Deception on His Mind (59 page)

Akram rose from his final prostration at the front of their small congregation of believers. He concluded their prayers with a recitation of the
taslim,
asking for peace, mercy, and the blessings of God. As Sahlah watched him and listened to his words, she wondered when any of those three requests would be granted to her and to her family.

As was always the case, the Malik employees returned to work quietly. Sahlah waited for her father just inside the door.

She watched him, momentarily unobserved. He was getting older, and she'd hardly noticed until this moment. His hair was combed and spread carefully across the top of his head but thinner than she'd ever remembered. His jaw was no longer firm, and his body—which she'd always seen as iron-like in strength—was soft in appearance, as if some sort of resistance had gone out of him. The skin beneath his eyes was dark, charcoal-smudged beneath his lower lashes. And his gait that had been swift and firm of purpose seemed hesitant now.

She wanted to tell him that nothing mattered so much as the future he'd so long held dear, a future in which he planted roots and a family in a small Essex town and built a life there for children and grandchildren and for other Asians like himself who left behind their country in pursuit of a dream. But she'd been party to obliterating that future. Any reference that she made to it now would be born of a need to maintain a pretence which, at the moment, she hadn't the heart to attempt.

Akram came inside the building. He paused to close and lock the door behind him. He saw her waiting by the water cooler and he came to her, taking the paper cup that she extended for him.

“You look tired,
Abhy,”
she said. “You don't need to stay at the factory. Mr. Armstrong can keep things going for the rest of the afternoon. Why don't you go home?” She had more than one reason for making this suggestion, of course. If she left the factory herself while her father was there, he would know soon enough and he'd want to know why.
Rachel's phoned and there's an emergency
had served her purposes on the previous day when she'd left to confront her friend at the Clifftop Snuggeries. She couldn't use that excuse again.

He touched her shoulder. “Sahlah. You bear the weight of our trouble with a strength I can't quite comprehend.”

Sahlah didn't want the praise, so sorely did it abrade her conscience. She looked for something to use as a response, something that was at least close to the truth because she couldn't bear to continue the process in which she'd been engaged these many months: constructing a careful maze of lies, projecting a purity of heart, mind, and soul that she didn't possess.
“Abhy,
I wasn't in love with him. I hoped to love him eventually, as you and
Ammī
love. But I hadn't learned to love him yet, so I don't feel the grief that you think I feel.”

His fingers tightened on her shoulder, then moved to graze her cheek. “I want you to know in your own life the devotion that I feel for your mother. That's what I hoped for you and for Haytham.”

“He was a good man,” she said, and she inwardly acknowledged the truth of this statement. “You made a good choice of husband for me.”

“A good choice or a selfish one?” he asked meditatively.

Slowly, they moved along the back corridor of the factory, past the locker room and the employees’ lounge. “He had much to offer the family, Sahlah. That's why I chose him. And every hour since his death I've asked myself if I still would have chosen him had he been hunchbacked, evil, or ridden with disease. Would I have chosen him anyway, just because I needed his talents here?” Akram's gesture encompassed the factory walls. “We persuade ourselves to believe all manner of falsehood when our self-interest guides us. Then, when the worst befalls us, we're left to gaze back over our actions. We wonder whether one of them might have been the cause of disaster. We question whether an alternative action might have averted the worst from happening.”

“You aren't blaming yourself for Haytham's death,” she said, aghast at the thought of her father carrying this burden.

“Who else is to blame? Who else brought him to this country? And to meet
my
need of him, Sahlah. Not yours.”

“I needed Haytham as well,
Abhy-jahn.”

Her father hesitated before passing through the doorway to his own office. His smile was infinitely sad. “Your spirit's as generous as it's pure,” he said.

No compliment could have grieved her more. She wanted in that instant to pour the truth before her father. But she recognised the selfishness of that desire. While it was true that she would experience the relief of finally dropping the guise of a goodness that she didn't possess, she would be dropping it at the expense of crushing the spirit of a man who had long been incapable of seeing that evil could exist under an exterior that was otherwise righteous.

