The Penguin Book of the British Short Story

by Philip Hensher

  In Willesden, we are almost all New People, though some of us, like Fatou, were, until quite recently, Old People, working the land in our various countries of origin. Of the Old and New People of Willesden I speak; I have been chosen to speak for them, though they did not choose me and must wonder what gives me the right. I could say, ‘Because I was born at the crossroads of Willesden, Kilburn and Queen’s Park!’ But the reply would be swift and damning: ‘Oh, don’t be foolish, many people were born right there; it doesn’t mean anything at all. We are not one people and no one can speak for us. It’s all a lot of nonsense. We see you standing on the balcony, overlooking the Embassy of Cambodia, in your dressing gown, staring into the chestnut trees, looking gormless. The real reason you speak in this way is because you can’t think of anything better to do.’

  0—14

  On Monday, Fatou went swimming. She paused to watch the badminton. She thought that the arm that delivered the smashes must make a movement similar to the one she made in the pool, with her clumsy yet effective front crawl. She entered the health centre and gave a guest pass to the girl behind the desk. In the dimly lit changing room, she put on her sturdy black underwear. As she swam, she thought of Carib Beach. Her father serving snapper to the guests on the deck, his bow tie always a little askew, the ugly tourists, the whole scene there. Of course, it was not surprising in the least to see old white men from Germany with beautiful local girls on their laps, but she would never forget the two old white women from England – red women, really, thanks to the sun – each of them as big as two women put together, with Kweku and Osai lying by their sides, the boys hooking their scrawny black bird-arms round the women’s massive red shoulders, and dancing with them in the hotel ‘ballroom’, answering to the names Michael and David, and disappearing into the women’s cabins at night. She had known the boys’ real girlfriends; they were chambermaids like Fatou. Sometimes they cleaned the rooms where Kweku and Osai spent the night with the English women. And the girls themselves had ‘boyfriends’ among the guests. It was not a holy place, that hotel. And the pool was shaped like a kidney bean: nobody could really swim in it, or showed any sign of wanting to. Mostly, they stood in it and drank cocktails. Sometimes they even had their burgers delivered to the pool. Fatou hated to watch her father crouching to hand a burger to a man waist-high in water.

  The only good thing that happened in Carib Beach was this: once a month, on a Sunday, the congregation of a local church poured out of a coach at the front gates, lined up fully dressed in the courtyard and then walked into the pool for a mass baptism. The tourists were never warned, and Fatou never understood why the congregants were allowed to do it. But she loved to watch their white shirts bloat and spread across the surface of the water, and to hear the weeping and singing. At the time – though she was not then a member of that church, or of any church except the one in her heart – she had felt that this baptism was for her, too, and that it kept her safe, and that this was somehow the reason she did not become one of the ‘girls’ at the Carib Beach Resort. In almost two years – between her father’s efforts and the grace of an unseen and unacknowledged God – she did her work, and swam Sunday mornings at the crack of dawn, and got along all right. But the Devil was waiting.

  She had only a month left in Accra when she entered a bedroom to clean it one morning and heard the door shut softly behind her before she could put a hand to it. He came, this time, in Russian form. Afterwards, he cried and begged her not to tell anyone: his wife had gone to see the Cape Coast Castle and they were leaving the following morning. Fatou listened to his blubbering and realized that he thought the hotel would punish him for his action, or that the police would be called. That was when she knew that the Devil was stupid as well as evil. She spat in his face and left. Thinking about the Devil now made her swimming fast and angry, and for a while she easily lapped the young white man in the lane next to hers, the faster lane.

