The Pickup

Chapter 43

Are you mad? Are you mad? Saliva filled his mouth, spit flew from his lips. Her silence was a wall of obduracy he could not pummel his fists against. He flung himself from the space that held them, stumbling against the iron bedstead, the chair, the obstacle of the charged canvas bag as he made for the door: it was too flimsy to bang behind him, he stood faced with the communal room of his mother’s house, aware at his back that she — the girl who picked him up, the lover, the faithful follower, the wife — could see him there through the gap of the sagging board. The family room was deserted; the sofa from which his mother surveyed all was unoccupied by her form. He did not know what he was looking for, for whom; if he had come out to look for — what? The one certainty in a life — it is not known until it suddenly is not there. And what does that mean? That his mother was not there for him on her throne; not now, this moment, not when he is in Africa, England, Germany, in Chicago, Detroit, not ever. That she, everything she has been, lover, follower at his heels, something called wife; she is not there. Not in the cottage, the café where she lured him for coffee, not on the iron bedstead in the lean-to, not in America. Not ever.

He did not want to see them, any of the family, no-one; and he needed at once someone. Anyone upon whom to lay ‘I’m not going’. To see from outside the self the effect of this statement. But it is never ‘anyone’ who is being sought; unacknowledged, in the deviousness, the reluctance to admit what is lodged deep, it is someone. He passed the warm voices coming from the kitchen; no, no, not the women; he found himself approaching the angle of privacy in the passage: but she was at prayer, his mother, her head bowed to her mat. He was the small boy who had burst upon her with the tale of a lost ball when she was in the middle of her devotions and had been shamed by reprimand; he slowed and turned away without her being aware of him.

And it happened to be Maryam he came upon. As he stood, back in the room the whole family lived in, every chair and cushion moulded to their weight, worn places on the carpet designed by the concourse of their feet, Maryam came smiling greeting to him on her way to the front door, leaving to clean her employer’s house. What she saw in his face and stance made her halt where she was; immediately she thought of some accident or illness in the family that somehow had been kept from her. So many dear ones, Ahmad working with knives at the butcher’s yard — she lived by tender concern for all. — What is wrong? What happened. Julie?—

— Nothing.—

— But you are— She feels her intrusion.

— Just woke up, that’s all.—

But he had now been assaulted from within by something he had not said, unable to think beyond Are you mad in response to a single meaning of I’m not going. Not going to Chicago, to Detroit, to California.

He left Maryam looking aside from him in her tact, and burst back to the lean-to, dragging the door shut behind him.

She was standing at the window. She turned with the agony of composure drawn in tight lines between her brows and around her mouth.

So you’re going back. There. Where you come from. I thought it all the time. One day. The day will be that you go home where you always say is not your home. But you see I was right. You do not know what you say. That is how it is with you. So you don’t know what you do. To people. Good luck. Goodbye. Tell them all at the Café, this shack you live in, this dirty place, and tell them you’re too good, you’re very fine, you won’t what is it — sell out, they say— you don’t live with the capitalists in California, tell them, you’ll think of everything to tell. Goodbye. Go and tell. Goodbye.

He began transformed by anger, his face dyed with rising blood, his eyes narrowed to chips of black glitter, his body strangely gathered as if to spring, and ended — as if by a knife thrust within himself — in dejection.

She was afraid of the dejection, not the anger which she had, his violent breath — taken in with open mouth. She came to him, stumbling as he had done over their baggage and he tried to fend off her hands and arms as she clung to him. Don’t say. Don’t say.

No right, hers, to say now what was eloquently unsaid ever since — certainly the first nights in the doll’s house—I love you.

Listen to me. Where did you get the idea. I’m not going back there. I don’t belong there.

She has taken his head between her hard palms and forced his face before her, she feels his texture, the nap of a day’s growth of beard against her skin. She has the image of him, one of those habitual and dear, pressing his tongue against the inner side of his cheek to tauten the flesh as he delicately shaves round his moustache; the image stored.

You know that. Saying both at once: the unsaid (that stored image is love) and what has been said, I’m not going back.

What are you talking? What is it. You are not going to America. That’s what you say. You are not going to your home. That is what you say.

And now she has to tell him what she thought he must have understood. I’m staying here.