A Girl From Zanzibar

by Roger King

  “It’s not true,” I broke in. “None of it is true.”

  “You don’t want to say anything now,” the sergeant advised, as if he were on my side. “You don’t want to give away your defence.”

  There was a scuffle across the room and a wrecked and wild Kamara, nothing of the African revolutionary left of him, made it to my side, policemen in pursuit. “Marcella, they are saying I did not have a ticket. Look, here is my ticket.” I took it, looked at it. “I’ve seen it,” I announced helpfully, as a policeman snatched it away from me and Kamara was dragged back across the room.

  Ironic, wasn’t it, after the great global crime we’d hatched, that my undoing should be for the spontaneous impulse of loyalty towards a friend and an offence I did not commit. I’ve thought about this—I’ve had the time —until it seems to coincide with logic. The plods—the policemen from the provinces who collared me—knew nothing of our happy multi-racial, international, supra-legal, prosperous, used and useful Bayswater. They were Thatcher foot soldiers licenced to patrol internal unrest. It came out during the trial that my policemen had just finished a spell in Yorkshire, battling striking miners. Earlier the same night they had been fighting a mainly black riot caused by resentment against the police actions in north London’s Tottenham, and apparently still had it in their heads when they surfaced from the Tube in cheerful multi-racial Bayswater that black people were the enemy. It hadn’t mattered to them that Kamara was a political refugee from Africa or that I was a businesswoman of good local standing. We were not white and we were prey. I checked the newspapers while I waited for my trial. Conservative politicians were labelling any criticism of the police as treason, and the judge took the same view. At my trial they made much of the murder of a policeman in Tottenham that same night, even though it turned out to have happened after our arrest.

  I had failed to read the signs. I had looked up and out when I should have looked down and in. I watched my front when I should have watched my back. I only noticed that Bayswater was part of the world instead of noticing it was part of England. I failed to correctly evaluate what the British wanted and conveniently overlooked the history of their ruthlessness. I misheard the warning shots. I mistook indifferent tolerance of me for the welcome of a home. England had reared up and bitten me. I only had myself to blame.

  But Benji’s business was not without its consequences. They searched my flat and found Ashraf’s gun catalogues and twenty thousand pounds in cash that I could not explain. The charge for me was raised from possession and dealing in heroin to that of “organiser,” a kingpin, a major player in the drug trade. How else could the money be accounted for? I could not say. How else was my comfortable lifestyle explainable? I had no tax receipts to prove otherwise. Kamara got two years, with his deportation to be reviewed in the light of his political refugee status. I got eight, with no doubt about my deportation at the end of it. My barrister asked Lord Cramp to be my character witness and we were deafened by the silence.

  "HELLO?" WHEN I PICKED UP THE PHONE I WAS LYING

  on my couch, drinking my coffee, reading student essays, my mind all on that.

  “Marcella?”

  There was something impossibly familiar in the voice. My spine knew first.

  “Yes.”

  “It’s really you?”

  “Benji.” I dared to whisper it.

  “Zanzibar girl.” He breathed it, as if shy.

  “Benji, wait. Don’t say anything. You’re not dead. You’re not dead, are you? My god! I never thought I’d hear your voice again. Oh, Benji! Where are you?”

  “No. No, I’m not dead. I wondered if you’d think that. I’m so sorry, Marcella. I couldn’t let you know. It was too dangerous. Then, when you left prison, you just vanished. I was waiting. I was sure you’d come here.”

  “Here?”

  He hesitated. “I’m in Zanzibar.”

  “Zanzibar? What on earth are you doing there? You can’t be in Zanzibar. You could never phone here from Zanzibar.”

  “I’ve been here years, Marcella. Hiding. Waiting for you. I have friends in the telephone department. And things have changed since you were here. We may never manage it again, though.”

  “But you’re well? You’re OK?”

  “I’m fine.” He chuckled. “And you’re fine too, aren’t you? A professor at a college, isn’t it? Are you fine, Marcella?”

