After the End(8)
“Maman! How many times have I told you? You don’t need to get up when I do.” On the television in the sitting room, an immaculately made-up woman in a lemon-colored suit is demonstrating the nonstick qualities of a saucepan set. Shopping channels are Habibeh’s guilty pleasure, and QVC her drug of choice. In the last two weeks Leila’s kitchen has acquired a spiralizer, a pineapple corer, and twenty microfiber cleaning cloths.
Habibeh kisses her daughter. “I’ve made you a lunch. What do you want for breakfast?”
“Just tea. But I’ll make it. You go back to bed.”
“Sit!” She presses Leila into a chair and boils the kettle, rinsing the teapot Leila only uses for visitors.
“Maman, I don’t have time for breakfast.” Leila doesn’t tell her it’s unlikely she’ll have time for lunch, either, and that the kotlet and pickles Habibeh has lovingly packed into boxes will stay in Leila’s bag until the end of the day, when she might find time to eat them as she walks to her bike.
Leila drinks her tea, accepts a slice of flatbread with her mother’s famous strawberry jam. “I need to go. Will you take a walk today?”
“Maybe. I have a lot to do here. Your windows are a disgrace.”
“Don’t clean my windows, Maman, please. Go for a walk.”
Beneath the porch, Leila’s bike is silver with frost. Her neighbor Wilma Donnachie waves from her bedroom window. It is half past six—why does no one want to be in bed today? When Leila is retired, she thinks, she will sleep in every day. She waves back, but Wilma points down at the pavement, then disappears. She’s coming down. Leila checks her watch. It takes twenty minutes to cycle to work, and she has only a little more than that before her shift starts.
“Morning, love. I just wanted to see how Mum was settling in.” Wilma is fully dressed, a thick cardigan buttoned over a roll-necked sweater. “I didn’t see her at the bake sale in the end.”
“Sorry.” Habibeh has been here for two weeks, and has not yet left the house. Leila spent a long time persuading her mother to visit the UK. She spent an even longer time persuading the authorities to allow her. Leila worries Habibeh will now spend the six months permitted by her visa shut inside Leila’s two-bedroom terraced house in the suburbs of Birmingham.
“I’ll pop round to see her, later, shall I? For a cuppa?”
“You’re very kind, thank you.”
Leila takes off the flowery shower cap keeping the seat of her bike dry, and drops it in the old-fashioned basket at the front. “If she doesn’t open the door . . .”
Wilma smiles. “I won’t take it personally.”
* * *
Leila likes cycling to work. She likes the subtle change in landscape as the suburbs become city; the freedom of sailing past a queue of cars, their occupants drumming impatient fingers on static steering wheels. She likes the fresh air that bookends a working day without daylight, and the exercise she would otherwise have no time to take. There are days when it is a joy to cycle through Birmingham; through Highbury Park, and past the Central Mosque, with its crescent-topped minarets. Then there are days like today.
The rain seems to come at her horizontally, regardless of which direction she’s traveling in. Icy water trickles past her sodden scarf and down inside her T-shirt, and despite her waterproofs her trousers are sticking to her legs. Her trainers are soaked; her feet numb. Lack of sleep makes Leila’s limbs heavy; makes each turn of the pedals an effort.
There’s a flash of silver in the corner of her eye; the brush of a wing mirror against the fabric of her sleeve. A car slices past, far too close, and she feels the clutch of fear that comes with a near miss. This stretch of road isn’t quite wide enough for passing when there’s oncoming traffic, but that doesn’t stop people trying.
Another car passes her, and another, and as Leila looks over her shoulder to see what else is coming, she feels her front wheel sliding away from her, derailed by this break in concentration. There’s the harsh sound of a horn, then two, three cars whipping past, keen to move on before an accident happens that might force them to stop.
Leila’s shoulder hits the ground first, with a bang that instinct tells her will bruise, but not break. Her head, next, then her body, concertinaing the air from her lungs in an involuntary curse. “La’nati!”
She hears a clatter of metal, the skid of rubber on tarmac. Her head wants her to sit up, but her body won’t comply. Someone is holding her down.
“Lie still, that’s it. Can someone call an ambulance?”
“I’m OK—I don’t need an ambulance.”
There’s a woman in a blue cagoule kneeling over Leila, looking up at a knot of passersby who have gathered to gape.
“My bike—”
“Never mind your bike,” the woman says bossily, “don’t move your head—you might have broken your neck. Ambulance!” she shouts again.
“I haven’t broken my neck.” A dull ache radiates from Leila’s shoulder. She wiggles her fingers and toes, to check they still work, then unclips her helmet and pushes it off, suddenly claustrophobic.
“Never take off a helmet!” the woman shrieks, and for a second Leila thinks she might try to ram it back onto her head. She tries again to get up, but she’s still winded.