Farid was nothing like our Dad. For a start, had our father still lived at home, he would have said, ‘Don’t torture the oven. Smooth the Brillo pad gently over the surface.’ Why did he always say don’t torture the kettle, don’t torture the light switch, don’t torture the ice cubes? My father had a very intimate relationship with objects like kettles and door handles and keys. According to him they had to be understood, never bullied or tortured. To fill a kettle through its snout and not to take the lid off was to humiliate the kettle. To turn a door handle too roughly was to ‘duff it up’. He would not tolerate what he called ‘brutality’ to inanimate objects.
While Farid and my brother rolled on the floor punching each other, I could hear people mowing their lawns and washing their cars, the sort of things that happened in England on Saturdays, while Joan next door shouted to her dog, ‘HOLLY HOLLY HOLLY come home for your tea.’
Farid had somehow managed to get up onto his feet and was staring at Sam’s face.
‘Som,’ he said.
Farid seemed to want to say something else but couldn’t get the words out. Still staring at my brother, he eventually asked where our father actually was? Why was it that he was not living with us in the family house?
‘Mom and Dad have separated.’
Farid shook his head, puzzled. For the first time since he arrived on our door step it occurred to me he might be a kind man. He even started to collect up the lids from the floor.
When Mom got back with the shopping, she said, ‘Everything is very calm. How nice to come back to children who are not fighting with each other for a change.’ She lifted up a bottle of Asti Spumante from the shopping bags and slipped it in to the fridge along with six pots of hazelnut yogurt. Good, I thought. I’ll take that fizzy wine out of the fridge when it’s cold and I’ll run with it to the park. Then I’ll drink it all and jump under a moving car, leaving my napkins with ENGLAND biro’d on them to my biographers. They will flock to the house in Finchley to see where I lived and a blue plaque will be nailed on to the bricks and mortar of our first English house. As usual my brother took it upon himself to interrupt my thoughts and stir things up.
‘Farid hit me,’ Sam whined to Mom.
‘Did you Farid?’
‘Yes, I did,’ Farid confessed in a meek, pathetic voice.
‘He was banging the drum while I was translating Marx’s essay on wage labour written for the German Working-Man’s Club in Brussels.’
‘Farid,’ Mom said sternly, ‘Never hit my children again or you’ll be out on your ear.’
Our au pair smiled. He looked happy for the first time since he arrived.
That night, we ordered an Indian take-away and watched Steptoe and Son on the television. Sam lay with his head in Mom’s lap and begged to be spoonfed dhal like a pasha. Farid sat in the armchair Dad had always sat in but we didn’t mind anymore. He said he had a stomach ache from all the stress yet managed to finish his own lamb madras and polish off my chicken korma as well.
‘I like this family very much. You are good people even though you do not know how to make a home. But I have no home in England so I am honoured you have given me a room in your tent.’
By the time I got to bed, I felt weird and shaky. I had lived in England for six years and was nearly as English as they come. All the same I had come from somewhere else. I missed the smell of plants I could not name, the sound of birds I could not name, the murmur of languages I could not name. Where exactly was Southern Africa? One day I would look at a map and find out. That night I lay awake all night long. I had so many questions to ask the world from my bedroom in West Finchley about the country I was born in. How do people become cruel and depraved? If you torture someone, are you mad or are you normal? If a white man sets his dog on a black child and everyone says that’s okay, if the neighbours and police and judges and teachers say, ‘That’s fine by me,’ is life worth living? What about the people who don’t think it’s okay? Are there enough of them in the world?
As the milkman clanked down milk bottles on our door step, I suddenly knew why the lids for honey and ketchup and peanut butter were never in their right place in our family house. The lids, like us, did not have a place. I was born in one country and grew up in another, but I was not sure which one I belonged to. And another thing. I did not want to know this thing, but I did know all the same. Putting a lid on was like pretending our mother and father were back together again, attached to each other instead of prised apart.
I rolled off the bed and found the napkins I had saved from the greasy spoon. I saw the word ‘England’ biro’d into the tissue, crumpled and stained with bacon fat, but I couldn’t work out what I was trying to say. I knew I wanted to be a writer more than anything else in the world, but I was overwhelmed by everything and didn’t know where to start.
Four. Aesthetic Enthusiasm
‘It is sometimes necessary to know where to stop.’ The Chinese shopkeeper had probably noticed that my hand was resting quite close to his shirt cuff when he said that. The palm trees outside the restaurant were covered in snow by the time we had finished our bottle of wine. In fact, the tracks and paths that mapped the way back to my hotel had more or less disappeared. He still had not told me his name. I had not told him mine either, although I knew he knew it because he’d read one of my books. For some reason, knowing each other’s names was something we did not want to know. He leaned over towards the German couple at the table nearby and congratulated them for having had the foresight to bring arctic clothing to Majorca in spring. ‘My friend here,’ he pointed to me, ‘is dressed for the beach’.
The German man began to tell us, in English, how they had encountered a snake on a hike in the mountains earlier that morning. It was lucky they were wearing boots. The snake was hiding in a crack in a rock. It might even have been a rattlesnake. Did we know that dead snakes can bite for up to an hour after their death?
‘Yes,’ the Chinese shopkeeper said, ‘I did know that.’ He turned to me and began to talk about soup again. He was obsessed with soup. Apparently, although he’d forgotten how to make one sort of Chinese soup, he still remembered how to make another sort. It was more like rice porridge than soup, very nourishing and warming in winter, and he liked to add sesame oil and pepper to it. I couldn’t help noticing that his hand was now resting quite close to my hand, and he might have noticed too, because of what he said next.
‘Now tell me, where do you think your skin is thinnest on the body?’
‘On the finger tips?’
‘No. I’ll tell you now. It is thinnest on the eyelids and it is thickest on the palms and soles.’
I laughed and he smiled. Then he laughed and I smiled. He said he missed the smell of roasted peanuts in China and he’d forgotten how to make the seafood kind of Chinese soup, but, he was very pleased he’d made a new life in the mountains of Majorca because that is where I had invited him to join me at my table for three. And then he nudged me because Maria had just walked in to the restaurant and was stamping the snow off her boots. She looked surprisingly tall in a heavy coat trimmed with fur. I waved to her and she made her way to our table. Maria was carrying a small suitcase in her gloved hand. Her face was stern and sad.
‘My brother told me you were cold in your room.’
‘Yes.’
‘I have moved you to another room. There are blankets on your bed.’
‘Thank you.’
‘Are you going somewhere Maria?’
‘Yes.’
Maria did not want to talk. Not at all.
I opened my bag and gave her the chocolate I had bought at the Chinese shopkeeper’s shop, ‘intensidad’, with the big 99 % on it. And then I counted out the rent for my hotel room, four nights in cash, because I thought she might need it for whatever she had to do next. She was pleased to take the cash. When she kissed my cheek I could feel her heart beating under her coat, fierce and roaring.