African Quilt : 24 Modern African Stories (9781101617441) Read online

  On the weekends, she made a list of the money she had spent: the sterling enough to keep a family alive back home. Yet she might fail her exams after all that expense, go back home empty-handed without a degree. Guilt was cold like the fog of this city. It came from everywhere. One day she forgot to pray in the morning. She reached the bus stop and then realized that she hadn’t prayed. That morning folded out like the nightmare she sometimes had, of discovering that she had gone out into the street without any clothes.

  In the evening, when she was staring at multidimensional scaling, the telephone in the hall rang. She ran to answer it. Fareed’s cheerful greeting: “Here, Shadia, Mama and the girls want to speak to you.” His mother’s endearments: “They say it’s so cold where you are . . .”

  Shadia was engaged to Fareed. Fareed was a package that came with the 7UP franchise, the paper factory, the big house he was building, his sisters and widowed mother. Shadia was going to marry them all. She was going to be happy and make her mother happy. Her mother deserved happiness after the misfortunes of her life. A husband who left her for another woman. Six girls to bring up. People felt sorry for her mother. Six girls to educate and marry off. But your Lord is generous: each of the girls, it was often said, was lovelier than the other. They were clever too: dentist, pharmacist, architect, and all with the best of manners.

  “We are just back from looking at the house.” Fareed’s turn again to talk. “It’s coming along fine, they’re putting the tiles down . . .”

  “That’s good, that’s good,” her voice strange from not talking to anyone all day.

  “The bathroom suites. If I get them all the same colour for us and the girls and Mama, I could get them on a discount. Blue, the girls are in favour of blue,” his voice echoed from one continent to another. Miles and miles.

  “Blue is nice. Yes, better get them all the same colour.”

  He was building a block of flats, not a house. The ground-floor flat for his mother and the girls until they married, the first floor for him and Shadia. When Shadia had first got engaged to Fareed, he was the son of a rich man. A man with the franchise for 7UP and the paper factory which had a monopoly in ladies’ sanitary towels. Fareed’s sisters never had to buy sanitary towels; their house was abundant with boxes of Pinky, fresh from the production line. But Fareed’s father died of an unexpected heart attack soon after the engagement party (five hundred guests at the Hilton). Now Shadia was going to marry the rich man himself. “You are a lucky, lucky girl,” her mother had said, and Shadia had rubbed soap in her eyes so that Fareed would think she was weeping about his father’s death.

  There was no time to talk about her course on the telephone, no space for her anxieties. Fareed was not interested in her studies. He had said, “I am very broad-minded to allow you to study abroad. Other men would not have put up with this . . .” It was her mother who was keen for her to study, to get a postgraduate degree from Britain and then have a career after she got married. “This way,” her mother had said, “you will have your in-laws’ respect. They have money but you will have a degree. Don’t end up like me. I left my education to marry your father and now . . .” Many conversations ended with her mother bitter; with her mother saying, “No one suffers like I suffer,” and making Shadia droop. At night her mother sobbed in her sleep, noises that woke Shadia and her sisters.

  No, on the long-distance line, there was no space for her worries. Talk about the Scottish weather. Picture Fareed, generously perspiring, his stomach straining the buttons of his shirt. Often she had nagged him to lose weight, without success. His mother’s food was too good; his sisters were both overweight. On the long-distance line, listen to the Khartoum gossip as if listening to a radio play.

  * * *

  On Monday, without saying anything, Bryan slid two folders across the table towards her as if he did not want to come near her, did not want to talk to her. She wanted to say, “I won’t take them till you hand them to me politely.” But smarting, she said, “Thank you very much.” She had manners. She was well brought up.

