A Matter of Marriage (29 page)

“Is that what he thinks I am?” she said, watching her fingers bounce off the brush's bristles, then painting her out-turned palm.

“He was very excited: wanted to call the BBC, conduct midnight tours.”

She half smiled, thank god. He should leave while she felt at ease.

“I'll head off now.” He hesitated, not wanting to imply lack of faith in her family. “If you need anything, if things change and you need to get away, or get back to London, you can call me.” He dug in his wallet for a business card, and held it out, but she didn't take it. “The phone in the main hall: it's working.”

“I think it'll be alright now, yeah.”

He started to walk downstairs, then turned. She hadn't moved, a pale wraith with the dark line of her plait over one shoulder. “I'm here all weekend, in the Lodge. And I'll be back next weekend as well.”

She was silent, and he cursed the many possibilities for misunderstanding.

“Perhaps it will all be sorted out soon.”

“I wouldn't count on it.”

“Well, goodnight then. Sleep well.”

“Yeah.”

T
ARIQ WOKE ON
Friday morning, headachey after a late night doing duty visits for Mum and Dad in the Oxford community, thinking that he was back in Libya, in the Tajura barracks. Perhaps it was the narrowness of his single bed, or the unusual warmth of the morning sun. He'd left the curtains open on the little dormer window last night, and now a hot square of sunlight fell across the red and white of his duvet cover.

The sunlit square lay centerd over his chest, with the shadow of the window's lattice forming a plus-sign directly over his heart, like the cross-hairs on a rifle. Or the old cross of Saint George that the Crusaders used to wear. He frowned. As an Islamist he should have thought Invaders, not Crusaders. But all that seemed so distant now. What difference did it really make? Was he a traitor or a martyr? Anglo or Desi? He stretched his arms above his head and grasped the vertical bars of the bed head. Gay or a criminal pervert? Tomayto, tomarto.

He tried to feel relief that he was not in Libya anymore, that those days were over forever. But the sick Tajura feeling, of being trapped, of living a lie, persisted. He got up, looked out the window. Blue sky, rolling green hills, no one in sight. A good day to get out of the house, get some fresh air, do a bit of exercise, think coolly and rationally, make some plans. Put his life in order
.
The chaos of uncontrolled feelings and impulsive acts must be avoided at all costs. How he would love to grab some of Mum's samosas and stay out till evening.

Things had been building up in the last few days, ever since the dinner party at the Lodge. Mum had been perky and busy, no longer so preoccupied with Munni's marital future and how to talk Dad around. It could only mean one thing: that that problem was on the way to being solved. And there was only ever one Desi solution for a daughter in trouble.

He drummed his fingers on the windowpane. Who on earth could Mum have fixed on? No one within the community would have Munni now. Surely not some opportunist from the old country, ready to marry anyone for a visa? If that was the case he would stop it. Take her away, back to South Africa, as he had promised. He was never going to let her down, not be there for her, again.

Stair treads creaked, followed by the tink and clink of crockery carried, and he froze. If Mum thought Munni was sorted, that meant she would now have the time and energy to devote to him. He threw on some clothes, padded quickly to the bathroom and slid the bolt across, just in time to hear her voice on the landing, using his pet name.

“Abu, are you awake? I have chai for you. Your father is in his study. I am on my own downstairs.”

Tariq made a non-committal noise and splashed water vigorously.

“Abu-u-u.” Mum's voice was at the bathroom door, as soft and sweet as sugar. “When you are ready. I will wait for you-u-u. I do not mind.”

He was trapped. If she'd been head of Jamat-al-Islami, the US would be under Sharia law by now. Not to mention every American adult married off. He stared grimly into the mirror, then unlocked the door and stuck his head out.

“I will just wait here with your chai. It is no trouble . . . Oh, Abu, I did not mean to interrupt your washings. And you have not shaved.”

“Alright Amma, just give me a minute, yeah? I'll shave and then I'll have a cup in the kitchen with you. Alright?” He could see it now: cup after cup, lots of arm pats and allusions to his single state, segueing into whatever secret stash she had of matchmaking CVs and photos of Desi girls in saris. “Then I've got to go out, yeah. I'm meeting someone.”

She patted his arm with her free hand, and smiled up at him. “My handsome son.”

Jesus Christ. He'd forgo the shave and the samosas and head straight out after the chai, one cup only. Perhaps he'd see Denny down by the river.

