But then. It’s her. Here she comes now. It is her! I know it is! I jump up and down waving like mad! Yes, yes, no, yes! At last! My sister! My mirror.
We both hug Nadia, and Ma suddenly cries and her nose runs and she can’t control her mouth. I cry too and I don’t even know who the hell I’m squashing so close to me. Until I sneak a good look at the girl.
You. Every day I’ve woken up trying to see your face, and now you’re here, your head jerking nervously, saying little, with us drenching you. I can see you’re someone I know nothing about. You make me very nervous.
You’re smaller than me. Less pretty, if I can say that. Bigger nose. Darker, of course, with a glorious slab of hair like a piece of chocolate attached to your back. I imagined, I don’t know why (pure prejudice, I suppose), that you’d be wearing the national dress, the baggy pants, the long top and light scarf flung all over. But you have on FU jeans and a faded blue sweatshirt — you look as if you live in Enfield. We’ll fix that.
*
Nadia sits in the front of the car. Ma glances at her whenever she can. She has to ask how Nadia’s father is.
‘Oh yes,’ Nadia replies. ‘Dad. The same as usual, thank you. No change really, Debbie.’
‘But we rarely see him,’ Ma says.
‘I see,’ Nadia says at last.
‘So we don’t,’ Ma says, her voice rising, ‘actually know what “same as usual” means.’
Nadia looks out of the window at green and grey old England. I don’t want Ma getting in one of her resentful states.
After this not another peep for about a decade and then road euphoria just bursts from Nadia.
‘What good roads you have here! So smooth, so wide, so long!’
‘Yes, they go all over,’ I say.
‘Wow. All over.’
Christ, don’t they even have fucking roads over there?
Nadia whispers. We lean towards her to hear about her dear father’s health. How often the old man pisses now, running for the pot clutching his crotch. The sad state of his old gums and his obnoxious breath. Ma and I watch this sweetie compulsively, wondering who she is: so close to us and made from my substance, and yet so other, telling us about Dad with an outrageous intimacy we can never share. We arrive home, and she says in an accent as thick as treacle (which makes me hoot to myself when I first hear it): ‘I’m so tired now. If I could rest for a little while.’
‘Sleep in my bed!’ I cry.
Earlier I’d said to Ma I’d never give it up. But the moment my sister walks across the estate with us and finally stands there in our flat above the building site, drinking in all the oddness, picking up Ma’s method books and her opera programmes, I melt, I melt. I’ll have to kip in the living room from now on. But I’d kip in the toilet for her.
‘In return for your bed,’ she says, ‘let me, I must, yes, give you something.’
She pulls a rug from her suitcase and presents it to Ma. ‘This is from Dad.’ Ma puts it on the floor, studies it and then treads on it.
And to me? I’ve always been a fan of crêpe paper and wrapped in it is the Pakistani dress I’m wearing now (with open-toed sandals — handmade). It’s gorgeous: yellow and green, threaded with gold, thin summer material.
I’m due a trip to the dole office any minute now and I’m bracing myself for the looks I’ll get in this gear. I’ll keep you informed.
*
I write this outside my room waiting for Nadia to wake. Every fifteen minutes I tap lightly on the door like a worried nurse.
‘Are you awake?’ I whisper. And: ‘Sister, sister.’ I adore these new words. ‘Do you want anything?’
I think I’m in love. At last.
Ma’s gone out to take back her library books, leaving me to it. Ma’s all heart, I expect you can see that. She’s good and gentle and can’t understand unkindness and violence. She thinks everyone’s just waiting to be brought round to decency. ‘This way we’ll change the world a little bit,’ she’d say, holding my hand and knocking on doors at elections. But she’s lived on the edge of a nervous breakdown for as long as I can remember. She’s had boyfriends before Howard but none of them lasted. Most of them were married because she was on this liberated kick of using men. There was one middle-class Labour Party smoothie I called Chubbie.
‘Are you married?’ I’d hiss when Ma went out of the room, sitting next to him and fingering his nylon tie.
‘Yes.’
‘You have to admit it, don’t you? Where’s your wife, then? She knows you’re here? Get what you want this afternoon?’
You could see the men fleeing when they saw the deep needy well that Ma is, crying out to be filled with their love. And this monster kid with green hair glaring at them. Howard’s too selfish and arrogant to be frightened of my ma’s demands. He just ignores them.
*
What a job it is, walking round in this Paki gear!
I stop off at the chemist’s to grab my drugs, my trancs. Jeanette, my friend on the estate, used to my eccentrities — the coonskin hat with the long rabbit tail, for example — comes along with me. The chemist woman in the white coat says to Jeanette, nodding at me when I hand over my script: ‘Does she speak English?’
*
Becoming enthralled by this new me now, exotic and interior. With the scarf over my head I step into the Community Centre and look like a lost woman with village ways and chickens in the garden.
In a second, the communists and worthies are all over me. I mumble into my scarf. They give me leaflets and phone numbers. I’m oppressed, you see, beaten up, pig-ignorant with an arranged marriage and certain suttee ahead. But I get fed up and have a game of darts, a game of snooker and a couple of beers with a nice lesbian.
Home again I make my Nadia some pasta with red pepper, grated carrot, cheese and parsley. I run out to buy a bottle of white wine. Chasing along I see some kids on a passing bus. They eyeball me from the top deck, one of them black. They make a special journey down to the platform where the little monkeys swing on the pole and throw racial abuse from their gobs.
‘Curry breath, curry breath, curry breath!’
The bus rushes on. I’m flummoxed.
*
She emerges at last, my Nadia, sleepy, creased around the eyes and dark. She sits at the table, eyelashes barely apart, not ready for small talk. I bring her the food and a glass of wine which she refuses with an upraised hand. I press my eyes into her, but she doesn’t look at me. To puncture the silence I play her a jazz record — Wynton Marsalis’s first. I ask her how she likes the record and she says nothing. Probably doesn’t do much for her on first hearing. I watch her eating. She will not be interfered with.
She leaves most of the food and sits. I hand her a pair of black Levi 501s with the button fly. Plus a large cashmere polo-neck (stolen) and a black leather jacket.
‘Try them on.’
She looks puzzled. ‘It’s the look I want you to have. You can wear any of my clothes.’
Still she doesn’t move. I give her a little shove into the bedroom and shut the door. She should be so lucky. That’s my best damn jacket. I wait. She comes out not wearing the clothes.
‘Nina, I don’t think so.’
I know how to get things done. I push her back in. She comes out, backwards, hands over her face.
‘Show me, please.’
She spins round, arms out, hair jumping.
‘Well?’
‘The black suits your hair,’ I manage to say. What a vast improvement on me, is all I can think. Stunning she is, dangerous, vulnerable, superior, with a jewel in her nose.
‘But doesn’t it … doesn’t it make me look a little rough?’