Twenty-three

bought him the best, most up-to-date computer and the day it was delivered was the first day I went to his flat. We set it up in his room, which was small and smelled of cigarettes. I opened the window for fresh air, something he apparently never did because he did not like the cold. Beside the open-plan kitchen and sitting room, there were two other bedrooms in the flat. The largest one belonged to Ameen, whose father owned the flat. I liked him straight away. He was flabby and smiling, his manners gentle and diplomatic. He was a doing a PhD in Chemistry down the road at Imperial College but always seemed laid back about his studies. I imagined that Anwar expected me to be like Ameen, upper class but committed to the communist cause, lavishing on it bourgeois money. Kamal was different, studying on a scholarship, aspiring. I didn't like the way he studied me, as if I were a puzzle to he figured out. He never looked at me directly. He was always shifting his eyes, but not from shyness. It was something else. A rivalry sprang up between us. It was silly but he took it seriously. Anwar would go on about how good my English was, better than Kamal's who was specializing in it. He would joke about it but I think Kamal took offence and took every opportunity to put me in my place. Ameen and Kamal kept different hours to Anwar. They would be arriving or leaving while I was there, would stroll into Anwar's room for a chat. They never knocked - they never had to with the door wide open - and this informality pleased me. They acted as if I were a cousin or a sister, as if Anwar and I could not possibly be doing anything wrong. This lulled me.

The summer was not sunny, not fresh but clammy, close. I knew Anwar's moods now. Rage when he couldn't get a security job (they turned him down because of his leg) and afterwards the quiet bitterness. He worked nights in a restaurant instead, the same Ethiopian restaurant he had taken me to. Often he brought back food and, unless the others had got to it first, I would heat it when I came during my days off. We would eat together with his papers and the computer between us. He did not know how to touchtype but I did. We sat with the computer manual and learnt Word Perfect together. Sometimes he gave me things he had written by hand and I typed them in. Or he would have started a file and I would go over it, checking the grammar. He insisted that I learn to type Arabic too. He dictated to me and I typed. It made us both feel important.

One day he said he had written a poem about me.

`Show it to me.'

`No, you might not like it.' He smiled, holding the paper out of my reach.

`Please.'

He shook his head but I managed to snatch it and ended up laughing on his lap. The poem was direct, simply erotic.

`Are you angry?' He was smiling, not caring if I was.

`Of course not.' I wanted him to think me daring.

Ameen poked his head into the room and I put the poem away. `Come, let's play cards,' he said. It was twelve o'clock and he had just got up, looking puffy. `I'll wait for you in the sitting room. We can drink a glass of tea, have a bite to eat.' He was hinting that he would like us to make tea, crack some eggs for breakfast. Because this was his flat, he expected the others to wait on him. Poor Ameen. Like Aunty Eva and so many of us, he felt deprived without his Khartoum servants. It was as if he was waiting for them to magically reappear, to clear up after him, to make the flat neat. We heard him putting on the TV, the blare of the news. Anwar closed the door and kissed me. He was different and I was different because I hadn't been angry about his poem.

It was inevitable that one day I would sit on his bed, that he would put his arms around me and ask, `Haven't you teased me enough?' We had circled each other for months, flirted for months, all the time aware that we were in London, conscious that we were free. And I had known in the back of my mind, that I would hold out and then give in to that side of me that was luxurious and lazy, that needed to he stroked and pampered and through him never he the same again. Afterwards, after the playing and the seriousness, such silence. I could hear the hum of the computer. The grating sound of the key opening the door of the flat, Ameen's excited voice, `Anwar, did you hear the news, come and hear the news.'

We leapt up, scurrying, guilty. Yes, guilty. And it was a relief that Ameen headed straight to the sitting room, the familiar on and off blare of the TV as he searched the channels for the news. Anwar and I thought the same thing: `A coup in Sudan, the government has fallen.' Another coup. Musical chairs, the carpet pulled out from underneath someone else's feet. Anwar dashed out of the room. We could go back now, I thought, and pick up our lives again. I could go back to the university, he a student again, Anwar would get his job back. We would get married.

