Ibrahim & Reenie Page 4

  While passing through Newport, they had stopped at a supermarket to pick up supplies – bread and cheese, bottles of water, cartons of UHT milk; bananas, apples and clementines – and Reenie made them both a supper of sandwiches, which Ibrahim gobbled down in seconds, leaving a litter of breadcrumbs in his beard and a splatter of ketchup on his t-shirt.

  What neither of them noticed, as they washed their plastic plates and cutlery in water, was the small black car orbiting the interchange; a car that had followed them, intermittently, since Newport, and now left the road and came to a halt a short distance from where they’d set up camp. A young woman got out of the car, gingerly crossing the four lanes of traffic and trudging her way across the island of grass beneath the motorway.

  ‘Who’s this?’ asked Reenie.

  He squinted at the young woman and shrugged, and the young woman waved at them and smiled.

  ‘Hi,’ she said, short of breath. ‘My name’s Kirsty. I’m a researcher for the BBC. Do you have a moment?’

  5

  It was too early to go home. There was a point in the night when, once he was out through the door, Gary knew he wouldn’t go back until breakfast.

  He’d mastered the art of getting out of bed without waking Emma; learned to take his uniform to the bathroom and get changed there, never once letting a single noise or the slightest bit of light from the landing disturb her. He knew which floorboards creaked, and he avoided them. If, before leaving, he made coffee, he would close the kitchen door to stop the noise of the kettle from travelling up the stairs. He could open, close and lock their front door almost without making a sound.

  It took months, maybe years, for him to get used to this – waking in the middle of the night after only a few hours’ sleep. It no longer rattled him as it used to, when he began working nights. Back then the sudden noise of his pager caused his body to react as if in shock, as if all his senses were under attack. If the night was warm, he woke up feeling clammy. If it was cold, the room felt like a fridge. The darkness played tricks on him; the bedroom ceiling full of swirling colours and patterns until his eyes adjusted to the dark. The silence of the sleeping world left him feeling alone though Emma still slept beside him. All this happened at once, so that the experience of waking at two or three o’clock in the morning was a near-harrowing, disorientating one, but eventually this passed and now, when work called, he could be out of the room in a minute and out of the house in ten.

  The summer months were quieter. People didn’t use their boilers so often in summer. Showers, baths, washing the dishes, that was about it. The winter months were much busier. Then he could expect three or four call-outs a night. Maybe more. Another pensioner or young mum who could smell gas. Another family with no hot water or heating. Flats and houses like iceboxes. People in dressing gowns and nighties, arms folded, faces all wrinkled up and sleepy, waiting for him to ‘work his magic’.

  The summer months weren’t so bad, but the nights felt more broken up. A night with no sleep at all was somehow better, less disruptive, than a night chopped in half by a single call-out, and the later that call-out came the less likely he was to go home before breakfast. Emma was a light sleeper. He was amazed she could sleep through the sound of his pager, but she did. Perhaps she was used to it now and knew how to block out its noise, to unhear it. It was the irregular sounds that woke her – sirens and car alarms – and, after a certain time, once awake she could never get back to sleep.

  At first she had tried sleeping tablets, but these left her sluggish and groggy in the mornings, so Gary decided that if he was ever called out after three he wouldn’t go back until she was up and awake, and this often left him stranded in the night with nowhere to go. The call-out might take minutes; an imagined scent of gas, a dead thermocouple replaced before the dressing-gowned customer had a chance to offer him tea. He’d go back to his van, tiredness weighing down every limb, and stare anxiously at the clock, praying for another call before dawn.

  That morning his pager had woken him a little before 4am. He reached the customer half an hour later, and was out of there again by five.

  For a while he drove and listened to the radio. Gary preferred stations where they talked, having failed to find a music station that didn’t, sooner or later, piss him off. One DJ played rock, the next played love ballads. Never any consistency. At least with the stations where people talked he might learn something, or they’d talk about something he found interesting. Sometimes he’d answer back, agreeing loudly with those he agreed with, swearing at those he didn’t.

