Forest Gate

by Peter Akinti

  Yet over the years things changed. Apart from my father, Mr Bloom was the only man I trusted. It was Mr Bloom I had called the morning after my parents were killed. He had picked us up, Ashvin and me, and after everything, arranged our flights. I remember him seeing us after we had washed the blood from our parents' bodies, the way he lowered his gun and then began to curse, unable to stem his anger, the way he walked around my parents' bodies carefully and quietly as though the realisation broke slowly within him like the cold, the loving way he embraced my father. Mr Bloom remained speechless. He just stared at the two of us for some time – I was slumped in a corner not having seen, until then, the amount of blood I had on my dress. Ashvin sat in an old plastic chair by the window. Mr Bloom was the reason we were fast-tracked into Great Britain. Red. Amber. Green. It was only as I watched the plume of smoke and the drips of fuel that fell onto the asphalt from the corroded exhaust of Mr Bloom's car that I knew Ashvin was really dead.

  There were police outside the mortuary. Death stained the walls of the building like rust clutching at iron. They led me down a narrow flight of stairs to a drab, tile-clad room that felt like it was directly underneath the entrance. The small, grey room was a place outside the rush of time. The two long windows had been darkened and gave me the uncomfortable feeling that I was being watched. There was a strong smell of sulphur. I turned and noticed a third basement window with a roller blind that was half closed so it looked like a giant eyelid. There was a crisp white sheet half covering a body on a metal slab. All the majesty of life gone.

  'Take your time,' said one of the policewomen.

  I felt a dull thud in my head as I searched for the desert orange of my brother's eyes but the eyes of the corpse were closed. It looked as though his upper lip had been bitten off. The neck was ravaged pulp. I looked at the face and I thought if I looked for too long anything could become familiar. I froze when I saw his navel. His had not been cut right, my brother's, it had swelled to the size of a tangerine, tumour-like. It was him.

  His forehead was lined with creases. He had large bags under his eyes. It was hard to believe he was still just a boy. My sixteen-year-old brother.

  His skin was pallid, his face swollen. It carried no expression save for a quiet snarl that did not belong to him; his arms looked flabby. There was a track of outraged flesh and coagulated blood around his throat and lacerations on his face where he must have scratched himself involuntarily. I felt my insides coil and reverse on themselves. I looked from the body to the police out of the corner of my eye and I thought of our father. I had asked him once why he didn't call his friend Mr Bloom by his first name. He looked at me as though I should have known. 'Because he is a white man, and despite what they say, they like us to remember our difference. You will do well to remember this, daughter,' my father said.

  'Well, miss?' asked the officer with the boyish haircut who hadn't spoken to me up until then.

  'Well what?' I said without removing my eyes from Ashvin. I wondered why it was that in Somalia people did not have surnames in the Western sense. To identify a Somali, three names must be used: a given name followed by the father's given name and the grandfather's. Women don't change their names at marriage. Nearly all men and some women in Somalia are identified by a public name, naanays. There are two kinds of naanays: overt nicknames, similar to Western nicknames, and covert nicknames, which are used to talk about a person but rarely used to address that person. I remembered my father called us fireflies on account of our eyes. And then I heard my father telling us that he loved us more than his own life. And then I wondered if coming to London had been worthwhile, if there was ever such a thing as escape. Since life is ultimately what you carry around in your heart.

  'Well, is it him or not?' She pointed her chin at me.

  I could do that.

  I had first noticed something strange happening to my brother a few months earlier. He would get very happy and then, mid-sentence, become irritable and start talking too fast, too much. He began coming home to our flat to shower and change clothes only when he knew I would be at school. He hardly ever slept. Some nights I would listen outside his bedroom. He would be having conversations with himself, as though he were two people. At first I would knock and go in but then he stopped letting me. When he wasn't around I would sneak in and try to work out what he saw in all the newspaper clippings he kept. He would circle words like 'Pope', 'UN', 'asylum', 'oil' and 'Ethiopia' always, always in red. And he kept a list under his bed with all the names of leaders of African countries and he put numbers next to them, numbers that made no sense, like Y2B8 or Zd29. We didn't speak about what he did in his room or about the bits and pieces of conversation I heard him having alone. But his gloom had come between us; it settled in our flat uninvited like a squatter. There were many things I had no idea about. At first I asked him questions but finally I gave up. I missed the days when Ashvin thought he was my protector, when he talked to me about everything as though he understood.

