A Girl From Zanzibar

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A Girl From Zanzibar Page 17

by Roger King


  “Benji, I do love you.”

  “No, no, no. Not that love nonsense. Not here in the middle of Pizza Express.” But he had his smile back.

  We ordered more beer. I let Benji talk and, as if eager to distance itself from the anchoring subject of a home, his talk flew fast and high. Lord Cramp had introduced him to gulf state Arabs with tens of millions to invest— but secretly. That was the beauty of being someone like Lord Cramp, you see. He could deposit millions of other people’s money in his accounts and nobody in London turned a hair. Then he’d buy some foreign investments and turn ownership back to the Arabs, keeping a percentage for himself. Laundering. That’s how money made money. He needed someone trustworthy like Benji as an intermediary to work out the details and insulate him from his partners. But, of course the arms business, that’s where the real money was, he had to admit it. Look at Adnam. And the BCCI. They understand that these days it wasn’t enough to be international, you had to be supranational. Above everything. “That’s the new world, Marcella. Our world. We’re made for it.”

  I let Benji’s words sweep over me through the cassata and espresso, losing sight of the precise propositions that composed his enthusiasm. I had become used to such talk and was already learning to give it no thought until something actually happened, not acknowledging the seed of disrespect in this.

  “Look,” I interrupted, proving my lack of attention. “Look how my arm’s changed colour.” I pulled my blouse sleeve back from my shoulder to show the difference. “I’ve turned black.” I reached over and pushed his rolled-up shirt sleeve up to his biceps. “You too. You’ve changed colour just like me. Just in an afternoon!”

  He laughed, easily changing gear, not too committed to his schemes. “We’re discovering our inner blackness.” At that moment there was an enormous thump, bigger and stranger than any familiar sound, bending our eardrums and insisting on attention. I looked around. Pedestrians had faltered, looking south towards Bayswater Road then towards each other. Finding no answer in any direction, they gathered themselves and carried on.

  I still find this strange and do not know whether their reserve was part of being in England, or because in Bayswater there is always the likelihood that the person next to you will not speak your language.

  “What was that?” I asked Benji, who had stood to peer in the direction of the sound.

  “An explosion. Maybe a bomb.”

  We were still waiting for our bill as the police cars, ambulances and Bomb Squad vans screamed their way past us, lurid in their orange and lime fluorescent paint. It might have been a film. Everyone seemed content to leave it to the professionals.

  “IRA,” offered the Italian waiter, laconically.

  He was wrong. Three Arabs in a car had blown themselves up by mistake on their way to plant a bomb. No one else was killed. The analyses on the TV and in the newspaper foundered before clarifying anything. It might have been the Iran-Iraq war spilling over into Bayswater, or they may have represented the Palestinians, or had something to do with Libya, or the Lebanese civil war. Nobody in England seemed to care very much which of these was true.

  My day often included the Strada—a new Iranian place with a Hollywood theme that had replaced the Greek Patisserie next to Porchester Baths—Le Cafe, run by Iraqis, and Etty’s in Hereford Road, a French restaurant owned by a Syrian architect married to an English woman. The newsagents in Westbourne Grove were owned by Asians, but the ones on Queensway were Arab-owned and I realised I did not know the precise nationality of any of them, nor of their restaurants, groceries or Halal butchers. As far as I could tell, everyone in Bayswater got along regardless of where they came from or the wars around the world, and I had loved Bayswater for this, its contrast to Zanzibar.

  With time, I remember the lunch at Pizza Express with increasing clarity, memory picking it out from other occasions to say: Remember that lunch with the bomb, something shifted then.

  OUR FRIEND KEN LAI BROUGHT THE PAPERS FOR THE

  flat and the mortgage to Le Cafe. We spread them out over the sparkly perspex, between the coffee and tea. “ You sign here and here and here,” said Ken, marking the forms with crosses.

