Kamila Shamsie - Broken Verses

He waved his hand. ‘There was just something so honest about their relationship. That’s all I’m saying. They didn’t flaunt it, but they didn’t lie and sneak around either. They didn’t deceive anyone. And you’re the proof of that. You, growing up here, where everything goes on behind closed doors and yet everyone acts outraged about the tiniest suggestion of impropriety. You’re not embarrassed or angry that your mother was involved with a man she never married. You don’t hold it against her.’

‘I loved him before I knew the meaning of the term “social convention”, Ed. It’s just that simple.’

‘You never had to find out she was lying to you. It’s that simple.’

Shehnaz Saeed had always confounded the purveyors of gossip by keeping her private life utterly private. Through all the years she was in the public eye there was never even a whiff of scandal attached to her. So, when she married her second husband, everyone was startled. He had been part of her wide social circle, but no one imagined he was anything more than that. Not even Ed?

‘I remember the first time I saw your mother after the Poet died,’ he said. ‘At a supermarket — Paradise, maybe. Somewhere near Bath Island, at any rate.’

She never got used to thinking of the neighbourhood around my father’s house as her neighbourhood. On those rare occasions when she did go out to shop it would always be back to her old haunts, the places where she looked on in exasperation as Omi took more time than seemed possible choosing the perfect watermelon, the ideal selection of green chillies. Even when it came to toothpaste and shampoo and soap, Omi would regard all the possible options as though being asked to locate a talisman, never choosing the same brand twice in a row.

‘She looked so lost. And there were these two women staring at her and obviously talking about her. Samina was ignoring them. But then one of the women said, out loud, “Well, you can’t expect people to treat you like a widow if you haven’t been a wife.”’

I folded my arms, pressed them against my chest. ‘What did you do?’

‘I went up to her, held her like this,’ he placed his hands on my arms halfway between shoulder and elbow, ‘kissed her on both cheeks and said how sorry I was. She seemed so grateful and surprised. There’s nothing more unfair than your mother being placed in a position where she should have been grateful that some nineteen-year-old idiot didn’t cut her dead when he saw her.’

I could love you, I thought.

He moved his hands slowly up to my shoulders. ‘So, tell me something. What do you believe happened to your mother fourteen years ago?’

I leaned back, tipping my chair on to two legs, so that he had to let go of me to avoid toppling forward. If he had said ‘think’ instead of ‘believe’ I might even have answered him. But ‘believe’? As though the fact of Mama’s continued life was so implausible it could only belong in that realm in which atheists placed God, that realm in which faith and fantasy were synonymous. I could understand his scepticism, it wasn’t something I would hold against him. But why did he have to look at me as though he were trying so hard — too hard — to convince me he was ready to double the numbers of this religion to which I alone subscribed, not because he believed the message but because he could not see me walk through the wilderness alone?

Come down to it, Ed was just another one of those men who wanted to fix me and believed that he could.

Take me broken, I wanted to say. But I knew already that in his eyes each one of my breaks would shift from challenge to reproach. Why can’t you be fixed by me, he’d want to know. Why aren’t I enough? Why do you resist my attempts?

I stood up and walked over to the wall without either window or door which was almost completely covered by an oil-paint poster advertising SHEHNAZ SAEED IN ‘MACBETH’ .

‘If we’re going to swap theories here, Ed, let’s make it about a present-day mystery. Who’s writing those hoax pages and sending them to your mother, and why?’

‘Leave it alone, Aasmaani. It isn’t the Poet.’

‘I know that. But I’m still entitled to be curious, aren’t I?’

‘Of course.’ He picked up the pile of photographs from his desk, pulled one out, and threw the rest into the waste-paper basket. ‘But I can’t help you. I’ve got no theories.’

His manner was so affectedly casual I knew he was hiding something. Irritation, or even hurt, at the way I had brushed him off? Or was it something else? I looked up again at the poster. Shehnaz Saeed’s face was painted on it with strokes so meticulous they avoided every flaw except that of excessive precision. There was no animation in the face; everything human had been replaced by perfection — except for the eyes, which seemed to look down at me in both invitation and warning. What was it I had thought the other day when I recalled her Lady Macbeth? Anyone in that audience would have plunged a dagger into a heart for her.

After the Poet died there was no reason for my mother to keep the code secret any more. She told me no one else knew it, but that was a year before she disappeared. What all did she say in that intervening year to the woman with whom she spent so much time? What did she say of codes and peaches and Shakespeare and shawls?

Ed said my name, his voice rising in a question.

I turned towards him. There he sat — Mama’s boy and his own man knotted into one. It made perfect sense. Why else would he have brought the letter to my office, then refused to give it to me? Why else tell me the Poet couldn’t be alive, then tell me that he could, then wake up the next morning and tell me no again? Poor Ed, caught between filial love and conscience.

He held out his hand to me. Not just conscience. There was something more going on here, something which Shehnaz Saeed couldn’t possibly have anticipated.

Between Ed and me there was a sheet of sunlight, speckled with dust. I could walk to him through the sunlight and take his hand. I could play him. I could play his mother through him, pretending to be the fool while all along gathering information about what exactly was going on, and once I had figured that out I would find a way to turn it on its head.

‘You’re angry with me for something,’ he said.

As he said it I realized how strange that, no, I wasn’t. Not at all. I was — I felt this all along the muscles of my back — incredibly disappointed. And without the heart to keep this going any longer. Whatever Shehnaz Saeed’s game, I wanted nothing more to do with it.

‘Angry? No. Just a little guilty. Look, I’m going to have to be blunt here. You’ve outlived your usefulness for me.’

‘What?’ He looked so startled — so wounded — that it was all I could do to keep going.

‘The pages are hoaxes, Ed. I looked them over again last night, and it was obvious they’re fakes. Whoever wrote them did very well with the broad strokes, but there are certain fine details which are just completely wrong. So, sorry, but I don’t need you or your mother in my life to act as the courier service any more.’

I moved towards the door, and he came through the sunlight and caught my arm. ‘To hell with my mother and the letters. What about us?’

He was so beautiful right then.

‘Listen, sweets, I’m sorry. I don’t know what to tell you.’ I pulled my arm away. I don’t know how to tell you what a monster your mother is . ‘Call me a bitch if it makes you feel better.’

‘You’re not,’ he said. ‘I don’t understand what you’re doing.’

‘I’m saying goodbye.’ I kissed him on the angle of his cheekbone. ‘Safe travels, Ed.’

I walked out and returned to my office. By the time I was sitting at my chair, I could feel white-hot anger taking over my mind. I picked up the phone and called Shehnaz Saeed. I would tell her a thing or two. I would tell her she didn’t have the intelligence to sound like the Poet. I would tell her all she’d done was make her son unhappy. I would tell her my mother used to laugh at her behind her back. I would tell her she was wrinkled and that everyone knew her husband couldn’t bear to touch her any more. I would say ‘casting couch’ and ‘neglectful mother’ and ‘has-been’ and ‘mediocre talent’.