  'Miss?' asked the policewoman.

  I nodded my head but fought off my tears.

  I began to wish I were dressed native, in black with a golden headtie. I didn't feel right somehow, dressed in a school blazer and a tie. The officer who had sat with me in the back of the police car looked at me soberly, inspecting my face.

  'I'm very sorry,' she said softly. With pursed lips she handed me a shopping bag full of belongings I barely recognised. When I extended my hand to take the bag I felt my fingers going dead from cold. The other policewoman, the driver, seemed happy with my discomfort.

  'Were you aware of your brother's medical condition?' she said.

  I nodded.

  Then she opened a large Manila envelope with her knuckle. 'Do you know this man?' She pulled out a black-and-white photograph. I looked at it for some time.

  'Course I know him,' I said. 'He's that dead Ethiopian guy in all the papers.'

  She sighed. 'Apart from what you have seen in the papers, have you seen him before?'

  'No.'

  'Well, we took a few fluid samples when we examined the body, before we established who he was. Some interesting revelations have come up.'

  I turned back to look at Ashvin.

  'Your brother is now a prime suspect in a murder inquiry.'

  I took a deep breath, looked up at her and I laughed.

  'Glad you find that funny,' she said.

  'But he's dead,' I said, tears blurring my sight.

  'DNA doesn't lie.'

  'What does that mean?'

  'Was your brother involved in a gang? We believe these deaths may be the connected result of gang-related violence.'

  'A gang? My brother was not in a gang.'

  'Secrecy is a big part of gang culture,' she said philosophically.

  'I don't want to answer any questions right now. Where I come from we give relatives time to honour their dead.'

  'As I understand it you came here to escape where you come from.' She said it as though she had known about me for a long time. I looked down at my feet and remained silent, suddenly feeling a hot wave of shame. I wanted to explain that I had no choice in coming to Britain. That term, political asylum, stole my bearings. I suddenly missed my parents, my friends. But inside I knew the policewoman was right. I should be grateful. I felt the resentment the policewoman saw when she looked at me.

  'I am a human being,' I said, or something just as daft.

  Much later I felt angry and wished I had punched that policewoman, but in that moment I realised, instinctively, what my brother had done and I hated him for being weak, for leaving me alone. Then I remembered the words to the old Somali song we sang whenever there was a death. My aunt sang it on top of a steep hill at the burial of my parents. That was when I tore open my school shirt and wailed.

  I couldn't go back to school. The policewomen dropped me off at our estate. The one-pound shop was overflowing with people, the chicken restaurant was closed but the smell hadn't wandered very far,
it blotted out the smell of freshly cut grass from the park. I stopped off at Mr Khan's and bought a loaf of bread and a newspaper. I took a long soak in a hot bath and read the celebrity news. I wrapped my hair in a towel and after I dried myself I fell into the sofa where I curled up with an arm propping my head and watched the dust beams of sunlight coming through the windows.

  I remembered the first day we arrived at our flat, dressed in our church clothes. The first day of a new life. The sun was out, several children were playing freely without fear on the streets. In those first weeks we hardly left the flat, fascinated and contented as we were with the TV, radio and the new Ikea furniture supplied by Mr Bloom. But you know, thinking about it, I realised how much I hated watching the news on television. The way it brought so much agony into our living room, so much of what I tried to forget.

