I Think of You: Stories (3 page)

My parents are still in the courtyard when they hear the sound of banging against glass. They turn and look up. A small figure in a white nightdress performs a demented dance behind
the darkened windowpanes. Fists hitting at the glass, mouth wide open in a silent scream. They race back up the stairs, unlock the door, and rush in. I am still on the chest by the window as, hysterical, I explain what happened. They tell me it cannot be and try to laugh at me. But whatever they tell me is no use, for it
has
been and I have seen it. They are not able to explain it away.

My father sits in the living room and my mother comes and goes between us.

“I must go down now and you must go back to bed.”

“No.” I am hysterical and crying.

“Daddy says he’ll be very cross with you.”

“No.”

“Daddy says there won’t be any new toys or books till Christmas.”

“I don’t want any.”

I know now my parents are neither omnipotent nor omniscient. They cannot stop the vampire from appearing, but at least they can be there when he arrives. I insist that they stay in and I win. I will not be left alone after this. And I am miserable.

1964

I
stood in the snow, freezing and waiting for the bus. I was lonely. I had woken up at six as usual, washed and dressed in the cold dark while my young sister and brother slept on. I had poured myself some cornflakes, smothered them in sugar, and eaten them. Then I had let myself out of the back door and walked to the corner of Clapham High Street to wait for the No.
37
.

The snow was deep around my ankle-high fur-lined black suede boots inherited from my mother. Or rather, I suppose now, donated by my mother while she wore ordinary shoes in the snow. Fourteen, with thick black hair that unfailingly delighted old English ladies on buses (“What lovely curly
hair. Is it natural?”) and which I hated. It was the weather; hours of brushing and wrapping and pinning could do nothing against five minutes of English damp.

I loved Maggie Tulliver, Anna Karenina, Emma Bovary, and understood them as I understood none of the people around me. In my own mind I was a heroine and in the middle of the night would act out scenes of high drama to the concern of my younger sister, who had, however, learned to play Charmian admirably for an eight-year-old.

We had come to England by boat. My father had come first. My mother had had trouble getting her exit visa. It was the New Socialist era in Egypt and there had been a clamp-down on foreign travel. Strings were pulled, but a benign bureaucracy moves slowly and it was two months before we were allowed to board the
Stratheden
and make for England.

We got on at Port Said. The
Stratheden
had come through the Suez Canal from Bombay and before that from Sydney. It was full of disappointed returning would-be Australian settlers and hopeful Indian would-be immigrants, and beneath my mother’s surface friendliness there was a palpable air of superiority.
We
were Egyptian academics come to England on a sabbatical to do
post
doctoral research. I wasn’t postdoctoral, but it still wasn’t quite the thing to play with the Indian teenagers, particularly as among them there was a tall, thin seventeen-year-old with a beaked nose called Christopher who kept asking me to meet him on deck after dark. In a spirit of adventure I gave him my London address.

I was summoned into my parents’ room, where the letter lay on the desk. It was addressed to me and had been opened. It never occurred to me to question that. It said that it had been respectfully fun knowing me and could he meet me again? It had a passport-size photograph of him in it. My parents were grave. They were disapproving. They were saddened. How had he got my address? I hung my head. Why was it wrong to give him my address? Why shouldn’t I know him? How had he got my address? I scuffed my shoes and said I didn’t know. My lie hung in the air. Why had he sent me a photograph? I really didn’t know the answer to that one and said so. They believed me. “You know you’re not to be in touch with him?” “Yes.” There were no rows, just silent, sad disapproval. You’ve let us down. I never answered his letter and he never wrote again—or if he did I never knew of it.

I was not troubled by the loss of Christopher, just by the loss of a potential adventure. Anything that happened to me represented a “potential adventure.” Every visit to the launderette was brimful with the possibility of someone “interesting” noticing me. When I slipped and sprained an ankle, the projected visits to the physiotherapist seemed an avenue into adventure. But the old man massaging my foot and leering toothlessly up at me (“What a pity you don’t slip more often”) was more an ogre than a prince, and after one visit my ankle was left to heal on its own.

The likelihood of my actually arriving at an adventure was lessened by the eight-thirty P.M. curfew imposed by my parents (“Even in England it’s not nice to be out later than that, dear”).

But no path to rebellion was open to me, so I waited for something to happen obligingly within the set boundaries.

Days of calm Clapham harmony passed and I was fretting— “moping,” my mother would say. Nothing ever happened. Life was passing me by. Then one day, when I returned from the launderette, my mother said that some young people, the vicar’s children from down the road, had come by and asked if I would like to go out with them that evening. She had said yes for me. I was thrilled.

They came to collect me. Two tall and angular girls with vanishing eyebrows and hair pulled back into ponytails and a boy with extremely short hair and glasses and a brown-checked suit. My knowing heart made a little motion toward sinking, but I was resolute. I was going out with three young people of my own age. I did not know where we were going, but the possibilities were infinite. We might go down to the café at the end of the road and play the jukebox; I had looked through the window and seen it gleaming. We might go to a movie (“It’s called a film, dear”). We might go to a youth club; I had heard of those and imagined them to be like the Gezira Club at home, only much more exciting and liberated. Instead, we went to church.

It was not even an old and picturesque church. It was modern and bare and the benches were miles away from the pulpit and my new friends’ father preached for a long, long time. I told myself it was nice that they thought nothing of taking me, a Muslim, to their church. It was proof that I belonged— a little; that I wasn’t as different as I feared I was. We all prayed.

