Forest Gate

by Peter Akinti

  I stood behind James and placed both my hands on his shoulders. He turned and gently kissed the nape of my neck.

  I touched his cheek and felt the pulse beneath his jaw.

  'Why do you touch me like that?' he asked.

  'Like what?'

  'Like I'm a child.'

  I removed my hands quickly. 'My guardian is coming here tomorrow. I'm going to let him know what happened with Nalma, he may be able to help.'

  James frowned. 'Who is your guardian?'

  'His name is Mr Bloom.'

  'I don't think you should tell anyone.'

  'Don't worry.' I sat down and crossed my legs. 'He'll be able to tell us what to do.'

  'I mean, who is he to you? Ash never said anything about him.'

  'He was a friend of my father's. You'll meet him tomorrow,' I said. 'You're worried about Whittaker. I can tell.'

  'No. I don't care about him or about anything any more.'

  The wind whispered against the window. Everything in the room felt sad. I thought of the time Ash and I spent with Mr Bloom. He lived in a vast condominium with a powerful electricity generator that was built to ensure the power supply never went out with the rest of Somalia. The building had twenty-four-hour armed security and was surrounded by Western-style shops. It was in the southern port town of Kismayo, a supposed safe zone. There were checkpoints everywhere and despite the service offered by the Special Protection Unit, aid workers, Unicef workers, journalists and NGOs were targeted indiscriminately in the area, kidnapped or shot. People lived in constant fear of ambush, car bombs and remote-control landmines. But it felt safe to Ash and me. That was the first time we lived with Mr Bloom. I stayed there happily for four months but Ashvin hardly ever came out of his room. I didn't know what was going on at the time. I was too busy reading Mr Bloom's books, eating cheeseburgers and strawberry jam and Chinese food to notice. I now know it was when Ash was first diagnosed with HIV. Since the death of our parents Ash had stopped saying what he was thinking, but Mr Bloom has told me since that Ashvin hated going to hospital. Once I asked him why he was so resentful towards Mr Bloom.

  'Baba told me to be wary of white men. Bloom tries to be so nice. I'm confused,' he said. I think the real reason was because Bloom was the only person who knew he was infected. For me, things seemed fine until our aunt started showing up on Saturday evenings. I remember the first time it happened.

  'They need a home where they truly belong, a traditional upbringing. I'm ready to play my part.' She spoke in a soft, caring voice and I believed her because I wanted to.

  She had Mr Bloom wrapped all the way round her finger by then.

  'Of course,' said Mr Bloom. He thought it was the right thing to do. 'But since I have already put in my application for permanent guardianship, I want to continue to provide financial support, to ensure the process will still go through, in case they check.'

  My aunt adjusted her headdress and tried to appear calm but she didn't. I should have known then. I shiver when I think about how badly I misjudged her – I had no idea what she had planned. Ashvin never liked her. He watched her carefully whenever she was around. 'I don't trust that woman,' he said.

  I was surprised when James kissed me. I had been married six times but before that night I had never had consensual sex. I had talked with other girls – my real friends in Somalia – about their fears of abduction, and nurses came to my school regularly for special 'stop the silence' classes and polio vaccinations. They would talk to teenage girls about the myth that sex with virgins was a cure for male HIV infection, preventing transmission of disease from mother to child, coercive sex; they warned us off seeking the attention of men, to have regular tests and they gave us proper sanitary pads. These classes were always about fear, so I wasn't at all prepared for the magic I felt when James's lips touched mine. I had no comprehension of the true power of a man – I ached for him. I felt I had waited all my life for his kiss. It was as though I was a weightless being carried along a river, and yet I was afraid. I gently touched the stitches on his lip with my finger.

  'They'll dissolve soon. It's where I bit myself.'

  I winced. His thick, woolly hair was softer than I had imagined.

  'Sorry, TMI.'

  'TMI?' I asked.

  'Too much information.'

