Swimming on the Lawn Page 3

  Above the sound of workmen shouting and women chatting, I hear water slapping against the wooden hull. I watch as a donkey is led up the plank of the boat next to ours. It gets halfway and stops. It won’t move. A man is pulling on its harness from the front, and a man is pushing it from behind. Suddenly the man behind it jumps backwards onto the bank just as the donkey kicks. After a while the man comes back up the plank behind the donkey holding a big stick and hits it hard on the rump. I glare at the man, and then I look away as he hits the donkey again.

  Our boat rocks as our gangplank is dragged away and the thick mooring rope is untied from a wooden stake a short way up the bank. A man coils the rope into big loops over his shoulder, approaching the boat until his feet are in the water. He throws the coiled rope into the boat, and then he lifts the hem of his jellabiah and grips it between his teeth to keep it from getting wet, and with the help of some other men, he pushes the boat out.

  I look around for my uncle and see him sitting next to the man on the tiller. I look over at the other boat as we leave the bank. The donkey is on board and tethered to the mast.

  A boy not much older than I unfurls a sail that has so many patches it looks like crazy paving. The wind catches the sail and we move gently away. As we leave the shore behind, bright circles of light from the lamps stretch out to us across the water, slowly thinning into feeble tentacles that reluctantly let us go. The moonlight on the smooth surface of the river looks as flat and shiny as the polished aluminium trays of the tea sellers at the Friday markets. One of the women sitting near me begins to sing. A few others join in. It is very soothing. I feel sleepy and I close my eyes.

  Donkey

  My head jerks up as our boat hits the shallows of the opposite bank. People are gathering their belongings and slowly making their way to the front of the boat. My uncle is beside me and helps me across the plank and onto the land. He leaves me standing for a couple of minutes, and then he is back with our bags.

  ‘We have a bit of a walk to my house, so you can ride on a donkey.’

  ‘No, I’m not tired. I can walk,’ I say. The donkey seems huge up close, and I have never ridden one before.

  ‘It’ll be much quicker this way,’ he says. I am lifted onto the donkey’s bony back and feel very unsafe. There is nothing to hold onto except the donkey’s mane. But I know what it is like when Amir pulls my hair, and I don’t want to hurt the donkey.

  A man leads the donkey up the bank, and my uncle walks by my side and holds my arm. I concentrate on keeping my balance. We pass lots of houses, but there are no lights in them. It is very dark and very quiet. No one from the boat is going the same way as us.

  My uncle is talking to the donkey’s owner, but I don’t listen to what they are saying. I am wondering what will happen if the donkey trips over a rock, or if its hoof goes down a hole in the ground and it twists its ankle, or if it suddenly gets scared and gallops away and I fall off.

  Eventually, the donkey stops by a big wooden gate in the middle of a mudbrick wall. ‘Here we are, home at last.’ My uncle helps me down, and my legs feel a bit wobbly.

  ‘Goodnight,’ says the donkey man as he walks off.

  ‘Goodnight, and thank you,’ says my uncle as he opens the gate.

  Village

  I follow my uncle into a large courtyard. There are no lights anywhere. A woman comes out of the dark towards us. She puts her hands on either side of my head and turns my face up so that she can see me by the light of the moon.

  ‘You are Farida,’ she says. ‘I’m your Aunty Zahra. Let’s get you into bed. We can talk in the morning.’ She takes my hand and leads me to a bed in a row of beds lined up in the middle of the yard.

  ‘Do you need to go to the toilet?’

  ‘No,’ I lie.

  She gently sits me down on the edge of the bed, takes off my sandals for me and gestures for me to lie down. She protectively places a sheet over me and smooths my hair off my forehead, then walks away. I pull the sheet over my head like a hood and close my eyes. I can hear my aunty and uncle talking quietly until their voices fade away. I feel hot. I throw the sheet off and open my eyes. The sun is up, and all the beds that were around me the night before have gone. Mine is the only bed in the huge empty courtyard. To one side are some mudbrick rooms, each with a small verandah, and at the end of the building there are a couple of straggly trees. Under one of them, my aunty is cooking on a charcoal stove. I turn over and see a boy, younger than I, watching me.