  “How do you know all this, Benji? How did you find me?”

  “Never mind that. Are you well? Are you married or anything?”

  “Yes, I’m well. I live very quietly.”

  “I went to Dar-es-Salaam airport to meet you, you know. I heard you were leaving prison and being deported to Tanzania. You know the way you hear things here. A friend in the government. Then you didn’t come. The plane came, but you didn’t arrive. I waited all day, you know. I stayed in Dar for the next week, meeting all the flights. I was going crazy. No one could explain it to me.”

  “Not even your friend?”

  “No. He just said you’d vanished.”

  “It was meant to be that way. I changed planes and came here. It was all planned for me.”

  “I checked with your family. They didn’t know. You could have been anywhere. In the end Zanzibar seemed my best bet. So I stayed.”

  “Oh, Benji. Benji, Benji. I love you, Benji. I do. And I could kill you. Where were you when I was in prison? Oh, I know—it wasn’t safe. You couldn’t help it. I still hate you for it, though. And I love you. And I’m happy you are safe. And I hate you. So how did you find me anyway? I’m so happy to hear your voice, but I think I need to know.”

  “There was a tourist here telling everyone he knew you. An American professor with a fat bottom.”

  “Ron. Of course. He found you?”

  “It wasn’t necessary for him to find me. I just listened to him talk from two tables away. Moore College in Vermont. He acted like he was your lover, but I didn’t think so.”

  “Absolutely not. I’ve no interest in Ron whatsoever.”

  “Thank god. He didn’t seem your type. But then again I never thought of you as a professor.”

  “Who is my type?”

  “Me, of course. When are you coming home, Marcella?”

  “To you, or to Zanzibar?”

  “Both.”

  “Coming home.... What are you talking about, Benji? You’re crazy. It’s been nine years. I haven’t even taken in that you’re not dead yet and you’re talking about me throwing everything up and going back to Zanzibar. You know I don’t like Zanzibar anyway. Let me enjoy just having you back in the land of the living for a little while. I’ll think about Zanzibar later.”

  “I know. I’m sorry. It must be a shock. I’ve been thinking about this for years and you haven’t had the chance to think at all. You would not believe how many times I’ve imagined this phone call. Now I have you, I want to say everything. We may never get this connection again. Listen, Marcella, Zanzibar’s changing. There are tourists and you can do business here now. It’s going to be very big. Think, Hong Kong of Africa. I have contacts here. What they want to do is declare independence from mainland Tanzania. There’s political support. A coup, maybe. We’ll turn Zanzibar into a tax haven and attract all the businesses that want to invest in Africa. It already has the best harbour in East Africa. The Arabs are putting money into the airport. It’s what Africa’s been lacking, a financial centre. Zanzibar will just pick up its old role as the hub of African trade. I’m helping them establish the financial services. They need people like us. It’s the perfect place now. You have to come. I know you. You’re not a professor, Marcella. You’re made for this. And we’ll be together. You’ll come, won’t you? I need your help. I’ve had a long time to think about it.”

  As Benji’s enthusiasm soared, I experienced a curious, sad wilting of my spirit, a failure to soar with him. This was all from before, and before had ended badly. And Benji did not seem to understand how bad it had been.

&n
bsp; “Benji, I was in prison for eight years. Eight years on my own for something I did not do. It was not nothing. I’m not ready to live dangerously again.”

  “I know. I know. I wanted to help. Just thinking about it drove me crazy. But there was nothing I could do. I was in hiding myself. That deal turned out to be more complicated than I thought. They cut me out and I thought they were going to kill me. I would only have made things worse for you. But it wasn’t the deal, was it, that put you in prison?”

  “Not exactly. No, it wasn’t. But I’m different now, Benji. This is too much, too quickly. Oh, I’m so glad you’re all right. That we’re both all right.”

  “You’re crying.”

  “I am crying, Benji. I thought they had killed you. I’ve been alone.”