I knew about prayers from books I had read and made the appropriate movements, and when we bent our heads and closed our eyes, communing silently with God, I prayed for something to happen to relieve the awful tedium of life. I knew it was slightly incongruous to ask for excitement in church, but I was desperate.

“Friends,” the vicar said, “in our city today we find increasing numbers of people who come to us from far places: from alien races, alien beliefs. There are some of those among us tonight. Should any person in this congregation wish to join with us in the love of Jesus Christ, let them raise their hands now while the eyes of everyone are closed in prayer and I will seek them out later and guide them into the love of Our Lord. Raise your hand now.” I kept my eyes closed tight and my fists clenched by my sides. I could not swallow. There was no doubt in my mind that he meant me.

Afterward we all had tea in a hall somewhere in the building. Everybody was large and pale with straight light brown hair and tweeds. I felt excessively small and dark and was agonizingly conscious of my alien appearance, and particularly my alien hair, as I waited to be sought out and guided into the love of Jesus Christ. Mercifully, it did not happen. Even so, I had been—however unknowingly—betrayed, and I knew I would never go out with the vicar’s children again.

On the way home I kept my eyes open for the teddy boys and the rockers preening on the street corners. My heart yearned after them, with their motorcycles and their loud and gaily colored girlfriends. They were all that I was missing, and

every time I walked past one, my heart would thud in anticipation of his speaking to me. It was hopeless, I knew. My parents would never allow me to make friends with them. And when a crowd of them whistled at me one day, I knew it was even more hopeless than that. For they were hostile. And I realized that with my prim manner and prissy voice they wouldn’t want me for a friend anyway. I was a misfit: I had the manners of a fledgling westernized bourgeois intellectual and the soul (though no one suspected it yet but me) of a rocker.

After I had refused a few times to go out with the church children (“But you’re always moping around complaining you don’t know anybody”), temporary rescue came from some friends of my parents. We went to visit them and it turned out that they had a son three years my senior. They suggested (I was sure to his annoyance) that he take me to the theater. My parents had no choice but to give their consent there and then, and arrangements were made for later in the week. Oddly, though, I still had to get formal permission to be out late. Permission to go to the theater apparently did not automatically include that. After all, one could always get up in the middle of the first act and be home by eight-thirty. However, permission was granted, but at ten-thirty on the dot I had to be home. I bathed myself like a concubine and went out dressed to kill in white gloves and a tartan kilt. There were lots of awkward silences.
Hobson’s Choice
ended at ten. David suggested we have something to eat but I had to get from Waterloo to Clapham in half an hour, so food was out. There followed a rush to get home, and though he kissed
me good night in our front garden he never asked me out again. But I had had an adventure: my first-ever kiss. I had felt nothing at all, but I became more and more a heroine and borrowed from the library Mills & Boon romances that I read by flashlight under the covers in the dead of night.

By now my parents had decided that the best thing to do with me was send me to school. I was meant to be studying at home for my Egyptian preparatory certificate at the end of the year, but at school I would use all my time constructively. I would also meet people my own age and make friends. I looked forward to it. I had always been happy at my school in Cairo and had no misgivings about this one. Besides, schools in books like
The Girls’ Annual
all seemed jolly good fun. Because of their liberal, enlightened ideology and that of their friends and advisers, my parents decided to put me in a comprehensive—in Putney.

So here I was. It was early ’
64
. The Beatles yelled “I wanna hold your hand” and shook their long shiny black hair and their hips; the mods and rockers zoomed through the streets in their fancy gear; and I stood in the snow at the No.
37
bus stop, on the outside looking in.

My first contact with school was with the dark cloakroom lined with rained-on navy blue coats, berets, and boots.

My second was with the long, windy corridor you had to walk through without your coat to get to the main body of the school.

My third was with thousands of uniformed girls in a huge hall singing about fishermen.

No one had warned me it was a girls’ school. I had always been in a mixed school at home and found boys easier to get along with than girls. Suddenly school didn’t seem like such a good idea; a vast, cold place with thousands of large girls in navy blue skirts.

“You can be excused from assembly on grounds of being Mohammedan,” whispered the teacher who had brought me there. No fear. I wanted nothing more than to merge, to blend in silently and belong to the crowd and I wasn’t about to declare myself a Mohammedan or even a Muslim and sit in the hallway looking bored and out of it with the Pakistani girls wearing their white trousers underneath their skirts. “It’s all right,” I said. “I don’t mind.”

My attempts at fading into the masses were unsuccessful. During the first break I was taken to Susan, the third-form leader.

“Where you from?” She was slight and pale with freckles and red hair.

“From Egypt.”

“That’s where they have those pharaohs and crocodiles and things,” she explained to the others. “D’you go to school on a camel?” This was accompanied by a snicker, but I answered seriously.

“No.”

“How d’you go to school, then?”

“Actually, my school is very near where I live. So I simply walk.” As I said this I was conscious of ambiguity (I even knew the word for it): I had not made it clear that even if
school were far away I still wouldn’t go on a camel. I started again: “Actually, we only see camels—”

“D’you live in a tent?”

“No, we live in a Belgian apartment block.”

“A what?”

“An apartment block owned by a Belgian corporation.”

“Why d’you talk like that?”

“Like what?”

“Like a teacher, you know.”

I did know. I knew they were speaking Cockney and I was speaking proper English. But surely I was the one who was right. My instincts, however, warned me not to tell them that.