Foreign Soil

by Maxine Beneba Clarke

  “My David. He used to have the bike, back in Sudan. One day I saw him ride, ride that bike, so fast like he was flying.”

  “Oh.”

  “Thank you, Little Sister. Thanking you. When I ride that bike I remembering my boy, riding toward me, laughing, how he laughing . . .”

  I felt awkward, had no idea what she was talking about, but felt like I was somehow supposed to. Auntie took up her grocery bag from the ground, smoothed some dirt from her skirt, walked away slowly, down toward West Footscray Station.

  I stood there for a minute, staring after her. The rain had stopped. A small puddle of water had settled in the baby seat. Nile would be getting testy. It was half an hour past when I usually collected him. I threw my leg over the bike, started pedaling down the street. The Barkly Star was a dream to maneuver—smooth gliding, killer suspension, sharp brakes. Felt like I was hovering above the wet tar, flying. Like there was nothing else in the world except me and my wheels. David. I slowly rolled her brand-new name around in my mouth.

  Harlem Jones

  HARLEM LEGS it from the job shop soon as the sour bitch pushes the button for security. Shoots like the fuckin’ wind. She won’t call the coppers, he’s sure of it. Old cow’s just trying to give him a scare. As if he’d been serious anyway, about that shit.

  Harlem rockets out onto Tucker Street and takes the back laneway through the park, long legs striding out on the cracked concrete path. His still-new black work shoes strain at the seams, creaking at each push off the pavement. Usually Harlem’s mind goes blank when he runs. Only thing he can hear is his own even breathing, wind rushing past his ears. This afternoon is different. As he sprints away from the place, all he can think about is that fuckin’ Mark Duggan. It’s the mug shot from the paper that rises up in front of him—not a real mug shot, but practically. The hard eyes, angry frown; the papers always drag out photos like that when London Met bullets get themselves lodged in some poor black bastard.

  Harlem pushes the man’s face from his mind. He’s not Duggan; the pigs won’t catch him. He’s more fuckin’ Linford Christie. Harlem reaches the Finsbury Park flats in less than five minutes, four even, not the slightest bit out of breath. Only reason they’d kept him on so long at school was because he ran cross-country like Wile E. Coyote on crack. Even his running hadn’t been enough for them to keep him on in the end.

  Harlem opens the door to the flat and dumps his rucksack in the hallway. He showers and dresses again, leaving his sweaty Tesco’s uniform in a heap on the bathroom floor. The kitchen still smells like that disgusting yellow porridge his ma cooks in the mornings. Harlem opens the fridge, starts digging into the jerk chicken and sweet potato left over from last night’s dinner. Devours it cold, he’s that fuckin’ starving, the whole container of it gone. When his ma comes back from her shift down at the youth center, she’ll make some more.

  Harlem raises his right arm and aims the empty plastic container across at the sink. “And the crowd goes wild. Harlem Jones! Harlem Jones has the ball! And he shoots. The ball is going in! I don’t believe it, it’s going in! And it’s a score! It’s a basket! Harlem Jones has won the game for them!” Head thrown back, arms over head, he runs mad circles on the small square of scuffed linoleum.

  After filling his rucksack with the spray paint cans hidden on top of the fridge, Harlem shrugs on his new hoodie and opens the front door.

  “Harlem Jones,” the tall copper says, knuckle poised to knock.

  Ain’t a fricken question, they know damn well who he is. Harlem curses. Course they have his fuckin’ address. For all he knows they might be the same filth that sent his brother down. Not that Lloyd hadn’t deserved it. Janelle was real pretty before Lloyd lost it with her that night. When Harlem saw his brother’s ex a few weeks after, everything on her face looked swollen and crooked.

  “Been making death threats against ladies down the job office, Harlem?” the ginger copper says.

  Death threats his skinny black arse. Even the crazy job-shop broad ain’t dim enough to really believe that. Harlem went to see about quitting the Tesco’s job. Got his first pay yesterday and the whole lousy shelf-stacking month gave him just twenty quid more than being on subsidies. Fricken slavery’s what it is. Time he pays his Oyster card fare he’s actually behind.

  “Sorry. Don’t know what you’re talkin’ bout. You got the right person?” His word against fuckin’ hers. Stupid cow told him if he ditches the Tesco’s job he won’t get benefits for three months. Casual, like she was used to dumping no-hopers like him in the shit. Fuckin’ stuck-up bitch.