  0—15

  ‘Don’t give the Devil your anger, it is his food,’ Andrew said to her, when they first met, a year ago. He handed her a leaflet as she sat eating a sandwich on a bench in Kilburn Park. ‘Don’t make it so easy for him.’ Without being invited, he took the seat next to hers and began going through the text of his leaflet. It was printed to look like a newspaper, and he started with the headline: ‘WHY IS THERE PAIN?’ She liked him. They began a theological conversation. It continued in the Tunisian café, and every Sunday for several months. A lot of the things he said she had heard before from other people, and they did not succeed in changing her attitude. In the end, it was one thing that he said to her that really made the difference. It was after she’d told him this story:

  ‘One day, at the hotel, I heard a commotion on the beach. It was early morning. I went out and I saw nine children washed up dead on the beach. Ten or eleven years old, boys and girls. They had gone into the water, but they didn’t know how to swim. Some people were crying, maybe two people. Everyone else just shook their heads and carried on walking to where they were going. After a long time, the police came. The bodies were taken away. People said, “Well, they are with God now.” Everybody carried on like before. I went back to work. The next year I was in Rome. I saw a boy who was about fifteen years old knocked down on his bike. He was dead. People were screaming and crying in the street. Everybody crying. They were not his family. They were only strangers. The next day, it was in the paper.’

  And Andrew replied, ‘A tap runs fast the first time you switch it on.’

  0—16

  Twenty more laps. Fatou tried to think of the last time she had cried. It was in Rome, but it wasn’t for the boy on the bike. She was cleaning toilets in a Catholic girls’ school. She did not know Jesus then, so it made no difference what kind of school it was – she only knew she was cleaning toilets. At midday, she had a fifteen-minute break. She would go to the little walled garden across the road to smoke a cigarette. One day, she was sitting on a bench near a fountain and spotted something odd in the bushes. A tin of green paint. A gold spray can. A Statue of Liberty costume. An identity card with the name Rajib Devanga. One shoe. An empty wallet. A plastic tub with a slit cut in the top meant for coins and euro notes – empty. A little stain of what looked like blood on this tub. Until that point, she had been envious of the Bengali boys on Via Nazionale. She felt that she, too, could paint herself green and stand still for an hour. But when she tried to find out more the Bengalis would not talk to her. It was a closed shop, for brown men only. Her place was in the toilet stalls. She thought those men had it easy. Then she saw that little sad pile of belongings in the bush and cried; for herself or for Rajib, she wasn’t sure.

  Now she turned on to her back in the water for the final two laps, relaxed her arms and kicked her feet out like a frog. Water made her think of more water. ‘When you’re baptized in our church, all sin is wiped, you start again’: Andrew’s promise. She had never told Andrew of the sin precisely, but she knew that he knew she was not a virgin. The day she finally became a Catholic, 6 February 2011, Andrew had taken her, hair still wet, to the Tunisian café and asked her how it felt.

  She was joyful! She said, ‘I feel like a new person!’

  But happiness like that is hard to hold on to. Back at work the next day, picking Julie’s dirty underwear up off the floor inches from the wicker basket, she had to keep reminding herself of her new relationship with Jesus and how it changed everything. Didn’t it change everything? The following Sunday she expressed some of her doubt, cautiously, to Andrew.

  ‘But did you think you’d never feel sad again? Never angry or tired or just pissed off – sorry about my language. Come on, Fatou! Wise up, man!’

  Was it wrong to hope to be happy?

  0—17

  Lost to these watery thoughts, Fatou got home a little later than usual and was through the door only minutes before Mrs Derawal.

  ‘How is Asma?’ Fatou asked. She had heard the girl cry out in the night.

  ‘M
y goodness, it was just a little marble,’ Mrs Derawal said, and Fatou realized that it was not in her imagination: since Sunday night, neither of the adult Derawals had been able to look her in the eye. ‘What a fuss everybody is making. I have a list for you – it’s on the table.’

  0—18

  Fatou watched Andrew pick his way through the tables in the Tunisian café, holding a tray with a pair of mochas on it and some croissants. He hit the elbow of one man with his backside and then trailed the belt of his long, silly leather coat through the lunch of another, apologizing as he went. You could not say he was an elegant man. But he was generous, he was thoughtful. She stood up to push a teetering croissant back on to its plate. They sat down at the same time, and smiled at each other.

