Nor, as he had spelt out to her on numerous occasions, did he like being dependent on hand-outs from his father when he was twenty-seven years old.
but we rely heavily on the data that the Centre provides, and I know that you are fed up and cynical but these things can make a difference. It is a war—
Rashid had tried to explain to her on the phone that it was not a war, that it was more of a cage fight, where the other side could throw these flying kicks but their side was limbless or heavily disadvantaged in some way and kept getting disqualified for spitting. The audience loved it. He could hear them rattling their cutlery, but Lisa had grown impatient at the cage fight analogy.
It’s not really something that you can just escape from. It’s part of you, part of your family. You have to remember that.
I just wanted you to know that I think of you and worry about you. I do hope that you get the scholarship if that is what you really want and of course I would love you to be here, but I do so respect what you are doing and think that you would be so much happier if you viewed your situation differently.
Miss you.
Miss you. Love. Three kisses.
Anyway, he had got it. Nothing else mattered. He would be there.
Miss you. Love. Three kisses.
London!
Lisa!
Iman’s bed had not been slept in and she was not in the kitchen either. It was his mother in the kitchen. He didn’t feel ready for his mother yet, but at least his sister was not in there trying to wash up or something. There was this state of mal-co-ordination that came over her after a night like the one before. Suds slipped out of basin on to the floor. She broke things. She walked into chairs that were where they were meant to be.
Rashid’s mother stood firm in the kitchen, frying meat and onions in a vat. She was wearing her long, slopping-around-the-house thoub. Away from the house she was a flesh-coloured-tights and fitted-knee-length-skirt woman, a wearer of short-sleeved chemises and cardigans. For the outside world she blow-dried her hair into hard outward-turning curls. Unlike the rest of the family, her nose was trim and tiny, as straight as her eyebrows were curved, the latter being regularly threaded down to dark arches. With the mandil over her hair and her thoub she looked older, but fresher somehow. Her skin had an unblemished look about it that was unnaturally wax-like, as though an exploratory scalpel would find her flesh to be blood-free under its surface.
His mother mainly left the cooking to Sabri who could spend hours chopping parsley for tabouleh, stuffing vine leaves or trying out different seasonings on the Sultan Ibrahim, that prince of Gazan fishes. His mother just pickled.
‘What are you preparing for, a siege?’ he asked after the last batch, when every inch of counter space was taken up with fat, square-sided bottles stuffed with eggs, aubergines, olives and courgettes. To Rashid they seemed morbid: embryos in formaldehyde, preserved body parts, mutated limbs bobbing around in tinctured jellies. She did not look up. ‘We’re already under siege, can’t you tell?’
Rashid popped at the lids of the pickle jars with a wooden spoon. Pickles. London. Pickles. A sense of the previous night came over him. Part fear, part thrill. The leap under the helicopters, Gloria’s stars under his skin. He stopped. A small pink-rimmed mirror hanging on a hook over a dishcloth shot a look back at him, one that said he must’ve been truly stoned, no not just truly stoned but royally stoned; his eyes were amassed with stringy red veins. Rashid picked a pair of mirrored sunglasses from the top of the microwave and put them on.
‘The belligerent aerial attack, their military sources claimed, was in direct response to the bombing of a park yesterday afternoon for which the Islamic Justice Party has claimed responsibility…’ It was the local station who had chosen not to name the bomber.
‘Did you hear she’s a Hajjar?’ his mother asked. ‘Foolish girl gave those bastards the excuse to bomb the hospital.’
‘I saw them do it.’ Rashid moved so that she could get to the sink and lifted his sunglasses on to his head. They were scratched and covered with fingerprints and kitchen grease. His mother pulled her sleeves up from the elbow and banged again at the base of the pan with a wooden spoon. Steam hissed out from under a wodge of brain-like meat.
‘They cut the power for over five hours this morning. Everything’s partly defrosted; blood dripping out of the freezer when I opened it. All I can do is cook the lot, put it back and hope they leave the power alone. At least fifteen kilos I have still to do.’ Arrayed on the floor on a waterproof sheet, shoulders of lamb and cubes of beef lay bagged up and oozy in see-through plastic bags.
She turned in his direction, as though there was something she remembered. Rashid pulled the sunglasses down. The sight of him appeared to confuse her. It was as though he were somehow misplaced, a lost man in her kitchen. His mother could do that. She could choose not to see things. She could choose, for example, not to see that Sabri was in a wheelchair with sores across his buttocks that she had to treat every night, a catheter bag that she had to empty several times a day, a body that she helped lift in and out of bed. Instead, she spoke as though he was still her strapping son, her noble warrior. Once Rashid had heard her say, ‘Sabri could still have children, you know,’ in a tone that challenged the world to contradict her.
And their father leaving? That, of course, hadn’t happened either.
He would ask her about the split. He would sit her down, here in the kitchen and ask her why their father had suddenly shot out of the marriage like that, propelled himself out of it so rapidly, like a cockerel from a canon, only to find himself in the Gulf preening down his feathers and resuming a perfectly cordial relationship with them once he had landed, financial commitments intact, civility impeccable, marriage ruined.
He wouldn’t ask her today though. Another day would be better for that. She was dealing with all that meat for a start.
Maybe it was not the time to tell her his news either, not with the bombing, the power cut and everything. His eyes focussed on her marked-up newspapers, piled up on top of a battalion of water bottles that spread out across the kitchen floor. She had done today’s paper already. Blue pen circled items on British arms exports to Saudi, bread riots in Cairo and the death of a Marxist leader in Colombia. On the last evening of the month she would date the side of each article, cut them out and place them all into a large brown envelope. ‘I can get you any article you want, whenever you want it. You can even find them by subject matter,’ Rashid had tried to explain the Internet to her once, showing her a basic search function, but she had been distracted by Gloria’s presence behind the screen. ‘And when they cut our electricity, what will you do then?’ was all that she had asked.
He could hear his mother saying something about his father from under the sink. She was moving detergent bottles and glass jars around so he was not sure exactly what it was.
‘Is it his health?’ Rashid asked.
‘Health? Maybe. Who knows? But the last time he called he started to say that maybe you and Iman should leave. He even suggested that you visit him.’
‘Seriously?’ Rashid made small crescents in the line of blackened putty around the sink with his fingernail.
‘He’ll probably change his mind tomorrow,’ she said to the cabinet. ‘Ah, here it is.’ There was a clattering of glass as she sat back on to her knees, breathless.