Brick Lane (39 page)

This was how he came into her life.

CHAPTER TEN

It was a strange thing, and it took her some time to realize it. When he spoke in Bengali he stammered. In English, he found his voice and it gave him no trouble. Having made the discovery, she went back to the beginning and made it afresh. She considered him. The way he stood with his legs wide and his arms folded. His hair. Cut so close to the skull. The way it came to a triangle at the front, and the little bit which stood up straight at the centre of his forehead. He wore his jeans tight and his shirtsleeves rolled up to the elbow. No. There was nothing there. No clue to the glitches in his Bengali voice.

And he was sure of himself. He took a strong stance. Sometimes his right leg worked to a random beat. He wore white trainers and a thin gold chain around his neck. He said, 'My uncle owns the factory.' He said, 'The sweatshop. My uncle owns it.' And he bounced his leg and fiddled with his mobile phone, waiting for her to count up the linings.

He wore the phone at his hip, in a little black leather holster. He felt the length and breadth of it and tested the surface with his thumb as if he had discovered a growth, this tumorous phone on his side. Then he refolded his arms. They looked strong, those arms. His hair. Razored short against the skull. It was odd, that the shape of a skull could be pleasing.

When his phone rang, he took it out to the hallway. She caught only fragments. A word, a phrase, a word repeated, a word struggling for release. The caller would not let him speak. So it seemed. It took some time to work out that it was his voice, not his listener, that had failed him.

'My husband had a mobile phone,' she told him. 'But he gave it up. Said it was too expensive.'

'Y-y-your husband is right.'

She switched to English. 'Very useful thing.'

'Y-y-yes, but t-t-too expensive.'

She saw at once that she had made a mistake. She had drawn attention to the very thing she had thought to hide. He would not speak English now. He would not disown himself. She thought of what to say and how to say it. But by then he had put money on the table and left.

She still had five more hems to do when he came the next time. Opening the door she knew that something was wrong. The look on his face. He rushed past and into the sitting room. He held the window frame. 'Gone,' he said. 'They've gone.' His head and shoulders slumped forward, and he began to pant just then though the action was over.

'What it was?'

He turned round. Sweat across the top of his lip. Sunshine in his hair made it sparkle. Some kind of oil. Or more sweat. He told her about the two men pushing leaflets through front doors. Pushing their filthy leaflets through letterboxes. He picked up the box – right under their noses – and he ran with it.

He got into position now. Legs wide, right leg working, and she saw the thigh strain inside the denim and she looked down at her sewing, which she had not finished. They had chased him but he was faster. He put the box, the filthy leaflets, in the bin where they belonged. He looped the estate, they didn't see where he went, he looped back again to check, and nobody saw him come up to the flat. It was safe. Quite safe.

'They'll get what's coming to them, man. That ain't the end of it.'

'What they say? The leaflets.' She had forgotten to cover her hair.

He sat down, across the table from her, and now the sun was directly behind him so that from the corner of her eye she saw him as a silhouette. It was the first time he had sat down in her home. She thought about tea but she was unsure what it would mean, to have tea with this boy. He was not a relative.

'I know who they are.'

'These men.'

'I know them, man. I know them.'

'Yes.'

'Lion Hearts. They are behind it. We are going to make them pay, man.'

'Who they are?'

'Just a front. They are only a front. We know everything about them. Everything.' He had his hands palms up on the table, slightly cupped, vibrating. Weighing it all up, or asking for trouble.

He put his hands under the table. She watched him obliquely.

'In our country,' she said, 'everyone would stop. Come and help you.'

He rocked back in his chair. 'This is my country.'

She told him she still had five hems to do and he said that he would wait. Though she kept her eyes to her work, she felt his gaze. Sun on the needle surround flashed iridescent prisms over her fingernails. She machined in bursts and thought of drawing the curtain but the thought was, somehow, confusing to her and she did not do it. The last hem snagged and she had to get up for the scissors.

She saw then that he had been reading all this time and a heat came into her face. He looked up and she looked away.

'That sari,' he said. 'My mother had one. Same material I mean.'

It was soft blue with a deep green band around it. Chanu had picked it out. He called it subtle and he said it was like her, subtle beauty, which she liked though she knew it was the words that pleased him.

She said nothing.

'She's dead now. Man.' He looked at his magazine, as though his dead mother were nothing to him.

'I sorry.'

'Yeah,' he said. 'Man.' And he turned the page.
'Are you a good Muslim? Twenty ways to tell.'
He held up the magazine, and Nazneen saw that it was no more than a few flimsy pages in black and white, stapled at the side.

Driver one-six-one-nine was frequently on duty in the evenings. Evenings in the flat became more relaxed. The girls did their homework in front of the television. Shahana said it helped her to concentrate. Bibi chewed the end of her pen. The laughter on the soundtrack never made her smile although Shahana developed a sophisticated giggle. Nazneen continued with her piecework. If she worked fast, if she didn't make mistakes, she could earn as much as three pounds and fifty pence in one hour. Maybe a little bit more. She heard the television and she caught glimpses of Shahana on her tummy, legs in the air, crossing and uncrossing. She thought about the five-pound notes inside the jar, wrapped in a cloth, inside a plastic bag, snapped into a see-through container that sat in the cupboard beneath the kitchen sink. She reminded herself of the money in an envelope on the high shelf, near the Qur'an, and decided it was haram and would have to be removed. She counted the money pushed into the foot of a pair of tights, wound up in a ball at the back of her underwear drawer. Another five pounds put away today. Fifteen more pounds wrapped in clingfilm, inside a sandwich bag, pushed into the hole in the wall next to the boiler. She would take it to the Sonali Bank in the morning. Hasina would have it before the end of the month. Some she would give to Shahana for the things she coveted, shampoo and lotion and slides for her hair.

Sometimes Chanu was out for the whole night. Then she would rise early and have the food heated, rice cooked fresh, ready for him on the table. 'I'll eat now.' He said it as he came through the door and he sat down with his coat still on and ate, jumping up when he remembered he had not washed his hand, preparing another mouthful before he had even taken up his place again, calling for pickle and chutney and a slice of lemon, some chopped onion on a side plate, a glass of water. 'Oh, well put it here,' he said when she told him it was already on the table. 'Put it just here so I can reach it.'

'These people,' he would say. 'Ignorant types. What can you do?'

She never learned anything about Kempton Kars. She did not hear about any Mr Dalloways, any Wilkies. The customers retained their mystery. All she knew was what he told her, that they were ignorant types.

But he was philosophical. 'You see, all my life I have struggled. And for what? What good has it done? I have finished with all that. Now, I just take the money. I say thank you. I count it.' He put a ball of rice and dal in his mouth and held it inside his cheek. 'You see, when the English went to our country, they did not go to stay. They went to make money, and the money they made, they took it out of the country. They never left home. Mentally. Just taking money out. And that is what I am doing now. What else can you do?'

These speeches he made in the simple language of a simple – though not ignorant-type – man. But when he took out his books in the evenings he spent at home, he began to speak differently.

He had Shahana turn pages as he lay on the sofa. Bibi was in the bedroom, twisting her ankles together beneath the desk and worrying a bit of paper. Shahana's face was pulling in on itself, setting into a mask of utter disregard. She knelt by the sofa and held the book at an angle to her father's face. He raised his eyebrows. Then he raised them again, further this time so that they untangled from each other at the centre. Shahana turned the page.