  Harlem locks the front door behind him and steps out onto the steps, forcing the coppers back toward the footpath.

  He’d lost it at the job-shop broad, with her fancy clothes, the posh way she talked. Fuckin’ raged out on her, and once he got started, he couldn’t do nothin’ to stop himself. Not that he would have fuckin’ wanted to in any case.

  “What’s dis goin’ on?”

  Jesus, his mother has bad timing. She’s looking from the coppers to him like she’s gonna have a heart attack or something. Seeing her so worried makes Harlem feel like shit. He doesn’t mean to rub up against the law so much. He’s just so fuckin’ angry, all the time.

  “You this lad’s mother?”

  “Don’t be foolin’ wid mi, ye know mi damn am.”

  He bets the pigs never counted on goin’ up against his ma. She can be a drag sometimes, but she always fronts up swinging when they come for her own. Harlem drops his rucksack off his shoulder, fishes out his ciggies and sits down on the step to watch the spat.

  Three minutes with her, and the coppers turn back down the path. She’s getting smarter at this shit, his ma. Harlem makes to leave as well, but she’s not finished with him. She blocks his way out of the front garden, right aggravated. Sweat’s pouring off her forehead like it’s her own chubby self that done that run.

  “Ye need te pull yeself together, Harlem.” Them veins in her neck are popping like the American weightlifters’ on the Nike ads. “Ye father an I never come te dis country te raise delinquent children. No chile-a mine gwan threaten a woman! Ye nat readin’ de news? Ye wan end up like dat udda black boy dem kill?”

  “He was a grown man, Ma, not a boy.” It’s on the tip of Harlem’s tongue to remind her about Lloyd, but he doesn’t want to risk a slap across the face with the workbag the woman’s wielding. Besides, his ma’s still in denial about Lloyd being inside. Won’t talk about it, even to Harlem. Tells all them mates down the West Indian club that his brother’s in Trinidad for a while, doing some work for her builder cousin.

  “Harlem, mi don’t wan ye turnin’ out like ye good-fe-nothin’ dadda is all. Ye raise bettah dan dis, ye know it. Look at mi, bwoy!”

  Harlem can’t look at her. She makes him too fuckin’ irate. She always dumps on his dad whenever Harlem does anything wrong. Ten years since the man pissed off, and she still can’t stop slagging on him. Harlem flexes his trembling fingers. He wants to fuckin’ strangle her, his own mother, who gave birth to him. Really strangle the woman. He wants to wrap his fingers firmly around that fat neck and squeeze until her face goes purple.

  * * *

  Toby’s late. Even after the holdup with the cops, Harlem reaches Seven Sisters before him. Dragging smoke deep into his lungs, Harlem sinks down onto the station steps and squeezes his eyes shut.

  Fuck.

  He exhales slowly. He can’t get Duggan out of his mind—the cocked head, the scowl on the bugger’s face. Harlem takes one last puff of his rollie and crushes the glowing stub into the step below him with the heel of his right sneaker. Gazing down at the running shoe, he spits on his right index finger and carefully wipes specks of London grime from the light gray Adidas stripes.

  He and Toby were both shit-faced yesterday when they agreed to meet up, but he’s sure they said five thirty on the steps at Seven Sisters Station. Toby’s a lost cause when he’s on the piss, though. Could be the dumb fuck’s forgotten
all about it.

  Harlem runs an anxious hand over his buzz cut, pulls his iPhone from his hoodie pocket and scrolls down to find his friend’s number. Absentminded as his mate is, Toby can pack a nasty fuckin’ punch, and tonight isn’t something Harlem wants to be walking into on his own. He presses Send on the text message, then stops to examine his reflection in the mobile screen. Funny, he didn’t realize before how much he looks like that poor dead geezer.

  Running late. Got caught up @ home. Soz. Harlem reads Toby’s reply, annoyed. What the fuck was Toby doing up in Brixton to keep him late? Caught up. Messing around with one of those Walker sisters, Harlem guesses. One of these days they’ll find out he’s horizontal with both of them. Watch the shit fly then. Harlem can’t never figure out what the girls see in his mate. Tobes is all pale English skin, sticking out ears, lanky arms and legs.

  Harlem stands, strides two at a time up the station steps, draws a gob of phlegm to the back of his throat and spits thickly on the curb.

  Fuck the stupid git.

