As If He Wasn’t There
Asif Declan Kalil Murphy has a brooding resentment of
his name, and by extension, of his deceased parents,
although he resents them for many more things than his
name, up to and including their untimely departure from
life. The trouble with his name, he thinks, is that it
promises so much more – it promises that he will be
interesting and exotic and larger than life, Irish charm
and whimsy blended with South Asian mysticism and
romance. Asif finds it impossible to live up to his shining
name, and so shudders moth-like just beneath it; avoiding
introductions and hiding behind initials. He finds it much
easier to be A Murphy, a Murphy like any other, just one
of the crowd of immigrants of Irish descent littering north
London. Or better still, simply AM; I am what I am,
thinks Asif, as his tube rumbles into the disappointing
depths of Finchley Central, where the rain has made the
edges of the platforms slippery, and there is a strong
smell of ammonia from an unidentified source. I am what
I am, he muses, not special or flawed or creative, just
unimpressive, dull as dishwater, little old neutral old
nothing old me; at a certain point, he thinks, he really
needs to stop blaming his parents. But not just yet. He’s
still young, he’s just twenty-three years old, and he
suspects that he has years of grievance left in him. He’s
an accountant like his British Asian mother before him;
he lacks her strong will, but he has inherited her fickle
constitution; his father was a hero who died on a peacekeeping
mission several years before his wife’s congested
heart was to claim her; Asif knows that he has nothing
approaching his father’s courage, but he shares his sense
of duty, and propensity to follow orders. It seems a bad
joke that the very things that got Asif’s father killed are
the things that deny Asif his own life; Asif is not the sort
to swear, but he admits to having experienced a secret,
soaring thrill the first day he heard the Larkin quote,
from Lila, of course: ‘They fuck you up, your mum and
dad. They may not mean to, but they do.’ It was so
brilliantly and starkly true. Like a song he’d been humming
his whole life had finally been put to words.
He walks up the steps at Finchley Central, and away
from the gritty high street down the narrow, treelined
roads towards the family home that he has inherited
from his begrudged parents and that he shares with his
youngest sister, Yasmin. The higgledy-piggledy streets
are untidy and the knobbly, sore-looking trees are not
slightly picturesque, but despite this, the walk to and
from the tube is his favourite time of day. It’s when he
doesn’t have to be at work worrying about his performance
and whether he’ll Consistently Meet Expectations
or Consistently Fail to Meet Expectations at his next
appraisal, and when he doesn’t have to be at home
worrying about pretty much the same thing, waiting to
be appraised wordlessly by Yasmin’s NHS-assigned specialists
instead. During the walk he is in between things,
and no worse than anyone else; certainly not any different.
During the walk he imagines that he has secret
superpowers, as he is invisible, in his smart suit and
precisely ironed shirt, and good shoes and tattered briefcase,
which he inexplicably carries like a prize, as one
might a broken nose, as though it has a scent of history
about it; he is the sort of pleasant-faced young man that
no one would notice.
His mobile phone rings as he turns into his street, and
he stands at the corner shop in full view of his house,
watching the curtain in the upstairs window twitch.
Yasmin is looking out for him, as she always does
between 6 p.m. and 6.30 p.m. He knows from past
experience that if she doesn’t see him there, she panics,
and so he never digresses from his usual path without
warning. He has got so used to seeing the curtain twitch
in the upstairs window each and every evening that he
wonders whether he’d panic himself if he didn’t see it, as
though Yasmin’s symptoms might be contagious; after
all these years of accommodating her infuriating demands
for consistency and routine, her habits and neuroses, it
would hardly be surprising if he unwittingly adopted
some himself. He searches for his phone in every pocket,
with mounting panic, until he finally locates it; he is
relieved to see that it is just his other sister calling, and
answers hurriedly, aware that Yasmin is waiting and
watching. ‘Hi Lila, what is it?’
‘I’m fine, thank you for not bloody asking. You’re
losing your manners spending all your days locked up
with Yasmin, I’ve always said it would happen.’
‘I don’t spend my days locked up with Yasmin, just
the evenings. I spend my days locked up at work,’ retorts
Asif, feeling guilty that Lila has managed to sum up so
swiftly and with so little premeditation what he has been
wondering himself.
‘At Accountants’ Anonymous?’ sniggers Lila, pleased
with her joke. ‘Same difference. I’m returning your call
from yesterday afternoon.’
