The Fortune Men

by Nadifa Mohamed

  Madison. Again. May that man burn and burn.

  ‘What do you mean by “more serious charges”?’ the magistrate asks, leafing through the pile of documents before him.

  ‘We are not at liberty to say more about it at this juncture.’

  The magistrate looks at Powell and frowns. ‘If that is the case, I can only grant a remand until Wednesday.’

  The clerk turns to Mahmood. ‘What do you want to say?’

  Mahmood clears his throat but his words still emerge in a whisper. ‘I wish to say nothing.’

  It’s with a sigh that Mahmood passes through the gates of Cardiff Prison. The Victorian building is so close to his former lodgings in Davis Street that its shadow used to keep his room dark for the first half of the day, until the sun managed to vault over its three storeys of muddy brick. He’s in the van, handcuffed, wondering who will collect his trunk and meagre possessions from number 42. Whether Madison and Monday are rooting through his things right now, reading his letters and filching what they want. It’s a headache, constantly looking for new lodgings; when he’s out, he’ll have to move out of Adamsdown, there’s no way he’ll be able to face those two without starting trouble. The fourth move in twelve months and still no prospect of Laura, the kids or a home anytime soon. He’s sick of dealing with the police, feeling the rattle of their bracelets around his wrists, sharing mattresses with the city’s vagrants and derelicts. He’s too old for this and they, the police, are beginning to hate him; there’s something personal brewing there, they speak his name too freely, and want to believe he is capable of anything. He won’t let them use him as the rag they soak up spilt blood with.

  At the processing desk they give him a blanket, a mug, a basin, a new uniform. Just two nights here and then release. They enter A Wing and it smells of boiled cabbage and unwashed men. A teenage prisoner, on his knees with a dustpan and brush, looks up and whispers for a cigarette. Mahmood pulls out his empty trouser pockets as an answer. Sunlight streams down from the high windows and bounces off the metal barriers, grilles and staircases, almost blinding him. The screw leads him up to the third floor. The prison cells, he remembers, are so cramped that with outstretched arms you can touch both walls at the same time.

  After he’s already walked two paces into the cell, Mahmood jumps back on seeing another man already there: a black man lounging in the bottom bunk, his big feet hanging over the edge of the narrow cot.

  ‘Me ain’t no duppy, you na ’ave to jump outta your skin, man.’

  ‘What you doing here?’

  ‘I’ll leave you chaps to get acquainted,’ the screw says, before locking them in.

  Mahmood dumps the objects in his arms on the upper bunk and glances down at Lloyd, the mysterious boxer at number 42.

  ‘Dangerous Drugs Act, anyting else?’ Lloyd laughs.

  ‘But they let you out.’

  ‘And den dey find more on me and call me come back in.’

  ‘Bad luck.’

  Lloyd chews the end of a matchstick and makes a ‘no bother’ face. ‘Whatta bout you?’

  ‘Stealing. Raincoat.’

  ‘I ’eard you call de Ghost, the sun come out too fast and catch you?’

  Mahmood smiles. ‘You can say so.’

  ‘Bad luck to you too.’ His words come out slow and sonorous, in an accent still strongly possessed of Jamaican cadences. He’s a good-looking man, a shade or two lighter than Mahmood and with an American Indian pitch to his eyes and the broad angles of his cheekbones. His hair is close-cropped with a sharp side parting razored into its gleaming whorls.

  ‘I’ve always had a cell to myself,’ Mahmood says, pacing the small strip between door and white-barred window.

  ‘Me know, this place sure is far from de Ritz but as long as dey do our washing and bring the boiled food we can’t complain to no manager.’

  ‘That bastard Madison kick me out of the house.’

  ‘He a cold man, bitter as an ol’ spinstah.’

  ‘Fuck him. I’ll find somewhere better to put my head and a better pocket to put my money.’

  ‘No shortage of rat-infested lodging in dis so-called Tiger Bay.’

  ‘I don’t sleep any place rat-infested.’ Mahmood turns his head sharply towards Lloyd.

  ‘Rest yourself, man. Anywhere we go we ain’t but a foot away from King Rat, whether he below us, above our head, behind the walls, he never far. Buckingham Palace nothing but a playground to him.’