  When he sees that I am awake, he comes closer. ‘I’m your cousin, Ahmed. Are you getting up now? I’ve been waiting for you for hours. Mum said not to wake you, and I’ve been very quiet.’

  I sit up. My dress is all crumpled. I put on my sandals. ‘Can you show me the toilet, please?’

  ‘Over there.’ He points at a small square room standing on its own in the far corner of the yard. ‘When you’ve finished, come to the pump. Your bag is in the kids’ room.’

  ‘Can you wait here for me and show me where that is when I come back?’

  Ahmed sits on my bed and watches me as I run to the toilet, which is a small windowless room with a hole in the ground, but the dirt floor is clean and it doesn’t smell. There is no toilet paper, but there is a bucket of water and a tin mug for washing. Squatting is so much easier than it was on the train.

  When I come back, Ahmed gets up off the bed and I follow him to one of the buildings. It is cool on the verandah, and darker and even cooler inside the room. The light from the doorway is enough for me to spot my bag on a wooden table.

  As my eyes get used to the gloom, I notice that there are six beds squeezed together, a wardrobe against the wall to one side of the door, and a cabinet with a glass front on the other. Inside the cabinet, pretty decorated tea glasses with gold-painted rims are lined up in neat rows on one shelf, and on the other is a silver teapot, a sugar bowl, a milk jug, and a couple of dolls wearing tartan kilts! On the walls above the beds are a few framed black-and-white photographs, too high for me to see the faces clearly. There is also a calendar, five years out of date, open on a picture of a beautiful Indian woman with long, black, shiny hair, advertising coconut oil.

  Ahmed watches as I open the front pocket of my bag and bring out my toothbrush, and then from the main compartment I take out a small towel and a clean frock. When I pull out a pair of underpants, Ahmed turns away and heads for the door. As I follow him to the hand-pump I notice that my bed has disappeared.

  By the pump I put my things on a small stool, and cup my hands under the spout. Ahmed pushes the lever up and down, but at first nothing happens. He continues pumping, and suddenly water starts gushing out in spurts as though it has hiccups. I quickly splash water onto my face, washing away the last of any stray strands of dreams.

  When I stand up and pick up my towel, Ahmed stops pumping and holds a tin cup under the spout, and it is filled by the last gush of water. He hands me the cup.

  ‘After you’ve brushed your teeth, come over there. My mum’s made you a cup of tea. Then she’ll show you where you can have a bath.’

  I watch as my cousin walks to the wooden door in the far wall. It is the one I came through the night before, and I notice it had once been painted a dark green. As I start brushing my teeth, Ahmed lifts the latch, pulls back the door and steps out into the street. All I can see through the doorway is the mudbrick wall of the house opposite, before he closes the door behind him.

  I rinse my mouth, and drink some of the water in the cup before tipping what is left onto a patch of grass. The grass looks like a lumpy green mattress that has been abandoned in the middle of the courtyard.

  I pick up my clothes and walk over to the trees. There is an outdoor kitchen without walls: just four wooden posts holding up a palm-frond roof. My aunty is sitting on a low stool, stirring a huge pan simmering on a charcoal-burning stove. I can smell tomatoes and onions as well as the distinctive whiff of tripe. On a metal tray, cubes of raw meat and chunks of red onion are thr
eaded onto iron skewers waiting their turn to be cooked over the charcoal.

  ‘Good morning,’ says my aunty, smiling, and indicating that I should sit on the palm-frond mat that is out of the path of any smoke from the fire.

  ‘Good morning,’ I say, seeing her properly for the first time. Ahmed’s mother is pretty. Her long cotton scarf has slipped back from her head. Her hair is plaited into such neat and narrow rows that it looks like black velvety needlecord that flows from her scalp in shiny waves to halfway down her back. Her lower lip is tattooed a dark blue-grey, a traditional custom to enhance beauty, but I’ve only seen it on older women.