  “I’m not so easy to kill. I think I may have outlasted them. The BCCI is gone now. The governments in South Africa and Pakistan have changed. It’s safe now. I’ve missed you, Marcella. I can’t tell you how much. Thinking of you in prison, not being able to help you ... It was like my heart was ripped open. Don’t cry now.”

  “Benji, I need to go. I have to think. But I don’t want to put down the phone. How can I be sure you will still be alive if I put down the phone?”

  “So don’t put it down.”

  “I have to. I can’t say any more now. Can I write?” “Zanzibar. PO Box 122.”

  “Benji, did you get any money from the deal? I was in prison. I couldn’t help you. And now the BCCI doesn’t exist.”

  “Not a penny. I just got away with my life. I was the connection between everyone. After the handover in Mozambique, they didn’t need me anymore. I think they thought that if they didn’t pay me there would be less connection to be discovered. If I was dead there would be even less connection. It was time to vanish and I took a dhow up the coast to Zanzibar. I arrived here the old way, the way your ancestors arrived.”

  “Well, the money doesn’t matter. It’s enough you’re alive. I’ll write.”

  “Think about what I said. It’s perfect for us. You have to come. I’ll try to phone again, but—well, you know Zanzibar.”

  “Bye, Benji.”

  “Bye, Zanzibar girl.”

  “Singapore man,” I responded on cue, hearing a false completion in it as I put down the phone.

  MY TRIAL MOVED LIKE CLOCKWORK. I FELT THAT EVENmy own barrister, a bright young woman Geoffrey found for me, did not believe in my innocence. I found it difficult to believe in it myself. I was surprised to discover that in spite of the sparse population of Bayswater Tube, no fewer than twelve policemen had been on hand to witness my unprovoked assault on the police and my drug dealer behaviour. Some had just been coincidentally passing by, having a night out in their civilian clothes. They lined up for the witness box to repeat each others’ phrases. I looked at the judge, trying to see a twinkle of scepticism or irony in his eye. But he was intent only on lending his gravity to this bad joke.

  My days in court were spent on an uncushioned wooden bench with iron railings for a backrest. No one but a guilty person would be found on such a seat. I was on a hard bench set below everyone. The judge loomed highest, then the recorder and the witnesses, then the barristers, then me, already in the pit, already being punished. I was so tiny I might have slipped through the railings and away.

  I gave my evidence and for the most part told the truth. But even to me my truth did not seem believable. A truth with so little force behind it—just a small, suspect, illegal immigrant woman—was so much less valid, with so much less reality, than the other version backed by a dozen beefy men in blue and a judge who showed that he chose to believe them. At the end of his questioning, the prosecuting barrister reached a theatrical pitch. “Is not the truth of the matter, that you were engaged that night in your business of distributing illicit drugs and when you realised that Mr Kamara, one of your dealers, was being arrested, you intervened in order to remove from him the drug evidence that would have incriminated you, and in addition you cynically assaulted a police officer in an attempt to incite a public disturbance against the police that would have effectively concealed your criminal activity? Are these not the true facts of the events of that night? And is it not also true that your only concern was the protection of your illegal drug activities and that you would go to any lengths, including the endangerment of the lives of police officers, in order to protect your deplorable, but highly profitable, business?”

  I stood there in the witness box, silenced by the plausible completeness of this story, and I giggled. I smiled and giggled. I could not find a single word of response. The barrister had sounded exactly like a lawyer on TV. The whole construction was so separate from reality, and so perfectly made, and so much more likely than my life, that I did not know any way to approach it or prize it open. I giggled, a silly Goan-Arab-Portugese girl from Zanzibar, so out of place that it was a surprise to me that I did not simply vanish and reappear somewhere more appropriate.

  “Well, I see you find this amusing, Miss D’Souza. The fact is, Miss D’Souza, that you have nothing to say in response because it is the simple truth.”

