‘I can’t remember you being all that keen,’ said Clara, adding her twopence worth. ‘You know, you have a very convenient way, Alsi, of forgetting what happened two minutes ago.’
‘This from the woman who lives with Archibald Jones!’ scoffed Samad. ‘I might remind you that people in glass houses-’
‘No, Samad,’ Clara protested. ‘Don’t even begin to start on me. You’re the one who had all the real objections about coming… but you never stick to a decision, do you? Always Pandy-ing around. At least Archie’s, well, you know…’ stumbled Clara, unused to defending her husband and unsure of the necessary adjective, ‘at least he makes a decision and sticks by it. At least Archie’s consistent.’
‘Oh surely, yes,’ said Alsana acidly. ‘The same way that a stone is consistent, the same way my dear babba is consistent for very simple reason that she’s been buried underground for-’
‘Oh, shut up,’ said Irie.
Alsana was silenced for a moment, and then the shock subsided and she found her tongue. ‘Irie Jones, don’t you tell me-’
‘No, I will tell you,’ said Irie, going very red in the face, ‘actually. Yeah, I will. Shut up. Shut up, Alsana. And shut up the lot of you. All right? Just shut up. In case you didn’t notice, there are, like, other people on this bus and, believe it or not, not everyone in the universe wants to listen to you lot. So shut it. Go on. Try it. Silence. Ah.’ She reached into the air as if trying to touch the quiet she had created. ‘Isn’t that something? Did you know this is how other families are? They’re quiet. Ask one of these people sitting here. They’ll tell you. They’ve got families. This is how some families are all the time. And some people like to call these families repressed, or emotionally stunted or whatever, but do you know what I say?’
The Iqbals and the Joneses, astonished into silence along with the rest of the bus (even the loud-mouthed Ragga girls on their way to a Brixton dance hall New Year ting), had no answer.
‘I say, lucky fuckers. Lucky, lucky fuckers.’
‘Irie Jones!’ cried Clara. ‘Watch your mouth!’ But Irie couldn’t be stopped.
‘What a peaceful existence. What a joy their lives must be. They open a door and all they’ve got behind it is a bathroom or a lounge. Just neutral spaces. And not this endless maze of present rooms and past rooms and the things said in them years ago and everybody’s old historical shit all over the place. They’re not constantly making the same old mistakes. They’re not always hearing the same old shit. They don’t do public performances of angst on public transport. Really, these people exist. I’m telling you. The biggest traumas of their lives are things like recarpeting. Bill-paying. Gate-fixing. They don’t mind what their kids do in life as long as they’re reasonably, you know, healthy. Happy. And every single fucking day is not this huge battle between who they are and who they should be, what they were and what they will be. Go on, ask them. And they’ll tell you. No mosque. Maybe a little church. Hardly any sin. Plenty of forgiveness. No attics. No shit in attics. No skeletons in cupboards. No great-grandfathers. I will put twenty quid down now that Samad is the only person in here who knows the inside bloody leg measurement of his great-grandfather. And you know why they don’t know? Because it doesn’t fucking matter. As far as they’re concerned, it’s the past. This is what it’s like in other families. They’re not self-indulgent. They don’t run around, relishing, relishing the fact that they are utterly dysfunctional. They don’t spend their time trying to find ways to make their lives more complex. They just get on with it. Lucky bastards. Lucky motherfuckers.’
The enormous adrenalin rush that sprang from this peculiar outburst surged through Irie’s body, increased her heart-beat to a gallop and tickled the nerve ends of her unborn child, for Irie was eight weeks pregnant and she knew it. What she didn’t know, and what she realized she may never know (the very moment she saw the ghostly pastel blue lines materialize on the home test, like the face of the madonna in the zucchini of an Italian housewife), was the identity of the father. No test on earth would tell her. Same thick black hair. Same twinkling eyes. Same habit of chewing the tops of pens. Same shoe size. Same deoxyribonucleic acid. She could not know her body’s decision, what choice it had made, in the race to the gamete, between the saved and the unsaved. She could not know if the choice would make any difference. Because whichever brother it was, it was the other one too. She would never know.
At first this fact seemed ineffably sad to Irie; instinctively she sentimentalized the biological facts, adding her own invalid syllogism: if it was not somebody’s child, could it be that it was nobody’s child? She thought of those elaborate fictional cartograms that folded out of Joshua’s old sci-fi books, his Fantasy Adventures. That is how her child seemed. A perfectly plotted thing with no real coordinates. A map to an imaginary fatherland. But then, after weeping and pacing and rolling it over and over in her mind, she thought: whatever, you know? Whatever. It was always going to turn out like this, not precisely like this, but involved like this. This was the Iqbals we were talking about, here. This was the Joneses. How could she ever have expected anything less?
And so she calmed herself, putting her hand over her palpitating chest and breathing deeply as the bus approached the square and the pigeons circled. She would tell one of them and not the other; she would decide which; she would do it tonight.
‘You all right, love?’ Archie asked her, after a long period of silence had set in, putting his big pink hand on her knee, dotted with liver-spots like tea stains. ‘A lot on your chest, then.’
‘Fine, Dad. I’m fine.’
Archie smiled at her, and tucked a stray hair behind her ear.
‘Dad.’
‘Yes?’
‘The thing about the bus tickets.’
‘Yes?’
‘One theory goes it’s because so many people pay less than they should for their journey. Over the past few years the bus companies have been suffering from larger and larger deficits. You see where it says Retain for Inspection? That’s so they can check later. It’s got all the details there, so you can’t get away with it.’
And in the past, Archie wondered, was it just that fewer people cheated? Were they more honest, and did they leave their front doors open, did they leave their kids with the neighbours, pay social calls, run up tabs with the butcher? The funny thing about getting old in a country is people always want to hear that from you. They want to hear it really was once a green and pleasant land. They need it. Archie wondered if his daughter needed it. She was looking at him funny. Her mouth down-turned, her eyes almost pleading. But what could he tell her? New Years come and go, but no amount of resolutions seem to change the fact that there are bad blokes. There were always plenty of bad blokes.
‘When I was a kid,’ said Irie softly, ringing the bell for their stop, ‘I used to think they were little alibis. Bus tickets. I mean, look: they’ve got the time. The date. The place. And if I was up in court, and I had to defend myself, and prove I wasn’t where they said I was, doing what they said I did, when they said I did it, I’d pull out one of those.’
Archie was silent and Irie, assuming the conversation was over, was surprised when several minutes later, after they had struggled through the happy New Year crowd and tourists standing round aimlessly, as they were walking up the steps of the Perret Institute, her father said, ‘Now, I never thought of that. I’ll remember that. Because you never know, do you? I mean, do you? Well. There’s a thought. You should pick them up off the street, I suppose. Put ’em all in a jar. An alibi for every occasion.’