As Nosa drove him back to the station later, Obinze asked, “So where do you work, guy?”
“Underground. A serious hustle, but things will get better,” Nosa said. Although Obinze knew he meant the tube, the word “underground” made him think of doomed tunnels that fed into the earth and went on forever, ending nowhere.
“What of Mr. Sharp Guy Emenike?” Nosa asked, his tone alive with malice. “He’s doing very well and he lives in Islington, with his oyinbo wife who is old enough to be his mother. He has become posh o. He doesn’t talk to ordinary people anymore. He can help sort you out.”
“He’s been traveling a lot, we haven’t yet seen,” Obinze said, hearing too clearly the limpness of his own words.
“How is your cousin Iloba?” Nosa asked. “I saw him last year at Emeka’s brother’s wedding.”
Obinze had not even remembered that Iloba now lived in London; he had last seen him days before graduation. Iloba was merely from his mother’s hometown, but he had been so enthusiastic about their kinship that everyone on campus assumed they were cousins. Iloba would often pull up a chair, smiling and uninvited, and join Obinze and his friends at a roadside bar, or appear at Obinze’s door on Sunday afternoons when Obinze was tired from the languor of Sunday afternoons. Once, Iloba had stopped Obinze at the General Studies quad, cheerfully calling out “Kinsman!” and then giving him a rundown of marriages and deaths of people from his mother’s hometown whom he hardly knew. “Udoakpuanyi died some weeks ago. Don’t you know him? Their homestead is next to your mother’s.” Obinze nodded and made appropriate sounds, humoring Iloba, because Iloba’s manner was always so pleasant and oblivious, his trousers always too tight and too short, showing his bony ankles; they had earned him the nickname “Iloba Jump Up,” which soon morphed to “Loba Jay You.”
Obinze got his phone number from Nicholas and called him.
“The Zed! Kinsman! You did not tell me you were coming to London!” Iloba said. “How is your mother? What of your uncle, the one who married from Abagana? How is Nicholas?” Iloba sounded full of a simple happiness. There were people who were born with an inability to be tangled up in dark emotions, in complications, and Iloba was one of them. For such people, Obinze felt both admiration and boredom. When Obinze asked if Iloba might be able to help him find a National Insurance number, he would have understood a little resentment, a little churlishness—after all, he was contacting Iloba only because he needed something—but it surprised him how sincerely eager to help Iloba was.
“I would let you use mine but I am working with it and it is risky,” Iloba said.
“Where do you work?”
“In central London. Security. It’s not easy, this country is not easy, but we are managing. I like the night shifts because it gives me time to read for my course. I’m doing a master’s in management at Birkbeck College.” Iloba paused. “The Zed, don’t worry, we will put our heads together. Let me ask around and let you know.”
Iloba called back two weeks later to say he had found somebody. “His name is Vincent Obi. He is from Abia State. A friend of mine did the connection. He wants to meet you tomorrow evening.”
They met in Iloba’s flat. A claustrophobic feel pervaded the flat, the concrete neighborhood with no trees, the scarred walls of the building. Everything seemed too small, too tight.
“Nice place, Loba Jay You,” Obinze said, not because the flat was nice but because Iloba had a flat in London.
“I would have told you to come and stay with me, The Zed, but I live with two of my cousins.” Iloba placed bottles of beer and a small plate of fried chin-chin on the table. It seared a sharp homesickness in Obinze, this ritual of hospitality. He was reminded of going back to the village with his mother at Christmas, aunties offering him plates of chin-chin.
Vincent Obi was a small round man submerged in a large pair of jeans and an ungainly coat. As Obinze shook hands with him, they sized each other up. In the set of Vincent’s shoulders, in the abrasiveness of his demeanor, Obinze sensed that Vincent had learned very early on, as a matter of necessity, to solve his own problems. Obinze imagined his Nigerian life: a community secondary school full of barefoot children, a polytechnic paid for with help from a number of uncles, a family of many children and a crowd of dependents in his hometown who, whenever he visited, would expect large loaves of bread and pocket money carefully distributed to each of them. Obinze saw himself through Vincent’s eyes: a university staff child who grew up eating butter and now needed his help. At first Vincent affected a British accent, saying “innit” too many times.
