Ibrahim & Reenie Page 3

  ‘For charity?’

  ‘Not for charity.’

  ‘Gandhi Asian, or Jackie Chan Asian?’

  ‘I didn’t ask.’

  ‘And where’d you get this?’

  ‘A friend. He works for the police.’

  ‘They’ve been arrested?’

  ‘No. Nothing like that. He just called me, because he’s seen them, and…’

  ‘Because if it’s police business it could get messy.’

  ‘No. They’ve not been arrested. I was thinking human interest, filler, like I said, maybe something we could check out…’

  He nodded. ‘Right. Okay. Tell you what. You drive up there, to wherever they are. Do a recce. If it stands up, give me a ring. We’re stretching bugger all very thin tomorrow morning as it is. I mean, we’re bloody leading with that leisure centre closure. So we might be able to use it. But you go scope it out first, yeah?’

  ‘Okay.’

  With that decided Kirsty returned to her desk and picked up her handbag and her car keys. The drive out of Cardiff took an age, her progress slowed by the rush-hour traffic pouring like treacle from the city. She sat in gridlock, drumming an impatient tom-tom on the steering wheel. The passengers of a coach stared down at her from their windows, an ageing gallery of white perms and dewlaps. The driver of a white van, his beefy arm tattooed with the greening feathers of a Welsh fleur-de-lys, leered at her and winked. Three Asian guys, teenagers, sat chicken-winging – elbows dangling from the open windows of a BMW; black bandana-and-baseball-capped heads bobbing in time with thunderous hip-hop.

  Then the cars and vans and lorries moved, and she was out of Cardiff and on the motorway, but by the time she reached the hotel near the junction her quarry – the old woman and the Asian man – had gone. Undeterred, she drove on and was within the southern limits of Newport when, finally, she saw them. Sure enough, an old woman and, a few paces ahead of her, a young man pushing a supermarket trolley.

  They looked like a story. Never mind what that story might be. There was struggle, pathos, grim determination, the faintest whiff of the eccentric. Exactly the kind of thing the audience for local news laps up. She was thinking like a journalist, because that was what she trained to be. Shame then that she wasn’t a journalist, but a researcher; a job only one or two rungs up from runner, though she could barely tell the difference. Still, this was your ‘foot in the door’, as people told her. Your way in. Knuckle down, look for stories. If you’re good, they’ll notice. They – the anonymous They. The omniscient They. The all-seeing They. The practically trademarked Powers That Be. Would they notice her this time? Would this be the filler, the piece of fluff, the small dose of whimsy that drew attention to her? Perhaps. She had seen true nonentities promoted for less substantial stories than this.

  Though she slowed the car as she passed them by, Kirsty was soon a hundred yards ahead of them. It would have looked strange for her to slow down to their pace, as if kerb crawling, and there were other cars behind her, so she drove on until the next roundabout, performed a U-turn, and came back, driving past them a second time.

  Perhaps it was a statement. Some kind of protest. There was something bohemian about the old woman. Didn’t seem the cosy, grandmotherly type. Was their journey political? A comment on the struggles of people in a faraway land? But if that was the case, where were their placards and t-shirts printed with slogans? Where was their message?

  Or perhaps something theatrical; an oblique work of performance art. No, that was ridiculous. Perhaps there was nothing to the story. Perhaps there was no story. Perhaps she should drive back to Cardiff and tell Rhodri there was nothing worth seeing, let alone reporting.

  And yet, as they shrank away, framed in widescreen by her rear view mirror, they looked like a story. So telegenic. This could work. This could work.

  Presently, she found somewhere to pull in and called the office, waiting briefly on hold before being put through to Rhodri.

  ‘So. What’s the story?’

  She pictured him staring fixedly at that grey plastic triangle on his desk, the lid of a ballpoint pen tucked in one corner of his mouth where he wished he had a cigarette.

  What was the story? They looked like a story. But what was the story?

  ‘They’re on the move,’ she said. ‘They’ve left the hotel and they’re heading in to Newport.’

  ‘And they’re both walking to London?’

