Gravel Heart(48)
Out there in Acton the life she had chosen with me would have looked different from the way it felt to live it. It would have looked reckless, na?ve, even treacherous. I guessed that in the brothers’ telling I would have seemed like a vagabond, snuffling and sidling into their family warmth, somehow tricking her into irresponsibility. In the end she could not resist her brothers, and there must be something more about the mother that Billie had not told me in full. Her threat of suicide sounded to me like a petulant declaration intended to manipulate and control. I did not understand how suicide could be a sacred act and did not fully understand its enormity for a pious Hindu woman, not at the time. Billie did not explain these things to me before she left so I had to guess at them as best I could and find out more later.
Billie did not make any of it easy, and afterwards, once she had made her escape from me, she rejected all my attempts to reach her or be with her again. It must have been what she had agreed with her brothers and her mother. She blocked my number after my second call so I could not get through to her mobile. She did not reply to my emails and in the end must have blocked my address. I rang her work number and persisted through all attempts to deflect me until she came to the phone. She listened to my greetings in silence then said quietly, ‘Don’t call this number again. You’re going to get me fired.’ I felt rejected and misused by this severity and, after the work call, I did not try to get in touch with her again.
Kwa mpenzi Mama,
Salamu na baada ya salamu, I hope you and Munira are both well. In the quiet time I have to myself these days, I remembered that Munira is now seventeen. That was nearly the age I was when I left, and I cannot imagine what she looks like now. A young woman, of course, but it’s been such a long time since I saw a picture of her. I should have asked you to send me a photograph of her every year so I could keep track of how she grew, but I did not do that. It did not even occur to my neglectful mind. There are times when I still feel myself to be the same age as when I left home, not in a thinking way but if I catch myself by surprise and imagine myself, then I see that seventeen-year-old youth who came here so long ago, or at least I feel him. I am still here after such a long time when I never thought to be here long when I first came. Everyone says that: I didn’t think I would stay for so long.
I’m sorry to have been quiet for a while, but it’s not because I don’t think of you. You must not think that I neglect you because of lack of care. It just seems as if every day happens like this, coming and going with nothing to report at the end of it. But today I do have some news. I am going to buy a flat, the same one I live in in Putney. I wonder what you would think if you saw it. Maybe I should take some pictures and send them to you, with me sitting in my comfortable armchair reading Chekhov. You’ll probably find it shut in and wasteful of space – with just me in it. I often think of the little house we lived in, and how intimate and close everything was and yet it was not stifling or oppressive. Here in this place I sometimes feel drained. The air is thick with dust and clogged with human breath and there are times I feel as if I am suffocating.
It is summer now but the weather has turned stormy and unsettled, heavy rain and hail and then brief sunshine. The language people speak on the news and in public has changed too since those killings in New York, and the talk is all about Muslim fanatics and terrorists. They speak a familiar language of freedom but plan to enforce it with violence. I guess that is familiar too. You would not recognise the way some of the bearded ones speak either, how it was all a plot by Kissinger and the Jews, who planted the bombs to make it seem that Muslims had done it so that America could take over the Muslim world and crush it. They are so full of rage and hatred and contemplate cruelties with such righteousness that it sounds nothing like those stories of our lives that we took in so avidly when we were young: the return to Medina, the Night Journey, the Dome of the Rock. I feel even more of a stranger here now. I hate it but still I stay. I feel like a traitor but I am not sure who it is that I am betraying.
Mama, some weeks ago I lost the woman I loved. I feel as if I have lost a life. I told her about you and Baba, and how things went wrong for us. She is the only person I have ever spoken to about you, and now I feel as if I have lost something of you so cheaply, given something away. Sometimes I feel unwell from loneliness. Sometimes I lose track of days, and on Wednesdays I think it is Thursday, although when I was younger, I always knew Wednesdays by heart because they felt so bad, with so much of the week still to go.
I don’t know what it is about buying the flat, but it makes me feel safe, as if I can’t now just float away unheeded into a vast dark nowhere. I have borrowed to the limit to buy it but it will be a necessary pain, a penance for a whole year and more of wanting too much. My notebook is filling up with unsent letters to you. I will have to get another one soon.
7
MOTHER
The shock of Billie’s going took a few days to reach every sinew in my body and by the end of that I was listless, weary, at times paralysed. I would not have believed it if it had not happened to me. I felt her rejection as a bodily nausea, a carnal sensation of revulsion and depletion. I had to force myself to do the simplest things, make the bed, have a shower, cook. Even when I cooked I often could not eat. I could not sleep for longer than two or three hours and then woke up in misery. I could not concentrate at work or on what I was reading. The silence of the flat was oppressive and there were too many objects around that reminded me of her. I thought of going home for a visit, to break the chain of events, to please my mother, to reassure myself. That would take my mind off her for sure but I did nothing about it. Weeks went by like that until I found ways to coerce myself out of that nerveless state. Buying the flat was one of those ways. The owner got in touch to say he wanted to sell and I agreed to buy and that occupied a large amount of head space and pushed thoughts of her away.