“Then let's go upstairs.”
He looked immediately alarmed, the very picture of a bloke with something to hide. With his mother not there to tell him what his rights were in the situation, it was clear to Barbara that she had the upper hand. She made for the stairs. He was hot on her heels.
“There's nothing up there,” he said. “And you got no call to be—”
She swung to face him. “Did I say I was looking for something, Trevor?”
He stuttered, “Y-you said …”
“I said let's go upstairs. I have an itch to make this conversation more private.”
She continued to climb. The rap music came from behind one of the doors, but it wasn't the door to Trevor's room this time. Since it was accompanied by the sound of water roaring out of a large tap, Barbara assumed that one other member of the family was using the unintelligible chanting as an accompaniment to a bath.
She entered Trevor's room, holding the door open for him and shutting it behind them. Once inside, she sauntered to the table where his spider paraphernalia was spread out. She began to sift through it.
“What're you doing?” he demanded. “You said you wanted to talk in private.”
“I lied,” she replied. “What's this about anyway, all this junk? And how'd you get into spiders, such a nice lad like you?”
“Hang on!” he cried as she shifted a collection of half-assembled arachnids to see what was in the box beneath them. “Those'll fall apart.”
“I was wondering how you held them together, when I was here yesterday,” Barbara admitted.
She rooted through various sizes of sponges, through tubes of paint, through pipe cleaners, black plastic beads, straight pins, and glue. She moved aside reels of cotton in black, yellow, and red.
Trevor said angrily, “You got no bleeding business with that.”
But Barbara saw otherwise when she moved two old encyclopaedias to one side. Crammed between the volumes and the wall was another reel. But this one didn't have cotton wound round it. It was wound with wire.
“I think I have business with this, though.” She straightened and held the reel up for him to see. “Want to tell me about it?”
“About what? About that? It's just some old wire. You c'n see as much yourself.”
“That I can.” She slipped the reel into her shoulder bag.
“What d'you want with it? Why're you taking it? You can't take something from my room like that. And it's nothing anyway. It's just some old wire.”
“Used for what?”
“Used for anything. Used for fixing that net—” He jerked his head at the fishing net above his door, where the model spiders still cavorted. “Used for keeping the spider bodies together. Used for …” He struggled for another use. Words failed him, though, and he advanced on her. “You give me that bloody wire!” He said the six words through his teeth. “I didn't do nothing and you can't make it like I did. And you can't take nothing without my permission because—”
“Oh, but I can,” Barbara said pleasantly. “I can take you.”
He gawped at her. His eyes bulged and his mouth fell open and then snapped shut.
“D'you want to come quietly for a chat at the nick, or do I need to phone and have some assistance sent over?”
“But …no …why … I didn't do—”
“So you've said,” she told him. “So I expect you won't mind giving us your dabs, will you? Someone as innocent as you doesn't need to worry about where he's left his fingerprints.”
Aware of the difference in their sizes and strength, Barbara didn't give Trevor a chance to resist. She had him by the arm, out of the room, and on the stairs before he had the opportunity to protest. She wasn't so lucky, however, in the case of his mother.
Shirl was hoisting another box—this one to her shoulder—while Charlie made himself less than useful by playing with the television. She caught sight of Barbara and her eldest son as they were halfway down the stairs. She dropped the box.
“Now, you hang on!” She made a dash for the stairway and blocked their path.
“You don't want to interfere, Mrs. Ruddock,” Barbara told her.
“I bloody well mean to know what you're doing,” Shirl replied. “I know my rights. No one let you into this house, and no one agreed to talk to you. So if you think you can waltz in here and expect my Trevor—”
“Your Trevor's a suspect in a murder,” Barbara said, overheated and patience worn to gossamer. “So step to one side and do it nicely before more than one Ruddock gets run into the nick.”
She advanced anyway. Trevor said, “Mum! We don't need no trouble. Mum! D'you hear?”
Charlie had come to the sitting room door. Upstairs, Mr. Ruddock had begun to yell. At that moment the youngest boy ran towards them from the kitchen, a jar of honey in one hand, a bag of flour in the other.
“Mum?” Charlie said.
“Shirl!” Mr. Ruddock shouted.
