Ibrahim & Reenie Page 2

  ‘Well, there’s Solomon.’

  ‘Solomon?’

  ‘My bird.’

  ‘Why would I want to steal a budgie?’

  ‘He’s not a budgie. He’s a cockatiel.’

  ‘Why would I want to steal a cockatiel?’

  She considered this for a moment, staring down at the pale oval of cream in her lukewarm tea. ‘Fair enough,’ she said, at last. ‘You can come, I suppose. But don’t think you’re sleeping in my tent. I do have some standards, you know.’

  2

  Irene Glickman – Reenie to the friends and family she once had – remembered the first time she felt others seeing her not as a woman, but as an Old Woman. It wasn’t her first grey hair, her first wrinkle, her first liver spot. It wasn’t The Change, or the day her bus pass appeared on the doormat. It was a Thursday, her shopping day, and as she stepped off the bus a young man helped her with her bags. He was only being kind, but there was something in his tone and his smile, something vaguely patronising, or self-satisfied, that said he was proud of himself for Helping The Old Woman. It was his Good Deed For The Day. She thanked him, and said something about there not being many gentlemen around nowadays, but as the bus pulled away she felt a kind of sadness as her age, and the reality of it, dawned on her in a way it never had before. It was one thing to notice her body ageing, quite another for others to notice and act on it.

  She was grateful, when she began planning the walk to London, that there was nobody to tell, nobody to look at her in that way; that patronising, disbelieving way that said, ‘Oh, dear. Reenie’s lost it.’ A friend of hers had spent her last days in sheltered accommodation, every plan questioned by those paid to keep an eye on her; every shopping trip and holiday requiring an unofficial seal of approval. Reenie spent many afternoons in their common room, seeing how they were treated, and she was determined never to end up in such a place. Yes, her house was too big and empty for her; yes, she struggled with the stairs, and she wasn’t dusting as often as she should, and the garden had long ago turned into a jungle, but it was all hers. She made her plans alone, with no one there to question them.

  The trolley she picked up from a supermarket near her home, and her status as an Old Woman granted her the license to walk away with it, unchallenged. Nobody questioned the sight of an Old Woman pushing a trolley down the street. But in a way, she had wanted someone to stop and question her, if only so that she could throw their question back at them. What was so strange about walking to London? People have been around much longer than cars and trains. Was it so long ago people walked from place to place? Hadn’t there been times, in living memory, when people walked great distances, and not always through choice?

  The trouble was, it had been a very long time since this had last happened in Britain. In Britain, people had been driven from place to place for generations. If anyone walked a great distance now it was to prove a point, and usually for charity. It was centuries since the last British exodus. Migrations, yes, but these involved cars, and trains, and boats. Photographs of suitcase-laden families walking single file on country lanes, leaving behind them ravaged towns and villages, were of events that had happened Somewhere Else and to Someone Else.

  Reenie didn’t remember such scenes, but they were as much a part of her as the single hazel fleck in her otherwise blue eyes, a hand-me-down from her father’s side. The story of how she came to live in London she remembered like a nursery rhyme, or the bare bones of a fairy tale. Her father spoke rarely of their time in Vienna, and even less of what followed, and her only memory of that time was so vague, so lacking in detail, it could have happened in any city, in any country.

  She remembered a vast park, and in that park enclosures filled with exotic animals; zebras and giraffes, elephants and monkeys, a blue-green pond surrounded by flamingos. She remembered a man and a woman, her parents, and mountainous clouds on a dusk horizon, but nothing more.

  There were voids in her father’s recollections of Vienna and Europe, chapters he’d never shared. They, he and Reenie’s mother, had left their home. They were put onto trains. They were taken north. Much of what happened after that remained blank, but her father did once share the story of how he and many other men – there were no women – were made to march west. It was January.

  ‘And Polish Januaries, they are cold,’ he said, with a distant understatement.

  When she told the young police officers she was walking to London, and they looked at her as if she were insane, she wanted to tell them about her father, and the walk so terrible he never spoke of it again.

