The Friendly Ones Read online

  The old man from next door was quite calm. ‘Put him down,’ he said. ‘There, on his back. Go and bring me a sharp knife – there must be one at the barbecue. Wipe it. Go on. And a pen,’ he said, turning to Aisha as her brother ran. ‘Just a biro would do. Take everything out, just the tube. Quick – good.’ Omith was back already, with a steak knife. The old man took it from him, running his finger along the blade. He knelt down, muttering, ‘I’m a doctor,’ in some kind of response to all this screaming, and reached out his hand for Aisha’s pen. She had found one in her bag, a new one, and tried with shaking hand to take off the lid, the stopper, to pull out the ink tube. The old man’s hand was patient, but steady, demanding; it was in that horizontal calm waiting that his professional standing was apparent. Aisha finally succeeded, and handed it to him. Before they could quite understand what he was doing, he had placed the tube in his shirt pocket, and with his left hand felt urgently at Raja’s throat. His hand stopped; held; and with a single gesture the other hand cut between his second and third fingers, into Raja’s throat. Raja made no movement as his flesh was sliced. The biro was taken from the upper pocket, and the old man – the doctor – plunged it firmly into the incision. There was a sound of whistling; you could feel the air re-inflating Raja. But Aisha was already leading her mother away to a little crowd of comforters. The flurry of action was over. The old man reached out, and pulled himself up with the aid of Omith.

  ‘He should be all right now,’ he said, to nobody in particular. ‘Has someone called for an ambulance?’ (Sharif was doing that, inside the house.) ‘The hospital will sort him out. I’ve done it once or twice before. Dramatic, but it leaves no ill effect.’

  ‘That was –’ Omith said, coming down to his brother. Raja was going to be all right, but he would come round with blood trickling down his throat and a biro stuck in his neck. He would want Omith to stay with him.

  The others were crowding round, appalled. ‘It’s best if you sit down,’ Tinku said and, placing his arms around Dolly, who was giving small piping noises of despair and helplessness, tried to push her in the direction of the patio. ‘Don’t – there’s nothing you can do here, Dolly. Come along.’

  The doctor was feeling Raja’s pulse, perhaps for the lack of something better to do, perhaps to go on seeming professional. ‘It looks frightening, I know,’ he said. ‘You’ve been taught the manoeuvre. It usually works, but if it doesn’t – well, you saw what to do. You have to decide you’re going to do that very quickly. I suppose it was one of the stones from the loquat tree he swallowed.’

  ‘It must have been that,’ Omith said.

  ‘Well, now you’ll be more careful eating them,’ the doctor said. ‘If it ever produces fruit again. The Tillotsons put it in. They loved it. I would say you’ve been lucky. I’m retired as a doctor – I was a GP. But you never forget these things. I once removed an appendix. That was the limit of my surgical experience. This was child’s play. I retired five years ago now. There’s a young fellow in my place ‒ you might know him. Dr Khan.’

  ‘Where is that?’ Omith said, with a sense of feeling dizzy. Raja had ordered him about all their lives, and that might have gone in a minute. His brother had nearly died and was still lying there faint and exhausted, his hand warm in his brother’s; this old man was talking to him about himself. Tinku and Bina were standing by, looking down as if awaiting instructions. It was for Omith to listen to the doctor talking.

  ‘Where is it?’ the old man said. ‘The surgery? On the Earlsfield road, just where it curves towards the top. We made a successful surgery out of it. I hope Dr Khan’s doing us proud. If you happen to see him, tell him Dr Spinster sends his best regards. My wife’s not at home. She’s in hospital herself.’

  But now Sharif was coming out of the house, and Tinku was going over to find out what news of the ambulance. Their mother was being comforted – restrained almost – by Aunty Bina. It was for him to stay here, with the doctor, and his brother, and in a moment the ambulance would come.

  ‘There are grandchildren now, of course,’ the doctor was saying. Had he lost interest in Raja? He let the wrist flop down. ‘Quite normal. My daughter has four, and my elder son has one. The younger two children don’t have any as yet. They’re coming up today or tomorrow. To see their mother, of course. It is serious but not final, not yet. Have you ever thought of becoming a doctor, young man?’