“See!” Brucie cried, and poured the honey and the flour together onto the floor.
Barbara watched and listened and silently clarified Trevor's statement. The Ruddocks didn't need any more trouble. But what was often the case was that those not in need were blessed with more of what they already had.
“Take care of the kids,” Trevor said to his mother. He cast a sideways look towards the stairs. “Don't let him get at them while I'm gone.”
MUHANNAD SHOWED UP for mid-afternoon prayers. Sahlah hadn't expected him to do so. The argument with their father on the previous night had bled into the morning's breakfast. There had been no further exchange of words about Muhannad's activities with respect to the police investigation, but still the animosity that lingered between them had charged the air.
“Be concerned about offending these bloody Westerners if that's what you have to do,” Muhannad had snapped. “Just don't ask me to do the same. I won't allow the police to question even one of our people without representation, and if that makes your position on the town council difficult, then that's just the way it's going to be. You can trust what parades as the good will and noble intentions of this filthy community as much as you like, Father. You're free to do so because as we both know, the world has plenty of room for fools.”
Sahlah had shuddered, waiting for her father to strike him. Instead, although a vein throbbed in his temple when he replied, Akram's words were calm.
“In front of your wife, whose duty is to obey and respect you, I will not do as I ought, Muni. But there will come a day when you are forced to realise that promoting enmity gains one nothing.”
“Haytham is dead!” was Muhannad's response, and he made it slamming his fist into his palm. “Wasn't that the first blow struck in the cause of enmity? And who struck that blow?”
Sahlah had left before Akram replied, but not before she'd seen her mother's hands fumble at the mess she was making of her embroidery, and not before she'd seen Yumn's avid face absorbing the altercation as if the hot words between father and son were feeding her blood. Sahlah knew why. Any antagonism between Akram and Muhannad had the potential to push the son away from the father and closer to his wife. And that's what Yumn had wanted from the first: Muhannad entirely and solely to herself. In the traditional way of things, she could never have him solely. He had duties to his parents that precluded this. But tradition had flown out of the window with Haytham's death.
Now, in the courtyard of the mustard factory, Sahlah saw that her brother had come to stand in the shadows—behind the factory's three Muslim women—while the other workers faced the mihrab that Akram had fashioned into the wall, so that they might direct their prayers eastward towards Mecca. But Muhannad didn't engage in any of the bows or prostrations, and when shahada was recited, his lips didn't move in the profession of faith: “There is no God but Allah and Muhammad is His Prophet.”
These words weren't in English, but everyone knew their meaning. As they knew the meaning of the Fatihah that followed.
“Allahu Akbar,” Sahlah heard her father murmur. And her heart was sore with the need to believe. But if God was most great, why had He brought their family to this: one member pitted against another, each engagement between them an attempt to illustrate which person had power and which was forced by age, by birth, or by temperament to submit?
The prayers continued. Inside the factory, the few Westerners whom her father employed took time from their own work like their Asian counterparts. Akram had long ago told them that they might use the periods each day during which the Muslims prayed as a group to pray formally on their own or to meditate. Instead, Sahlah knew, they hurried out to smoke in the lane, as happy to take advantage of her father's generosity as they were willing to remain in ignorance about the tenets of his religion and his way of life.
But Akram Malik didn't see that. Nor did he notice the way their lips curved slightly behind his back, offering smug smiles of superiority in the face of his foreign ways. Nor did he observe the glances they exchanged—eyes moving subtly skyward and shoulders shrugging—each time he shepherded his Muslim employees to the courtyard in which they said their prayers.
As they were doing now, and with a devotion that Sahlah herself couldn't pretend to feel. She stood as they stood, she moved as they moved, her lips formed the appropriate words. But in her case, it was all performance.
A movement out of the ordinary caught her attention. She turned. The outcast cousin—Taymullah Azhar—had come into the courtyard. He was speaking in a whisper to Muhannad. In response to whatever Azhar was telling him, Muhannad's face went rigid. In a moment, he gave a single sharp nod and indicated the door with a canting motion of his head. The two men left together.
Akram rose from his final prostration at the front of their small congregation of believers. He concluded their prayers with a recitation of the taslim, asking for peace, mercy, and the blessings of God. As Sahlah watched him and listened to his words, she wondered when any of those three requests would be granted to her and to her family.