  Yes, she could have caught the train. That would have been the easy thing to do, and the cost of the fare was unimportant to her. Speed and comfort were unimportant to her. Ease was unimportant to her. It was the journey that mattered. And what about her belongings? They might have allowed her on a train with Solomon inside his cage, and a small suitcase would be enough for her clothes, but Reenie knew she might never return to Cardiff, or the house where she had lived for almost fifty years. If she was leaving, and for good, she would travel as a whole; the parts of her life that still mattered to her crammed into that supermarket trolley.

  She hadn’t expected to meet another person on the same journey. Perhaps people did this all the time, walking between cities, and it wasn’t all that strange. Perhaps there were hundreds of people out there, now, tramping from one end of the country to the other on foot – north to south; east to west. Perhaps, away from the motorways and the train tracks, this was a country full of people walking about like nomads, just walking.

  She realised that, had they met under other circumstances, she would have treated Ibrahim differently. If she saw him coming towards her on a dark night she would have crossed the street to avoid him. If he were loitering outside her house, she would hover near the phone, wondering when it was appropriate to dial 999.

  Or if she were fifty years younger, how would she look at him then? He was handsome, if a little weighty, but she had always been attracted to bigger, cuddlier men. And there was something exotic in his looks, his short hair and thick beard the darkest black, his skin the lightest shade of brown, but still dark enough to make his almost metallic blue eyes stand out like little coins. He reminded her of a waiter she’d met when in Venice with Jonathan. They were at a restaurant near San Marco, on the Calle Spadaria, and the waiter flirted with her, sparking a jealous row between husband and wife, not because Reenie had attracted the waiter’s attention but because – and only because – she had enjoyed it.

  Beneath his scruffy clothes and that shabby bird’s nest of a beard, Ibrahim had something of the waiter’s beauty; something almost feminine in his long eyelashes, his full lips, his smooth skin; but beyond that something soft and quiet, something gentle. Nothing like the young men she had seen on TV; waving placards and burning flags. Ibrahim was different. She saw no violence in him, no hint of a temper. A sadness, perhaps, but no violence.

  As a girl she might have fallen for his looks, for his quietness, for that lack of violence. Liking him, though, was not the same as trusting him. Reenie trusted no one completely, having learnt and relearnt this lesson her whole life.

  Ibrahim was not one of the bastards. He hadn’t tried persuading her to turn back, or catch the train. He hadn’t laughed at her plan, or talked to her as if she was mad. If he wanted to steal from her, he’d already had the opportunity. He was not one of the bastards, but still. He’d go soon enough. Get sick of her slowing him down. Hitch a ride or give in and catch the train. Everyone goes away, eventually.

  For now, though, it was a relief having someone else push the trolley. It wasn’t so much the weight that made it hard work – once you had the whole thing moving it seemed to push itself along with its own momentum. No, it wasn’t the weight; it was the wheels that made it a challenge. They had minds of their own, all four of them pulling in different directions, and the whole thing jumping and shuddering with every bump and pothole. But Ibrahim was a youn
g man, and stronger than her, and they made greater progress in the two hours after leaving the hotel than she had made in her first two days from Cardiff.

  They entered Newport from the south-west, and all the way across the city centre they were gawped at. Nothing about them – little old woman in raincoat and wellies; stocky, dark young man with shaved head and beard – made sense, and people stared at them as if to say, They’re not a couple, they’re not mother and son. What’s their story?

  Reenie felt safer outside the cities, where there were fewer people, fewer cars – where there were wide-open spaces and places to camp. The city was noise and commotion, and it was getting late. If they weren’t on the other side of Newport by nightfall there would be nowhere to pitch her tent, and she’d have to sleep outdoors, in some cold, hard concrete corner of the city.

  Unlike Ibrahim, Reenie hadn’t planned her journey with maps. She knew some of the roads she would have to travel along from daytrips taken years ago. Then, she had been the navigator, an RAC road atlas open in her lap while Jonathan drove. She’d hoped some parts of the route would prove familiar, but very few had.

