Gravel Heart Read online

  ‘Then there’s you,’ she said. ‘It was on the tip of my tongue to tell him about you and just stay on in Brighton, but where would I stay? I’ll end up being broke all the time and living in a slum. I did not fancy that but it will be unbearable to leave you. I think I’ve fallen in love with you a little bit. Do you think you’ll miss me?’

  After she left, the weeks she had spent at the café seemed like a fantasy to me at times, and the memory of her lived in my body for years. Later I knew that she would have been too much for me, and her life of pleasure would have looked different when viewed from the other side. I remembered how in repose after pleasure her face was slack-jawed with satiety. I thought that despite what she said about David, they were likely to be more permanent than she made their lives together sound. Perhaps it was not at all strange for people to choose to live on the edge of crisis like that. I wanted to tell someone about her but I could not think who that would be.

  *

  At the beginning of my final year I moved to a one-bedroomed upstairs flat with an annoying leaking cistern the landlord’s plumber could not fix. There would be silence for some weeks, then in the early hours of the night I would hear the unhurried whisper of water escaping and the gentle gurgle of the cistern running into the toilet bowl. At times I thought I could put a face to the leak. I had a dread that the toilet bowl would overflow and bring the ceiling down on the downstairs flat. I could not sleep once I started to think like that and could not make the dread go away.

  In my early years in London, I could not always hold off vivid visions of my father’s lonely decrepitude. Had he begged in the streets? I am sure he never did that but I saw him approaching people with outstretched hand, a vivid image that I dreaded recalling and could not dismiss. And I woke up in the middle of the night to the echo of a cry that had escaped me because I feared the self-hurt my mother would inflict on herself in her silent guilt. I must die – because I have done wrong and cannot put it right.

  An elderly Chinese couple lived in the downstairs flat, mostly in silence it seemed to me except for the hiss of frying when it was warm enough for them to open the kitchen window. On some weekend days, a young Chinese woman visited them and brought them their shopping. Sometimes she cleaned up in the little garden, weeding and refreshing the pots with supermarket bedding plants, and every now and then, when it was dry, she hung out their bedding to air. I guessed she was their daughter, and while she was there I could hear her voice, raised and querulous, as if she was hectoring them in their gentle lives. But perhaps words spoken by an unfamiliar voice in an unknown language sounded aggressive to an ignorant ear. Perhaps she was only telling them stories of her working week. The old couple never went into the garden themselves, and I had only ever seen them outside twice, both times walking unspeaking, one behind the other, towards the main road, wrinkled and shrunken with age. He was wearing an old, baggy suit that had perhaps fitted better once, and she was wearing what seemed like layers of blouses and jackets. They looked as if they were heading to an event: a reunion, or a funeral, or a visit to a hospital. I raised my arm in greeting but they ignored me.

  Dear Mama,

  Salamu na baada ya salamu, here’s another new address for you. Thank you for your last letter, which I almost did not get because I had moved during the summer. I am sorry to hear that you had to go to the hospital in Dar for checks. You did not say for what. I hope the results were OK. I had a bit of a scare myself a few days ago. I was reading in my room, when suddenly I felt cold and shivery and began to sweat. Shetani anapita, as we used to say. But the cold sweat did not pass for several minutes. I thought I was having some kind of an attack, my heart, my lungs, my spleen, what could it be?

  The next morning I went to the clinic at the university, expecting the worst, but the doctor could find nothing wrong. It was the first time I had a proper detailed medical check-up: heart, lungs, blood pressure, blood sugar, everything in good shape. The doctor was laughing by the end, telling me I did not know how lucky I was to be so well. I felt so good afterwards.

  You ask me to come and visit and I will do that when I can afford it, and thank you for the telephone number. I will know how to get in touch if something urgent comes up. Love to Munira and tell her I wish her luck in secondary school.

  Love,

  Salim

  I wrote to my father too, not letters, sometimes a few lines in my notebook or a paragraph that I allowed to roam back and forth in my head. I composed brief bewildering apothegms in the voice of al Biruni or Alhaj Ahmed ibn Khalas al Khalas al-Aduwi or whoever, and imagined my father reading them, sitting in a low-slung chair under a tree in Kuala Lumpur: In abeyance I faced the wood and saw a dazzling glimmer of the garden of the knowing, who willed the arbitration of the affairs of the beloved.

  Dear Baba,

  I live with a sense of dissembling. I do not know how to speak about the things that sadden me, about the feeling of loss that is with me at all times, the sense of wrong-doing. And perhaps no one knows how to ask. Even those who might have done, don’t know how to enquire into what troubles someone like me. Is that how it was for you? Perhaps no one knows another well enough to care, or does not want to presume, or cannot see any troubling thing to ask about. In any case, if anyone does ask I would not know where to begin: with my mother and what befell her, with you, with Uncle Amir, with my journey into this wilderness, with how much I loathe this life, this place, this cringing?