  Back in her room, at her desk, the clearest handwriting she had ever seen. Sparse on the pages, clean. Clear and rounded like a child’s, the tidiest notes. She cried over them, wept for no reason. She cried until she wetted one of the pages, smudged the ink, blurred one of the formulas. She dabbed at it with a tissue but the paper flaked and became transparent. Should she apologize about the stain, say that she was drinking water, say that it was rain? Or should she just keep quiet, hope he wouldn’t notice? She chided herself for all that concern. He wasn’t concerned about wearing the same shirt every day. She was giving him too much attention thinking about him. He was just an immature and closed-in sort of character. He probably came from a small town, his parents were probably poor, low-class. In Khartoum, she never mixed with people like that. Her mother liked her to be friends with people who were higher up. How else were she and her sisters going to marry well? She must study the notes and stop crying over this boy’s handwriting. His handwriting had nothing to do with her, nothing to do with her at all.

  Understanding after not understanding is fog lifting, pictures swinging into focus, missing pieces slotting into place. It is fragments gelling, a sound vivid whole, a basis to build on. His notes were the knowledge she needed, the gap filled. She struggled through them, not skimming them with the carelessness of incomprehension, but taking them in, making them a part of her, until in the depth of concentration, in the late hours of the nights, she lost awareness of time and place, and at last, when she slept she became epsilon and gamma, and she became a variable, making her way through discrete space from state “i” to state “j.”

  * * *

  It felt natural to talk to him. As if now that she had spent hours and days with his handwriting, she knew him in some way. She forgot the offence she had taken when he had slid his folders across the table to her, all the times he didn’t say hello.

  In the computer room, at the end of the Statistical Packages class, she went to him and said: “Thanks for the notes. They are really good. I think I might not fail, after all. I might have a chance to pass.” Her eyes were dry from all the nights she had stayed up. She was tired and grateful.

  He nodded and they spoke a little about the Poisson distribution, queuing theory. Everything was clear in his mind; his brain was a clear pane of glass where all the concepts were written out boldly and neatly. Today, he seemed more at ease talking to her, though he still shifted about from foot to foot, avoiding her eyes.

  He said, “Do ye want to go for a coffee?”

  She looked up at him. He was tall and she was not used to speaking to people with blue eyes. Then she made a mistake. Perhaps because she had been up late last night, she made that mistake. Perhaps there were other reasons for that mistake. The mistake of shifting from one level to another.

  She said, “I don’t like your earring.”

  The expression in his eyes, a focusing, no longer shifting away. He lifted his hand to his ear and tugged the earring off. His earlobe without the silver looked red and scarred.

  She giggled because she was afraid, because he wasn’t smiling, wasn’t saying anything. She covered her mouth with her hand, then wiped her forehead and eyes. A mistake had been made and it was too late to go back. She plunged ahead, careless now, reckless. “I don’t like your long hair.”

  He turned and walked away.

  * * *

  The next morning, Multivariate Analysis, and she came in late, dishevelled from running and the rain. The professor, whose name she wasn’t sure of (there were three who were Mc-something), smiled, unperturbed. All the lecturers were relaxed and urbane, in tweed jackets and polished shoes. Sometimes she wondered how the incoherent Bryan, if he did pursue an academic career, was going to transform himself into a professor like that. But it was none of her business.

  Like most of the other
students, she sat in the same seat in every class. Bryan sat a row ahead which was why she could always look at his hair. But he had cut it, there was no ponytail today! Just his neck and the collar of the grey and white striped shirt.

  Notes to take down. In discriminant analysis, a linear combination of variables serves as the basis for assigning cases to groups.

  She was made up of layers. Somewhere inside, deep inside, under the crust of vanity, in the untampered-with essence, she would glow and be in awe, and be humble and think, this is just for me, he cut his hair for me. But there were other layers, bolder, more to the surface. Giggling. Wanting to catch hold of a friend. Guess what? You wouldn’t believe what this idiot did!

  Find a weighted average of variables . . . The weights are estimated so that they result in the best separation between the groups.

  After the class he came over and said very seriously, without a smile, “Ah’ve cut my hair.”

  A part of her hollered with laughter, sang: “You stupid boy, you stupid boy, I can see that, can’t I?”

