‘But they are not materialistic and demanding like our girls.’
‘Yeah right,’ his brother said and he laughed.
‘Wait until they kill you for the insurance money and then you’ll know who is more materialistic.’
Tochi listened to these conversations nervously. They made him a bit uncomfortable because there was something he had been meaning to ask his brother. For days he could not find the courage. It was not until his brother was packing his bags for the return journey that Tochi eventually found the courage to ask if he could join him abroad in London.
‘To stay here and go to school is what I believe is best for you,’ his brother said.
‘But I have already gone to school.’
‘Go to school some more. Get a master’s degree or even a doctorate. I’ll sponsor you.’
‘But there are no jobs here.’
‘And you think there are jobs in London?’
‘It must be better than here.’
His brother laughed. It was not his usual deep-throated laughter. This laugh was totally lacking in humour.
‘Let me tell you something. If you cannot swim the Lagos lagoon there is no way you can swim the river Thames. I see all my friends here; they work in banks, they own their own companies. They wear suits, they have drivers, maids, houseboys. They come back from work; they go to the club to drink beer and eat suya. They are happy. Such opportunities rarely exist for us outside of here.’
‘But look at you, you are successful.’
Once again, the dry laughter. He shook his head.
‘You do not understand.’
‘Make me understand.’
‘Here’s the difference – no job is considered too low over there.’
‘You know I am a hard worker.’
‘Seven, eight years ago before I left I was like you. Let me just say this. I will not stop you. If you step into the city of London at any time my door is open.’
Getting the visa was not difficult. Through a contact his name was included on the list of healthcare workers attending a mental health conference at the university of London. He became a psychiatrist at the university teaching hospital. He had his letter of invitation and was prepared for the interview. The young interviewer asked him a couple of routine questions and just when he thought it was over she paused.
‘Tell me, why have you never attended any international conferences before now?’
‘I have never been invited before now.’
‘Really?’
‘Yes, and I only go where I am invited.’
His response made her smile. She told him to return in a couple of days for his visa.
Three months later Tochi arrived London. After he had cleared immigration, he walked casually to a Thomas Cook to change the twenty-pound note in his pocket so he could buy a train ticket. He did not want to join the long lines at the ticket windows. He was coming from a place where long lines or lines in general were a dreaded thing. He handed the note to the clerk. The clerk held it up to the light. Brought it down. Held it up again and seemed to sniff it.
‘This is your money innit?’
‘Yes it is.’
‘And whereabouts did you get it from?’
‘I bought at a Bureau de Change in my country, at the airport.’
‘No worries. Please step forward towards me,’ she said politely.
He stepped forward. She made a call. In the next minute a man in a dark uniform appeared by his side.
‘Come with me, please,’ the officer said.
He began to sweat beneath his heavy wool coat.
‘This is a counterfeit pound note,’ the officer said to him in the airport police station. ‘I am going to keep it and it will be destroyed at a future date. You may go.’
He had shown them the receipt from the Bureau de Change from which he had purchased the currency, he sensed that was what had saved him. He was exhausted but buoyed up by the fact that he would soon be seeing his brother. He soon arrived at his brother’s council flat in Peckham.
But the brother he was seeing in London was the opposite of the brother who visited home. This one slept through the day and left for work dressed in a well-made suit at night.
Who wore a dapper suit to work at night? Tochi wondered what type of job his brother did.
His brother encouraged him to familiarise himself with the city.
‘Get to know London. Some people live here for thirty years and don’t even know where Soho is. Tourists visit here for two days and they go to Soho every day. Get to know your way around.’
He bought him an expensive ticket with which he could ride the bus or tube. He rode the double-decker. There he listened to fellow Nigerians as they conversed with themselves in their native dialects like they were on a Lagos Molue bus.
He loved the names of the bus stops. They were like mini-stories in and of themselves; Elephant and Castle, Bird in Bush, Bricklayers Arms.
He got an occasional casual cleaning gig with a Ghanaian. The Ghanaian taught him the tricks of the trade.
‘Clean a little bit. Make the work last. You are paid hourly. If you want to sleep, turn on the vacuum cleaner on high, leave it running and go sit on the toilet seat and sleep. When your supervisor is coming he will hear the sound of the vacuum cleaner and think you are busy and turn back.’
He kept what he earned. His brother bought all the foodstuff they needed. There were so many Nigerians living in Peckham that one could live in Peckham as if one lived in Lagos. You could conduct all your business using a local Nigerian language.
Then one day his brother bought him a nice navy blue suit and a powder blue TM Lewin shirt and a dark pair of brogues and told him to shave, take a bath, use an aftershave and cologne and get ready to go to work with him.
They drove over the bridge that separated Peckham from the city, went past the football stadium, and into the city centre. Just after Trafalgar square his brother brought the car to a stop in front of a Gentlemen’s Club. Tochi began walking towards the entrance his brother stopped him.
‘Where do you think you are going?’
‘I thought we were going inside.’
‘To do what?’