I walked to the bathroom, conscious of every step, a little dazed, like I had been feverish for a long time and now was cool. I walked slowly as if I were fragile. My right hand was too weak to flush the toilet or turn the tap - I needed both hands. My face in the mirror looked as if nothing had happened. My hair was dishevelled as if I had been asleep. I smoothed it down with water, cleared my throat. Would my voice sound normal? 'Yellow suits me,' I thought and a memory came of another bathroom mirror, of me admiring myself while Baba packed and Mama fussed over him. Admiring myself in my yellow pyjamas, while Baba left the house for the last time. I should have been with him instead. When I vomited into the basin, there were bits of tomato like flecks of blood.

The room looked wrong, messy, student-like and smelled of Anwar's cigarettes. It should not he like this. It should be a room in the best hotel in Khartoum, my wedding dress hanging in the cupboard, the sheets white and crisp. A view of the Nile and henna on my hands. I would slip my arms through the sleeves of a new dressing gown that matched my nightdress. Mama had bought Ille that set from Selfridges, peach-coloured, expensive. And she would have told the sales girl that her daughter was getting married and they would have smiled the smile they save for foreigners with money. I should not be wearing my ordinary jeans and yellow T-shirt. My mother should be a phone call away, anxious, waiting to ask, Are von all right?'

Anwar came into the room, smiling, shaking his head, and tapping his finger to his forehead. `Ameen is mad. He's excited and the news has nothing to do with Sudan.'

`What happened?'

`Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait.'

So the Khartoum government hadn't fallen and we were not going hack.

`Why are you so glum? Are you all right?' He was trying to be kind but he was thinking of the news. I said, `I have to go home, I'm not in the mood for Ameen.' He understood and did not urge me to stay. I walked down Gloucester Road and thought that whatever happened to me, whatever happened in the world, London remained the same, constant; continuous underground trains, the newsagents selling Cadbury's chocolates, the hurried footsteps of people leaving work. That was why we were here: governments fell and coups were staged and that was why we were here. For the first time in my life, I disliked London and envied the English, so unperturbed and grounded, never displaced, never confused. For the first time, I was conscious of my shitty-coloured skin next to their placid paleness. What was wrong with me today? I had a warm bath when I got home. I heated up a tin of soup. My dislike of London went away and left me feeling ill.

He said, `I love you more than before.' I wasn't sure whether I loved him more or less or just the same. I belonged to him more now, he knew me now more that anyone else and more than my family even knew me. It was strange that someone could come close to me like that. His voice became distant as I worked out when my next period was due. Who would care if I became pregnant, who would be scandalized? Aunty Eva, Anwar's flatmates. Omar would never know unless I wrote to him. Uncle Saleh was across the world. A few years hack, getting pregnant would have shocked Khartoum society, given nay father a heart attack, dealt a blow to my mother's marriage, and mild, modern Omar, instead of heating me, would have called me a slut. And now nothing, no one. This empty space was called freedom.

`Talk to me, Najwa, don't daydream.' imagine telling Anwar about a peach satin nightdress, clothes bought specially for a honeymoon. He said the soreness would go away. He said the guilt would go away. `Like every other Arab girl,' he said, `you've been brainwashed about the importance of virginity.'

He was right about the soreness but the guilt didn't go away. His stories of prospective Sudanese brides paying for operations to restore their virginity depressed me. He had a friend, a doctor, he said, who was doing quite well performing illegal abortions on unmarried girls. You would think them demure,' he said, `covering their hair and acting coy, but all that is hypocrisy, social pressure. Do you remember the girls who went missing whose photos were shown on TV? They weren't lost, these girls, they weren't missing - they were killed by their brothers or fathers then thrown in the Nile.'

He went on as if I were a child who needed to be taught the facts of life, as if I lived in a happy, innocent world and needed shaking up. `Arab society is hypocritical,' he would say, `with double standards for men and women.' I remembered how Omar was allowed to smoke and drink beer and I was not. The seedy parties he went to without taking me. I had taken these things for granted, not questioned them. Anwar told me that most of the guys in university used to visit brothels. Then they would heat up their sister if they so much as saw her talking to a boy.

`Did you go to a brothel?' I asked him and knew he would say yes.

`There was a girl there who became attached to me.' He laughed a little. She was an Ethiopian refugee as so many of them were. He seemed surprised that a young prostitute would have feelings for him. It annoyed me that he was talking about her as if she were a pet.

`Why shouldn't she love you? You were probably nice to her.'

He laughed and said, `Are you jealous, Najwa?' I threw a pillow at him and he ducked.

