‘I lived in Toxteth as I told you, in a house I shared with other men, all of them Muslim, one of them Jafar Mustafa’s brother Sadiq, most of us hard-working and all of us poor … black men away from their homes. My brother turned out to be a violent and lazy young man. He did not stay long in any job. He just wanted jokes and dole and women and drugs, and in Sadiq he found a perfect partner. They were just the way the English want all of us to be. They roamed the streets and visited women and went to the pub. Then one day they killed a woman. Yes, they killed a prostitute in a violent sexual game of some kind. They hurried home and told me. I gave them all the money I had and they escaped. Neither of them had papers and we would all have got into trouble if they had been arrested. It was a terrible thing to do, helping those two to escape, but there is an obligation … The police came, of course, and asked a lot of questions. We said none of us knew anything. But we found out that the woman did not die after all, and she was a black woman, so the police were not interested for long. That is the story of Toxteth. That is why lawyer Jafar Mustafa Hilal is so obliging.’
‘Do you know what happened to them?’ I asked.
Mr Mgeni shrugged. ‘They’re somewhere in the world doing the same dirty business,’ he said. ‘Perhaps lawyer Jafar knows but I don’t.’
*
In the meantime I fell in love with Mr Mgeni’s daughter Frederica. She was sixteen and perfectly beautiful and I could not help myself. Whenever I went round there to have dinner with the family or to wait for Mr Mgeni before we went to do a job, or when I went to collect my pay – Mr Mgeni preferred to pay me out of sight of the others – I hoped that she would be there too. My sexual innocence was a burden to me in a country where provocation was intense and constant and I felt diminished and inadequate about it. Frederica’s manner told me that she knew more about these matters than I did, despite her parents’ watchfulness. I was sure she knew about my secret adoration and had no interest in it, but still rewarded me with smiles and occasional flattery as if she was the elder of the two of us. It must sound ridiculous, but I was profoundly in love with Frederica for several months and the anguish her lack of interest caused me is impossible to describe. If I knew how to do so I would have written a poem or a song. It was exhilarating in its way. I am sure Mr Mgeni and Marjorie knew what was going on and were amused by it. It couldn’t be helped.
My anguish needed cooperation to sustain its intensity and since Frederica was not willing to provide it, it dissipated and leaked away, but I knew it was something real, something truthful, not something imagined or misconstrued, genuine like the pain I felt when loneliness and homesickness overcame me. Homesickness sounds like a silly adolescent condition to be in, but there were times when it consumed me and paralysed me with sorrow and then I locked myself in my room and wept for hours. That too must sound ridiculous but it was real and unarguable. My misery was so deep it was tragic, but that could not be helped either and after a time I had to open my door and get back out. I was having to learn so much so quickly, and I was so busy with so much work, that I did not have a proper sense of what I knew any more.
The work at college was reassuring, but I suspected my grades were inflated to encourage me. Most of us were students who had failed before and were trying again, which was not to say that some were not able and clever, but perhaps our teachers feared we were short on confidence. When I felt doubt or was wearied of the task I had been set, I reminded myself of what it would make possible for me. I would be a student in a university and participate in the life of the mind, among people who valued that pursuit above everything.
That year in the OAU house raced past for me. I had worked hard, learnt to be independent, studied materials I enjoyed, and fallen in unrequited love.
Dear Mama,
You banished me to this place in the name of love. You said you wanted the best for me but really you let him take me away so you could live your life in peace. Sometimes I panic when I think I will never see you again and that this is what you want, but then the panic passes and I return to my labours because there is nothing else I can do. Sometimes I hear your voice in the dark. I know it’s you, your voice slightly hoarse as if you’ve just woken up from a nap, but I know it’s you.
*
The tenants changed during my second year at the OAU house. Alex returned to Nigeria to marry and the man who replaced him was another Nigerian. His name was Amos, a quarrelsome battler who by sheer force of ill will imposed himself on the house and poisoned its atmosphere, changing its routine to suit himself. He brooded silently when Peter and I laughed or looked as if we were enjoying ourselves and then burst out at us with mocking sarcasm and jeers. He was a short, round man of impressive energy, and he looked strong enough to overcome any of us. It was as if he loved to speak only in dispute and disagreement, as if he needed to do that for his own well-being. Amos even cowed Mr Mgeni, who gave up coming round unless he knew that Amos was out. The television blasted the news as soon as Amos came in, the fridge was taken over by his various packages and pots. He disapproved of music and demanded its silencing, and he was revolted by alcohol, screwing up his face if anyone opened a can of beer in his vicinity. He was a diligent church-goer and had a phobia about Muslims. Whenever something about Islam came up on the news and I happened to be there, he turned to me as if I were the only Muslim in London and in some way responsible for what he disliked.
‘Muslims are fanatics, imperialists, racists,’ he said, eyes bulging with rage. ‘They came to Africa and destroyed our culture. They made us subservient to them and stole our knowledge and inventions and made us into slaves.’
I was not sure why I deserved Amos’s outrage any more than Mannie, who was a Muslim too and whose father was a devout imam, or Mr Mgeni, or several million other Africans who could also have shared the blame. Peter, though, refused to be cowed, and the two of them spent several evenings arguing and shouting at each other as if they would come to blows.
