The Fortune Men

by Nadifa Mohamed

  He is not sure the coat will fit Laura’s small island of a body. After their marriage he had explored her as inquisitively as Ibn Battuta, her green veins showing through her mottled skin as clearly as branching rivers and streams. Her breasts firm and goose pimpled under his hard grip. Truth be told, he had hurt her that first time, a mistake caused by forgetting what it was like with a virgin, but also because he had been an angrier man then; he was using her body to avenge himself of every laugh, ‘nigger’ and slammed door. Driving himself into her without being able to meet her unblinking eyes. Just before meeting Laura, he’d docked in America, in New Orleans, where even black and white shit had to be separated, and where any white woman could make you carry her bags, or have you killed for catching her eye.

  Things had changed when he had come back from sea and felt the thump of his child inside Laura; first, irrational panic that this white body contained something so precious to him, that his sixteen-generation abtiris would be passed down to a child mingled with the blood of Welsh miners and Irish refugees. The heaving as the baby turned somersaults and thrashed like a sea creature beneath her taut hot skin amazed him. Then it became his haven, her body, somewhere private and sanctified that allowed the stresses and humiliations of the day to fall away. Her scars, smells and private parts becoming as familiar to him as his own until she complained that she wanted to be left alone, that she was sore and constantly pregnant and wanted a break from it. They could only find black-walled, squalid places to rent as a mixed couple in Cardiff, and had no chance at a council house, so they had decided to start afresh. They moved to Hull to live together properly, as a family, until one day, home from a shift at the steelworks, he came back to an empty house. Boom! She had packed up a suitcase and returned to Cardiff with the boys. First complaining that she couldn’t stand living with her family and then running back, crying, saying she was lonely without them. Just like that, Laura had pulled her body away from him, had deported him from it, and slowly all they had to talk about was the children, or money, or what her mother or father had said. Laura no longer the teenager who had so easily told her parents no but now a woman who seemed to delight in telling him no. No, no, no to everything. Awake in his cold bed at Doc’s place, hearing her voice telling him no, no, no: to getting back together, to trying for a girl, to moving to London. He can’t accept the possibility that another man might one day be pawing at her, filling her with his seed, desecrating his temple. Everyone laughing at her, saying she’s too stretched out for a decent white man; and her moving from black man to black man, like they do, growing slack and pliant. Falling for someone who might beat her or pimp her out. Using black men like knives to hurt herself with, like some end-of-the-line white girls did, proof of how far they had fallen from redemption. No, she isn’t that type, he reminds himself; if anything, she is the blade that he has cut himself on. They need to stay married to keep her respectable; those old heifers on Davis Street can only say so much while they are properly wedded. But if she slides they will finish her.

  Mahmood had known before Laura that their marriage was a kind of death for her, and he understood that she needed time to grieve. He had swallowed his pride and let her name their firstborn son after her favourite brother, who had moved out of the house in disgust at their marriage. Now, he can see that she is growing alert to status and all its tiny degrees: she keeps the boys away from the Qur’anic school, uses their Welsh names, wants them baptized and raised just like their cousins. She is retracing the steps they had taken together. He had arrived at their house not long ago, and found his boys sat around the table, eating boiled pig’s trotters. Almost retching at the slick oil on his sons’ lips, he’d got so angry that he’d just picked up their plates and thrown them into the backyard, akhas!

  Mahmood had also blown his top another time, when he had told her mother that he would kill her dead if he saw her with another man. Laura had heard him from the landing upstairs and bellowed a stream of cuss words at his departing back. Course, he didn’t mean it, she would know that, but love can drive a man to madness. This place, too, had a way of making you demented. Look at that poor Sikh bastard, Ajit Singh, waiting for the hangman in his cell at Cardiff jail. Go stir-crazy after a white girl threw him over, so he shoots her outside a hospital in Bridgend with a thousand witnesses to hand the black cap to the judge. A damned foolish end to a life.

