The Pickup

Chapter 33

The Uncle spoke measuredly and clearly — to her ears — in contrast with the quick speech of the young people in the family whom she found difficult to follow, probably because they spoke colloquially while she was studying the language out of primers, and those who had volunteered in the friendly exchange of languages over tea also thought it respectful of theirs to teach her only its conventional formulations.

Afterwards, Ibrahim gave her full account of what the Uncle had said. So she was able to piece together the words and phrases she had understood in the Uncle’s own voice and to correct for herself, with that echo, the paraphrase and lack of emphasis in what she was being told in the medium of Ibrahim’s English. She needed an explanation to the reference to sorrow, a tragedy, at the end, that had produced such a strong effect on everyone, she had felt it herself?

Didn’t she remember that the only son was dead? Ah yes — the heir apparent — she did, how was it?

A terrible thing. He burned in his car, an accident. And no-one says it, but it was when he had taken alcohol. Drunk.

So she understood; the reference was used to wind up with something to shame the one who was refusing bestowal of a privilege to which he wasn’t really entitled anyway. Like the other women of the house, she hadn’t known, hadn’t expected to be told every time her man was out at night, where he went and what he did; this attitude came naturally to her, from the mores of The Table at the EL-AY Café—everyone free to come and go, particularly in the code of intimacy, no-one should police another; even in the ultimate intimacy called love, monitoring was left behind with the rejected values of The Suburbs. The reference — his own — to America, which she had understood as he pronounced it evenly in his mother tongue, had brought an immediate urge of protectiveness towards him, she had wanted to get up, go to him, shield him from the pathetic humiliation he was exposing himself to before the eyes of the family, when everyone knew, everyone, how since his return, deported from one country, he was always making applications for immigration visas to other countries and coming back from the queues in the capital with a piece of paper; refusal. He was going to Canada, Australia, New Zealand. The neat file in the canvas bag was full of such documents.

To save him embarrassment, she did not refer to the pretext he had given for his refusal; she knew the real reasons. The grease-stiff overalls and the stink of fuel from which he had emerged in the garage round the block near the EL-AY Café. And perhaps he felt it was — what? — distasteful, bad luck, somehow not what should be, to fill the empty space of someone’s sorrow, occupy the place of a young man he must have known, a family sibling, as a child. He could not tell them that; he brought up a pretext nobody could believe in.

It was not the end of it, for him, of course. His father had the right and obligation of long homilies addressed to the son, the family kept out, the house subdued to the death-watch-beetle tlok-tlok of the ornamental clock (also a gift from the Uncle). His mother, rising from prayers that he must feel were for him, summoned him aside and their mingled voices were so low it sounded merely as if prayer were continuing. But if the supreme authority of the Uncle could have no influence on their son, no-one, nothing else would.

What passed between mother and son must have been an apocalypse for both, a kind of rebirth tearing her body, a fearful thrusting re-emergence for him. His wife who had never known, never would know, such emotions — Nigel Ackroyd Summers, and the mother someone imagined in California — felt the force of his with humility and offered all she had in recognition: love-making. In her body he was himself, he belonged to nobody, she was the country to which he had emigrated.

In some accommodation reached with the Uncle by family council, the prodigal nephew was continuing to help out at the vehicle repair workshop as if nothing had happened, to have use of the car, and to go off to the capital during working hours on affairs of his own. He also still pursued family matters since it was felt his education made him the one best qualified to, and one day actually was able to bring news of the brother, Khadija’s husband, Zayd — at the agency there was a letter, a bank draft. Whatever explanations for the long silence were, the withdrawn Khadija did not say whether or not she accepted them. Khadija used a strong perfume, it was the assertion of her presence in the house, constant pungent reminder that she was deserted by a son of this family; when Ibrahim’s wife was impulsively bold enough to approach her and say how glad she was that this sister-in-law’s husband was safe and well, the woman gave a proud wry smile — and then, suddenly, she who never touched anyone but her own children, embraced Julie. Perhaps it was because Julie spent much time with one of the children. Leila had fallen in love with her, as small girls will with some adult who offers activities different from those of a parent; as Julie had fallen in love with Gulliver-Archie. Her kind of Uncle.