Gravel Heart Read online

  Mr Mgeni spoke to me in Kiswahili and I think that was part of the pleasure he took in telling me his stories. ‘I don’t have anyone I can speak to like this any more, not someone who will understand the language properly, without mangling it with Somali and Kikuyu, and slang and shang and who knows what words. It makes me so happy, to speak the old language and to use the big words with their flourishes and their yaanis and their graces.’

  Mr Mgeni came round to our house every day to say hello and sit with us for a while. Sometimes when he came during the day and saw dirty dishes in the sink, he did the washing up. Sometimes he brought fruit or a cake Marjorie had made for the boys. In the evenings he came in for a few minutes, listened to the talk and the teasing and then went back to his house. It was as if he had come to see that we were all getting along together. No one seemed to mind his frequent presence.

  Peter’s girlfriend Fran was also a regular visitor. I had become friends with Peter and sometimes the two of them included me in their plans. Fran was attractive and soft-spoken, a tall well-built woman with a bronze complexion and pulled-back dark hair. Her temperament was smiling and subdued, quite unlike the edgy frenzy of Peter’s wit and conversation. She was fussy about clothes, dressing in elegant combinations that had obviously been selected with care. The expensive clothes and her groomed appearance made her seem out of place in the cheerless décor of our house. She was in her twenties and despite her demure airs had an aura of restrained sexual energy, or so at least it seemed to me in my innocence. She worked in the finance department of a large department store in central London, from where she was able to buy clothes and accessories at a huge discount. Peter often made fun of what he called her middle-class disguise.

  ‘I think her mother chooses her clothes, don’t you?’ he said to me in front of Fran. ‘Her mother’s English and does not want her daughter to forget it.’ Her father was a Rwandan theology student who went home after he completed his studies and did not keep in touch. I knew this from Peter who brought up his girlfriend’s story every now and then. I sometimes thought he was ashamed of her and treated her slightingly to punish her and himself. It might start in a light-hearted way, with Fran doing something unlike her usual fastidious self, perhaps licking her knife or picking a gherkin out of the dish with her fingers.

  ‘Hey, what would your English mother say about that?’ Peter would pounce and then repeat the gist of the story of her mother’s abandonment. ‘And to think your father was a priest.’

  Fran put up with these cruelties and did not defend herself, which seemed oddly forbearing. It was as if she knew something I did not, and knew what Peter really meant. It was difficult to be fond of him at such moments. I wondered if his mockery was to do with his own unspoken shame, and to forestall any suggestion that he had strong feelings for Fran, or that he did anything more than tolerate her. We did not talk to each other about intimate pains. We managed those kinds of things on our own. If I was the only other person in the house, Peter and Fran stayed to watch the TV for a while, and I saw them murmuring to each other on the sofa and saw the way Peter clung to her. If the others were all there, the two of them went upstairs to Peter’s room and sometimes Fran stayed the night. I thought she was uncomfortable with the others, perhaps because Peter played up the teasing and banter when they were around. Fran treated me like a younger brother although there were no more than two or three years between us and we were the same height. So many young women treated me like a younger brother. It was disheartening.

  Alex and Mannie never invited their girlfriends to the house, or at least they did not come, so I never met them. Once Alex showed me a photograph of a woman looking over her shoulder at the camera in a familiar glamour pose. Her body was half turned away and her head was bent slightly forward as if she had been looking down and had just lifted her eyes at the photographer’s request. Strands of her auburn wig partly concealed her left eye. She was wearing a white running top, which was tight across her breasts, and the top six inches of her white track pants were visible in the half-body pose. Her glistening black midriff was bare. ‘Beautiful, huh? Her name is Christina and one day she’ll be my bride,’ he said before returning the photograph to his wallet.