  The bridge across the River Usk she remembered, but as a brand new landmark in the city. Now it looked weathered and worn, its concrete pillars the same muddy shade of brown as the river beneath it. The riverbanks were strewn with debris – the half-buried skeletons of shopping trolleys, a discarded bicycle, the rotting carcass of a rowing boat.

  Ibrahim said little as they crossed the city. He was slowing, his face flushed and shining with sweat, and while at first he kept a steady pace, always a few yards ahead of her, now they walked side by side; Reenie talking as if to punctuate the prolonged silences between them.

  ‘Haven’t been to Newport in years,’ she said. ‘I remember when they was making that film, Tiger Bay. It had the girl in it. What’s her name? Hayley Mills. That’s her. John Mills’s daughter. And it was set in Tiger Bay, down in Butetown, but they filmed some of it in Newport, by the Transporter Bridge. Must have been fifty years ago now.’

  ‘You’ve… lived in… Cardiff… fifty years?’ asked Ibrahim, struggling to catch his breath.

  ‘Yeah. Must be that, at least.’

  ‘’Cause, you haven’t… got the accent. You still sound… like you’re from London.’

  ‘Yeah, well, some people lose their accents, some don’t.’

  She didn’t tell him that as a child her accent, and even the language she’d spoken, were different again, that her accent had changed, but that having changed once, and so dramatically, it stayed fixed, as if that one change was enough to last a lifetime.

  ‘And why’d you move to Cardiff?’ he asked.

  She took a moment to answer him, and in that moment considered the raft of promises that brought her from London to Cardiff and the man – no, the boy – who made and broke them all. He’d made this other city, this place away from London, sound like the answer to all their problems, and she believed him. So long ago. She remembered his name, but his face was vague now. Did it happen to her? Wasn’t it all just a film she had once seen?

  ‘Just fancied a change of scenery,’ she said. ‘You know how it is. A change is as good as a rest. Why did you move to Cardiff?’

  ‘University.’

  ‘Oh. You’re a brainy one, are you?’

  He laughed and wiped his forehead with his sleeve. ‘No. Not really. Just wanted to go to uni. Got in to Cardiff.’

  ‘What were you studying?’

  ‘History.’

  ‘Did you get a degree?’

  He shook his head. ‘Didn’t finish the course.’

  There was something in his expression – as if he was tired of answering that question – that stopped her from asking any more. They carried on in silence until reaching the eastern edge of the city, and by then it was beginning to get dark.

  3

  Kirsty’s phone buzzed its way, sideways, across her desk, nudging itself closer to the edge; the last name she expected to see lit up on its screen. They hadn’t spoken in almost a year. Not out of animosity or resentment, rather their clumsy and abortive attempt at dating, an attempt that came close to being ‘a relationship’ before stalling, had left them with too little to talk about, and nothing in common except the very brief time they shared. So why should he call now?

  She picked up her phone and answered it. ‘Steve?’

  ‘Hi, Kirsty. You okay to speak?’

  ‘Sure.’

  A quick glance around the newsroom. Another researcher thumbing idly at his phone. Rhodri, her producer, soundproofed and pacing in his glass box of an office, talking to someone distant through the speakerphone. Most of the other researchers and production team elsewhere, as the office reached the end of a Tuesday afternoon.

  ‘So. How are you?’ asked Steve.

  Christ. Where was this heading? Had a year of single life reduced him to rekindling former flames, flicking through the well-thumbed pages of his Little Black Book? That was assuming men even had Little Black Books these days, or that they ever had, outside of films and dodgy sitcoms. Assuming, too, that he had spent the last twelve months single, unable to move on, or frozen in the very last moment she had seen him, in that same way that it’s impossible to imagine rivers flowing if you’re not around to watch them.

  ‘I’m good, thanks,’ said Kirsty. ‘How are you?’

  ‘Great. Great. You still with the BBC?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Oh, that’s good. That’s kind of why I called you, actually.’

