Africa39 (29 page)

‘You boys must be tired,’ he said. ‘I apologise for making you wait outside like that. I hope we didn’t offend you. My colleagues are a bit nervous and aren’t used to speaking in front of others.’

He was the only man I had ever met who spoke like that. It wasn’t the accent but the words themselves that were striking, at once formal and yet seemingly more gentle, as if he were trying not just to communicate but to elevate whomever he was speaking to on to the same privileged plane on which he existed.

‘We didn’t mind,’ Isaac said. ‘We would have been happy to stay outside longer.’

It had been decided that Isaac and I would share my room on the top floor, and Joseph, the three other men, and the two soldiers with them would take over the rooms on the first and second floors.

‘We are going to need all the space we have,’ Joseph said. ‘This is just the beginning.’

As he talked, two of the house guards quietly entered, carrying a mattress that must have belonged to one of them. Joseph stopped them just as they were climbing the stairs. He had them turn the mattress over so he could see both sides, and then said something in Kiswahili that made both of them smile and Isaac turn away in embarrassment.

That was the second time Isaac and I shared a room – the first had been back in the slums, after Isaac was kicked out of his house. Neither of us had slept well that night, fearful about what would happen next. I felt a similar fear that second night, though it was hard to know what lay behind it. We were safe in that house, at least for the moment, but there was something else at risk. Isaac seemed to know that, too. He didn’t say a word to me after we entered the room, just undressed in the dark and went straight to his mattress, which had been placed opposite mine, next to the door. It fell to him to say that everything would be OK, even if we were both certain that it wasn’t. As tired as I was, I couldn’t sleep while he was visibly disturbed. I turned my back to him so he couldn’t see that, though I was lying perfectly motionless, I had both eyes wide open.

Either my performance was better than I thought or, after an hour of silently waiting, Isaac no longer cared. Sometime around 3 a.m., Isaac rose from his bed. I didn’t turn around to see him, but I could hear him pull back the sheet and put his pants on. He opened the door just enough to slip out; not until I was certain that he was gone did I turn over.

Whatever I had been afraid of left with Isaac. With him gone, I was asleep in a few minutes. I suppose I knew that night where he had gone, and I suppose I also knew that he was trusting me not just to keep that knowledge to myself, but to ignore it altogether. There was no secret to guard, nothing to deny, because, according to the deal we had silently struck, nothing had happened.

When I woke the next morning, Isaac was back in his bed. His pants and shirt were strewn on the floor just as he had left them when he arrived. He was, to my surprise, deeply asleep. I had never felt protective of him before. I had seen him injured, beaten, and knocked unconscious, and all I had ever felt was pity or sadness and maybe a bit of envy for his reckless courage. He had never needed me to come to his defence, and to be honest, I wouldn’t have known how to. Had I woken him up and told him that when it came to me he was safe, he had nothing to worry about, he would have kicked me out of that house, and we would never have spoken again. I wanted him to know that, though, and so I did the only thing I could think of: I picked his clothes up from the floor. I folded his pants and shirt, just as my mother had done for my father and for me – a seemingly insignificant gesture that was still one of the things I missed most about living so far away from home. It had something to do with knowing that even in your sleep you were watched over, and that each morning, no matter what mistakes you might have made, you had the right to begin again. I laid Isaac’s clothes next to his bed, which was how my mother had always done it; before leaving, I swept my hands over his shirt and pants to shake off the dirt and smooth out the wrinkles as best I could.