  Mahmood stands, looking straight out of the window at the crown of a bare oak tree on the civilian side of the high perimeter wall; at the sky that has cleared to a blazing, radioactive blue; at the sooty backs of the terraces of Davis Street with their weed-choked backyards ugly with upturned wheelbarrows, rusting bicycles, flapping shirts and grey undergarments pinned to sagging washing lines; at the sloping, rain-beaten outhouses about ready to give up the ghost.

  ‘You getting sentimental for ti bed?’

  ‘No, my woman and boys live over there.’

  ‘You married a backra?’ Lloyd smirks.

  ‘What you mean by backra?’

  ‘A white gal,’ he replies, running his tongue over his small, nicotine-stained teeth before giving them a little kiss.

  Mahmood glances over his shoulder and for a second it seems as if Lloyd is transformed. He has a peculiar energy, serpentine and shifting, that makes it possible to doubt, for a second, that he is human, that he is solid, that he won’t change form before your eyes.

  ‘I thought you Mohammedans couldn’t eat …’ Lloyd stops his joke there when he sees the strange look on Mahmood’s face. ‘You alright?’

  Mahmood turns back to the window. ‘I don’t want to talk about my wife.’

  ‘Your prerogative, chief.’

  ‘I know it.’

  Lloyd sits up, throws his legs over the side of the bed and plays a quick rhythm on his thighs, his broad yellow palms loud and hollow against the dense muscle. ‘Ah!’ he yells, jumping to his feet.

  Mahmood turns quickly, thinking he is about to attack, and raises his fists.

  Lloyd laughs. ‘You wanna spar? Put up dem dukes!’ He throws quick, dart-like punches that stop inches away from Mahmood. His eyes bright, his smile wide, he looks suddenly joyful and childlike.

  Mahmood mimics him and bounces on his feet, hiding his face behind one arm as he jabs with the other, beginning to laugh.

  ‘Round Two. Ding! Ding! Ding! Joe Louis versus Sugar Ray Robinson. De Brown Bomber gets the sugar man on de ropes! Pow! Pow! Pow!’ He pretends to unleash a barrage of blows on to Mahmood’s head and then skips back and twirls with his fists in the air. ‘De uncontested champion of deeee worrrrld!’

  Mahmood drops his arms and complains. ‘You can’t make yourself champion.’

  ‘All the way from Kingston, Jamaica! De undisputed, uncontested, unquestioned champion of de universe!’

  Lloyd wraps his long arms around Mahmood’s shoulders and pats him lightly on the back. ‘Better luck fi next time, Ghost.’

  Mahmood shakes him loose but they are both laughing, midday sun shining through the bars. He feels the close walls of the cell recede and the heat of Lloyd’s touch warm on his skin.

  ‘Ah, man, de summer, de summer in London, de tings dat carry on make you want to cork up your ears.’

  Lights out. Both of them on their backs in their bunks. The mattresses so narrow they have to sleep as still and straight as Nosferatu.

  ‘I’d prowl from Notting Hill Gate to Green Park in half-hour easy, dat was my precinct, some fellas just lime between Marble Arch and Lancaster Gate, but de real top sports come out along de railings near Green Park. I kept a coop of five girls – three from de counties, one Irish, one dark little gal from Spain. All wore red shoes, stylish, nah? Dat was my trademark.’

  Mahmood doesn’t reply, he is near sleep and only half listening to Lloyd’s sleazy tales.

  ‘I kept them in style, it be their own money but I bought class: royal hat-makers, Fren
ch stockings, Italian shoes, dey looked like dey step out of Vogue magazine. I was part loverman, part boss, part fairy godmother. Not dat dey all understood what dey were receiving. One of me English sports would roll up her mink stole and sit ’pon it in de winter if de bench too cold, what do you do with a gal like dat? Not much. But summer, no man can get vex in a London summer, you cool off in de Serpentine and den lie back, eyelids red, on de grass, knowing dat you were born for dis and no one can break de spell. I came all de way from Jamaica so it ain’t de sun dat I’m chasing, but der is someting about how dis country change when der is some warmth to sweeten dese Anglo-Saxons and Celts. How all dose grand buildings on Whitehall, Pall Mall and Regent’s Street look like dey tanning too as dey lose der grey and turn gold. Man, even de pigeons in Trafalgar Square start to strut and get sex crazy, it just pouring out of ev’ry fountain, ev’ry bar tap, ev’ry sweaty armpit. De same madness.’