  Alex loved talking about the huge appetites of Nigerian politicians for stolen wealth. When it came to pilfering public money, they were definitely the worst in the world. He said definitely with an unusual emphasis, as if with awed respect. Nobody else came close to Nigerian corruption. Travel allowance, community allowance, hardship allowance, constituency allowance, contingency fund, seedcorn fund … you name it, they voted it for themselves. And all that besides the secret numbered accounts and the hidden commissions. He named improbable figures of stolen money, and the absurd carelessness in the handling of it. How assistants and family members travelled with thousands of dollars in their hand luggage, which they then left in a taxi or the departure lounge. He described these carryings on with a perverse pride, beaming at the audacity and the nonchalance of his country’s legislators, laughing so hard that he staggered from the force of his mirth. ‘Nobody in the world is as corrupt and greedy as us.’

  Every Saturday Alex washed and shampooed and creamed and perfumed himself until he gleamed, and then he put on his multi-coloured shirt and leather jacket and headed off to Tottenham to see his girlfriend and to join the congregation of the Church of Resurrected Souls of Bethany. He did not return until Sunday evening.

  Mannie’s girlfriend lived in Coventry. He said nothing about her, except that he was going away to Coventry for a few days and when he returned he was visibly happier. I learnt about her from Mood. He had never met her but he knew that she came from Martinique and was a Catholic. Mannie’s father was a Sunni imam back in Sierra Leone and would be upset to know about her and Mannie.

  ‘Everyone knows how tolerant Sierra Leoneans are about religion,’ Mood said.

  ‘Yes, everyone says that about themself,’ I said.

  ‘But it’s true,’ Mood said, with such anguish that I laughed and conceded. ‘But I think Mannie is afraid his family will be very angry with him, because in addition to everything else, his girlfriend is still married and has one child by her husband and another one by Mannie, and her husband refuses to divorce her. It will be too much for Mannie’s father, who is as devout an imam as you can find anywhere, a proper pious alhaji, closed off to the world. I don’t know what is going to happen to them, except maybe they will just continue like this. That’s why Mannie doesn’t talk about his girlfriend … too much guilt. He is afraid his family will find out and tell his father. I don’t know why people make such impossible choices for themselves.’

  I did not have a girlfriend and the others pestered me and kept suggesting candidates. Even Fran joined in, telling me, as she would have done a younger brother, how handsome I was and how all the girls at college were probably waiting for me to ask them out. Peter frowned slightly when she said how handsome I was, but it inflamed my secret lust for her.

  I could not tell them that I felt alienated by the idea of being alone with a woman – or that was what I believed, despite my physical longings. It was not that I did not have desires and cravings, and I did what was necessary to satisfy those, but when I imagined intimacies with a woman, I felt a kind of nausea and anxiety, and had to suppress memories of the defeated silence that surrounded my father, and refuse glimpses of my mother’s coercion and that man’s hard hands on her. The idea of sexual intimacy seemed to me like a submission to an ugly and shaming force and filled me with a kind of terror.

  Dear Mama,

  Salamu na baada ya salamu. I think of you often even though many months pass and I am silent. Even as time passes I find I cannot forget and that I miss everything so much. I miss the sight of familiar faces and old buildings and streets. I can shut my eyes and feel myself walking this or that street, leaning a little to the left as I turn into the Post Office Road or hear bicycle tyres squelching on the wet road behind me as
I walk the lanes behind the market. I miss the sights and the smells that I know without knowing that I do. There are sights I don’t remember seeing which come back to me in full recall, and make me ache with their absence. I don’t know why I cannot shake off this feeling of painful longing. Why can’t one place be as good as another? I know there is a thought I have been keeping at bay, which is that you are a betrayer, that you sent me here to be with Uncle Amir to get me out of your way, that you could think of no further use for me.

  I started again.

  Dear Mama,

  Several months have passed since I have been here in Guinea Lane and I have been working in my various jobs and attending my classes and saving a little bit of money. In this way I have had glimpses of many different worlds, for which I have no immediate use but which complicate my understanding of what I thought I knew. The winter is almost over, but sometimes it drags its feet into the months of spring, as late as May and June even. Then it seems that the cold will never go away and life will never change and I will never get away from here.

