Ibrahim & Reenie (16 page)

14

‘¿A cuántos kilómetros está Madrid?
How many kilometres to Madrid.'

‘A cuantos… a cuantos kilometros esta Ma
drid
.'

‘¿Dónde están las tiendas?
Where are the shops.'

‘Donde esta… es
tan
las… las tiendas.'

‘Oiga, por favor. ¿Para ir al aeropuerto?
Excuse me. How do I get to the airport.'

‘Oy… oiga por favor. Fa
bor
. Para… ir al…'

‘Quiero una habitción con dos camas para tres–'

Natalie hit the stop button with her thumb and shook her head. That was enough for one night. She was tired, her concentration failing. She could focus on the road, or she could listen to
Spanish Made Simple
, the CD whose tutor spoke with too sensual and soporific a voice for this time of night.

‘¿Dónde están las tiendas?'
She said, to no one but herself, and with a greater degree of confidence than she had when answering the sultry, seductive voice of her faceless tutor.

And what did this woman actually look like? She pictured an olive-skinned beauty with long black hair; raggedy skirt reaching her ankles and a crumpled white blouse tied around her breasts, exposing a smooth brown stomach. The kind of curvy, buxom woman who'd launch into an impromptu flamenco at the single clack of a castanet. Probably looked nothing like that. She might be plain, or even ugly. Perhaps she was pale-skinned, with hair the colour of damp straw; all bony, boyish shoulders and no tits.

The CD was a gift of several Christmases ago, and it had languished at the bottom of a box, half-forgotten, for years. Since then the box had moved around – from cupboard to dark corner beneath bed and back to cupboard, a different cupboard, again – but the CD hadn't left its case until now.

Now it was a part of the new Natalie, one of many ingredients that would go into making a new, improved Natalie; one ready to take on the world, meet new challenges, try new things; such as learning a foreign language.

Was that a cliché, the kind of thing people in her situation did? Reinvent themselves? She reminded herself this wasn't reinvention, it was self-improvement. There was a difference.

And so she took the CD from its case, making sure it was the only CD in her car, and began listening to it during every journey; to and from work, to and from the shops. She'd even tried listening to it during the night, in the belief that some Spanish might seep into her brain via a kind of nocturnal osmosis, but found it simply kept her awake.

A friend told her there were classes, night classes, at a primary school near where she lived. ‘They do everything,' this friend said. ‘Spanish, French, German…' But Natalie wouldn't go. She pictured herself sitting in a classroom, on the tiny, plastic classroom furniture, and embarrassing herself before a room of adults, people her age, all of them watching her, waiting for her to slip up. Here, in the relative privacy of her car, where other motorists might think she was talking to someone on her phone, hands free, she could repeat each line with a wavering, irregular confidence; invest her all in mimicking the tutor's Iberian purr. In a room full of her peers she knew she would fail, that the words would fall out in that Gloucestershire drawl she'd spent a lifetime trying to mask, that she would sound like yet another sunburned, monoglot Brit on holiday.

‘Dondee esta la player, pour favor?'

This shouldn't have been so difficult. Her grandfather was Italian. Picking up another language, just as he had done, should have been second nature, a genetic memory. Why couldn't she just stop being so bloody English?

It had been an ambition of hers for some time, learning a foreign language. She dreamed of walking into a bar or restaurant in Barcelona or Madrid, placing her order in flawless Castilian. Then, all the shame of her upbringing – so very, tediously British and introspective – would evaporate. Many of her colleagues, fellow nurses, were from such interesting places. West Indians, Africans, Filipinos. She was grateful, sometimes, for that quarter of her that wasn't Anglo-Saxon.

And what a story that was. Captured in Sicily. Brought to Britain as a POW. Met a local girl and married. Settled in England. Lived happily – well, pretty much happily – ever after. What did Natalie have to compete with that? Four (disastrous) years in London. A few foreign holidays. She'd once had four numbers on the lottery. Once saw George Clooney standing outside Fortnum & Mason's. At least, she thought it was him. It looked like him.

Those colleagues of hers, they could tell some stories. The kind of things you can't quite imagine, things you've only ever seen on the news. And when they talked about Gloucester it was with a strange fondness that was endearing and sad at the same time. Natalie had spent much of her life thinking it a dead-end town – pretty enough, but provincial, twee and insular; in a way, a microcosm of the whole country.

To hear people who'd survived civil wars and massacres describe Gloucester – grey and dowdy old Gloucester – you'd think it was paradise. The kind of place you'd run to, rather than from. It made her realise just how spoiled she was. Not just spoiled as in affluent, but spoiled for choice, spoiled for offers, for promises. Spoon fed stories of success practically from birth, all those images of celebrity, wealth and glamour. Against all that – all those rooftop bars, indoor swimming pools, gala openings and parties that made the society pages in the paper – Gloucester never quite cut it. If you hadn't come to it from a place of horror, Gloucester was average, nondescript. Famous for nothing but cheese and serial killers.

It hadn't seemed so bad when she was with someone. Then it was easy to look at the city with charitable indifference; neither its biggest fan nor its greatest critic. Now she found herself noticing everything, every flaw, every shortcoming. Time had slowed right down. Days became long. Being with someone, sharing her life with someone, burned time so effectively. Afternoons spent doing little passed quickly. A whole weekend could be structured around the smallest thing, a sunny afternoon's daytrip. Now she was alone, a weekend away from the hospital had become a vast desert of time, bleak as a salt plain beneath an unforgiving sun; something approached with dread and apprehension.

Within the first month of joining her local library she'd read eight novels, culled from a predictable enough list of ‘Books to Read Before You Die'. She found
Wuthering Heights
enchanting,
Brideshead Revisited
fun if a little bogged down by all that Catholicism, and she hated Hemingway's
The Sun Also Rises
with a passion. She took up knitting, producing a misshapen scarf and matching, hideous cardigan that no one would ever see, let alone wear. She then took
Spanish Made Simple
from its case.