  ‘I think so. Well. They’re definitely walking to Newport.’

  ‘Right.’

  She felt the prolonged silence from the other end of the line draw all the air out of her lungs and stop her heart from beating. Her mouth got dry, and she felt she might be blushing. Why had she called him so soon? Why hadn’t she taken the initiative to follow them, stop them, ask questions before calling Rhodri? This wouldn’t be the day she got noticed. If anything, this would be the day she got unnoticed, reverse-noticed, ignored.

  Forget Kirsty. She’ll bring you nothing but rubbish. In fact, maybe she’d make a better runner…

  ‘Sod it,’ said Rhodri. At last. ‘Find them. Quiz them. If they’re walking to London, call me back and I’ll send Angharad and a crew.’

  And Kirsty promised him she would do just that.

  4

  They had reached the Coldra, a large interchange on the far side of Newport, and Ibrahim couldn’t remember another time when he had felt so tired.

  In the centre of this interchange, in the shadow of the motorway flyover, lay an oasis of grass and trees, the perfect place for them to pitch Reenie’s tent. The motorway would provide shelter, should it rain, and the trees could hide them from the road.

  He could leave her there, of course. Sure, it was getting late and the sky was beginning to ink over with night, but in the plans he drew up, the notes he scribbled on maps, he ended his first day so much further along the road than this. He had thought he might walk for twelve hours, at least, and in those plans ended his first day in Lydney, on the other side of the English border. He had no idea where he would stay when he got there, perhaps a bus station where he could spend the night, or a park with a bandstand. Somewhere dry, with no people.

  Now, as they put up the tent and began unpacking the things from Reenie’s trolley, he tried convincing himself he could walk another twelve miles, at least. Maybe even reach the border. He had no obligations. He had helped her get this far, never promising to take her all the way to London. Besides, there was an urgency to his journey. Time was a factor. He could help her set up camp, in the middle of this roundabout, then carry on walking. He could walk well into the night. Eventually the roads would get quieter, and on some he might feel like the only man on Earth. What was keeping him here?

  But then he remembered the name she’d said and he felt the thudding pain in his right leg; an ache that was spreading now, through every limb and tingling like pinpricks in the soles of his feet. He was exhausted.

  ‘Shall I put the kettle on?’ asked Reenie, unfolding her small table and draping over it the gingham tea towel she used as a tablecloth. ‘Nothing like a cuppa after a long walk. We used to walk all the time when I was a girl. We’d walk for miles and miles. All the way up over Hackney Marsh, or out as far as Epping Forest. We’d walk all the way there, all the way back. Nowadays, no one walks anywhere. Too bloody lazy, if you ask me.’

  He nodded and smiled but said nothing. He had both hands on his leg, working at the muscle with his thumbs, and each time he applied more pressure a shot of pain pounced through his leg, but it was that good, almost reassuring pain that he could tolerate, though only just.

  ‘You alright?’ asked Reenie.

  ‘I’m fine.’

  ‘That leg of yours giving you gip?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘So what happened to it?’

  ‘An accident.’

  It came out blunt, colder than intended, and it was strange for Ibrahim to remember a time when he couldn’t even call it that, when he’d refused to ca
ll it an accident. For months and even years he had called it his injury, both the physical damage to his body and the event that caused it. Injury seemed the only word for it; ‘accident’ felt so diluted, so small. An accident was something unintended, random, without reason.

  The damage he suffered seemed so precise, so calculated, he often wondered if it was the product of some grand, unseen design. There had to be a reason why his leg was broken in so many places, why his face was smashed beyond recognition, why – microscopic and undetected for two years – there had been one final punchline to his injuries. His faith told him there was a reason for everything, that everything that happened was the will of God, from blessed miracles to deaths and injuries. Even his father had believed this, saying it was a sign, a message from Allah. If his father could suggest that, knowing only what he knew, what would he have said had he known everything?

  As it was, the timing was all wrong. Two years earlier Nazir Siddique may have had a point. Had Ibrahim’s accident happened then, there may have been some justice to it, and even then if he was the only one to be injured, but what had the others done? What had Rhys and Caitlin and Aleem done to deserve that?

