‘Blackie?’ I retreated, putting one foot into the road and wiping my face with a sleeve. ‘No one says blackie anymore!’
I saw a curtain twitch in one of the windows and suddenly the ridiculousness of the situation became clear. ‘Someone’s watching, cut it out.’
‘I’m sorry. You just don’t react, do you?’ Maley took my arm, yanking me back onto the pavement.
‘I’ve heard it before,’ I said, as we continued on up the street.
‘We were northerners, but my grandfather’s grandfather came here because of the steel.’ He shook his head. ‘It’s time to move on, that’s all.’
‘I get it, you’re just trying to justify your new life as the only inhabitant of an Australian island.’
‘The only human inhabitant,’ he corrected and smiled, exposing a jagged row of large teeth crammed into a tiny pinched jaw. I had never seen him so happy. I pictured the bittersweet scene of a ghastly white Maley running along some beach in his tatty Y-fronts.
We crossed a dual carriageway and scrambled up a steep bank on the other side. Again Maley stopped, bending down to look at a plant. ‘Have you noticed how those wasps, the yellow ones with the black stripes, you don’t see them anymore?’
‘When we were little we used to trap them in a milk bottle, wet them and make them fight each other,’ I said.
‘Know what this is?’ He caressed a small yellow flower with the back of his hand.
‘Never paid it much attention,’ I said.
‘It’s a ragwort. Oxford ragwort. It’s not indigenous. It was brought over by Indian railway workers.’ He scanned the horizon. ‘Railway used to join up here.’
‘Won’t you miss that? The knowledge? The stupid kingfisher and your dad going deaf from the boilers. It’s special.’
‘I’ll put it to good use,’ he replied cheerfully, springing to his feet and sliding down the other side of the bank. ‘This is it,’ he said.
Following him, I looked around. It was a familiar busy intersection with traffic lights posted on each of the four sides. The 247 hurtled past and stopped further ahead.
‘Here?’ I gazed at the bus, wondering if he was about to run for it.
Maley held the sign reading please across his chest. We stood for an hour, scanning each vehicle hopefully as though it would be the one, and we hardly said a word. Some drivers tooted their horns, some slowed to jeer at us, their voices lost to the rush of wind past the moving car.
‘I got an idea,’ I said eventually, ‘but if I tell you, you mustn’t object.’
‘What is it?’
‘I’m going to go over there.’ I pointed to the top of the grassy bank. ‘It’s because of me. That’s why the cars don’t stop.’
Maley shook his head, but without waiting for him to answer I scrambled up the slope. It was calm sitting up there, and quiet, as though it was a long way from the road. I plucked an Oxford ragwort; it had a dark orange feathery button and I counted twelve thin petals coming off it like spokes in a wheel.
A few minutes later, a truck stopped next to Maley. I felt a sudden wave of panic. After signalling to the driver, Maley raced up the hill. Standing over me, panting, he said, ‘Just so you know, kingfishers aren’t stupid.’ Then, without looking back, he raced to his waiting lift and climbed into the cabin. For a minute the truck remained eerily still. I felt a strange foreboding, but not for him. Maley would be okay. The fear was for me.
*
I search for words to explain why I am here. It is warm and there is Grace asleep. I feel passive and content and beyond that I cannot provide an answer. I should leave, but the view through the window, the luminous presence of Allah in the near dark, it keeps me glued.
The evening of the day Maley left, like most evenings, I went to Best Street mosque, but that day I went of my own volition, without my father having to nag. Best Street mosque is on the junction of Best Street and Garratt’s Lane. A small green sign above the door announces the purpose of the building, and across the windows are steel bars. It is shabby and unkempt and it was once an ordinary house occupied by the foreman of Rowley Works. Ordinary, but with the bonus of being located on a corner and hence having a side yard and two street-facing walls. When the foreman died it was sold at auction, and the local Pakistanis, all of whom sent their children to school in tatty clothes and lived in dingy, cold houses, clubbed together thousands of pounds and bought it.
When we got the key, we entered en masse, about twenty men and boys, and without a word began to strip the walls and floors, piling everything unholy outside. We laid bricks, later rendered, to make stools and installed before them a long strip of cold water taps, and there the men and boys shivered as they conducted ablutions before prayer. Later, dividing walls were knocked through to make a prayer room, one that could hold — we counted — fifty-three seated worshippers. We fixed to the walls pictures of Mecca and Medina and one other of the oldest mosque in Jerusalem, cheaply framed and with Christmas tinsel around the edges. A carpet was purchased at great cost. On a Sunday morning exactly five years after it was installed, we took out the carpet, spread it across Best Street, closing off the public highway, beat the thick wool with sticks and soaped and rinsed it using buckets of water. Finally, when the imam was satisfied, we hung it to dry on the side wall on Garratt’s Lane. Under its sodden weight the wall collapsed and blocked traffic to the lane. Quickly arriving were the newspapermen and council inspectors. While they reported and called their superiors, they over saw like colonial masters supervising the natives as we relaid the bricks — the first wall any of us — factory workers, bus drivers and children — had built.
Every day after school throughout my childhood and teenage years I went to Best Street. There we boys and girls sat in a line with our backs to the wall, a Koran spread open before each of us on a wooden, easel-like stand, rocking back and forth to the ebb and flow of the metre we could not hope to understand. Of the Arabic words we recited I knew only one, Allah. At first the routine seemed relentless and without joy, and I found it difficult to find the word Allah, appearing as it often did as a prefix or suffix in a long string of curling calligraphy, but even then I knew it was about faith, about carrying on. Like a parade sergeant the imam patrolled the line, lashing his stick painfully at anyone who displeased him, often apparently at random. Later I grew to understand that the word Allah was synonymous with justice; but at the time of the imam’s thrashing stick, the Bible passages read out at school assembly, in direct contrast, were all about love. God was love. Jesus loved us and we loved him and he had come as a baby to save us all. We Muslims, we have missed a trick, I used to think, and it is a simple fix — just add love. After Koran lessons I’d go home for supper and then return to the mosque with my father for the last prayer of the day. It is important to sleep on a prayer was my dad’s refrain, and the same day Maley left I sat on the mosque carpet, gone eleven at night, staring at the age-defying tinsel garlanding the picture of the Great Mosque in Mecca.
Loudspeakers transmitted the soft voice of the imam, muffled and sleepy, as he closed the night prayer. It was black and wet outside, and mid-prayer a brief storm passed overhead. We were seated facing the imam who was at the front, and on the wall behind him were six wooden clocks, like those used by children to learn time. Five were set, by the imam’s finger, to the hours of the five daily prayers, and the sixth established the time of Friday prayer, usually around lunchtime. I closed my eyes, feeling a clock beat inside my head, in rhythm with the imam’s final chant, and tried to imagine how Maley must be feeling. He was alone and surely he was scared. How far had he got? Where was he sleeping? I said a Bismillah, and as I prostrated myself for the last time, my forehead to the ground, the imam ahead of me and worshippers either side of me, silently I prayed in English. I prayed for Maley.