As was always the case, the Malik employees returned to work quietly. Sahlah waited for her father just inside the door.
She watched him, momentarily unobserved. He was getting older, and she'd hardly noticed until this moment. His hair was combed and spread carefully across the top of his head but thinner than she'd ever remembered. His jaw was no longer firm, and his body—which she'd always seen as iron-like in strength—was soft in appearance, as if some sort of resistance had gone out of him. The skin beneath his eyes was dark, charcoal-smudged beneath his lower lashes. And his gait that had been swift and firm of purpose seemed hesitant now.
She wanted to tell him that nothing mattered so much as the future he'd so long held dear, a future in which he planted roots and a family in a small Essex town and built a life there for children and grandchildren and for other Asians like himself who left behind their country in pursuit of a dream. But she'd been party to obliterating that future. Any reference that she made to it now would be born of a need to maintain a pretence which, at the moment, she hadn't the heart to attempt.
Akram came inside the building. He paused to close and lock the door behind him. He saw her waiting by the water cooler and he came to her, taking the paper cup that she extended for him.
“You look tired, Abhy,” she said. “You don't need to stay at the factory. Mr. Armstrong can keep things going for the rest of the afternoon. Why don't you go home?” She had more than one reason for making this suggestion, of course. If she left the factory herself while her father was there, he would know soon enough and he'd want to know why. Rachel's phoned and there's an emergency had served her purposes on the previous day when she'd left to confront her friend at the Clifftop Snuggeries. She couldn't use that excuse again.
He touched her shoulder. “Sahlah. You bear the weight of our trouble with a strength I can't quite comprehend.”
Sahlah didn't want the praise, so sorely did it abrade her conscience. She looked for something to use as a response, something that was at least close to the truth because she couldn't bear to continue the process in which she'd been engaged these many months: constructing a careful maze of lies, projecting a purity of heart, mind, and soul that she didn't possess. “Abhy, I wasn't in love with him. I hoped to love him eventually, as you and Ammī love. But I hadn't learned to love him yet, so I don't feel the grief that you think I feel.”
His fingers tightened on her shoulder, then moved to graze her cheek. “I want you to know in your own life the devotion that I feel for your mother. That's what I hoped for you and for Haytham.”
“He was a good man,” she said, and she inwardly acknowledged the truth of this statement. “You made a good choice of husband for me.”
“A good choice or a selfish one?” he asked meditatively.
Slowly, they moved along the back corridor of the factory, past the locker room and the employees’ lounge. “He had much to offer the family, Sahlah. That's why I chose him. And every hour since his death I've asked myself if I still would have chosen him had he been hunchbacked, evil, or ridden with disease. Would I have chosen him anyway, just because I needed his talents here?” Akram's gesture encompassed the factory walls. “We persuade ourselves to believe all manner of falsehood when our self-interest guides us. Then, when the worst befalls us, we're left to gaze back over our actions. We wonder whether one of them might have been the cause of disaster. We question whether an alternative action might have averted the worst from happening.”
“You aren't blaming yourself for Haytham's death,” she said, aghast at the thought of her father carrying this burden.
“Who else is to blame? Who else brought him to this country? And to meet my need of him, Sahlah. Not yours.”
“I needed Haytham as well, Abhy-jahn.”
Her father hesitated before passing through the doorway to his own office. His smile was infinitely sad. “Your spirit's as generous as it's pure,” he said.
No compliment could have grieved her more. She wanted in that instant to pour the truth before her father. But she recognised the selfishness of that desire. While it was true that she would experience the relief of finally dropping the guise of a goodness that she didn't possess, she would be dropping it at the expense of crushing the spirit of a man who had long been incapable of seeing that evil could exist under an exterior that was otherwise righteous.
It was her desperation to preserve her father's image of her that now caused her to say, “Go home, Abby-jahn. Please. Go home to rest.”
His answer was to kiss his fingers and press them to her cheeks. Saying nothing further, he entered his office.