  I ate a bowl of 25p ramen noodles, the sort that you add boiling water and red dust to, astronaut food that never disappointed. I loved the meat and rubber smell and the wild-thyme taste of steaming hot noodles. When I had finished eating I closed my eyes and tried to sleep. I couldn't. A phone was ringing somewhere deep in my mind. When I answered I heard the loving voices of my mother and my father. They were together and they were happy. I slammed the phone down but couldn't rid myself of the sound of their soft voices floating out from the dark. And then I saw their beaming faces surrounded by love and filled with the joy of our past lives. I used all my strength to push them out of my head, to block out their images. But there was this one that got through.

  Once when I was small, the police burst into our house on a Sunday and took my father away because of something they accused him of saying against the government in an article he had written for a local journal. Enforced disappearances were widespread and systematic. Armed men would block roads, search towns and raid homes in the middle of the night. He was missing for a week. It was one of the few times my mother took to embroidering and she also cancelled her Friday-night salon. I remembered listening to her calling her friends, the artists and poets who filled our house with cigarette smoke and grand hand gestures. In the background of their meetings there was always gunfire, sometimes intense, but they would continue to talk, as if to say everything was normal, under control. I remember her eyes seeking bad news. She told her friends she felt 'lifeless'. I couldn't understand this expression 'lifeless' at the time. She agreed to move their planned discussion to the following month. Every day while he was missing my mother would burn charcoal and herbs inside a haan and she would shake it around the house; white puffs of smoke oozed out and sailed behind her with her prayers along our faded walls and a heavenly smell would spread. Every day my mother would send Ashvin to buy the Shabelle Times, the local newspaper that published the names of the men wounded or found dead. But mostly we found out what was happening by listening to the radio. We would huddle together listening to the voice of Muhad Ahmed Elmi on HornAfrik while people cried and prayed.

  Boys were generally banned from listening to the radio by their mothers because once they understood what was happening they would want to join their fathers, brothers or cousins and go to war. There were never enough men in families to protect the women and to do the work that needed to be done. Boys and men would return crippled or blind, some of them with missing limbs – but at least they were alive. When my father came home his hair was dirty and messy, he was bruised and skinny and his eyes were splashed red. But when he saw us all together he smiled, white teeth on smooth chocolate skin. Despite looking haggard he was still very handsome and my mother laughed even as she wept. I remember watching her tears splash onto her black muslin dress and when I touched her eyes the water that came from them was hot.

  'How can you cry when you are happy?' I was young and confused.

  'Because they are tears for love, they are tears to make you better.'

  My mother squeezed my face between her palms and we all tucked ourselves under my father's open arms as if we were one body and he winced and laughed at the same time, never taking his eyes from my mother's. I felt safe in my father's arms. He was like a big Higloo tree with long roots and leaves that always remained green. He didn't speak much but the little he said kept me busy. Neighbours would frequent our house: 'What should I do about this or that?' My father was very practical, he told the truth no matter what because, he said, it was all he had.

  That day when he came back to us we ate warm bread together just before sunset in our small living room that overlooked Damal trees in the highlands under the Karkaar Mountains where the grass grew tall. By then the ICU had declared jihad on Ethiopian troops who were crossing into Somalia. The Ethiopians, recipients of US military aid, invaded Mogadishu and installed a new Somali interim government with Abdullahi Yusuf as president. All the ICU soldiers regrouped to Ras Kamboni, the oldest al-Qaeda training camp in Africa. But every day the Somali insurgents – mostly frightened, vengeful young men and homesick boys – fought with the installed Transitional Federal Government for control of Mogadishu.

  Many of the roads were blocked with families fleeing. Our part of the city was relatively calm but the streets were empty during the day, only a handful of people could be seen and the market, which used to be the biggest in East Africa, did not function because of the assassinations linked to robbery. People were scared. Who would risk their life for the sake of a few vegetables? It felt strange to be in London so far from home, to be all alone. I remembered the muffled sound of the shelling and I thought of crowds scattering like birds and of bullets penetrating soft skin.

  The memory of my father returning home stopped playing in my head but the sound of gunfire went on and on, haunting me. I had lived with the sound for so long it had become bearable. All you could do was hope for silence, for still air. It all seemed like such a long time ago, long before moving to live with my crazy aunt and the six husbands who touched me at night.

