Dottie

by Abdulrazak Gurnah

  Later, he caught up with her as she was going to lunch and walked alongside her for a while. ‘Don’t take any notice of this shower, my dear. You wanted to know what happened to the boy didn’t you? I heard you,’ he said and smiled, pleased with himself. ‘Well, he chucked his bike on the ground and ran, didn’t he? You should’ve seen his little nigger legs pumping like pistons. He just legged it out of there for all he was worth, and good luck to him.’

  ‘Did he?’ Dottie asked, grinning. ‘Was he hurt badly?’

  ‘I wouldn’t know about that,’ Mike Butler said. ‘He didn’t hang around long enough for me to ask him. Once he realised that the gentlemen chucking stones at him weren’t joking, he just dumped the bike and scarpered. Like a streak of greased black lightning he was.’

  ‘That’s good!’ she said, wanting to clap her hands with glee.

  ‘Just like that, phew!’ Mike Butler said, clapping his hands to demonstrate the suddenness of his departure. ‘Like a bat out of hell. You couldn’t see him for dust!’ Mike Butler said, with an air of someone delivering a definitive account.

  ‘What were you doing in Stepney anyway? You seem to have been everywhere,’ Dottie said, unable to resist the mischief.

  Mike Butler grinned too. ‘My dad used to live in Stepney, before he move out to Norwich. My grandad was a cobbler just by Mile End Road, and every summer we used to stay with my dad’s family for a few weeks. They were all there, his brothers and sisters, and his mum and dad. There were no uncles and aunts yet, because my grandad emigrated from Russia on his own. Well, with just my grandma and their three children. Grandma’s family was scattered God knew where in Siberia and everywhere, but Grandad’s family still lived in a town south of Minsk. They left all his family behind there, you see. They never got out, none of them. By the time I’m talking, of course, they couldn’t have got out even if they wanted to. The Revolution had caught up with them and that was that.

  ‘My grandad used to talk about that time and the things they did to them, and tell us about how we must always stick together. But my dad wouldn’t have none of that, and he left. He was the only one to leave Stepney, and he changed his name to Butler and went to work for a bookbinder. Me and my brothers and sisters were all baptised Christian Englishmen and Englishwomen. When the war came, all his family was killed in the bombing, although Grandad had already gone by then. So that’s what I’m saying, love. Don’t take any notice. You just get on with it, and make the best job of it you can. Some of these people think they are characters in Tarzan or something like that.

  ‘I know what you’re dying to ask me,’ Mike Butler continued, for he was never one to under-work a captive audience when he had one. ‘How come Grandma’s family were scattered all over Siberia or wherever? Well I’ll tell you. They were Jews, weren’t they? In Russia that meant they could be taken from pillar to post and accused of everything, from drinking bat blood to overthrowing the Tsar. They were banished and exiled and all kinds of things, pogroms, special taxes, you name it. On top of all that, Grandma’s family was accused of being unpatriotic and packed off to somewhere. When my Grandad met her, she was the only one of her family that the authorities had overlooked, so he married her. You can’t pass up that kind of luck every day, and he always had a superstitious streak in him.’

  ‘I didn’t know that,’ Dottie said, thinking about the scattered people that Mike Butler was describing. They were standing outside the canteen by this time, and people walking past glanced at them. ‘Why does everyone hate the Jews so much? The killings and the expulsions . . . and all the terrible names they give them.’