  My aunty tosses one end of her scarf out of the way over her shoulder while she cooks, but then uses it wadded up to protect her hand from the heat when she picks up a blackened kettle from the coals and pours steaming milky tea through a strainer into two glasses. She hands me one. I take a careful sip. It is like drinking hot sugar syrup. My aunty is watching me.

  ‘Do you need some more sugar?’ she asks.

  ‘No thanks,’ I say politely. Then feel I need to explain. ‘I don’t usually have this much sugar in my tea.’

  ‘Plenty of sugar makes a girl sweet,’ she says, and laughs.

  My ‘bath’ isn’t the shower I am expecting, but another container of water filled from the pump in the yard and another tin mug that is placed in a small room where I stand in a pair of borrowed rubber flip-flops and I’m washed and rinsed by my aunt. I feel a bit peculiar being bathed by someone else when it is something I have done for myself for years, but I think that maybe it is so I don’t waste too much water.

  When I am dressed I decide to go out and have a look around and see if I can find my cousin. When I open the outside door, there is a sheep lying on the ground blocking my way. I know it is dead because I can see blood soaked into the dirt next to its head. I’m still standing there wondering whether to go back inside when Ahmed comes along the alley.

  ‘Jump over it,’ he says.

  ‘Why is there a dead sheep here? Who killed it?’ I ask.

  ‘My dad did. It’s alms for the poor. He always kills two sheep for the Eid. One for the family and one for people who can’t afford a sacrifice. Soon it will be taken away and divided up between a few families.’

  ‘Where’s the other sheep?’

  ‘That one was slaughtered early this morning. I wanted to wake you so you could watch, but Mama said you got here very late last night and you needed to sleep.’

  I’m so relieved that I missed it.

  ‘Anyway, I’ll show you round and you can meet some of my friends, then when we get back the special Eid breakfast will be ready. I can’t wait. My favourite is the raw liver with raw onions, with lots of chilli and lemon juice paste,’ says Ahmed before making a loud slurping noise like he is already imagining the taste and has to stop his saliva from drooling out of his mouth.

  I am not going to touch the raw liver.

  Later that day, once the worst of the afternoon heat has been cooled by the breeze from the river, my uncle says, ‘Come, Farida. There is something you need to see before you go home.’

  Our walk takes us to the outskirts of the village. We turn inland, away from the thin line of date palms that mark the banks of the distant river, and continue along a narrow goat track that winds its way through sparse prickle bushes up a slight hill. The sandy ground is now strewn with small heaps of jagged rocks that look like someone has tipped them off the back of a tip-up lorry.

  At last we reach the top and I turn to look back. The breeze is wonderful up here, and the sun is low enough to make our shadows long and skinny on the ground. I can see the river and the village in the distance. The mudbrick houses are turning orange in the setting sunlight.

  ‘It’s beautiful,’ I say.

  ‘Yes, it is, but there is something else I want to show you,’ my uncle says.

  I turn to look in the direction he is pointing. The sun is lower now and I make out dark silhouettes of what look like crumbling old buildings in the distance.

  ‘Is that an abandoned village?’ I ask.

  ‘No,’ he says. ‘They are the ruins of pyramids – the tombs of our forebears.’

  Oranges

  Back home, the orange trees in our garden are in danger of collapse. They are weighed down with so much fruit that their branches touch the ground on all sides. They look like green and orange camouflage tents. Selma and I have two empty buckets each.

  ‘I’ll start on this tree,’ I say. ‘You choose one of the others.’

  I pick an orange, and peel it, the rind getting under my nails. It is deliciously sweet. I eat half of it quickly and throw the rest away. The strong citrusy smell hangs around me like an invisible cloud.

  I start picking the oranges, one hand holding the branch steady so that it doesn’t break while I twist off the fruit with the other hand. Despite being careful, my arms are getting scratched by the thorns. It is hot work.

  ‘Maybe we could sell some of these to the shop down by the block of flats,’ I say. ‘What do you think?’

  ‘That’s a good idea,’ says Selma. ‘How much do you think we could get?’

  ‘It will depend on how many we can carry. They’re heavy and it’s quite a long way.’

