‘Nothing is forever,’ said Mustafa matter-of-factly.
‘I know one thing that is.’
Still holding his brother, Mustafa got to his feet. ‘What?’
‘Infinity.’
‘What’s that?’
‘It’s like counting upwards from one and never stopping.’
‘Until you die.’ Mustafa propped his charge onto the saddle, balancing the weight with his own.
‘You don’t get it. The worst thing is. you just never die. You just count and count and count.’
Mustafa wheeled the bike away, quickly diminishing from view in the semi-darkness. I kicked at the fire, now about two feet high, watching gleefully as sparks flew. I pulled out a thin stick of wood still burning at one end and held it up to my face until I felt it burn the hairs over my forehead. I got to my feet, my chest beating tight and fast in anticipation of my father’s reaction when I got home.
Our house was only a few doors down and nearing, I looked around for somewhere to dispose of the lit torch. A letterbox? A petrol cap on a car? A post box? Somewhere it would cause the most damage. My face contorted into a snarl, and then again, as though no matter how much I tried I couldn’t straighten it out.
The next school day was Monday. I watched the year eights line up in the playground before class, laughing and joking, ribbing each other as they always did.
‘You seen Dax?’ I asked Maley as we joined the line for year seven.
‘Animals kill, but not in malice or wrath,’ he said angrily.
‘You shouldn’t talk like that.’ I felt sick in the stomach.
‘Told you we were a cruel species.’
And then from the year eight line-up we overheard: ‘Mum was on the night shift. She says they brought some gypo kid in.’
‘Oh yeah.’ The words were accompanied by a nervous laugh.
‘Says doctors tried everything, says he was born with a weak heart.’
I clenched my teeth as hard as I could and looked up at the sky. ‘Bismillah. Bismillah.’
8
Grace’s hands again make a clawing motion in her sleep, disturbing the duvet, and as I silently will it to do so it falls slowly like a furling banner to a point below her breasts.
Her hands find my arm, gripping it tightly, and she awakens and looks at me. ‘There was a prostitute and a dog,’ she murmurs in a soft sleepy voice.
I smile.
‘And someone who was kind to them called Allah.’ Her voice is broken and confused, and self-consciously she pulls the duvet up over her breasts.
‘You invited me up,’ I say.
She says slowly, as though recollecting our meeting, ‘Soldier boy?’
I nod. ‘Hush now, go back to sleep.’ I chant to myself almost inaudibly ‘La ilaha il Allahu. ’ It is soothing for me, takes me to a place far back. I am just beginning to gather a coherent set of early childhood images and already she is fast asleep again. I would have liked to tell Grace about that distant place, lying in bed watching my mother’s lips inches from mine as she hummed my infant self to sleep, and for a moment I resent Grace for her slumber.
I swing my feet onto the thick carpet. I look for my stick but cannot see it. How I got into bed I cannot remember, and I search for things to hold on to on my way to my clothes.
But it seems too permanent a thing to dress, I am not ready to leave, and instead I find a towel and wrap it around my waist. Another towel I lay on the floor at the foot of the bed as a make-do prayer mat. Owing to the limits of the titanium articulation I cannot bend and prostrate, so I decide to pray seated on the edge of the bed with only my feet placed on the towel. From there I can bow my head to signify a deeper movement. Although it is not yet dawn and time for the first daily prayer, fajr, a Muslim can instead pray at any time, a simple prayer composed of two repeating sections. I say it once and then again, and each time I raise my head I catch, through the window, a patch of sky. After the second recital I cup my hands before my chest, and gazing through the window, seeking Allah, I wonder what it is I should say to Him. Behind me sleeps Grace, making barely a sound. I should pray for her. I bend towards the towel until the knee hurts. The towel is scented with soap and shampoo and lotions that Grace would have applied to her water-dripping body, and trapped between its fibres is also a scent unique to her, that of her body masked by the things she applies. These are impure thoughts I quickly block out, and as I stare at the blackish nothingness, grateful that somewhere up there is Allah, what comes to me is landscape — streets I have known. Like smoke I drift through them, taking in the details. At the end of a typical road two lanes run off, left and right. Down one is a series of prefab houses hurriedly put up after the war. They are clad with concrete blocks about a metre square, and between each block the joints have slipped and grown with age, rendering slits and gashes along the entire terrace as I view it from the street. Further on, the road curves out of view. The other lane is terraced with red-brick houses, and before each front door is a neat path and a patch of green. Outside one such house the path is gone, replaced by a gently sloping concrete ramp with a metal handrail on each side. The council installed it after the elderly occupant, Maley’s father, lost the use of his legs. There was no need for it. He had called time on his days at The Gate Hangs Well and, with his pride dented by incapacity, the old man no longer left the house. The handrail is cold and wet with dew. The green paintwork on the door is flaking, and a plastic sign reads Beware of the Dog. The windows are grimy, the curtains drawn. Mr Male has been moved into a home.
I speak quietly so as not to wake Grace. ‘I stood here once, with Maley. He opened that green door, newly painted then, a foul unhygienic smell emanating from within, and then he said a strange thing, brightly, with a smile on his lips. He said, “I don’t feel pain like normal people.”’
I thought about his dead mother. ‘I know that, pal.’
We were sixteen years old and it was the last day of school. While our classmates were signing each other’s shirts with thick marker pen, we had slipped away.
‘You’re lucky you got one of these new places,’ I said to Maley, wrinkling my nose at the smell.
‘It’s not that new,’ replied Maley. ‘We moved here when I was born.’
Inside, the smell of boiled cabbage and cigarette smoke clung to the air. We passed quickly into the living room, wallpapered in an orange and brown geometric design, the sort of thing you would usually only find once you had removed several layers of existing wallpaper. Placed against the walls were two heavy-set armchairs and a matching sofa with roughly textured brown cushions and thick sweeping arms. Between the chairs was a steel coffee table, one his father had welded out of steel plates, Maley told me, and tidily at its centre sat a thick glass ashtray, a packet of cigarettes and a lighter. The room was square and cold; it had a low ceiling and on the mantel was a line of empty brown beer bottles. A glass-fronted cabinet was crammed with miniature drink bottles and on top of it stood two framed pictures. One picture showed a chubby thin-haired infant maybe a year old; on each side of him, leaning into the shot, were a mum and dad who looked more like grandparents, dressed as though from an earlier generation. In the other picture the same boy, now about four, sat atop a horse, a cowboy hat on his head.
‘That’s me,’ Maley said proudly.
I followed him up a steep carpeted staircase into his bedroom. The window was open and the smell was different there, of damp and perspiration. Save for a single bed and a small table there was nothing to see. I stuck my head out of the window, observing how the grassy bank at the rear swept in a graceful railway-like curve before disappearing behind the houses.