“This is business, innit, but I’m helping you. You can use my NI number and pay me forty percent of what you make,” Vincent said. “It’s business, innit. If I don’t get what we agree on, I will report you.”
“My brother,” Obinze said. “That’s a little too much. You know my situation. I don’t have anything. Please try and come down.”
“Thirty-five percent is the best I can do. This is business.” He had lost his accent and now spoke Nigerian English. “Let me tell you, there are many people in your situation.”
Iloba spoke up in Igbo. “Vincent, my brother here is trying to save money and do his papers. Thirty-five is too much, o rika, biko. Please just try and help us.”
“You know that some people take half. Yes, he is in a situation but all of us are in a situation. I am helping him but this is business.” Vincent’s Igbo had a rural accent. He put the National Insurance card on the table and was already writing his bank account number on a piece of paper. Iloba’s cell phone began to ring. That evening, as dusk fell, the sky muting to a pale violet, Obinze became Vincent.
CHAPTER 26
Obinze-as-Vincent informed his agency, after his experience with the curled shit on the toilet lid, that he would not be returning to that job. He scoured the newspaper job pages, made calls, and hoped, until the agency offered him another job, cleaning wide passages in a detergent-packing warehouse. A Brazilian man, sallow and dark-haired, cleaned the building next to his. “I’m Vincent,” Obinze said, when they met in the back room.
“I’m Dee.” A pause. “No, you’re not English. You can pronounce it. My real name is Duerdinhito, but the English, they cannot pronounce, so they call me Dee.”
“Duerdinhito,” Obinze repeated.
“Yes!” A delighted smile. A small bond of foreignness. They talked, while emptying their vacuum cleaners, about the 1996 Olympics, Obinze gloating about Nigeria beating Brazil and then Argentina.
“Kanu was good, I give him that,” Duerdinhito said. “But Nigeria had luck.”
Every evening, Obinze was covered in white chemical dust. Gritty things lodged in his ears. He tried not to breathe too deeply as he cleaned, wary of dangers floating in the air, until his manager told him he was being fired because of a downsizing. The next job was a temporary replacement with a company that delivered kitchens, week after week of sitting beside white drivers who called him “laborer,” of endless construction sites full of noises and helmets, of carrying wood planks up long stairs, unaided and unsung. In the silence with which they drove, and the tone with which they said “laborer!” Obinze sensed the drivers’ dislike. Once, when he tripped and landed on his knee, a fall so heavy that he limped back to the truck, the driver told the others at the warehouse, “His knee is bad because he’s a knee-grow!” They laughed. Their hostility rankled, but only slightly; what mattered to him was that he earned four pounds an hour, more with overtime, and when he was sent to a new delivery warehouse in West Thurrock, he worried that he might not have opportunities for overtime.
The new warehouse chief looked like the Englishman archetype Obinze carried in his mind, tall and spare, sandy-haired and blue-eyed. But he was a smiling man, and in Obinze’s imagination, Englishmen were not smiling men. His name was Roy Snell. He vigorously shook Obinze’s hand.
“So, Vincent, you’re from Africa?” he asked, as he took Obinze around the warehouse, the size of a footba
ll field, much bigger than the last one, and alive with trucks being loaded, flattened cardboard boxes being folded into a deep pit, men talking.
“Yes. I was born in Birmingham and went back to Nigeria when I was six.” It was the story he and Iloba had agreed was most convincing.
“Why did you come back? How bad are things in Nigeria?”
“I just wanted to see if I could have a better life here.”
Roy Snell nodded. He seemed like a person for whom the word “jolly” would always be apt. “You’ll work with Nigel today, he’s our youngest,” he said, gesturing towards a man with a pale doughy body, spiky dark hair, and an almost cherubic face. “I think you’ll like working here, Vinny Boy!” It had taken him five minutes to go from Vincent to Vinny Boy and, in the following months, when they played table tennis during lunch break, Roy would tell the men, “I’ve got to beat Vinny Boy for once!” And they would titter and repeat “Vinny Boy.”