It was her desperation to preserve her father's image of her that now caused her to say, “Go home,
Abby-jahn.
Please. Go home to rest.”

His answer was to kiss his fingers and press them to her cheeks. Saying nothing further, he entered his office.

She returned to reception, where her own duties awaited, her brain working anxiously to create an excuse to take her away from the factory for the time she needed to do what had to be done. If she claimed to be ill, her father would insist that someone accompany her home. If she claimed an emergency on Second Avenue—one of the children having disappeared and Yumn in a panic, for instance—he would himself charge into action. If she simply disappeared …But how could she do that? How could she cause her father more worry and trouble?

She sat behind the reception desk and watched the fish and bubbles float across the screen of her computer's monitor. There was work to be done, but she couldn't at the moment think what it was. She could only turn over the possibilities in her mind: what she could do to preserve her family and simultaneously to save herself. There was only one option.

The outside door opened, and Sahlah looked up. God
is
great, she exulted silently when she saw who was entering the factory. It was Rachel Winfield.

She'd come on her bicycle. It leaned just beyond the entry, rusted from years in the town's salty air. She wore a long, filmy skirt, and round her neck and dangling from her ears were a necklace and earrings of Sahlah's own creation, fashioned from polished rupees and beads.

Sahlah tried to take comfort in Rachel's attire, especially in the jewellery. Surely it meant that her need of help was foremost in Rachel's mind.

Sahlah didn't offer her a greeting. Nor did she let the gravity of her friend's face dismay her. The matter before them
was
a grave one. Becoming a party to ridding oneself of a burgeoning life—no matter how critical was the need to do so—wasn't an endeavour that Rachel would ever take lightly.

“Hot,” Rachel said by way of greeting. “Hotter than I ever remember. It's like the sun killed the wind and is getting ready to suck up the sea as well.”

Sahlah waited. There was only one reason for her friend to appear at the factory. Rachel was her route to the means by which she would begin to put her life back in order, and her arrival suggested that the means were at hand. It wouldn't be easy to arrange to be gone for the length of time necessary to take care of her problem—her parents had long ago made it their practice to hold her accountable for every moment of her day—but with Rachel's help, surely she'd be able to create a plausible excuse for an absence whose length would guarantee a successful visit to a doctor or a clinic or a casualty ward where someone skilled in the process could end the nightmare that she'd been living for the last—

Sahlah schooled herself to draw past the desperation. Rachel was here, she said silently. Rachel had come.

“Can you talk?” Rachel asked. “I mean”—with a glance towards the door leading into the administration offices—”maybe outside is better than here. You know.”

Sahlah rose and followed her friend out into the sunlight. Despite the heat, she felt unaccountably cool, but the coolness ran beneath her skin as if her veins argued with what her senses perceived.

Rachel found a shady spot where the factory wall cast a shadow in the afternoon light. She faced Sahlah, looking beyond her shoulder to the sprawl of the industrial estate, as if the mattress factory held a fascination that she had to experience immediately.

Just when Sahlah was beginning to wonder if her friend would ever speak, Rachel finally did so. “I can't,” she said.

The coolness beneath Sahlah's skin seemed to spread into her lungs. “Can't what?”

“You know.”

“I don't. Tell me.”

Rachel moved her eyes from the mattress factory to Sahlah's face. Sahlah wondered that she'd never noticed before how misshapen those eyes were, one slightly lower than the other and too widely set—even after surgery—to be deemed natural. It was one of the features of Rachel that Sahlah had disciplined herself to overlook. Rachel couldn't help the way she'd been born. No one could.

“I've thought and thought,” Rachel said. “All last night. I didn't even sleep. I can't help you with …you know …with what you asked.”

At first Sahlah didn't want to believe that Rachel was talking about the abortion. But there was no avoiding the implacable resolve that settled the odd, uneven features on her friend's face.

All Sahlah could manage to say was “You can't.”

