As her meal was preparing itself, she went for the television remote, which, as usual, she couldn’t find. She was searching the wrinkled linens of the unmade daybed when someone rapped at her door. She glanced over her shoulder and saw through the open blinds on the window two shadowy forms on her front step: one quite small, the other taller, both of them slender. Hadiyyah and her father had come calling.
Barbara gave up her search for the remote and opened the door to her neighbours. She said, “Just in time for a Barbara Special. I’ve two pieces of toast, but if you behave yourselves, we can divide them three ways.” She held the door wider to admit them, giving a glance over her shoulder to check that she’d tossed her dirty knickers in the laundry basket sometime during the last forty-eight hours.
Taymullah Azhar smiled with his usual grave courtesy. He said, “We cannot stay, Barbara. This will only take a moment, if you do not mind.”
He sounded so sombre that Barbara glanced warily from him to his daughter. Hadiyyah was hanging her head, her hands clasped behind her back. A few wisps of hair escaped from her plaits, brushing against her cheeks, and her cheeks themselves were flushed. She looked as if she’d been crying.
“What’s wrong? Is something…?” Barbara felt dread from a dozen different sources, none of which she particularly cared to name. “What’s going on, Azhar?”
Azhar said, “Hadiyyah?” His daughter looked up at him imploringly. His face was implacable. “We have come for a reason. You know what it is.”
Hadiyyah gulped so loudly that Barbara could hear it. She brought her hands from round her back and extended them to Barbara. In them, she held the Buddy Holly CD. She said, “Dad says I’m to give this back to you, Barbara.”
Barbara took it from her. She looked at Azhar. She said, “But…Sorry, but is it not allowed, or something?” That seemed unlikely. She knew a little about their customs, and gift giving was one of them.
“And?” Azhar said to his daughter without answering Barbara’s question. “There is more, is there not?”
Hadiyyah lowered her head again. Barbara could see that her lips were trembling.
Her father said, “Hadiyyah. I shall not ask you-”
“I fibbed,” the little girl blurted out. “I fibbed to my dad and he found out and I’m meant to give this back to you in consee…con…consequence.” She raised her head. She’d begun to cry. “But thank you, because I thought it was lovely. I liked ‘Peggy Sue’ especially.” Then she spun on her heel and fled, back towards the front of the house. Barbara heard her sob.
She looked to her neighbour. She said, “Listen, Azhar. This is actually my fault. I had no idea Hadiyyah wasn’t supposed to go to Camden High Street. And she didn’t know where we were going when we set off. It was something of a joke anyway. She was listening to some pop group and I was giving her aggro about them and she was saying how great they are and I decided to show her some real rock ’n’ rock and I took her down to the Virgin Megastore but I didn’t know it was forbidden and she didn’t know where we were going.” Barbara was out of breath. She felt like an adolescent getting caught for being out after curfew. She didn’t much like it. She calmed herself and said, “If I’d known you’d forbidden her to go to Camden High Street, I never would have taken her there. I’m dead sorry, Azhar. She didn’t mention it straightaway.”
“Which is the source of my irritation with Hadiyyah,” Azhar said. “She should have done so.”
“But, like I said, she didn’t know where we were going till we got there.”
“Once you arrived, was she wearing a blindfold?”
“Of course not. But then it was too late. I didn’t exactly give her a chance to say something.”
“Hadiyyah should not need an invitation to be truthful.”
“Okay. Agreed. It happened, and it won’t happen again. At least let her keep the CD.”
Azhar glanced away. His dark fingers-so slender, they looked like a girl’s-moved beneath his trim jacket to the pocket of his pristine white shirt. He felt there and brought forth a packet of cigarettes. He shook one out, appeared to think about what to do next, and then offered the packet to Barbara. She took this as a positive sign. Their fingers brushed as she took a cigarette from him, and he lit a match that he shared with her.
“She wants you to stop smoking,” Barbara told him.
“She wants many things. As do we all.”
“You’re angry. Come in. Let’s talk about this.”
He remained where he was.
“Azhar, listen. I know what you’re worried about, Camden High Street and all that. But you can’t protect her from everything. It’s impossible.”
He shook his head. “I don’t seek to protect her from everything. I merely seek to do what’s right. But I find that I don’t always know what that is.”
“Being exposed to Camden High Street isn’t going to pollute her. And Buddy Holly”-here Barbara gestured with the CD-“isn’t going to pollute her either.”
“It’s not Camden High Street or Buddy Holly that comprises my concern,” Azhar said. “It is the lie, Barbara.”
“Okay. I can see that. But it was only a lie of omission. She just didn’t tell me when she could have told me. Or should have told me. Or whatever.”
“That is not it at all.”
“What is it, then?”
“She lied to me, Barbara.”
“To you? About-”
“And this is something I will not accept.”
“But when? When did she lie to you?”
“When I asked her about the CD. She said you had given it to her-”
“Azhar, that was true.”
“-but she failed to include the information about where it had come from. That in itself slipped out when she was chatting about CDs in general. About how many there were to choose from at the Virgin Megastore.”
“Bloody hell, Azhar, that’s not a lie, is it?”
“No. But the outright denial of having been in the Virgin Megastore is. And this is something that I will not accept. Hadiyyah is not to start that with me. She will not begin lying. She will not. Not to me.” His voice was so controlled and his features so rigid that Barbara realised far more was being discussed than his daughter’s initial venture into prevarication.
She said, “Okay. I get it. But she feels wretched. Whatever your point is, I think you made it.”
“I hope so. She must learn that there are consequences to the decisions she makes, and she must learn this as a child.”
“I don’t disagree. But…” Barbara drew in on her cigarette before she dropped it to the front step and ground it out. “It seems like making her admit her wrongdoing to me-sort of like in public?-is punishment enough. I think you should let her keep the CD.”
“I’ve decided the consequences.”
“You can bend, though, can’t you?”
“Too far,” he said, “and you break on the wheel of your own inconsistencies.”
“What happens then?” Barbara asked him. When he didn’t reply, she went on quietly with, “Hadiyyah and lying…This isn’t really what it’s all about. Is it, Azhar.”
He replied, “I will not have her start,” and he stepped back, preparatory to leaving. He added politely, “I have kept you from your toast long enough,” before he returned to the front of the property.
NO MATTER HIS conversation with Barbara Havers and her reassurance on the subject, Winston Nkata didn’t rest easily beneath the mantle of detective sergeant. He’d thought he would-that was the hell of it-but it wasn’t happening, and the comfort he wanted in his employment hadn’t materialised for most of his career.
He hadn’t started out in police work feeling uneasy about his job. But it hadn’t been long before the reality of being a black cop in a world dominated by white men had begun to sink in. He’d noticed it first in the canteen, in the way that glances sidled over to him and then slid onto someone else; then he felt it in the conversations, how they became ever so slightly more guarded when he joined his colleagues. After that it was in the manner that he was greeted: with just a shade more welcome than was given the white cops when he sat with a group at table. He hated that deliberate effort people made to appear tolerant when he was near. The very act of diligently treating him like one of the lads made him feel like the last thing he’d ever become was one of the lads.