  If anyone asks I think I will smile and let the moment pass. It is something I try to teach myself. It would be easier to lie or to evade, to tell a story about a holiday house on the beach, or the walk to school, or to speak about the big rains. I used to love the big rains with a dread I could not explain even to myself: the ancient light, the water-logged land about to slide off the edge of the world, the croaking of beasts in the shadows. I expect you have monster rains there in Kuala Lumpur.

  Yours,

  Salim

  *

  After graduation I stayed on in Brighton. It was too far to return home, and I had not earnt the right because I had achieved nothing in the years I had been away. If I returned penniless and empty-handed I would be at the mercy of the man with the unspeakable name who was my mother’s lover, who would find a job for me and take me in hand and quarter me in his stables. I could return to London but I had come to dislike the bustle and chaos and dirt of the city since going to live in Brighton. Maybe I would stay here a little longer before bowing to the inevitable.

  Over the years I had become a secret miser. I pretended not to be one but I counted every penny and put away what I could. I bought cheap clothes and wore them until they were threadbare. I denied myself whatever I could resist and saved what I earnt with stubborn determination. There was pleasure in the self-denial. Moving into the one-bedroomed flat on my own was a struggle but I could no longer bear the dirt and the tumult of the shared house in Fiveways. At the beginning it had been my idea that I must save enough for a ticket home, in case my life here became intolerable. It was part of the panic I felt when I first arrived to live in London under the protection of Uncle Amir and Auntie Asha. I did not feel safe once I began to understand the wilfulness of my guardians. The price of a ticket home was a sum that seemed beyond possibility at first, but I added pound after pound over the years, watching the numbers grow in my bank statement with a secret gloating, so that by the time I graduated I had saved more than the price of a ticket home.

  I wrote to my mother:

  Dear Mama,

  It’s time for a little relief and celebration. It’s seven years now that I’ve been here. Or have you stopped counting? I hope you are enjoying your luxury flat and you find it amusing to mingle with those plunderers of the human spirit. Well, I am learning to stop counting too and will soon become naturalised. That is what happens to people like me in this country. If we are lucky we stop being foreigners and we become naturalised. Everything has changed so much, I feel I have been bleached
or emptied of something vital but at last I have managed to complete my degree. What a long time that took, and I am not sure the thing I’ve now got in my hands was worth the anguish. If I had listened to Uncle Amir I would have been an accountant or something useful like that by now, instead of which I am working in a café and I don’t know what else I can do. Do you have any news of Baba? I imagine him living peacefully in Kuala Lumpur, walking in the Botanical Gardens (there are always Botanical Gardens in places the British have colonised) or lying in the shade of the veranda of his father’s house, reciting verses he remembered from his childhood.

  I started again:

  Dear Mama,

  Salamu na baada ya salamu. I hope you are well and that Munira is well. It must be beautiful there now the rains are over and everything is cool and green. I received my results today, and I am writing to tell you the good news that I have passed quite well. I wish I was with you in person to celebrate this news with you, but I think of you whenever anything good befalls me. I am sorry to hear the tests have been inconclusive but that could be good news.

  Love,

  Salim

  After graduating I continued working for Mark full-time while I applied for other jobs. He told me I could stay as long as I wanted but he could not give me a raise. Business is business, my sainted friend, he said, looking shifty and fat. I applied for work everywhere: to the British Airports Authority (Gatwick was only twenty minutes away on the train), local newspapers, estate agents, banks, American Express (their main UK offices were in town), the University of Sussex, the University of Brighton, solicitors, and was tempted by an advertisement recruiting trainee train drivers. Why not? But it all came to nothing.

  *

  I went to visit Mr Mgeni in the New Year. ‘We thought we had lost you,’ he said. He had sold the OAU house to a businessman from Zaire, who was now converting it back to a family home for sale. House prices were soaring in their street. Mannie had moved to Coventry but did not leave an address. Amos had taken a job in Libya and had a bad accident there. A piece of grit entered his eye, which became infected. Mr Mgeni heard that from someone who was a carpenter and who went to Libya with Amos on the same job. ‘Someone came to ask for you,’ Mr Mgeni said, ‘that friend of yours, Mannie’s young relative, Mood. I asked him what kind of name Mood was, and he said it was short for Mahmood. Why do you shorten a nice name like that? I didn’t say so to him because he did not look well: trembling, sniffing, dirty clothes. He’s taking something. He asked me for a pound but I said no, because if you give money to someone doing that kind of thing, he will come back. He wanted to know how he could reach you, but I said I didn’t know any more.’

  ‘But I sent you the address,’ I said.

  ‘You want him to come all the way to Brighton to find you? Why don’t you get a phone?’

  I had not seen Mr Mgeni for a few months. His breathing was laboured and his eyes lacked their usual spark. I did not want to interrogate him about his health at our first meeting after so long. Marjorie prepared a small feast and Frederica came to lunch, looking outrageously beautiful in a thin red cotton dress. Mr Mgeni laughed with delight when she arrived, holding her at arm’s length to have a good look at her before pulling her briefly into an embrace.

  ‘My child, you look stunning. You have come to woo him, haven’t you?’ he said, nodding towards me. ‘You’ve decided to give that other one up and come back for your childhood sweetheart.’

