The Fortune Men

by Nadifa Mohamed

  ‘What’s your occupation?’ Perkins asks, pouring sugar from his spoon into a muddy prison tea.

  ‘In my real life I was a sailor.’

  ‘When I was a little boy I wanted nothing more than to sail the seven seas.’

  ‘I did that, I sail all seven,’ he counts them off on his fingers, ‘Indian, Atlantic, what you call it … Pacifical?’

  ‘Pacific, that’s right. Artic? Antarctic?’

  ‘Both of them.’

  ‘You’re a bona fide Phileas Fogg!’ Wilkinson says.

  Mahmood doesn’t know the reference and looks at Wilkinson to explain.

  Perkins jumps in. ‘He’s a character from a novel, Around the World in Eighty Days, it’s by a French writer, Jules Verne. He travels all over the world in eighty days to win a wager.’

  Mahmood smiles. ‘I like that idea, you put the bet down, and I would do something like that.’

  ‘A betting man? OK, let’s play for cigarettes, then.’

  ‘These cigarettes hurt my throat.’

  ‘Matches, then. Five a game?’

  ‘Deal.’ Mahmood collects twelve white counters in his hand. ‘I play with these, the colour black seem to bring too much bad luck.’

  Perkins gives a false little laugh.

  They begin the game in silence, just the clack and slide of counters marching from one side of the board to the other. Mahmood rests his chin in his palm, more invested in the game than he had expected to be. Their skill is evenly matched, unless Perkins is being soft on him. It suddenly feels deeply important to beat this white prison warder at this simple game.

  Isn’t this what the world is like? Mahmood thinks. With countries and seas instead of black and white squares, the white man spread all over, the black man picked off wherever he might be and left to eke out a life on the fringes of the board, in ghettoes and shantytowns. Not this time, he resolves, jumping over and then slamming one after another of Perkins’ counters on to the table. He remembers with fondness the Imam from his childhood and his scheming, winking face; a man devoted to nothing but making life difficult for the British.

  Mahmood has breached the last row on Perkins’ side. His humble counter now a king, able to move across the board with absolute freedom. He had seen himself that way once, a very long time ago. He was a self-anointed king, far beyond being just a Reer Gedid youth, a Sacad Musa clansman, a Somali, a Muslim, a Black. Those labels so hollow they echoed around him, not stirring any part of his mind or heart. He was cast from a single mould, he had told himself, which is why he struggled to live by the rules other people scrabbled along to. Don’t argue, don’t fight, don’t ask for more than you’re given, don’t go places where you don’t belong. But now those labels are pinned into his flesh: his clan matters because they are few in Cardiff; his Somalihood matters to the West Africans and West Indians who take him for an Arab rather than one of them; his faith matters to the sheikh and the others at Noor ul-Islam who think he turned kuffar long ago. And his blackness? Forget it. That was the one he was mad to think he could ever outrun.

  Perkins’ last counter is hemmed in on all sides by Mahmood’s, unable to escape. Game over.

  ‘What I tell you? I play white and my luck change.’

  Perkins leans back as if he has exerted himself and takes a long slug of his tea. He wipes his upper lip with his sleeve, burps softly and then counts out five matches. ‘Guess you were right.’

  Mahmood arranges the counters back in their orderly starting position to take on Wilkinson. He sticks to the winning counters, superstitious as ever.

  A question enters his mind but he is unsure whether to even bring it up, whether it will just disturb the little mental peace he has cultivated. He drums his nails on the table and then decides to just ask, fuck it.

  ‘In court, when they ask that man, Powell, questions, my lawyer ask him about a warder who called him to the prison to talk about a man he see, who look like me, standing outside. You know which warder it be?’

  Perkins and Wilkinson knot their eyebrows in doubt.

  ‘Not a big thing, I’m just curious, that’s all,’ Mahmood says quickly.

  ‘I’m sure I could ask around … being from out of town, I can’t say I know that off the top of my head.’ Perkins looks to Wilkinson.

  ‘Wouldn’t be hard to find out. Have to run it by the governor, though. Find out if the solicitor would need to –’

  Mahmood cuts him off. ‘No, I don’t want to involve the solicitor, just wanted to say … you know … that I thank him … for trying to help me, for telling the truth.’

  Perkins pats him on the arm. ‘Easily done, leave it with us.’

