My mother sighed. ‘It’s our way, but if your generation. if you prefer independence, there are always houses coming up in this street. ’ She paused and looked wistfully out of the window to the backyard. ‘Or we could build an extension? Azra’s very religious, prays five times a day no less. Maybe she can show us all how to live a better life? How to grow closer to our faith?’
I could see her leaving our house clad from head to toe in black, with thin black gloves and a slit to look through, and I saw myself standing on the doorstep behind her.
‘No need to pull a face, she doesn’t smell.’
Since my mother had first introduced the idea, I had developed a fantasy about the girl Azra. It was a sexual fantasy, and because all I was required to do was to reply in the affirmative to my mother, at times it had felt tangible. However, the sudden insertion of the long black burqa, that precise image, was like a poster from a horror film. I had seen such women in the high street, and despite the Grim Reaper-like invisibility of their cloaks I could tell that, inside them, their bodies were bird-like and tender. Holding each woman’s black-gloved hand was some muscle-strapped, bearded teen smiling broadly as though all he did was fuck her all night. Azra. The fantasy had suddenly grown into a name I could hook to my private lust.
‘I’ll find my own wife.’
The hamster in the left tunnel had won three times in a row. Its owner, a fat bubbly teenage girl, was awarded a pink rosette.
‘You’ll learn to love her.’ It took a lot of effort for my mother to use the word love. It was a word that had never been used, not in our house. It was a gora word, a modern word, and articulating it had never been necessary.
‘I’ll go back to the shop, and I’ll ask for a pound of grapes and one clean Pakistani wife.’
‘What are you planning? Will you take a gori?’
‘Only if she cooks a good curry.’
Mum shook her head. ‘It is no joke. We will never accept a gori.’ She leant forward and gripped me tightly by the arm. ‘Never.’
‘Is that a new gold bangle?’
‘I’ll show you something else as well.’ Mum got up and reached onto the top shelf of the dresser where my father kept his important papers. She selected a brown envelope and returned to her seat. She pulled a passport out of the envelope and smiled broadly. I took it off her and thumbed through it. It was mine, bearing a picture I’d had taken for my recent provisional driving licence. It was strange holding my own passport, and the idea that instead of going to Pakistan with my mother I could use it to run away flashed through my mind.
‘So you’re all set?’ I said. For a brief moment we both stared at the gold on her arm.
‘It’s just one small bangle.’ Mum giggled like a little girl.
I reached for her arm, and as she pulled away her shirtsleeve fell back to her elbow, revealing, I counted, six gold bangles.
‘I can’t go with empty arms, people would talk.’
For the first time I noticed that my mother had aged, although she didn’t show it on her face. She was slimmer now than she had ever been, and the years had crept up on her in other ways and were telling on her hands and arms, crisscrossed with thousands of almost imperceptible wrinkles. Now, as she proudly held up her arm with the bangles, her face lit up. In Pakistan she would have had nephews and nieces and by now perhaps even grandchildren. We would have shared a farm and she would be in charge of them all, the grand matriarch. Here she had only my dad and me, and the house, and now that I had replaced her in the shop she would spend endless hours at home waiting for us to close for the night at eleven.
‘Next you’ll be telling me you’ve bought the aeroplane tickets?’
‘It’s for the best, son,’ she said softly, pulling her shirtsleeve down over her wrist. ‘You were betrothed to Azra the day you were born. You see, we promised our first-born son to Azra’s father, my brother, and as Allah, peace be upon him, blessed me with only one child, I’m afraid the obligation falls to you.’
‘What obligation?’
‘He lent your father the money to come to England. It was his generosity that bought us the shop and kept us all these years.’
‘You didn’t pay it back?’ I was angry.
She shook her head. ‘My brother is a wealthy man and demands something more than money.’
The hamsters were now running inside a spinning wheel. The camera zoomed in for a close-up and their moving legs blurred. The wheel was connected to an electrical device measuring revolutions per minute.
‘I’m not doing it.’
Mum leant forward and slowly she pulled off the bangles, one at a time, and placed them noisily on the coffee table. She looked at them and then at me and tears welled up in her eyes. She slipped off her sofa and, coming over to my side, sank to her knees. She gripped my legs and, fumbling as though she was blind, worked her way up to my face, then grasped my head in both hands. She pleaded, ‘Azra’s very beautiful, and the minute you see her you will approve, and if you don’t then you will not have to marry her.’ Mum pulled back so that I could see the tears streaming down her cheeks. ‘She’s young enough for you to change her, make her who you want. Son, you’ve got nothing to lose. For my dignity, for your father, please just consent.’
Unable to look at her, I turned away.
‘If she doesn’t please you, you can always divorce her.’
I knew she was lying and hated her for it. ‘What does Dad say?’ I asked, although I had little hope of receiving the answer I wanted.
‘He says you can leave this house if you don’t accept.’ Mum got to her feet and went back to the dresser, walking her fingers along the top shelf until she found another brown envelope. She pulled out a wad of banknotes and threw them at my feet. ‘If you want to go, just go.’
‘You’re bluffing,’ I sneered. Slowly I picked up the money. Mum had her back to me, and when I touched her on the shoulder she flinched and turned further away.
I swallowed hard. ‘I suppose it was always going to come to this.’
And then, retching against the cursed bits of paper stuck in my throat, I carefully placed the money onto the coffee table next to the plastic flowers and the gold bangles.
10
Grace shuffles towards the end of the bed. ‘Did we.?’
I shake my head.
‘You sure there’s nothing I need to know? I mean, it’s fine — if we did I can get a pill.’ She swipes her hair behind her ears, exposing a small, star-shaped tattoo on her earlobe where a piercing might have been. Ink in lieu of an earring. ‘I don’t want another baby.’
‘You should know who you’ve been intimate with.’
‘Yeah.’ She turns away to face the wall.
‘I don’t know what I’m doing here.’
‘That’s nice.’
‘I mean I don’t know you.’
‘It’s coming back to me. You’re married. Technically. ’ She laughs. ‘I blacked out, but. still a virgin?’
I shrug my shoulders, one hand propping up my chin.
‘This Azra not giving you any?’ Grace gets out of bed and straightens, unembarrassed by her naked body. She comes around the end of the bed and bends down; putting a shoulder into my armpit, she helps me off the end of the bed and to the chair on which I have draped my clothes. I see my stick leaning against the back of the chair, and grapple onto it.