A Private Business (6 page)

“I have to be honest,” Lee continued, “I know you're holding back on me about something.” He failed to mention that had actually been Mumtaz's notion. “So I'm sorry but I just don't buy that you're getting this upset about a
possible
invasion of your privacy just
glimpsed
out the corner of your eye. You can't concentrate and your career's going down the pan and you're turning on your audience!”

“I know.” She looked across at him with tears in her eyes. “I know.”

Alan Myers had nearly lost his mind. He'd been the first one she'd bowled into when she ran off the stage.
You have one more chance and that's it!
he'd growled at her.
Do this to me again and I'll fucking finish you, darling!
Betty had been sympathetic but with an element of
I told you so
and so Maria had had to send her away. She'd offered to stay, of course, because she was a true friend but …

“I have to know about any threats,” Lee said. “Real threats, not just some memory of some randy fan from 1989.”

“I haven't had any actual threats at all,” she said. “I used to get them years ago.”

“Who from?”

“I told you. But then there were also people who thought I should be censored,” Maria said. “Mary Whitehouse types, religious people. I offended everybody.”

“You still do, or you try to. That's still the point of the act, isn't it?”

She looked down. “Yes.”

“So, you getting direct threats now, Maria, or what?”

“No! But I might do after tonight!”

He moved in so that he could see her face. She was only a few years older than him and she was lovely. There was something of the Katharine Hepburn about her. Lee loved the old movie stars, they were so much more glamorous than modern people. But she still wasn't telling him everything. Lee had been a good, instinctive copper and that hadn't changed. “So if you're not getting threats, then what is going on? Why are you intimidating your crowd? Why are you alienating your audience?”

She looked into his eyes.

“Is it simply your fear? About what you're experiencing at home?” He didn't use the word “imagine” or talk about what she “thought” she might be seeing. “That stuff you do about priests, is that true? Is it?”

She said nothing. Lee, helpless, shrugged.

And then she said, as if it were the most obvious explanation in the world, “I've found God.”

“You go to church, I know,” Lee said. “So do lots of people.”

Maria shook her head impatiently. “No,” she said, “I don't
just
go to church. As you say, a lot of people do that, pedophile priests do that. I'm not talking about Catholicism. No, I am being born again. I've committed to take Jesus into my life. I've found God and I know that he loves me. I also know that he wants what is best for me, and it isn't this act.”

* * *

“These fundamentalist chaps dishonor God.”

Baharat was holding forth again, distressed by the ten o'clock news. Some Muslim boys had been arrested in Manchester for apparently plotting to blow up a church.

“They think they're doing jihad.” Baharat shrugged his shoulders. “What do silly bloody kids from Manchester know of jihad? Like those silly bloody buggers meeting at the café, talking nonsense.”

Sumita pulled her sari down across her shoulders and carried on folding the ironing. Ranting in English was one of her husband's very few pleasures and so she just let him get on with it.

“I mean, what do these sods think that the Brits will do now, eh? Islamophobia is what that character from the Muslim Council of Britain calls it. Islamophobia! But who can blame them? They see these silly buggers and their hatred and of course they think we're all the same!”

The television was turned up so loudly, Sumita could hardly hear herself think. Baharat was over seventy now and as deaf as a post. He shouted, always in English. His father, even though he'd never left Dhaka in his life, had always believed that English was “civilized.” Sumita's grasp of it was at best adequate.

“They should hang them,” Baharat continued. “That ridiculous bugger in the café and those boys he has with him too. Talking about beating up the girls who don't cover their heads. Modesty is what a Muslim woman should
display, whether her head is covered or not. That is a choice. We are not fanatics in this society!”

