A Girl From Zanzibar

by Roger King

  The notion of English gentlemen sent my thoughts to Lord Cramp, his sweaty hands and dirty deals, and from him to Henry Drummond, the colonialist who had the cheek to call Zanzibar a “cesspool of wickedness.” They had become combined in my mind into a single, redfaced, upper-class Englishman.

  I decided that Ron was not ready to hear more about my troubles with British law and simply replied, “No, I don’t think I’ll be going back.” Then I thought, and added, “How can you live here in Vermont and talk about England being gentle. Moore College is the most peaceful place I have ever been. And look at this restaurant, how patient and friendly the waiter is, how relaxed the people are.” The customers did look happy and harmless: pale skins, khaki pants, flannel shirts, sensible boots. “When was the last time there was a murder anywhere near Moore?”

  “A murder?”

  “Yes, we had murders in London. My butcher was killed. I worked in a restaurant where a customer was stabbed to death. We had bombs too. Even Dickens has murders.”

  I recognised myself. I was Geoffrey in Zanzibar disillusioning a foreigner about her naive London dreams. It was an obscure revenge. I relented and asked, “Where did you stay?”

  “A hotel on the Bayswater Road overlooking Hyde Park.”

  “Its name?”

  “The Coburg.”

  My stomach clenched. One outing from my new house and I’m already back at The Coburg. At The Coburg seeing Benji for the last time.

  Ron was watching me. “It doesn’t overlook Hyde Park,” I managed. “It overlooks Kensington Gardens. They join at Lancaster Gate. Where Baynard’s Water was. That’s how the area got its name—Bayswater.” There was a silence. He had not expected his quiet brown-skinned date to be so vehement, or pedantic. I closed my eyes to settle my stomach and cast around for something polite to offer a Professor of English. “You must have seen the old Whiteley’s store down the road then. Do you know it’s mentioned in Shaw’s Pygmalion? He tells Eliza Doolittle to get her dresses there.” I wanted to add, “I learned that in prison.”

  “No, I didn’t know that. But I shopped there.” “Shopped there. Whiteley’s? But it’s closed.”

  When I left Cookham Wood Prison I was escorted directly to the airport for deportation and had not seen Bayswater again. I had assumed that, like Zanzibar’s haunted House of Wonders, Whiteley’s would stay empty for ever.

  “No, it’s open. It’s a mall. A bit more glamorous than most. Expensive. It has a beautiful circular staircase.” “Copied from La Scala, Milan.”

  Ron leaned back in his chair, his eyes glinting behind his glasses with a terrifying admiration, “'you’re amazing, Marcella. You really know London. I’m so pleased they hired you.” Then he leaned forward and took my hand, but any chance he might have had with me on this date had gone since he had brought The Coburg into it, though I’d have difficulty explaining that to the host of Love Connection.

  “Well, I wrote my doctoral thesis on Bayswater,” I explained, now adding, “During my prison period.”

  I held his eye and this time Ron was too gendemanly an anglophile to press for more. He patted my hand and relinquished it, wondering perhaps about the frequency of murder in London.

  IT TOOK A MONTH OF NO BENJI AND A MURDER TOturn me into a poodle, one of those pampered pets you see sitting pretty in the passenger seats of luxury cars with no clear purpose. It was my poodle spring, with so much future in front of it that only ignorance made it bearable. This spring, by contrast, is one for counting blessings. Let’s see. A salary. Nice people. Empty countryside. Peace. This house. A bit of respect. An admirer I can take or leave. The freedom to imprison myself. No ambition but to continue like this.

  In Bayswater, after I pushed the idea of Benji into some small dense place behind the back of my mind, I set about finding my way without the secrets he apparently possessed for living life in London. I succeeded brilliantly, quickly managing to be the last human contact of a drug dealer, then transforming myself into a lapdog.

  London was full up, overstuffed with people and activity. There were hundreds of ice-cream machines, thousands of taxis. Rents were enormous, "you could buy the entire city of Zanzibar for the price of a shop on Queensway. Several of the restaurants I noted on my first evening had already been replaced by new ones. I hated to think what had happened to the poor owners. Hundreds of people wanted every job and not only was I unqualified, I was illegal.