  Mahmood nods, his mind drifting away to whom the warder might have noticed standing outside the prison gate: an innocent double of his? The real killer come to gloat? Or maybe even Mahmood’s soul gone wandering.

  ‘Is it quick?’ Mahmood is back in bed, facing the brick wall, taken over by a bone-deep tiredness.

  ‘What’s that?’ Perkins replies, cracking his stiff spine.

  ‘The hanging.’

  Silence.

  ‘Yes,’ Wilkinson says finally.

  ‘How long it take to die?’

  ‘You are out immediately.’

  ‘You sure?’

  ‘Absolutely.’

  ‘Good,’ Mahmood says, closing his eyes.

  Mahmood hears her deep, musical voice before he sees her. Laura.

  Perkins had gone to help her up the steps with the children and he now returns to the corridor carrying the large-wheeled, old-fashioned pram in his arms. Mahmood enters the visiting room and David is standing alone behind the glass and looking nervously at his father, his tongue swiping back and forth across his chin.

  ‘Aabbo,’ exclaims Mahmood, holding his palm flat against the glass, ‘ii kaalay.’

  David doesn’t move.

  Mahmood switches to English. ‘Come to me.’

  David runs back through the open door and only returns when Laura is beside him, with Mervyn on her hip and Omar clutching the other side of her skirt.

  ‘Beauty,’ smiles Mahmood, as the sight of them fills up his eyes.

  Laura’s face collapses from blank repose to slack, sobbing pain.

  ‘Sit. Sit. Sit!’ he orders, shaking his head. ‘None of that.’

  Mervyn looks at his mother’s reddening face and then, squeezing his eyes shut, begins to wail too, starting a chain that doesn’t end until they are all wet-eyed, Mahmood included.

  They have clustered close together, steaming up the partition and smearing prints across the clean glass. Small, fat fingers and long, thin ones pressing down, mingling like leaves on a tree.

  ‘Boqoradey, my queen,’ Mahmood says softly, rubbing his nose roughly on the back of his hand.

  Laura’s chin rests on her chest. Her tears well every time she looks at him.

  ‘It’s not over yet, Laura.’

  Perkins enters her side of the room and places a small white plate of golden digestive biscuits in front of the children. David dabs his hand on them, as if not trusting anything in these strange surroundings, but then passes two to his brothers and puts one to his lips, nibbling at it to savour the taste.

  Mahmood watches Perkins as he stands back against the wall and although he is thankful for his kindness, it humiliates him to not be able to give the boys anything, not even a biscuit, to comfort them.

  ‘Laura, listen to me, listen to me.’ He holds his hand up to the glass as if it will transmit his words more clearly. ‘I got the appeal yet, they can’t do nothing until we hear back from London, from the real judges there.’

  ‘I went to see someone …’

  ‘What you say?’

  ‘I went to see a lady, that my friend said would be able to see … ahead.’

  ‘What you mean, love?’

  Laura’s eyes are on the floral handkerchief that she’s twisted between her fingers. ‘She can read the future, she lives down on the Docks, a M
altese woman.’

  Mahmood is caught between frustration and fear. ‘And she say something to upset you?’

  Laura wipes her eyes and nods. ‘I never took that kind of thing serious, you know? But Flo told me of all the things she had predicted that had come true, like the little boys who drowned in the canal and that Flo would marry a Yemeni.’

  ‘Everyone say Flo marry a Yemeni, all her boyfriends come from Aden. The Maltese bint just take your money and give herself even odds for getting the answer right.’

  ‘No, Moody, she didn’t take any money from me. She asked to see me because she kept dreaming of you.’

  Mahmood tries to smile and lighten her spirit. ‘She just a dirty old woman, keeping herself warm at night thinking of young men she see in the paper, take no notice of her blabber.’

  ‘You told me your mam could read the future in coffee beans.’

  ‘She say so … but what do I know of it?’

  ‘The Maltese woman was crying, she was really crying, and she just kept saying “your poor babies, they lose their papa”.’

  ‘Evil woman,’ Mahmood pulls his hand back from the glass, ‘who she to call the end of my life? God curse her and the devils she listens to at night.’

