A Girl From Zanzibar

by Roger King

  “How are you getting to Paddington? I could drive you, but I’ll lose my parking space. Why don’t you take a taxi?”

  “No, it’s a waste of money. I’ll walk. I don’t mind the rain. Dinner was great, Marcella.”

  That night, I burrowed my hand into the hair on Benji’s chest and found a small voice for my unease. “Benji, what’s happened to all your bits of this and bits of that since Ashraf arrived?”

  “What do you mean?” He put his arm around me, as if he was my protector.

  “I mean the badminton classes, the acting, the restaurant things. All the things you did for fun.”

  “I haven’t done those for a long time. They didn’t make money.”

  “I liked it when you did them. I was very impressed by all those bits when we first met.”

  He turned away from me and I draped my arm over his back to keep the connection. “I don’t like the things you do with Ashraf so much. They scare me, Benji. All this business with uranium scares me. You could go to prison. It’s dangerous and immoral.”

  He pulled himself free of me and sat up in the moonlight. “Immoral? Where are you getting that from? There’s nothing immoral about it. Britain has a bomb, why shouldn’t Pakistan? It’s just business. International laws are just put there for someone’s convenience to keep the newcomers out. They’re just remnants from the past. Look, Marcella, I don’t want to involve you in this more than I have to. It’s just a deal. For years everyone’s been making use of Benji, saying what a useful person he is, what good company he is. Meanwhile they’ve been getting on and I’ve been getting nowhere. Even you. I’m middle-aged and people don’t take me seriously. I’m tired of it. This is my chance. I’ve made this happen. It’s my creation. Now, it’s just a matter of keeping my nerve and holding on for a while. Then, I’ll be able to do whatever bits and pieces I like again. Anything you want. I promise. I have to do this.”

  I lay there, my head under Benji’s arm. This was the smell of him, a scent as natural and sweet to me as my own. I said, “I want to be involved.” Then, “You need someone to look after the money side. That’s your trouble, Singapore man, you never really care about the money.”

  “I’d rather not involve you.”

  “I’m involved.” I kissed him on his nearest part, somewhere on his side.

  “Well, I can’t back out now, anyway. It’s nearly done.”

  "POODLE OR POSH?" I ASKED, KNOWING THE ANSWER.

  “Posh. Lord Cramp will be there. Conservative. It’s not a party, anyway.”

  “How about this?” I held up a deep blue dress. “With a gold necklace.”

  Benji hardly looked in my direction while we dressed. He was being polite the way he was when he was nervous. I wanted to make him laugh but could not think of a way. Now he glanced over and said, “Perfect.”

  “Don’t worry,” I found myself saying. “It will be fine.”

  The bedroom at the Coburg Hotel was fussy and too small for all of us. The Hotel had decided to be very English for its foreign visitors. The easy chairs had a floral print, and more vegetation spread across the carpet, wallpaper and curtains. Only the Sony TV, turned on for background noise, was starkly modern. On the wall was a print of a city with Arab dhows in front of it, which I thought might be a Victorian view of Zanzibar. Another print was of a penny-farthing bicycle. My seat was on the pink candlewick bedspread, since there were not enough chairs. Benji was sitting on the bed too, which did not seem right. The South African, “Mr Thomas,” whose room it was, had an easy chair in the corner where the room spread out into a round windowed turret overlooking the corner of Bayswater Road and Queensway. Under the window you could see the dirt and litter collected on top of the entrance to Queensway Tube. Lord Cramp had a comfortable chair too. Adnam had taken the desk chair. We were waiting for Ashraf.

  Lord Cramp took it upon himself to do the introductions, introducing Benji to his man, Mr Thomas, though I thought it should have been the other way around. “Benji’s our mastermind,” he said.

  Mr Thomas had kinked fair hair like steel wool and was wearing a short-sleeved shirt. He was all business.

  Everything was set up. The amounts and specifications. Transport of the uranium to Moputu in Mozambique and from there by ship to Pakistan. Money would go from a BCCI account in Pakistan, to one earmarked for the South Africans in the Caymans.

  I asked, “How will Benji receive his commission if the money goes direct?” since Benji hadn’t.

