What Came Before He Shot Her

interesting than you English generally eat at this hour?”

            “Tea cake’s good,” Ness said. She wasn’t about to try anything else. She replaced the photo, but she continued to eye Majidah the way one might look at a species of animal one has never seen before. She said, “So how old ’as you? What’re you doing marrying some granddad, anyways?”

            “I was twelve years old when I first married. Rakin was fiftyeight.”

            “Twelve  years old? Twelve years old an’ hooked up permanent to some old man? What in hell’re you t’inkin? Did he . . . Did you . . . I mean . . . Wiv him?”

            Majidah used hot water from the faucet to heat the teapot. She took a brown paper packet of loose tea from a cupboard. She went for the milk and poured this into a small white jug. Only then did she answer.

            “My goodness, isn’t your questioning rude. This cannot be the way you’ve been brought up to speak to an older person. But”—she held up her hand to prevent Ness saying anything—“I have learned to understand that you English do not always mean to be as disrespectful of other cultures as you seem to be. Rakin was my father’s cousin. He came to Pakistan—from England—when his first wife died because he believed himself in need of another one. He had, at the time, four children in their twenties, so one would think he might have proceeded throughout the rest of his life in the company of one or all of them. But this was not Rakin’s way. He came to our house and looked us over. I have five sisters, and as I’m the youngest, it was naturally assumed that Rakin would select one of them. He did not. He wished to have me. I was introduced to him, and we were married. Nothing more was said of the matter.”

            “Shit,” Ness said. And then she added hastily, “Sorry. Sorry. Slipped out, innit.”

            Majidah pressed her lips together to quell a smile. “We married in my village and then he brought me to England, a little girl who spoke no English and knew not a single thing of life, not even how to cook. But Rakin was a gentle man in all ways and a gentle man is a patient teacher. So I learned to cook. And I learned other things. I had my first child two days before my thirteenth birthday.”

            “You d’i’nt,” Ness said in disbelief.

            “Oh yes. Indeed I did.” The kettle clicked off and Majidah made the tea. She toasted a tea cake for Ness and took it to the table with a square of butter, but for herself she brought forth pappadums and chutney, both of which she declared to be homemade. When she had everything assembled, she sat and said, “My Rakin died when he was sixty-one. A sudden heart attack and he was gone. And there I was, fifteen years old, with a small child and four stepchildren approaching thirty. I could, of course, have lived on with them, but they would not have that: an adolescent stepmother with a toddler who would have become their responsibility. So another husband was found for me. This was my unfortunate second husband, who remained alive for twenty-seven interminable years of marriage before he had the good sense to pass on from liver failure. I have no pictures of him.”

            “You get kids from him?”

            “Oh my goodness, yes. Five more children. They are all adults now with children of their own.” She smiled. “And how they disapprove of a mother who will not live with any one of them. They inherited, alas, their father’s traditional nature.”

            “Wha’ ’bout the rest of your fam’ly?”

            “The rest . . . ?”

            “Your mum and dad. Your sisters.”

            “Ah. They remain in Pakistan. My sisters married, of course, and raised families there.”

            “You get to see ’em?”

            Majidah spread a bit of chutney on a sliver of pappadum, which she broke off from the larger piece. She said, “Once. I attended my father’s funeral. You are not eating your tea cake, Vanessa. Do not waste my food or we shall not have tea together again.”

            That didn’t seem like an altogether bad idea, but Ness was sufficiently intrigued by the Asian woman’s history to butter her tea cake and begin to consume it. Majidah watched her disapprovingly. Ness’s table manners were in need of adjustment as far as she was concerned, but she said nothing until Ness took up her tea and slurped it.

            “This will  not do,” Majidah told her. “Has no one taught you how to drink a hot beverage? Where is your mother? Who are the responsible adults in your life? Do they slurp as well? This is common, Vanessa, this noisy drinking. This is vulgar. Watch me and listen. . . . Do you hear my lips flap against the tea? No, you do not. And why is this? Because I have learned the method to drink, which has nothing to do with sucking and everything to do with—” Majidah stopped because Ness had put her cup down so abruptly that tea sloshed into her saucer, which was an even greater offence. “What is the matter with you, you foolish girl? Do you wish to break my china?”

            It was the word. Sucking. Ness had not expected it. Nor had she expected it to produce a series of images in her mind: mental mementoes that she preferred to forget. She said, “C’n I go now?” Her voice was sullen.

            “What do you mean with this ‘Can I go now?’ This is not a gaol. You are not my prisoner. You may go whenever you wish to go. But I can see that I have hurt you in some way—”

            “I ain’t hurt.”

            “—and if it has to do with your tea drinking, I must tell you that I meant no harm. My intention was to educate you. If no one bothers to inform you when your manners are not what they should be, how are you to learn? Does your mother never—”

            “She ain’t . . . She’s in hospital, innit. We don’t live wiv her. Haven’t done since I was little, okay?”

            Majidah sat back in her chair. She looked thoughtful. She said, “I apologise to you. I did not know this, Vanessa. She is ill, your mum?”

            “Whatever,” Ness said. “Look, c’n I go?”

            “Again I say: You are not a prisoner here. You may come and go as you like.”

            At this second expression of liberation, Ness might have got to her feet and departed. But she did not, because of that photo on the windowsill. Little Majidah in gold and blue on the arm of a man the age of her granddad kept Ness in her chair. She looked long at that picture before she finally said, “You scared?”

            “Of what?” Majidah said. “Of you? Oh my goodness, I hope not. You do not frighten me in the least.”

            “Not me. Him.”

            “Whom?”

            “Dat bloke.” She nodded at the photo. “Rakin. He scare you?”

            “What an odd question you ask me.” Majidah looked at the picture and then back at Ness. She took a reading off her, making an assessment that grew from having brought up six children, three of whom were female. She said quietly, “Ah. I was not prepared. This was a sin against me, committed by my parents. By my mother, especially. She said to me, ‘Obey your husband,’ but she said nothing else. Naturally, I had seen animals. . . . One cannot live in a village and escape the sight of copulation among the beasts of the fi eld. The dogs and the cats as well. But I did not think men and women did such strange things together, and no one told me otherwise. So I wept at first, but Rakin, as I have told you, was kind. He did not force anything upon me, which made me far luckier than I knew at the time. Things were very different when I married again.”

            Ness pulled on her upper lip, listening. Within her was a tremendous stirring, a begging to be spoken. She did not know if she could manage the words, but she also did not know if she could hold them back. She said, “Yeah. I ’spect . . . ,” but that was all she could say. Majidah took the leap. She said quietly, “This has happened to you, has it not? At what age, Vanessa?”

            Ness blinked. “Summick like . . . I dunno . . . ten maybe. Eleven. I forget.”

            “This is . . . I am very very sorry. It was not, of course, a husband chosen for you.”

            “’Course not.”

            “This is very bad,” Majidah said quietly. “This is very wrong and bad indeed. This dreadful thing should not have happened. But happen it did, and I am sorry.”

            “Yeah. Well.”

            “Sorry for you, however, will not change things. Only how you view the past can alter the present and the future.”