  “'You mind if I just go through the small print?” asked Benji. He had recently acquired his first pair of reading glasses and now he took them from their case and put them on, though I doubted that he really needed them. “I always thought people with reading glasses had an advantage,” he had told me earlier. “Instant seriousness.” He had practiced in front of the mirror, pushing them on and whipping them off, asking, “What do you think?” I made small talk with Ken and waited. The small print usually was not a concern of Benji’s. “Judge the quality of the person, not the paper,” was one of his dictums. “The best deals are made with a handshake.” Finally, I asked, “Is it OK?” sure that it was.

  “It seems fine,” he said, then hesitated. “Ken, would this work if just one of us signed?”

  “If you want only one of you to be the owner.” “Legally speaking, we’re increasing our liability if we both sign, aren’t we?”

  “In a sense.”

  “Increasing the complication.”

  “Yes, perhaps.”

  I was watching him, puzzled, and he turned to me. “Marcella, why don’t you sign this on your own? I’ll pay my share, but I don’t think I need to sign. You know I don’t like signing things.”

  “I thought we were doing this together, Benji. You’ve never said anything before.”

  “I know. I know. I hadn’t thought it through before. But it’s better. We’ll still be doing it together. It’s right that it should be your name on the deed. You found it, and you really want to own a home of your own. I’ve already had a home. I’ve done all that. It’s still there, in Italy.”

  “Benji, I thought you wanted to sign. I’d feel better if you’d sign. Half the deposit is your money.”

  “Don’t worry about that.”

  “Ken, I need to talk to Benji. Can we postpone this?”

  “If you do, you might lose the flat.”

  I closed my eyes and found a surprising thing, that alongside the intensity of my wish to share this home with Benji was a second wish, rising like a monster from the depths, for the flat to be all my own. I started to imagine decorating decisions made entirely according to my taste. I opened my eyes. “Benji, are you absolutely sure?”

  “Yes. You know me ... signing.” He made a face. “OK, Ken. Here? And here?”

  Benji moved in a wardrobe’s worth of shirts and suits and a grey filing cabinet, then left me to my flat, departing on a mysterious overseas trip for several weeks. I knew that he was fleeing and also knew that his flights were elastic, his returns built into them. I bought furniture from Self ridges, being bold with the cost.

  At this magical time, when I was not quite located in my new home but sensed that I would become so, I discovered that the double decker buses on their way to Marble Arch, Oxford Circus and Trafalgar Square passed so close that, when speeding, their upper decks rattled my windows in their frames, and if I had stretched out I might have brushed their sides with my fingers. In turn, the top deck passengers in their upright seats could see me, and I thought that if they paid attention they would see a smart London woman in a stylish flat, a cosmopolitan woman at the centre of things, with a gleaming dining table, a TV, a stack of silver stereo equipment, a couch upholstered in impractical white, a woman with modern pictures on the walls. I left the Venetian blinds open so that they could see. This, I decided, was even better than the Zanzibar dream of watching myself in the upstairs room of a London home; in this version I owned the home.

  WITH EVERYONE GONE, I'M TRYING TO DO WITHOUTpeople. I’m not as good at this as I would wish. I can think of no reason why I should need people so absolutely, except that I have always had them. In prison there were cell-mates and the other prisoners, which was too much company. In London we were never short of visitors. In Africa it’s hard to be left alone. The
daily contact with the Moore students has counted for more than I realised and now I regret that I kept my colleagues at a distance. In the Dean’s words, “We have learned to respect your privacy.” It’s too late now for me to ask for less respect.

  My ancestors lived like this, waiting helpless for the seasons. They waited for the arrival of the westward Monsoon Drifts to move the boats between India and Zanzibar, then once aboard, they languished for a season while nature did its work. The westward winds from Asia took them and their goods up from Goa to Arabia, then down the African coast to Zanzibar. Return required waiting for the eastward Drifts, the work of winds from Africa. Nobody moved until the season was right. I’m waiting myself this summer, looking for patience, looking for a destination, hoping again for a letter. I’ve heard nothing from Adnam. My paper on migration is unfinished, becalmed, short of a conclusion.

