The Pickup Part 14

Others in the family could not rejoice. Maryam cried: Julie would miss her wedding. He embraced his father: his mother.

For forgiveness, for their blessing, once again. When he came home with his foreign wife his mother had allowed tears to mark the cast of face she had bequeathed to him, now she allowed no emotion to change the sculpture of years and the discipline of prayer. Or perhaps features and flesh could not express what she experienced in this departure; yet again.

Only she, and her son, could know what that was. He said to her under the voices of others, I will send for you. To come; to visit us. It was as well, he knew, that she seemed not to hear.

The visas in his hand.

Still a number of practical details to attend to. He must go back to the capital, present his pa.s.sport to his own government's authorities, fill in forms pertaining to his emigration.

He must return to collect the pa.s.sport when behind the files and the computer screens whatever the process was has been completed. The airline would not accept a booking until both pa.s.sports and visas were brought for scrutiny: and of course once this had been done, tickets could not be issued without money to pay for them.

They sat on the iron bed in the lean-to reviewing their resources. She had a few dollar traveller's cheques left but these would have to be kept aside to provide for immediate needs on arrival. His final hand-out pay from his Uncle, if they-managed to leave, as he was determined to, within not more than two weeks, must go to Maryam as a wedding gift; her brother could not do less.

Your father.

She stared in alarm.

Just say the word.

No. No, no.

Your father. He can pay for the tickets there and have them sent to you. That is the wav. We will pay back.

I can't.

Again.

He had to fix her with his mother's eyes while he kept control of himself, kept his voice soft and reasoning, held down, as he had had to do countless times in immigration offices, his frustration, and swallow the reflux of evidence that privilege can never be brought to understanding of reality, of what matters, the dignity of survival against principles.

How to make him understand: her voice sharpened.

You wouldn't ask your Uncle Yaqub, would you!

I asked. He said he would not help me to run away again.

He enjoyed himself.

She put her head on his shoulder and buried her face in his neck. And he had not told her of this, the latest refusal.

He had spared her.

Back where she came from she had been the one in charge, the one with status; here, in what was his home, his place, ineradicable birthmark that defined in him that place's ways of going about things, he had done*and only he could do*what was necessary. Alone with her in the lean-to now, he talked more than he had ever talked, taking her step by step out of her ignorance. The brother-in-law of a cousin had been in the United States successfully (that means legally) for six years. The family had lost touch with the man but through the months of asking everyone who might have heard where he was, in the days of sitting it out in coffee stalls, nights in the backroom bars in the streets where she had seen the bloated body of a dead sheep, he had been slowly gathering the information he was after. He had been able to get in touch with this cousin's brother-in-law. And this one, somehow, Al-Hamdu lillah (the usage of home came unnoticed to his tongue as The Table would exclaim 'Thank Christ' when some secular dispensation could be acknowledged only through a deity), had done everything he could, and more, to offer a start for them at the other end*America. America. He was janitor in a large apartment block*

she'd been to the States, she'd know how they are twenty, forty storeys, plenty of people living there*as janitor or care-taker or whatever he was called, he had a place to live, an apartment down at the bottom*

Yes, she had been there, to America, she had seen how some people lived in the apartment buildings of the affluent.

*In the bas.e.m.e.nt.

The cousin's brother-in-law knew a lot of people who had found work to get started with, and knew how from that base you could move up towards the kind of position you wanted, so long as you had education where you came from and could learn to speak the language well, learn the skills. Night college courses, schools of technology, advanced computer training, computer science*that's it! This man had all the information, addresses of inst.i.tutions, foundations, openings, opportunities. Chances.

America. To him, beside her. it was a single concept: but America, its vastnesses, so many Americas, from the casinos in California to Idaho (where she had skied) to New York (where she frequented museums and theatres), Char-lottesville (where one of her lovers came from, she remembered), to Seattle, to Florida ...

Where is he, in America? What city would we go to?

Chicago. He's in Chicago. And his brother and a friend like a brother are in Detroit, there's work there. For a start, that's all right. They say they could find something for me.

We might go to Detroit. You been there, you know it?

Her upper and lower lips are drawn, mum, into her closed mouth: her head moves as if she is searching.

He watches: ah yes. thinking back to another adventure.

She never was in Detroit but she knows, remembers, the other kind of distances in the vastness of America. From the houses of Sutton Place with their doormen attired as royal flunkeys (Daddy Summers had sent her to be received by his friends at an address) to the shuns of Chicago and New York where a worn old man or blowzy woman sits on the broken doorstep of a decaying building where emigrants 'of colour' find lodging, a bed-s.p.a.ce, along with the black American poor, born down-on-their-luck.

For the first couple of weeks Ismail says we can stay with them, they'll make room for us in their place, Chicago. They have this janitor's apartment*I told you. They must be very nice, wonderful people*don't know us but of course we are family.

And then.