  ‘I don’t mean to upset you, Moody, I just can’t shake her words. She looked like someone who would know things. I don’t know if it was her eyes or her gloomy, cobwebby home or what, she just did somehow, I can’t explain it, but I went from having hope to just feeling like I have a big hole inside of me.’

  ‘I am here, Laura, I am still living and breathing and fighting for my life. You have to keep beside me and not fall back. Even your mother is helping with the appeal, after she call me “that man” in court.’

  Laura’s eyes flash. ‘My mother, my mother …’

  David taps on the glass. ‘Daddy, it’s been ages, why won’t you just come home? Stop being silly.’

  ‘I’m coming home, son, I have to finish my work here, then I come home and sleep beside you. Right, Laura?’

  Laura’s eyes well again and she looks away from him, stroking Mervyn’s cheek. She leaves the question hanging in the air between them.

  ‘I’m afraid I come back with disheartening news, Mr Mattan.’

  Mahmood clutches the thin sides of the table, pushing his flesh into its sharp edges. ‘They refuse me?’

  ‘Yes, they have.’ The solicitor watches Mahmood’s face closely, studying his reaction.

  Mahmood feels a contraction of anger so pure that he has to wince at its intensity, heat spreading like acid along his skin and his stomach turning. He can’t deal with what he is hearing. ‘But you say they are serious judges? The best in the country.’

  ‘They have their reasons for coming to their decision but …’

  ‘Reasons? I come to a country full of evil people, stupid people, hateful people, that reason enough, I understand.’

  ‘It’s no easy thing for the Court of Criminal Appeal to overturn the decisions of the lower courts, there must be overwhelming evidence, and in your case … they didn’t find cause.’

  Should I just throw this table at him? Mahmood thinks. Should I finish him and then give them real cause to take my life? But then he releases his hold on the table in fright, realizing how easy it would be to do that, how his muscles and sinews are primed like a bundle of dynamite sticks. He struggles to contain his breathing, to slow the ragged pants that come too fast.

  ‘We have one last legal avenue and that is to write to the Home Secretary and ask for a royal pardon.’

  Mahmood closes his eyes, he doesn’t care how strange it looks; he just needs blankness, blackness to envelop him.

  ‘Mr Mattan, are you listening?’

  ‘How long? How long have I got?’ His eyes are still shut.

  The solicitor sighs, a long tired sigh. ‘They have rescheduled the execution for the third of September.’

  Why does that date sound important? Mahmood wonders, rubbing the heels of his palms into his eye sockets, but he can’t remember the answer.

  ‘I will write to the Home Secretary immediately.’

  ‘You said royal, is it royal or government?’

  ‘In this matter it’s a royal prerogative, or right, exercised by the Home Secretary.’

  ‘Just call her, your Queen, and tell her to look at me, look at my wife,’ spittle flies from his lips as he speaks, ‘look at my sons, look at the evidence and ask her if I’m fit for hanging? I give up with your judges and politicians, there is no human heart between them.’ Mahmood meets the solicitor’s gaze, his anger dissipating to leave just a dark chasm behind his eyes.

  The solicitor looks defeated, as if he is playing to the end of a cricket game that he knows he has no chance of winning, with the rain starting to pour and too few spectators to encourage him on. ‘There are sometimes petitions …’ he begins, but looks at Mahmood with his wild hair and sullen, persecuted face and realizes that he is not the type that petitions are established for. ‘I bid you goodbye, Mr Mattan, we can only hope that the Home Secretary exercises mercy.’

  ‘Goodbye, solicitor, if you try your best, God praise you for it,’ Mahmood says, putting his hand out.

  The solicitor stands frozen.

  ‘Just take it, it might be the last time I see you and I need to start acting right.’

  Mahmood squeezes the solicitor’s colourless, lotioned hand hard. ‘If you try your best, may God bless you,’ he repeats, trying not to emphasize the ‘if’.

  ‘The very best of luck, Mr Mattan.’ He nods.

  ‘Everything always come back to luck,’ Mahmood says, standing, preparing to return to the claustrophobia of the cell.

  It comes to him later in the afternoon, when he is sitting on his bed, a child’s jigsaw splayed over the sheet. The third of September. Mahmood begins to laugh, a bitter, unbelieving laugh blooming from deep within his chest.

  Perkins and Wilkinson look to each other in amusement.

  ‘What you cackling over?’ Wilkinson asks, his lips twitching.