  “We’ll set up a separate account for Benji. Numbered. You’ll be able to access it by phone. Is that good?”

  I glanced at Benji. “Yes,” I said, “That’s fine.”

  When Ashraf arrived half an hour late, he took Lord Cramp’s hand and, bless him, crushed it. “Good heavens, man!” the twig of the Churchill family tree blurted, nursing his fingers while Ashraf filled the remaining space, introducing himself to Mr Thomas without waiting on formalities.

  “So, we’re all here,” he declared. “It’s all settled. You didn’t need me.”

  “We’ll need someone technically competent in Moputu for the handover,” said Mr Thomas.

  “Of course. We have plenty of competent people. I’ll tell them at home.”

  “And we’ll need someone with us in South Africa, someone accountable, until the transaction’s completed.”

  “That would be Benji,” said Lord Cramp. “He’s our coordinator.”

  I saw Benji start a little and glance at me, then Adnam. He had said nothing of this.

  “It’s for the best,” said Adnam to me, “To see it through. You’ll look after Benji’s interests here, won’t you?” Then he added as reassurance to everyone, “We’ve done business before,” equating the conversion of a London house to flats with an international deal in uranium.

  “I’m going to South Africa too,” said Ashraf. “Pakistani interests.” And he winked at me, as if this was our conspiracy. “I’ll keep that bad man of yours out of trouble.”

  I nodded, not sure at what. “Thanks,” I said, finding myself genuinely grateful that Benji would be tied to Ashraf’s indestructibility.

  “OK,” said Benji. “That’s good.”

  “My plane leaves in three hours,” said Mr Thomas to Benji. “If you want to keep an eye on me you might want to be somewhere on it. Are you packed?”

  “I think I want to,” said Benji. “I’m ready to go.”

  “That’s it then.” Lord Cramp stood. We all stood.

  I put my hand on Benji’s arm. “Benji, how long for?”

  “I don’t know. Not long. I’ll phone as soon as it’s prudent.” He was looking at Lord Cramp and Mr Thomas, while he spoke to me. There was some detail or other that had suddenly become essential for him to raise before it was too late.

  “We’d better leave singly,” Lord Cramp was advising. “Security and all that. Ladies first, I think. Marcella?” Now Benji looked at me. I thought he might be confused but did not want to show it.

  “Take care, Zanzibar girl,” he said.

  “You take care,” I said. “Call me when you arrive.”

  “If I can. Don’t worry.”

  Among all those awful men, we had the briefest parting kiss.

  There was order. Then there wasn’t order. Then there was order again. Now I fear a new disorder. I had made a sense in Bayswater. Sense makes a life, like the logic of a house. The walls hold up the roof and make a space for you inside. You come to trust the soundness of the parts. Cappuccino and croissants at Le Cafe in the morning will bring a moment’s happiness. The police are nice young men who say hello. Benji’s good heart would always trump his dreaming head.

  In my order, Zanzibar was over there in Africa, treacherous and turbulent, previous and finished with. Then David was in Bayswater, Kamara belonged to a corrupt regime, Thatcher staged a coup, Idi Amin was on the phone. My business was simple and honourable, finding homes or making them, but to my best friend I was another profiteer taking hospitals from
the poor. The BCCI had been my lovely bank, more elegant and vibrant than the British banks, sticking up for global migrants like myself. Then it was rapacious, ruthless, sinister. Geoffrey, my stable separate reference, might have been an inadvertent spy in Zanzibar, or could become a new employee of the BCCI.

  Disorder is only order we can’t see, and coincidences are the evidence. My days had remained quiet but I was out of time with the world around me, clinging to old understandings in spite of the clues. Things that should have been separate were no longer separate. The riots, bombs and murders were a background noise I refused to hear.

  My new order was made in prison: shopping my friends, putting them into history. I described what made us come to Bayswater and how we did there, each case an instructive lesson. Now I’m an expert on migration, our confused dramas buried in the aggregate. And I’m waiting for a letter, my heart and mind given over to unfinished business. Nothing from Adnam. The students are back. The newspaper article with its grey photos of dead men has clouded Vermont and made its landscape thin and false. A year ago when I arrived, full of hope and nervousness, I loved this house and my new work. I liked my students, enjoyed their affection and admiration. I watched TV and was fascinated by what made up an American, secretly considering whether I had what it took, a migrant’s migrant in a nation of migrants. But these days it is something old and unfinished that is reaching out for me.

