SAHLAH SPENT HER time in the hospital corridor watching the door to Mrs. Shaw's room. The nurse had informed them that only one person at a time was allowed to see the patient, and she was relieved that this injunction prevented her from having to see Theo's grandmother. At the same time, she felt enormous guilt at her own relief. Mrs. Shaw was ill—and desperately so if the glimpse Sahlah had had of the hospital machinery in her room was any indication—and the tenets of her religion directed her to minister in some way to the woman's need. Those who believed and did good works, the Holy Qur'aan instructed, would be brought into the gardens underneath which rivers flowed. And what better work could be done than to visit the sick, especially when the sick took the form of one's enemy?
Theo, of course, had never directly stated the fact that his grandmother hated the Asian community as a whole and wished them ill individually. But her aversion for the immigrants who'd invaded Balford-le-Nez was always the unspoken reality between Sahlah and the man she loved. It had divided them as effectively as had Sahlah's own spoken revelations about her parents’ plans for her future.
Sahlah knew at heart that the love between Theo and herself had been defeated long before its inception. Tradition, religion, and culture had acted in conjunction to vanquish it. But having someone to blame for the impossibility of a life with Theo was a temptation that had sought to beguile her from the first. And how easy it was to twist the words of the Holy Qur'aan now, moulding them into a justification of what had happened to Theo's grandmother: Whatever good befalleth thee (O man) it is from Allah, and whatever of ill befalleth thee it is from thyself.
She could thus stoutly proclaim that Mrs. Shaw's current state was the direct result of the loathing, bias, and prejudice that she fostered in herself and encouraged in others. But Sahlah knew that she could also apply those same words from the Qur'aan to herself. For ill had befallen her as surely as it had befallen Theo's grandmother. And just as surely, the ill was a direct result of her own selfish, misguided behaviour.
She didn't want to think about it: how the ill had happened and what she was going to do to bring it to an end. The reality was that she didn't know what she was going to do. She didn't even know where to begin, despite the fact that she was sitting in the corridor of a hospital where activities euphemistically labelled Necessary Procedures were probably performed all the time.
Just for a moment with Rachel, she'd felt relief. When her friend had said, “I've gone and done it,” such a weight had lifted from Sahlah's shoulders that she'd actually thought she might become airborne. But when it had become apparent that going and doing it had meant acquiring a flat into which Sahlah knew she would never move, despair had descended upon her forcefully. Rachel had been her only hope to rid herself of the overt mark of her sin against her religion and her family, doing it in perfect secrecy and with minimum risk. Now, she knew, she was going to have to strike out on her own. And she couldn't even begin to determine the first move she had to make.
“Sahlah? Sahlah?”
She started at the sound of her name, said in the same hushed tone that he'd used in the pear orchard on those nights that they'd met. Theo stood to her right, stopped dead in his progress to his grandmother's room, one hand holding a can of Coke that was beaded with moisture.
She reached without thinking for the pendant she wore, as much to cover it up from him as to hold it in a form of taking sanctuary. But he'd seen the fossil, and he obviously made an interpretation from the fact that she was wearing it, because he came to the bench on which she was sitting and he sat down next to her. He set his Coke on the floor. She watched him do it. Then she kept her eyes on the can's aluminium top.
“Rachel told me, Sahlah,” he said. “She thinks—”
“I know what she thinks,” Sahlah whispered. She wanted to tell Theo to leave or at least to stand across the corridor and pretend their conversation was nothing save an expression of concern over his grandmother's condition on her part and a polite offering of gratitude for that concern on his. But the very nearness of him after the long weeks of not seeing him was like an intoxicant to her. Her heart wanted more and more of it even as her mind told her that the only way she could serve herself and ultimately survive was to accept less.
“How could you do it?” he asked. “I've been asking myself that question over and over since I talked to her.”
“Please, Theo. It doesn't help to talk about it.”
“Doesn't help?” He asked the question bitterly. “That's fine with me, because I don't much care if it doesn't help. I loved you, Sahlah. You said you loved me.”
The top of the Coke can shimmered in her vision. She blinked quickly and kept her head lowered. Around them, the work of the hospital went on. Orderlies hurried by with trolleys in front of them, doctors made their rounds, nurses carried small trays of medication into their patients. But she and Theo were divided from them as effectively as if they'd been encased in glass.
“What I've been wondering,” Theo said, “is how long it took you to decide you loved Querashi instead of me. What was it, a day? A week? Two? Or maybe it didn't happen at all because, like you kept telling me, your people's ways don't make love necessary when it comes to marriage. Isn't that how you put it?”