  Soon we fill our buckets, but they are too full to lift off the ground, and so we tip out most of the oranges. We have to make about six trips each to the kitchen, where we empty our buckets into cardboard boxes that Mama keeps from her monthly grocery shopping.

  The scratches on my arms turn into angry welts, and they sting even more when I wash them at the kitchen sink. Amazingly, Selma has managed to pick her oranges much more carefully.

  ‘It looks like you’ve been attacked by a cat,’ she says. ‘Maybe there was a cat hiding in the orange tree. A marmalade cat!’ And she gives me a Cheshire grin.

  We get one of Mama’s big palm-frond shopping baskets and count twenty oranges into it. Selma and I take a handle each, lift the basket and walk across the kitchen. We add ten more oranges.

  ‘I think we’ll just take thirty,’ I say. ‘If the shop doesn’t want them, we’ll have to carry them back again and we’ll be fed up and it will feel even heavier on the way home.’

  ‘If the shop doesn’t want to give us any money, we could just give them away, then we won’t have to carry them back.’

  ‘Good idea,’ I say.

  We set off down the road, the basket swinging gently between us. It doesn’t seem too heavy at first, but ten minutes later – and only halfway there – the basket feels as if Amir has snuck into it, hoping for a ride. We keep stopping to swap sides. I can feel the sweat running down my back.

  ‘If we get thirty piastres, what will you buy with your half of the money?’ Selma asks.

  ‘I don’t know. Maybe some Superman comics. What will you buy?’

  ‘I want to buy Mama a present. What do you think she’d like?’

  ‘That’s very kind of you and a wonderful idea. She likes books, but they’ll be too expensive. Maybe a nice notebook for her to write in?’

  We arrive at the railing that runs around the perimeter of the scraggly lawns that surround the block of flats. We duck under and make for the shop next to the building’s entrance. I’m looking at the ground in case there are any stones or broken bricks that might scrape my toes, and I notice an orange-coloured piece of folded paper caught between tufts of yellowing grass.

  I stop and pick it up. Selma turns to see what it is.

  I hold up a faded and grubby twenty-five piastre note. The shopkeeper glances at our oranges, then he points to the floor by the wall, and we see cardboard boxes full of oranges. It looks like other people have had the same idea.

  ‘Ours are much more ripe,’ I say. ‘And they’re very sweet and juicy. Why don’t you try one?’

  ‘I’m sorry, I have too many. I can’t sell all these,’ the shopkeeper says. ‘Next year you have to come sooner.’

  I look at Selma. She shr
ugs her shoulders. I say, ‘Let’s go and visit Aunty Nina. She doesn’t have an orange tree. We can give them to her, and we can see the baby.’

  Eggs

  Aunty Nina lives in a house just across the road from the flats. We clap our hands by the gate. The door to the house opens and a servant in a perfectly ironed white jellabiah steps out onto the driveway to see who it is.

  ‘We’ve come to see Aunty Nina,’ we call out together.

  He waves at us to come in.

  We crunch along the pebble drive, wipe our feet on the doormat, and carry the basket into the house. We leave it in the hallway, and make our way through to the sitting room.

  By the sofa we stop to admire an empty bassinet on a stand. It is festooned with swags of white mosquito netting, and inside, the white sheets are trimmed with lace. After we’ve had a good look and examined everything, including the pastel-coloured rabbit and teddy bear, we go out through the French doors onto the back verandah. We see Aunty Nina in the garden under the biggest tree. She is sitting in one of the wicker chairs that are arranged around a low coffee table. The table is covered in a white cotton cloth that reaches to the ground. She is reading a magazine and hasn’t seen us.

  ‘Hello, Aunty Nina,’ we call.

  ‘What a lovely surprise,’ she says, smiling at us. ‘Is your mother with you?’

  ‘No, we came on our own,’ I say. ‘We brought you some oranges off our tree. They’re in the hall. We were going to sell them to the shop, but the shopkeeper had too many.’

  ‘Where’s the baby?’ asks Selma.

  ‘He’s having a sleep in his room, but it’s time he woke up and had something to eat. I’ll go and fetch him.’