‘Oh good, you got the message. That bloke who took
the call seemed really out of it.’
‘Mikey? He owns the record shop. He is always out
of it; I think he did too much dope as an adolescent or
something. Still does. Has a fantastic arse though, I’m
considering sleeping with him when I’m single again.’
Asif, becoming rapidly appalled at how quickly he can
lose any sense of conversational control with Lila, ignores
the merits of this unknown Mikey’s arse and asks, ‘So
you’re coming round tonight, at eight-ish? I’m getting a
curry in for us.’
‘What? As if, Asif! Spend a Friday night in with you
and sodding Miss Spock. Not bloody likely.’ Lila begins
to laugh, and then, realizing that her cackle sounds selfconsciously
cruel, like a cartoon villainess, stops abruptly.
‘I’m seeing Wesley tonight, anyway.’
‘That’s nice. Where are you meeting up?’ asks Asif
with pointed civility, watching the curtain twitch a little
bit more.
‘The Central,’ admits Lila grudgingly. The Central Bar
is only ten minutes’ walk away from the house, a fact
that hangs unspoken in the air between them.
‘Then come around at eight anyway,’ asks Asif at last,
trying to sound business-like rather than pleading; he
often gets lost between these two tones when making
perfectly reasonable requests at work of the office support
staff. ‘You can bring Wes if you want. Or leave him
there for half an hour if we embarrass you. Yasmin has
something important she wants to discuss with us; she
wouldn’t tell me what. Something to do with school, I
suppose.’
‘Why is it always about Yasmin?’ mutters Lila. Asif
doesn’t answer, as, of course, she knows why already.
‘OK, I’ll pop around, but just for half an hour. And get
me a veggie samosa please.’ Asif smiles; both he and Lila
know that she doesn’t really want a samosa; asking him
for one is her way of saying that she’ll be there, it’s her
promise, wrapped up in pastry and stuffed with steaming
and aromatic vegetables. His smile fades a little when he
sees the curtain at the window has stopped twitching;
he hopes that Yasmin isn’t sitting in the corner sulking
because he took so long on the phone.
When he walks into the house, it is exactly fourteen
minutes past 6 p.m., so Yasmin has only had to stand at
the window for fourteen minutes that day. He tries to
convince himself that he doesn’t need to worry about
Yasmin; she’ll probably be a complete delight all evening,
and will behave beautifully when Lila and Wes come
round. As if, Asif, he mocks himself, the childish mocking
that Lila so perceptively started almost as soon as she
could talk, and has never tired of since. Of all the
inspiring Asian names available, why did his parents call
him an unanswered question, ‘As if?’ The idea of something
still wanting, a road untravelled, an unfinished
comparison, which of course it was. They had expected
a girl, whom they were going to call Kalila, which is how
he had ended up with his third name. Asif Declan Kalil
Murphy. A Murphy. AM. Little old nothing old As If he
wasn’t there.
When Asif enters his house, he goes through to the
kitchen, and sees Yasmin washing up plates at the kitchen
sink; her hair is pulled back in a sensible ponytail, and
she is wearing a grey T-shirt and her soft, baggy jeans.
She seems so normal that it almost looks contrived, as
though she has made preparations for a stranger to come
in and say Hi-Honey-I’m-Home.
‘Hello Asif,’ she says with polite, almost rigid formality,
but she does not turn towards him or acknowledge
him in any other way. He is home as he always is, and
that is enough for her. There is something a little bit
wrong with the scene that an outsider would take some
time to work out, a bit like those spot-the-difference
pictures in the backs of magazines, where you have to
find the tiny mismatch, a different detail in the background
greenery, a strand of hair misplaced. Asif is used
to Yasmin, and doesn’t need any time to work it out; he
can see that the plates that she is scrupulously washing
up are already clean, she has probably just taken a stack
straight out of the cupboard or dishwasher. Sometimes
Yasmin irons already ironed clothes, although he’s not
very comfortable with her using the iron if he’s out of
the house, for obvious reasons. And sometimes she launders
already clean bedlinen. Just for the calm, soothing
feeling of fulfilling domestic routine; the beautifully ordinary
things that their mother used to take care of, when
not taking care of Yasmin.
He doesn’t comment, but puts his briefcase down, and
tells his sister, ‘Lila’s going to be here for 8 p.m. just like
you asked.’