  She said, “It looks nice.” She said the wrong thing and her face felt hot and she made herself look away so that she would not know his reaction. It was true though, he did look nice; he looked decent now.

  * * *

  She should have said to Bryan, when they first held their coffee mugs in their hands and were searching for an empty table, “Let’s sit with Asafa and the others.” Mistakes follow mistakes. Across the cafeteria, the Turkish girl saw them together and raised her perfect eyebrows. Badr met Shadia’s eyes and quickly looked away. Shadia looked at Bryan and he was different, different without the earring and the ponytail, transformed in some way. If he would put lemon juice on his spots . . . but it was none of her business. Maybe the boys who smashed Badr’s windows looked like Bryan, but with fiercer eyes, no glasses. She must push him away from her. She must make him dislike her.

  He asked her where she came from and when she replied, he said, “Where’s that?”

  “Africa,” with sarcasm. “Do you know where that is?”

  His nose and cheeks under the rims of his glasses went red. Good, she thought, good. He will leave me now in peace.

  He said, “Ah know Sudan is in Africa, I meant where exactly in Africa.”

  “Northeast, south of Egypt. Where are you from?”

  “Peterhead. It’s north of here. By the sea.”

  It was hard to believe that there was anything north of Aberdeen. It seemed to her that they were on the northernmost corner of the world. She knew better now than to imagine suntanning and sandy beaches for his “by the sea.” More likely dismal skies, pale, bad-tempered people shivering on the rocky shore.

  “Your father works in Peterhead?”

  “Aye, he does.”

  She had grown up listening to the proper English of the BBC World Service only to come to Britain and find people saying “yes” like it was said back home in Arabic: “aye.”

  “What does he do, your father?”

  He looked surprised, his blue eyes surprised. “Ma dad’s a joiner.”

  Fareed hired people like that to work on the house. Ordered them about.

  “And your mother?” she asked.

  He paused a little, stirred sugar in his coffee with a plastic spoon. “She’s a lollipop lady.”

  Shadia smirked into her coffee, took a sip.

  “My father,” she said proudly, “is a doctor, a specialist.” Her father was a gynaecologist. The woman who was now his wife had been one of his patients. Before that, Shadia’s friends had teased her about her father’s job, crude jokes that made her laugh. It was all so sordid now.

  “And my mother,” she blew the truth up out of proportion, “comes from a very big family. A ruling family. If you British hadn’t colonized us, my mother would have been a princess now.”

  “Ye walk like a princess,” he said.

  What a gullible, silly boy! She wiped her forehead with her hand and said, “You mean I am conceited and proud?”

  “No, Ah didnae mean that, no . . .” The packet of sugar he was tearing open tipped from his hand, its contents scattered over the table. “Ah shit . . . sorry . . .” He tried to scoop up the sugar and knocked against his coffee mug, spilling a little on the table.

  She took out a tissue from her bag, reached over and mopped up the stain. It was easy to pick up all the bits of sugar with the damp tissue.

  “Thanks,” he mumbled and they were silent. The cafeteria was busy: full of the humming, buzzing sound of people talking to each other, trays and dishes. In Khartoum, she avoided being alone with Fareed. She preferred it when they were with others: their families, their many mutual friends. If they were ever alone, she imagined that her mother or her sister was with them, could hear them, and she spoke to Fareed with that audience in mind.

  Bryan was speaking to her, saying something about rowing on the River Dee. He went rowing on the weekends, he belonged to a rowing club.

  To make herself pleasing to people was a skill Shadia was trained in. It was not difficult to please people. Agree with them, never dominate the conversation, be economical with the truth. Now, here was someone to whom all these rules needn’t apply.

  She said to him, “The Nile is superior to the Dee. I saw your Dee, it is nothing, it is like a stream. There are two Niles, the Blue and the White, named after their colours. They come from the south, from two different places. They travel for miles over countries with different names, never knowing they will meet. I think they get tired of running alone, it is such a long way to the sea. They want to reach the sea so that they can rest, stop running. There is a bridge in Khartoum, and under this bridge the two Niles meet. If you stand on the bridge and look down you can see the two waters mixing together.”

