The Fortune Men

by Nadifa Mohamed

  It takes Violet a moment to understand what the sound is. Her nightmare is still live, filling her mind with images of hands banging on the windows of a synagogue as the entire white structure sweeps up into flames, the night sky shimmering green and blue from the Northern Lights, the cries of men, women and children lifting up to it unheeded.

  An alarm.

  An alarm ringing.

  Not for those dying inside the shul, but for her, in her own home. She sits bolt upright in bed and holds her head in her hands, her heart pounding louder than the metallic rattle of the burglar alarm. Edging her feet into her slippers, she picks a silver candlestick up from the dressing table and switches on all the lights. Hearing footsteps on the landing, she holds on tight to the doorknob and feels almost ready to faint. It would be easier to just die here quietly, she thinks, than to face whatever is on the other side. Leaning her forehead against the door, she closes her eyes and slowly turns the knob.

  ‘It’s alright, Violet, the window’s busted but there’s no one down there.’ Diana is standing at the top of the stairs, a torch in her overcoat pocket and a hammer in each hand. Seeing her sister’s bloodless face, she stomps over and pulls her into her arms. ‘Don’t be getting into a state, Sis, everything’s fine. Whoever it was chickened out.’

  Shaking, Violet holds on to Diana and tries to gather her nerves together; it’s not just the break-in, or the one before, or the one before that, but the letters that land on the doormat, counting the relatives murdered in Eastern Europe. Names that she barely remembers from her childhood, figures she can just about identify from black and white family portraits now come to her in her dreams, crowding her dining table and asking for more food, more water, a place to rest – please, please, please – pleading with her in Polish, kuzyn, ocal mnie, cousin, save me. Nowhere feels safe any more, it is as if the world is trying to sweep her away, her and everyone like her, creeping through locked doors and windows to steal the life from their lungs. Avram dead, Chaja Dead, Shmuel dead. In Lithuania, in Poland, in Germany. More and more names to add to the memorial plaque at the Temple. The facts still seem unreal. How could they all go? The letters from Volackis in New York and London pile up but make less and less sense, rumours of who perished and where, when and how, a drip feed of death with a little happy news forced in at the end – a birth in Stepney, a graduation in Brooklyn.

  ‘Which window is it?’ she finally asks.

  ‘The little one around the back. We’ll call Daniel in the morning and get him to brick it up. I’ve put boxes up against it for now. Come on, get in with Gracie, and I’ll keep an eye on things.’

  Nodding obediently, Violet creeps into her niece’s room and slides into bed beside her; gathering the child’s sleeping body up in her arms, she feels even smaller and more vulnerable than her. There is an atlas on the floor beside the bed and Violet reaches for it, flicking through; the red of the British Empire tints the pages. She’s had to learn so much more of the world recently, learnt the names of places that sound fantastical – Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Manchuria. The strong young men and women who had hidden in forests and survived Hitler are scattered, running, running, running from the catastrophe, going further and further east, as if looking to jump off the edge of the world. It’s become the work of spinsters, who don’t have the excuse of husbands or families, to round up these waifs and strays, these communal children who trust no one but take whatever is given. She sends money to these distant relatives and even to their destitute friends through banks in Amsterdam, Frankfurt, Istanbul, Shanghai, never knowing if it has got to them in time, or if they will come to their senses and turn back to civilization, if it is still that. Violet drops the atlas back on the floor. The rhythm of Grace’s inhalations and exhalations calm her but not to the point of sleep; her ears are fixed on the sound of Diana sweeping the glass away downstairs, her feet marching up and down the floorboards, fearless and strong, until finally she pounds up the stairs as the first birds call up the dawn.

  Daniel arrives while they are eating breakfast, the fear of the night veiled by the homely scents of coffee and toast. Violet blushes as he leans over to grab a crust from her plate, his deep, foreign-accented voice thrilling her and his bearlike body filling the dining room. She snatches a glance at his pale, wide-eyed face lost in the black fur of his beard and astrakhan hat, crumbs catching in his moustache. Musky cologne emanates from his damp sheepskin coat as he pulls it off and hangs it up in the hallway. He belongs to Maggie, their middle sister, but desire and envy have crept into Violet’s heart. Her body is flush with yearnings stronger than she has ever felt before, and Daniel is the focus of them, his tall and broad frame like a sepulchre for her hope of some day bearing children. He is in her waking dreams: his lips, his hands, his pink nipples lewd and raspberry-like against his snowy skin. The fire in her womb suddenly flaring before the change moves the heat somewhere else. She looks forward to the end of it all – anything rather than this lovelorn, girlish infatuation with a man who sees her as a sister.

  ‘Maggie is worried about you girls, she thinks the street is getting worse. I tell her it nothing, cost of the business, but she like a chicken this morning, pacing, pacing. She wants me to get you a gun!’ Daniel pulls up a stepladder and eases the remaining glass out of the window frame. ‘It must have been a little fella who think he can come through this window.’

  With his back to Violet, she cannot help but look at his backside straining against his trousers. She looks quickly away when she sees Diana smiling at her.