  She frowned for the benefit of no one. ‘Right. Well. Yes. I’m still here.’

  ‘Still working on the news?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Okay. Well, as it happens, I might have a story for you.’

  ‘Really.’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Are you sure? I mean, is that even, you know, allowed?’

  ‘Well. Not really. But, you know, as long as I’m not mentioned by name or anything. I mean, anyone could have given you this story. And it’s not like we’re… you know. And anyway…’

  ‘So what’s the story?’

  A long pause. Steve was a policeman, at least he had been when they dated, but this was the first time he’d ever called with a story. She leaned back in her chair, waiting for his explanation.

  ‘This old woman and this Asian guy are walking to London,’ he said.

  She scowled. It sounded like the opening line of a joke.

  ‘They’re walking to London?’

  ‘Yeah. We got a call from this hotel, just off the M4. They were complaining about the old woman camping next to their car park, so we went to check it out. Turns out she and this Asian guy are walking to London.’

  ‘What? For charity?’

  ‘No. That’s the thing. They’re just walking to London. It’s not for charity.’

  ‘Right. And… I mean… who are they?’

  ‘Don’t know. They weren’t breaking any laws or anything. We moved them on. But I just thought… It’s weird, isn’t it? Apparently, they’d only just met.’

  ‘So they don’t know each other?’

  ‘Don’t think so.’

  ‘But they’re walking to London together?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘So you thought you’d call me?’

  ‘Well. Yeah. It’s the kind of thing you report on the local news, isn’t it?’

  True. It was September. The last dreary days of Silly Season. Unless war broke out (and even a war was unlikely to impact much on local news) or some major crime or accident occurred, they were in the slow news doldrums between party conferences. Paradoxically, a ‘slow news’ month meant a busy month for researchers, whose job it then became to comb through acres of minor events in the search for something newsworthy.

  ‘So where are they?’ she asked.

  ‘Just off the M4. You know the junction with the hotel and the business park?’

  ‘I think so.’

  ‘We
ll, there. But we moved them on, so they’ll be heading towards Newport.’

  ‘Right.’

  Another silence that became pointed.

  ‘So, anyway,’ said Steve. ‘Just thought I’d let you know. You know. In case it was something you could use.’

  ‘Yeah. Well, thanks for that, Steve.’

  ‘Don’t mention it. You know. Just thought, we haven’t spoken in ages, and then this happened, and I thought, “Kirsty might be able to, you know, use this,” so I called you.’

  ‘Yeah. That’s great, Steve. Thanks.’

  ‘Cool. Well. Maybe see you around, yeah?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Great.’

  ‘Take care, Steve.’

  ‘Right. Yeah. You too, Kirst.’

  ‘Bye, Steve.’

  ‘Bye.’

  She ended the near-interminable call with her thumb, got up from her desk, crossed the office to Rhodri’s glass box, and rapped her knuckles three times on the door. Rhodri was still talking at the grey plastic triangle in the centre of his desk, but he gestured for her to come in, and she entered, closing the door quietly behind her. He was talking to somebody in Welsh, a language Kirsty had never spoken. Even after eighteen months of working there she still felt a twinge of resentment in those moments when colleagues jabbered away in this familiar yet foreign tongue as if they were doing it on purpose to exclude the handful of people, a minority, who couldn’t.

  ‘Iawn iawn, byddain siarad i chi’n fuan! Wel dwi’n credu bod e di bod yn Barcelona penythnos yma. Yeah… Mae’n alright i some! Iawn, hwyl hwyl.’

  Finished, Rhodri clapped his hands together and grinned at her. Or rather, he gave her tits a cursory glance and then grinned at her.

  ‘Kirsty,’ he said. ‘What can I do you for?’

  She smiled falsely, more a grimace than a smile. ‘Erm, I think I might have a story. Filler, really. Nothing major. Too late for tonight, obviously, but maybe we could get it done for tomorrow morning.’

  ‘Okay. What’s the story?’

  ‘Old woman and some Asian guy walking from Cardiff to London.’