Paradise Postponed Read online

  “Quick Nasim!” I hissed, “Run to the bathroom and lock yourself in and don’t come out whatever happens!” And as she fled upstairs, I rushed to the front door and threw the inner bolt across. Then I ran to the kitchen door and locked that up as well and pulled down the blinds on both the kitchen windows.

  “We know you’re in there! Open up!” Tariq was shouting.

  I raced up the stairs taking two steps at a time and hid breathlessly behind my curtains in my dark bedroom trying to peer out to see who was there with Tariq without being seen by them. It seemed that this time he had come with his Uncle and his cousin. They kicked on the door again. I reached for my phone and speed dialled Quinn.

  “Yes?”

  “Quinn! Can you come over straight away?” I asked urgently.

  “Sorry Eve, I’m finishing a late shift at work,” he said apologetically. “Is it important?”

  “Oh, never mind!” I cut him off. I didn’t have time to explain. The men outside were pacing up and down now yelling threats. I rang Dad. His phone was switched off. I thought of American films where by now I’d have a shot gun in my hand and I’d be blasting at them through a bedroom window. Damn our namby-pamby pathetic Englishness! Tariq had spotted me. He stood underneath the window. “If you don’t send her out to us,” he shouted at me. “You’ll regret it! You’ll have to watch your back where ever you go! And we’ll smash every window right now and then we’ll come back and fire-bomb you as you sleep!”

  For the second time in a year, I rang 999.

  “Police,” I said through gritted teeth.

  To give the police their due, they turned up extremely rapidly while Nasim’s family were still there. First one patrol car and then a second. The officers got out and put their hats on and walked up the path. Nasim’s men stood their ground. A good tactic on their part as running off would look seriously suspicious. They began to justify themselves and claim that they were just trying to legitimately speak to their sister/ niece/cousin, who was being a naughty silly girl who had run away for no good reason and who was being shielded and led astray by me.

  The doorbell rang. “Stay in the bathroom with the door locked,” I called to Nasim and went downstairs to answer the door. I unbolted and unlocked and opened the door a tiny crack. “You’re not to let them in,” I told the policeman standing there. “She doesn’t want to speak to them.”

  “Ok,” he said. “But you’ll have to let us in so you can tell us what’s been happening.”

  I opened the door a bit wider. I could see that the three men were being ushered down to the police cars. And then I realised that the second officer standing behind the first was John Holt.

  “Let us in, Eve,” John said calmly.

  I opened the door and turned away. I didn’t know whether to be pleased or sorry that Holty was here. On the one hand it was him that had landed me with the Community Punishment Order, but on the other hand, I wouldn’t have to explain so much.

  “Nasim,” I called. “You can come down now.”

  As we explained what had been going on, Holty was frowning. Nasim was being awfully cautious about what she was saying and not making a particularly convincing witness.

  “I think you ought to go home,” Holty advised her.

  “She’s over sixteen, she doesn’t have to,” I confronted bolshily. “What are you going to do about the fact that Tariq has threatened to kill her and now he’s threatened to smash all our windows and fire-bomb us while we sleep?”

  “You did the right thing to call us rather than try to take anything into your own hands,” John said as though he felt he should reinforce some good behaviour before he hacked me off by telling me he wasn’t about to do anything useful. “But he hasn’t actually done anything tangible, only made some threats.”

  “So you’re saying that you have to wait till you find our bodies burned to a crisp in our beds before you can do anything?” I said angrily. I was getting déjà vu here. “Tariq used to hang out with Luke Beck, Hussein and Tino, you know? He’s a nasty piece of work.”

  Holt’s eyes flickered momentarily but he wasn’t going to allow himself to react. You know perfectly well what I’m signalling to you, I thought.

  Nasim wasn’t helping by leaping to the defence of her brother every time I said anything against him.

  “So what are you going to do to protect us?” I demanded.

  “Are you on your own here tonight?” John asked. “Where’s your father?”