  ‘No need for that,’ Diana replies. ‘Me and Vi have agreed that we couldn’t stab a burglar but we could certainly batter one. Vi came out of her room ready with a candlestick last night, I’m sure she would have made mincemeat out of him.’

  Daniel’s laugh booms out and then it’s just the grind of mortar mixing, the scrape of metal on stone, and the tap-tap of bricks piling one on top of the other. The rectangle of light quickly extinguished and another barrier placed between the world and Violet.

  After Daniel departs for the gentleman’s outfitters he owns with his brothers on Church Street, Grace kisses them goodbye and strolls the few minutes to St Mary’s primary school, which sits beside the church where most of the locals are baptized, married and laid to rest. Diana sets up her table as a turf commissioner in the small, damp outbuilding in the yard, the radio turned on to follow the day’s major racing fixtures. Her nails, painted so thickly scarlet they look dipped in vinyl, are the only colour in the room. Her face will be slowly made-up throughout the day, like a photograph developing in a darkroom, until at 5 p.m. she will look ready for a red carpet; the transformation from young widow to aged starlet complete. Violet, on the other hand, is habitually bare-faced and clean-nailed, she wears a simple navy calf-length dress and her father’s silver war badge pinned to her brassiere for courage.

  One display is still how their father left it; full of expensive compasses and ivory-inlaid hipflasks that are beyond the reach of their customers but still distinguish the shop from the others on the road. The rest of Volacki’s is engorged with cheap and popular items: wellington boots hanging off hooks, black school plimsolls crammed into wooden cubbyholes, cotton dresses hanging ethereally from a rail near the stockroom, woollen blankets wrapped in tissue paper and stored on the upper shelves. This shop is a ‘padded cell’ in Diana’s eyes, a place of madness whose method only Violet knows, the merchandise piling around her in small, unstable heaps. She sells knives, razors, rope, oilskin hats and coats, good strong work boots, sea bags, pipes, tobacco and snuff, but the real money is in cashing advance notes of pay for departing sailors. The heavy hand-cranked till collects more than a hundred pounds a day in its deep trays – and is only touched by Violet – never mind the safe or drawer where she keeps larger notes. The last customers arrive after the official closing hour, knocking discreetly yet impatiently on the glass panels to buy an urgent box of matches or cigarettes; everyone bending the law a little to ma
ke life easier.

  TWO

  Laba

  The plump, fat-marbled kosher mince begins to sizzle and brown in the pan and Mahmood shakes a teaspoon of chilli powder into the oil. He had bought kosher all the time in East London because he had a good butcher only a few doors down, and kosher is as good as halal, religiously speaking, but now, for some reason, it also tastes better to him. Holding the mysterious Hindi-labelled spices up to his nose, he picks out cumin, turmeric and ginger – good enough – and spills a teaspoon of it over the lamb. He’ll eat some mince with a side of tinned sweetcorn for lunch and then mix the remainder with the last of the rice in the evening. This is as much good eating as he’s capable of now, even though he had learnt how to steam, stew and roast while a ship’s pantry boy, and to bake from the little kitchen job he’d had in the Somali boarding house he’d roomed in last year.

  Mahmood still can’t accept that he is just another uncared-for man eating from a plate on his lap in the solitude of a cold rented room. He had always helped Laura in the kitchen – what other husband would have? He’d had to, because she had no sense of what good food tasted like; he’d managed to get her to use herbs and spices, but still her carrots would be undercooked, her potatoes mushy, her meat dry and gasping. Now, meals are just another thing he has to do by himself, for himself. Everything with just his own damned hand.

  Mahmood has to remind himself that he doesn’t hate Laura. That he is not better off without her. That those red thoughts that jut into his mind as he’s walking down the street – telling him that her tits are too small, her arse too flat, her face too long – are not what he really believes.

  Laura has fixed him in this longitude and latitude. He’s only living in this house – with black men he has no common language, culture or religion with – so that he can stake her out, and keep things rolling between them until she comes to her senses. He watches the company she keeps and crosses the road to see his sons every few days. In many ways it’s a come-up from that derelict Somali boarding house he was told to leave after the mosque business. He has a room to himself with a lock on it rather than that attic room sprawling with camp beds. He doesn’t have to put up with the all-night coughing, or gossip, or damp laundry dripping from the lines suspended across the ceiling. All of the other seamen were lazy beggars, rolling around in bed waiting for someone else to get the stove hot in the mornings. Mahmood remembers the yellowed list of regulations pinned up above his head that Warsame had read to him before telling him to pack his bags.

  The Seaman’s Lodging House keeper shall not sell or be engaged in the sale of intoxicating liquor, or be engaged or interested in the business of a Clothier, Outfitter, or a Slop-dealer.

  The Medical Officer of Health, officers of the Board of Trade, and Police have right of access and inspection to his premises at any time.

  He must provide at least 30 cubic feet of air space for each person in his dormitories, and not accommodate at any time a larger number of lodgers than has been authorized by the Council.

  He must follow out certain provisions regarding sanitation, water closets and washing facilities, and general hygiene. He must affix in a prominent place a copy of the City’s Byelaws in this respect together with his scale of charges, and not make a higher charge than is provided by the scale.

