he said, carefully tearing open an empty cornflakes box. Crouching over the kitchen table, he took out a marker pen from his pocket. As he wrote on the cardboard, I looked down at my shirt and made out the name Craig Male. Only then did it really sink in that it was the last day of school. Earlier, in the classroom, Maley had signed my shirt, and somehow that now seemed a long time ago. I looked back up at Maley. Proudly he held up a square of cardboard on which he had written the word PLEASE. Through the window, Betty marked circles around a child’s swing, her claws tearing up the lawn.

  ‘You really don’t know where you’re going?’ I enquired as Maley locked the front door behind us. Scanning the terrace, I saw that each house had a willow tree planted in the centre of a small front lawn, blocking the view into the bay windows. I always felt a compulsion to look into gora houses. I wanted to know what they had.

  Maley with an idea always walked fast, and I struggled to keep up with him.

  ‘There are lots of places I’d like to see,’ he said.

  ‘Like where?’

  ‘The Australian outback. You can die of loneliness out there.’

  ‘The outback? Can’t think of anywhere further?’

  ‘I’ve got this idea. I’m on this uninhabited island somewhere in the Pacific and one day this surfboard washes up.’ The breeze teased at Maley’s hair and rippled into the surface of his large parka, a fashion he still wore, whatever the weather. He didn’t smile, but then he didn’t ap
pear his usual tense self either. His arms swung at his sides, the vinyl under his armpits squeaking.

  ‘What about your dad?’

  He ignored me. ‘Depends on which stats you read, but Australians live longer than us.’

  ‘Maybe they have different genes?’ I said.

  ‘Your environment can compensate for your genes.’

  ‘Does he know you’re going?’ I persisted.

  ‘He’s an alc. Has been since Mum—’

  ‘He’s still your dad.’

  ‘When he was last sober he wished me luck.’

  ‘And your mum?’

  ‘She’s dead, remember.’

  ‘Don’t you say goodbye,’ I was confusing myself now, ‘to the ashes or something?’

  ‘Are you stupid?’

  ‘So that’s it? Nice knowing you, Dad, see you, I’m off?’

  Maley stopped walking and turned angrily towards me. ‘You keep thinking there’s got to be more.’ A familiar pink blotch crept up his neck from the collar of his school shirt. ‘I tell you about nature and you seem to say it’s not good enough, like there’s something higher – God – but there isn’t any proof of that. I tell you about my dad and you want me to speak to a jarful of soot in the kitchen cupboard. Life is what it is. Can’t you just see me off?’

  ‘Sorry.’

  ‘It’s like you’re holding me back.’

  ‘You’re holding yourself back.’ I wanted to hurt him for leaving me.

  ‘How?’

  ‘Well, why do you need me to see you off?’

  ‘I thought it might do you good.’

  ‘Oh, that’s all for me, is it? It isn’t because you have no one else?’

  ‘I wanted to do it properly. To say goodbye. You’ve been kind and fed me and that. But I also wanted you to see that it’s perfectly possible to just leave.’

  ‘Why would I want to leave?’

  Maley slowly spun on his toes, taking in the full circumference of the view. On one side was a row of Victorian terraces, neat and homely from a distance but close up the paintwork was peeling and the brickwork chipped. There were piles of litter too, as though someone had taken a giant broom and swept up against the faces of the houses. On the other side of the narrow street was a high black oily wall that marked the rear of Blackheath Forgings. It was tall enough to block out the sunlight to a degree, and beyond it, save for the occasional crack of metal against metal, there was silence.