‘What inventions did they come and steal from you? What inventions are you talking about?’ Peter said. ‘The only thing Africans ever invented was the assegai, and we did that. What were you lot doing up there all the time? Selling each other for trinkets.’
‘You South Africans have no sense of history,’ Amos sneered. ‘The white man ate your brains generations ago.’
‘You are right, we are full of bullshit,’ Peter said. ‘But at least we know it instead of inventing a history that did not exist.’
‘You are just a self-hating kaffir, my friend,’ Amos said.
‘Who’s your friend? I don’t make friends with bigots.’
Amos took off his belt and waved the buckle threateningly in front of him, but he kept his distance and Peter ignored him. I found Amos’s bluster and noise so disagreeable that often they drove me away to my room, which perhaps was just as well for my studies.
I had not been to see Uncle Amir and Auntie Asha since I left the house in Holland Park, nor had I sent them the Guinea Lane address. I forwarded my financial guarantee renewal papers to the embassy. At first it was because I could not face seeing them after my expulsion, and could not rid myself of the memory of the hard words my uncle had to say to me in farewell. But as time passed, my reasons for staying away multiplied: I was ashamed of my failure, I was angry with them for bringing me here, I despised their self-importance, I did not owe them a thing. So I was surprised when around Christmas of that year, I received a letter on embassy paper from Rome. They must have got my address from my mother.
Uncle Amir’s name was on the letter-head as His Excellency the Ambassador, so he had become a big man at last as he had promised to do many years ago. The letter was hand-written by Uncle Amir, and it wished me well in my studies or whatever I was doing, and advised me of his current address. Rome! I wished I could go to Rome. I wished I could go anywhere, I wished I could liberate myself from the drudgery of my life in London. If I had been obedient to my uncle and aunt I would have been spending
the Christmas vacation in Rome this year. I sent my uncle a postcard of London Bridge, congratulated him on his appointment and asked him to convey my best wishes to Auntie Asha and the children. What else could I do?
I took my examinations in the summer of that year and passed. When Mannie heard the news he hugged me without a word and kissed me lightly on both cheeks. Peter grinned and grinned and then dragged me off to a Turkish café for a celebration meal and the first of many hours of advice about the life of a student. I wrote to Uncle Amir to tell him that I had passed my examinations and was going to start at university in two months. It was several weeks before I received his reply on embassy paper from Rome. I thought I knew what the letter would say. I held it in my hand for a while without opening it, contemplating the uncle I had once loved. I could not get over how he had taken me away from my home and discarded me to a life of such sterility. Dear Salim, his letter read, I am relieved to hear the news of your success and I wish you luck in your career as a university student. I expect you are telling me about it because you want me to pay your fees but I’m afraid I can’t do that. The trust I have been paying into has collapsed along with so many others, and I cannot afford to support you. I have received no word of thanks from you for anything I have ever done for you, and until your note arrived I had no idea what progress you were making with your life. You never sent us any news of yourself and did not even send us a greetings card now and then. I have learnt to accept this ingratitude even if it comes from a member of my family that I had once considered like my own son. But now, under these financial difficulties everyone is going through, and which seem to be getting worse each time they come round again, I have to look after the future of my own children and you have to learn to look after yourself. Your Auntie Asha and the children send regards.
I had been expecting that letter for a long time as a final act of spite from him, an expression of outrage for my ingratitude. I often wondered what had made Uncle Amir bring me to England. I did not believe it was a way of paying my mother back for something she had done for him. Or if it was, then that was only a small part of it. Uncle Amir would not have wanted to dwell too long on his part in messy events, whatever they were, and seeing my face in front of him every day would require him to do just that. I think it was to show that he was a man of substance with a sense of responsibility towards his family and the means to fulfil it. He swaggered into my life and plucked me out and brought me all the way to fabled London, but instead of giving grateful deference and eager obedience to his every command I proved obstinate and without talent, and harboured inexplicable grievances. To Uncle Amir and Auntie Asha, who would have long ago forgiven themselves for whatever chaos they brought to my life, I would have seemed quite the most ungrateful little shit imaginable. So I had been expecting all along, once I failed to play my part as the cringing dependent nephew, that sooner or later they would fling me away as they did.
But by the time Uncle Amir’s letter arrived from Rome, the solicitor Jafar Mustafa Hilal had produced the required papers and Mr Mgeni had helped me to arrange a student loan, and in September I moved to Brighton. Keep your money, Uncle Abhorréd. I could not resist the thought that everything was going to be different now.
I found a job in a café in Hove, Café Galileo, and took a room on campus. My room was small, painted white and blue, and had an aura of freedom. I went back to Camberwell for a weekend day trip and visited Mr Mgeni and Marjorie and Frederica. I wanted to see them and for them to see me in my transformed self, to say to me: haven’t you done well? We are proud of you. Mr Mgeni patted my knee every now and then and smiled in muted congratulation for the plot we had successfully hatched. Later I went next door to say hello and they welcomed me back with laughter and warmth. Even Amos seemed pleased to see me, and asked me to recite Shakespeare to them to prove that I was really a literary scholar at the university. Seeing Mr Mgeni and everyone there at the house was like going home and I laughed hard and genuinely but I could not wait to get back to Brighton.