  “Do ye get homesick?” he asked. She felt tired now, all this talk of the river running to rest in the sea. She had never talked like this before. Luxury words, and this question he asked.

  “Things I should miss I don’t miss. Instead I miss things I didn’t think I would miss. The azan, the Muslim call to prayer from the mosque. I don’t know if you know about it. I miss that. At dawn it used to wake me up. I would hear ‘prayer is better than sleep’ and just go back to sleep. I never got up to pray.” She looked down at her hands on the table. There was no relief in confessions, only his smile, young, and something like wonder in his eyes.

  “We did Islam in school,” he said. “Ah went on a trip to Mecca.” He opened out his palms on the table.

  “What!”

  “In a book.”

  “Oh.”

  The coffee was finished. They should go now. She should go to the library before the next lecture and photocopy previous exam papers. Asafa, full of helpful advice, had shown her where to find them.

  “What is your religion?” she asked.

  “Dunno, nothing I suppose.”

  “That’s terrible! That’s really terrible!” Her voice was too loud, concerned.

  His face went red again and he tapped his spoon against the empty mug.

  Waive all politeness, make him dislike her. Badr had said, even before his windows got smashed, that here in the West they hate Islam. Standing up to go, she said flippantly, “Why don’t you become a Muslim then?”

  He shrugged. “Ah wouldnae mind travelling to Mecca, I was keen on that book.”

  Her eyes filled with tears. They blurred his face when he stood up. In the West they hate Islam and he . . . She said, “Thanks for the coffee,” and walked away, but he followed her.

  “Shadiya, Shadiya,” he pronounced her name wrongly, three syllables instead of two, “there’s this museum about Africa. I’ve never been before. If you’d care to go, tomorrow . . .”

  * * *

  No sleep for the guilty, no rest, she should have
said no, I can’t go, no I have too much catching up to do. No sleep for the guilty, the memories come from another continent. Her father’s new wife, happier than her mother, fewer worries. When Shadia visits she offers fruit in a glass bowl, icy oranges and guavas, soothing in the heat. Shadia’s father hadn’t wanted a divorce, hadn’t wanted to leave them; he wanted two wives, not a divorce. But her mother had too much pride, she came from fading money, a family with a “name.” Of the new wife her mother says, bitch, whore, the dregs of the earth, a nobody.

  Tomorrow she need not show up at the museum, even though she said that she would. She should have told Bryan she was engaged to be married, mentioned it casually. What did he expect from her? Europeans had different rules, reduced, abrupt customs. If Fareed knew about this . . . her secret thoughts like snakes . . . Perhaps she was like her father, a traitor. Her mother said that her father was devious. Sometimes Shadia was devious. With Fareed in the car, she would deliberately say, “I need to stop at the grocer, we need things at home.” At the grocer he would pay for all her shopping and she would say, “No, you shouldn’t do that, no, you are too generous, you are embarrassing me.” With the money she saved, she would buy a blouse for her mother, nail varnish for her mother, a magazine, imported apples.

  * * *

  It was strange to leave her desk, lock her room and go out on a Saturday. In the hall the telephone rang. It was Fareed. If he knew where she was going now . . . Guilt was like a hard-boiled egg stuck in her chest. A large cold egg.

  “Shadia, I want you to buy some of the fixtures for the bathrooms. Taps and towel hangers. I’m going to send you a list of what I want exactly and the money . . .”

  “I can’t, I can’t.”

  “What do you mean you can’t? If you go into any large department store . . .”

  “I can’t, I wouldn’t know where to put these things, how to send them.”

  There was a rustle on the line and she could hear someone whispering, Fareed distracted a little. He would be at work this time in the day, glass bottles filling up with clear effervescent, the words 7UP written in English and Arabic, white against the dark green.