“Sahlah, I talked to Theo,” Rachel said in a rush. “I know, I know. You didn't want me to, but your thinking's wrong cause you're in a state. It's only fair for Theo to have some say in this. You got to see that.”

“This isn't Theo's concern.” Sahlah could hear the stiffness in her voice.

“Tell that to Theo,” Rachel said. “He sicked up in a rubbish bin when I told him what you were planning to do. Now, don't
look
like that, Sahlah. I know what you're thinking. Like his being sick meant he didn't mean to do anything to help you. That's what I decided at first as well. But I thought and thought about this all last night, and I just know that if you wait and give things a chance to settle down and give Theo a chance to do right—”

“You didn't listen,” Sahlah finally cut in. Her body was tense with the need to take some sort of action and take it at once. She recognised the panic for what it was, but recognition did nothing to quell it. “Did you hear anything I said to you yesterday, Rachel? I can't marry Theo, I can't be with Theo, I can't even talk to Theo publicly. Why won't you see that?”

“Okay, I see it,” Rachel said. “And maybe you won't be able to talk to him for a while. Maybe you won't even be able to talk to him till the baby comes. But once the baby does come … I mean, he's a human being, Sahlah. He's not a monster. He's a decent man who knows what's right. Some other bloke might look the other way forever, but not Theo Shaw. Theo's not going to reject his own baby for long. You'll see.”

Sahlah felt as if she were sinking into the lumpy, hot ground beneath her feet. “And how do you propose that I keep my family from knowing about all this? About being pregnant? About having a baby?”

“You can't,” Rachel said with perfect reason, in the voice of a girl who hadn't the slightest idea what kind of encumbrances went with being born female into a traditional Asian family. “You'll have to tell your mum and dad.”

“Rachel.” Sahlah's mind careened from one possibility to the next, each of them presenting an unacceptable alternative of what to do and how to do it. “You've got to listen to me. You've got to try to understand.”

“But it's more than just what's right for you and the baby and Theo,” Rachel said, still reason incarnate. “I thought and thought last night about what's right for me as well.”

“How does this have anything to do with you? All I need from you is information. And a little help to get me away from here—or from my parents’ house—with enough time to see a doctor.”

“But it's not like going to the market, Sahlah. You can't just pop in and say to some bloke, ‘I got a kid inside me I want to get rid of.’ We'd have to go more than once—you and me—and—”

“I wasn't asking you to go at all,” Sahlah said. “I was just asking you to be willing to help me with information. But I can get that myself. And I
will
get that myself. And when I have it, all I'll need from you is the willingness to phone me and ask me to do something—it can be anything—that would serve as an excuse for me to be away from my parents’ house for enough time to go to the clinic—or wherever it is that I can have it done.”

“Look at you,” Rachel said. “You don't even want to say the word. You call it
it.
And that should tell you pretty much how you'll feel if you get rid of the baby.”

“I know how I'll feel. I'll feel relieved. I'll feel as if I have my life back. I'll know I haven't destroyed my parents’ belief in their children, split my family into pieces, struck a death-blow to my father, caused my world—”

“That won't happen,” Rachel said. “And even if it happens for a day or a week or a month, they'll come round. They'll all come round. Theo, your mum and your dad. Even Muhannad.”

“Muhannad,” Sahlah said, “will kill me. Once I can no longer hide my condition, my brother will kill me, Rachel.”

“That's rubbish,” Rachel said. “You know that's rubbish. He'll be in a twist and he might even pick a fight with Theo, but he'll never lay a hand on you. You're his sister, for God's sake.”

“Please, Rachel. You don't know him. You don't know my family. You see their exteriors—what everyone sees—but you don't know how it really is. You don't know what they're capable of doing. They'll see the disgrace—”

“And they'll get over it,” Rachel said, with an air of finality to her voice that washed a wave of despair over Sahlah. “And until they do, I'll take care of you. You know I'll always take care of you.”

Sahlah saw it then: how they'd come full circle. They were back where they'd been on Sunday afternoon, back where they'd met on the previous day. They were at the Clifftop Snuggeries, if only in mind rather than in body.