  Diana watches from the bus stop outside the shop as the main Eid al-Adha procession troops down from the canal all the way round Loudoun Square and ends at the zawiya on Peel Street, while Sheikh Hassan’s competing but smaller group dawdle up from the docks. Children dressed in Yemeni thobes and headdresses, with tin discs and red embroidery on the bodices, lead the adults in song and step. Even Christian, Buddhist and Jewish children have joined their friends, dressed in nativity costumes of Mary blue and shepherd check, miming the verses of the Arabic nasheeds and raising their voices at the choruses, ‘Ya Allah, Ya Allah, Ya Allah kareem.’ A darbouka keeps the beat and is added to by the pounding footsteps of hundreds of celebrants. Up front is Ali Salaiman, proprietor of the Cairo Café, holding one side of a navy banner stitched with Holy Scripture by Cardiff’s convert wives. His own wife, Olive, stands outside their café handing out meat sambusas and paper cups of Vimto cordial. Aproned matrons, flat-capped gamblers, ruined rummies, yapping dogs, fresh-faced bar girls and leather-jacketed teenage delinquents watch from the pavement and wave out of windows. A few tatty Union Jacks, left over from VE-Day celebrations, flap about. The giddy children delight in what they call Muslim Christmas and take cellophane bags of boiled sweets and gobstoppers greedily, without knowing or caring what the day commemorates. The story she knows well enough from the Torah: sacrifice of a child as small and innocent as them. Ismail’s throat reddened by the blade but miraculously not cut; his silence in Abraham’s arms as, weeping but steadfast, the prophet obeyed God’s command; the ram then sent down at the last moment to replace Ismail and deliver God’s mercy. Both the trial and deliverance celebrated.

  The stumpy dome of Noor ul Islam zawiya comes at the end of a row of brick chimneys on a plain grey terrace on Peel Street. The original mosque had been destroyed in the Cardiff blitz of ’41, Mahmood had heard, and this stark white building with its pointed-arch windows had replaced it; the black paint along its edges giving it the look of a child’s pencil drawing. The voices of boys in prayer caps and turbans chanting religious verses in lilting Welsh accents stream out of the window, the one-legged Yemeni teacher holding a cane to the blackboard, the wall behind him covered in medallions of hand-painted Islamic calligraphy and leather-bound kitabs. Mahmood wipes his feet before entering and then takes his shoes off in the small vestibule leading to the prayer hall. The qibla glows with neon Arabic letters along the niche’s crest. It’s sometime between ’asr and maghrib prayers and the hall is empty apart from one old soul clicking his tusbah beads, his yellowed soles tucked under him and his slouched spine heaving to the right. The names of Allah come in whispered fragments from him: The Witness, The Friend, The Evolver, The First, The Last.

  Along the stairs, worshippers’ footsteps have already worn away the dark varnish to reveal the pale whorled pine of each steep step. Mahmood skips up them, his keys jingling in his pocket as he leaps over two at once. He stops at the first floor where there is a meeting room decked in Persian rugs and low Arab cushions. He sees their legs first, socked feet splayed out before them, as a silver samovar steams to a boil, fogging up the bare window. Their cheeks bulge with qat, brought over frozen from Aden so that it is now dry and acrid – still chewed, however, for the sake of custom if not pleasure.

  ‘Ya salam! Look who has returned,’ says the mosque caretaker, Yaqub.

  ‘Assalamu alaikum, kef haq?’ Mahmood spreads a wide smile over his face. ‘Getting an early start on the chewing today?’

  There is a delay before anyone responds. ‘Liverpool docks on strike so no work today.’ It is Ibn Abdullah, the one-time alcohol
ic who now has a dark callus on his forehead from pressing it so often against a prayer mat.