He rose, away from her, and began to walk about the room: so confined that only a few paces took him back and forth. Her eyes followed him to read what the movement might mean. His unaccustomed expansiveness had dried up: she was back to reading him in other ways, as she had learnt to. Was he pacing the cage of refusals for the last time, ritually, just before it was about to swing open wide, on America: never easy to read him.

Depends what happens. I'll go to Detroit. That's it. I think it will be.

Have they found a place for us? To live, in Detroit.

Well, I'll sleep somewhere, wherever they do. They are without wives, not been able to send for them yet. They've only been there a year ... a bit more ...

He had come back, to stand before her, his legs touching her knees where she sat. I'll look for something for us right away. An apartment. Even some rooms.

You. 'You'. Was she understanding him. What d'you mean?

It will be good if you go to California. To your mother, just for some days.

She bent forward with the flesh over her cheek-bones lifted in anguished pressure against her eyes, her head tipped to him, trying to scrutinize what might be written for her on his smooth tarnished-gold forehead under the fall of black silk hair.

How did you think that.

He had come to know the power of his particular smile, she had made him conscious of it, so that what he had been unaware of, when the impulse to smile came, was now a tactic to be employed; this is one of the possibilities of power that come with what he had though he couldn't afford; what the privileged call love. The smile offered himself to her.

Julie. You are not always right about your parents. Of course they are not like you. Not in many ways. But in some ways they are there* He put the flat of his hand on her breast-bone, just above her b.r.e.a.s.t.s. It was touch, a gesture, very different from his seeking out her b.r.e.a.s.t.s in a caress; it brought him closer to her than any s.e.xual advance.

It is like with my parents.

It's nothing like with yours. Your mother. What can I say.

Then there came to her as a slap in the face, something that had been intended to be a pleasant surprise: How do you know my mother would want me there? Around-thirty-year-old daughter to prove to everyone that my mother is much older than her latest husband.

And then what there was to be read in him was deciphered: Have you been in touch with her? Have you?

On the phone, yes. The letters she sent, from her husband.

They were a great thing*help*to get my visa. We won't ever know how much. Until I took those letters, nothing happened. You know that.

California. Take on the casino style, for my mother and her husband. Her voice was backing, away, away. California.

The smile had opened a flow in him again. It is good sense. You don't understand what it is like. Come in a country like I do. I have done*how many times? Even legal. It's hard, nothing is nice, at the beginning, Julie. Without proper money to live. You are a stray dog, a rat finding its hole as the way to get in. I know you don't mind, you even seem to like to live ... rough ... it's like a camping trip to you. But this is different, it can be bad, bad. I can't take you into it. I don't want you to experience ... I don't mind for me*because this time I have the chance to move out of all that, finished, for ever, for ever, do what I want to do, live like I want to live.

That is the country for it. There's plenty of chances again now, there; you don't read the papers, but the unemployment is nothing. Lowest for many years. Work for everybody.

And the meantime. *She seems to force herself to speak.

What is that?

Before the chances to live the way you want to. What work will you do.

Same as immigrants, always. Anything. If you have some brains and education, it doesn't matter. I tell you, you don't know what happens there. It isn't your country, never get out of the garage! You don't know*one of the biggest, the most important financiers in the whole world today was an immigrant from Hungary, he started there in New York as a waiter in a club. He was white, a Jew, yes. But people where I come from make it, there, even if not so high as that, they're in computers, in communications, that's where the world is!

Women here*his home*do what their men tell them to. Is that what is happening in the makes.h.i.+ft walls of the lean-to, are there listeners with ears to the clapboard door hearing what is being said, is he who 'runs away from home' (Uncle Yaqub) yet taking an a.s.sumption from all he abandons? He and she won't go on talking about it: California. That may mean anything. That he has accepted her rejection; that she has accepted her a.s.sent.

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 doc.u.ments, 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 pa.s.sed 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 s.h.i.+t*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 a.s.sault comes at her: in your city? Your country? All real people by law now. but who still does the s.h.i.+t 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 t.e.s.t.i.c.l.es and proud p.e.n.i.s 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 s.p.a.ce, s.p.a.ce 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.

Dear Archie, You won't be too surprised to hear from me, and you'll know that it probably means I'm coming to you*for something. Because you've always been the one I could ask. This time it's money. Ibrahim has been granted a visa for America.

It was never a problem to get one for me, but it has taken months and endless ha.s.sle to arrange for him. He's been turned down by every other country he's tried. I still don't know how he's done it*better not ask! You'll understand that, after his experience in S.A.

So we have the green light for the LSA. But my dollars have run out. We couldn't have and wouldn't have expected his family to keep us. His earnings here (work he's had as a favour from a relative) and the small sums I've been able to add by having the nerve to teach English, are not enough to pay our airfares and give us a breather when we get there.