  *

  When they moved me from Holloway Prison in London to Cookham Wood in Kent, I went back to Africa. The other women were mostly African, the majority from Nigeria. They were usually small businesswomen, assertive, intelligent and warm, who had been chosen as drug couriers because they were poor but stylish enough to belong on an international flight. They were all innocent, to hear them. They had been misinformed about British law. They had been forced into the trip by moneylenders who threatened their families if they did not go. They had been tricked into carrying the luggage of friends. They had not got further than Heathrow or Gatwick.

  For a year I fled, whenever able, into a wilful, corrupted sleep. When I came to, it was to a louder, clearer version of the same looped tape of anger. How the British had treated me. How none of my influential friends had come forward to help. Even how Benji was not there when I needed him, and how his foolishness had made things so much worse. I was angry at everyone and angry at myself, my stupidity. The unpleasantness of spending wakefulness with this despairing, useless anger, drove me back to sleep. I had lost everything and I could not imagine the hopeful effort of ever creating anything again. They told me I would serve the full eight years because illegal immigrants cannot have time off for good behaviour. There would be no home visit releases for me near the end of my sentence. And at the end of the eight years I would be immediately deported to Tanzania to face, at the very least, a return to my original imprisonment on Zanzibar. Back where I started, empty-handed, humiliated. If I was unlucky the Tanzanian government would try me for drug dealing a second time, with the guilty verdict certain. I would have been happy not to wake at all from my sleep. I was so close to being nothing that to slip away to death would have been no great event.

  Gabrielle and Geoffrey were my visitors and they looked so concerned for me that I tried to seem a little better. Inside, Bintu, my cellmate, an overweight Nigerian who liked sleep nearly as much as I did, was my protector. Because of her I was never beaten by the more violent prisoners. Bintu’s attitude to sleep was different from mine. She explained it: “I like my sleep. I like to be deep asleep with dreams I cannot remember. And I like to be half asleep when I cannot tell what is dream and what is life. Sometimes I can lie down and just think of nothing at all. Sometimes I can dream whole days of my life at home and it is as if I was still there.” To Bintu sleep was a recreation that required skills and connoiseurship for its full enjoyment. While we were together, before I was given a room of my own, her calm and happy sleep began to seep into the black negation of mine and lighten it.

  I considered the solace of religion, of the little bit of wisdom there, but retained self-respect enough to see that what I had dismissed when my mind was sharp could not be decently adopted when it was blunted by sorrow. Wishing to rid myself of the corrosion of anger, I looked to see if my punishment might be de
served in some larger sense, above the squalid detail of my case. I wondered if I had taken too light a view of what might be taken from a life without the payment of a price. I had lived with a man without marriage. My parents had died for something similar. I had not paid taxes, a dishonesty that had contributed to my punishment. But here I was fierce in my defence, indignant still at the way a world created seamless was divided up by the powers-that-be to catch out those of us who did not fit, and brand us as illegal. My crime, perhaps, was simply to have turned my back on a family, a community and a country, and my punishment was earned by that treachery. Or maybe guilt by association is a sort of justice, and the fact was that my associates had not been entirely honest. Well, actually, they were criminals on an global scale, albeit the useful white collar kind, not generally brought to account. Well, actually, their business was sometimes lethal. Well, actually, I had become one of them.

  It took me time to separate this out and see myself as blameless in my case, a woman helping a wronged friend, wrongly accused by criminal police. Then, allowing that my suffering was because the world was devious and cruel, and my error had been to think my part of it was not, I set about allowing the sadness to settle at a lower level of my mind, like a sediment not to be disturbed, concentrating instead on the clarity above, a level available for new understanding.

  Gabrielle and the prison counsellors conspired to sign me up for The Open University. Other prisoners often took certificate courses in word processing and the like, but a university degree was less common. I would follow the same basic social science course that Gabrielle was taking, sending in the homework by post in the usual way. The prison let me watch the early morning or late night lectures on TV. Gabrielle and Geoffrey helped me on their visits and The Open University made special arrangements for me to make up for the summer school I could not attend.