  ‘A while ago you asked me about Cambodia,’ Andrew said. ‘Well, it’s a very interesting case.’ He tapped the frame of his glasses. ‘If you even wore a pair of these? They would kill you. Glasses meant you thought too much. They had very primitive ideas. They were enemies of logic and progress. They wanted everybody to go back to the country and live like simple people.’

  ‘But sometimes it’s true that things are simpler in the country.’

  ‘In some ways. I don’t really know. I’ve never lived in the country.’

  I don’t really know. It was good to hear him say that! It was a good sign. She smiled cheekily at him. ‘People are less sinful in the country,’ she said, but he did not seem to see she was flirting with him, and began upon another lecture.

  ‘That’s true. But you can’t force people to live in the country. That’s what I call a Big Man Policy. I invented this phrase for my dissertation. We know all about Big Man Policies in Nigeria. They come from the top and they crush you. There’s always somebody who wants to be the Big Man, and take everything for themselves, and tell everybody how to think and what to do. When, actually, it’s he who is weak. But if the Big Men see that you see that they are weak they have no choice but to destroy you. That is the real tragedy.’

  Fatou sighed. ‘I never met a man who didn’t want to tell everybody how to think and what to do,’ she said.

  Andrew laughed. ‘Fatou, you include me? Are you a feminist now, too?’

  Fatou brought her mug up to her lips and looked penetratingly at Andrew. There were good and bad kinds of weakness in men, and she had come to the conclusion that the key was to know which kind you were dealing with.

  ‘Andrew,’ she said, putting her hand on his, ‘would you like to come swimming with me?’

  0—19

  Because Fatou believed that the Derawals’ neighbours had been instructed to spy on her, she would not let Andrew come to the house to pick her up on Monday, instead leaving as she always did, just before ten, carrying misleading Sainsbury’s bags and walking towards the health centre. She spotted him from a long way off – the road was so straight and he had arrived early. He stood shivering in the drizzle. She felt sorry, but also a little prideful: it was the prospect of seeing her body that had raised this big man from his bed. Still, it was a sacrifice, she knew, for her friend to come out to meet her on a weekday morning. He worked all night long and kept the daytime for sleeping. She watched him waving at her from their agreed meeting spot, just on the corner, in front of the Embassy of Cambodia. After a while, he stopped waving – because she was still so far away – and then, a little later, he began waving again. She waved back, and when she finally reached him they surprised each other by holding hands. ‘I’m an excellent badminton player,’ Andrew said, as they passed the Embassy of Cambodia. ‘I would make you weep for mercy! Next time, instead of swimming we should play badminton somewhere.’ Next time, we should go to Paris. Next time, we should go to the moon. He was a dreamer. But there are worse things, Fatou thought, than being a dreamer.

  0—20

  ‘So you’re a guest and this is your guest?’ the girl behind the desk asked.

  ‘I am a guest and this is another guest,’ Fatou replied.

  ‘Yeah … that’s not really how it works?’

  ‘Please,’ Fatou said. ‘We’ve come from a long way.’

  ‘I appreciate that,’ the girl said. ‘But I really shouldn’t let you in, to be honest.’

  ‘Please,’ Fatou said again. She could think of no other argument.

  The girl took out a pen and made a mark on Fatou’s guest pass.

  ‘This one time. Don’t tell no one I did this, please. One time only! I’ll need to cross off two separate visits.’

  For one time only, then, Andrew and Fatou approached the changing rooms together and parted at the doors that led to the men’s and the women’s. In her changing room, Fatou got ready with lightning speed. Yet somehow he was already there on a lounger when she came out, eyes trained on the women’s changing-room door, waiting for her to emerge.

  ‘Man, this is the life!’ he said, putting his arms behind his head.

  ‘Are you getting in?’ Fatou asked, and tried to place her hands, casually, in front of her groin.

  ‘Not yet, man, I’m just taking it all in, taking it all in. You go in. I’ll come in a moment.’

  Fatou climbed down the steps and began to swim. Not elegant, not especially fast, but consistent and determined. Every now and then she would angle her head to try to see if Andrew was still on his chair, smiling to himself. After twenty laps, she swam to where he lay and put her elbows on the tiles.

