The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel: A Novel Page 7

  Muriel had lived in Peckham all her life, except for a short and traumatic period during the war. While she stayed put, however, the area had changed around her. The Blitz had been followed by equally savage destruction in the 1960s, when streets had been bulldozed to make way for high-rise blocks. As the years passed many of the families she knew had moved out, to be replaced by blacks. Nowadays crack dealers drove past in convertibles, music blaring, the thuds making her ornaments tremble. Huge girls barged into the Only Two Schoolchildren at a Time newsagent’s. They shoved past her, shouting on their mobiles, while she tried to buy a tin of Whiskas. More recently, illegal immigrants had moved in, gray-faced men from God knew where. They stood outside the tube station waiting to be picked up by cowboy builders. Crime statistics were soaring; her nights were punctuated by the sound of smashing glass.

  Keith had urged her to move out. “It’s a dump, Mum. Come to Chigwell.” He lived there in some style; he had done well for himself. Muriel, however, was stubborn. She let him buy her a flat on the ground floor of a nice new block, around the corner from where she grew up. She let him fit it out, washing machine, satellite TV. She even took the money Keith pulled out from his wallet, so fat it didn’t close properly, when he visited her. But she stayed where she was. She was an independent woman; she didn’t want to be beholden. And she didn’t want to live anywhere near that snarky wife of his.

  The loathing was mutual. When Muriel had been stuck in Casualty, back in May, Sandra hadn’t even been bothered to phone. It was only when Keith got back from Spain that all hell was let loose—newspapers, TV; Muriel did enjoy it. The neighbors made a fuss over her, the ones who could speak English; all of a sudden she was a celebrity.

  Muriel loved her son. She had always been there for him. Wives and girlfriends came and went—“Here we are, gathered together again,” said the best man at Keith’s last wedding—but they were like driftwood, washed back to sea while Muriel remained, the rock. That was mothers for you. Keith was all she had, Keith and her cat, Leonard. In fact they had a certain amount in common. Both were sleek, handsome and predators of the opposite sex; both disappeared for days at a time on mysterious business of their own—in the case of her cat, returning with a torn ear.

  Where did Keith’s money come from? Muriel didn’t ask. He said he was in property, and that was good enough for her. It certainly financed a lavish lifestyle: the house in Chigwell, the house in Spain, the vast silver Jeep-thing in which he arrived to whisk her out to Sunday lunch up west at places where they removed her coat with a flourish as if she had just arrived from Buckingham Palace. In Keith’s presence Muriel was plugged into a different world. His father would have been proud of him. After all, that was what sons were for: to do better than you ever did. Otherwise there would be no sense in it.

  Life had to make sense. Muriel was a superstitious woman. She read tea leaves—a lost art since the arrival of tea bags. She scanned the skies of the urban jungle for supernatural omens and read her horoscope in the Daily Express. Her life had had its sorrows and though her husband, and the large tribe of Donnellys to which he belonged, had found solace in the Catholic Church, she was suspicious of organized religion and pursued her own spiritual path. Cats understood this. Leonard sensed things; that was why they were close. He was an independent spirit, like herself, in his own feline way.

  She had named him after one of her dead husband’s brothers. Leonard had died during a bombing raid; he was returning home from leave, carrying a bag of sausage rolls. She was a young girl at the time. The Donnellys lived next door and it was Leonard she had loved, more than all of his brothers. When I grow up I shall marry Lenny, Muriel had thought. His spirit lived on in her cat. She talked to him in a way she had never talked to her husband, Patrick, with whom she had shared a bed for forty-two years until he had smoked himself to death.

  Muriel was talking to Leonard now, the day that she herself was to become a crime statistic. No tea leaves had warned her. “I fancy a spot of fish,” she said. “It’s Friday, see, though it’s all the same to you.” She checked her handbag: purse, keys. “Daft picture of Charles in the paper. Paddy called him Jug Ears, remember? We were on the same side, Paddy and me—we had that in common.”

  Leonard lay draped over the back of the armchair. The fabric was worn, from where Patrick’s head had rested when he watched the telly. It had remained her husband’s chair; only the cat used it. She stroked Lenny’s fur; he rose to meet her hand. That’s what she liked about cats. They were so easily contented: a chair, a gas fire, a loving stroke. Humans needed so many things to make them happy.