  He swapped his Tesco’s shift with Ayana to make it tonight. The only shift she’d swap for his four-hour evening at the supermarket was an eight-hour Saturday. Done him right over she had, even though she’d figured out what he wanted the night off for.

  “You goin’ down Tottenham way, innit?” she’d whispered triumphantly from the other side of the wire shelving where she was restacking cartons of pomegranate juice. “Better be careful. Cording to Facebook it’s gonna be fricken war.”

  Harlem hadn’t bothered responding, just continued turning the Yorkshire pudding packet mixes around so they all faced the same way.

  He reaches into his trackie pocket and pulls out his gray beanie, jams it down over his head. It’s summer, but the clear evening has a chilly edge.

  Tardy shithead.

  If he waits for Tobes he’s gonna miss the action. Harlem crosses the road, turns the corner and heads down Woodgreen. It’s been a few months since he came right into Tottenham. Several more Caribbean grocery shops have sprung up. Through the grimy windows Harlem glimpses shelves lined with jerk seasoning, tinned ackee, smoked saltfish and bruised plantain: all the shit his ma cooks from back home in Trinidad that Harlem mostly can’t stand.

  On the corner of Woodgreen and Martin a new bookstore’s opened: kids’ books in the window showing bright, happy-to-look-at pictures. Jalawah and the Beanstalk, Jet Black and the Seven Pygmies. Harlem stops to read a few of the titles, smiling to himself. Black hair salons spill onto the footpath with baskets of hairpieces, dreadlock wax and netted sleeping caps—all that rubbish them girls back at school spent hours messing up their heads with. The barbershops are filled with brothers. They man-clamp, bump fists and chat, as barbers carefully pattern-shave the sides of their heads.

  “Harlem! Thought you were gonna fricken wait for me!” Toby jogs into step beside him.

  “You’re late, you shit.” Harlem stops to touch knuckles with his friend.

  “Yeah. Sorry bout that. It was Camille. I kept tellin’ her I had to go, but she wanted me to, y’know, finish what I, uh, started.” Toby grins, gold-capped front tooth glinting from his pale face.

  Harlem grimaces. “Too much fuckin’ information. You know where this place is, then?”

  “You’re joshing me, right?” Toby stops to stare at him. “You ain’t never spent a night in the Tottenham pigpen?”

  Harlem ignores Toby, flicking through Google maps on his phone.

  “Fastest way is up High Street.” Toby flicks a thumb over his shoulder.

  “Nah, we should go Beaconsfield, then Philip Street. Back way.”

  “True. Don’t wanna get searched by filth.” Toby pats his bulging blue backpack.

  “Fuck you got in there?”

  “Something I will not mention in questioning, and may later disown when evidence is given against me.” Toby grins like a madman.

  Harlem undoes the zip a few centimeters, peers in. Molotovs. Bloody hell.

  They step up their pace as they turn the corner past Marcus Garvey Library. A bunch of elderly African men on the steps of the library building stop their chatting to watch the two of them pass by.

  “Careful, sons,” a man in a brown plaid bowling hat calls over the fence. “Lord watch over you all tonight.”

  “Fuck was that bout?” Toby asks Harlem, as they pass the bus garage.

  “You know what?” Harlem smiles and squares his shoulders. “I think that’s ole grandpa’s way of sayin’, ‘Go on, boys, you have our full permission to burn London to the fricken ground.’ ”

  Toby throws back his head and wolf howls as they skirt round a trio of parked cop cars.

  “Holy fuckin’ shit.” Harlem stops to stare at the rippling crowd.

  JUSTICE FOR MARK. STOP POLICE BRUTALITY. MET MURDER. DUGGAN IS ALL OF OUR SONS. They pause a moment to survey the signs: professionally sign-written, home-printed, handmade, scrawled in large childlike handwriting, dripped on with red paint to look like blood. Most of the placard-waving lot look Harlem’s ma’s age or older. Harlem’s well surprised about that, though he guesses he shouldn’t be. After all, it’s all of them povo lot that are being royally fucked over—anyone down here, where him and Toby are.

  Toby pushes through the closely packed crowd, elbowing his way closer to the cop station. Harlem sticks on his mate’s tail, eyes glued to the blue backpack. Swallowed up by the throng, Harlem feels at home. Angry chatter hums over them, rising, collecting, pulsing like the gathering of a bee swarm.

