Brick Lane (65 page)

Into her reverie broke the sound of knocking at the door. Before she even opened it she knew it would be him, knew the way that he knocked with gentle impatience. Karim had a bale of jeans over his shoulder, tied together with thick cord. He set it down on the floor and folded his arms. They did not speak but regarded each other with caution, each wondering who would offer an explanation and what would be explained.

Looking became unbearable and, as if by mutual agreement, both lowered their eyes. Nazneen breathed air that was choked with things unsaid, their suspense caught in molecules like drops of condensation. She was aware of her body, as though just now she had come to inhabit it for the first time and it was both strange and wonderful to have this new and physical expression. A pulse behind her ear. A needle of excitement down her thigh. Inside her stomach, a deep and desperate hunger.

She did not know who moved first or how but they were in the bedroom and locked together so close that even air could not come between them. She bit his ear. She bit his lip and tasted blood. He pushed her onto the bed and tore at her blouse and pushed the skirt of her sari around her waist. Still dressed, she was more than naked. The times when she had lain naked beneath the sheets belonged to another, saintly era. She helped him undress. She felt it now: there was nothing she would not do. She drew him in, not with passion but with ferocity as if it were possible to lose and win all in this one act. He held a hand across her throat and she wanted everything: to vanish inside the heat like a drop of dew, to feel his hand press down and extinguish her, to hear Chanu come in and see what she was, his wife.

Karim lay on his back with his arms behind his head. Nazneen did not move, her limbs strewn around like the result of a traffic accident. She lay and waited for disgust to stalk its way over and into her. But nothing came. Only the warmth of his body radiating into hers. She had begun to drift into sleep when Karim turned on his side and started to talk. He uttered caresses, whispered promises, moaned and mumbled his love, sweet with the stupidity of youth, humbled by his stutter. She got up and went to wash and rinsed away his words.

Later, he sat on the sofa with his feet on the coffee table while she worked. There was a hole in his sock and a big toe poked out of it. Nazneen tried not to see this. She brought him a glass of water. She brought him some dates. All the time she tried to keep her eyes away from the white socks with the grey bits at the heel and ball and the extra hole.

A couple of times he punched numbers into his mobile phone but there seemed to be no one to speak to. He stretched his arms and fidgeted. 'Got to get things going,' he said, to nobody in particular.

Nazneen worked on her zips. If he asked her, she would tell him everything – about her illness, about the impossibility of continuing – and then they would talk, and out of the talking would come an ending.

'You angry with me?'

She looked up, to check he was not speaking into his phone.

'Are you angry because I haven't been here for a while?'

'No.'

He smiled. 'OK, I can see that you're angry.' He seemed amused. 'I've been away, up to Bradford to see some family.'

'I am not angry.'

'I'll make it up to you.'

Suddenly, she was furious. 'Why do you not believe me when I tell you I am not angry?' She spoke in Bengali and she hissed the words.

He enjoyed the joke. 'I believe you, sister. I can see that you are happy.'

She did not answer and for several minutes she shoved silence at him. After a while she wanted something to say but nothing seemed suitable.

'Better go, man,' said Karim, and he took his feet off the table. He spoke lightly, as if they were just fooling around. 'Places to go, people to see.'

'No,' she said. 'Don't.'

'Things to do. Jeans to deliver.' But he didn't get up.

'The girls will be here tomorrow. And the next day.'

He paused a while. When he spoke again he had dropped the tone. 'Maybe it's, like, time I got to know them.'

She had wanted to talk and now she did not want to talk. She wanted things to go back to the way they were, not the old way but the new way: just two weeks ago, or ten minutes ago.

'Who did you see in Bradford?'

He shrugged, as if it were impossible to say. 'Family. Cousins and that.'

'How many cousins?'

He shrugged again. 'Loads.'

She worked on him, and it was not difficult to make him stay. He decided to use Chanu's computer. She wiped the dust off the screen. While he fiddled around with plugs and wires he began to talk about the Bengal Tigers.

'We've got to get things going again. Nobody bothers to turn up. It's pathetic.'

She ran a damp cloth over the keyboard. He was close enough to smell: limes and cloves and the lingering afterburn of sex, washed away but still there if you knew about it, like a removed stain.

'Everyone was coming, you shudda seen it,' he told Nazneen, as though she had not. 'Then – smack' – he clicked his fingers – 'all gone again.'

His beard had grown in. Even a beard could not hide how handsome he was. She remembered the meeting in the community hall at the edge of the estate, sitting below the stage, flaming inside her red sari, watching him pull the audience to his side, running home and waiting for him, knowing yet scarcely believing he would come. That was how she wanted him, like that, not with his feet on her coffee table and holes in his socks.

'When we were going to organize that march . . . different story.' He bent down and unravelled some wires.

'Make another one.'

'Lion Hearts were going to march against us. We were going to march against them. But they bottled it. They knew they were going to be outnumbered. We were going to hammer 'em.' He banged his head on the table coming up again, and rubbed it with his fist.

'Make another march. Why you have to do it against someone?'

He looked at her and transferred his fist to his beard and rubbed that as well. 'It don't work like that.'

'Why not?'

'You can't march for no reason. That's like – like just walking around, man.'

She grew stubborn. 'Why?'

He looked her slowly up and down, as if she might be an impostor. 'Because,' he said with quiet emphasis, 'it is.'

'You want people to come back in the group?'

'Bengal Tigers is dying out. We need new blood.' He pressed a button on the keyboard and the computer made a whirring noise, like insects at nightfall. He sat down and pressed more buttons.

'Make it into a celebration,' she said. 'People always come out for a celebration. Some singing, some dancing.'

'What, like a mela?' He looked round at her, and gave her the kind of smile that substituted for a pat on the head.

'Yes,' she insisted. 'Like that.'

He was absorbed in the screen and she could not say any more. She stood by his shoulder and demanded his attention silently. After a few minutes he spoke again without turning his head.

'You know, it could be like a mela.'

'Oh, but do you think so?' said Nazneen.

'It don't have to be a
negative
thing. It can be positive.'

'Well,' said Nazneen, 'if you say so.'

Karim spent an hour or so in front of the computer screen and Nazneen blunted two needles on the zips. From time to time it occurred to her that Chanu, who had gone back to the taxi-driving early in the morning, might arrive home and find them in this compromising domesticity. The thought of it left her indifferent. He comes, he doesn't come, she said to herself. By this attitude, she was vaguely shocked and nearly thrilled for it seemed at once wanton and sublime, the first real stoicism she had shown to the course of her fate.