  I smiled and he leaned in towards me, gently pushing his tongue between my lips. It was like opening my eyes and being able to see for the first time. I hoped I wouldn't wake up tomorrow and find it was all a dream. His breath was light, his lips like silk. I wasn't sure I was doing it right. I closed my eyes when I saw he had closed his and only opened them once, for a second, when our teeth clashed. I felt reassured when he ran his hand over my face with care, on my head, through my hair, down, down, until he gripped my lower back. I gasped when I touched his neck and for a moment I pulled away. My hand was wet.

  'James, you're bleeding. Did I hurt you?'

  'It keeps doing that. Sorry,' he said.

  'I'm sorry.'

  I kissed him. Then I felt him touching my lower back under my shirt where my skin was hot and damp.

  I wanted to stop him. I must have tensed my body.

  'Meina, are you OK?'

  I was confused. He wasn't meant to sound so warm. I was trembling. It was like electricity was passing through me. I looked at the window. It was a bright night but I couldn't see the moon. I thought I should stop. But I needed to prove something to myself.

  'Do you want to?' I asked.

  He opened his eyes.

  'What's wrong?' I thought perhaps I had embarrassed him.

  'Do you want to?'

  I moved his hand from my back and placed it on the front of my panties, letting him feel my heat. I felt him trembling as he fumbled with the elastic on the inside of my left thigh. I was wet. I opened my eyes to see him looking at my face.

  'Meina, is it OK?' he said.

  'Yes.'

  He widened my legs.

  'God,' I said when I felt his finger inside me. I had no idea I could be happily led to the undignified places he took me. He opened me up and together we made love.

  When I fell asleep James made his way to the other bedroom in the dark. I woke again at one o'clock and found it difficult to go back to sleep. I wrapped the blanket around the bottom of my feet. I wondered if he lay awake like me, listening for sounds all around in the dark, groping for a reason to get up.

  ELEVEN

  MEINA

  THAT NIGHT WAS FILLED with vivid memories of my father. I always had an image of him conducting his interviews in an expensive room in a huge white castle. I went with him once to a place called the Alibi in Baidoa. He made me wait opposite the entrance but I went and peeked inside through a crack in the wooden door at the back. The front door faced the corner of the main street, across from a deli and discount store in a part of town that was then unfamiliar to me. Both sides of the Alibi building had signs bearing the bar's name in peeling yellow paint accompanied by a faded blue elephant logo with the shape of the African continent in bold. The building's three storeys looked noticeably worn, with chipped blue-and-green paint and barred or boarded-up windows. The chalkboard outside touted the air conditioning but there was no mention of the bare, peeling mud-coloured walls, layers of grime everywhere or the bar stools that were held together by duct tape.

  The Alibi was about 250 kilometres from the war zone in Mogadishu. I had heard my father and some of his teacher friends say it was the only decent secret bar left in Baidoa. Ashvin asked him about it once and my father said it was where big business was done. There were no paved roads or street names and the rains had created ravines with crumbly sides; the entire area was virtually impassable. The first time my father met him, Mr Bloom's driver got stuck in the sandy chasms.

  In the centre of the main room stood two dilapidated picnic tables; they used two wooden stands for a bar. With the exception of the counters and the picnic tables the room was bare. A wet sludgy substance covere
d the floor, a mixture of beer and dirt and who knows what else.

  There were broken beer bottles on the floor too and empty plastic cups swelled in the corners and around the tables. My father said the beer was like battery acid but the Alibi served this special hot-buttered rum that tasted like heaven. It was made by mixing butter, rum and goat's milk, whipped in-house with four different spices and brown sugar, stirred forty or fifty times and taste-tested by the regulars. Many of the regulars were drunk and danced on the tables. In another front room, local guys lined up at the bar to holler over the soccer game on a small, mounted black-and-white TV, while others cheered on the often highly competitive pool games. A harshly lit, graffiti-marred back room provided extra seating and a Top Forty reggae list played loudly on a strange home-made jukebox.