It amused Obinze, how keenly the men flipped through their newspapers every morning, stopping at the photo of the big-breasted woman, examining it as though it were an article of great interest, and were any different from the photo on that same page the previous day, the previous week. Their conversations, as they waited for their trucks to be loaded up, were always about cars and football and, most of all, women, each man telling stories that sounded too apocryphal and too similar to a story told the day before, the week before, and each time they mentioned knickers—the bird flashed her knickers—Obinze was even more amused, because knickers were, in Nigerian English, shorts rather than underwear, and he imagined these nubile women in ill-fitting khaki shorts, the kind he had worn as a junior student in secondary school.
Roy Snell’s morning greeting to him was a jab on his belly. “Vinny Boy! You all right? You all right?” he would ask. He always put Obinze’s name up for the outside work that paid better, always asked if he wanted to work weekends, which was double time, always asked about girls. It was as if Roy held a special affection for him, which was both protective and kind.
“You haven’t had a shag since you came to the UK, have you, Vinny Boy? I could give you this bird’s number,” he said once.
“I have a girlfriend back home,” Obinze said.
“So what’s wrong with a little shag then?”
A few men nearby laughed.
“My girlfriend has magical powers,” Obinze said.
Roy found this funnier than Obinze thought it was. He laughed and laughed. “She’s into witchcraft, is she? All right then, no shags for you. I’ve always wanted to go to Africa, Vinny Boy. I think I’ll take a holiday and go to Nigeria when you’re back there for a visit. You can show me around, find me some Nigerian birds, Vinny Boy, but no witchcraft!”
“Yes, I could do that.”
“Oh, I know you could! You look like you know what to do with the birds,” Roy said, with another jab at Obinze’s belly.
Roy often assigned Obinze to work with Nigel, perhaps because they were the youngest men in the warehouse. That first morning, Obinze noticed that the other men, drinking coffee from paper cups and checking the board to see who would be working with whom, were laughing at Nigel. Nigel had no eyebrows; the patches of slightly pink skin where his eyebrows should have been gave his plump face an unfinished, ghostly look.
“I got pissed at the pub and my mates shaved off my eyebrows,” Nigel told Obinze, almost apologetically, as they shook hands.
“No shagging for you until you grow your eyebrows back, mate,” one of the men called out as Nigel and Obinze headed for the truck. Obinze secured the washing machines at the back, tightening the straps until they were snug, and then climbed in and studied the map to find the shortest routes to their delivery addresses. Nigel took bends sharply and muttered about how people drove these days. At a traffic light, Nigel brought out a bottle of cologne from the bag he placed at his feet, sprayed it on his neck and then offered it to Obinze.
“No thanks,” Obinze said. Nigel shrugged. Days later, he offered it again. The truck interior was dense with the scent of his cologne and Obinze would, from time to time, take deep gulps of fresh air through the open window.
“You’re just new from Africa. You haven’t seen the London sights, have you, mate?” Nigel asked.
“No,” Obinze said.
And so, after early deliveries in central London, Nigel would take him for a drive, showing him Buckingham Palace, the Houses of Parliament, Tower Bridge, all the while talking about his mother’s arthritis, and about his girlfriend Haley’s knockers. It took a while to completely understand what Nigel said, because of his accent, which was only a deeper version of the accents of the people Obinze had worked with, each word twisted and stretched until it came out of their mouths having become something else. Once Nigel said “male” and Obinze thought he had said “mile,” and when Obinze finally understood what Nigel meant, Nigel laughed and said, “You talk kind of posh, don’t you? African posh.”
One day, months into his job, after they delivered a new fridge to an address in Kensington, Nigel said, about the elderly man who had come into the kitchen, “He’s a real gent, he is.” Nigel’s tone was admiring, slightly cowed. The man had looked disheveled and hung over, his hair tousled, his robe open at the chest, and he had said archly, “You do know how to put it all together,” as though he did not think they did. It amazed Obinze that, because Nigel thought the man was a “real gent,” he did not complain about the dirty kitchen, as he ordinarily would have done. And if the man had spoken with a different accent, Nigel would have called him miserly for not giving them a tip.