‘To watch the dancing girls.’
‘Don’t be silly. You are here to watch me, not the girls.’
He sat back in the car and began to watch his brother. As soon as the club began to empty out he approached a man who looked a little drunk and friendly.
‘Do you want company mate?’
The man gave his brother a strange look.
‘What kind of company?’
‘Girls, any kind of girls you want – white, black, blonde, redheads. I have them all.’
‘Where?’
‘In my place not too far from here. Get in the car. I’ll take you there.’
The man got in the car a little nervously. He sat in front while his brother drove.
His brother tried to reassure the man that he was safe.
‘You’ll be safe and comfortable where I’m taking you to. If for any reason you feel uncomfortable just let me know and I’ll drop you off at your hotel or wherever.’
‘Is this some kind of brothel?’ the man asked.
‘Not a brothel, mate. We’ll soon be there. Nice cosy place with friendly girls. You can relax. If you don’t like it I’ll take you back for free, like I mentioned earlier.’
Then his brother was on the cellphone.
‘Yes, a friend and my younger brother I had earlier mentioned to you.’
They parked on a side street. The buildings looked like office buildings. His brother rang the bell. A girl let them in. At first he thought she was a black girl. Later he would see that she was just darkly tanned. She was Eastern European but liked black guys and was trying hard to make her skin darker.
In the large sitting room of the flat were lots of girls. Some were dressed in lingerie. A few wore swimsuits. Some sat in the large kitchen drinking coffee and
smoking.
The girl who answered the door was attending to the man they had brought in. She was rubbing his shoulders and asking him to feel at home, look around and pick any of the girls hanging around to be with. Another guy, apparently the owner of the place, was typing on a laptop as an Indian guy read numbers off a credit card to him.
The man they came in with was guzzling a cold can of Heineken’s beer. A girl was sitting on his lap. She was touching his face and telling him in accented English to make himself at home that she was not about to eat him up unless he wanted to be eaten. The man laughed. The girl laughed. Soon the man gave some money to the girl who handed the money over to the dark-tanned girl. The girl who was earlier sitting on the man’s lap took the man’s hand and led him into a bedroom. They shut the door. His brother tapped him on the shoulder.
‘Time to go,’ his brother said.
They drove to another Gentleman’s Club. Again his brother waited. Again the patrons streamed out and he homed in on one. They chatted. He got the man into the car and drove him to the flat.
By the time his brother brought in his last customer it was almost 4am.
The guy on the computer was still feeding in numbers with the Indian guy standing beside him.
‘These are no good. Bring new ones tomorrow,’ he said to the Indian.
The dark-tanned girl came into the kitchen where they were sitting and handed his brother some pound notes. His brother took it and pocketed it immediately.
‘Aren’t you even gonna count the cash?’ the tanned girl asked.
His brother smiled.
‘No need to count, I know you are not gonna cheat me, Eva.’
‘I don’t cheat. It is you Africans that like to cheat. Like my ex, your good buddy Ade. Never satisfied with one woman.’
His brother only smiled. He made Tochi a cup of coffee and made one for himself. ‘Now, you have seen everything. This is my job. This will soon be your job. You will study me. This is your school. You must never pick some nationalities. Slightly tipsy men are good but not totally drunk men. You must be careful so you don’t pick an undercover cop. Usually, the men are mostly tourists who have been at the strip club. They are aroused. They want to be with women. We bring them here to the girls. They have a good time with the girls. They pay good money. We get a cut. Nothing complicated about it. Leave the girls alone. I know it is tempting but keep it strictly business.’
At night the next day, Tochi wore his suit and began to get ready to head out to the gentlemen’s clubs. He looked out into the London night. Back home the night descended suddenly without warning and covered everywhere with impenetrable inkiness. Here the night was grey – gauzy, even – but like the night at home it still hid much.
THE RAPE ESSAY (OR MUTILATED PAGES)
Suzanne Scanlon
‘Well yes of course I’d read it, but you know it’s hard –’
‘You dated him anyway!’
‘I mean how could I –’
‘There’s a blog about that –’
‘Something so cartoonish could not have been real, you know?’
‘A Twitter maybe, something.’
‘Or very real.’
‘Surreal. That way. That he was just what – I mean, worse – than the men he wrote about.’
‘The one who sleeps with the Hippie Chick?’
‘Or the two guys having that sick conversation –’
‘Today’s modern woman blah blah –’
‘Something about the way it was like how – women, ha! – were totally hosed, you know, by wanting to be independent and also wanting to be totally overcome and undone and ravished in love, by a man. Like blissed out and destroyed, obliterated.’
‘Yeah.’
‘Well that was actually smart. I mean that’s why he gave me it that day, before we –’
‘Very.’
‘Do you think –’
‘It’s like this book I’m reading where this –’
‘But regardless, it is condescending for a man to come to such a conclusion – like, he’s trying to undo through intellectual analysis the very women he’s seducing.’