  ♦

  AFTER

  LIFE

  YOU WOULD THINK, WOULDN'T YOU, THAT THE LAW—or some regulating influence of the world, some collective defence of the status quo, some governing moral force —would have stepped in to stay us, to prevent, arrest or eliminate us, the whole unaccountable enterprise of us. Over the previous weeks I had accumulated a sort of nervousness, like a confident mountaineer who, near the summit, unexpectedly develops a fear of heights. The alarm I had felt at the news of Ashraf’s arrest had been cushioned by a deeper feeling of relief that the correct and inevitable had arrived to re-establish sense. And when Ashraf turned up later, cheery and untouched, blessed by the powers-that-be, my vertigo returned with him, even as I gathered myself, like a good Sherpa, to continue our ascent. Apparently, my intuitions were all wrong. Just as the slave traders were in the good graces of the Sultan of Zanzibar, the authorities in England had no objection to anything we did.

  Still, you would think, wouldn’t you, that in such a world, the sources of misfortune might be readily foreseen—the many imaginable motives for assault, betrayal, arrest, imprisonment, deportation or restraint. This was not so. While I had been meeting with Her Majesty’s peer of the realm, the representatives of unpleasant governments, crooked financiers, arms dealers, mercenaries and spies—my friends, that is—another London had escaped my attention but was waiting to embrace me.

  I reached the street outside the Coburg and breathed its air: coolness, cooking smells and petrol fumes, the thick perfumes of the American women exiting the hotel with me. I walked north along Queensway in a light rain that shone on the road, reflecting the lights of cars. There was the Fortune Cookie Chinese restaurant, the Taza juice bar, the entrance to the ice rink that looked more like an entrance to a theatre. The unlit gap over there was the Catholic church. The flower stand by Bayswater Tube. The BCCI across the street. I was grateful to be grounded again by all this familiarity, to know it so well, to be passing through it with nothing more grand than my own two feet. I was pleased that it was rainy and cool, ordinary and English. I took deep breaths and deliberately slowed my steps. It would be all right. In a couple of weeks all this would be over and it would be all right. We’d never have to do anything like it again. Benji would go back to being Benji, the full, happy, clever, good-hearted Benji.

  "Years later, in my Cookham College researches, I came across a nineteen-sixteen painting of Bayswater Tube Station by Walter Sickert, who apparently was famous. The name on the portico was Queens Road Bayswater then —before Queens Road became Queensway and a second station was added with the new name—but the name was the only change that I could see. It remained a simple, well-proportioned entrance framed with blue and white lettering and topped with the bright red of the London Transport symbol. Inside, the vestibule divided into simple steps down to the platforms on either side of the railway, which briefly humped to the surface there before diving underground in both directions. Of the three tube stations within walking distance of my flat, Bayswater had always been my favourite for its human proportions and simple style, but I was astonished to find a famous painter had also noticed it.

  A group of teenage tourists—German was my guess —swarmed past me, excited and laughing, and I allowed myself a small smile at their happiness, as if they were guests in my home. When I came level with Bayswater Tube, I was trying to remember what shop or restaurant the BCCI across the street had displaced, nostalgic for it and mildly annoyed that it escaped me. Three men stood near the telephone boxes just beyond the station, caught by the dark allure of the prostitutes’ cards that filled the windows. Unconsciously I think, I altered course to give them a wider berth, which brought me closer to the station entrance.

  “Marcella!” The voice was deep, and urgent, with a desperation that put everything else out of my mind. I turned towards the station without a thought. I turned my head, then moved my legs, while others just turned and hesitated in their step, the way they did for distant bombs.

  “Marcella! It’s Kamara. They’re beating me. I’ve done nothing. Help me.”

  All I could see were the dark-blue backs of two policemen, jerking in struggle as they pushed and pulled a person down the steps towards the platform and out of sight of the street.