I loved it there by the sea. I took bus rides further along the coast and walked on the cliffs, bracing myself against the cold breeze and listening to the waves crashing repeatedly against the rocky shore. Sometimes I sat on the shore and watched as the line of foam ran silently up the beach. Although I spent so much time alone, I did not feel lonely. It made me think of my father whom I had not thought about as much as I should have done. Those solitary walks made me think about his friendless retreats. I wrote an imaginary letter to him to tell him that.
Dear Baba,
I thought it would be something you would know about, how it feels to be silent and alone. Perhaps you don’t have time for that any more in Kuala Lumpur with all your family around you. I think you would have loved the cliffs and the restless sea and taking a walk in the rain. When the sun is on them, the cliffs look as if they are made of snow. Have you seen snow, Baba? I don’t think there’s snow in Kuala Lumpur. I have stood on ice. Can you imagine that? When you told me to keep my ear close to my heart, I think it was to warn me against hard-heartedness. I think I have understood now. Or were you just babbling? I hope you have found peace there in Kuala Lumpur. I have become a vagrant like you. Sometimes the darkness is hard and fills me with a kind of terror as it did when I was a child, and then I realise that everything lives on, that very little fades and imagination retrieves what does. I realise that I have forgotten nothing and probably never will.
Yours
Salim
Dear Mama,
I am sorry to have been so long in writing to you, despite my promise to be good. You must get tired of my apologies when I do nothing to put things right but I do mean to write more often, it’s just, well, I don’t know. Sometimes you seem so far away and the way I live seems unreal, like someone else’s life. Still, it is wrong of me to be so neglectful. I will write more regularly from now on. I have moved again and now live in Brighton where I am studying at the university. I love it here. It is a town by the sea, although it is nothing like our sea. I am sending you my new address.
Love,
Salim
5
THE LITTLE UTOPIA
I had coveted the life of a student, the scholarly community, living on campus, attending seminars, but I found myself on the edges of this university life and hardly said a word in class. When I spoke it sounded wrong: not the grammar and the arrangement of words but something deeper, as if I was making things up and my stumbling efforts were evident to everyone. I did not have the self-possession of the other students and I felt uncomfortable among them.
I was surprised by how many causes and injustices they were passionate about: liberation politics in South America, paedophile operations in South Asia, the persecution of Roma people in central Europe, gay rights in the Caribbean, the war in Chechnya, animal rights, genital cutting, NATO in Bosnia, the ozone layer, reparations for colonial plunder. I had told my mother that there were people from everywhere in the world in London but that was not how I had lived my life there. I never spoke to any of its world-citizenry about the realities of the lives they had left behind. Even in the OAU house, we picked up bits of information about each other but did not probe. I did not know anything about Peter’s family until Amos, in his confrontational way, asked him how he would be classified in South Africa – this was towards the end of the apartheid days – and Peter reluctantly replied that he would be classified as Coloured. Amos, it turned out, had been a child soldier in the Biafra war, but we could not ask him anything about it because his eyes filled with tears the moment he blurted the words out and then he rushed out of the room.
Everything is complicated and questions simplify what is only comprehensible through intimacy and experience. Nor are people’s lives free from blame and guilt and wrong-doing, and what might be intended as simple curiosity may feel like a demand for a confession. You don’t know what you might release by asking a stupid question. It was best to leave people to their silences.
That was how it seemed to me but it was not how it seemed to my fellow students. If the posters and the campaigns and demonstrations were a guide, any injustice in the world seemed to be theirs to claim, accompanied by frivolities that were like a celebration of disorder. They were fortunate people who desired to own even the suffering of others. It seemed that after all that going around the world their ancestors did and their descendants continue to do – all the effort and the carelessly inflicted misery – people in England now wanted to live a good life, to observe the decencies, to abhor hatred and violence, to give all that up and respect everyone’s humanity.
I started work at the Café Galileo at the beginning of term. The café’s owner, Mark, did not smile much and was watchful at all times like a herdsman with his flock. His eyes roved over everything and he was everywhere – supervising in the kitchen, helping out with preparation of food, serving at tables, sitting behind the till – and when regular customers he liked came in and it was not too busy, he would take coffee with them and relax in conversation. He was a serious man, and even this relaxing had a working air about it, heads bent close together, talking or listening with small frowns of concentration and occasionally bursting out into raucous ribald laughter, which I knew must have been prompted by a dirty joke. Mark was not English. He and his regulars spoke Arabic. Their bodies moved differently as they spoke: the shrugs, the hand gestures, the shape their lips made as they spoke, the way they laughed and the frequency of Libnan and Beyrut in their conversation made it clear where they were from.
Then one Sunday morning I found out for sure. A dishevelled-looking and hung-over Mark sat silently sipping a strong coffee, looking exhausted. Then he said to me, speaking wearily: ‘Salim. Where are you from with a name like that?’
I poured him another coffee and said, ‘Zanzibar.’
Gravel Heart Page 11