They were approaching their next delivery address in South London, and Obinze had just called the homeowner to say that they were almost there, when Nigel blurted out, “What do you say to a girl you like?”
“What do you mean?” Obinze asked.
“Truth is, I’m not really shagging Haley. I like her, but I don’t know how to tell her. The other day I went round her house and there was another bloke there.” Nigel paused. Obinze tried to keep his face expressionless. “You look like you know what to say to the birds, mate,” Nigel added.
“Just tell her you like her,” Obinze said, thinking how seamlessly Nigel, at the warehouse with other men, often contributed stories of his shagging Haley, and once of shagging her friend while Haley was away on holiday. “No games and no lines. Just say, Look, I like you and I think you’re beautiful.”
Nigel gave him a wounded glance. It was as if he had convinced himself that Obinze was skilled in the art of women and expected some profundity, which Obinze wished, as he loaded the dishwasher onto a trolley and wheeled it to the door, that he had. An Indian woman opened the door, a portly, kindly housewife who offered them tea. Many people offered tea or water. Once, a sad-looking woman had offered Obinze a small pot of homemade jam, and he had hesitated, but he sensed that whatever deep unhappiness she had would be compounded if he said no, and so he had taken the jam home and it was still languishing in the fridge, unopened.
“Thank you, thank you,” the Indian woman said as Obinze and Nigel installed the new dishwasher and rolled away the old.
At the door, she gave Nigel a tip. Nigel was the only driver who split the tips down the middle with Obinze; the others pretended not to remember to share. Once, when Obinze was working with another driver, an old Jamaican woman had pushed ten pounds into his pocket when the driver was not looking. “Thank you, brother,” she said, and it made him want to call his mother in Nsukka and tell her about it.
CHAPTER 27
A glum dusk was settling over London when Obinze walked into the bookshop café and sat down to a mocha and a blueberry scone. The soles of his feet ached pleasantly. It was not very cold; he had been sweating in Nicholas’s wool coat, which now hung on the back of his chair. This was his weekly treat: to visit the bookshop, buy an overpriced caffeinated drink, read as much as he could for free, and become Obinze again. Sometimes he asked to be dropped off in centr
al London after a delivery and he would wander about and end up in a bookshop and sink to the floor at a corner, away from the clusters of people. He read contemporary American fiction, because he hoped to find a resonance, a shaping of his longings, a sense of the America that he had imagined himself a part of. He wanted to know about day-to-day life in America, what people ate and what consumed them, what shamed them and what attracted them, but he read novel after novel and was disappointed: nothing was grave, nothing serious, nothing urgent, and most dissolved into ironic nothingness. He read American newspapers and magazines, but only skimmed the British newspapers, because there were more and more articles about immigration, and each one stoked new panic in his chest. Schools Swamped by Asylum Seekers. He still hadn’t found someone. Last week, he had met two Nigerian men, distant friends of a friend, who said they knew an Eastern European woman, and he had paid them a hundred pounds. Now, they did not return his calls and their mobile phones went directly to voice mail. His scone was half-eaten. He did not realize how quickly the café had filled up. He was comfortable, cozy even, and absorbed in a magazine article when a woman and a little boy came up to ask if they could share his table. They were nut-colored and dark-haired. He imagined that they were Bangladeshi or Sri Lankan.
“Of course,” he said, and shifted his pile of books and magazines, even though it had not been on the side of the table that they would use. The boy looked eight or nine years old, wearing a Mickey Mouse sweater and clutching a blue Game Boy. The woman was wearing a nose ring, a tiny glasslike thing that glittered as she moved her head this way and that. She asked if he had enough room for his magazines, if he wanted her to move her chair a little. Then she told her son, in a laughing tone that was clearly intended for Obinze, that she had never been very sure if those narrow wooden sticks next to the packets of sugar were for stirring.
“I’m not a baby!” her son said when she wanted to cut his muffin.
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