  Right now there was only news. Bombs exploding and protestors getting shot somewhere foreign. The economy up the spout. Some politician talking bollocks, as usual. Outside it was getting light, but Gary imagined the presenters on the radio sitting in their dark, windowless studio, a room where it could have been any time of day or night, and he felt sorry for them. He actually felt sorry for them.

  He drove back towards the city on near-deserted roads, and veering around the interchange at the Coldra saw a small orange tent pitched on the grass at its centre. He wondered, briefly, who would camp in a place like that, but those thoughts drifted effortlessly to a vision of bacon and fried eggs and beans and sausages and fried bread and both sauces.

  In the city he went a café he knew would be open. On weekends the place was invariably full of nightclub bouncers and bleary-eyed kids at the tail-end of their nights on the town, but on a Wednesday morning it was mostly drivers – cab drivers, lorry drivers, maintenance men. A greasy spoon place with red plastic gingham on the tables and, for some reason, pictures of sports cars on its walls; the kitchen a racket of clanging pots and pans and the hiss of meat and eggs frying on the hotplate, a catering boiler firing hot jets of water into mugs and stainless steel teapots with a steamy whoosh.

  After ordering his breakfast at the counter, Gary sat at a table near the window, where somebody had left behind their newspaper, and he read – or rather scanned – it while he waited.

  Everyone he knew was asleep. Dreaming, not dreaming. Snoring, not snoring. With someone, alone. Sleeping. And nobody, not even Emma, knew where he was. Most of the people he and Emma knew had regular jobs, Monday to Friday, nine till five. They woke at respectable hours and enjoyed peaceful, unbroken nights of sleep. Their weekends were sacred, their time precious. Whenever there were parties, at Christmas or on birthdays, these friends made a point of sympathising with Gary. Always the first to leave, hardly ever drinking.

  ‘That must be horrible,’ they’d say, as if they understood, but they didn’t.

  The achievements and successes of his friends and family were a sore point, but those were thoughts he kept to himself, knowing how bitter it would make him sound. When he congratulated his mates on their promotions, it had that veneer of sincerity, and sometimes it was genuine – he wasn’t yet bitter enough to wish for their failure – but behind it lay a shadow of regret.

  Gary ate his breakfast quickly, pausing just once to watch as an old man in a heavy, camel-coloured duffel coat shuffled along the street outside, bending down to pick half-smoked cigarette butts from the gutter.

  Disgusting. What was the world coming to? He saw these things more often now, but were they always there, or had something changed? Driving around the city in the early mornings, everything looked shabbier, more worn. Paint peeling. Windows boarded up. Graffiti everywhere. Broken glass everywhere. Dog shit everywhere. Things were beginning to slide, as if no one cared about anything any more. He was the only person in the café to notice the old man picking soggy cigarette ends from the gutter. When did people stop seeing these things?

  The city was waking up, the traffic getting heavier. Soon it would be time for him to go home, which was just as well, because he wanted nothing more than to leave this place and forget about the old man and his damp, second-hand cigarettes. And his timing was important. Emma hated being woken in the night, but more than that she hated waking in an empty house.

&nb
sp; Later that day, when it was time for him to sleep again, Gary contemplated the importance of timing; how time and coincidence play such an important part in anyone’s life. It was typical for that kind of thought to pop into his head just as he was trying to get some sleep, and that night he was kept awake by the idea that just a few minutes difference could change somebody’s life completely, and that this could in turn begin a chain reaction, influencing others, each minor event triggering another, until the shape of the world was somehow different. The next morning he sat in front of his computer and read about the so-called Butterfly Effect and chaos theory and fractals, but he came away no wiser than when he had sat down.

  If he stayed in the café a few minutes longer, or took a different route home, he wouldn’t have entered their house just as Emma turned on the television. She was standing in the centre of their living room, still wearing her dressing gown, a steaming mug of tea in one hand and the remote control in the other. He kissed her on the cheek, noticing that she still had that morning smell – stale but not unpleasant – and he said ‘Good morning’, but then his attention was drawn to the television.