  It will be three years in September since I came here and it feels like a lifetime of standing still while debris builds up around me. I have worked hard and learnt a great deal, especially this year, about myself and about other people, many of whom have been kind to me. I do not know why I have been offered these kindnesses, by Mr Mgeni in particular. I have done nothing to deserve them, nor do they come to me through any virtue of mine. I had not understood how fear and trouble can co-exist with such generosity, and how complicated people are. Mr Mgeni invites me to eat with his family and he helps me with work and things like that. I wish I was more daring and could take everything on and succeed. Instead I have learnt that I am timid and cautious, afraid to cause offence.

  I think of you and Baba and I try to understand. Do you think Baba likes it in Kuala Lumpur? Have you had any word? Salamu Munira.

  Love,

  Salim

  *

  In addition to telling me stories on our job outings, Mr Mgeni took to asking me a lot of questions. Sometimes they were questions about college and then he listened patiently while I held forth on the book we were studying, about the opening scene of The Rainbow or the slave-ship allusions in ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’ or something else that he had not the slightest interest in but which none the less I delivered to him without mercy. At times he asked probing questions about me. I resisted at first but he persisted and in the end I succumbed even if I told myself that I had no choice.

  ‘What brought you here?’ he asked me one day as we were decorating an upstairs flat in Old Kent Road. We were scraping off old wallpaper in the stairwell when he paused to ask that. I often asked myself that question when I was weary: what am I doing here? Hearing it from someone else made it sound such a pointless and obvious question that I did not answer for a moment. Because that’s how things worked out. He must have thought I had not understood because he elaborated: ‘What brought you here to London?’

  ‘My uncle brought me,’ I said.

  Mr Mgeni waited a moment and then prompted me: ‘Yes, OK, very funny, he brought you here. To do what?’

  ‘He sent me to college to do Business Studies but I failed so he told me to go,’ I said.

  We went back to scraping while Mr Mgeni processed this information. ‘Does your uncle live in London?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes,’ I said, scraping diligently and even turning slightly away from Mr Mgeni.

  ‘Shall we go and find him and plead with him?’ he asked, and without turning to look at him I could hear the smile in his voice. He did not mean it. ‘Is he your real uncle?’

  ‘My mother’s brother,’ I said.

  ‘And he threw you away like that,’ Mr Mgeni said, and then we did not speak for another short while. ‘You did not do anything bad that you’re not telling me?’

  I shook my head. ‘I said something he did not like. He did not think I was grateful for what he had done.’

  ‘Is he a man full of anger?’

  I thought for a moment. ‘I think he likes to be feared.’

  ‘It’s your luck,’ Mr Mgeni said. ‘You can’t do anything about that. What does your uncle do in London?’

  ‘He is a diplomat.’

  ‘Ah, a big man. Are your mother and father still living?’

  ‘Yes, but not together.’

  ‘They cannot help you?’ said Mr Mgeni.

  It was a question so I said, ‘No.’ I did not tell him that my mother was the one who sent me here and that something broke in my father’s life a long time ago and I was the debris of their disordered lives. He asked many other questions until he knew the matter in detail though he did not ask again about my mother and father. He knew that Uncle Amir had agreed to give me a financial guarantee for the moment, but that he was angry with me and spiteful, and he was unlikely to help me in that way for long. It was more likely that in the next year or two I would have to leave or disappear. Mr Mgeni returned to the matter several times until he knew my circumstances by heart and then he came up with a plan.

  ‘There is someone I know,’ he said. ‘He is a Sudanese lawyer who is very good at this kind of thing.’

  ‘What does that mean? Is he crooked?’ I asked.

  ‘He has his ways,’ Mr Mgeni said and then paused to see if I wanted him to continue. Of course I wanted him to continue and nodded several times to show him my eagerness. ‘I have done business with him before. He specialises in cases of dependants who require papers to join their families. His clients are mostly Somalis and Eritreans and his fee is very big but I knew his brother many years ago when we lived in the same house in Toxteth, a whole bunch of us crowded on top of one another, understanding nothing. He will take care of this, I’m sure.’

