The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher

December 6th: ‘Ijaz stayed too long,’ the diary says. Next day he was back. After the way he had spoken of his wife – and the way he had compared me to dear old Patches from his Miami days – I didn’t think I should see him again. But he had hatched a scheme and he wasn’t going to let it go. I should come to a dinner party with my husband and meet his family and some of his business contacts. He had been talking about this project before my leave and I knew he set great store by it. I wanted, if I could, to do him some good; he would appear to his customers to be more a man of the world if he could arrange an international gathering, if – let’s be blunt – he could produce some white friends. Now the time had come. His sister-in-law was already cooking, he said. I wanted to meet her; I admired these diaspora Asians, their polyglot enterprise, the way they withstood rebuffs, and I wanted to see if she was more Western or Eastern or what. ‘We have to arrange the transportation,’ Ijaz said. ‘I shall come Thursday, when your husband is here. Four o’clock. To give him directions.’ I nodded. No use drawing a map. They might move the streets again.

The meeting of December 8th was not a success. Ijaz was late, but didn’t seem to know it. My husband dispensed the briefest host’s courtesies, then sat down firmly in his armchair, which was the one that had tried to levitate. He seemed, by his watchful silence, ready to put an end to any nonsense, from furniture or guests or any other quarter. Sitting on the edge of the sofa, Ijaz flaked his baklava over his lap, he juggled with his fork and jiggled his coffee cup. After our dinner party, he said, almost the next day, he was flying to America on business. ‘I shall route via London. Just for some recreation. Just to relax, three–four days.’

My husband must have stirred himself to ask if he had friends there. ‘Very old friend,’ Ijaz said, brushing crumbs to the carpet. ‘Living at Trafalgar Square. A good district. You know it?’

My heart sank; it was a physical feeling, of the months falling away from me, months in which I’d had little natural light. When Ijaz left – and he kept hovering on the threshold, giving further and better street directions – I didn’t know what to say, so I went into the bathroom, kicked out the cockroaches and cowered under the stream of tepid water. Wrapped in a towel, I lay on the bed in the dark. I could hear my husband – I hoped it was he, and not the armchair – moving around in the sitting room. Sometimes in those days when I closed my eyes I felt that I was looking back into my own skull. I could see the hemispheres of my brain. They were convoluted and the colour of putty.

The family apartment down by the port was filled with cooking smells and crammed with furniture. There were photographs on every surface, carpets laid on carpets. It was a hot night, and the air conditioners laboured and hacked, spitting out water, coughing up lungfuls of mould spores, blights. The table linen was limp and heavily fringed, and I kept fingering these fringes, which felt like nylon fur, like the ears of a teddy bear; they comforted me, though I felt electric with tension. At the table a vast lumpen elder presided, a woman with a long chomping jaw; she was like Quentin Matsys’s Ugly Duchess, except in a spangled sari. The sister-in-law was a bright, brittle woman, who gave a sarcastic lilt to all her phrases. I could see why; it was evident, from her knowing looks, that Ijaz had talked about me, and set me up in some way; if he was proposing me as his next wife, I offered little improvement on the original. Her scorn became complete when she saw I barely touched the food at my elbow; I kept smiling and nodding, demurring and deferring, nibbling a parsley leaf and sipping my Fanta. I wanted to eat, but she might as well have offered me stones on a doily. Did Ijaz think, as the Saudis did, that Western marriages meant nothing? That they were entered impulsively, and on impulse broken? Did he assume my husband was as keen to offload me as he was to lose Mary-Beth? From his point of view the evening was not going well. He had expected two supermarket managers, he told us, important men with spending power; now night prayers were over, the traffic was on the move again, all down Palestine Road and along the Corniche the traffic lights were turning green, from Thumb Street to the Pepsi flyover the city was humming, but where were they? Sweat dripped from his face. Fingers jabbed the buttons of the telephone. ‘Okay, he is delayed? He has left? He is coming now?’ He rapped down the receiver, then gazed at the phone as if willing it to chirp back at him, like some pet fowl. ‘Time means nothing here,’ he joked, pulling at his collar. The sister-in-law shrugged and turned down her mouth. She never rested, but passed airily through the room in peach chiffon, each time returning from the kitchen with another laden tray; out of sight, presumably, some oily skivvy was weeping into the dishes. The silent elder put away a large part of the food, pulling the plates towards her and working through them systematically till the pattern showed beneath her questing fingers; you looked away, and when you looked back the plate was clean. Sometimes, the phone rang: ‘Okay, they’re nearly here,’ Ijaz called. Ten minutes, and his brow furrowed again. ‘Maybe they’re lost.’

