“Barbara! Hullo, hullo! Dad and I are blowing bubbles. Come and see. When the light hits them just exactly right, they look like round rainbows. Did you know that, Barbara? Come and see, come and see.”
The little girl and her father were seated on the solitary wooden bench in front of their flat, she in the fast- fading light, he in the growing shadows where his cigarette glowed like a crimson firefly. He touched his daughter's head fondly and rose in the formal fashion that was his by nature. “You'll join us?” Taymullah Azhar asked Barbara.
“Oh do, do, do,” the child exclaimed. “After the bubbles, we're watching a video.
“This is a
“Hence the title. Yeah. Right.”
“So she
“Now, there's a twist I might be able to live with.”
“You've never seen it, have you? Well, tonight you can. Do come.” Hadiyyah whirled round in a circle, surrounding herself with a hoop of bubbles. Her long, thick plaits flew about her shoulders, the silver ribbons that tied them glittering like pale dragonflies. “The little mermaid's prettier'n anything. She has auburn hair.”
“A good contrast to her scales.”
“And she wears the sweetest little shells on her chest.” Hadiyyah demonstrated with two small, dark hands cupped over two non-existent breasts.
“Ah. Strategically placed, I see,” Barbara said.
“Won't you watch it with us? Please? Like I said, we've got toffee ap-ples…” Coaxingly, she drew out the last two words.
“Hadiyyah,” her father said quietly, “an invitation once extended needn't be repeated.” And to Barbara, “Nonetheless, we'd be most happy to have you join us.”
Barbara considered the proposition. An evening with Hadiyyah and her father offered the potential for more distraction, and she liked the thought of that very much. She could sit with her little friend, comfortably lounging on enormous floor pillows, their heads in their palms and their feet in the air, swaying side by side as they kept time to the music. She could chat to her little friend's father afterwards, when Hadiyyah herself had been sent off to bed. Taymullah Azhar would expect that much. It was a habit they'd developed during the months of Barbara's enforced leave from Scotland Yard. And in the past few weeks especially, their dialogue had moved from the banalities of relative strangers being polite to the initial delicate conversational probing of two individuals who might become friends.
But in that friendship lay the rub of the matter. It called for Barbara to reveal her encounters with Hillier and Lynley. It required the truth of her demotion and her estrangement from the man she'd sought to emulate. And because Azhar's own eight-year-old daughter was the child whose life had been saved by Barbara's impetuous actions on the North Sea-actions that she'd managed to keep from Azhar in the three months since the chase had occurred-he would feel a responsibility for the fallout to her career that wasn't his to bear.
“Hadiyyah,” Taymullah Azhar said when Barbara didn't answer, “I think we've had enough bubbles for the evening. Return them to your room and wait for me there, please.”
Hadiyyah's small brow furrowed, and her eyes looked stricken. “But, Dad, the little mermaid…?”
“We shall watch it as previously decided, Hadiyyah. Put the bubbles in your room now.”
She gave Barbara an anxious glance. “More'n half the toffee apple,” she said. “If you'd like, Barbara.”
“Hadiyyah.”
She smiled impishly and dashed into the house.
Azhar reached into the breast pocket of his spotless white shirt and brought forth a packet of cigarettes, which he offered. Barbara took one, said thanks, and accepted his light as well. He observed her in silence until she grew so restive that she was compelled to speak.
“I'm knackered, Azhar. I'll have to cry off tonight. But thanks. Tell Hadiyyah I'm happy to watch a film with her another time. Hopefully, when the heroine isn't as skinny as a pencil with a silicone chest.”
His gaze was unwavering. He studied her the way other people studied the labels on tins in supermarkets. Barbara wanted to writhe away, but she managed to restrain herself. He said, “You must have returned to work today.”
“Why'd you think-”
“Your clothing. Has your”-he searched for a word, a euphemism undoubtedly-“situation been resolved at New Scotland Yard, Barbara?”
There was no point in lying. Despite the fact that she'd been able to keep from him the full knowledge of what had occurred to put her there, he knew that she'd been placed on suspension. She was going to have to start dragging herself out of bed and down to work each morning, beginning with the very next day, so he would deduce sooner or later that she wasn't spending her waking hours feeding the ducks in Regent's Park any longer. “Yeah,” she said. “It was resolved today.” And she drew in deeply on her cigarette so that she'd have to turn her head and blow the smoke away from his face, thus hiding her own.
“And? But what am I asking? You're dressed for work, so it must have gone well.”
“Right.” She offered him a spurious smile. “It did. All the way. I'm still gainfully employed, still in CID, still have my pension intact.” She'd lost the confidence of the only person who counted at the Yard, but she didn't add that. She couldn't imagine an occasion when she would.
“This is good,” Azhar said.
“Right. It's the best.”
“I'm happy to know that nothing from Essex affected you here in London.” Again, that level gaze of his, dark eyes the colour of chocolate drops in a face with nut-brown skin that was amazingly un-lined on a man of thirty- five.
“Yeah. Well. It didn't,” she said. “Everything worked out brilliantly.”
He nodded, looking past her finally, above her head and up into the fading sky. The lights from London would hide all but the most brilliant of the coming night's stars. Even those that shone would do so through a thick pall of pollution that not even the growing darkness could dissipate. “As a child, I drew my greatest comfort from the night,” he told her quietly. “In Pakistan, my family slept in the traditional way: the men together, the women together. So at night, in the presence of my father, my brother, and my uncles, I always believed that I was perfectly safe and secure. But I forgot that feeling as I came into adulthood in England. What had been reassuring became an embarrassment from my past. I found that all I could remember were the sounds of my father and my uncles snoring and the smell of my brothers breaking wind. For some time when I came to be alone, I thought how good it was to be away from them at last, to have the night for myself and for whomever I wished to share it with. And that's how I lived for a while. But now I find that I would willingly return to that older way, when whatever one's burdens or secrets were, there was always a sense-at least at night-of never having to bear them or keep them alone.”
There was something so comforting in his words that Barbara found herself wanting to grasp the invitation to disclosure that they implied. But she stopped herself from doing so, saying, “P'rhaps Pakistan doesn't prepare its children for the world's reality.”
“What reality is that?”
“The one that tells us we're all alone.”
“Do you believe that to be the truth, Barbara?”
“I don't just believe it. I know it. We use our daytimes to escape our nighttimes. We work, we play, we keep ourselves busy. But when it's time to sleep, we run out of distractions. Even if we're in bed with someone, their act of sleeping when we can't manage it is enough to tell us that we've got only ourselves.”
“Is this philosophy or experience speaking?”
“Neither,” she said. “Just the way it is.”
