The Pickup

Chapter 39

Just say the word

There was no strain between them and that cannot be explained. Better not. For either to try to. Not everything between two people can be laid before The Table for resolution. That’s it. He was sorting out the contents of the canvas bag, there were things, time-fingered documents, to unburden himself of forever, now; legality is light to carry. He looked up to give her the smile as she opened the door … going out to his sister or somewhere about the house.

She walked as a somnambulist slowly down the street to its end, the desert. The bean rissole vendor must have seen her, the man with a donkey cart hawking melons must have passed her, the nasal harmonies of house radios and the electronic call of the mosque trailed round her familiarly unfamiliar figure. The dog was waiting. If there is not The Table, there is always someone. She sat on the clump of masonry that had once been a house and the dog stood on its splayed thin legs a little way off. The desert. Always. The true meaning of the common word tripping off every tongue to suit every meaning, comes from the desert. It is there before her and the dog. The desert is always; it doesn’t die it doesn’t change, it exists.

But a human being, she, she, cannot simply exist; she is a hurricane, every thought bending and crossing its coherence inside her, nothing will let her be, not for a moment. Every emotion, every thought, is invaded by another. Shame, guilt, fear, dismay, anger, blame, resentment at the whole world and what it is — and names come up, names — for the sight of him as he is going to be. Again. Living in a dirty hovel, a high-rise one or a shed behind a garage, what’s the difference, with Christ knows what others of the wrong colours, poor devils like himself (as he used to say), cleaning American shit — she has seen the slums of those cities, the empty lots of that ravaged new world, detritus of degradation — doing the jobs that real people, white Americans, won’t do themselves. At least in her home, that city of the backward continent, lying under a car’s guts was a better human grade. And then the assault comes at her: in your city? Your country? All real people by law now, but who still does the shit work, neither Nigel Ackroyd Summers nor his daughter Julie. And even the ‘better human grade’ was denied the grease-monkey there, he was kicked out of that better grade, wasn’t he, right out; of your country.

And again: America, America. The great and terrible USA. Australia, New Zealand — that would have been something better? Anywhere would be. America. The harshest country in the world. The highest buildings to reach up to in corporate positions (there he is, one of the poor devils, the beloved one, climbing a home-made rope ladder up forty storeys); and to jump off from head-first. That’s where the world is. He thinks I don’t know; he doesn’t know. He is standing before her, conjured up by her rage against all that threatens him, waits for him: so young, his slender hands hanging ready for anything, at his sides, his defiant elegance — that silk scarf round his neck with its strong tendons, the black hair down his breast and again round his testicles and proud penis she sees beneath his clothes whenever she looks at him, the black eyes that never reveal what’s going on behind that face she discovered comes from his mother, as the traits of an ancient Greek, Egyptian or Nubian image may be rediscovered in far-removed living descendants.

But there is no-one. Nothing imprinted on the desert. It is always; and what is thudding inside her like a road-worker’s stamp in a street is now.

She is at one with the woman, his mother, to whom she should have been able to run, at one with the woman with whom she could not exchange, did not have, the right words for what she now shared with her. Only she herself, who had discovered him disguised as a grease-monkey — not the father, not Maryam, not anyone at all in the family where people were so close to one another — only she and the mother could experience the apprehension of, the rejection of what every emigration, this emigration, was ready to subject the son to. But the mother was at prayer; his mother had prayer. She should not be interrupted. Even if one were to have had the words in the right language.

The dog went silently away. She sat on until the tumult slowly cleared within her, disentangled. The sands of the desert dissolve conflict; there is space, space for at least one clear thought to come: arrived at.

When she came back to the house the prayer rug had been folded away. Mother and son were together in their privacy on her sofa. He looked up and signalled — come. Where he sat, he put an arm round her waist; Where have you been? A walk. Fresh air is good if it is not too hot, the mother said to her, speaking slowly so that she would understand. They looked at one another for a moment; she thought his mother knew — if not where she had been — where experiences were taking her.

They retired to their lean-to together — that was the formal feeling of it before the following eyes of the mother. He had her by the hand, it was a gesture more for his mother than for her: as if to say, my foreign wife is with me, I am not alone.

She dumped herself on the bed that had complained so much under the weight of love-making.

I’ll write to Archie. My Uncle.