  I try hard to be fascinated by the birds and flowers and to feel a deep identity with nature that will leapfrog the lack of human belonging to something larger. I look at the ground and take photographs of leaves, sticks, even litter on the road. Vermont, America. This place. I don’t really want to love another place, any more than another person. I’m resisting it. I thought I would be in London forever. I gathered it around myself, a home I owned, a man I loved, friends to keep, nice things to buy. That was solidity, a shape for me in my new life. And all of it was lost. Now I sit lightly in a borrowed house, few attachments. I try to stay satisfied and grateful and not attract the attention of the world.

  In London, instead of resisting attachment, I was unguarded and over the years place entered me. The Tube map was insinuated there along with nerves and circulation. I learned the texture of newly sandblasted yellow brick and the feel of granite kerbstones underfoot. From my living room I could distinguish the engine tones of the different types of London bus, those with open platforms and those without. I could make out a taxi’s diesel long before it came into sight. After I bought a car, I learned the best routes for driving from Bayswater to Docklands and from there to Camden Town, and where to park, and what to buy. I sussed out the bric-a-brac shops from Portabello to Kew where I might add to the collection of miniature ceramic pots from Asia cluttering my shelves and windowsills. In Bayswater I discovered shortcuts, hidden gardens, the Greek and Russian cathedrals, and could point out to clients the busts of famous English writers moulded into the upstairs of the building that housed the Arab bookshop in Westbourne Grove. I had learned to feed on winter gloom as well as summer sun. The programmes of the BBC, TVam and Thames Television were part of my personal clock. There was no national cuisine for which I was at a loss to recommend a restaurant. There was no clear line where London ended and I began. All this without deciding, or acquiring any sense at all that I was lost to place, or that place could be lost to me.

  For three years after we heard the distant explosion and I bought my flat alone, London life carried me along. My business did well and Benji kept his word. He paid his share. I accommodated his mysteries and departures and came to trust the constancy and kindness of his love. His was the only body I wanted in my bed. I even told Gabrielle that I liked his absences, with their promise of reunions and the selfish enjoyment of my home. I fielded his phone calls, little birds flying in from the distant shores of his business life. If the calls became more numerous and the absences more frequent, it only meant that when he was less in my life, his life was more in my charge. The drift was so slight that we never troubled to talk of it.

  At about this time, Ashraf called. I took it in the bath. “Hello?”

  “Hello. I’m Ashraf.” A pleasant, confiding, playful voice.

  “Ashraf?”

  “Mohammed Ashraf. Hasn’t Benji mentioned me?”

  “I’m not sure. He’s very busy.”

  The caller chuckled, a laugh full of good humour. “But I know who you are. You’re Marcella.”

  “Yes.”

  “From Zanzibar. An Indian Arab from Zanzibar. Very beautiful. Very clever. Drives a red Peugeot 205. Benji’s right hand.”

  “Thank you. Did you want to talk to Benji? He’s away at a conference. Or can I help you with something?”

  “Benji’s at a conference?” He found this amusing. “Yes, it’s you I should talk to. In any case, I have his car phone. When is Benji going to change that old Mercedes of his?”

  “Remind me what this is about.”

  “Fiji. About Fiji.”

  “Oh, you’re the Fiji man.”

  “No, I’m the Pakistani man. But it’s about Fiji.”

  Fiji was one more of Benji’s complicated schemes for making money in some tiny, distant place we knew nothing about. They never worked, or if they did work, he didn’t get paid. Or if he did get paid, it wasn’t much and I was the one who had to do all the chasing. There was money to be made in London, but Benji favored distant places, long odds.

  “I don’t know anything about Fiji. What did Benji say?”

  “That you look after the money. That Marcella—who is clever and beautiful—looks after everything.”

  “It will have to wait until I see Benji. What’s your number, Mohammed?”

  “Ashraf. I prefer Ashraf. No number. I’ll visit you.” “Please call first. And what business did you say you are in?”

  “I’m a soldier, Marcella.” He dropped his voice into mock conspiracy. “A mercenary.” Then he laughed, as if we had agreed that this was all jolly fun, adding, “Sorry,” at my silence.

  “And Benji knows how to contact you?”