  On the screen was the night-time image of an orange tent pitched beneath a concrete flyover.

  ‘The Coldra, Newport,’ said the television: a woman’s voice, soft but sincere. ‘Irene Glickman is seventy-five years old. She’s lived in Cardiff more than forty years, but is returning to London, the city where she grew up.’

  A pause, as the camera lingered on the image of an old woman in a deckchair, sipping from a white mug.

  ‘What makes Irene’s journey remarkable,’ the voiceover continued, ‘is that she’s doing it on foot. Irene is walking the one hundred and sixty miles to London, alone. She is travelling with all of her belongings in a supermarket trolley, and tonight she will sleep in a tent next to one of the busiest roads in South Wales.’

  It cut to a close-up of the old woman. Hard to tell whether she was happy about being filmed. If anything, she looked as if she couldn’t care less.

  ‘I’ve just got so many things,’ she said. ‘And I wasn’t planning on coming back to Cardiff. Thing is, I haven’t got a car, and I couldn’t take all this stuff on the train. It just made sense.’

  Emma dropped herself into an armchair and shook her head. ‘Mad old thing,’ she said. ‘Walking to London? That’s the Coldra, isn’t it? She must have Alzheimer’s, or something.’

  The image on screen switched to the reporter; beige suit, rigid hair, too frosty and pinched for Gary to find sexy.

  ‘Earlier today, police in Newport moved Mrs Glickman on from a busy roundabout on the other side of the city. A spokesperson for Gwent Police told us that while they were concerned for Mrs Glickman’s welfare, she had not committed an offence. They said, “Mrs Glickman is of sound mind, and capable of making her own decisions. This is why we have not taken the matter further or referred her current situation to social services.’’’

  Gary turned to his wife. ‘What was that you were saying about Alzheimer’s?’

  ‘Meanwhile,’ the reporter continued. ‘Irene Glickman still has a very long way to walk.’

  ‘Still think she’s mad,’ said Emma. ‘They should put her in a care home, or something. It’s not right, leaving her out there. Even if she ain’t a danger to the public, she’s a danger to herself.’

  ‘She seemed alright to me,’ said Gary. ‘I mean, she only wants to get to London.’

  ‘Well, couldn’t somebody have driven her there? I don’t know… a neighbour or something?’

  ‘Maybe she hasn’t got anyone.’

  The news moved on to another story, leaving the old woman where they found her. From what Gary had seen as he drove around the Coldra, she was still there now. And she had no one. This alone bothered him. We think the world will always provide for us, that there’ll be friends and family to keep us safe, that we won’t be abandoned or ignored, but how many years had the old woman been alone? When had she last had a conversation, a proper conversation, with anyone? He imagined her in a supermarket, chatting away to the staff because they were the only people she ever spoke with. And maybe they knew her by name, but they didn’t really know her. She had no one.

  So many of them. The old woman sleeping under the motorway. The old man picking fag butts from the gutter. One city, and two people that alone, that desperate. Just one city. Not even a big city. Not even that many people. But two of them. Two people like that.

  ‘D’you want a cuppa?’ said Emma, but he was on his feet and out of the room before she’d finished the question.

  On reaching the landing, the first thing he noticed was an open door, and the bright and colourful light from the room behind it. There, visible through the narrow gap between the door and its frame, he saw the blue and pink border decorated with teddy bears. That door was usually shut, which meant Emma had been in there again, something she only ever did when he was out. He closed the door gently, hoping she wouldn’t hear it, and went to their bedroom.

  For a moment he sat on the edge of their bed, and caught sight of himself, reflected in the mirror above Emma’s dressing table. He aged the face he saw, adding further creases to the corner of each eye, drawing the hairline a little further up his forehead and peppering the hair with dashes of grey. He imagined his life without Emma, without friends or family, in which his only conversations were with the people on supermarket checkouts.