  He must not admit or fail to exclude from his premises any thief, reputed thief, prostitute, or reputed prostitute, or any other person of immoral or improper character.

  Mahmood had laughed when Warsame got to that last rule. So he was no better than a prostitute? Ajeeb. He packed his trunk and vacated his 30 cubic feet of air space; moving into Doc’s place that very same afternoon.

  Red brick and leaded glass, the smell of bleach and defeat. The Employment Exchange has the atmosphere of a church; job notices flutter from the wall like paper prayers, and mean council workers dole out state relief with the aloofness of priests placing wafers into indigent mouths. Out-of-work miners, dockworkers, drivers, handymen, barrel boys, plumbers and factory workers mill around, their eyes avoiding each other. The pinewood floor is dented from the tramp of work boots near the counter and littered with cigarette butts and matches.

  ‘WELDER NEEDED’

  ‘TEN YEARS’ EXPERIENCE NECESSARY’

  ‘UNDER 21 YRS?’

  ‘APPRENTICESHIPS’

  ‘CARPENTERS NEEDED’

  ‘GRAVEDIGGING’

  Mahmood shoves his hands into his sports jacket and paces from one notice to another, looking for boiler or foundry work. He has only shrapnel in his pocket, having lost the rest at poker. There is nothing worth trying for; none of the usual firms that can be relied upon to take coloured fellas are advertising. He looks again at the gravedigging notice. It’s for Western Cemetery, the pay not half bad, but the thought of shovelling hard, damp earth and filling it with stiff corpses makes him shake his head and mutter, ‘Astaghfirullah.’

  Pulling his homburg hat low over his eyebrows, he takes a yellow ticket stamped with a 9 and waits his turn for the counter beside one of the heavy coiled radiators. The heat from the cast iron blasts through his thin trousers and teases his skin, somewhere between pleasure and pain, and he rocks his body back and forth, letting the heat rise and dissipate. On the last tramper he had taken, the owners had installed new boilers and all the brass fittings had shone gold in the white light of the furnaces. He had stepped back to admire the conflagration, before shovelling more coal in and turning the white light into an almost sentient, colourless gas that roved backwards and up the chimney like a jinni escaping a lamp. He had birthed that fire and nurtured it, from yellow to orange to white to blue and then that colour that had no name, just pure energy. He’d wondered what it would be like to step forward the few inches that separated him from it, whether, like in cadaabka, his skin would just fall from his flesh like a sheet. He had been formed by those fires, turned from a puny pantry boy into a knotted-muscled stoker who could stand at hell’s gate for hours at a stretch, his face roasted and grimy with coal dust.

  ‘Number nine come forward.’

  Mahmood takes the chair in front of Counter 4 and places his hat on his knee, before handing over his grey identity card.

  The woman in front of him is in a brown tweed suit and maroon lipstick, her hair done up with a net over the large bun. She looks at Mahmood over the rims of small wire-framed glasses. ‘What can I do for you, Mr Mattan?’ she says, examining the card.

  ‘I need national assistance, no job good for me.’

  ‘What work can you do?’ she asks, lengthening each word.

  ‘Boiler work. Quarry.’

  ‘Let me see if there is anything else that we are yet to pin up.’

  She looks through the files on her side of the partition; her manner is good, better than some of the other clerks, who seem to resent him, whether he is looking for work or drawing dole.

  ‘There is one foundry job here but I don’t think you will be suitable,’ she says, leaving the rest unsaid.

  He meets her gaze, swallows a bitter smile.

  She stamps his card in the right places and counts out two pounds and six shillings.

  ‘Have a pleasant day, Mr Mattan.’

  ‘And you, madam.’

  Mahmood rises and folds the £1 notes into his pocket book, before putting on his hat and leaving the melancholia of the Exchange for the thud and clamour of the racetrack.

  The turf at Chepstow is turned up nicely; drizzle lifting the smell of soil, grass and horseshit into the air. Mahmood had had a tough morning at the greyhound track but is feeling better now that he is on to the horses. Hooves thundering, the ground shaking, his heart thudding, the other punters shouting or whispering, ‘Come on, come on!’ Gasps as a rider is thrown off and then, with no breath escaping his lungs, his horse breaks clear from the wave of undulating muscle and mane and is whipped, whipped, whipped, head daggered forward, across the finishing line. The confetti of betting stubs thrown to the wind is confir
mation that he was one of the few sharp enough to take a risk on the stallion; over ten pounds in winnings on a horse with 20/1 odds. Mahmood had changed his bet at the last moment, after catching sight of the horse in the paddock; he was a fine-looking black thing, and Mahmood could have sworn that he had nodded to him as he passed by on the groom’s reins. A lucky name too, Abyssinia. Names beginning with an A are always good to him – and he has visited Abyssinia too, another sign. He should lean more on the As, he thinks. So far he has won on:

  Achtung

  Ambitious Daisy

  Apache

  Artist

  Angel Song

  Artois

  Arkansas’s Pride

  Atlantic Revelry.