  ‘I don’t know, my dear, but I’m glad you’ve asked,’ Mike Butler said, smiling at her and stroking his silvery mane of hair. ‘Perhaps they’re envious of them. The names aren’t nothing, everybody’s got names for everybody else. It’s the chains and the whips and the ovens that stagger you. Jews aren’t the only ones, you know that. Look what we’ve done to other people too, to your lot. This is how we are, all of us, a degraded and degenerate lot, if you don’t mind my saying. The history of man consists mostly of plunder and looting and murder. That’s how human beings have been, whether in China or Rome or America or Timbuktoo, and they’d be the same even if you put them on the sea-bed. Don’t believe all that stuff about glorious victories and great men. Wherever human beings find themselves, no matter how much food or prosperity there is for everyone, they loot the place first and kill what they can. It’s only when the easy pickings have run out that they think about what they’ve done. Or when they’ve killed everybody off or reduced them to beggars and drunks. Then they put what’s left in ghettoes and reservations and bantustans and game parks and what have you. We’re a despicable lot however you look at us.’

  2

  After that she began to be offered over-time. She gladly accepted when she could. The worse everything was becoming at home, the more time she spent at work. After Sophie left, she stayed on almost every day, especially as summer was round again and the days were light until late in the evening. On her journey home, she would work herself into a state, ready to take on anything, determined to begin to do something about her life. The late journeys home frightened her and made it easier to get herself worked up in this way. Although she did not know anyone who had suffered such a fate, the newspapers were full of stories of solitary black people being set upon in the streets, sometimes in broad daylight. She stirred herself up to hide from the terror of being abused or beaten by teddy boys and young thugs. On weekend afternoons she had seen them strutting down the High Road, laughing raucously and jostling people off the pavements. She turned another way whenever she saw them, although this made her feel cowardly. By late afternoon the teddy boys became bored with seedy Balham and went to more interesting pastures in Clapham or Chelsea. The black youths that they had driven off the High Road would then return from the side streets, strolling into shops and leaning against street corners.

  The afternoon crowds were a reassurance. It did not seem likely that anything very bad could happen with so many people around. In the evenings, Dottie felt more exposed. She hurried through the warren of quiet side-streets that took her from the bus stop on the High Road to Segovia Street, keeping her eyes down and focusing on the things she would do when she got in. The room was often empty, but there were usually signs that Hudson had been in: dirty dishes, a hunk pulled out of the loaf of bread, a tin of baked beans that had been opened and consumed cold. He never did anything helpful. Either he stayed out of the way, or he made his presence felt by leaving a disgusting mark of his passage. She cleared up, cooked herself something on the grimy Baby Belling, and ate the food that tasted good despite everything else.

  The room had become her prison, she thought. She could feel it draining the hope and the energy she came home with, leaving her with doubts and feelings of self-contempt. She did what she could: cleaned, read a book. She found recipes in newspapers, impractical exotic-sounding hors d’œuvres or magnificently evocative desserts that she promised herself she would try one day. She had bought herself a small radio with the over-time money, a Pye in maroon plastic casing with a cream-coloured grille. The smug voices that came out of it irritated her, but the music helped to pass the time.

  She found that she was earning enough money to have some left over every week. She hid the money in a jewel box that Brenda had given her for her birthday the previous year. It had a tiny padlock on it, and she thought it was better not to leave the money unsecured. The box reminded her of Brenda. Dottie smiled at the thought of her old friend, and felt pangs of guilt that she did not try harder to see her. She could just imagine Brenda Holly getting annoyed with her, and lecturing her for the way she had allowed events to overwhelm her, but really she was too exhausted to do anything about any of it.

  She kept out of Hudson’s way when she could, and he showed no inclination to seek her out. He was too much for her, she had conceded that. There was nothing she could do to stop or pe
rsuade him from whatever he wanted to do. The landlord had tried to interest himself in Hudson’s affairs too, and had been rebuffed. He had banged on Hudson’s door because he could smell the hashish he was smoking. ‘Hey you, open up! None of that in my house,’ he shouted. When Hudson opened the door, Andy threatened him with eviction if he caught him again. Hudson pulled a knife with one hand while with the other he took hold of the landlord’s trousers-front, squeezing his genitals through the cloth. The landlord yelped with terror and ran down to Dottie as soon as he was released, close to tears and clutching his mortified gonads.