It took half an hour for Tariq to escape to the Park. Losing the samosas was a small sacrifice in the circumstances, and he appreciated Mum's strategic vision: he would have to come back to eat. She'd never needed Napoleon to tell her that her family marched on their stomachs.

Treetops tossed messily and wisps of cloud morphed as quickly as smoke, in a strong and noisy breeze that it tired him to walk against.
Fitna
, chaos, his cell leader had called a state of mind like this: roiling in confusion, pushed in every direction, prey to every desire, and a sin in itself, as the Qur'an makes clear. He let the wind push him downhill through the Park until he found himself in a sheltered spot near a bend in the river: a miniature oasis of quiet and calm.

The water was shallow here, and so clear that he could see the flicker of small fishes, throwing their shadows onto the pale sand beneath them. The shadows were easier to see than the fish themselves, which were almost transparent, less than half an inch long and seemed to be in constant, frantic motion. His own shadow above them caused a sudden flurry into hiding, and it was some time after he'd sat down, peeled off shoes and socks and started to think seriously about taking off his t-shirt, before they returned.

The drowsy heat of this sheltered spot, the glare of sunlight, took him back to Libya. Long days in the desert on some pointless sentry or picket duty where, squatting hard up against a boulder or wall for its sliver of shadow, he had spent minutes, maybe hours, watching the comings and goings of the ants at his feet, rather than the middle and far distance of those sweeping rocky vistas. The sun there had been so bright that the ants' shadows were easier to spot than the light grey of their segmented bodies and almost invisible legs. Sometimes, back then, full of the
shaitan
doubt, he had felt that their busy forays along established paths contained the answer to all his questions. Such purpose and unity. The ants never faltered, never departed from their own highways except to rush blindly and furiously to attack his idly stirring foot, with no thought for themselves. Why couldn't he surrender, submit to the will of Allah, the call of Jihad that seemed to have galvanized and fulfilled everyone around him?

As his training continued, week after week, he developed a flinching distaste for the perpetual shouting of orders and replies, and the webbing for his ammo-pack and radio that had rubbed a painful blister between his right shoulder and collarbone. Most of all, he hated the heavy, awkward Kalashnikov that he was expected to take everywhere, on every trip, every exercise. It burnt his hands if he handled it unwarily on picket and seemed to need as much carrying and cleaning and changing as a newborn.

He became known for volunteering for the solitary boredom of picket: anything to get out of barracks, away from the tasks at which he never did well, and his fellow trainees, whom he had come to loathe. Though it was also true that this gigantic, mutable desert sky, the scurrying ants, made more sense than anything that happened on Tajura's parade ground. What was wrong with him? Where was the sense of ecstatic purpose, of coming home, that had filled him at the Oxford mosque less than a year ago?

Then Robbie had arrived: a professional soldier, with all the no-bullshit, take-the-piss humor of a Special Forces NCO turned mercenary to help train Quaddafi's foreign guests. The other men hated Robbie on sight. He was an infidel, of course, but also a professional who made no secret of his opinions of the college dropouts, taxi drivers and mobile-phone salesmen that he'd been given to train.

In those first few days after Robbie's arrival Tariq felt, in his presence, as self-conscious and awkward as a teenager. Even more disturbingly, he began to see their group with Robbie's eyes: not as the Mujahedeen they wanted to be, but as the men they were—the G.I. Joe fantasies of short-man Shahin, the pretension of Jamal's ostentatiously extended
salat
, and the bullying clinginess of Ali and Mohammed's “voluntary” scripture study group.

Through Robbie's occasional sharp exchanges with their Libyan superior officers, Tariq recognized the contempt they had for their group: men from the West who were so materially fortunate but so ignorant, not even speaking the language of the Prophet, and so ready to betray their own country. So much for the
ummah
, the international brotherhood of Islam. Here, Tariq and the other trainees were more foreign, more outsiders, than they had ever been in England.

One day soon after Robbie had arrived, they were sent out at dawn on a desert training exercise. This kind of thing had already happened often enough to feel drearily familiar: struggling to understand the orders given in Italian or Arabic; the feelings of failure, thirst and bone-aching tiredness; and the petty sniping between members of the group trying to recover their dignity.

When they were finally allowed to return to camp, Tariq and the others piled into a jeep driven by Robbie, with Tariq scoring the front passenger seat. “Fucking towel-heads,” someone in the back muttered, but no one responded. Tariq jammed his cap down over his face and shut his eyes against a headache that seemed to be trying to escape the confines of his skull.

