Tell the Truth, Shame the Devil(96)

“You and my mother?”

“Yes, Bashir,” she said.

“I’m trying to imagine what you and my mother could have in common,” he said.

“You mean apart from her father and mine coming from the same city in Egypt?”

“I’m just surprised,” he said, suddenly on the defensive. “That’s all.”

“Well, I find it therapeutic speaking to Saffron,” Noor said.

“What do you talk about?”

She hesitated. “About how much we love our children. How much we miss our husbands and our mothers and our brothers…and our fathers. How she regrets never going to university. How one day she hopes she’ll have the courage to ask you to come along to an AA meeting with her.”

“I might have a drinking problem,” he said, “but I’m not an alcoholic.”

“No one said you were.”

It took a long moment to sink in. His mother had a drinking problem? Or did have? And had managed to hide it from him all these years.

“Do you know what’s strange, Bashir? I’m locked up here and I have more communication with my family than you do as a free man. What are you afraid of finding out if you ask her the questions?”

That Saffron had stopped loving him. Wanting him. He understood his father’s absence from his life. Stephen Ortley had always been emotionally distant, but his mother’s love had promised so much when he was a child.

“It’s a bit like circumstantial evidence,” she said.

“What is?”

“The way we remember our childhood.”

“So you’re a psychologist now?” It came out harsher than he meant it to.

“No. But I meet a lot of troubled people in here and it all seems to stem from either childhood or the men these women met.”

As much as he resented Noor being privy to his personal life, he wanted to keep talking to her. “Can I ask you something? And you don’t have to answer.”

“All right.”

He heard hesitation in her voice and almost changed his mind. “That circumstantial evidence thirteen years ago—you were overheard threatening the manager of the Brackenham supermarket two days before the bombing. You told him, ‘Your time will come.’ Is that right?”

Silence.

“My father was demoralized,” she finally said. “And don’t think for one moment I’m justifying what he did. But he started his life in this country stacking boxes and he ended it stacking boxes. The manager of the Brackenham store was thirty years younger and was patronizing and rude and had no respect. My father was losing the plot in the end—he thought his own family were conspiring against him. Jimmy had made decisions without him. Apart from the Premier League, he had been pursued by a French team before signing with Man United. My father found out through a magazine article months later. He was angry…hurt that Jimmy had consulted his own brother but not him. There was a rift, and Uncle Joseph came to visit because he wanted peace. It was the handshake caught on camera that supposedly incriminated Jimmy and my uncle. But days before, when my father came home from work humiliated, I was so angry I went down to the supermarket and told Jason Matthews what I thought of him. The witnesses heard right. I did say that, but in a sane world where the media and the public aren’t baying for your blood, those words would be taken as they were meant: that one day Matthews would be a man in his sixties demoralized by someone younger in the workplace, and then he would know how my father felt.”

There was something besides regret in her voice. Bish wished he were hearing this face-to-face.

“So many assumptions. So many. You were there that day,” she said. “My mother’s crying was scaring Violette in that cell, and I told Jimmy to make her laugh. And all anyone could say was that the Sarrafs were laughing while Brackenham buried its dead. How could people I’d known all my life possibly believe that my words meant I was going to make a bomb and blow Jason Matthews up? How? I bet you’ve said the exact same thing, in your own anger.”

“I have indeed. You and I aren’t that different.”

“Oh, but we are,” she said bitterly. “Because if your father had blown up those people, they would never have come for your mother, or for you. They came for the Sarrafs because of our race.”

What could he say to that? He didn’t want to insult her with denial.

“I’ve got to go,” she said.

“Don’t,” he found himself saying. Almost begging.

“Is that ‘Baker Street’?” she asked suddenly.

Gerry Rafferty’s voice rang out from the speakers.

“Yes.”

“I haven’t heard that for years.”

“My first slow dance was to ‘Baker Street,’” he said. “Francine Riley. I got to touch her boobs. Your first dance?”

“‘Mandy.’ Barry Manilow,” she said. “Wouldn’t let anyone touch my boobs that night.”

“Well, what a disappointment you’ve turned out to be today.”

It was the first time he had ever heard her laugh. A great laugh. Coming from someplace real.

When he got through to Bee after hanging up from Noor she told him Rachel had delivered a baby boy named Rufus, after David’s father. Bish thought it was a ridiculous name, meant for pets, but he didn’t articulate that thought.