He tried a different line of argument. He talked about the West, about the magazines I read - Cosmo and Marie Claire. `Tell me,' he said, `how many twenty-five-year-old girls in London are virgins?' That was when I laughed and felt a little better. It became a game for us, every time we were out, looking at girls. `Is she? Isn't she?' He was right, I was in the majority now, I was a true Londoner now. I could take a quiz in a magazine: `How Hot is Your Love life?' or `Rate Him as a Lover!' I could circle the answers based on experience not on imagination. `I know you're Westernized, I know you're modern,' he said, `that's what I like about you - your independence.'

But I would have preferred the breathlessness of a wedding, its glow of approval, not his room smelling of cigarettes, the sheets he rarely changed, not his flatmates' laughter, the knowing way they now looked at me. At times there would he a moment of clarity, a moment with no sound, no touch and I would wonder, staring at a strand of my hair clinging to his pillow, what I was doing, how had I gone that far? Did Omar wake up to see prison walls and prison sheets and did he wonder for a second what he was doing?

Anwar said, You can't still he feeling guilty, you're enjoying yourself too much.' He laughed and said, if your conscience was troubling you, you wouldn't be so eager now.' So I kept my thoughts to myself. They churned in my head, my active, uneducated mind; my kind of loneliness. You have become quiet,' he said, 'you have become drearily.' I dreamed of nothing, no happy dreams and no sad dreams. I lay in my bed awake, listening to the sounds of the street; the windows wide open because of the heat. I remembered things I had left behind in Khartoum: a pair of beige sandals, a poster of Bonet' NI, my schoolbooks and photos. Where were these things now - in whose hands had they fallen? Our house was looted. It was looted for the television sets, the video recorders, the silver, freezers, cars, hi-fi system and cameras. Even the air conditioners were stripped from the walls, the fans unhooked from the ceilings. It was looted because my father was a symbol, even more than the President had been, of an order that was being usurped. His letter opener made of ivory; my mother's china and crystal glasses - did they smash in the chaos or were they delicately taken away? I would never know. I should forget, let go. Yet I could still feel a tattered Enid Blyton book in my hand, smell the chlorine clinging to my swimsuit, a copy of Cosmopolitan borrowed front Randa and never returned.

I phoned her up in Edinburgh to apologize for the magazine. She laughed. `I can't believe it! It's been five years - how can you remember it?'

`There's a novel too - I never got round to returning it,' I said. One by Danielle Steele.'

`Ach, I don't read her any more. I've moved on.' There was a laugh in her voice. It made me feel like I was old and pedantic.

I could lie in bed all day. A phone call to Aunty Eva to say I was not feeling well, then hack to bed to stare at the ceiling, and I would look at my watch and, strangely enough, an hour had passed just like that, two hours, three. I liked it when I had my period and Anwar kept away from me. The guilt lost its edge then. I liked it that he was not too keen on us meeting in my flat. The aura of my parents weighed on me. Aunty Eva did a clear out and gave me piles of magazines. I cut out the pictures of princesses in exile: daughters of the Shah, daughters of the late King of Egypt, the descendants of the Ottoman Sultan. They were all floating in Europe knowing they were royal, but it didn't matter, it didn't matter any more. Muslim countries had rejected the grandeur of kings and wanted revolutions instead. After his fall, the daughter of the Emperor Haile Selassie was imprisoned for years in a small room. `Well, I know for sure whose side I'm on,' Anwar would say, `the side of the people.' He would be happy if Britain became a republic and I would be sad. Uncle Nabeel bought the new biography of Prince Charles and when he finished with it, I read it from cover to cover. `You waste your time,' Anwar said but the books he gave me to read always disturbed me.

Out of the blue, Wafaa phoned me. But it was not really out of the blue. She had been phoning once every two or three months, saying the usual things, come with me to the mosque, cone to a Ladies' Eid Party, so have you started to pray like you promised you would? This time her voice seemed to come from another planet. `So, Najwa, have you started to pray?' I nearly laughed out loud. I was further away than she thought; I was out of it now. She had no idea. If my heart had been soft, I would have burst into tears and asked her how to repent. But my heart was not soft. I saw Wafaa through Anwar's eyes; a backward fundamentalist, someone to look down on. My voice was cold when I answered her questions, yes, no, sorry I'm busy, got to go. Unless she was completely thick skinned, she would never phone nee again. Yes, I wanted to pray in the same way that I wanted to sprout wings and fly. There was no point in yearning, was there? No point in stretching out. In my own way, in my own style, I was sliding. First my brother, and now it was my turn to come down in the world.