  It was as if the old man had not quite known who he was talking to, and with that last sentence had taken a look and realized who Omith was; he had spoken in a hearty, encouraging, routine way, as doctors must to any fifteen-year-old who shows the slightest interest. But Omith had shown no interest. He wanted to design computer programs with Raja. The old man had just decided that he ought to speak to someone like Omith like that. The party was dissolving; people were tactfully leaving without demanding anyone say goodbye to them. And now there was a light flashing somewhere nearby, on the other side of the castellated house, reflecting from some high leaf, and two paramedics in uniform were coming around the side of the house with their box of tricks. This was the proper stuff, not a biro and a steak knife now lying on the ground with his brother’s blood on it. In confusion, too, coming round the ambulance, bearing dishes wrapped in clingfilm, were the Manchester lot, concern written on the faces of Rekha and Rashed, their son Bobby and, with impeccably poor timing, like the worst storyteller in the world, his wife Aditi carrying the secret she had been waiting to divulge, her pregnant belly. Omith felt that this conjunction of stories, however ill-timed, was what they had been waiting for, and as the old man started to explain what had been done, he stood up, too, eyeing the ambulance men as they set to work, sure that in a moment they would turn and tell Dr Spinster off firmly for what he had done, for what he had failed to do. The party was over. The festoons hung, unenjoyed, unfulfilled, from the trees above the uneaten food. He had quite looked forward to some aspects of it. His mother was rushing forward to embrace Aditi, to tell her everything.

  10.

  For some reason, Enrico was still in the seat where he had been arguing, and in a sulky, ignoring stance. Had he not seen? Did he think this sort of thing was normal? Aisha looked out from the sitting room where most of the rest of them were sitting. The party was over; Mummy and Daddy and Omith had gone with Raja in the ambulance. Aisha had offered to stay, to see people off, to give them a cup of tea before they had to go. It was a great shame, but there it was. Now the remnants of the party were in no great hurry to go; they were, rather, in a mood to cap each other’s tales of lives put at risk and saved by timely intervention. They were enjoying each other a great deal. Mummy and Daddy would be at the hospital all evening, she supposed, but they would be coming home at some point. If all the aunts and cousins were still here when they came back, it would really be too much. And then there was the question of what to do about Enrico.

  He sat outside, drinking what must be a third bottle of beer, his back in its tattered brown sweater eloquent with resentment and complaint. She wished he would go home. But he would not: he was staying with them. His back spoke to her. It explained that Enrico felt they had failed in their duties towards him by leaving him outside, by showing inadequate interest in him and, worst of all, by correcting him on a matter of fact. All that would have been far more irritating to Enrico had Raja actually died. She looked at him and really felt that she could ask him to take a train back to Cambridge this evening.

  ‘What’s up?’ Fanny said, coming up and slipping her hand into the crook of Aisha’s arm. ‘Poor old Aditi. No one’s paying her the slightest attention after all. She was planning to be the star, too.’

  ‘You kept her secret so well,’ Aisha said.

  ‘To be honest,’ Fanny said, ‘I half forgot. She’s such a bore. Now what?’

  ‘Oh, someone ought to go and pay the caterers,’ Aisha said. ‘It seems such a waste.’

  ‘We can pack it up and parcel it out,’ Fanny said. ‘And take it home and eat it fo
r the next week or two. Lucky that old man being a doctor.’

  ‘At the end he said, “Well, now I suppose I should climb back over the fence,” and we all said nothing. This is after Raja had been taken off and there was nothing else for him to do. But then I realized what he meant, and said, “Oh, no, you must come through the house. There’s no need for you to be climbing fences.” And that turned out to be what he meant, could he come through the house.’

  ‘They just want someone to talk to, people that age.’

  ‘He’s got a wife and four children, the man next door.’

  ‘Well, I don’t know, then.’

  ‘They are just so weird. I don’t understand them.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘People. Where’s baby Camellia?’

  ‘God knows. Not my business.’