  ‘You have no shame, Ibn Mattan? You come back to the scene of your crime.’ It’s Yaqub again; he rises to his feet and blocks Mahmood’s view of the suitcases and steamer trunks lining the far wall. They are preparing for a hajj to Mecca, the luggage full of ‘charity’: nylon shirts, cotton underpants and bras, boxes of penicillin and aspirin, baby milk powder, English dictionaries and children’s textbooks. Mahmood wonders how much of it will reach the poor that it is intended for and how much will be gifted to their families. Yaqub follows his eyes to the suitcases and recites a hadith cursing thieves to the lowest cadaab.

  ‘It was a loan.’

  The Yemenis laugh. ‘Kebir, oh kebir, ya Iblis!’

  ‘And I always pay my debts.’ Mahmood reaches for his pocket.

  ‘You need to be careful, Mahmood, the devil on your left shoulder will soon collapse from exhaustion writing all the trouble you get into, have mercy on him.’

  ‘Well, let him strike off this one thing at least,’ he raises the cash in his hand over his head, ‘you all see this?’ then he slaps it hard into Yaqub’s palm, ‘I’ve put in a little more for my donation.’ Mahmood strikes a pose in the middle of the circle, chest out, chin up and mock salutes the portrait of Imam Ahmad bin Yahya over the fireplace. It’s so poorly executed that the bulging-eyed, drug-addled, minuscule King of Yemen looks more goblin than the jinn he is reputed to be; the jinn who has escaped untold assassination attempts by jealous relatives, republicans and fanatics.

  Stepping out into the cold air, Mahmood’s conscience is lighter but so is his wallet, noticeably so, worryingly so. This is what always happens. A big win that haemorrhages into nothing overnight. There is a strong smell of incense on his jacket that he hadn’t noticed inside the mosque. His mother had always said it was a sign of evil not to enjoy the sacred smell of oonsi but it remains a headache-inducing odour to him.

  It felt ridiculous lugging the teddy bear down the narrow street, the small distance between numbers 9 and 42 Davis Street punctuated by twitching curtains and urgently slammed doors. The atmosphere of Adamsdown is cooler and meaner than that of Butetown, with the few black and brown residents corralled into a handful of run-down boarding houses. It is where Irish dockworkers, hunchbacked deliverymen and sleep-deprived factory workers live with their families, in brown-brick terraced houses bought with council loans and paid off within fifteen brutal years, the spectre of compulsory purchase and demolition hanging suspended somewhere over the sea. So far, the only objectionable thing that the sea had actually blown in was the foreign seamen. It always tickled Mahmood that Laura’s mother, Fanny, had told his wife as a young teenager to cross the street if a foreign man ever tried to talk to her, and when Laura asked what she should do if he followed, the answer was to scream. No one screams at the sight of him but they are generous with muttered insults, evil stares, laughs, dishwater splashed in his direction by the women, and pebbles thrown by their young sons. He lives here because Laura lives here, with her parents and youngest siblings, in a house hit by shrapnel from a German bomb during the blitz, which left behind a leaking roof and a spiderweb-cracked bathroom window. Mahmood knocks the brass knocker of the blue door and gathers the bear and bag up in his arms. The sound of David’s small feet pounding up the hallway quickens his breath.

  ‘Mammy, Mammy! Daddy’s at the door!’ he shouts out, pressing his nose up to the frosted glass and leaving a wet smear.

  Mahmood laughs at the sound of his son’s voice and every tight, gnarled sinew of his body slackens, the constriction of his lungs only perceptible now that it has lifted.

  ‘Wait for me,’ he hears Laura call out, but David is grabbing for the door, stretching his body on tippy toes and struggling with the lock.

  At last, he’s managed it and Mahmood is both proud and afraid.

  ‘Daddy!’ David trills, overcome and wriggling as his dad lifts him up with one arm.

  ‘Aabbo,’ Mahmood corrects in Somali, ‘call me aabbo,’ but the words fail, just the nuzzle and smell of him is everything.

  ‘Bear mine?’ he asks, pawing at the huge stuffed toy.

  ‘For you and your brothers, yes.’

  ‘No, mine!’

  Mahmood places David back on the floor and gives him the bear to hold but it’s too big, he loses his balance and sinks under it, as if assaulted, but happily so.