‘Where she talks about um how you can’t desire what you have – how it’s like hide and seek and you can’t seek what isn’t hidden –’
‘The most cynical –’
‘But I mean maybe there’s something to it. Also.’
‘But smart. Yeah. I know.’
‘I know you know. I’m just saying. I’m just saying.’
‘Yeah.’
Maybe the story begins here: Harold just beyond the doorframe; you see him, don’t you? He holds a sweatshirt: grey and torn, with the insignia of a Jesuit boy’s school in the Bronx: XAVIER. Esther’s sweatshirt, a gift from a boy she’d met in asylum. That’s what Harold liked: that it belonged to a boy, a boy from asylum, another boy, and that the boy must have liked Esther very much, to give it to her. And now, he, Harold, is the one who got it, and got her, too.
Not that the boy in asylum ever got Esther, of course. But maybe that was better, leaving it there, in the realm of desire. Or not even desire.
Back to the moment, the beginning: here’s Harold, in the doorway, wearing tennis shorts. His elegant legs, which taper at the knee.
‘This is what makes legs sexy,’ a girlfriend once advised Esther. They were in high school.
‘Without that taper, you have fat legs.’
Esther considered her own legs.
‘My mom said these were the legs of an obese person.’
‘You can’t have everything,’ the friend consoled.
Or was it later, the beginning, or maybe this was the end, that day in class, when Harold held up his copy of the essay, to make his point. With his left hand, gesturing to the page, saying,
‘This was originally published alongside a very unattractive photo of the author.’
The beginning might be later, too, like the time Harold took a pair of sweatpants that had been given to her by a boyfriend she’d had when they met.
‘I fed them to my dogs,’ he told her, of the sweatpants, and it seemed to be a joke, hyperbolic.
Still, Esther loved it, the way Harold wished to possess her, this violence of competition. She’d never been loved that way before, violently, madly; and even though, later, she decided it was not love, she’d never, anyway, had love performed that way before this, which was what mattered sometimes, above all, or in the moment of it: the performance of love.
If Esther were asked now to describe Harold – in one line, retrospectively – she would say: Harold wore shorts. Or: Harold was aware of the beauty of his legs.
‘To be concerned with fame is much like a preoccupation with sexual appeal: one day it pleases you, soon enough, it destroys you.’
‘…’
‘You become consumed with trying to keep it. Like everything else, it becomes something to lose. The prospect of losing it terrifies you.’
‘…’
‘So what you have to do is not get attached to anything; it’s all here to be lost, just as we are.’
If you worship money and things, if they are where you tap real meaning in life, then you will never have enough, never feel you have enough. It’s the truth. Worship your body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly. And when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally grieve you.
Esther holds back the curtain covering the small window at the top of the door. Harold is no longer in shadow; he is complete, in colour, lips pursed and head bowed.
‘Did you get my email?’ Harold asks.
‘I don’t want it.’
‘…’
‘My dad would be mad if I lost –’
‘It’s not really me, mine, I don’t care.’
‘It’s important to him.’
So a boy named Brian, incidental here but maybe not? had given Esther the Xavier sweatshirt years earlier, just after he was admitted to the adolescent
program. This was late in Esther’s stay. Suddenly, there were so many kids on the ward; it changed everything. Brian carried a bible, wrote notes he’d sign with bible verses. St Francis Xavier School in the Bronx, on Haight Street.
Esther didn’t want to be a mental patient anymore, not this way – not in front of so many children. Little eyes on her: it forced her to grow up. Eyes that did not gaze, but needed. Be not afraid. 1 Peter 3:4 Something had to make her want to leave that place, why not the transformation of long-term asylum into short-term high school respite? Babies are famous to themselves, Harold said. She’d sung the biblical line as a child. The idea of it: Jesus, a Savior, holding you. Nothing to fear. This was how the gaze worked. She became supplicant. She wanted to believe. This, too, was why she loved Harold; he also wanted to believe. He didn’t believe, but he wanted to.
If Brian believed, why was he in a mental hospital?
‘Do the Jesuits look askance?’ she asked one day, thinking of James Joyce.
‘Not at all.’
‘I don’t think fervour sits well.’
‘They only mind when I speak of the visions.’
‘…’
‘When I’m lucky. Occasionally. I have to prepare, to be ready –’
‘What happens?’
‘A bird flying over, around and around in circles; he comes closer and closer and then – right into my heart.’
Brian closed his eyes, put his hand to his chest, a lowered salute.
‘…’
‘Another time, spiders, bleeding, but others – Saint Dymphna, for example.’
‘The patron saint of nervous illness.’
‘She was, in fact, molested,’ Esther told Brian; she’d loved Lives of the Saints as a girl. ‘I mean, that’s the irony, right? She was abused like so many women here on this psych ward but really she’d been raped, desired by her own father, then ran away.’
‘I didn’t know.’
‘He cut her eyes out.’
Esther’s aunt sent a prayer card of Dymphna to the asylum; Esther threw it in the trash immediately.
A Kind of Compass Page 11