  Mahmood can’t answer, he leans back, holding his chest, laughing and laughing.

  ‘Don’t do that, you’ll get me started too,’ Wilkinson chuckles.

  ‘Don’t keep a joke that good to yourself,’ Perkins teases.

  Mahmood slaps his thigh. ‘You never believe!’

  Perkins and Wilkinson laugh along as Mahmood wipes his eyes.

  ‘You never believe!’

  ‘What?’ cries Wilkinson.

  ‘They want to … to hang me … on my eldest boy’s birthday.’

  Mahmood paces the room, it’s making the new pair of guards tense, but they don’t try to stop him. He glances up at them; a man with a scorched pink face that seems to glow in the fading light and a muscled, handsome fella with a Scottish accent.

  ‘Take a seat beside them, Queen,’ he mutters in Somali. ‘You ever been inside one of your cells? Oh, they love to keep saying Your Majesty’s Prison, like it all belongs to you. Like you bought these sheets and those chairs and handpicked all of us that are kept here at your pleasure. What kind of woman gets pleasure from keeping her men cooped up like chickens or goats? The Queen of the English, malikat al’iinjilizia to the Arabs, angrejee kee raanee to Indians. The little woman in black in the newspapers. I see you now. I see your power, you satisfied? Araweelo the castrator, the indomitable. Somalis were right to overthrow our own evil queen. You have me at your knees. You see that?’ He nods to the small barred window. ‘I could get up on that table and jump and punch my fist through the grille and tear my veins on that glass, I could do that so quickly your guards couldn’t do anything to stop me. I still have some power, you understand? I know you but you don’t know me. I see you in the papers, in the newsreels, I can recognize your voice on the wireless but you don’t know nothing ’bout me. You drink your tea and mourn your father with no knowledge of Mahmood Hussein Mattan, the Reer Gedid man of the Sacad Musa clan of British Somaliland, your Somaliland. You
count your ancestors for how many generations? I count mine for sixteen, that good enough for you? I am a descendant of the Prophet Muhammed through Sheikh Isaaq, that good enough? You mourn long enough for your father but you will never mourn for me, I know that. You live your life and I live mine, there is nothing to bring us together. You rich, I’m poor, you white, I’m black, you Christian, I’m Muslim, you English, I’m Somali, you’re loved, I’m despised. Fate is wrong to tie us up together when we have no more in common than a … than a …’

  ‘Why don’t you sit down now and rest your legs and our eyes, you’ve nearly worn a hole in that floor,’ asks the Scottish warder, keeping his tone jovial.

  Mahmood looks straight through him and continues pacing.

  After standing out in the yard for his allotted time, hands in pockets, half-smoked cigarette behind his ear, Mahmood turns to see the doctor waiting for him by the door.

  ‘Take your time,’ the doctor says cheerily, as if Mahmood looks busy.

  ‘How long have I got left of my yard time?’

  He checks his watch. ‘About five minutes, I’d say. Is it spitting rain again?’

  Mahmood holds his palm out. ‘Nothing serious.’

  ‘Our notorious Welsh summers, I’m afraid, more benefit to gardeners than anyone else.’

  The clouds above are dark and marbled, each one self-contained with flashes of blue sky between. It’s the kind of weather people in Hargeisa sit out in, when the rain flattens the dust and cools the air.

  ‘I like it,’ he replies, not closing the twenty-foot gap between them. He fiddles with the end of the cigarette, imagining what his mother might be doing right now: three hours ahead there, the ’asr call to prayer will be bounding from the mosques to the east and west of their sun-bathed bungalow, his mother not getting up from her kitchen stool to pray but just whispering long prayers under her breath as she washes her home-grown tomatoes or grinds spices from Harar between her wooden pestle and mortar. Hooyo macaan, sweet mother, if only you knew the peril I’m in, you would put down your bowls and knives and reach for the prayer mat.

  The breeze picks up and splatters his forehead with rain; at home his mother would do that too, sprinkle him with water that she had blessed when he had a fever, using her full voice to scare away any malign spirits. Home. For the first time he hankers deeply for home, the embrace and complicated scent of his mother and the feel of her firm fingers as she grips his head tight to place her dry, feathery kisses on his cheeks. It’s been so long, he can’t even count the years since he last saw home – ten years, certainly.