Could I ask, I am asking, could you possibly, somehow, let me have the equivalent of about 5,000 dollars? I know exchange control regulations may make this difficult, but any currency you could arrange to come to me from your contacts anywhere, would be fine. Ibrahim has a friend at a bank in the capital who will take care of the draft and get us the proper rate of exchange at this end. I am enclosing a sheet with all details of the bank for the transfer, however you can do it.

Dear Archie, I would hope to pay back some time. I wanted to write to you, anyway, not long ago, about the possibility of a pre-inheritance from the Trust you know was set up*but that's no doubt something complex that would take time, and we really have to have cash right now. So to be honest, I won't be able to meet the debt too soon because we don't know what our situation will be in the USA. But eventually, I'll write again for your advice on how I could perhaps draw on that Trust. I suppose in America I could most likely get the same kind of work I used to do. I could contact the princ.i.p.als there, of the people I worked for in Johannesburg, it's an international spider, legs down all over the place. If they make some sort of in-house request to employ me apparently a work permit won't be a problem. For the moment, Ibrahim's been granted one, I'm just the wife he's supposed to provide for while she sits and watches TV.

Archie, I don't know how to say how grateful we'll both be to you.

You know I can't ask my father.

With much love, as it's always been, Julie It came to her from herself with reproach, only now: she had a.s.sumed, in her outrage at the preposterous charge against Archie, that it had not been, could not be pursued; must have been dropped before evidence of his life-long professional reputation. Only now; so in the emotional confla-tion of what had happened, all at once, to him and (in her hand) the two airline tickets to take her and her lover out of the country, she had not written to him as she meant to do!

Hadn't written although in all her adventures round the world she was free to roam she carried in her address book, on Archie's insistence*just in case*his fax and telephone numbers at his consulting rooms and at home.

Ibrahim had talked to her about calling, but she was reluctant, and no point in pressing her now that she had come forth with the solution for them; he sensed it was better to let her achieve it in her own way; she seemed to shrink from some emotional complication in speaking to this uncle of hers. They went together to the capital to a friend-of-a-friend who was in the import business and sent the letter by fax.

The draft came with incredible prompt.i.tude*in their experience, anyway, so accustomed to protracted patience, sit-Nadine Gordimei- ting it out isolated in the village in the desert that knows no time while officialdom teased with promises from week to week.

Archie had sent six thousand dollars, not five. Following a day later there was a letter faxed through Ibrahim's friend-of-a-friend. My dear Julie, What a relief to hear from you and know that your life is working out. We were told you came to the house before you left, whether it was to say goodbye or if you had heard about that crazy unpleasant business with a patient*sorry to have missed you. It was difficult to prove that the woman was a so-called borderline personality (psy-chiatrist's diagnosis) but there'd been leaked information to my defence team that there was a history of such incidents in her past and they were able to obtain corroboration of this. I privately think, poor thing was concocting deliberate revenge on any man*happened conveniently to be me*in the resentment and anger she felt against some other man she couldn't get at to damage. You cannot believe how incredibly supportive my patients were, there were more wanting to give evidence on my professional conduct and ethics than the lawyers could use. There I was advising you to engage good lawyers for your problem, when I was about to need them for myself! Never thought I'd be the male victim of s.e.xual hara.s.sment*but there you are, there has to be a first time for some man. Tables turned. She was the one making unwelcome s.e.xual demands on her doctor, not t'other way about.

Test case. It went against her and I could have claimed damages but decided on the facts of the way medical colleagues as well as my patients indignantly rallied round and publicly vouched for me, not only in court but perhaps even more importantly in the press. I hadn't been damaged ... Sharon disagrees, she says the forgiveness and reconciliation we're busy with in our country doesn't extend (I think she means descend, eh) to the level of someone who could have destroyed The Pickup me. You know redhead Sharon, she wanted to go up to the woman in court and slap her face this side and that*those were the damages she thought of, just to start off with.

What's come out of the whole thing is that many of my fellow doctors have become afraid of their patients ... I continue to trust mine, how else be their doctor?

It's over, we're intact, we're well. Please keep me posted wherever you are/go. Let me have an address. After I was told you'd come to the house that time, I asked Nigel for yours, he said he was not in touch with you, did not have it.

I'm sorry it's like that. Time will mend. Good luck in the L.S.

to you both. You're a brave girl. Love, Archie.

Along with his generosity there was this, to her, another kind she would always need to know existed; Archie was as he had always been, unharmed, not making judgments others did, his own man; a surety to be found in no-one else, nowhere else.

She had that uncle, this was the response from the family she cut herself off from! Under his dark gold skin there was an elation of red that added to the deep brilliance of those eyes.

Now there is something good will be left over from the air tickets, I will have what you need to put down in deposit when I find a place for us, I can buy things to make it ready*for when you come.

But with this money we'll be able to get somewhere to live right away. Even some cheap hotel, Chicago, Detroit, whatever.

They were thrust back to what they had not talked about since the first time he had spoken of it.