  It was the most unlikely friendship. Mr Bloom represented everything my father despised about Westerners in Africa. My father, well, he was black. Mr Bloom had not had a black male friend before. He had worked with many, even chased a football around the park with a couple. But friendship? Never.

  My father was a handsome man who commanded the respect of the beautiful. He blushed easily and although he laughed without exception at all of Mr Bloom's jokes he was very intelligent. After eight years abroad he had returned to Somalia in 1974. He was only twenty-five years old and eager to begin building a professional life, to play a part in developing a modern Somalia. My father never lost his ambition. He worked closely with the Somali experts in Scandinavia (where he met Mashood, my mother) and for the Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs. During his four years in the UK he worked at the Department of Economics and International Development at the University of Bath before he returned to Somalia where he built his reputation at the University of Mogadishu. What Mr Bloom liked most about my father was his candour, the way he never tried to impress. He didn't pretend he was anything other than what he was and that, according to Bloom, made the relationship honest.

  Their friendship was cemented the night they finally got round to doing the interview in my father's study at the back of our house. Mr Bloom loved being in our home. It was clean, with haphazard shelving and furniture covered in sailcloth. It was decorated with ceramic bowls and locally sculptured vessels. There were cushioned nooks for reading, decorative bundles, and twigs and sticks and odd baskets filled with bits of cut firewood. Our house was always brimming with people with familial or professional bonds: poets, writers, academics and children running around and shooting marbles on the veranda. My father's friends, who drank seriously despite the alcohol ban, seemed to enjoy Mr Bloom's presence. Soon he was at our house more than his own.

  Our house looked across a river that was still and blue. But there was always fighting in the area. People kept light to a minimum out of fear of the roaming militia; ash from the fighting covered the streets and many buildings, but from inside our home, the war seemed like flashes of distant lightning.

  TWELVE

  MEINA

  MY FATHER'S STUDY WAS a small igloo stuffed with books, lit by a cluster of candles and had a single block of wood for a desk. There were two overturned Coca-Cola crates for chairs. The only sign of the modern times was his minidisk player that had 'Property of the New York Times' stamped across the face. I remember sitting with Ashvin outside the study that night, listening to our father asking questions. My father didn't encourage us exactly, but he knew we were there. By that time the two men were more like family than friends. The interview went on long after Ashvin and I had gone to sleep, until dawn. My father's two thousand scathing words appeared in the international pages of the New York Times, my mother showed it to me. I didn't understand it very much. It was something about the issue of skyrocketing food and fuel prices in Somalia which he linked to China's expansion and its influence on world trade; the way the West used green politics to slow down the pace of economies in the Third World; the way the West had been ravaging the world with impunity since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution.

  Two weeks after the publication of my father's article he was invited to speak in Mogadishu at a protest rally over high food prices. He took Ash and me with him despite our mother's disapproval. It was peaceful to begin with; the crowd cheered his speech. Then something happened and people started hurling rocks at cars, shops and buses. Some people were wounded, others began looting the restaurants and shops, and fighting broke out in Baraka market. As people thundered past I fell and lost a sandal. I felt an odd sensation, it was as if my leg muscles had turned to water and my heart thudded out of control. I thought I would be lost to the clamour of feet and the swirling clouds. I felt foolish when Ashvin found me. He raised an eyebrow when I mumbled something ridiculous about retrieving my sandal. He held my hand tightly as he led me back to my father. He was a small boy and had to keep turning his back to zigzag through the throng. 'Don't let go,' he said frowning with concentration, his head bent down. If I close my eyes I can still smell the sweat from all the rushing bodies and feel the chaos all around. But everything became still when my father, the sunlight behind him, hugged us and told us to remain close as we walked back to safety.

  Soon after that the Ethiopian men came wearing uniforms supplied by the Transitional Government and murdered my mother and father. It rained early the next morning. I could see the trees outside bending in the high wind. I called Mr Bloom for help and sat waiting with Ashvin for a long time beside the open window. It felt like all the promises that had ever been made had been broken.

