The Pickup

Chapter 18

They had a bride for him. Of course. Since he was sixteen or seventeen years old there had been a girl marked out. Even before, perhaps; there was a little one all skinny elbows and knees who swung her plait among the children he played with and later she was recognizable, mournful-eyed to attract attention, in the group of girls past puberty. But that one would be out of the way, by now, he had been away too long — there had been refuges other than under the belly of a car, in other parts of the world where he was unwelcome. Girls are married off young in this place that the innocent, this foreign wife thrown against him by the swaying of the bus, called his home: home, you’re home! Her adventure wiped out, for her, the anguished weeks of effort to avoid being relegated to this return. But the lurch and retreat of her soft body against his brought a tenderness in irrelevant distraction, he liked plumpness in a woman, the flesh that takes in the sharp edges and splinters of a man’s fate. This Julie who was not for him had just the right amount of flesh for solace. There it was, a gentle weight every now and then, comforting against his side. He did not know what he was thinking; he did not want to think about whatever it was, lurching his mind this way and that, along with the efforts of the overloaded bus to stay on the road.

He had prepared them; or warned them. He was coming back and it was not as the successful son who had made a better life, the Western life of television version, bringing them a share of it in his pockets and in his person, but as a reject, with nothing but a wife — a foreign woman.

At least she had some money because she was one of those not for him. But how much that would compensate them, reach them, his family, was doubtful because she had the luxury, of those who have always had everything, to pride herself in not taking money from her rich father even if he were to offer it. The credit card and dollar traveller’s cheques in her sling bag representing a limited sum were the preparations made for this adventure just as she was accustomed to do for other trips abroad. Funds that only if she goes back before long will make it possible for her to buy for herself in foreign currency the things she had where she comes from and will find she can’t do without — her essentials are not the essentials of this place.

She’ll have enough to pay for her food and mine, while she’s here. That’s what I, their son, bring back to provide for their old age, for my sisters and their children’s future, and for my young brother who is hoping to follow a path— away — opened by his elder.

And again he does not know what he is thinking, no, feeling, currents of love and resentment crossing the inevitability of the family waiting to greet him.

She was exclaiming, asking questions — what is this, oh look at that — about the desert landscape they were being transported through, all new to her. But for him nothing is changed. It is all as it was; everything he had believed he could get away from.

As he knew they were coming close to the village where there was the image of the family waiting, he looked at her, up and down, in a way that made her turn, smiling enquiry.

Have you got something else to put on. In one of the bags.

Put on? What?

He touched at his breast-bone in the open neck of his shirt. Here. To cover up.

But it’s so hot. Don’t I look all right? She hitched at the shoulders of the indeterminate sort of garment she wore as a comfortable travelling outfit with her jeans, the movement of muscle lifting for a moment into view the soft cupping of her breasts.

A scarf or something.

I don’t see how I can get at things — in our stuff — among all these people, I’ll be tramping over them. Wait. Wait — I’ve got a safety pin somewhere—

She drew together, at the base of her elegant long neck which would some day become flesh-ringed, the openings of the garment and pinned them, with some difficulty, on the inner side of the material so that the pin would not be obvious. All right? All right?

With his eyes down, already preoccupied with some other thought, he signalled, a hand raised from the wrist, that whatever makeshift she had managed would have to serve. She was not at home, now, in the EL-AY Café; she had been determined to come here, to this place. It had its rules, as her father’s beautiful house and the guests who came there had theirs. She had made her choice; here it was. She was the one with the choices. The freedom of the world was hers.

There they were. In his mind. His mother for whom he had wanted to save the garage money, bring away from the yoke of family burdens in this dirty place, dirt of the politics of the rich, dirt of poverty. His father always with half-curled hanging hands of a man who lives only through the expectations he places on those he’s engendered (they must live the life he could not), the brothers left behind, the sisters where there would be one, as usual, swollen with child, the husband knowing his place is not in the foreground, the sister-in-law, wife of the brother away at the oil fields, whose reputation of being difficult he’s heard about; the children, babies when he left who must be gangling by now, the Uncle who no longer has a backyard workshop but a vehicle sales and repair business, the neighbours, witness to everything in each other’s lives, coming to see what this son has brought from the world, his baggage and his strange wife.

Ibrahim ibn Musa. His face drew up in a grimace of pain and anger at the nature of their existence, but his eyes, black as theirs, swam tears across this vision of his people.