‘Sure they’re lost,’ sister-in-law sang. She sniggered; she was enjoying herself. Nineteenth Lesson, translate these sentences: So long as he holds the map the wrong way up, he will never find the house. They started travelling this morning, but have still not arrived. It seemed a hopeless business, trying to get anywhere, and the text book confessed it. I was not really learning Arabic, of course, I was too impatient; I was leafing through the lessons, looking for phrases that might be useful if I could say them. We stayed long, long into the evening, waiting for the men who had never intended to come; in the end, wounded and surly, Ijaz escorted us to the door. I heard my husband take in a breath of wet air. ‘We’ll never have to do it again,’ I consoled him. In the car, ‘You have to feel for him,’ I said. No answer.

December 13th: My diary records that I am oppressed by ‘the darkness, the ironing and the smell of drains’. I could no longer play my Eroica tape as it had twisted itself up in the innards of the machine. In my idle moments I had summarised forty chapters of Oliver Twist for the use of my upstairs neighbour. Three days later I was ‘horribly unstable and restless’, and reading the Lyttelton–Hart-Davis Letters. Later that week I was cooking with my neighbour Yasmin. I recorded ‘an afternoon of greying pain’. All the same, Ijaz was out of the country and I realised I breathed easier when I was not anticipating the ring of the doorbell. December 16th, I was reading The Philosopher’s Pupil and visiting my own student upstairs. Munira took my forty chapter summaries, flicked through them, yawned, and switched on the TV. ‘What is a workhouse?’ I tried to explain about the English poor law, but her expression glazed; she had never heard of poverty. She yelled out for her servant, an ear-splitting yell, and the girl – a beaten-down Indonesian – brought in Munira’s daughter for my diversion. A heavy, solemn child, she was beginning to walk, or stamp, under her own power, her hands flailing for a hold on the furniture. She would fall on her bottom with a grunt, haul herself up again by clutching the sofa; the cushions slid away from her, she tumbled backwards, banged on the floor her large head with its corkscrew curls, and lay there wailing. Munira laughed at her: ‘White nigger, isn’t it?’ She didn’t get her flat nose from my side, she explained. Or those fat lips either. It’s my husband’s people, but of course, they’re blaming me.

January 2nd 1984: We went to a dark little restaurant off Khalid bin Wahlid Street, where we were seated behind a lattice screen in the ‘family area’. In the main part of the room men were dining with each other. The business of eating out was more a gesture than a pleasure; you would gallop through the meal, because without wine and its rituals there was nothing to slow it, and the waiters, who had no concept that a man and woman might eat together for more than sustenance, prided themselves on picking up your plate as soon as you had finished and slapping down another, and rushing you back on to the dusty street. That dusty orange glare, perpetual, like the lighting of a bad sci-fi film; the constant snarl and rumble of traffic; I had become afraid of traffic accidents, which were frequent, and every time we drove out at night I saw the gaping spaces beneath bridges and flyovers; they seemed to me like amphitheatres in which the traffic’s casualties enacted, flickering, their final moments. Sometimes, when I set foot outside the apartment, I started to shake. I blamed it on the drugs I was taking; the dose had been increased again. When I saw the other wives they didn’t seem to be having these difficulties. They talked about paddling pools and former lives they had led in Hong Kong. They got up little souk trips to buy jewellery, so that sliding on their scrawny tanned arms their bracelets clinked and chimed, like ice cubes knocking together. On Valentine’s Day we went to a cheese party; you had to imagine the wine. I was bubbling with happiness; a letter had come from William IV Street, to tell me my novel had been sold. Spearing his Edam with a cocktail stick, my husband’s boss loomed over me: ‘Hubby tells me you’re having a book published. That must be costing him a pretty penny.’

Ijaz, I assumed, was still in America. After all, he had his marital affairs to sort out, as well as business. He doesn’t reappear in the diary till March 17th, St Patrick’s Day, when I recorded, ‘Phone call, highly unwelcome.’ For politeness, I asked how business was; as ever, he was evasive. He had something else to tell me: ‘I’ve got rid of Mary-Beth. She’s gone.’