  I tried to imagine myself into all sorts of professions. Could I be the girl in the Bureau de Change booth under the Coburg Hotel? But she was Chinese and I bet that her family owned the business. I wondered about the owner of a dress shop who seemed to be Iranian, and the assistants who worked under her. About estate agents, and the women being helped from Mercedes cars outside the Golden Horseshoe Casino, the West Indian girl bus conductor who fearlessly shouted out, “Any more fares!” and took no nonsense from the men. I asked Gabrielle about nursing and she told me not to even think about it: “Mrs Thatcher doesn’t like us. The National Health is being cut and the English girls get all the promotions. In any case, it’s years of training. I don’t think it’s right for you, Marcella,” she said, her hand holding mine. “You’re made for something different.” But she did not tell me what.

  Kamara and Geoffrey tried to persuade me to apply for political refugee status which would, they explained, give me government benefits while my application was being processed, which could take years. I actually went to the office to get the forms. When I reached the door, I was overcome by nausea and dizziness at the idea of pleading with a British Omar and waiting for him to determine in which country I could live. In any case, I decided, as I turned away from the door, briefly flushed with the certainty of instinct, I’m a businesswoman, I don’t need help.

  But I did. In the absence of capital and a brilliant idea, I finally offered myself to the Kentucky Fried Chicken take-away in a poorer neighbourhood. On my first shift a West Indian customer, who had just insisted on shaking my hand, was stabbed in the chest on our doorstep. I had to push the dead man’s heels off the step with my toe before I could lock the door. The Hot and Spicy I had sold him was spilled down his shirt, so the blood looked like gravy. He had shaken my hand and invited me to a party. I had not liked him, his arrogance. “Drug dealer,” the pasty-faced manager had said contemptuously.

  Still wearing my Kentucky Fried uniform, I fled back to Hereford Road before the police could question me, all Geoffrey’s unwelcome talk about nasty, dangerous London swirling in my head, flushing out the optimism.

  That evening I sat in my dressing gown, shocked and demoralised, my chin on my knees, trying not to meet the sympathetic looks on Monique’s and Adnam’s faces.

  “Adnam’s had an idea,” said Monique, brightly. “A spontaneous idea.” Spontaneous was Monique’s favourite compliment.

  “Yes, but it’s nothing much, you know. You’re Indian, aren’t you, Marcella? From Zanzibar.”

  “Goan.”

  “Perfect.”

  “I’m half Arab,” I surprised myself by adding.

  “You speak Arabic?”

  “No. A few words.”

  “Well, that’s fine. Well, what I propose is that you help me with my work. I have a business associate, Ismael. The poor fellow is driving around all day visiting people, having meetings. He needs some help. Could you? It will not be a lot of money, but better than Kentucky Fried Chicken. He’s a nice fellow.”

  “Say yes,” instructed Monique from behind him, nodding her head vigorously. “You’ll learn all about London business.”

  “Yes,” I said. “Anything. If you think I could do it. I’m sorry, Adnam, I don’t even know what sort of business you are in.”

  “International trade mainly. But it doesn’t matter. Don’t worry. 'You’ll pick it up.”

  “What,” I asked Monique the next day, “should I wear?” “Something colourful, sexy. Those poor men in suits and their boring business deals. But not too sexy. We don
’t want to inflame them, do we, rouse their passions?”

  “Monique, I don’t have any sexy clothes. Only jeans.” “Definitely no jeans. A dress.”

  “Dresses don’t look good on me. I’ve got skinny legs. Only very long or very short dresses look good.”

  “Definitely the short. Let’s look in Gaby’s wardrobe. She’s your size.”

  “But Arab men don’t like women in short dresses.” “Marcella, cherie, are you crazy? Where have you been all your life?”

  “Zanzibar.”

  Ismael—from Syria via Lebanon and France as far as I could tell—picked me up the next morning. I wore a coat over the red dress with its spaghetti straps and low back. “I can’t wear a bra with this,” I’d said to Monique. But she had assured me it was OK, that the dress was French and the French knew how to be sexy and modest at the same time. “And you have nice little breasts, not these big nuisances,” she added, spreading her perfect hands across her perfect chest.