  Frederica slapped her father on the hand, the playful slap that young women give to an elderly flirt, or that a daughter might teasingly deliver to an ailing father. Marjorie explained that Frederica was now living in Streatham with her partner, Chris, and they planned on getting married soon. I did not know what it meant that Frederica looked so exceptionally beautiful. She was like a miracle. It seemed to me that her beauty must have meaning. if I could grasp what that was, it would be a way of understanding something important.

  ‘You look more beautiful every day,’ I said. ‘What a lucky man your Chris is.’

  Frederica smiled and raised her eyebrows with incredulity at the same time, as if my flattery was only friendly banter.

  ‘He would have come to lunch,’ Frederica said. ‘I’ve told him about you, and I know he’d like to meet you. But he’s on duty today. He’s a physiotherapist in Denmark Hill Hospital, and he just couldn’t change his shift.’

  Frederica herself worked in the Personnel Department of Lambeth Council based in Brixton, and when I said that I was languishing in a café job in Brighton and thinking of moving back to London, she told me to look out for a Lambeth advert coming out in the next couple of days. She sent me a cutting of it, and although I delayed applying until the last minute, and also applied for several other posts in different offices and businesses, and was almost certain it would all come to nothing, I was offered the Lambeth job and had not the strength to resist. I duly became a local government officer.

  6

  BILLIE

  I found a small studio flat off Brixton Hill above a motorcycle shop. As if that was not noisy enough, my neighbours on the same floor and on the one above were bickerers who argued deep into the night, shouting and banging and throwing things. As soon as I could I moved, to a tiny sublet in Clapham Common and finally to a two-bedroomed flat in Putney. It took over a year to make that journey and in that time I had become reconciled to many things but in particular to the salary that went silently into my bank account in return for my lackadaisical efforts in the office. Rushing around in Café Galileo had tired me and put me on edge, assaulted some part of my senses one way or another, but the work of the Leisure Department was much more orderly and measured.

  For a while I was content. I told myself it was a kind of holiday while I was working out what else to do, but as the weeks passed I could not resist the return of my anxieties, and then I thought I was drifting. I feared that word. I feared turning into one of England’s helots, becoming accustomed to bondage. Perhaps it was time to go while I had the strength, or maybe in a year or two, especially now I had a residence permit and need not rush my decision for fear of expulsion. I could save money, maybe retrain and then look for work in the Gulf or in South Africa, one of those places where they had jobs to spare for people like me. Or I could go back home and see if there was anything for me to do there. At times I thought I was waiting to return, at others that I never would.

  In the meantime I went to work and performed my duties, biting my lip and letting the moment pass until what I did became routine and I no longer needed to suppress a feeling of uselessness as I did what was required of me. Some of my colleagues addressed their duties with a purposefulness I envied and pretended to share. I wondered if they were pretending too. I went out drinking with work-mates, and sometimes to the cricket or to a football match or a motorbike race, for a day-trip to whatever came up and was on everybody’s lips, to a music festival, a circus, to Wimbledon, the best tennis tournament in the world. We talked to each other as if we were on the same side, spoke the same language and had grown up with similar experiences and shared similar pleasures. Where I came from no one would dream of saying that anything to do with them was the best in the world. How could one know that without knowing the whole world? Here they have plenty which is the best in the world – the best goalkeeper in the world, the best university in the world, the best hospital in the world, the best newspapers in the world. You had to take that in with your mother’s milk to say such words without cringing. When it was necessary to do so I said those words. I was becoming naturalised.

  I had many relationships with women. That is, I had more or less brief affairs with women I met and got to know, who also wanted to live a life of uncomplicated encounters. It was not always possible to keep the complications out, and cruelties were sometimes unavoidable, but I became better at sensing the moment when it was necessary for me to slip away. I had spent many years not knowing how to approach women, thinking of sexual intimacy as demeaning
and an oppression, which enticed the victim into abjection, but then I found out it required nothing but willing partners. I learnt how to recognise the willing and how to make my availability known to them, and I did not try too hard or become too greedy. It seemed then that matters took care of themselves and one thing led to another without rancour. It was possible for a while to make the pursuit of pleasure the real point of everything. I found excitement in the mutually egotistical brevity of these encounters, which allowed me to suppress the distaste that was sometimes inevitable.

  Mr Mgeni was fully retired now. He no longer had the strength for the work, and his blood pressure was dangerously high. The doctor told him he might have had a mild stroke without realising it. Now he needed to avoid exertion or he might harm himself. Mr Mgeni had his doubts about doctors but Marjorie did not. She insisted that her husband took his medication, which he preferred to avoid because it bloated and constipated him, but she did not allow any debate.

  ‘You are a stubborn, ignorant man,’ she told him. ‘And you have no choice but to take those pills, so better give up sooner then you can have a little peace.’

  ‘I am only sixty-seven,’ Mr Mgeni said querulously, refusing to submit to growing feebleness. ‘What am I supposed to do with myself? Sit around and get fat? I have only ever worked all my life, since I was a little boy. How am I supposed to stop now?’