  An ice-cream van arrived in the neighbourhood. I could not place the name of the nursery rhyme; it was way out of tune. I stood for some time naked in front of the mirror. Spots had erupted on my forehead. I wiped the moisture from between my breasts. In the possessive silence I felt a longing for someone to hold me. I was still for a while, staring at the hair between my legs as a ball of heat began to rise. I thought of Shirley, from my school, the way she spoke about having a Brazilian once a week, how smooth she said it was. I scraped the last of the noodles from the black bowl. And then decided to shave my pubic hair. As I spread shea butter delicately over myself I laughed when I thought of Shirley going on about her Brazilian during class. It is standard practice for a Muslim woman to remove all her body hair, especially just before marriage, we just don't ever talk about it.

  I felt empty, my mouth dry. The overwhelming need for release was overtaken by images of my brother that came flashing one after the other. In the quietness of the room I felt something strange; not an idea, a notion. A warm sensation spread over me and I smiled. All of a sudden I became very clear about what I was feeling. I decided right then that I wanted a baby.

  I couldn't bear to be on my own. It was OK being home alone when I knew Ashvin was coming back, but now it felt different. It was almost two o'clock when I left the flat. I wanted to be seen. I dressed, opened my front door and stepped outside just as a white lady and her daughter walked by.

  I let them pass and then I walked slowly up the road as the wind blew leaves and sweetie wrappers around my legs. I passed a mother a few doors down sitting on a chair on her doorstep plaiting her daughter's hair. The smell of singed hair from a burning-hot comb came out of the house along with Gladys Knight's voice. I smiled at the little girl's stubborn expression. She was dressed for a party and had a pink towel wrapped tightly around her neck. Half of the child's head was already done in tiny neat rows while the other half, undone, looked like a cloud of brown candyfloss. I remembered leaning my head against my mother's thighs, one arm raised, holding a tub of Dax while she plaited my hair. I have always suffered
from a dry scalp and my mother would use the sharp edge of her comb to scratch the dry flakes out of my hair and then she would rub aloe vera and Dax between the lines of my thick plaits. It only hurt a little but I would act like I was having a heart attack. 'Who is my beautiful little girl?' she'd ask tickling me with her knuckles until I said my name. That was our 'doing my hair' game. I still used Dax in my hair after all these years. I shook my head and inhaled to try to catch the smell of my hair grease but my nose filled with the smell of my deodorant and of the yellow fabric softener I used on my clothes.

  I walked past a group of boys who were always hanging around on the estate. They were dressed in denim with shiny belts and gleaming trainers and hats worn at many different angles. I recognised Jimi Hamilton who had once driven a stolen car through my neighbour Helen's living room. She was a supply teacher who Jimi held responsible for getting him excluded. What was funny about the incident was that Jimi didn't run. He stayed because he said he needed to get arrested. When the police eventually arrived, he told them straight. 'Here what,' he said to the officers, removing his hood, 'I'm gonna do it again because she ruined my career, blood.'

  Helen walked around visibly shaking for a week. She was only twenty-two. She told Crimestoppers she was having a crisis of conscience and one day, about a week after the incident, she was gone, traded her one-bed for a two-bed in East Ham.

  Those boys. Always standing in the same spot. Sometimes at night I watched them out of my bedroom window. I have been doing my own private psychological study of them and I still can't work out what it is they do on their corner. I call it the poverty effect and they have immersed themselves. They don't sell drugs or fight. They just stand there talking real fast into pretend microphones. Maybe being bums is the best thing for it. Perhaps that is what happens when adults screw each other indiscriminately. At some stage everyone becomes part of each other and then we just all hang out. Get along like a faded Benetton ad or the Jolie-Pitts. I tried to think what my brother would have been like if he had not been up to his neck in the turmoil of current events. And then I thought of what I would have given in that moment to see my brother on the corner with those other boys just shooting the breeze.