  He refused to believe his accident – their accident – was some divine punishment, backdated to earlier actions, as if the heavenly clerics and number crunchers meting out spiritual justice were simply catching up with a backlog. And into this single plughole of doubt he saw his faith begin to vanish, like so much swirling, brackish bathwater. He tried clinging to the vestiges of it, but he might as well have tried clinging on to soapy dregs. If the accident, his injury, was not the work of God, what was it? If it was just that, an accident, why do such things happen? If there is no reason why they happen, what then? His doubt, and the absolute terror it gave birth to, was a cancer to his faith, and he began to wonder if he had ever truly believed.

  Yes, he had proclaimed that God is great, and done so at the top of his voice, but it was said as a chorus, with a dozen of his friends. They spoke loudly, as if volume added credence, or took away the need to question what was being said. Now that he was left with none of those friends and just the sketches of his faith he realised they could have shouted anything, any choice of words, in any order. It wouldn’t have mattered.

  Of course, they had never questioned the substance, the character and the mind of Allah. When their discussions were over, and they’d finished poring over another passage, reciting it in their faltering, East London Arabic, Allah remained as faceless and unknowable as He was before they began. His words, so the sheikh told them, were there in the book. There was nothing more to know. It is the word and the law of God. Even thinking about what He might look like, or how His mind might work beyond those pages, was haraam.

  So in losing God, or his faith in God, he often felt he had lost nothing at all. The God who allowed his accident to happen, or turned a blind eye when it did, was the same unknowable, monolithic God who shrouded Himself in scripture and defied all questions and inquiries, who demanded nothing more substantial than that His name be shouted by a dozen men with a limited command of the chosen language. The God who wasn’t there at all was almost indistinguishable from the one he had sworn to fight and die for.

  Reenie passed him a mug of coffee and took to her own deckchair. The sky was getting darker still and the lights at the roadside flickered to life with a sickly, peach-coloured glow. Rush hour was ending, the traffic thinning out until the sound of each passing car and van became a pulse, almost metronomic, rather than a constant hiss of white noise.

  ‘It was a car crash,’ said Ibrahim.

  Reenie peered at him through the steam rising from her tea, and it had been so long since her question, he wondered if she remembered asking it.

  ‘The accident, I mean,’ he said. ‘It was a car crash.’

  She nodded and glanced down at his leg, her expression almost placidly unmoved. ‘Broke your leg, did you?’

  ‘Leg. Pelvis. Fractured skull.’

  ‘Were you in hospital long?’

  ‘Six months.’

  Reenie drew a sharp breath, as if she’d stubbed her toe, and she slurped her tea noisily.

  ‘Six months,’ she said. ‘That’s a long time to be cooped up. Can’t stand hospitals. My husband worked in one. Couldn’t even bear popping in to see him when he was in work. Can’t stand them.’

  ‘Me neither.’

  ‘Don’t blame you. Six months. And half the time you come out with more wrong than when you went in. All these super bugs they have nowadays and what have you. Can’t stand hospitals. Full of sick people. And there’s no dignity in it. In any of it. I was in, couple of years ago. Overnight stay. One of them mixed wards, so there was me, some old dear in her eighties, some lad who must have been thirty, and this one man. Well. I don’t know what the politically correct word for it is, but he was a bit funny…’ She tapped one finger against the side of her head. ‘You know. Up there. And the old dear in her eighties, she spent most of the night screaming. And the lad who was a bit… you know… in the head… Well, he’d get up and walk about the place with his smock all hitched up so you could see his bits. And there’s me just trying to get a good night’s sleep.

  ‘By the time the old dear stopped screaming and the funny boy went back to sleep it must have been three o’clock, and then they wake you up at half six to take your blood pressure and stick all those instruments in your ear and what have you. Half six! And let me tell you, I’m not one of those people who can get back to sleep. Once I’m up, I’m up. So they wake you up at half six, and then they don’t get round to serving tea and toast till nine. Well, by then I was starving. I hate hospitals. Can’t stand them.’