Baharat made her tired, but Sumita couldn't charge him with hypocrisy, not exactly. Their only daughter, Mumtaz, had never been obliged to cover her head by her father. Her brothers had gone through a phase of thinking that this was shameful, but Baharat, as usual, had had the final say on the matter. “If the girl wants to cover, then that is down to her,” he'd said. “If she doesn't, that is her business too.” But he
had
kept her close. Working in the shop until she married that man that Sumita had never liked. She'd admired him, she'd wanted her daughter to marry him, but … A man with Savile Row suits, a Rolex on his wrist and perfume in his dyed black hair. She'd never liked Ahmed Hakim. He'd
made
Mumtaz cover her head.

“They want to close that café down, the police,” Baharat said. “Bangla Town, it calls itself. Huh! A dishonor to the home country. And that ridiculous sod sitting in there all day telling silly boys he's some sort of sheikh. The man pours pure poison into people's ears. It's not right! It's not moral! It's not Islamic!”

He'd been stabbed, Ahmed Hakim. In front of her daughter. Only then had they discovered that all the wealth he'd dazzled Baharat with had been just so much smoke. Now Mumtaz had some job, now she made it her business to look after her husband's child. Alone. Far away
from Brick Lane in that big, lonely house in Forest Gate. Sumita missed her so much she could feel her heart bleeding sometimes in her chest.

Baharat looked away from the television set and rolled himself a cigarette. He was a good Muslim who prayed five times a day, didn't eat pork, didn't drink, but he did smoke and he had a cough that was persistent and impressively loud. Sumita wished he wouldn't smoke, but then she also wished he'd give up going out six and a half days a week, and that wasn't happening either.

Baharat Huq had emigrated to London in the early nineteen sixties. He'd arrived with one suitcase from a country that was then called East Pakistan. He'd worked for an old Jewish man who sold women's clothes on Petticoat Lane Market and had lived with a group of other young East Pakistani men in a crumbling Huguenot house in Princelet Street, Spitalfields. It had been little more than a squat, really, and when Baharat's father had decided that it was time that he got married, he'd had to find somewhere more suitable double quick. Baharat and Sumita began their married lives in 1970 in one room above a fish and chip shop on Brick Lane. Tariq their eldest child had been born there but by the time they had their second son Abdul, and daughter Mumtaz, they lived in the house on Hanbury Street that they now owned. As the years had progressed, Baharat's idea that what Spitalfields needed more than anything was a shop that
sold Islamic ephemera, had paid off. A lot of people had since emigrated from what by then was Bangladesh and they wanted prayer rugs, Qur'ans and tasbeeh beads. Baharat had been the first ever trader in the Brick Lane area to successfully import boxes for storing the Holy Qur'an in the shape of the Sacred Ka'aaba in Mecca, which had made him quite the famous chap in the community. And when his clever daughter had married an apparently wealthy and influential local businessman, Baharat felt that he'd made it. His dream of British streets paved with gold had, seemingly, come true.

But it had been an illusion. First had come the July 7 London bombings, Islamophobia as some called it, and then Mumtaz's husband had been murdered, leaving her his highly Westernized, privately educated daughter and a legacy of debt so enormous Baharat couldn't afford to even think about tackling. Ahmed Hakim had not been the man that Baharat thought he was. As if reading his wife's gloomy thoughts, he said, “You know, I don't know which is worse: a misguided bugger who kills in the name of God or a liar who drinks and eats pork and has a gangsterly life.”

Sumita shrugged. “Who can say?” she replied in Bengali. “I just wish that our daughter would come home. That child of her husband should be sent back to his family in Sylhet. Then Mumtaz could remarry. There is no shame in widowhood.”

But Baharat did not reply. He looked back at the television and then began ranting about the economy. He knew as well as Sumita that there was no point in even talking about trying to make their daughter do something that she didn't feel right about. Not now.

Lee Arnold had not understood. He hadn't said anything, he was too professional for that, but Maria
knew
. Mr. Arnold didn't believe in God any more than most of the people she came across. He was an ex-copper—not big on God, ex-coppers. Like most stand-ups really. Like Maria as she used to be.