  ‘Where am I meant to put that?’ Laura steps out of the front room, cradling Mervyn to her bare breast.

  ‘Anywhere you want, my girl.’ Mahmood smiles.

  She rolls her eyes and pads back in a pair of men’s woollen socks to the settee. ‘Shush, Omar’s sleeping upstairs.’

  Mahmood follows her, helping David carry the bear as its head drags on the floor.

  The fire’s burning but she’s there alone, with a mug of tea and the newspaper balanced on the settee’s wooden arm. ‘Where are your parents?’

  ‘Bingo. The water’s just boiled, go and get yourself a mug if you want.’ She looks gaunt and fatigued, her wristwatch loose and restlessly circling her fine bones.

  ‘I haven’t come for no tea.’ Mahmood swings the canvas bag in his hand so that it falls at her feet.

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘Look yourself.’

  Pulling the groggy baby away from her breast, she languidly tugs her brassiere back into place, the large raspberry-like nipple receding slowly from his view. She rests the baby’s head on a cushion and sighs before bending over and opening the bag.

  He watches every small muscle of her face for a reaction; imagining that he can see the pupils of her large translucent eyes expanding and contracting as she looks the coat up and down. She strokes her hand over the fabric and flips open the satin lining. Small appreciative sounds escape her lips but nothing coherent or unambiguously grateful.

  ‘It’s nice,’ she says finally.

  ‘It’s real nice,’ he corrects.

  Folding the coat up in her lap, Laura turns to her estranged husband and asks, ‘Where did you get it from? It looks and smells brand new.’

  ‘A shop up in the town, I paid good money for it, got lucky at horses, at the races,’ he fumbles.

  Laura has perfected a glance when it comes to Mahmood that signifies scepticism, amusement and a ‘let’s leave it there’ finality.

  ‘I can’t accept this, Moody.’

  ‘Who says you can’t? God? The King?’ He paces the carpet in front of the fire. ‘You get given a present, you can’t give it back.’

  ‘I can’t be encouraging you … please! Just sit down, you’re giving me a headache!’

  David looks up from the teddy bear he’s been wrestling with and his eyes flicker back and forth between them, afraid there is going to be another row.

  Mahmood sits in her father’s high-backed, uncomfortable armchair and closes his eyes for a second, defusing his rising temper. He opens his eyes and lets them rest on the wallpaper, patterned with tendrils of lilac leaves that seem to float.

  ‘I cannot believe you stole from the zawiya,’ she says softly, carefully, bitterly.

  ‘I had to,’ he says, resting his temple between thumb and forefinger.

  ‘What kind of a devil of a reason is that? You had to?’

  ‘I had to pay your maintenance, didn’t I? You think the court just writes it down for a laugh?’

  ‘You have missed too many of those payments for me to buy that excuse.’

  David snuggles up between his father’s legs and sucks the knuckles of his right hand, his foot scratching nervously at his calf; his eyes are anxious and beseeching.

  ‘I was broke. One hundred per cent skint. Will you accept that?’

  ‘I will because it’s the truth.’ Laura smiles, part victory, part love. ‘I could write a book about being skint, Moody, it’s nothing new to me, I don’t let it get under my skin. But stealing, I’ve sat too long in Sunday school to think that’s alright.�
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  ‘Well, I never went to Sunday school but I went and sat with the macalim under a tree on Fridays and he told me that thieves’ hands should be cut off. Real life teaches us something else.’

  Their voices are still soft and it’s a relief to both of them that the tension has quietly dissolved. Mahmood runs his long fingers through his son’s curly brown hair, massaging the scalp. David’s whole skull fits neatly within the span of his own large hand.

  ‘You are your father’s boy, ain’t you, David?’

  David smiles in contentment.

  ‘I paid them back, you know, the zawiya, gave them more than I took.’

  ‘That doesn’t surprise me, Moody, that’s the kind of man you were when I married you.’