Number 9

Nadifa Mohamed

I have to take care on this floor. My narrow, high-heeled boots struggle to find purchase on the smooth white marble, flecked here and there with brown fossilised shells, relics of prehistory within the steel, glass and concrete of Hammersmith Broadway. I pause for a moment by the Tube entrance and gaze at the flower stall heaving with buckets of roses, tulips, irises, sunflowers, and baby’s breath and wonder if he will bring a bouquet with him. I stand like a pebble in the cascade of commuters and take a deep breath. I won’t get the Piccadilly line, I decide, the vertiginous escalators, the bad-tempered rush through the corridors and the awkward intimacy of a strange man’s heart beating against my ribs in the humid carriage are the last things I need right now. I take the battered iPhone from my coat pocket and double-check exactly what he said in his last text:

loking forward c u by statu at
7

He is the fourth from the site and the tallest so far, 6’3” according to his otherwise bare profile. What he lacked in words he made up for in photos, he had uploaded eighteen from his travels but wore large mirrored sunglasses that concealed half his face in most of them. In the handful from Dubai you could see the remains of a woman who had been closely cropped from the images; a heavily henna-painted hand draped over his shoulder, the hem of an ornate abaya and gold sandals beside him and in one close-up the reflection in his lenses of a pretty girl with deep dimples in her cheeks and a red, lacquered smile. Even from that dim image I knew I wasn’t as attractive as her. I’m not the kind of woman who makes men’s eyes light up or who turns their heads in the street but neither do they seem disappointed when they meet me. The hijab has actually seemed to make them more intrigued in the few months I’ve been wearing it. The religious guys in ankle-skimming gowns and white prayer caps surreptitiously check me out now rather than scowling and muttering under their breaths, the white guys are the worst though, staring into my eyes as if I’m a snake that might be charmed.

I take the lift to the bus station and check my reflection in the glass doors. I look smart, presentable in a raspberry wool coat and black trousers. My threaded eyebrows are so perfectly arched they open up my otherwise small face. The black scarf around my hair is folded intricately around my jaw and held in place by a constellation of diamanté brooches. My stomach performs a small flip as the lift reaches the floor. I am early enough to take the bus and at this time the routes into central London are quiet; I can put my bag beside me, stretch out my legs and listen to my music in peace. I flip the music player to the next song and hear snatches of Arabic, Somali, Hindi before I finally settle on bass-heavy R’n’B. Walking lazily to the bus stop I speed up when I see a number 9 to Aldwych pull into the kerb. I press the Oyster card against the reader and see that the balance is low again, the money from my temp job at the hospital haemorrhages into these machines; I’m getting sick of struggling in this city alone, coming home to nothing but bills on the doormat. The route begins in the bus station and the Polish driver is still wiping crumbs from his thick blond moustache after his short break. I yank open the narrow, horizontal window to clear the smell of smoked kielbasa from the air and take my favourite position on the right-hand seats above the wheels. I sit a little higher than everyone else and the double-glazed panel serves as a picture frame to the snatches of city we catch from traffic light to traffic light. I know this route intimately, years of un- or under-employment kept me chained to London’s buses, my internal clock in tune with the timetables and particularities of certain routes and even certain drivers. I know the impatient, the rude, the generous, the late, the lecherous, all by sight. I also know this ring road beside the station and the tall, modern office building outside of which a young woman was raped recently, and the Iranian supermarkets and restaurants garlanded with strings of light bulbs. The Kensington Olympia is hosting a wedding show and I turn my head at the couples exiting with plastic bags full of the crap that weddings seem to involve these days. Would tonight be the start of that journey for me? I needed to become like one of those women on the street, they were neither perfect nor very individual, but had moulded their relationships into something real and tangible that others could see. I would make him believe that I was the right one for him; he could close the laptop and step away because I would be all that he was looking for. He had written that he would consider women up to the age of thirty-four, my real age, but I had told him I was twenty-nine. I had fibbed that I work in public health but in all honesty I sit on reception at an outpatient ward. I also said that I had travelled to Doha and Thailand and Brazil but haven’t left London since a visit to my grandparents a decade ago. All of these details are insubstantial; they say nothing of whether I will be devoted, faithful, fertile, the qualities that these men are looking for deep down.

The bus lane along High Street Kensington is clogged with double-deckers and I browse the clothes shops as we chug along, the heater under my feet burning the soles of my boots. A gaggle of Italian schoolchildren in matching pink T-shirts clamber aboard at the stop opposite the underground station while their beleaguered teacher negotiates the fare at length with the driver. Just as the doors beep ready to close, a bearded drunk staggers on. He presses the orange cover of a freedom pass hanging around his neck to the reader and then raises his hands to announce his presence.