Back in the day, she'd based a whole one and a half hour one-woman show around religion, or “your invisible friends who are so much fun to be with!,” as she'd put it. But then she'd been young and on coke and she hadn't even met Len, much less lost him. The isolation she'd felt after Len died had almost destroyed her, and her mother's dark Catholicism, the religion she herself had once loved, hadn't helped. Still praying to saints who had been roasted on gridirons, venerating relics—bones, bodies, beads, the words of discredited priests. She'd gone back on the circuit, not for the money but for the distraction. Then, suddenly, when she wasn't looking, Jesus had come into her life. Initially via leaflets through her door, then a booklet, picked up and read in the doctor's surgery; so Maria discovered the Chapel of the Holy Pentecostal Fire. And for the
first time ever, she'd gone to a
real
church, a proper place of worship. Like Len, out of the blue, a man had arrived to save her—Jesus.

Lee, the man who was watching her, who believed that Jesus was a myth, looked after her because she paid him well. At massive expense he'd fitted cameras and microphones all over the house, and yet he probably thought that what she was seeing out of the corners of her eyes wasn't real. She'd asked him about evil and whether or not he believed in it, but he'd seemed unsure. All he would say was that he'd seen some things in his life that people might describe as evil. He was an atheist, what did she expect? Part of her brain, to her shame, was still in that world too.

It was the wee hours of the morning and Maria stood in her darkened living room and idly fingered one of her many ceramic cat ornaments. In spite of light pollution from the London monster that engulfed her, the sky was as black as a sky could get. Although illuminated by security lights, the garden was frigid with both lack of movement and with the onset of yet another bone-grinding cold snap. Eerie featherings of frost lightly touched the blades of her well-cut grass and not even a distant cough from a sick urban fox disturbed the nighttime peace.

But Maria knew that he, she,
it
was out there somewhere. She could feel the tingling knowledge of it at the base of her skull. If she turned around suddenly and
quickly she knew with her whole being that she'd see who or what was charting her slightest move, every variation in facial expression. She wanted to know what it was. That was why Lee Arnold and his colleagues were working for her. But then again she didn't want to know because deep down at the bottom of her soul just the thought of having that knowledge produced an urge to harm herself.

Words could reach right down into your core with or without your understanding. It had been the spikiness, the furious shape of the graffiti letters that had attracted Mumtaz first. What was being said only became apparent as she drew closer.
Filthy homosexuals get out
it read, and then a warning:
Allah will smite you
. People appeared not to notice it. But it made Mumtaz want to howl. She loved going back to her parents' house in Spitalfields but there was a dark side to it always and it wasn't just because of the odd religious nutter stalking the streets around Brick Lane.

Before the area became known as Bangla Town, Spitalfields had been home to generations of Jewish refugees. Their synagogues and ritual baths still appeared like shades from the past in back streets all over town. The Brick Lane mosque had even been a synagogue once and some people claimed that you could still occasionally catch a whiff of the smell of the kosher wine they had once stored in the basement. The Jews had co-existed with their Christian neighbors and some still remained.
They'd been grateful for the shelter from pogroms and oppression that London had given them. But there were written words in Spitalfields that indicated that this safe haven had come at a price. As Mumtaz passed in front of the whiteness of the great Christ Church on Commercial Street she recalled them.

She'd only been nine at the time and together with other children from her school she'd appeared in a musical concert at the church as part of the Spitalfields Festival. Their teachers had led them up the steps and into a sort of antechamber in front of the actual church itself where there had been some stone tablets high up on the walls with wordy dedications to people active in the “Christian Hebrew” movement. Whether it was the possible forced conversions of Jews to Christianity, or the unfamiliar look of the few phrases in Hebrew written at the bottom of these tablets that had caused Mumtaz to shiver and sweat, she didn't know. But every time she'd been back, those tablets had made her feel exactly the same. Even only half noticed, their baleful presence was evident in the way she walked and in the pounding of her heart. To some extent the Jews had been under the cosh in this place even though they, like her own people, had been outwardly tolerated.