  I frowned. “I don’t know. I suppose he must be staying over at work. I expect he told me at some point, but I can’t remember. He’s not answering his phone.”

  “Ok,” John thought for a moment. “Well, we’ll make sure we send a patrol car along this way every now and again through the night, and we’ll lay out to them in clear terms what will happen if we find out that they’ve been round here again.” He glanced at the other officer. “We can caution them for threatening behaviour if needs be, and ultimately – if it came to it – we could take out a restraining order against them.”

  He stood up and the other officer followed suit. “Ring us again if you need to,” John finished up. But they hadn’t taken any formal statements from us and they hadn’t written anything down, so for all their fine words this clearly wasn’t going to be logged as any sort of serious incident.

  I watched them through the window. They stood at their car leaning on the roof, discussing something for a minute. Then they took their caps off and got in, sat discussing something for a few more moments, then put their seatbelts on and drove off without a backward glance.

  Nasim started to cry. “Mum will be so upset. Auntie Mo will be so upset. I’m so wicked!”

  “No, you’re not.” I yanked the curtains closed.

  “Maybe I should go home?” She sobbed. Then she wailed, “But if I can’t see Rajesh, I just want to die!”

  I gritted my teeth. Because I’d never felt that way about anyone myself, I found people that made dramatic statements like that a bit irritating. “Why don’t you ring him?” I suggested tersely. “Ask him to come and stay round here tonight to protect us, or at least to see you.”

  While she was upstairs in Dad’s room ringing Rajesh from the landline, I at last got hold of Jamie on my mobile.

  “Where are you for heaven’s sake?” I demanded crossly.

  “At Sally’s.” His tone was aggressive. “Sahmir’s family scared the hell out of her yesterday! She doesn’t want to come round to ours.”

  “So when will you be back tonight?”

  “None of your business,” he snapped. Then, “Not at all if I can help it!” And then he cut me off.

  Nasim came down, crying again. “Raj says it’ll just inflame the situation!”

  “What, as in Tariq burning the house down?” I drawled ironically.

  “He says that at least at the moment we can prove that he hasn’t dishonoured me, but if he stayed over tonight it would just be adding fuel to the fire!”

  “I wish people would stop talking about fires,” I muttered. Rationally, I didn’t think Tariq would be back tonight, but I felt shaken and I just wished we weren’t on our own here. I went out to make us some hot chocolate, hoping it would soothe our shattered nerves. When I came back with it, Nasim said miserably, “I should be saying my prayers.”

  “Ok then, go ahead,” I said.

  “No, you don’t understand – I need a prayer mat!”

  “There’s a mat over there,” I nodded at the rug in the middle of the room.

  “Not one that people have walked all over in their shoes,” she said impatiently.

  I racked my brain. But we weren’t a rug-rich household. “I could give you a clean towel,” I offered. I took her upstairs to the airing cupboard.

  She looked dubious as I handed her the raggedy old blue towel, but it was all we had and it would have to do. “I’m supposed to do this five times a day,” she said.

  “Do you do it at school?” I asked amaz
ed. I never remembered her disappearing off to do anything like that.

  She shook her head. “I’m meant to – they’ve set aside a room for us – but I don’t. But I want to do it now.”

  “Ok,” I said mildly and she retreated into the bedroom with the towel. Seconds later her head popped out again. “Which way’s East?” She queried.

  I wrinkled my nose and tried to think logically. “The sun rises on that side of the house,” I dredged up, and pointed helpfully at the wall that ajoined us to the Quinns’.

  I went back downstairs and sat down with a sigh on the settee with my hot chocolate. Moments later, the doorbell rang and someone tried the handle. My heart thumping wildly again, I rushed to the door and shot the bolt across into the locked position, realising that I’d forgotten to replace it when the police left.

  “Who is it?” I yelled.

  “Who do you think?”

  It was Quinn. I opened the door and fell into his arms. “Thank God you’re here!” I greeted him shakily.

  He looked surprised. He wasn’t used to this sort of welcome. He took full advantage of the situation however and gave me a hug and a right good snog.