  “Not exactly. But he wants to see me. I’ll visit. Tomorrow evening. At seven. You don’t mind, Marcella, do you?”

  “Please call first. Are you sure Benji wants to see you?”

  “He’s like my brother.” Ashraf hesitated and I could sense his mischief building. “He told me you take your bath at this time, Marcella. Is it true?”

  “I’ll tell him you called.”

  I put down the bathroom phone and picked up the glass of white wine sitting next to my open copy of Cosmo on the edge of the bath. I had been looking at a quiz: “Is your man having an affair? Twenty questions you won’t want to answer.” Benji had been scoring badly on the quiz—unexplained absences, failure to regularly repeat “I love you,” generous presents for no obvious reason— but I did not think he was having an affair. With such a richness of profitless intrigue in the rest of his life, deceit over a woman was unlikely to hold his interest. Lunch with a sad Frenchwoman to talk over her late husband’s defunct investments in Mauretania was more exciting than an affair for Benji. And, in any case, he did love me.

  I threw aside the Cosmoand slid down into the water. I had mixed feelings about Fiji. Increasingly, Benji’s business ventures produced mixed feelings. More than anything, partly for selfish reasons, I wanted Benji to be successful. I had started to do better than Benji and though his pride would never allow him to admit it, there was a sliver of discomfort in this. His business ideas were becoming wilder—or my assessment of them had become less forgiving. The last time he offered one of his maxims for business success, he had checked himself and said, “Well, you know better than me,” which made my heart sink. And it seemed to me that, in bed, he turned away from me more. Still, mercenaries sounded unpleasant, and I thought I should steer Benji away from this. Then I noticed I was protecting Benji, and that this was not the first time, and that it was wrong, and I should not have to do it. Annoyance rose in me, until I set against it the way Benji never complained of his disappointments, kept his pride, his hopes, his smile, dressed carefully, was never cruel. I reminded myself of the early days when he always seemed to be right, and how I could not have come this far without him.

  My own business was not difficult, far too simple for Benji. I knew my way around Bayswater as well as anyone and found flats and houses for foreigners. English yuppies sought me out in the belief that they would make a killing renting their over-mortgaged homes to Arabs. Asians trusted me because I was Asian
, Middle- Easterners because I was Middle-Eastern, Africans because I was African. With the yuppies, I was a yuppie. Zanzibar’s accumulated history had prepared me perfectly for being a Bayswater property consultant. Only the most recent wave was leaving me at a loss. I couldn’t be Japanese. All I could find in common with the Japanese was a smile. I had bought property too, converting houses in other parts of London in partnership with other developers, and all this had left my accounts at the BCCI very healthy. When I walked down Queensway, I heard my name a dozen times: “Marcella!... Marcella!” Each time there was a little thrill to it, proof that I belonged.

  BENJI TURNED UP IN GOOD TIME FOR ASHRAF'S VISIT,

  in good spirits. Loaded yellow plastic bags from Nisa kept his arms stretched while I kissed him hello. Food and drink. From the beginning Benji had decided that the responsibility for stocking the drinks cupboard in the flat must be his. A matter of honour. He also cooked the most serious meals. My cooking had already slipped into the pattern of tasty snacks whenever I wanted them.

  “So, who’s Ashraf? And what is Fiji about?”

  “Ashraf... is someone special. You’ll like him. He’s had an amazing life.”

  “A soldier?”

  “Yes. He was a big shot in the Pakistani army before he went freelance. But you wouldn’t think so to meet him. Very informal.”

  “And he’s going to fight in Fiji? What do we have to do with Fiji, Benji?”

  “No, no. He’s not going to fight. The Indians on Fiji are having a hard time because the government and army are Fijian and discriminate against them. Some are so scared they are fleeing the country. The Indians are the majority and own most of the businesses, and some of them asked me if I knew anyone who could help them fight back. I thought Ashraf could be their advisor. He knows Adnam.”

  “I’m not sure that’s reassuring, Benji.”

  “No, you’ll see. You’ll like him. Don’t worry over nothing. Shall I make gin and tonics?”

 

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