Barely a minute had passed when he stood up and said he had to go. Mama paid him and walked him to the door. She then went to the kitchen, the black form of her medicine bottle stood on the kitchen table. She threw an impatient glance at me. We sat in an uncomfortable silence. I began to tap my foot against the leg of the table. 'Stop,' she said. I felt as awkward with her now as I did when I had to keep a guest company in the reception room while she made tea. She lit a cigarette, and I went to my room.
I lay in bed, curling myself beneath the sheet. Going to bed in the middle of the afternoon had always felt strange, but now it seemed right somehow. Outside, I heard her walk to her room, a liquid being poured into a glass, the familiar chinks of ice. I remembered the cigarette that was burning in her hand. Mama only smoked when she was ill and then she didn't allow one cigarette to die before lighting the next. Sometimes she would forget and have two going at the same time, one in the ashtray, the other between her fingers. I was nervous she would fall asleep while smoking. Several times I had woken up in the night to make sure all the cigarette butts in the ashtray beside her were out, looking under the bed in case one had fallen there. That was one of the reasons why I couldn't leave her side when she was ill. I heard her move around the house. I could tell she was bored. She often, during those empty days when Baba was away, walked aimlessly around the house. And she never sang to herself in that soft, absent-minded way she often did when taking a bath or painting her eyes in front of the mirror or drawing in the garden. That singing that had always evoked a girl unaware of herself, walking home from school, brushing her fingers against the walclass="underline" a moment before the Italian Coffee House, a moment sheltered in the clarity of innocence, before the quick force which, without argument, without even the chance to say, 'No,' thrust her over the border and into womanhood, then irrevocably into motherhood. I wanted so much to make her happy, as happy as she seemed when Baba was home. Except it wasn't happiness that came over her then but something like confidence: she moved faster and sounded more self-assured. Could I ever come to inspire that in her, I wondered from beneath the bed sheet.
I had faded into sleep and woke up disoriented, not knowing what time it was. The sky was dark, the world was silent. But still I felt a warm comfort at having napped for the first time. I must be becoming a man, I thought. I noticed an odd smell in the house, but the tide of sleep was strong, it pulled me and I drifted back into the warmth and magic of its certainty.
A few hours later I woke up dying, horses galloping up my nostrils, down my throat. I jumped out of bed and opened the window. I did this in every room of the house, opening windows and doors without knowing why. She had left the gas on in the kitchen.
When she woke up the following morning she couldn't understand why I was so upset and kept repeating, 'What's this smell, did you leave the gas on in the kitchen, Slooma?'
I slammed the door shut and locked myself in my room. From the way she spoke through the door it felt as if it really was another woman who had left the gas on to kill us.
'Why are you upset at me? How do I know you are all right if you don't speak?'
My mouth was about to utter something, but I held it shut with my hand.
'How do I know that you are not dead?'
I covered my ears and shut my eyes.
'OK,' she came to say in the late morning. 'At least come out for some food. It's almost lunch time and you haven't even had breakfast.' When she walked away, I heard her say to herself, 'What a strange boy.' After a while she returned to ask, 'What if your father comes home now, what will he say about us?'
By noon she slipped a note beneath my door. It read:
I, therefore, hope that my beloved son will honour me with his visit, and I am sending my vizier to make arrangements for the journey. My one and only desire is to see you before I die. If you refuse my request, I shall not survive the blow. May peace be with you!
It wasn't funny. I recognized the words. They weren't hers, they were from a letter King Shahryar had sent, when his heart was ill with sadness and he believed he was going to die, to his brother King Shah Zaman. She just replaced the word 'brother' with 'son'. I folded it twice and pushed it back beneath the door. After a few seconds I heard her pick it up.
By the afternoon knives were stabbing at my stomach, and I was dying for a pee. I walked out and went straight into the bathroom, locking the door behind me. I couldn't hear her outside. I went to the kitchen, poured myself a huge glass of milk, grabbed a loaf of bread and went straight back to my room, leaving my door ajar. It was past four, nap time was over. Where was she?
I went out on to the street to see if any of the boys were there. I found them all gathered around Adnan. Adnan was the only one who had been absent when Kareem and I had fought. If he had been there I might have behaved differently. I was certain that Osama, Masoud and Ali were now telling him their version of the story. Kareem was leaning on a car. When they saw me they stopped talking. Ali said hello and Masoud stared at him. They had all agreed, I thought, to ignore me. 'Let's go and see the school,' Masoud told them. But it wasn't a school day, it was summer. To my surprise they all followed him. I watched them walk away. Osama put his arm round Kareem, talking to him as they walked. Adnan walked beside them, listening to Osama. When they reached the end of the street and turned out of sight I began to follow, walking slowly, kicking a pebble, digging my fists into the pockets of my shorts. I turned after them and they were in view again. In the distance their figures looked closer together.
When they reached the school gates they stopped. Just before I caught up with them Kareem shouted, 'Last to Mulberry is a girl,' and like a herd they came running towards me. When they were close I thought of getting out of the way, but I suspected they were trying to frighten me so I didn't move. I closed my eyes and stood still, making myself as thin as possible, listening to their panting, feeling the wind from their speed brush past me. And I heard Kareem shout again, 'Last to Mulberry is a girl,' and I knew he meant me.
Adnan had remained by the school gates, weak with illness. He was as old as Kareem but couldn't run very far. He wasn't allowed to eat any sweets, and if his skin was punctured he was in danger of losing all of his blood. He had to take two injections a day, and he gave them to himself. Once we convinced him to show us. 'If you laugh I'll slap each one of you,' he warned before taking us into his bedroom. None of us had ever been inside his house before. He had books on his disease that occupied a whole shelf. He had a huge dictionary open on his desk with a perfectly sharpened yellow pencil in its fold. Without a doubt it was the biggest book I had ever seen. Small brown medicine bottles clustered together on his bedside table. Each bottle had his full name, Adnan el-Melhi, hand-written on its label. His room was spotless, and his bed was made so tightly I wondered if it was comfortable. He had an entire box of syringes in his desk drawer, and another with miniature yellow sponges in plastic envelopes. 'These disinfect the skin,' he explained.
'Why?' Ali asked.
'What do you mean, why?' Adnan snapped at him. 'So that no germs enter me, of course.'
We all crowded round him. He pulled down his trousers, rubbed his skin with the sponge, then without introduction drove the long needle deep into his buttock. None of us said a word. He pulled it out and pressed the small yellow sponge in its place. His buttock was dotted with brown bruises. We never wanted to see him do that again.