Back in the room, now that Maley had flung open the doors, I saw that two walls had concealed floor-to-ceiling cupboards. Inside them were shelves stacked to the top with boxes of toys and puzzle sets. In places the cardboard had coloured like rust but otherwise the boxes appeared pristine, as though unopened. One large box caught my eye. It bore a picture of a steam locomotive painted green. Other pictures in shadow showed what else was in the box: trees, a signal box, people, and a village railway station.
Maley, seeing my interest, offered to assemble it for me, but then seemed to abruptly change his mind and said there wasn’t time. He said I could have it, and I declined. As a Pakistani I knew it was polite to decline twice but on the third offer I could accept. I waited but he didn’t ask me again.
I didn’t often get toys when I was a child, and to compensate I had learnt the toy section of the Littlewoods catalogue by heart. On Christmas Day, I would jealously observe from our window the gora kids wobbling on their new bikes and racing battery-operated vehicles, and I knew precisely the maximum adjustable seat height of a Raleigh Chopper and what batteries a Milton Bradley Big Trak required. Even then, aged sixteen, I would have liked a toy train set.
Maley slammed the cupboard doors shut. He pulled a green rucksack out from under the bed and beamed. ‘Got it on sale from the army and navy shop.’
We went back down the stairs into the kitchen, where the mustiness, mixed with the smell of frying lard, was most intense. It was the coldest room in the house and the cabinets were made of plastic-coated metal. Against one wall stood an upright cooker, the sort I remembered my mother throwing out a long time ago. A latticed window was cut into the back door, and a thin black dog sat with its nose squashed up against it.
Maley saw me looking at the greyhound. ‘Races it sometimes, my dad. She’s called Betty.’
‘Does she win?’
‘Hate dogs, no substitute for nature.’
I couldn’t imagine Maley hating anything, least of all something belonging to the animal kingdom.
Shaking his head, he peered into the fridge and pulled out a thick yellow slab wrapped in cellophane. I laughed. ‘Bloody hell, look at the size of that!’
‘Cheese, equal parts protein and fat, keeps me going.’ He stuffed it into his pack. I watched as he tied a bow in the drawstring on the backpack. His fingers seemed to work opposite to how it was normally done, his left hand twisted into the string while his right trembled as it swept around to make the knot.
‘One more thing before I go,’ he said, carefully tearing open an empty cornflakes box. Crouching over the kitchen table, he took out a marker pen from his pocket. As he wrote on the cardboard, I looked down at my shirt and made out the name Craig Male. Only then did it really sink in that it was the last day of school. Earlier, in the classroom, Maley had signed my shirt, and somehow that now seemed a long time ago. I looked back up at Maley. Proudly he held up a square of cardboard on which he had written the word PLEASE. Through the window, Betty marked circles around a child’s swing, her claws tearing up the lawn.
‘You really don’t know where you’re going?’ I enquired as Maley locked the front door behind us. Scanning the terrace, I saw that each house had a willow tree planted in the centre of a small front lawn, blocking the view into the bay windows. I always felt a compulsion to look into gora houses. I wanted to know what they had.
Maley with an idea always walked fast, and I struggled to keep up with him.
‘There are lots of places I’d like to see,’ he said.
‘Like where?’
‘The Australian outback. You can die of loneliness out there.’
‘The outback? Can’t think of anywhere further?’
‘I’ve got this idea. I’m on this uninhabited island somewhere in the Pacific and one day this surfboard washes up.’ The breeze teased at Maley’s hair and rippled into the surface of his large parka, a fashion he still wore, whatever the weather. He didn’t smile, but then he didn’t appear his usual tense self either. His arms swung at his sides, the vinyl under his armpits squeaking.
‘What about your dad?’
He ignored me. ‘Depends on which stats you read, but Australians live longer than us.’
‘Maybe they have different genes?’ I said.
‘Your environment can compensate for your genes.’
‘Does he know you’re going?’ I persisted.
‘He’s an alc. Has been since Mum—’
‘He’s still your dad.’
‘When he was last sober he wished me luck.’
‘And your mum?’
‘She’s dead, remember.’
‘Don’t you say goodbye,’ I was confusing myself now, ‘to the ashes or something?’
‘Are you stupid?’
‘So that’s it? Nice knowing you, Dad, see you, I’m off?’
Maley stopped walking and turned angrily towards me. ‘You keep thinking there’s got to be more.’ A familiar pink blotch crept up his neck from the collar of his school shirt. ‘I tell you about nature and you seem to say it’s not good enough, like there’s something higher — God — but there isn’t any proof of that. I tell you about my dad and you want me to speak to a jarful of soot in the kitchen cupboard. Life is what it is. Can’t you just see me off?’
‘Sorry.’
‘It’s like you’re holding me back.’
‘You’re holding yourself back.’ I wanted to hurt him for leaving me.
‘How?’
‘Well, why do you need me to see you off?’
‘I thought it might do you good.’
‘Oh, that’s all for me, is it? It isn’t because you have no one else?’
‘I wanted to do it properly. To say goodbye. You’ve been kind and fed me and that. But I also wanted you to see that it’s perfectly possible to just leave.’
‘Why would I want to leave?’
Maley slowly spun on his toes, taking in the full circumference of the view. On one side was a row of Victorian terraces, neat and homely from a distance but close up the paintwork was peeling and the brickwork chipped. There were piles of litter too, as though someone had taken a giant broom and swept up against the faces of the houses. On the other side of the narrow street was a high black oily wall that marked the rear of Blackheath Forgings. It was tall enough to block out the sunlight to a degree, and beyond it, save for the occasional crack of metal against metal, there was silence.
‘You’re not blind. When. well, you know. when people are at their worst, I think of my island, and the more they go on the clearer it seems to become. But you, I pity you, because I know you don’t have an island.’
My heart sank at the thought of being left behind. ‘I don’t need some imaginary island.’
Maley stooped to pick up a small stone and held it close to his eyes, examining it. ‘I tell you what I think. I think you’re going to carry on taking it for the rest of your life.’
‘I w-won’t,’ I stammered, looking away.
‘You’ll be living in one of these draughty terraced houses waiting for the next brick through the window, and every morning you’ll be scrubbing off graffiti, and just because you’ve got a shop and maybe a car you’ll think it’s all okay, but it won’t be. It never will be okay. You’ll have lost your imagination and become one of them.’
‘You quite finished?’
‘No.’ He squared up to me. ‘What you going to do about it?’ With two needle-like fingers he pushed me hard in the chest. The pink flush had spread rapidly up his face.
‘Steady on, mate.’ I pulled away from him, and to make light of it I forced myself to laugh.
Maley came closer, his face craning upwards on his thin neck. With my back to the road I could feel my heels balancing on the edge of the kerb. Again he pushed me in the chest. ‘Paki. Wog. Blackie.’ His spit splattered my chin.