‘Great, thank you,’ says Yasmin mechanically, putting
the last clean plate in the rack.
‘She might bring Wesley,’ Asif adds. ‘Or she might
leave him at the bar and come by herself.’ He sees
Yasmin’s shoulders stiffen, not because she dislikes Wesley,
but because she dislikes the uncertainty of whether
he will be there or not.
‘Great, thank you,’ she says at last, and this time she
remembers to face Asif, and looks him deliberately in
the eyes. Yasmin’s own eyes are hazel, clear and rather
pretty; specialists have occasionally commented on Yasmin’s
pretty eyes, something which Asif thinks is wholly
inappropriate. He never leaves her alone with anyone
whom he doesn’t know and trust, specialist or not, and
especially not with any overqualified creep who remarks
on her looks; Yasmin has never had a boyfriend, and he
worries that her inexperience, youth and vulnerability
would make it too easy for the wrong sort of man to
take advantage. After Yasmin has held his gaze for a
count of Mississippi One and Mississippi Two, just as
their mother taught her to do, she takes the plates out of
the drying rack and puts them back in the sink, to wash
up all over again.
Asif watches her for a moment, and considers asking
her about her day; smarting slightly about Lila’s earlier
offhand remark, he wonders whether he should remind
Yasmin about it being good manners to ask how someone
is when she speaks to them. But then he’d have to remind
Yasmin to listen to the answer as well, and to respond to
it. It suddenly seems too much like hard work, and he
doesn’t feel up to it, he’d just like to have a beer and watch
the TV for a bit. The rest of the evening stretches out
painfully before him, another evening in which he has to
entertain Yasmin, or rather, let her entertain herself, while
he watches over her. His little sister’s warden. Fridays are
the worst, as he knows he won’t be escaping the next
morning, but will have to be there for the whole, aching
weekend, making nutritious dinners which will probably
be rejected in favour of neatly compartmentalized readymeals,
planning improving activities to get Yasmin out of
her room and away from her TV and computer for at least
a little while. He imagines that this is what single mothers
feel like. He realizes uncomfortably that he would rather
be anywhere than here.
Asif tries to console himself with the fact that at least
Lila will come round tonight, but he knows that she will
only stay for a little while. She doesn’t consider looking
after Yasmin to be her job; she doesn’t even think that
Yasmin needs looking after, as though it is all some
elaborate game that Yasmin has played for the last
nineteen years in the interests of being bloody-minded.
And so Asif is left to do the looking after, and the coping,
and the caring; as he has his whole life, and especially
now that his parents are dead. No wonder he hates them;
resents, he corrects himself sternly, I resent them. It’s OK
to resent your dead parents, but it’s not OK to hate them
just because they’re dead. It feels like just the sort of fine
distinction that he’d have to explain to Yasmin.
Asif orders the takeaway and gets his beer out of the
fridge; there is a photo of his mum with the three of them
as children on the fridge door, with little Yasmin on her
lap, but sitting scrupulously forward, to avoid touching
her siblings. Lila and himself are pushed out to the side.
When he was a child, he used to believe that his mother
was the most beautiful woman in the world, practically
bridal with her permanently fresh-faced and dewy complexion.
Now, as he looks at the photo, he can see that
she is smiling with unnatural, strained calm, her expression
almost assessing, as though she is daring someone to
criticize her or her offspring. He hears his mother’s voice,
‘Engage with her, Asif; you need to engage with her, or
she’ll never learn to . . .’
‘To what, Mum?’ Asif had replied with adolescent
annoyance at her deliberately trailing off. ‘To be normal?’
The look his mother had given him was so disappointed
that he’d almost rather she’d hit him; as she sometimes
had Lila. A disciplined slap to show where the acceptable
boundaries were; a slap issued with sadness rather than
anger, along with the quiet command, ‘Go to your room
and think about what you said.’ And how Lila had
sobbed that obvious, overused phrase, clutching her sore
face, a phrase which probably haunted her now, years
later, ‘I HATE you, I wish you were DEAD,’ before running
upstairs.