‘What about the children?’

‘Saleem is staying with me. The girl, it doesn’t matter. She can have her if she wants.’

‘Ijaz, look, I must say goodbye. I hear the doorbell.’ What a lie.

‘Who is it?’

What, did he think I could see through the wall? For a second I was so angry I forgot there was only a phantom at the door. ‘Perhaps my neighbour,’ I said meekly.

‘See you soon,’ Ijaz said.

I decided that night I could no longer bear it. I did not feel I could bear even one more cup of coffee together. But I had no means of putting an end to it, and for this I excused myself, saying I had been made helpless by the society around me. I was not able to bring myself to speak to Ijaz directly. I still had no power in me to snub him. But the mere thought of him made me squirm inside with shame, at my own general cluelessness, and at the sad little lies he had told to misrepresent his life, and the situation into which we had blundered; I thought of the sister-in-law, her peach chiffon and her curled lip.

Next day when my husband came home I sat him down and instigated a conversation. I asked him to write to Ijaz and ask him not to call on me any more, as I was afraid that the neighbours had noticed his visits and might draw the wrong conclusion: which, as he knew, could be dangerous to us all. My husband heard me out. You need not write much, I pleaded, he will get the point. I should be able to sort this out for myself, but I am not allowed to, it is beyond my power, or it seems to be. I heard my own voice, jangled, grating; I was doing what I had wriggled so hard to avoid, I was sheltering behind the mores of this society, off-loading the problem I had created for myself in a way that was feminine, weak and spiteful.

My husband saw all this. Not that he spoke. He got up, took his shower. He lay in the rattling darkness, in the bedroom where the wooden shutters blocked out the merest chink of afternoon glare. I lay beside him. The evening prayer call woke me from my doze. My husband had risen to write the letter. I remember the snap of the lock as he closed it in his briefcase.

I have never asked him what he put in the letter, but whatever it was it worked. There was nothing – not a chastened note pushed under the door, nor a regretful phone call. Just silence. The diary continues but Ijaz exits from it. I read Zuckerman Unbound, The Present & The Past, and The Bottle Factory Outing. The company’s post office box went missing, with all the incoming mail in it. You would think a post box was a fixed thing and wouldn’t go wandering of its own volition, but it was many days before it was found, at a distant post office, and I suppose a post box can move if furniture can. We drifted towards our next leave. May 10th, we attended a farewell party for an escapee whose contract was up. ‘Fell over while dancing and sprained my ankle.’ May 11th: With my ankle strapped up, ‘watched The Texas Chainsaw Massacre’.

I had much more time to serve in Jeddah. I didn’t leave finally till the spring of 1986. By that time we had been rehoused twice more, shuttled around the city and finally outside it to a compound off the freeway. I never heard of my visitor again. The woman trapped in the flat on the corner of Al-Suror Street seems a relative stranger, and I ask myself what she should have done, how she could have managed it better. She should have thrown those drugs away, for one thing; they are nowadays a medication of last resort, because everybody knows they make you frightened, deaf and sick. But about Ijaz? She should never have opened the door in the first place. Discretion is the better part of valour; she’s always said that. Even after all this time it’s hard to grasp exactly what happened. I try to write it as it occurred but I find myself changing the names to protect the guilty. I wonder if Jeddah left me for ever off-kilter in some way, tilted from the vertical and condemned to see life skewed. I can never be certain that doors will stay closed and on their hinges, and I do not know, when I turn out the lights at night, whether the house is quiet as I left it or the furniture is frolicking in the dark.

Comma

I can see Mary Joplin now, in the bushes crouching with her knees apart, her cotton frock stretched across her thighs. In the hottest summer (and this was it) Mary had a sniffle, and she would rub the tip of her upturned nose, meditatively, with the back of her hand, and inspect the glistening snail-trail that was left. We squatted, both of us, up to our ears in tickly grass: grass which, as midsummer passed, turned from tickly to scratchy and etched white lines, like the art of a primitive tribe, across our bare legs. Sometimes we would rise together, as if pulled up by invisible strings. Parting the rough grass in swathes, we would push a little closer to where we knew we were going, and where we knew we should not go. Then, as if by some pre-determined signal, we would flounce down again, so we would be half-invisible if God looked over the fields.