  “Will you stay over tonight?” I asked.

  His green eyes glinted. “What in your bed?”

  “Nasim’s in my bed, so I don’t think you’ll be getting much of a welcome there,” I said tartly. “No, on the settee, yer muppet!”

  He spotted the other mug of sitting on the table. “Mmm, hot chocolate…”

  “That’s Nasim’s,” I reproved.

  But he’d already picked it up. “Yuk, skin,” he remarked, then fished it out, hung it over the far side of the mug and settled down on the settee and started slurping it down regardless.

  I gave up and sat down beside him. I cuddled up and told him what had been happening.

  “Bloody hell,” he said helpfully. He put his arm round me. For the first time ever, I felt sort of safe and comforted by being with him. At least he’d turned up, unlike Rajesh. “I was really worried by your phone call,” he explained. “You didn’t sound yourself at all. I thought I’d better come round as soon as I finished work and find out what was wrong.”

  Blimey! I’d never rated his perceptiveness very highly, but perhaps I’d got him all wrong.

  When Nasim came back down, she too seemed relieved to see Quinn, (not a normal human reaction, I assure you), and didn’t appear to notice the disappearance of her beverage. “I’ll go to bed then,” she said, looking calmer.

  I left Quinn eating Jamie’s unclaimed pie and peas reheated in the microwave and went up with her to get ready for bed myself. Then I came back down with a spare duvet and pillows for Quinn. Once he’d showered and padded back down in just tee-shirt and boxers, I joined him for a while on the settee under the duvet. We lay in the dark, with just the faint light from the street working its way through the curtains.

  “Thank you for staying,” I said.

  His answer was to slip his hand up under my pyjama top and kiss me for an excessive length of time. I felt so absurdly grateful at the security of his presence, and so turned on by the sensation the strength of his arms around me and his broad hard chest against mine, that if it hadn’t been for the faint but distinct possibility of being interrupted by Nasim, Jamie or Dad, and the annoying fact that right in the middle of everything, Quinn went suddenly slack and began to snore, I might have given in that night. As it was, I just disentangled myself from his arms and heavy thighs that now lay like dead weights on top of me, pulled the duvet over him, and slipped upstairs to sleep on my mattress by Nasim. She stirred and muttered something as I came in, and I lay awake for a time, savouring the memory of Quinn’s hands running over my body, and feeling all tingly at the thought, and then I fell asleep.

  At work the next day, the men had already bought the local paper to cast their critical eye over Entwistle’s advert for a mechanic. It was pleasingly prominent, (‘that’ll have cost him a bomb,’ Dewhurst had muttered), and it contained an explicit if tangled sentence about it being an equal opportunities post and all genders and backgrounds being welcome to apply.

  “How many genders does he think there are?” Dewhurst commented, flapping the folded paper at us.

  “He wants another bloody female, that’s what he wants.” Bowker was as surly as usual.

  “Nothing wrong with females,” Steve Bolton winked at me. He’d done well out of our targeting the single female market, having managed to persuade a helpless female Mini Metro driver with a dodgy crankshaft to shack up with him, and had consequently been in an excellent mood for nearly two months now. “And besides, you’re not going to be around to mind. You’ll be topping up your tan in the Costa del Sol.”

  The reminder seemed to mollify Bowker, and he walked off with less of a stomp.

  When Dad walked in that night, I jumped on him, aggrieved. “Where were you last night? I made tea for you and I’ve had to throw it out!”

  Dad looked awkward. “Oh, sorry Eve.”

  “And what’s more, bloody Tariq was round and we ended up having to call the police because he was threatening to burn the place down! In the end I had to call Quinn and ask him to come and sleep over with us because John Holt didn’t think we should be on our own!”

  Dad looked as worried and guilty as I had meant him to. “Well, at least you had Adam to turn to,” he said feebly.