  It wasn't the first time the soldiers had been to our house. Three of them had come once before. They wanted to warn us of the danger we were in because of what they had overheard their officers saying. My father had to give them protection money. It was one of the few times I ever heard my parents arguing. My mother said the soldiers' visit would become routine. She begged him to sell up and buy a house in another village but my father refused. 'Abandon my house? All I'm doing is telling the truth. I left my country once before, I'm tired of running. This is my house.' When my father got something in his mind that was that. Their raised voices didn't bother me until I realised how frightened my mother was – she sat up at night staring out of the window, listening to the distant sound of gunfire around Baidoa. I watched her one night for a while, not wanting to disturb her thoughts. She had a habit of gently rubbing the right palm of her hand against the back of her left. Looking back, it didn't seem like she was expecting anybody. She looked more like she was preparing for the worst. The next morning my mother cooked a large breakfast and seemed herself again. We ate together and laughed and my father took Ashvin fishing while my mother read aloud from one of her books, Mariama Ba, I think. Shortly after that – perhaps a week – both of my parents were dead.

  I remember it was late morning by the time I called Mr Bloom. Ash didn't want me to. I tried my best to speak clearly and calmly over the telephone. He had worked all night and was preparing to enjoy a newlyweds' party with his then girlfriend, Sossina. He came to our house alone through the back. We were washing our parents' feet when he arrived. Nobody spoke. Mr Bloom let out a deep sigh. He closed his eyes, tilted his head and stood there, one hand holding the gun, the other clutching his ponytail, teetering on the edge of saying something but he seemed to have swallowed his words. Ashvin glanced at him and then sat by the window. I remember Mr Bloom wore a grey T-shirt that was wet in patches with sweat. When I first noticed him he looked like he was holding up the wall with his back. I saw him lower his gun and take my father's hand, check his pulse. My father was covered in blood, his throat had been cut and he had been shot several times. I remember Mr Bloom tried to wipe blood from my father's mouth and nose. He didn't see me see him do it; he made the sign of the cross and he kissed my father. That was when I knew he was my father's true friend. Nobody else I called came, at least not when it mattered – that's the point about the black/white thing. Mostly it's character that counts. You never really know people until something happens in life. Nobody
teaches you that. Ashvin did not cry, he looked weak and feverish. He only spoke once. 'Why do you think this has happened? To us?' I had nothing to say and Ash just sat in silence, looking out of the window.

  THIRTEEN

  MEINA

  IT WAS COLD THE next morning. When James came into the living room I stopped talking. He asked me if I wouldn't mind turning up the central heating.

  I stood and gave him a hug. He felt warm.

  'I cooked breakfast,' I said.

  Immediately, I could tell, by the way he looked at Mr Bloom, that James was going be hostile. Mr Bloom wore a black sweater over an expensive white shirt. His dark rheumy eyes were set deep in his leathery face and he had long silver hair, which was thinning. He swirled his coffee for a moment, stared at James the way he might look at a dog, not hatefully but as if at a completely different species – as though he was telling James he could never walk or talk in the same way as him. I don't know what he was looking at him like that for. I watched James try to square up to him. Mr Bloom smiled, as if he was laughing at him.

  James told me later he thought Bloom was a 'proper wanker'.

  'I'm Larry Bloom.' He half stood and extended his right hand.

  James shook his hand and sat in the chair facing him.

  'How are you feeling?'

  'How are you feeling?' James said.

  He didn't want him to think they were friends.

  'I'm Meina's guardian,' Mr Bloom said. 'Forgive me, I don't mean to pry, but I've heard so much about you. You were very close to Ashvin, I know, and you must have been under a lot of stress to do what you did. Those feelings don't just go away like that.' He snapped his fingers. 'Believe me. Go easy on yourself. I know you think you can take care of yourself but everyone needs help sometimes, even old white men like me.' Mr Bloom stopped speaking when he saw the icy expression on James's face.