  Muriel let herself out of the flat. Pulling her shopping trolley she made her way past the school, the roar of the playground behind the wall. Years ago there had been two fish shops in the high street. One was run by Ron Whiting. She had explained the joke to Keith, when he was little, his hand in hers. Now she had to go to the supermarket, which was farther away: across the main road, down an alleyway—her shortcut—and past what had once been a row of cottages where her friend Maisie lived. They had fed sugar cubes to the milkman’s horse. A man came into the stable once and showed them his willy. When she was sixteen, Maisie had run off with a GI.

  The sun came out. It glinted on the broken glass. Her neighbor Winnie went the long way around, by Cressy Road, but Muriel pooh-poohed that. Winnie was such a timid little thing, cowering behind her nets, never emerging after dusk.

  Muriel walked past the Dixon’s loading bay. There was nobody around. Why hadn’t Keith phoned? It had been three days now; this was not like her son. He had given her a mobile phone. When she sat on the bus, her handbag throbbed in her lap. But she couldn’t see the little numbers and she never remembered to plug it in. It was hard enough, working out the buttons on her remote.

  Muriel didn’t hear the footsteps behind her. She was thinking about her son when a hand grabbed her arm and wrenched it back.

  She didn’t feel the pain, not until later. It happened so fast—the wrench, the kick. “Sod off!” she screamed, gripping her handbag. A hand clamped her mouth shut. She smelled the skin; she smelled sweat and fear. Something kicked her again, hard.

  Muriel fell over. She hit the pavement heavily. She glimpsed a black face, hood pulled down. He wrenched at her bag and tripped over her shopping trolley. “Fuck!”

  Then they ran off. Lying on the pavement, she saw them sprinting down the alley—two kids—and then they were gone.

  They had punched the breath out of her body. Muriel lay spread-eagled, her knickers showing. For a moment, she was too shocked to move.

  Maybe she fainted, because now a man was bending over her, blocking out the sun. “You all right, love?”

  He tucked his hand under her arm and helped her to her feet. Muriel swayed, bumping against him. Her legs kept giving way. Later, she didn’t remember how she got there but she seemed to be standing in a shop, holding onto her trolley as if she were drowning.

  “I been mugged,” she gasped, but the words seemed to come from somebody else. Her legs were trembling. And then she was in a back room, this Paki man helping her, and she sat down on a chair. A woman gazed at her. She had a red blotch on her forehead. Muriel’s own face felt sticky; when she inspected her fingers it was blood.

  “They took my bag,” said Muriel.

  The newsagent gave her a glass of water, but Muriel’s hand was shaking; the water dribbled down her chin. She hadn’t been in this shop before; the one she went to was nearer home.

  “They were blacks,” she said. “Not like you. Black blacks.”

  “I’ll phone the police,” said the man.

  He spoke to his wife in a foreign language. She wore a sari, holding it against her mouth as if she had bad breath. Muriel remembered a girl at school named Annie Jones. Annie had a harelip. When she talked, her hand strayed to her mouth. Nobody had wanted to be her friend.

  Muriel’s head swam. The newsagent must have called the police, because now he was pickin
g up the phone again. “I shall call the ambulance,” he said.

  “No! I’m not going to no hospital!”

  “You’ve got a nasty cut.”

  “Not Casualty!” Muriel’s face throbbed. Her leg hurt, and when she looked down she saw her stockings were torn. “What about my cat?” she said. “They got my keys; what about his food?”

  “Fifteen times we’ve been robbed,” said the man. “Fifteen times in two years. These kids have destroyed my business.”

  “They got my handbag,” said Muriel. “It only had twenty pound in it.”

  “I’ve had enough,” said the man. “I’m packing up and taking my family home.”

  “Don’t go!” she cried, grabbing his arm.

  “Not now, love. When I’ve sold my shop. I’m going to take them home to India. It’s safe there.”

  “Safe?”

  “India has a very low crime rate. You can walk the streets in Hyderabad, my hometown, and feel no alarm. I wanted to make a life for my family in England, but what sort of life is this?”