  ‘You’re not coming in? It’s so warm. Like a bath.’

  ‘Sure, sure,’ he said. ‘I’ll try it.’

  As he sat up his stomach folded in on itself and Fatou wondered whether he had spent all that time on the lounger to avoid her seeing its precise bulk and wobble. He came towards the stairs; Fatou held out a hand to him, but he pushed it away. He made his way down and stood in the shallow end, splashing water over his shoulders like a prince fanning himself, and then crouching down into it.

  ‘It is warm! Very nice. This is the life, man! You go, swim – I’ll follow you.’

  Fatou kicked off, creating so much splash she heard someone in the adjacent lane complain. At the wall, she turned and looked for Andrew. His method, such as it was, involved dipping deep under the water and hanging there like a hippo, then batting his arms till he crested for air, and then diving down again and hanging. It was a lot of energy to expend on a short distance, and by the time he reached the wall he was panting like a maniac. His eyes – he had no goggles – were painfully red.

  ‘It’s OK,’ Fatou said, trying to take his hand again. ‘If you let me, I’ll show you how.’ But he shrugged her off and rubbed at his eyes.

  ‘There’s too much bloody chlorine in this pool.’

  ‘You want to leave?’

  Andrew turned back to look at Fatou. His eyes were streaming. He looked, to Fatou, like a little boy trying to disguise the fact he had been crying. But then he held her hand, under the water.

  ‘No. I’m just going to take it easy right here.’

  ‘OK,’ Fatou said.

  ‘You swim. You’re good. You swim.’

  ‘OK,’ Fatou said, and set off, and she found that each lap was more distracted and rhythmless than the last. She was not used to being watched while she swam. Ten laps later, she suddenly stood up halfway down the lane and walked the rest of the distance to the wall.

  ‘You want to go in the Jacuzzi?’ she asked him, pointing to it.

  In the hot tub sat a woman dressed in a soaking tracksuit, her head covered with a headscarf. A man next to the woman, perhaps her husband, stared at Fatou and said something to the woman. He was so hairy he was almost as covered as she was. Together they rose up out of the water and left. He was wearing the tiniest of Speedos, the kind Fatou had feared Andrew might wear, and was grateful he had not. Andrew’s shorts were perfectly nice, knee-length, red and solid, and looked good against his skin.

  ‘No,’ Andrew said. ‘It’s great just to be here with you, watching the world go by.’

  0—21

  T
hat same evening, Fatou was fired. Not for the guest passes – the Derawals never found out how many miles Fatou had travelled on their membership. In fact, it was hard for Fatou to understand exactly why she was being fired, as Mrs Derawal herself did not seem able to explain it very precisely.

  ‘What you don’t understand is that we have no need for a nanny,’ she said, standing in the doorway of Fatou’s room – there was not really enough space in there for two people to stand without one of them being practically on the bed. ‘The children are grown. We need a housekeeper, one who cleans properly. These days, you care more about the children than the cleaning,’ Mrs Derawal added, though Fatou had never cared for the children, not even slightly. ‘And that is of no use to us.’

  Fatou said nothing. She was thinking that she did not have a proper suitcase and would have to take her things from Mrs Derawal’s house in plastic bags.

  ‘And so you will want to find somewhere else to live as soon as possible,’ Mrs Derawal said. ‘My husband’s cousin is coming to stay in this room on Friday – this Friday.’

  Fatou thought about that for a moment. Then she said, ‘Can I please use the phone for one call?’

  Mrs Derawal inspected a piece of wood that had flaked from the doorframe. But she nodded.

  ‘And I would like to have my passport, please.’

  ‘Excuse me?’

  ‘My passport, please.’

  At last Mrs Derawal looked at Fatou, right into her eyes, but her face was twisted, as if Fatou had just reached over and slapped her. Anyone could see the Devil had climbed inside poor Mrs Derawal. He was lighting her up with a pure fury.