  The evening sunlight hits Harlem’s face. They’ve reached the front of the crowd. The coppers are out in force, ringing the whole police station four or five deep. They’re strapped into bulletproof vests, wearing clear riot masks and carrying shields.

  “We are all Mark Duggan, we are all Mark Duggan, we are all Mark Duggan . . .” A woman somewhere in the crowd starts the refrain on a megaphone, static electrifying her words. Within a minute, her voice has been joined by several hundred. The bloke standing next to Harlem, a burly middle-aged man still wearing his fluoro council-worker’s jacket, raises his right fist and repeatedly punches the air to the staccato mantra echoing around them.

  “We are all Mark Duggan, we are all Mark Duggan, we are all Mark . . .”

  Harlem wishes they’d fuckin’ stop. He—they—are not Mark. Duggan is dead. Shot by the cops, at almost point-blank. Mark’s mother has lost her child. Mark’s children have lost their father. They are not Mark Duggan. He is not Mark Duggan. He is Harlem fuckin’ Jones.

  The cops shift in their positions, ears trained on their radios. Something’s going on. Harlem looks over at Toby. His friend is several meters away, has stopped mid-chant. Their eyes meet. Toby whisks his bag from his back and disappears beneath the crowd. Harlem watches the spot where his friend was standing, holding his breath.

  A smashing sound comes sudden, shotgun-like, scattering the crowd. A Molotov. Harlem breathes out. He and Toby cocktailed a car once—that dickhead principal’s back at the Comprehensive. It was fuckin’ magic; crystal rain glittering everywhere, flame bursting into being from nowhere.

  The crowd has thinned. People have been startled in every direction. The pigs step forward, shields raised in a single movement. Harlem steps back, eyes scanning the sixty or so youths left in front of the station. Toby’s next to him now, passing him something. Harlem’s fingers close on the glass bottle. The rag taped around it reeks of kerosene. His friend fishes in his jeans pocket, quickly tosses him a red plastic lighter. The coppers are moving forward now, pushing them back toward the road.

  “Don’t be stupid, son.” Muffled by the riot mask, one of the coppers tries to raise his voice above the smashing, shouting, running, in the distance, stares Harlem down.

  Harlem smiles. The pigs have no fuckin’ idea what’s coming to them. It’s not just him this time—won’t be just the few of them left behind to fight after the main crowd has scattered. There’s an army of them, all over London, just waiting
for the word. They’re all angry; they’re all armed. They’re all Harlem Jones.

  Harlem flicks the lighter on with his thumb, holds the flame up in front of his face. “My name,” he says, “is not son. My name, my fuckin’ name, is Harlem fuckin’ Jones.”

  Holding the neck of the Molotov, he touches the flame to it and quickly pulls back his arm.

  Hope

  AT ALMOST fourteen, Mildred Lucas was already a beautiful young woman. Cappuccino-skinned, she had inherited what her mother called “good hair,” tightly coiled like telephone cord rather than the dense frizz that crowned her seven younger brothers and sisters.

  “Dat dere be Spanish blood dat done come tru de bloodline, chile. It frum ye fadda’s grandaddy,” Mrs. Lucas would tell her daughter, fondly stroking her curls as Millie worked at the family darning late at night after the younger children had gone to bed. “Folk, dem seh im was a pirate, ye know. Sail de seas an all. Ye tink im would leave nough treasure te keep im family outta want, but all im did leave was dis yere ringlet curl on top ye head.”

  Millie was born, and grew up, in Cidar Valley, Saint Thomas. Her home was nestled in an emerald dip at the foot of the Blue Mountains, some ten miles east of Kingston. The place was a small town, run on coffee and community. Most Cidar Valley residents worked with the coffee bean, in the local fields, factories, and processing plants still owned by British expatriates.

  The Lucas family steered clear of coffee, except for utilizing discarded grounds in the tending of their livelihood—a small block of land on which they grew bananas and yams and kept a large coop of chickens, producing both eggs and meat. A small community of black growers and farmers surrounded the family.

  Millie loved her childhood home. The way the mountains glistened shiny shades of jade at the height of wet season. The way the warm summer winds whispered softly through the cracks in the door of the Lucases’ small cabin. There was little privacy at home, but there was always a fat-nappied, pumpkin-faced baby to be squeezed, and Millie loved the percussion of myriad hopscotch stones simultaneously scraping across the dirt driveway, the rhythmic slosh of her mother’s spicy flying-fish stew being dished into ten wooden bowls at dinnertime.