  “I’m not going to no hospital,” said Muriel, but already she could hear the siren approaching.

  Where’s Keith? Muriel wailed silently. Where’s my boy? In her distress she had forgotten his phone number. It was in her handbag, of course, but her handbag was gone. Without it her hands felt useless, like flippers.

  The policeman looked like Keith when he was young. She had wanted to stroke his cheek. Now he was gone and she was lying on a trolley like last time, it could be the same trolley, with people hurrying past and somebody moaning on the other side of the curtain. The bin said Contaminated Sharps Only.

  Muriel would have killed for a cup of tea, but despite her asking twice, nobody had brought her one. They had put her in Coventry, because of last time. The big black nurse who took her blood pressure looked like the same one, though you couldn’t always tell. She had yanked the band so tight it hurt.

  I’ve been mugged! Muriel wanted to shout. How dared they? Why had they singled her out—that brief blow that had sent her reeling, that could have cracked open her skull? What had she done to deserve it? And the indignity! Her damp knickers, because she had wee’d herself; the hole in her stockings that exposed her varicose veins and turned her into a bag lady, except she had no bloody bag.

  She had felt threatened by them before, of course—the gangs of them jostling in the bus queue; the mad old lady in a poncho who spat at her in the high street. She had seen them smashing car windows and being chased by the police. And then in the hospital it was all foreign people too, jabbing you with needles and shouting at each other over your head. It was like being mugged all over again. Did nobody realize that when you were frightened you wanted your own kind around you?

  Muriel hated hospitals. It was this place, St. Jude’s, that had swallowed up her husband. Paddy had entered on a stretcher, never to come out again. She had returned home to an empty armchair and an oxygen cylinder.

  She heard voices. “It’s that Mrs. Donnelly again,” said a nurse.

  “The Mrs. Donnelly?” She recognized the doctor’s voice. “Oh well, we have to treat all sorts here.”

  Muriel bristled. How dare he?

  They pulled open the curtain and stepped in. It was the tall, gray-haired Indian doctor. “Well well, Mrs. Donnelly,” he said. “So we meet again.”

  They sent Muriel home in a community ambulance. It was dark.

  Was it only that morning when she had set off for Safeway? Compared to last time, the doctor had seen her quickly. He probably wanted to get rid of her. Cuts and bruises, that was all it was, and a nasty black eye. No X-ray, no overnight stay. A new nurse had dressed her leg: a nice Australian girl.

  “I’m not a racialist,” Muriel told her. “Last time, the nurse was ever so rude. They got different manners from us. People pretend it’s not true but they don’t live with them. They don’t know what it’s like, them in their nice houses in Wembley or whatnot.”

  There was only one passenger left on the ambulance, an old boy with a Zimmer walker. He was dropped off at the elderly folks’ home down by Peckham Rye. Muriel gazed at them through the window. The old people sat there. A TV was on but they weren’t watching. Some of them had fallen asleep, lolling in their chairs. The chairs were ranged around the walls, leaving the center of the room empty, as if waiting for a significant event to happen.

  Muriel leaned her cheek against the glass. It cooled her skin. Soon Keith will arrive, she thought. When he hears what’s happened he’ll drop everything and come over. He’ll know I’m shaking like a jelly. He’ll come over in his big silver Jeep that all the neighbors stare at and he’ll tuck me up in bed. He’s a good boy.

  The smell of urine rose from her clothes. Today she felt her age; those thugs had made an old woman of her. She thought: I need somebody to take care of me. The doctor had said that. She had flinched from his brown fingers, pressing her, prodding her, prizing open her lids and shining a torch into her eyes. But he had been kind to her—surprisingly kind, considering. Maybe he had forgotten what had happened last time; so many people made a fuss about the conditions in that place.

  The doctor had actually sat down beside her—him, a busy man. “You shouldn’t be living alone at your age,” he had said. His badge said Dr. Ravi Kapoor. “Have you considered some sort of residential accommodation?”

  “My son’ll look after me.”

  “I know a very good place.” He had smiled at her, as if sharing a secret.

  “Catch me being stuck in front of the telly with a lot of old bats.”