  They looked out together at the garden, at Enrico sitting with his back to them, at the caterers now packing up and parcelling out. Next door, there was the noise of the French windows being closed, and further away, the sound of a mother calling to her answering, querulous teenage son. The afternoon had started beautifully, but now was darkening. There were a few spots marking the flagstones. The cousins stood and watched with some enjoyment as it began to rain in earnest.

  CHAPTER TWO

  1.

  There was another man next door. Aisha remembered that the old man had said he had grown-up children, and this one could be one of those. She was going to stay on. She had explained to Enrico that she would be hanging around until Wednesday at least, to make sure of Raja, and he might as well get a train back to Cambridge on Sunday night. Enrico had looked doubtful, in his party shirt underneath his tatty old sweater, but Aisha had assured him that the trains were good until quite late on Sunday night. There was a train to Birmingham every hour, at five minutes past, then a short walk over the platform and a fast train to Cambridge, all night until at least eleven. In fact she had no idea. By the time he was at the station and on a train to Birmingham, it would be too late for him to do anything about it.

  It wasn’t until she heard the impatient rattle and tick of a black cab outside in the street that she realized how keen she was to get rid of Enrico. The poor man, she found herself thinking. He was sitting there with his coat on, his small bag by his side on the floor, and it only takes the sound of a taxi for them to leap up and say, with relief and thanks, ‘That’ll be for you.’ It was herself she was shaking her head over, leaping up and smiling brightly. Fanny smiled, gorgeously, slowly, pulling herself up without much enthusiasm, and the two of them took Enrico to the door.

  ‘I’ve very much enjoyed myself,’ Enrico said, scowling. ‘Please thank your mother and father for me.’ He made a sort of gesture towards Aisha, but she had a sandwich in her left hand, a piece of pork pie in the other. Although the rain had retreated to the spattering stage, Aisha was not going to venture out from under the porch, and the handshake he had in mind turned into a sort of shrug, performed by two people leaning into each other.

  ‘I’m so sorry they couldn’t be here to say goodbye themselves,’ Aisha said formally. ‘And I’ll see you in Cambridge in a few days’ time.’

  ‘I don’t think that’s Enrico’s taxi,’ Fanny said, drawling. ‘Someone’s in it.’

  The cab had pulled up outside their gate, but Fanny was right: there was a man in the back of it. His shape was hunched over, counting money or gathering bags.

  ‘Why don’t you take it anyway?’ Aisha said. She took a bite of the pork pie. ‘One taxi’s much like another.’

  The man got out. He had two suitcases with him, old brown leather suitcases. He put them on the pavement and stretched, a wide, relieved sort of stretch. He looked up at the heavy sky, feeling a drop of rain. There was even some enjoyment in his face at being rained on. At first Aisha thought he was going to walk up their drive, but that was impossible. He was coming home, not visiting a stranger. That was in the way his arms fell after the stretch. There had been other homecomings. She saw the stranger’s relieved face, and it was with a sense of something being talked over that she heard the Italian’s voice beginning to complain. That face, bemused, round, the eyes big and startled and blue: it was like a long-ago familiar piece of music that you caught in a public place and paused, listening intently to its cadence. She could not go on chewing. The stranger’s expression, warm and humorous, regretful, even flirtatious, went over the three of them, and he turned away. The taxi had got the house number wrong – they were hard to read from the road – and this man with the two suitcases walked twenty paces, and into the house next door. It was a strong, assessing, somehow disappointed face moving away quickly from what it had considered.

  ‘I’ll go now,’ Enrico was saying.

  ‘See you later,’ Aisha said. She smiled brightly, and surely she smiled in his direction. But there was something strange in the way she did it: he looked at her first curiously, then, as if with understanding, with the beginnings of fury. He walked down the wet gravel drive, hunched as if it were still bucketing down. He did not look back.

  2.

  Leo had forgotten what the trains on a Sunday were like, and had managed to get on the wrong one. He had found himself at Doncaster and having to change. There had been nothing to eat on either train, and he had even thought about getting a sandwich when he arrived at Sheffield. The girl who had sat opposite, with the Louise Brooks bob, the heavy boots and the delicate ankles, she had agreed – it was a scandal, she was starving. She’d got off at Chesterfield.