About halfway back to the barracks, Robbie pulled over at an ancient stone reservoir that Tariq had seen before. A perfect square of semi-dressed, mortared stone, filled almost to the brim with water, its palmetto corners dated it back to the Fatimids. Dad would have been pleased that he'd remembered that. An old shepherd and a teenage conscript were crouching in its shadow, next to a large bundle of bloodstained hessian, covered in flies. Robbie jumped out of the jeep, tossed a folded tarp from the back toward the boy, and told everyone to get out and cool off in the water.

Tariq had climbed out gingerly, his head feeling like it was splitting. Some argument seemed to have started in the back of the jeep. Something about the exact protocol for
wudu
, washing: the whole complex of rules and injunctions and
fatwas
laid down by the Prophet and the centuries of scholars who came after him, about the great importance of proper, godly cleanliness and how it was achieved.

Ali and Mohammed, speaking with the dropped eyes and half-smiles of the morally superior, seemed to have reached a consensus that
wudu
was not possible in standing water used by animals. Tariq glanced at the water, dark and sparkling in the midday sun. Its beauty hurt his eyes, and he closed them for a second. What a joke. Nitpicking dogma even in the desert.

“Come on, lads, it's not an order,” Robbie said, seeming to recognize the inevitable. “Swimming's optional, orright?” He pointed at the bloodstained pile. “Make yourselves useful: that's our dinner there!”

Only then did the men slowly begin to unfold themselves from the various tortured positions they had taken to fit onto the vehicle, and climb down. The old shepherd and the boy started to drag the hessian bundles toward the jeep. They turned out to be goat carcasses, and Tariq began to heft the first blood-soaked bundle to throw it into the back of the jeep. But the fizzing flies, the smell and limp weight of the meat made him gag almost immediately. This place was even hotter than where they had been, the glare off the tarmac unbearable. He just made the jeep and, after dropping the carcass, staggered away, feeling cold sweat prickle his forehead and back. The ground swung beneath his feet, and he fell to his knees, the sand moving to meet him. But a steadying hand grasped his shoulder.

“Come on then, mate.” Robbie hooked a hard hand under his right armpit, lifted him onto his feet and propelled him into a staggering run toward the reservoir. “Got a bit of heatstroke there. In you hop.”

Tariq crashed into the hot stone of the reservoir wall, but could do no more. As he started to slide downward, hands hoicked him up and over the side and into the water. It burnt like ice. He sank, gasped, swallowed water, could not rise, and a moment later felt the explosion of another body entering the water, a forearm across his chest and under his chin, pulling him onto his back, and then his own face clearing the water.

His eyes shut reflexively as he faced up into the burn of the sun, Robbie's voice coming to him as if from miles away.

“Be the first fucking time I've lost a soldier in the desert from drowning, mate!”

Robbie helped him get out, took off his own wet shirt and draped it over Tariq's head and shoulders, and walked him to the jeep. The others, covered in flies, were sitting in two drooping rows on top of the tarped, stinking meat. They reminded Tariq of some old newsreel footage of German POWs, waiting to be moved on. Or was it French resistance fighters, or Jewish partisans? He couldn't remember.

All the way to the cookhouse, then the barracks, Robbie's naked torso was in Tariq's peripheral vision, the spray of blue tattoos across his chest and shoulders heightening the freckled silver of his skin.

After lights out, Tariq went to Robbie in the transport yard, and Robbie ran his hands across his shoulders and back and down his buttocks, and pulled him close to kiss deeply, his erection pressing against Tariq's thighs. No pretence that this was accidental touching or some kind of furtive shower-room fuck due to circumstances, necessity. No muttering of
Al-darurat tubih al-mahzurat
: necessity overrides the prohibition. Full eye contact, pleasure and desire openly expressed. No shame, no excuses.

The little fishes were bolder now: coming right up to the margins of the water, only inches from where Tariq's bare toes rested on the sand. What did he look like to them, refracted through the water and their fishy eyes? Something beyond their imaginings. Or perhaps not so unfamiliar in their collective memory: some presence, alien and unknowable that appeared on the margins of their world, invading then retreating at unpredictable intervals.

So, where to from here? He was home again, Munni was safe for now, and perhaps one day he would be able to tell her the truth. But Mum would not be put off forever: he had seen his own CV, the studio shots she'd dug out from years ago, heard the allusions to how nice it was to have her son home to look after them in their old age. And to look after his sisters. A low blow.