Sahlah could feel the blood beating fiercely behind the birthmark on her cheek. There was no way that she could make him understand when his understanding demanded a truth from her that she would not part with.
“I've also been wondering how it happened and where. You'll forgive me for that, I hope, because you'll understand that for the last six weeks I've thought of practically nothing else but how and where it didn't happen between the two of us. It could have, but it didn't. Oh, we came close enough, didn't we? On Horsey Island. Even that time in the orchard, when your brother—”
“Theo,” Sahlah said. “Please don't do this to us.”
“There isn't an us. I thought there was. Even when Querashi showed up—just like you said he was going to show up—I thought there still was. I wore that fucking bracelet—”
She flinched from the term. He wasn't, she saw, wearing the bracelet now.
“—and I kept thinking, She knows she doesn't have to marry him. She knows she can refuse to do it because there's no way in hell that her dad will make her marry anyone against her will. Her dad's Asian, yes. But he's English as well. Maybe more English than she is, really. But the days went by and turned into weeks and Querashi stayed. He stayed and your father brought him round to the Cooperative and introduced him as his son. ‘In a few weeks, he joins our family,’ he told me. ‘He takes our Sahlah as his bride.’ And I had to listen and offer best wishes and all the time I wanted to—”
“No!” She couldn't bear to hear the admission. And if he thought her refusal to listen meant her love for him was dead, that was just as well.
“Here's how it was at night,” Theo said. His words were terse. Their sound limned his bitterness. “During the day I could forget about everything and just work myself into a stupor. But at night I had nothing but the thought of you. And while I couldn't sleep and I couldn't much eat, I could deal with that because all along I thought you would be thinking of me as well. She'll tell her dad tonight, I kept thinking. Querashi will leave. And then we'll have time, Sahlah and I, time and a chance.”
“We never had either. I tried to tell you that. You didn't want to believe me.”
“And you? What did you want, Sahlah? Why did you come to me those nights in the orchard?”
“I can't explain it,” she whispered hopelessly.
“That's the thing about games. No one can ever bloody explain them.”
“I wasn't playing a game with you. What I felt was real. Who I was was real.”
“Right. Fine. And I'm sure that was true for you and Haytham Querashi as well.” He started to rise.
She stopped him, her hand reaching out and closing on the bare flesh of his arm. “Help me,” she said, looking at him finally. She'd forgotten the exact blue-green of his eyes, the mole next to his mouth, the fall of his soft blond hair. She was startled by his sudden proximity and frightened by her body's response to the simple sensation of her hand's touching him. She knew she had to release him, but she couldn't. Not until he'd committed would she let him go. He was her only chance. “Rachel won't, Theo. Please. Help me.”
“Get rid of Querashi's kid, you mean? Why?”
“Because my parents …” How could she possibly explain?
“What about them? Oh, your dad'll probably be bloody well cheesed off when he hears you're pregnant. But if the kid's a boy, he'll adjust quick enough. Just tell him you and Querashi were so hot for each other that you couldn't wait until after the ceremony.”
Beyond the rank injustice of his words—born however they were from his own suffering—their sheer brutality forced the truth from her. “This isn't Haytham's baby,” she said. And then she dropped her hand from his arm. “I was already two months pregnant when Haytham came to Balford.”
Theo stared at her, disbelieving. Then she could see him trying to bleed the full extent of the truth from an agonised study of her face. He said, “What the hell …?” But the question died before he finished it. He merely repeated the opening part, saying, “Sahlah, what the bloody hell …?”
“I need your help,” she said. “I'm begging for your help.”
“Whose is it?” he asked. “If it isn't Haytham's …Sahlah, whose is it?”
“Please help me do what I need to do. Who can I phone? Is there a clinic? It can't be in Balford. I can't take that chance. But in Clacton …? There must be something in Clacton. Someone there who can help me, Theo. Quietly and quickly so my parents don't know. Because if they find out, it will kill them. Believe me. It will kill them, Theo. And not only them.”
“Who else?”
“Please.”
“Sahlah.” His hand closed fiercely on her upper arm. It was as if he sensed in her tone everything that she could not bring herself to say. “What happened? That night. Tell me. What happened?”
You're going to pay, he'd said, the way all whores pay.
“I brought it on myself,” she said brokenly, “because I didn't care what he thought. Because I told him I loved you.”
“Oh God,” he whispered and his hand fell from her arm.
