Gravel Heart(11)

Both our bedrooms were air-conditioned now, and Uncle Amir had a colour television installed in his room. The television boomed out in our house and could be heard in every room. As soon as Uncle Amir came home he switched the set on just to see that it was still working as it should because there were times when it did not. Then he would get angry with it and fiddle and fiddle until he got it to work, although sometimes it remained blank for days on end. When he did not succeed he said abusive words about the electrician who fixed it for him and went off in search of him. In the end he found another electrician, who told him that the aerial was not properly adjusted, although that did not mean the end of Uncle Amir’s anguish over his television. At these times it exasperated him so much he shook his fists in rage at it and promised to kill it, but I think he also did that to make us laugh.

I still slept in a cot in the same room as my mother, but Uncle Amir teased me that I would not be doing so for a great deal longer because he was planning to move to his own flat and then I would have to give up the cot and sleep in a room of my own like a grown-up. He knew that I did not like any of these ideas. I liked sleeping in the cot in the same room as my mother and I loved listening to the stories she told me when she was in the mood. Also, I did not want Uncle Amir to leave.

He was always coming and going, Uncle Amir, always fidgeting, unable to sit still for long, his legs crossing and uncrossing, ankles jittering restlessly. He needed to do things, he said. He could not just sit around staring at a wall. He played music or watched television with his door open, played the guitar and sang at the top of his voice as if he was still playing with the band like he used to when he was younger. He talked about one plan or another, making fun of my mother or of me, laughing and prodding and provoking. So when he went away the following year an unexpected silence descended on our house and us. I was too young to understand precisely where he was going and why, but he explained it all anyway and later explained it again. He was sent on a three-year International Relations course to University College Dublin, intended, he told my mother and me, for future high-flying diplomats. Those words International Relations at University College Dublin stayed with me for years even though I did not know their full meaning.

‘It’s a very prestigious programme,’ he told us, ‘very difficult to get into, very generous stipend paid by European governments. Do you know what a stipend is? It’s like a salary, only more classy. It’s Latin. Do you know what Latin is? It’s an ancient language spoken in prestigious universities. Only the very best people are selected for this programme, people like your Uncle Amir. Do you know why they have a programme such as this? It’s so that people with personality and style will be fast-tracked to the top.’

Almost no time seemed to pass between the announcement of Uncle Amir’s selection and his departure for Ireland, so eager was he to go. He liked to do things that way, he said, get on with them. He planned to do a six-month refresher language course, and at the same time get acclimatised to the Irish way of doing things. He did not need the refresher, he said, but it was all covered by the scholarship, so why not, and he would be getting his stipend from the first day.

When Uncle Amir left to go to Dublin to study to be a diplomat, I moved out of my mother’s room. From time immemorial I had slept in my cot at one end of my parents’ large room. It had a curtain strung across the middle of it to give them privacy. Then my father left us, and I shared the room with my mother, and in our unsettled life she did not always bother to draw the curtain between us. When Uncle Amir left, I was moved into his room. My mother threw Uncle Amir’s television away because she said it was junk and more trouble than it was worth. Some time afterwards a brand-new set arrived, which she put in her room because she said it was not right for a child to have a television in his. I could go into her room and watch with her sometimes, whenever I wished, but she did not really like to watch the cartoons, and turned the volume down when I watched them, and chased me off to bed at the earliest opportunity. She liked to watch the news and then endless dramas with women in long dresses and men sitting behind huge desks, all of them living in enormous mansions and driving long, gleaming cars. When I said it was boring, she told me not to take it seriously, then it would seem more amusing. When I tried to see the funny side of the dramas I failed because I could not understand what the people were saying and my mother talked over everything, re-telling the story as she wished it to be and chuckling at her own wit. Sometimes she turned the sound off completely and we watched the silent goings-on on the screen while my mother made up comic stories about what was happening.

When I moved into my own room, I did not like to shut the door on myself. I was so alone in there. A small window high on the outside wall overlooked the lane but I did not leave it open at night because then the darkness surged in and filled me with fear. I missed sleeping in the same room as my mother, who sometimes sang softly to herself as we lay in the dark or sometimes spoke about the past times she could bear to talk about. You have to grow up stop crying don’t be such a baby you are nine years old, she told me when I made a fuss about being alone. I covered myself from head to toe as soon as I switched off the light so that I would not hear any of the small scurrying night noises, and I never left the safety of the mosquito net until daylight reappeared. I adjusted these arrangements as I grew less fearful, and especially after I learnt to read books from beginning to end, when I stayed awake longer and forgot about being afraid. When I was a little older, I read so late into the night that my mother sometimes knocked on my door and told me to switch off the light, but it took a while to get to that. I did not lose my fear of stealthy night noises, not realising that everyone felt like that.