Buried in the grass we talked: myself monosyllabic, guarded, eight years old, wearing too-small shorts of black-and-white check, that had fitted me last year; Mary with her scrawny arms, her knee-caps like saucers of bone, her bruised legs, her snigger and her cackle and her snort. Some unknown hand, her own perhaps, had placed on her rat-tails a twisted white ribbon; by afternoon it had skewed itself around to the side, so that her head looked like a badly-tied parcel. Mary Joplin put questions to me: ‘Are you rich?’

I was startled. ‘I don’t think so. We’re about middle. Are you rich?’

She pondered. She smiled at me as if we were comrades now. ‘We’re about middle too.’

Poverty meant upturned blue eyes and a begging bowl. A charity child. You’d have coloured patches sewn on your clothes. In a fairy tale picture book you live in the forest under the dripping gables, your roof is thatch. You have a basket with a patchwork cover with which you venture out to your grandma. Your house is made of cake.

When I went to my grandma’s it was empty-handed, and I was sent just to be company for her. I didn’t know what this meant. Sometimes I stared at the wall till she let me go home again. Sometimes she let me pod peas. Sometimes she made me hold her wool while she wound it. She snapped at me to call me to attention if I let my wrists droop. When I said I was weary, she said I didn’t know the meaning of the word. She’d show me weary, she said. She carried on muttering: weary, I’ll show her who’s weary, I’ll weary her with a good slap.

When my wrists drooped and my attention faltered it was because I was thinking of Mary Joplin. I knew not to mention her name and the pressure of not mentioning her made her, in my imagination, beaten thin and flat, attenuated, starved away, a shadow of herself, so I was no longer sure whether she existed when I was not with her. But then next day in the morning’s first dazzle, when I stood on our doorstep, I would see Mary leaning against the house opposite, smirking, scratching herself under her frock, and she would stick her tongue out at me until it was stretched to the root.

If my mother looked out she would see her too; or maybe not.

On those afternoons, buzzing, sleepy, our wandering had a veiled purpose and we drew closer and closer to the Hathaways’ house. I did not call it that then, and until that summer I hadn’t known it existed; it seemed it had materialised during my middle childhood, as our boundaries pushed out, as we strayed further from the village’s core. Mary had found it before I did. It stood on its own, no other house built on to it, and we knew without debate that it was the house of the rich; stone-built, with one lofty round tower, it stood in its gardens bounded by a wall, but not too high a wall for us to climb: to drop softly, between the bushes on the other side. From there we saw that in the beds of this garden the roses were already scorched into heavy brown blebs on the stalk. The lawns were parched. Long windows glinted, and around the house, on the side from which we approached, there ran a veranda or loggia or terrace; I did not have a word for it, and no use asking Mary.

She said cheerily, as we wandered cross-country, ‘Me dad says, you’re bloody daft, Mary, do you know that? He says, when they turned you out, love, they broke the bloody mould. He says, Mary, you don’t know arseholes from Tuesday.’

On that first day at the Hathaways’ house, sheltered in the depth of the bushes, we waited for the rich to come out of the glinting windows that were also doors; we waited to see what actions they would perform. Mary Joplin whispered to me, ‘Your mam dun’t know where you are.’

‘Well, your mam neither.’

As the afternoon wore on, Mary made herself a hollow or nest. She settled comfortably under a bush. ‘If I’d known it was this boring,’ I said, ‘I’d have brought my library book.’

Mary twiddled grass stalks, sometimes hummed. ‘My dad says, buck yourself up, Mary, or you’ll have to go to reform school.’

‘What’s that?’

‘It’s where they smack you every day.’

‘What’ve you done?’

‘Nothing, they just do it.’

I shrugged. It sounded only too likely. ‘Do they smack you on weekends or only school days?’

I felt sleepy. I hardly cared about the answer. ‘You stand in a queue,’ Mary said. ‘When it’s your turn …’ Mary had a little stick which she was digging into the ground, grinding it round and round into the soil. ‘When it’s your turn, Kitty, they have a big club and they beat the holy living daylights out of you. They knock you on the head till your brains squirt out.’

Our conversation dried up: lack of interest on my part. In time my legs, folded under me, began to ache and cramp. I shifted irritably, nodded towards the house. ‘How long do we have to wait?’

Mary hummed. Dug with her stick.