  Tea was a subdued affair. Jamie had booked one of his clan war games for seven o’clock despite knowing that we always ate at seven, and Nasim drooped miserably over her plate stirring her sausages, mash, peas and gravy unenthusiastically. Dad started eyeing her uneaten sausages with a predatory eye.

  “Are you going to eat those, Nasim?” I asked on his behalf.

  “No,” she said with apparent relief, and so I passed them over to him.

  She then finished her veg and disappeared off up to the bedroom.

  “How long is she going to be staying?” Dad asked.

  “Don’t know,” I said. “Will you be in tomorrow night?”

  Dad looked oddly uncomfortable. “Ummm. Maybe. I don’t know. Maybe not. Let’s say not, shall we?” He concluded finally.

  “Well, let’s hope we don’t get a repeat performance from Tariq while you’re out and we’re left on our own again,” I snapped. “The least you could do is keep your mobile phone switched for once!”

  Dad glanced at me, looked as though he might be about to say something, then thought better of it. He got up and retreated to the settee to watch TV and I threw all the plates and pans in the sink and decided that he could bloody well wash them up as I wasn’t his bloody wife.

  Upstairs, I found Nasim lying on the bed reading Romeo and Juliet. “Listen to this,” she said and started spouting what sounded like poetry.

  “With love’s light wings did I o'erperch these walls,

  For stony limits cannot hold love out,

  And what love can do, that dares love attempt.

  Therefore thy kinsmen are no stop to me.

  Juliet:

  If they do see thee they will murder thee.

  Romeo:

  Alack, there lies more peril in thine eye

  Than twenty of their swords. Look thou but sweet,

  And I am proof against their enmity.

  Juliet:

  I would not for the world they saw thee here.

  Romeo:

  I have night’s cloak to hide me from their eyes,

  And but thou love me, let them find me here.

  My life were better ended by their hate

  Than death proroguèd, wanting of thy love.”

  “What does proroguèd mean?” I asked blankly.

  She sighed. “I don’t know, but I guess it means he’d rather die at the hands of her relatives than not have her love. It’s so romantic isn’t it? It’s just like Rajesh and me! ”

  “I guess,” I said. ‘Cept that Rajesh didn’t seem particularly willing to leap over any walls and defy
the family… “I didn’t know I was buying you poetry, I thought it was just a story.”

  “It’s Iambic Pentameter,” she announced mysteriously. “It’s how the English speak, an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable, da DUM, da DUM, da DUM, da DUM, da DUM.” She clapped her hands in rhythm to what she was saying.

  Blimey. I was glad I’d left school. “So how do other people speak then?” I asked. “How would it go in Pakistani?”

  “There’s no such language as Pakistani,” she corrected me irritably.

  I stared at her. “What do you speak at home then?”

  “English,” she said sharply.

  I frowned. I knew I’d heard her mum speaking to her in a different language.

  “There are twenty-four languages and dialects in Pakistan,” she added suddenly.

  “But what does your mum speak?” I interrogated with a frown. Nasim was being unexpectedly prickly as far as I was concerned.

  “Sindhi,” she admitted at last.

  “Ok…” I’d never heard of it. I thrashed around to find something intelligent to say.

  She warmed up a bit. “Sindhi is known for its very rich literature and it’s one of the oldest languages.”

  “So can you speak it then?” I asked curiously.

  She nodded. “Can’t read it though. Sindhi Abjads contain as many as fifty three alphabet symbols and can be written in three different scripts.”

  “Goodness,” I said feebly. I couldn’t even imagine fifty three symbols… Time to change the subject back to something safer. “Oh well, let’s hope your Rajesh and Nasim story ends as happily as Romeo and Juliet!”

  She stared at me. “Romeo and Juliet end up killing themselves!” She exclaimed.

  “Oh my God, don’t do that will you?” I back tracked hastily. I’d never have bought it for her if I’d known that was the ending! I’d thought it was a famous romance.

  “Course not,” she snapped scornfully.

  “Well, mind you don’t!” I said severely.

  She glared at me and pointedly lifted the book up again.