She returned to reception, where her own duties awaited, her brain working anxiously to create an excuse to take her away from the factory for the time she needed to do what had to be done. If she claimed to be ill, her father would insist that someone accompany her home. If she claimed an emergency on Second Avenue—one of the children having disappeared and Yumn in a panic, for instance—he would himself charge into action. If she simply disappeared …But how could she do that? How could she cause her father more worry and trouble?
She sat behind the reception desk and watched the fish and bubbles float across the screen of her computer's monitor. There was work to be done, but she couldn't at the moment think what it was. She could only turn over the possibilities in her mind: what she could do to preserve her family and simultaneously to save herself. There was only one option.
The outside door opened, and Sahlah looked up. God is great, she exulted silently when she saw who was entering the factory. It was Rachel Winfield.
She'd come on her bicycle. It leaned just beyond the entry, rusted from years in the town's salty air. She wore a long, filmy skirt, and round her neck and dangling from her ears were a necklace and earrings of Sahlah's own creation, fashioned from polished rupees and beads.
Sahlah tried to take comfort in Rachel's attire, especially in the jewellery. Surely it meant that her need of help was foremost in Rachel's mind.
Sahlah didn't offer her a greeting. Nor did she let the gravity of her friend's face dismay her. The matter before them was a grave one. Becoming a party to ridding oneself of a burgeoning life—no matter how critical was the need to do so—wasn't an endeavour that Rachel would ever take lightly.
“Hot,” Rachel said by way of greeting. “Hotter than I ever remember. It's like the sun killed the wind and is getting ready to suck up the sea as well.”
Sahlah waited. There was only one reason for her friend to appear at the factory. Rachel was her route to the means by which she would begin to put her life back in order, and her arrival suggested that the means were at hand. It wouldn't be easy to arrange to be gone for the length of time necessary to take care of her problem—her parents had long ago made it their practice to hold her accountable for every moment of her day—but with Rachel's help, surely she'd be able to create a plausible excuse for an absence whose length would guarantee a successful visit to a doctor or a clinic or a casualty ward where someone skilled in the process could end the nightmare that she'd been living for the last—
Sahlah schooled herself to draw past the desperation. Rachel was here, she said silently. Rachel had come.
“Can you talk?” Rachel asked. “I mean”—with a glance towards the door leading into the administration offices—”maybe outside is better than here. You know.”
Sahlah rose and followed her friend out into the sunlight. Despite the heat, she felt unaccountably cool, but the coolness ran beneath her skin as if her veins argued with what her senses perceived.
Rachel found a shady spot where the factory wall cast a shadow in the afternoon light. She faced Sahlah, looking beyond her shoulder to the sprawl of the industrial estate, as if the mattress factory held a fascination that she had to experience immediately.
Just when Sahlah was beginning to wonder if her friend would ever speak, Rachel finally did so. “I can't,” she said.
The coolness beneath Sahlah's skin seemed to spread into her lungs. “Can't what?”
“You know.”
“I don't. Tell me.”
Rachel moved her eyes from the mattress factory to Sahlah's face. Sahlah wondered that she'd never noticed before how misshapen those eyes were, one slightly lower than the other and too widely set—even after surgery—to be deemed natural. It was one of the features of Rachel that Sahlah had disciplined herself to overlook. Rachel couldn't help the way she'd been born. No one could.
“I've thought and thought,” Rachel said. “All last night. I didn't even sleep. I can't help you with …you know …with what you asked.”
At first Sahlah didn't want to believe that Rachel was talking about the abortion. But there was no avoiding the implacable resolve that settled the odd, uneven features on her friend's face.
All Sahlah could manage to say was “You can't.”
“Sahlah, I talked to Theo,” Rachel said in a rush. “I know, I know. You didn't want me to, but your thinking's wrong cause you're in a state. It's only fair for Theo to have some say in this. You got to see that.”
“This isn't Theo's concern.” Sahlah could hear the stiffness in her voice.
“Tell that to Theo,” Rachel said. “He sicked up in a rubbish bin when I told him what you were planning to do. Now, don't look like that, Sahlah. I know what you're thinking. Like his being sick meant he didn't mean to do anything to help you. That's what I decided at first as well. But I thought and thought about this all last night, and I just know that if you wait and give things a chance to settle down and give Theo a chance to do right—”
“You didn't listen,” Sahlah finally cut in. Her body was tense with the need to take some sort of action and take it at once. She recognised the panic for what it was, but recognition did nothing to quell it. “Did you hear anything I said to you yesterday, Rachel? I can't marry Theo, I can't be with Theo, I can't even talk to Theo publicly. Why won't you see that?”