  Ismael took my coat immediately and I felt Monique had given me bad advice for a cold London morning. “The car is warm,” he said. “You’ll see.” I watched his face light up. “Beautiful.” He opened the door of the big BMW. “Please.”

  We drove along Westbourne Grove and then past Paddington station. Ismael put in a tape, smiled but did not talk. What, I wondered, was happening? I was wearing someone else’s clothes, driving with a stranger to an unknown destination for a purpose I did not understand. We had not discussed money. I’d given up all control for this cocoon of a leather seat in a warm car. I looked at Ismael and realised he was young and very handsome, almost pretty. His grey suit shimmered, and seemed as immune to creases as a baby’s skin. Like Adnam’s, his hair was immaculate, the subject of microscopic attentions. His nails were better manicured than mine. He was so polished and perfect that I could not imagine any way of being with him.

  “Where are we going?” I asked, conscious of the smallness of my voice.

  He turned down the music. “Sorry, Marcella?”

  “I wondered where we are going.”

  “Oh, the bank. Then we have a lunch meeting.” He turned the music back up.

  “And what do I have to do?”

  Patiently, he again turned down the volume and I repeated my question.

  “Do? Oh, nothing to worry about, Marcella. Just being there is enough.”

  We worked our way through Edgeware Road’s heavy traffic. Just short of Marble Arch, where the road converged with Oxford Street and Park Lane and the press of vehicles was at its greatest, Ismael stopped the car and switched on its flashers, blocking one lane of the road.

  “I’ll be back in a minute,” he anounced, sending me into a panic. “Play the tapes. If anyone asks you anything, just say you don’t speak English.”

  Before I could form a reply, he had closed the door and was hurrying across the pavement, miming helplessness and apology to the traffic stuck behind us.

  Left alone, I found I was the focus of a hundred hating eyes. Whole busloads of hostility slid past my window at a snail’s pace. They saw that their appointments were being missed because of the selfishness of an expensive black car containing a foreign woman wearing a backless red minidress at ten in the morning, and they hated me. In a day I had gone from being the fast-food servant of a low-life murder victim to a symbol of resented wealth and privilege. I locked the doors, turned up the music and wished I’d brought a magazine. To avoid looking at the traffic, I turned towards the elegant shop that had swallowed Ismael. The name was on the window in gold letters—Bank of Credit and Commerce International— and the initials, BCCI, were incorporated into a relief design above, set on a white marble facade. Inside I could see more white marble and deep green plants in a spacious lobby. Gold, white, green. I was impressed by the cool elegance and how it stood out from the lurid yellows and reds of its attention-seeking neighbours. The words of the name were oddly ordered and I thought their origin might be French, convinced first by Philippe and now by the sisters that good taste came from France. It was completely unlike the dark, dusty branches of the British banks in Westbourne Grove, with their lines of patient, vacant customers.

  When the policeman arrived, I gave my best smile and wound the window down one inch.

  “You know you can’t park here, miss. Where’s the driver?”

  I looked puzzled and shook my head.

  “You speak English?”

  “Sorry?”

  “Driver inside?” He spoke loudly and pointed at the bank.

  “Inside?”

  “Right. Sure. Of course, you wouldn’t speak English, would you? You’re a wog and can’t understand a word I say.” He retreated a few yards and spoke into the radio on his shoulder.

  I watched dumbly as Ismael emerged from the BCCI, smiled, danced past the policeman and jogged around to the driver’s door with his pantomime of hurrying as much as he could out of unlimited respect for everyone.

  “Hey!” called out the policeman, moving towards us.

  “I know, I know, I have to go. I’m gone. Thank you, officer.” Ismael slammed the door and set the car in motion. To me, he said, “Good! One more stop, then lunch. You know they can’t tow a car with someone in it.”

  “That’s my job?”

  “It’s important if we want to move around.”

  “But they have our number.”

  “The owner lives abroad.”