Sometimes he thinks he should take the photo down,
but it seems to him that would be an act of defeat; as
though his mother would just say I-told-you-so from the
safe distance of her harp-twanging cloud. How easy, it
would be, not to engage with Yasmin. Just to share the
house as indifferently as flatmates who’ve come together
through an internet ad, and to coexist like toddlers sharing
a set of toys at a nursery, sitting side by side but not
playing together. Leading parallel lives, never having to
connect. She could sit at her computer, and watch the
same episode of The Simpsons and wear the same clothes
all week without him commenting, and he could go to
work and go to the pub and snog a kind-faced stranger
and come back drunk and pass out on the couch without
having to notice whether or not she’d eaten or done her
homework or kept her medical appointments. Engage
with her, Asif, his mother tells him coldly. Yasmin’s not
sorry for herself, so why are you?
Asif sighs; he is unable to be disobedient, even to a
memory. ‘Thanks for washing up, Yas,’ he says. ‘So, how
was school today?’
‘School was fine,’ says Yasmin automatically, abruptly
putting the last double-washed plate in the rack, and
walking away from the sink. She looks at Asif, Mississippi
One, Mississippi Two, and then leaves the room,
and heads upstairs.
‘Did anything interesting happen?’ Asif perseveres,
calling up the stairwell.
Yasmin pauses and looks at her feet; lots and lots of
things have happened today: Tilly came into History
class ten minutes late, and had a red bruise on her neck
that she tried to hide with a fringed purple scarf, and
there was a spider in the corner of the Great Hall where
they had assembly, descending on a silky line which
caught the light, and they sang one of Yasmin’s least
favourite hymns because it had five typos in the hymn
book which always annoyed her, and one of the first
years had cried in the loos and Yasmin had remembered
to ask what was wrong but had forgotten to listen to the
answer and left when the bell went for her next class,
and she had walked around the playing fields eight times
clockwise and eight times anticlockwise at lunchtime,
and she had gone to the canteen and had orange juice
and grated cheese and bread for lunch, and Mr Hutchinson
had read The Pardoner’s Tale at the afternoon sixthform
lecture in what was meant to be a Middle English
accent, but she had counted thirty-one inconsistencies in
his pronunciation, and his lip had had a bubble of spittle
on it when he’d finished, and in French class they had
started reading Camus’ L’E´ tranger which starts off with
the line ‘Aujourd’hui, Maman est morte,’ and the opening
chapters are meant to shock you because the character’s
mother had just died but he still went on a date with a
girl while he wore a black armband and watched a funny
film starring a famous French comedian, but it hadn’t
shocked Yasmin at all, as she had wanted to watch The
Simpsons after Mum’s funeral and only hadn’t because
of Lila . . .
Yasmin looks up from her feet and down the stairs
towards Asif, as she tries to work out if any of these
might be classified as ‘interesting’. Just a few seconds
have passed since he has asked his question, and all these
images and many others are melting and swirling with
insistent lucidity around her head, each with their own
texture and shape and taste and music, each recollected
moment as present and loud and impressive as the next,
as though demanding that they get plucked out and
chosen, even though she knows that they are probably
Mostly Irrelevant. Her gaze fixes and focuses upon the
drink in Asif’s hand, and she says with no further hesitation,
‘Yes, I had orange juice at lunchtime. They normally
run out by the time I get to the canteen, but there was
still some today.’ She feels satisfied with herself for this
small achievement; he has asked, and she has replied, the
perfectly ordinary tennis of conversation, a matter of
returning the ball with appropriate speed, and not letting
it bounce out of play; there are no spectators at this
rally, but if there were, they would be looking left and
right and left again, as Asif’s words and then her own go
thwack-thwock across the invisible net of each other’s
consciousness. Her response isn’t slightly interesting to
her, but she hopes that it is interesting to Asif.
Asif smiles at her encouragingly. ‘That’s nice. Our
office canteen doesn’t even have orange juice. Just lots of
complicated mixed fruit smoothies. You’ve been there,
you remember, don’t you?’ Yasmin smiles back, to make
him happy by showing that she is, but as she is distracted
by the importance of returning his smile, she doesn’t
really register what he says, and realizes that she has let
the ball bounce out of play; asking him to repeat himself
would bring attention to this, so instead she makes an
assenting sound that follows, rather than accompanies
her smile. It seems to Asif as though she is agreeing with
unnecessary solemnity to what he has just said, effectively
closing the conversation, so he attempts nothing further
as she carries on upstairs. A moment later, Asif hears
the familiar theme tune to The Simpsons playing from
her bedroom, a sound he used to love and now heartily
loathes.