  Sometimes she heard Hudson with his friends upstairs, and heard laughter cutting through the rumble of conversation. He had become pleasant enough with her, but only because she left him alone. She knew it was because of that that he had stopped defying her at every turn, and she felt that she was failing in a responsibility bequeathed to her. She was ashamed to think what Sharon would have said to her if she knew, or what Sharon would have said if she had not herself been such a ruin. At one time, Dottie would have risked her life for the boy and Sophie, but they had not required it of her, and now they no longer wanted anything from her.

  3

  After an absence of several weeks, she thought it was time she went to the library again. She would remake her life, as she had done once before. The idea gave her strength, and new energy. She was eager to take it up before it dissipated itself in her habitual uncertainties. She wanted to read about the riots in Stepney, and about the Jews in Russia, and she wanted to find out about thousands of other things that she had once begun to develop an appetite for. She always glanced at Dr Murray’s chair whenever she went there, not because she expected to see anything extraordinary, but because she thought of him every time she entered the reading hall. Once, the woman who had told her about him intercepted her look and smiled at her.

  On the day she returned to the library, she saw a black man sitting in Dr Murray’s chair reading a magazine. He was turning the pages idly, glancing up frequently as if he was on the look-out for someone. He noticed Dottie browsing through the encyclopaedia shelves and gave her a couple of speculative glances. When she made no response he did not pay any further attention to her. He was a tall, slim man with a very thin moustache. His jacket and tie hung badly on him, as if he was not used to them. He looked like someone from the country, she thought. Right down to his yellow shirt. She wondered if he was new in England, and had turned up for a rendezvous arranged months ago across thousands of miles. If she went near enough she would smell hot earth on him, she thought.

  At last, the man he was waiting for turned up. The new arrival was another black man but seemed much more at ease. He was wearing a checked blazer and an open collar. His brown felt hat was tilted forward at a rakish angle, and his knees wobbled stylishly as he strolled into the library. The man who had been waiting rose to greet his friend, whooping with delight, his face wreathed in smiles. The dude who had just arrived in the library raised a finger in greeting, making as if to touch his hat but not quite doing so. The country cousin, as Dottie took him to be, clapped his hands together without making a noise, and then convulsed with silent laughter to show appreciation of his friend’s city-slicker elegance. They lunged for each other’s hands, grinning in a dumb-show of welcome and waving each other down, concerned to act with restraint and decorum in such a public place. She was smiling too as she watched them go, infected a little by their mutual joy at meeting again.

  Dottie had not got anywhere with the encyclopaedia. She did not know how to look up Riots in Stepney in 1919. Riots told her nothing about Stepney, and Stepney told her about the Tower of London and Petticoat Lane and paragraph after paragraph about Roman remains. She read several other entries that her eye lit on: Prometheus, the Ruhr, Rabindranath Tagore, but could find nothing on the riots in 1919. Saskatchewan, Smuts, Stone Age: after a while she knew that her mind was no longer taking in what she was reading. So she went to fiction and borrowed a copy of King Solomon’s Mines instead, because Mike Butler had mentioned that too and told her to look out for it.

  4

  In the summer months, the work increased several-fold at the factory. Scores of students were taken on for the holidays. It was the busiest time of the year, and Dottie worked herself to her limit, going home exhausted every night. She worked so hard because she found the long evenings unbearably lonely. Hudson disappeared again but she did not think she really cared, just as long as he did not get into terrible trouble. She took armfuls of books out of the library every weekend, and read furiously. Romances and detective thrillers she devoured with growing ease, but she struggled unavailingly with more difficult things. She tried to read David Copperfield again, but could not manage it any more. She could not keep her mind on it, and could not be bothered with the labour of trying.

  Every night she lay alone, listening to the noises of the house. Above her, she could hear the mad Polish woman talking to herself. Her cats roamed the dark house, their eyes glittering with malice. The woman on the same landing as Dottie sometimes shifted furniture late at night. She never spoke and rarely went out of her room once she came in from work.