  In the bathroom he brushed away the aftertaste of coffee and cigarettes and splashed cold water on his face to remind himself it was morning. Emma had already sensed something was wrong, or that something was different, by the time he came back downstairs and walked out of the house, and she followed him as far as the front door.

  ‘What are you doing?’ she asked. ‘Ain’t you going back to bed?’

  He didn’t answer her at first. Instead, he opened the van and began taken out his equipment – the tool kit; the industrial-strength vacuum cleaner; the different tools and devices for detecting water mains and electrical currents. He stacked as many of those things as he could, and carried them up the short driveway.

  ‘Oh no,’ said Emma. ‘You are not bringing that stuff in this house. Gary? Gary. I said you’re not bringing that stuff…’

  He was already past her, and carrying everything through to their kitchen.

  ‘Gary? What are you doing?’

  Groaning with the weight, he crouched and placed the stack of tools down on the kitchen floor. ‘Just making a bit of room,’ he said, as if this made perfect sense.

  ‘But why?’

  ‘I’ve got an idea.’

  He walked back through the house, and out through the front door, and began taking more things from the van.

  ‘What do you mean? What idea?’

  ‘I’m gonna drive her over the bridge,’ said Gary, carrying the last pile through the house, and putting it down next to the first. ‘There’s room for all her stuff.’

  ‘Who’re you on about?’

  ‘The old woman,’ he said. ‘Off the telly. I’ve got a couple of hours spare. I can drive her over the bridge.’

  ‘Gary. Have you gone mad?’

  ‘No, love. I’m not mad. I just think… it makes sense.’

  ‘Makes sense? You’re gonna drive a complete stranger, a mad old woman, over the Severn Bridge in your van, with her trolley and all her rubbish, and you think that makes sense?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Listen to yourself. You’re tired.’

  He laughed. It was a long time since anyone had told him he was tired. Wasn’t that what his mum and dad would tell him, when he was a kid? The minute the grizzling began, they’d tell him he was tired, and he remembered perfectly the indignation he felt. He wasn’t tired, he was angry, and right now he wasn’t tired, he was determined; determined to use his day to shape the world, to be more than just another cog, turning because a bleeping pager commanded him to turn.

  ‘I’m not tired,’ he said. ‘Anyway
. It won’t take long. I can be over the bridge and back in an hour and a half. And think of the time it’ll save her.’

  ‘But you don’t know her,’ said Emma. ‘Why should you drive her?’

  Gary shrugged.

  ‘You know what would make me laugh?’ said Emma. ‘Is if you get there and they’re queuing up. All the white van men who saw her on the news, queuing up to offer her a lift.’

  ‘Yeah,’ Gary laughed. ‘That would be funny.’

  They were in front of the house, Emma holding her dressing gown a little tighter around her thin frame, accentuating her belly, and Gary caught himself glancing down and feeling that dreadful, familiar wave of shame and horror and grief. He gasped, too quietly for her to hear, and he turned away to look inside the van. Plenty of room in there for a trolley, he was sure of that. The old woman could sit up front, assuming she said yes. And maybe Emma was right; maybe he’d get there and they’d be queuing up. He closed the doors with a loud clunk.

  ‘I won’t be long,’ he said. ‘Promise.’

  He kissed her, this time on the lips, a kiss that couldn’t help but feel like an apology, and he climbed into his van. The engine started with a splutter and cough, and he drove away, leaving Emma on the driveway, watching him until he’d gone.

  6

  ‘Must be nothing else happening in the world,’ said Reenie. ‘I mean, why’d they want to talk to me? Don’t make any sense.’

  Ibrahim shrugged. Despite his sleeping bag and the cushions Reenie loaned him, he’d woken up cold and tired. The pain in his right leg had subsided, but he knew this couldn’t last. It would return as soon as they were walking again, but perhaps the pain might give the day some focus. He had decided that today he would make it over the border and into England.