She'd given up knitting, those first abortive attempts enough to put her off for life, and her reading had slowed – she'd been wrestling with
Midnight's Children
for over a month and was barely a hundred pages in – but she was determined to persevere with Spanish. Just maybe not tonight.

It was as she neared the dual carriageway, taking a left at the crossroads and heading down beneath the gleaming edifice of a chain hotel, that she noticed a dark shape at the roadside. It looked at first like a bundle of rags, or something stolen and abandoned on the cycle path, but then she saw the outline of limbs, a head, and the suggestion of movement, perhaps breathing.

Could be a drunk, another drunk, too paralytic to make it home after a day spent sitting on a bench drinking cheap cider. The kind of person beyond help. She saw enough of them in the hospital, and there and then it was her duty to help, however impatient she might get, however frustrating it was to help someone who just won't help themselves, but here? Out here on the road, at night? What obligation was there? Who would know if she carried on driving?

She sighed, pulling in to the narrow hard shoulder and flicking on her hazard lights. Probably a drunk. Another drunk. Dark stain around his crotch. The musty stink of booze, old sweat and sick. He'd get surly the minute she woke him. They always did.

She hesitated, clenching and unclenching her fingers around the steering wheel. The embankment, and the dark, all-too-human shape at its crest, were lit up by the orange pulse of the hazard lights. Maybe not a drunk. Old man walking his dog, had a heart attack. Dog ran off, yapping, into the bushes. Or someone who'd been mugged.

Natalie stepped out of her car, and with uncertain, clumsy steps made her way up the embankment and towards the body on the path.

15

Reenie was looking at the stars.

Earlier that evening she had eaten a light supper. Her supplies of food and water were running low. She had hoped to pass a supermarket or any kind of shop where she could buy groceries, but there were few villages in this part of the country, and she'd made little progress since leaving the farmhouse that morning, walking only a few miles before tiredness hit her and she was forced to set up camp again. The next large town, and most likely the next place where she would find shops, was Chippenham, but it would take another two or three days for her to reach it.

Along the way she had picked blackberries from the roadside, collecting them in a plastic carrier bag, and as soon as she stopped walking she ate a few, without rinsing off whatever muck might be on them. What little water she had left was for drinking only. Solomon, the lucky sod, had a full supply of food, enough to get him to London and back several times over.

That night was colder than any other on her journey so far. The summer was coming to an end – the evenings getting darker, the night air laced with the scent of dry leaves and burning wood – and what struck her, out here in the country, was the darkness of the night sky. She had lived in cities her whole life, and it was decades since she'd last seen a night untainted by the glow of streetlights. The darkness above her wasn't black, but rather a deep, velvety shade of blue. The stars she saw weren't distant pinpoints but a spray, and she counted dozens of shooting stars. She saw the moon – perhaps a third of it erased by shadow – and if she squinted and strained her eyes enough was sure she made out the craters on its surface.

The sky had been this dark when she was a girl. She remembered rushing, with Mrs Ostroff, to a neighbour's Anderson shelter, and, while they waited for the all-clear, Mrs Ostroff reading her fairy tales and nursery rhymes;
Babele-ber
and that song by Bialik, ‘Under the Little Green Trees':

‘Unter di grininke beymelekh

Shpiln zikh Moyshelekh, Shloymelekh,

Tsites, kapotkelekh, shtreymelekh,

Yidelekh, frish fun di eyelekh.

Fartrakhtn zikh tif un farkukn zikh

Oyf nekhtige teg un oyf feygelekh,

Oy, mir zol zany, yidishe kinderlekh,

Far ayere koshere eygelekh!'

She recalled, with greater clarity, the final attacks on London, shortly before the war's end, remembering not images or precise moments but noise; when rockets began falling from the sky.

The first of them came with two warnings. First the drone, like a swarm of angry bees, but getting deeper in pitch, singing out with a low, throbbing hum before cutting off, and that sudden silence, the absence of noise, was their second warning. The rocket was now tumbling to earth, and it took eleven seconds to fall. She knew this because Mr Ostroff was an air-raid warden, and had timed their descent with his watch. Eleven seconds of absolute silence between the last monstrous yawn and the heavy thump of the explosion. A thump if the impact was far away, almost like the sound of somebody beating a rug. If it was closer, not one noise but many. Thunder. Breaking glass. Masonry being pulverised. The hiss of sand and dirt raining back to earth. Screaming.

Then came the second wave of rockets, and with these there was no warning. They travelled at such speed you'd only hear their approach after they struck, and it seemed in that moment as if the sky was the enemy; a vengeful force of nature meting out its punishment on the city below. By the time one of those rockets slammed into Green Street, just five minutes' walk from the Ostroff's home, Reenie had reached an age when she could no longer be distracted by fairy tales and nursery rhymes. By now the idea of death was real. She had been surrounded by it too long for it to remain distant and abstract.

She had been playing in the street when a telegram arrived for number fifty-eight, and she saw Mrs Ingram break down, right there on her doorstep, crying for all the world to see. And the boys in school, the O'Leary brothers, who simply weren't there one morning, after the attack on Plaistow, and no one ever mentioned them again.

And when the rocket hit Green Street its explosion rattled every window in their house and shook ornaments from shelves, and Reenie and Mrs Ostroff hid beneath the dining table and watched as a world that had always felt safe, even when the rest of the world was burning, quaked as if it were trembling.

Reenie later learned how these bombs came not from planes, or even cannons, but from space, and that knowledge filled her with a tingling sense of awe. If the Germans had weapons like
this
, weapons that fell almost silently from space, what hope was there of winning the war?