  “I can see you’re a woman of spirit, Mrs. Donnelly.” When the doctor smiled, his face was transformed. Like a lot of those Indians, he was a handsome man. “Anyway, if you change your mind … I’ll get your address from Admissions and send you a brochure.”

  There had been something puzzling about this conversation, but then the whole day had been disorienting. Muriel thought: I won’t be beaten. Two kids aren’t going to knock the stuffing out of me. I can see you’re a woman of spirit. She hadn’t lived through the war for this.

  The war. One day she would tell her son what had happened—the whole story, not the parts she had told before. She had always put it off—tomorrow, the next week. It never seemed the right moment. All of a sudden it would be too late; the events of today had demonstrated that.

  The bus jerked to a halt outside her flat. The windows were dark, of course. So were those of her neighbor Winnie; she was away, staying with her daughter in Bromley.

  “Sure you’ll be all right?” asked the driver.

  Muriel nodded. “I’ll let myself in.” She didn’t want him to see where she hid her spare set of keys.

  She felt odd: light-headed, numb. Later she realized it was a portent. She crossed the forecourt to her front door. The keys were there, in their plastic bag behind the tub of geraniums. She thought of the real Leonard, the human one. Like the Indian doctor, he, too, had a smile that transformed his face. Say he had missed his train and taken a later one; say the bomb had fallen on somebody else. Then it would have been Lenny waiting in the flat with tea and buttered toast, ready to kiss her better.

  But then, of course, her son would never have been born. The thought made her weightless.

  The door swung open. She hadn’t inserted the key. It just swung open.

  Muriel stepped inside and switched on the light.

  Something was wrong. Surely she had locked the door behind her when she went out shopping, a hundred years ago?

  Muriel stood still. She felt a draught—a chill wind from the kitchen. In their vase, the peacock feathers trembled.

  The back door was open—that was why. Somebody had been into her flat; maybe they were still there. Muriel stood in the hallway, her heart knocking against her ribs. Keith, where are you?

  She knew she should get out of the flat but she stayed there, stuck. She thought: Those boys, they had my keys. They know where I live.

  The
n she seemed to be in the lounge. She switched on the light. The bookshelf had been knocked over. The ornaments lay on the floor—her Royal Family mugs, her glass animals. The settee was skewed sideways. Despite the disorder, there was an emptiness in the room. It took her a moment to realize that her TV was gone—the big wide-screen TV that Keith had given her.

  Muriel whispered: “Leonard?”

  There was no sign of her cat. He must be terrified. Muriel went into the bedroom and opened her wardrobe. He wasn’t there. She bent down, creakingly, and fished out the shoe box. The cash was still there—two hundred pounds, her money for emergencies.

  Muriel felt a brief flush of triumph and then she burst into tears.

  Ravi returned to an empty house. His wife and father-in-law had left that morning. At this moment they must be thirty thousand feet above Bahrain.

  As he walked from room to room, he felt lighter. The invasion had been lifted; his house had been returned to him. There were no signs of Norman’s habitation except some sheets in the washing machine, which Pauline had switched on before she left. There was a note to that effect in the kitchen. Ravi pulled out the damp sheets, stuffed them into the dryer and slammed the door shut. It was as if Norman had never existed. Ravi slotted Cosí fan Tutte into the CD player. How fleeting is our imprint upon this earth, he thought. Just a footprint in the sand, and soon the wind will blow it away. Ferrando’s voice swelled out: “Un’ aura amorosa …,” a loving breeze brings balm to my soul.

  Ravi drew the curtains. He sank back in the sofa and gazed at the armchair, the one occupied by Norman for the past four months. Soon it would revert to simply being an armchair again. How little we leave behind, he thought. He pictured the plastic bags of belongings in A & E: spectacles, a watch. He had lost a patient that day—a motorcycle accident. There had been two muggings (including that Mrs. Donnelly), a lacerated finger, a first-degree burn from a chip pan. So many near-collisions—knives slipping on chopping boards, lorries skidding—it was a miracle that anybody survived into old age at all. “What about karma?” Pauline had asked. Like many English people, she was attracted by that subcontinental mumbo-jumbo. He resented her talking in those terms; it was a betrayal of what he had given up his life to do—to restore the casualties of chance, to mend the cracked vessels. Didn’t she understand the most basic thing about him?