  In the long, gloomy evenings, Dottie sometimes stood at the window looking down on the garden. It was the middle of August, and the garden was overgrown with bushes and long grass. The brambles had twisted and wriggled their way into every corner. The rank fumes of rampant nettles mingled with the sappy smell of cow-parsley, which despite the brambles grew to enormous sizes. Here and there in the primordial chaos, a little flower appeared. Pale and undersized, it was a feeble descendant of a more pampered and luscious ancestor: a tiny rose that had lost all pretensions, and now displayed itself deferentially, scraggy daisies that had learned to grub around for space and light.

  The huge elm tree at the back of the house no longer put forth any leaves. It was blighted with the beetle and was going to be cut down, but some stubborn, russet leaves still hung on to the bare branches, dried and misshapened, tossing and rattling fruitlessly in the breeze. That was how she was, she thought, dried up and terrified, like something that had already died and now could only contemplate its extinction.

  It was a relief to escape the room, even if only to go to work and suffer the boredom of mindless labour and stupid conversation. One of the new people at the factory was taking an interest in her. Sooner or later, the summer workers paired off with someone, usually another summer worker like themselves, a student, or a flashy young man with an exotic story to tell. Dottie received her share of casual invitations to go out for a drink with them, which she casually declined. She thought of them as people with places to go. Unlike her, they were not staying on at the factory, just doing a job in passing, on the way to somewhere else. To these men she would only be something to pass a few hours with, to torture and dismember for the violent thrill of asserting dominance and inflicting pain. It was not something she had thought out thoroughly, and sometimes she suffered unexpected pangs of guilt and shame for it, as if she was refusing to accept some kind of obligation. But when she pictured herself with men, she saw herself being fearful of their violence.

  There was a dream of a little girl that sometimes came to her. The girl was walking or playing on a large green, strolling in the wistfully self-absorbed manner of little children. At other times she would be skipping and trotting joyfully towards the canal and the line of trees beyond that, the very picture of innocence. Later she was howling with fear while a man whose lips were smeared with slime tried to drag her by her arm. Another little girl was sitting on the grass, crying and holding out her arms. She thought of it as her own nightmare, the fear of abuse that she had lived with, that Sharon had taught her to beware of. The dream was so real at times that she woke up with the conviction that it had really happened, although she knew very well, she thought, that nothing like that had ever happened to her.

  So she did not require much reflection to turn down the invitations from the restless m
en at the factory. She understood enough to know that if she went with one of them she would be entertained with a couple of glasses of vodka and orange, and would then be expected to submit to a fierce grope in a dark stairway or in a dirty hall. If she was unwise enough to agree to enter a room, she might find herself having to submit further than this. Some of the students from less worldly-wise backgrounds, or the young girls who could not resist the cynical flattery of the predatory men, had given a hint of their experiences. The eyes of these men truly roved, moving from one victim to another with egotistical hunger, oblivious of how they seemed to others.

  The man she had seen looking at her, and smiling at her whenever he caught her eye, was not one of these. He walked with his head slightly lowered, as if he was deliberately avoiding people. Even when she caught him with his eyes on her, he smiled quickly and looked away. She liked the attention, but did not think anything would come out of it. She did not really want anything to come out of it, she thought. It was better that she caught his eye now and then and felt a thrill of excitement run through her, and felt a trickle of sweat begin to run from under her armpits. His name was Ken. He told her shyly one day after he had sat down next to her on the bus. He was fair-haired, with bright, cheerful eyes. His small, red lips were pulled back in a smile, but at the corner of them she saw a kind of tightening, as if he was anxious about something. He grew a small beard and moustache, like a Frenchman or a painter, she thought, although she did not know anyone who remotely fitted those descriptions. He was dressed in a shirt and trousers, and seemed very casual and comfortable despite the mildly uneasy smile on his face. He glanced at the book she was reading, then raised surprised brows.