  The solicitor’s chambers were in a former Junior School in Walthamstow. I saw from the nameplates by the door that in addition to Jafar Mustafa Hilal, Solicitors, there were other respectable businesses operating out of the building: a litho and digital print service, a textile designer and an accountancy firm. A handsome young assistant showed us into the solicitor’s office and shut the door on us. There was no one else in the room or so it seemed. Mr Mgeni sat on one of the chairs facing the desk and I sat on the other. After a moment I heard the noise of running water and realised that the room was not empty after all, and that someone was washing behind the partition in the corner. In a moment a man came out from behind the screen, wiping his hands on a towel. Jafar Mustafa Hilal was somewhere in his fifties, tall and dark and heavily built. His face was round and clean-shaven and his lips were thick and bulging. His hair was close-cropped. He smiled as he walked towards Mr Mgeni with outstretched hand, but that did nothing to soften his menacing appearance.

  ‘Ahlan wa sahlan, my old friend,’ he said. He gripped Mr Mgeni’s hand briefly and then reached out for mine. ‘And this is our young man. Welcome, my son,’ he said, crushing my hand in his right while still gripping Mr Mgeni’s hand with his left. He released both of us and waved us back into our chairs. When we were all settled Mr Mgeni began to speak, to explain my situation, but I did not get the impression that Jafar Mustafa Hilal was paying careful attention. His eyes were on me, curious, smiling, and I thought predatory.

  ‘Yes, yes,’ he said when Mr Mgeni paused in his brief recital of my wretchedness. ‘He will do very well as your dependant, very becoming. We will see what we can do.’

  He leant back, elbows on the arms of his office chair, eyes almost closed as he contemplated illegalities with what seemed like deep contentment. ‘We will have to get him a complete set of papers. It will take a while and there will be a cost, but I will do my best to make it manageable. There is no accounting between us, as you know, my brother, and the only cost will be to pay the witnesses and the providers of certificates.’

  He nodded after he said this and Mr Mgeni nodded back and smiled and then leant forward slightly to express his gratitude. Mr Mgeni must have done something big for h
is brother. I was looking forward to the story of Toxteth. Jafar Mustafa Hilal then turned towards me. ‘This will take a little time but it is not impossible,’ he said, and I wondered if those bulging lips made it hard for him to form words, if they required greater effort to manoeuvre. ‘We will take down a few details and then you can leave this to me. You just concentrate on your studies. There is nothing more important than learning. You will be Mr Mgeni’s nephew and he will be your last remaining relative. We will also have to lower your age to strengthen your case for dependence. It will take a little time to send for the papers but once we have those we’ll get the residence issue sorted out. I will be in touch. Maasalama ya habibi,’ he said, his eyes softening with the endearment.

  ‘What’s the Toxteth story?’ I asked Mr Mgeni later.

  ‘I made a promise not to tell anyone,’ he said, but I saw the mischief in his eyes and knew that he would.

  ‘I’m your nephew,’ I said.

  ‘It is an unpleasant story,’ Mr Mgeni said, without any sign of reluctance. ‘Did I ever tell you about my brother? I had one brother and three sisters, all younger than me. My brother was the baby of the family. Then my father married a much younger woman than my mother. This new family and the way the young wife treated my mother became intolerable to me. I was sixteen then, already working at sea on the coast trade, and the insolence of this woman with whom my father spent every night was unbearable, so I signed up for a cargo ship and went sailing around the world. I moved around the earth like the sun until after a while I no longer knew the way back.

  ‘I wrote to my brother from Liverpool and told him I was living there. I had just learnt to write in evening classes, and that was the first letter I wrote. My brother wrote back after several weeks … I mean he got someone to write the letter for him because he still did not know how to write. He begged me to send money for him to join me, begged me, because he said life there in the old house was intolerable. I saved up enough and sent it to him and he came to live with me.