The traffic clears and we fly past Kensington Gardens and the Albert Memorial, the dead prince shining golden on his plinth, what woman wouldn’t want her man struck in metal? Eternally loyal, silent and hard. I had chosen the Eros statue in Piccadilly as a meeting point to force some romance into what so often feels like a job interview. The little iron cherub with his bow and arrow also gave some charm to a part of the city that teemed with fast food packaging, prostitutes’ calling cards and lost tourists. Frigid trees in their winter nakedness stand against the jewel-toned monument, it’s impossible to imagine them lush, green and dense again but in a couple of months they will be clad in leaves and blossoms. The road widens to four lanes and doormen pose in red polyester frock coats outside heritage hotels with chintz curtains in their windows. I notice a nasty smell in my nostrils and turn away from the window; the drunk has moved seats again and is sitting beneath me. His thick, black, wavy hair is enviable but it’s also oily and peppered with large grey flakes of dandruff. The smell is hard to pull apart but there is sweat involved and urine and perhaps even vomit. He feels my gaze on him and turns his head sharply back until it hits the rail hard. Our eyes meet and he gives me a hazel-eyed, bloodshot stare. He must have once been a good-looking man, poetic in a way, with strong eyebrows, long eyelashes and a full mouth.

‘Suck. My. Dick,’ he mouths slowly in an Irish accent, then giggles to himself.

I roll my eyes dismissively and return to watching out of the window. We have passed the new development of hundred million pound flats, and armoured Bentleys and Range Rovers wait, their hazard lights flashing, for their Russian and Chinese owners to return. A bat­­­mobile-like Lamborghini overtakes the bus with an aggressive roar of its throttle and then has to stop abruptly at a red light. I look inside its leather interior as the bus crawls up beside it; two young Arab men lounge inside in distressed jeans and garish T-shirts, they have the stiff gelled hair and trimmed goatees of low-rent male strippers but they exude wealth from the gold on their wrists and their necks to the stack of parking tickets stuffed carelessly under the windscreen wiper. They speed off with Arabic pop wailing behind them. We reach Harrods and I check my phone. Twenty to seven. Another ten minutes and we should reach Piccadilly.

The sky is indigo now and a squall of rain falls lightly on to my cheek from the open window, I slam it shut. The exterior lights studding the facade of Harrods are lit and the skeleton of the building glows orange. I hate the place; its expense, disorder and incongruous Las Vegasness. The Italian students disembark giddily, boys and girls brazenly pawing each other on the pavement, all tongues, hands and sexual entitlement. At that age I was terrified even to be seen walking beside a boy, the shame alone would have killed me; my desires were lived out only in my mind.

The bus feels airy again even though the smell remains. The drunk’s legs splay out in front of him, his battered trainers tied clumsily around his toes with string, he smiles and hums to himself. A wealthy-looking family waits in the gangway for him to make room for their pushchair. The father is middle-aged, tall, sandy haired, wearing salmon pink trousers and a mustard tweed jacket, he must be cold but his face is flushed red. He tries to manoeuvre the buggy into the small gap while his blonde baby sleeps with her hands over her knees. His wife behind him is a narrow, brittle thing with chestnut hair and teeth that look like they have been whitened with Tipp-Ex. A shy boy in the clothes of a wartime evacuee, grey short trousers and a wool jacket with red piping, hides his face behind a new iPhone.

‘Do you mind moving?’ the mother says sharply to the drunk. Her lips move awkwardly as she speaks and I notice that they look swollen and stiff. Silicone.

He doesn’t move but reaches for the baby’s hands with both of his grimy ones, ‘Allo gorgeous . . .’

The father jerks the pushchair back. ‘What do you think you’re doing? Leave her alone. You shouldn’t be sitting here anyway, can’t you see the sign?’ he points a finger to the blue and white notice on the side, reserving this area for pushchairs and wheelchairs.