  He smiled and took a sip of his coffee. There had been times when he hated the hospital, days when he longed to see something from beyond its car park. Some of the upper wards had views over the city’s suburbs, but they were so distant as to be rendered abstract, little more than rooftops and trees.

  The hospital was vast, practically a town in its own right, or so he came to think of it. There was a concourse with shops – the usual selection of newsagents and florists – and a self-service café. There was a central quadrangle where patients and visitors could go to smoke, or just to get out of the sterile, bleached air of the wards.

  Once he was more mobile, more confident using a wheelchair, Ibrahim spent hours touring the hospital, searching for undiscovered corridors, places he hadn’t yet seen, and it was while wheeling himself around the corridors that he saw, on a television suspended in one corner of the day room, the image of a red London bus blasted in half, the street around it littered with debris. He entered the room and asked the only other person there – a burly rugby type with his leg in plaster – to turn up the volume.

  ‘…a scene of carnage at Tavistock Square, where it would appear there has been an explosion on board a bus. The top deck of the bus, as you can see, severely damaged…’

  The rugby type looked at Ibrahim with a brief sideways glance – brief but held long enough for Ibrahim to notice – and that one look said enough.

  This was your lot.

  And on TV there were people with faces covered in blood and there were bodies lying in gutters and people weeping and what Ibrahim saw wasn’t a statement or a victory but chaos and blood and smoke and nothingness.

  It meant nothing.

  He hated the hospital most of all when things were demanded of him; when he was sent for x-rays or told to stay in his ward and wait for the latest in a string of junior doctors to come and assess him. These things were stark reminders that he was damaged. His body had been damaged. It no longer worked as it should. His legs were all but useless, his left arm still feeble. He found it difficult to eat anything with a consistency tougher than soup. His eyesight was still poor, making all the newspapers and magazines brought by visitors little more than colourful waste paper.

  And to begin with, once he was well enough, there had been many visitors.
His family came from London and Birmingham to see him, sometimes checking into hotels to stay the night and visit again the next day. His Cardiff friends, most of them students, travelled up en masse, and brought odd gifts picked up in second-hand shops and flea markets. Early on, they’d sit around the bed cracking jokes, sharing gossip.

  It was during one such visit that he learned they were clearing out his room, in the house he had shared with four others. The academic year was nearing its end; the landlord had new tenants ready to move in over the summer. Ibrahim might have reacted to this angrily, were it not for the painkillers and sedatives that kept him placid most afternoons. Besides, as he had to remind himself, and keep reminding himself, he was lucky. The friends sitting around his bed, telling him these things, were talking to the only friend of theirs to survive the crash.

  Eventually the gaps between visits from all but one person became longer. In justifying it, both to Ibrahim and themselves, his family reminded him of the distance and the cost. Neither petrol nor train fares were cheap, they said. You’ll understand, won’t you, if we don’t make it up this weekend, they said. Maybe next weekend? Then the semester was over, and many of his friends went back to their hometowns, and their words came to him as text messages.

  Soon enough he stopped hating the hospital in any real sense. He might tell others he hated being there, but all the raw anger had trickled out of him. He even came to find some comfort in the hospital’s patterns and routines, in its inherent safety. Nothing terrible could happen to him there. He was surrounded, day and night, by staff whose job it was to keep him safe.

  When, after six months of treatment, his doctor announced he was well enough to leave, Ibrahim felt a kind of panic, an anxiousness, a sensation only heightened by his leaving, and one that stayed with him, constantly ringing, like an emotional tinnitus.

  The world outside the hospital was, he realised, dangerous; made up of random sequences of events that had no meaning. There was cause and effect, yes, but the spidergram was so vast, so intricate, it made him nauseous to consider it for any length of time. Meeting Reenie, for instance, and learning her father’s name. Looking at her from across their small campsite, he wondered if she could be a product of his imagination, if he could be dreaming. But when he dreamt, invariably those dreams were filled with meaningless violence and an acute, unending sense of loss.