THE DOOR TO Agatha Shaw's hospital room opened, and Sahlah's father stepped out. He closed it carefully behind him. He looked bewildered to see his daughter and Theo Shaw in earnest conversation. But his face warmed in an instant, perhaps with the certainty that Sahlah was doing her part to bring herself into the garden underneath which the rivers flowed.
He said, “Ah. Theo. I'm so very happy that we won't have left the hospital without seeing you. I've just spoken to your grandmother, and I've given her my assurance—as a friend and town councillor—that her plans for Balford's renaissance will go forward unchanged and unimpeded in any way.”
Next to her, Theo rose. Sahlah did likewise. She ducked her head modestly, and in doing so, she hid from her father's vision the telltale sign of her birthmark's painful throbbing.
“Thank you, Mr. Malik,” Theo said. “That's good of you. Gran will more than appreciate your kindness.”
“Very good,” Akram said. “And now, Sahlah my dear, shall we be on our way?”
Sahlah nodded. She cast Theo a fleeting look. The young man had gone pale beneath his light tan, and he was gazing from Akram to her and back to Akram as if he sought but failed to find something to say. He was her only hope, and like every other hope she'd once harboured about love and life, he was fading from her.
She said, “It was lovely talking to you again, Theo. I hope your grandmother recovers quickly.”
He said, “Thank you,” stiffly.
Sahlah felt her father take her arm, and she allowed herself to be led towards the lift at the end of the corridor. Each step seemed to take her away from safety. And then Theo spoke.
“Mr. Malik,” he said.
Akram stopped, turned. He looked pleasantly attentive. Theo rejoined them.
“I was wondering,” Theo said. “I mean, forgive me if I'm out of place, because I don't pretend to know exactly what's right in this situation. But would you very much mind if I took Sahlah to lunch one day next week? There's a …well, there's a jewellery exhibit—it's at Green Lodge, where they do the summer courses—and as Sahlah makes jewellery, I thought she might like to see it.”
Akram cocked his head and considered the request. He looked at his daughter as if gauging her readiness for such an adventure. He said, “You are a good friend of the family, Theo. I can see no objection, if Sahlah wishes to go. Do you, Sahlah?”
She raised her head. “Green Lodge,” she said. “Where is that, Theo?”
His reply was as even as was his expression. “It's in Clacton,” he told her.
UMN KNEADED THE SMALL OF HER BACK AND USED her foot to kick the trug ahead of her in her assigned rows of her mother-in-law's loathsome vegetable garden. Sullenly, she watched Wardah cultivating two rows over—hovering over a vine of chillis with the devotion of a newlywed wife to her husband—and she wished upon the older woman everything foul that was humanly possible, from sun stroke to leprosy. It was approximately two million bloody degrees, working there among the plants. And to accompany the unbearable, deadly temperature, which that morning had been declared a record high by the BBC Breakfast News, the insect life in Wardah's garden was making a feast of more than the tomatoes, peppers, onions, and beans upon which they normally sated themselves. Gnats and flies buzzed round Yumn's head like malicious satellites. They landed on her perspiring face, while spiders worked their way beneath her dupattā and tiny green caterpillars dropped from vine leaves onto her shoulders. She flailed her hands and raged, attempting to drive the flies in her mother-in-law's direction.
This torment was yet another offence committed by Wardah against her. Any other mother-in-law, filled with what ought to have been gratitude at having been presented with two grandchildren in such rapid succession and so soon after her son's marriage—would have insisted that Yumn rest herself beneath the walnut tree at the edge of the garden, where even at this moment her children—two male children—rolled their toy lorries along the miniature thoroughfare created by a space between the old tree's roots. Any other mother-in-law would have recognised that a woman on the verge of another pregnancy should not even be relaxing in the blazing sunlight, let alone be toiling in it. Hard manual labour wasn't good for a woman in her childbearing years, Yumn told herself. But try sharing that bit of information with Wardah, Wardah the Wonder, who'd spent the entire day of her son Muhannad's birth washing every window of the house, cooking dinner for her husband, and scrubbing the dishes, the pots, and the kitchen floor before she squatted in the larder to deliver the baby. No. Wardah Malik was unlikely to see temperatures rising to thirty-five degrees as anything other than a minor inconvenience, just as she'd seen the hose pipe ban.
Every sensible person in the country had met the annual restriction on the use of hose pipes by limiting what was planted in his garden. But this, of course, was not Wardah's way. Wardah Malik had planted as usual, row upon row upon endless nasty row of fragile seedlings that she tended to every afternoon. The hose pipe banned because of the drought, she watered every loathsome plant by hand, hauling water by the bucketful from the outdoor tap near the kitchen.
