Gravel Heart(49)

Taking long walks was another. I think that walk I did to stay out of the flat on the day of Billie’s mother’s visit started something. I enjoyed it so I began to take long walks through London on my own. Sometimes I set off in the morning and headed across the river, going west or east as I felt like, as far as Chiswick or Hackney. I stayed out all day, or until I needed to force myself to keep walking, then I caught the train or the bus and headed back to Putney. I always took a book with me and if I was in the mood and I found the right spot, I sat down to read. Sometimes I walked to Camberwell and strolled past the OAU house, or to Holland Park to see the house where I lived when I first came to England. In the spring, I sometimes came home from work and went out again to walk in the park or as far as Clapham Common, stopping at a café or a pub on the way.

One Friday I walked all night long, through Wandsworth, and Tooting Bec and Brixton and Denmark Hill and Lewisham as far as Greenwich. I passed clubbers and revellers and people like me walking through London streets in their sleep. Mostly I kept away from the major roads, and tried to find my way through the tangle of small streets, bearing left whenever I felt in doubt. I read how once Charles Dickens walked from Tavistock Square in central London to Gad’s Hill Place, his house near Rochester, a seven-hour walk through the night, because he had had a row with his wife. I read about a group who re-enacted the journey of Chaucer’s pilgrims from Southwark to Canterbury. I dreamt of taking that walk one day later in the summer when the sun had warmed up the ground a little more, carrying my pilgrim’s flask to refresh myself on the way.

Dear Mama,

I am so glad you are pleased to hear about the flat but I should tell you that it is only a small one and it does not mean that I am now well off. In fact, the very opposite because I have to pay a lot of money back every month. It must be very frustrating to keep having these tests and not get any firm results. Maybe it does mean that there is nothing to worry about. Here the days (years) pass. I’m surprised how easily and swiftly they do. When I add them up I am astonished how long I’ve been here. I think you are right, it is time I came for a visit before you forget what I look like. I’ve made a plan to come after the New Year. I’m due some leave from work then and I’ll take a month off and come and see the old homeland and my old Mama.

Thank you for Munira’s photo. It was wonderful to speak to her and to you just recently. I enclose a photo of the flat.

Love,





Salim

*

The following New Year’s Eve I went down to Folkestone in Kent to stay with a friend. I met her on a training course and things worked out, and after that she called me when she was coming to London and felt like meeting and a couple of times she stayed with me. Her name was Rhonda. I make the relationship sound casual but Rhonda was a troubled woman and I told myself this New Year’s Eve would be the last time I met her.

The morning of New Year’s Day was mild, with heavy clouds and a thin, almost invisible haze. The ashy light had an unexpected brightness at the back of it, like the silvering in a mirror, and it made me feel sad, as certain kinds of light do for inexplicable reasons. I was sitting on the back porch of Rhonda’s ground-floor flat, overlooking the lawn that sloped towards the surgery next door. There was no fence or hedge to mark a boundary between the two because all the lawn belonged to the surgery. It was Saturday and quiet at this end of the town with its rows of gabled Victorian houses, some of them three storeys high and still occupied by single families. The streets were avenues of huge leafless trees, which I knew in the summer made the pavement as gloomy as a forest floor. From where I sat, I could see the surgery building and I wondered if the house Rhonda lived in would have been the doctor’s house perhaps, and it and the surgery would have been one property.

Every so often I heard a car go past, a faint, wet whispering noise as if the road were some distance away when I knew it went past the front of the house. There were no other sounds even though it was New Year’s Day and a Saturday. Rhonda was still in bed, wearing her eyeshades to indicate that she was not to be forced awake, and her daughter Susannah was sleeping over at a friend’s house. A few days before this Saturday, Rhonda telephoned me in the early hours of the morning. I knew it was her because that was the kind of time she rang. The first time she did it, I thought it was a call from another place, and now every time she rang in the middle of the night I had to suppress a spasm of guilt that I did not call my mother more often.

By the time I was awake enough to reach for the phone, on that early morning some days before New Year’s Eve, I knew it was Rhonda. I did not want to see her but I also did. I said hello and waited for the ritual gap that Rhonda liked to leave in our conversations, then after a few seconds she told me that she could not sleep. She hated it. Was I alone? Did she wake me up? I said yes and left it at that. After another moment, she said that she was going to be on her own on New Year’s Eve as well and she knew she would not be able to bear that. She couldn’t, not on New Year’s Eve. Was I doing anything? Did I want to come and stay for a day or two? I left my own pause then, and in those silent seconds images of Rhonda rushed in on me: her eyes with their luminous grief, her warm nakedness beside me, her anguishes. There was something not quite right about her. Her jaw was slack, her eyes quite small, but she carried herself as if she was a beauty and her self-love made her provocative.

Her call came after weeks of silence. The last time we had been together had been an evening of bitter talk, and long before we stopped and decided to call it a night we had heaped scorn on each other and on whatever it was that brought us together. When she was in this bitter mood she spoke with incomprehensible assurance, in a language that made me think of abstraction in its ruined temple, of fantasy taking flight. I hesitated for a long moment, wondering if I should allow myself to be drawn into being with this woman who spoke as if words meant something different to her, as if she knew a language with an emphasis all her own. After a while, as the memory of her came surging back into my body, I said, yes, I would come. A moment later the phone went dead and she was gone.