  Under the porch of the house next door, three Asian people stood, saying goodbye to one of them – no, two and a white man. It had been raining hard. He wondered what had happened to the Tillotsons. His father, when he opened the door, looked surprisingly chipper, and was even rubbing his hands together.

  ‘Good, good,’ he said. ‘Parked your car on the road, have you?’

  ‘No,’ Leo said, coming inside by pushing past his father. ‘It wouldn’t start this morning. Some mechanical thing. I took the train in the end.’

  ‘You could have got someone to come out,’ his father said. ‘That’s what they’re there for.’

  ‘I’m just doing what Mrs Thatcher was telling us to do the other day,’ he said. ‘Save the planet. Go by train! We’re all going to die.’

  ‘I don’t suppose taking the train from London to Sheffield instead of driving is going to put that off very much,’ his father said.

  ‘You seem cheerful,’ Leo said.

  ‘Do I?’ his father said. ‘Come through. That would be most extraordinary. I suppose I did something rather clever, just an hour ago.’

  ‘Oh, yes,’ Leo said, discouragingly. They said that when you returned to your childhood home it seemed smaller. The house was the same size, and in any case, he’d last been here at Christmas. His father had succeeded in shrinking, however. He was determined that he was not going to let him begin by explaining how clever he had been. There had been enough of that. His father should look outwards, and think of other people, and not sing his own praises for once.

  ‘You know the people next door moved out,’ he said. ‘The people who bought it, a nice family, Asian, they were having a party for all their relations. Visiting, visiting, not living there. And one of them was eating something too fast and got it stuck in his throat. And luckily I could do something about it. He’ll be fine. It all comes back to you when it needs to. I dare say they’ll always be grateful for me leaping over the fence like that, just at the right time.’

  ‘Like speaking French,’ Leo said.

  His father gave him an interrogative look, as if there were something superior and dismissive in what he had said.

  ‘Is there anything to eat?’

  ‘Oh, I dare say,’ his father said. ‘I eat at six, these days. Your mother’s left the pantry stuffed with the usual and there’s all sorts of goodies in the freezer. It never changes.’ He went off into the sitting room where the Sunday Telegraph lay folded on the arm of t
he chair. Had he changed newspapers? Leo could have sworn he used to read the Sunday Times. When he’d said, ‘It never changes,’ he’d meant, of course, that your children came home, dumped their suitcases on the floor, and started demanding food. It was true that Leo had done exactly that. But it was not quite the same. He discovered this by going into the kitchen, and then into the pantry. The kitchen was bare; a single mug and a single plate stood, washed, on the side of the sink. The pine table in the middle had a scatter of breadcrumbs, the remains of something on toast, all that the old doctor thought he would make for himself.

  To go from the kitchen into the cool, windowless pantry was to go into the ruin of his childhood. In the past, when he had come home or when he had lived here, there had been six of them – the old ones, Leo, Blossom, Lavinia and Hugh. Quite often a boyfriend or a girlfriend, too, turning up and needing to be fed. Sometimes Leo, at fifteen, had come in here and dithered, pleasantly, unsure whether he would go for a biscuit or for the full sandwich, for a piece of cheese and pickle – one of seven or eight different pickles – or for a piece of cake. What must the shopping have been like? Speculative, unplanned, just getting food in for whenever anyone felt like diving into it. Now it was depleted, like the middle point of a siege: one tin of beans, a jar of pickled onions with the label half slipping off and translucent with spilt juice, cloudy and menacing within, a jar of peanut butter for the children. Leo reached up and took the cake tin from the top of the fridge. There was a dried-up and stony block inside that might once have been half a walnut cake. Christ on a bike. Only in the fridge were there a few things: a small steak, some bagged tomatoes and small potatoes, a block of Lancashire cheese and an open jar of pickle, the lid lost. The contents of the pantry did not show that his mother had got the usual in. Hilary was shopping for himself, these days.