‘Put your legs together, Mary,’ I said. ‘It’s rude to sit like that.’

‘Listen,’ she said, ‘I’ve been up here when a kid like you is in bed. I’ve seen what they’ve got in that house.’

I was awake now. ‘What have they?’

‘Something you couldn’t put a name to,’ Mary Joplin said.

‘What sort of a thing?’

‘Wrapped in a blanket.’

‘Is it an animal?’

Mary jeered. ‘An animal, she says. An animal, what’s wrapped in a blanket?’

‘You could wrap a dog in a blanket. If it were poorly.’

I felt the truth of this; I wanted to insist; my face grew hot. ‘It’s not a dog, no, no, no.’ Mary’s voice dawdled, keeping her secret from me. ‘For it’s got arms.’

‘Then it’s human.’

‘But it’s not a human shape.’

I felt desperate. ‘What shape is it?’

Mary thought. ‘A comma,’ she said slowly. ‘A comma, you know, what you see in a book?’

After this she would not be drawn. ‘You’ll just have to wait,’ she said, ‘if you want to see it, and if you truly do you’ll wait, and if you truly don’t you can bugger off and you can miss it, and I can see it all to myself.’

After a while I said, ‘I can’t stop here all night waiting for a comma. I’ve missed my tea.’

‘They’ll be none bothered,’ Mary said.

She was right. I crept back late and nothing was said. It was a summer that, by the end of July, had bleached adults of their purpose. When my mother saw me her eyes glazed over, as if I represented extra effort. You spilled blackcurrant juice on yourself and you kept the sticky patches. Feet grimy and face stained you lived in underbrush and long grass, and each day a sun like a child’s painted sun burned in a sky made white with heat. Laundry hung like flags of surrender from washing lines. The light stretched far into the evening, ending in a fall of dew and a bare dusk. When you were called in at last you sat under the electric light and pulled off your sunburnt skin in frills and strips. There was a dull roasting sensation deep inside your limbs, but no sensation as you peeled yourself like a vegetable. You were sent to bed when you were sleepy, but as the heat of bed-clothes fretted your skin you woke again. You lay awake, wheeling fingernails over your insect bites. There was something that bit in the long grass as you crouched, waiting for the right moment to go over the wall; there was something else that stung, perhaps as you waited, spying, in the bushes. Your heart beat with excitement all the short night. Only at first light was there a chill, the air clear like water.

And in this clear morning light you sauntered into the kitchen, you said, casual, ‘You know there’s a house, it’s up past the cemetery, where there’s rich people live? It’s got greenhouses.’

My aunt was in the kitchen just then. She was pouring cornflakes into a dish and as she looked up some flakes spilled. She glanced at my mother, and some secret passed between them, in the flick of an eyelid, a twist at the corner of the mouth. ‘She means the Hathaways’,’ my mother said. ‘Don’t talk about that.’ She sounded almost coaxing. ‘It’s bad enough without little girls talking.’

‘What’s bad …’ I was asking, when my mother flared up like a gas-jet: ‘Is that where you’ve been? I hope you’ve not been up there with Mary Joplin. Because if I see you playing with Mary Joplin, I’ll skin you alive. I’m telling you now, and my word is my bond.’

‘I’m not up there with Mary,’ I lied fluently and fast. ‘Mary’s poorly.’

‘What with?’

I said the first thing that came into my head. ‘Ringworm.’

My aunt snorted with laughter.

‘Scabies. Nits. Lice. Fleas.’ There was pleasure in this sweet embroidery.

‘None of that would surprise me one bit,’ my aunt said. ‘The only thing would surprise me was if Sheila Joplin kept the little trollop at home a single day of her life. I tell you, they live like animals. They’ve no bedding, do you know?’

‘At least animals leave home,’ my mam said. ‘The Joplins never go. There just gets more and more of them living in a heap and scrapping like pigs.’

‘Do pigs fight?’ I said. But they ignored me. They were rehearsing a famous incident before I was born. A woman out of pity took Mrs Joplin a pan of stew and Mrs Joplin, instead of a civil no-thank-you, spat in it.

My aunt, her face flushed, re-enacted the pain of the woman with the stew; the story was fresh as if she had never told it before. My mother chimed in, intoning, on a dying fall, the words that ended the tale: ‘And so she ruined it for the poor soul who had made it, and for any poor soul who might want to eat it after.’