“Okay, I see it,” Rachel said. “And maybe you won't be able to talk to him for a while. Maybe you won't even be able to talk to him till the baby comes. But once the baby does come … I mean, he's a human being, Sahlah. He's not a monster. He's a decent man who knows what's right. Some other bloke might look the other way forever, but not Theo Shaw. Theo's not going to reject his own baby for long. You'll see.”
Sahlah felt as if she were sinking into the lumpy, hot ground beneath her feet. “And how do you propose that I keep my family from knowing about all this? About being pregnant? About having a baby?”
“You can't,” Rachel said with perfect reason, in the voice of a girl who hadn't the slightest idea what kind of encumbrances went with being born female into a traditional Asian family. “You'll have to tell your mum and dad.”
“Rachel.” Sahlah's mind careened from one possibility to the next, each of them presenting an unacceptable alternative of what to do and how to do it. “You've got to listen to me. You've got to try to understand.”
“But it's more than just what's right for you and the baby and Theo,” Rachel said, still reason incarnate. “I thought and thought last night about what's right for me as well.”
“How does this have anything to do with you? All I need from you is information. And a little help to get me away from here—or from my parents’ house—with enough time to see a doctor.”
“But it's not like going to the market, Sahlah. You can't just pop in and say to some bloke, ‘I got a kid inside me I want to get rid of.’ We'd have to go more than once—you and me—and—”
“I wasn't asking you to go at all,” Sahlah said. “I was just asking you to be willing to help me with information. But I can get that myself. And I will get that myself. And when I have it, all I'll need from you is the willingness to phone me and ask me to do something—it can be anything—that would serve as an excuse for me to be away from my parents’ house for enough time to go to the clinic—or wherever it is that I can have it done.”
“Look at you,” Rachel said. “You don't even want to say the word. You call it it. And that should tell you pretty much how you'll feel if you get rid of the baby.”
“I know how I'll feel. I'll feel relieved. I'll feel as if I have my life back. I'll know I haven't destroyed my parents’ belief in their children, split my family into pieces, struck a death-blow to my father, caused my world—”
“That won't happen,” Rachel said. “And even if it happens for a day or a week or a month, they'll come round. They'll all come round. Theo, your mum and your dad. Even Muhannad.”
“Muhannad,” Sahlah said, “will kill me. Once I can no longer hide my condition, my brother will kill me, Rachel.”
“That's rubbish,” Rachel said. “You know that's rubbish. He'll be in a twist and he might even pick a fight with Theo, but he'll never lay a hand on you. You're his sister, for God's sake.”
“Please, Rachel. You don't know him. You don't know my family. You see their exteriors—what everyone sees—but you don't know how it really is. You don't know what they're capable of doing. They'll see the disgrace—”
“And they'll get over it,” Rachel said, with an air of finality to her voice that washed a wave of despair over Sahlah. “And until they do, I'll take care of you. You know I'll always take care of you.”
Sahlah saw it then: how they'd come full circle. They were back where they'd been on Sunday afternoon, back where they'd met on the previous day. They were at the Clifftop Snuggeries, if only in mind rather than in body.
“Besides,” Rachel said in a tone that indicated she'd reached the conclusion of her remarks, “I have my own conscience to think of, Sahlah. And how d'you expect I'd feel, knowing I made myself part of something I didn't think was right? I got to consider that.”
“Of course.” Sahlah's lips formed the words, but she couldn't hear herself say them. Instead, she felt as if she were being sucked out of Rachel's presence, out of the industrial estate altogether. An unseen force had her in its grip and was casting her away, away, away. She couldn't feel the ground beneath her, and the once-hot sun had burnt itself to nothing, leaving cold in its place, and endless frost.
And from the distance she had left behind, Sahlah could hear Rachel's words of parting. “You don't need to worry, Sahlah. Really. It'll all work out for the best. You'll see.”