  “Stop!” I shouted. “Stop it!” earning only a brief over- the-shoulder check on me from one of the policemen. I wasn’t worth a second glance. I saw Kamara’s frightened face as he was bent back against the railing, then saw him jerk forward from a punch. I’d never seen Kamara helpless and it was horrifying to see it now.

  “Stop it,” I shouted. “I can see what you are doing. He’s not doing anything to you.”

  “Do something, Marcella. They’re hurting me.”

  I looked around me. The platforms below held only a few scared tourists. Behind me the entrance to the station was dark with spectators who were not venturing beyond the threshold. “Help us,” I shouted, my voice never thinner. A few people warily edged a step or two closer. Stupidly, I nearly asked them to call the police.

  “My glasses!” called out Kamara. “They are breaking my glasses.” The two policemen had him on the ground and Kamara’s hand stretched out to me holding his broken glasses. I took the glasses, then held on to his hand.

  “Leave the scene,” instructed one breathless policeman with a thick accent, “or we’ll arrest you too.”

  I tugged at Kamara’s free arm while he screamed out in pain at what they were doing with his other. There was blood on his face and his raincoat was ripped along its seam. “I was just going about my business,” he managed between agonised shouts. “I was just going about my business.”

  “We know all about your sort of business,” answered one of the policemen who had time and taste for repartee.

  There were heavy running footsteps behind me and the shorter, older policeman, the one with the thick accent that turned out to be Welsh, said, “Get the bitch. She bit me,” though I had not touched him.

  I found myself lifted, turned and slammed against the wall, my surprise caught between the pain in my back, the odd, distant clunk of my skull on brick and the closeness of the blank, hate-filled face of the newly arrived policeman who had propelled me. I thought, suddenly finding it remarkable: In all my adult life no one has ever hit me. I had no idea I was so light and portable, so utterly fragile. For all these years I had been walking around under the illusion that I was in some way protected, that when the worst came to the worst I would find the means, the wit, to protect myself. In travelling the foot or so between the policeman’s hands an
d the wall I discovered that all the thousands of days of not being hit were only because no one had chosen to hit me.

  None of this seemed possible. I was in my neighbourhood. I was smartly dressed. Policemen said hello to me. I had influential friends. Lord Cramp, for example. The police were assaulting me in public, in Bayswater Tube Station for no reason. I took a fraction of a second to scan the audience, suddenly embarrassed at the idea of a client seeing me.

  The moment ended when the policeman took my arm and twisted it, making me yelp and fling my other arm towards his head, breaking my nail on his ear, but not deterring the completion of his movement that had me bent double, my head between my legs and pain shooting up my arm. He held me there with one hand and put the other to his ear. “Blood,” he announced. “'You’ve just made the biggest mistake of your life, Paki bitch.”

  “Maybe you’re the one who’s made a mistake,” I said bravely from between my legs.

  They put us in separate vans to take us to their Porta- kabin offices. I learned something new about London. These police were not the regular police, but Transport Police who looked just the same but were of lower quality and exercised greater power. They made me empty my bag and took away my shoes and belt. The policeman who arrested me went through my belongings while a woman officer stood at the door. He dwelled on the cash and went through the notes with progressive slowness, waiting for my reaction. A bribe, I thought, he wants me to offer him a bribe. Either for the money or so he can charge me with bribery, or both. Eventually, as he slowly rubbed the final ten-pound note between his thumb and fingers, and I found myself unable to decide between bribing or not bribing, I settled on offering him a simple explanation. “It’s money,” I confided.

  “Don’t get smart with me.” He slapped the notes into a plastic bag.

  They had us well fitted-up and framed by the time they handed us over to the regular police. I listened with sickened horror while the Transport Policemen expounded their case to a sergeant. “We were observing the suspect on suspicion of drug dealing. When he passed the ticket barrier without purchasing a ticket we challenged him and he subsequently assaulted us. He tried to pass the drugs to his accomplice who also assaulted us when we attempted to detain her. We called up support and both were arrested. We found packages of heroin on both and the man was also carrying a knife.”