  The lunch was nothing, just chatter and an exchange of papers among nicely dressed Middle-Eastern men who were charmed to have me there. They did business in Arabic and I was bored, but late in the afternoon we pulled into the gated driveway of a house in St John’s Wood that looked so expensive that I was immediately nervous. Zareen, a tall, beautiful Pakistani woman, took me to meet her two children while Ismael talked to her husband in another room. “It’s so nice to have someone new to talk to,” she said. “I was a stewardess with Pakistan International before I married. I was free like you.” We were served tea and played Scrabble with the eleven- year-old boy, who beat me but said I was a good opponent, better than mummy and daddy, at which his mother laughed and ruffled his hair. The boy and his naughty younger sister were sweet, like little grown-ups in the white shirts and ties of their British school uniforms. When Ismael returned I did not want to leave my gentle new friend, her nice children and her calm, luxurious home. “Bring Marcella again,” she told Ismael as we left.

  “Good,” said Ismael in the car. “The wife liked you. Do you know whose home that was?”

  “No.”

  “That was the home of a great man. High up in the BCCI. It is the bank that is helping people in Asia and Africa and South America. It is changing the world.”

  I looked over at him. He was intense and reverent, his pretty features comically stern. I could tell this was not the time for joking, but nothing serious was coming to mind. I managed, “Is it French?”

  “French? Why? Not French. Everything. European, African, Arab, Asian—everything. Pakistanis and Arabs started it, but now it’s global. Global. The fastest expanding bank in the world. It has freed the whole world from the Western banking system and the Zionists. This is something wonderful.”

  “Yes,” I agreed, and looked down at my knees, finding them bare and wondering at their role in something so wonderful.

  “So, tomorrow?” said Ismael when he dropped me at Hereford Road. “It was useful today.”

  “I didn’t do anything.”

  “You did something. "You made things better.”

  “'You mean with parking your car illegally?”

  “Not just that.”

  Well, every part of the day had been more interesting than staying at home with no money. And Ismael, who was so neat and humourless that I could find nothing of interest in him, also seemed to have no interest in me. For the next weeks I became a regular poodle: make-up and long earrings; cars, restaurants and casinos. I noticed the other girls waiting in other cars. We were a profession
. One or two of the policemen in the Edgeware Road came to know me by sight and even tried to flirt. Whatever our route for the day, it always included an office of the BCCI.

  I wondered if I was learning about London business by osmosis because I could not put my finger on anything specific. The conversation usually turned to Arabic for serious talk, and no one ever asked for my opinion. The names of countries—Pakistan and Panama, Nigeria and Liberia, Saudi Arabia and Oman (causing a brief pang for Ali, my jilted fiance), Brazil and Mexico, Syria, Iraq, China, Indonesia—dotted the conversations as if the countries of the world were listed on the restaurant menus.

  “Isn’t there something more I could do to help?” I asked Ismael one morning, causing a surprised look in my direction. “I’m good at figures.”

  “Maybe something. I don’t know what. I’ll talk to Adnam.”

  This promise kept me in the passenger seat for another week. All I had learned about Ismael and Adnam’s business so far was that it involved many countries, large loans, no office and agreements that depended on handshakes over restaurant tables.

  They never did find a more substantial job for me and of course I was foolish to hope for it. I had nothing to offer, no contacts, relevant experience, education, useful knowledge. I had a bit of wit, some looks and a false cosmopolitan gloss that did not bear close investigation. I was female, foreign, youngish and without other allegiances. The market had classified this new immigrant well and pigeon-holed her as unskilled labour at Kentucky Fried or marketable female charm for the oiling of business. Only the distance of this evaluation from my own kept me from seeing it.

  When I again reminded Ismael of my wish to be useful, he replied that there was an important party the following Saturday. “Adnam will be there. Maybe you can talk to him.”

  “What sort of party?”

  “A very nice one. In Pall Mall. Someone from Dubai asked for you especially.”

  “I don’t know. I can’t talk to these men.”

  “No, it’s all right. They like you anyway. It’s important, Marcella. I’ve promised him. It’s a good opportunity for you. And your friend Monique will be there.”