The Friendly Ones. Philip Hensher
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Leo said. With the act of driving, Aisha had taken on an air of capacity and system; the sense that she was doing things out of order, of staring and nearly giggling and not knowing what came next had quite gone. He got in. ‘Where have your parents come from?’
‘Bangladesh,’ Aisha said. ‘Or do you mean just now? Hillsborough. They’ve moved from Hillsborough. Which one did you mean?’
‘Did you go to school there?’
‘In Hillsborough? Yes, mostly, but then I got taken out and I did my A levels at the high school. My mum wanted me to go to Oxford. It’s all right, you can ask where my family come from, being brown and all that.’
Leo had, in fact, retreated in an embarrassed way at the thought that he had been asking an English girl where her family came from. He gave a shy grunt.
‘Look at that woman,’ Aisha said. ‘She’s really going for it, isn’t she, with the Cornish pasty? Go on – go on – can you get it all in in one go? Can you? My God, the things you see in Broomhill on a Monday afternoon.’
‘I think I was at school with that woman,’ Leo said.
‘Surely not,’ Aisha said. ‘You were asking – I was born here, but then they went back to Bangladesh. That’s where we come from. Daddy was doing a PhD in Sheffield, in engineering, and he was married to Mummy and she came over and I was born here. All I can remember is the blue door we had by the side of a shop and the Alsatian that sat in the shop downstairs. When he finished his PhD we all went back. I don’t know why he didn’t stay – it was a terrible time over there. And then after 1971 Daddy said there was a duty. He had to stay and work at the university in Dhaka, the university needed him and, really, the country was going to need people like him. He says it now and it’s like a big joke that anyone would ever need someone like him, but Mummy says that that’s what people used to say, back in 1971. Duty – they used to sing songs about it, probably.’
‘What happened in 1971?’
‘Oh, I’m sorry,’ Aisha said, concentrating on the road. ‘I forget not everyone talks about it all the time over breakfast, lunch and dinner. Bangladesh happened – there was a war of independence. It was part of Pakistan and then there was a war and it became independent but very poor, which is how it’s stayed since. Lots of people were killed, you know. I had an uncle who was killed. I just about remember him. We talk about 1971 like you’d talk about 1066 if it happened twenty years ago.’
‘I don’t really know anything about it at all,’ Leo said. ‘I went to India once with my wife, before we got married. I thought it would be romantic.’
‘It’s sometimes quite romantic, I believe,’ Aisha said. In the little rectangle of mirror, he caught her eye; it flicked away. ‘I’ve not been, apart from once to Calcutta where we were changing planes and Daddy thought we’d stop over for two or three days to see things. Where did you go?’
‘Rajasthan. Temples and palaces. There was a night in a really expensive hotel, a palace on a lake, but apart from that it was terrible backpacker hostels. My wife got awful food poisoning – she thought she was going to die or have to be shipped out.’
‘What happened to her?’
‘Well, she was fine in the end, no harm done.’
‘No, I meant …’
‘Oh – we’re divorced. Is that what you meant? Her food poisoning and some camels and the traffic – that’s what I remember about India. I must go to Calcutta,’ he said, in a rush.
‘That wasn’t romantic, I don’t think,’ Aisha said. ‘I remember little bits about Bangladesh when I was little, but it’s all confused now. We’ve only been back once since Mummy and Daddy left definitively. They came over in 1975 ‒ they said enough was enough. The twins were born here. They were born in the Northern General, actually – I remember going through the snow to visit Mummy with some flowers and seeing the pair of them for the first time. It was really the snow more than the twins I was excited about.’
‘Your family’s all here, then,’ Leo said.
‘Yes, they all came over in dribs and drabs,’ Aisha said. ‘Most of them after ’seventy-five, though Mummy and Daddy were the first. No, I tell a lie. Aunty Sadia and Uncle Mahfouz came over here before then. Do you have any war criminals in your family? I’ve hardly met Aunty Sadia or Uncle Mahfouz, apart from maybe when I was about two years old and had no judgement.’
‘How glamorous, having war criminals in your family,’ Leo said.
‘Well, I don’t really know what they’re supposed to have done,’ Aisha said, ‘but we’re never allowed to meet them and Daddy always says that if everyone got what they deserved Uncle Mahfouz would have been shot by a firing squad years ago, or hanged, or put in the electric chair. Everyone, I mean the aunts, they all say that nothing could ever bring them to have Mahfouz or Sadia in the house again, which is unusual. They never agree with Daddy about anything. Here we are, the Northern General Hospital. How are you going to get back?’
‘You’ve been very kind,’ Leo said. ‘I hope you didn’t have anything important to do.’
6.
The hospital wing he found his way to, with many confusing blue signs, had a new brick frontage with a choice of steps or wheelchair ramp, but inside, its narrow corridors and metal windows revealed it as what it was, a conversion of army huts, thrown up rapidly during the war. It had the powerful disinfectant smell that all hospitals had, a sharp twinge of annihilation – there was no real question of cleanliness in the smell, just a sense that things, quite recently, had gone too far.
All about were families of visitors, a small gang of decrepit patients in dressing-gowns and slippers heading outside for a smoke, a child or two carrying a bunch of yellow chrysanthemums and there, in the middle of the hall, an old woman in what must have been a communal wheelchair, abandoned and fretful, sitting with her expectant gaze in the middle of the space, waiting to be collected or returned, like a volume of a dictionary in a public library. Leo reached his mother’s ward thinking that he too should have brought some yellow chrysanthemums. Grapes.
His mother was sitting up in bed in her nightie, a shawl round her shoulders. Her right arm was in a thick plaster, her fingers poking out of the end, like curious animals. She looked clean and pink, her hair in an unaccustomed greying shock round her face, and she broke out in a delighted smile to see him.
‘Nobody tells me anything,’ she said. ‘What are you doing here?’
‘Came to see you,’ Leo said. ‘I thought you’d be a bit bored.’
‘Your father was here a moment ago,’ Leo’s mother said. ‘Did he know you were going to come?’
‘He should have,’ Leo said lightly. ‘I got in last night. We arranged to meet here. What’s up?’
‘Oh, he does madden me,’ she said. ‘He’s just gone out for a cup of tea, I think. Fancy not mentioning that you were on your way.’
‘Probably wanted it to be a nice surprise for you,’ Leo said, wondering. ‘But what’s that? What have you done?’
‘Oh, I don’t know,’ she said, raising her heavy plastered arm with some effort. ‘It’s so absurd. I can’t imagine how it happened. I thought I just banged it, just that, and then there was this awful pain, and your father looked at it and told me I’d broken it. You wouldn’t think you could break an arm that easily. Did you …’
But then she went off into a fit of vacancy, and Leo remembered that she must be on a heavy dose of morphine.
‘I got up here yesterday,’ he said. ‘Late last night or I would have come over. I met the new neighbours!’
He wasn’t quite sure, but Celia refocused, smiling in a woozy way, and nodded. Out of her window was a courtyard, and in the middle an ornamental cherry tree. There was a bench on the far wall; a man