She used two buckets for this exercise. While she was engaged in filling one bucket and carrying it to the edge of the vegetable patch, she expected Yumn to sling the other bucket round the plants. But prior to that daily exercise, there was cutting, pruning, picking, and weeding to be done. Which is what they were engaged in at the moment. And Wardah expected Yumn's help in this as well. Curse her to eternal, burning, scalding, skin-bubbling torment.
Yumn knew what lay behind Wardah's demands upon her: from cooking to cleaning to slaving in the garden. Wardah sought to punish her for doing so easily that which she herself had been nearly incapable of doing at all. It hadn't taken much investigation to discover that Wardah and Akram Malik had been married ten years before Wardah had been able to produce Muhannad. And another six years had passed before she'd been able to present her husband with Sahlah. That was sixteen years of effort resulting in only two children. Given the same amount of time, Yumn knew that she would be giving Muhannad more than a dozen babies and most of them males. So when Wardah Malik looked upon her son's wife, she saw her superior. And only by enslavement was she able to ensure that Yumn knew and remained in her place.
Curse her to everlasting, freezing, rat-infested, starvation-ridden torment, Yumn thought again as she hacked at the rock-hard earth that the sun had baked into a brick-like consistency, despite her daily ministrations of water. She aimed her hoe at a Gibraltar-shaped clod beneath one of the tomato plants, and as she drove it into the earth, she pretended the clod was Wardah's bum.
Whap went the hoe. The old witch rears back in surprise. Whap. Whap. The nasty crone howls in pain. Yumn smiled. Whap. Whap. Whap. Yumn draws first blood on the cow's backside. Whap. Whap. Whap. WHAP. Wardah falls to the ground. WHAPWHAPWHAP-WHAP. She's at Yumn's mercy with her hands uplifted. She begs for a release that only Yumn can give her, but WHAPWHAPWHAPWHAP-WHAP, Yumn knows that her time of triumph has come and with her mother-in-law at last defenceless, subdued, a slave to the killing whimsy of her own son's wife, a veritable—
“Yumn! Stop it at once! Stop!”
Wardah's cries broke into her thoughts as if disturbing a dream, and Yumn woke from them just as abruptly as a dreamer wakes. She found that her heart was pounding ferociously and the sweat was dripping from her chin onto the front of her qamts. The handle of the hoe had become slick from the wetness of her palms and her sandal-shorn feet were buried in the earth she'd managed to rearrange in her attack. Dust was rising on every side of her and settling against her streaming face and her sweat-drenched clothes like a gauzy veil.
“What are you doing?” Wardah demanded. “You stupid girl! Look what you've done!”
Through the haze of soil sent upwards by the flailing of her hoe, Yumn saw that she'd hacked down four of her mother-in-law's prized tomato plants. They lay like storm-felled trees. And their fruit was thoroughly mashed into crimson pellets, completely beyond redemption.
As, obviously, was Yumn herself. Wardah threw her secateurs into her trug and advanced upon her daughter-in-law angrily. “Is there nothing you can do without destroying it?” she demanded. “What do I ask of you that you don't ruin?”
Yumn stared at her, feeling her nostrils flare and her lips move into a sullen line.
“You're thoughtless, lazy, and completely selfish,” Wardah declared. “Believe me, Yumn, had your father not paid us handsomely to take you off his hands, you'd still be at home tormenting your mother instead of exasperating me.”
This was the longest speech that Wardah had ever made in her presence, and Yumn was at first startled to hear her normally docile mother-in-law say so much. But her surprise quickly dissipated as her muscles coiled in a desire to strike the other woman across the face. No one was to speak to her like that. No one was ever to speak to the wife of Muhannad Malik without deference, subservience, and solicitousness in her voice. Yumn was gathering her wits to reply, when Wardah spoke again.
“Clean up this mess. Take those plants to the compost heap. Repair the row that you've ruined. And do it at once, before I act in a way that I'll later regret.”
“I'm not your servant.” Yumn threw down her hoe.
“Indeed you're not. A servant with your talent for doing nothing would have been dismissed within a week. Pick up that hoe and do as I say.”
“I shall tend to my children.” Yumn began to stride towards the walnut tree, where her two boys—oblivious of the altercation between their mother and grandmother—zoomed their toy lorries along the old, exposed roots.
“You will not. You will do as I say. Get back to work at once.”
“My boys need me.” Yumn called to the children: “Lovely ones, shall your ammī-gee play with you now?”