  Mahmood knows what he means. He had met Laura in the early summer of ’47. At that moment when you can go from umbrellas and woollen coats to short sleeves and ice creams in one day. He’d wait under the railway bridge at the top of Butetown at 5.30 p.m. sharp, just after her shift at the paper factory had finished, always fearing that this time she’d stand him up, but then she’d come along, neat scarf tied under her chin, her mother’s old coat cinched in with a plastic yellow belt. ‘Alright, Moody?’ she’d ask in her deep voice. Then he’d take her bag from her, to look gentlemanly, her metal sandwich tin chiming along with their steps, as they headed to the cinema or a milk bar. He had signed on to a ship headed to Brazil the week they met but had then passed the job along to another Somali, there was just something about her that made him want to dilly-dally. She had made him wait – that he liked – for her, it was marriage or nothing. She also had grit, didn’t give a penny damn about what anyone else thought about anything.

  ‘You know sometimes you see a fancy car sliding along and assume dey after one of de gals? And den you realize it’s you dey checking out. First time it happen, I say to meself, “Jesus!” I afeared it must be some pansy out for dark meat but den der’s a woman in de goddamn passenger seat. She lower her sunglasses and look at me outta de window of de Rolls Royce, real cool, you ’ear? I swear she look just like Marilyn Monroe, a hoity-toity Marilyn with big pearls ’alf choking her neck. De man curl his finger and call me over. “Good evening, good evening, isn’t the weather fine?”, “Oh, certainly is!” We talk de English way and den he tell me dey about to ’ave a party and would like to invite me, no, he say “to extend an invitation”.’ Lloyd chuckles. ‘I say I would be most delighted and get in de back of de car, pale fine leather, smell real good, enough room to stretch my legs out real straight, and we go to der pad in ’Olland Park. I spare you de details but it were a kind of party I never been to before but have known since, went back to de park with three pounds in my pocket too and de gals asking where I’ve been.’

  Mahmood grimaces. He remembers once, early on in Cardiff, that a man coming out of a pub, a bald man squeezed into a three-piece suit, had grabbed his arm and said that his wife would like to say hello. They walk up to his gaunt wife. Black bouffant hair, powder-white face, she look embarrass and try to hide her bad teeth. ‘Say hello!’ the man order and she look down and mutter something like hello. Mahmood pull his arm free and start to walk away. ‘Don’t go,’ the man plead, ‘do you have somewhere to stay? We’ve got a spare bed going to waste.’ He hadn’t understood then why they were so eager to take him home when many wouldn’t even look him in the eye. It had taken time but he eventually understood that for some men it was a real thrill to watch their woman done over by someone else, and a black man gave the biggest thrill of all. It was like learning that he was surrounded by cannibals, his mind couldn’t unwrap it, how could a man do that to his wife? To his children? To himself? It made him feel as if he had gone too far from home, too far to understand anything.

  ‘Man gotta hustle while he still can, no shame to it.’

  Mahmood exaggerates his breathing in reply, feigning sleep, but Lloyd drones on until he sends him to sleep for real.

  Berlin must have browbeaten the badmarin to pull a pound from the lint of their pockets because in the morning a solicitor turns up, asking to see Mahmood, says that he has been sent to represent him. He’s a youngish fella with a sharp widow’s peak and arched black eyebrows that remain high up his forehead as he speaks. He barely meets Mahmood’s eye but just points with a ridged thumbnail to different lines on which he should sign. His careful M. H. Mattan still awkward-looking and crimped like a child’s. The solicitor – was it Morgan? Mahmood barely caught it – stuffs the documents into a large yellow envelope, the ‘REX’ scored out and replaced with ‘REGINA’ in fresh black ink, and leaves with a curt farewell thrown over his shoulder.

  The prison hums like a train station, every little noise made loud and metallic by the bare brick and criss-crossing metal railings. Laughter, spoons clinking against enamel bowls, warders’ whistles, and from one table a man with a baritone voice singing a sorrowful Welsh hymn towards the blank wall. A crew of Maltese prisoners huddle together, their tan skin and neat dark moustaches making them seem healthier and somehow more dangerous than the pale, untrimmed horde of white inmates. There are a few other dark skins that he can see; a couple of West Africans with small nicks to their cheeks, a scrawny Arab with dark half-moons under his eyes, a thick-necked Chinese with tattoos on the backs of his hands, a handsome, preening Indian. The porridge was dished out only minutes ago but already there is the smell of cabbage and boiling meat coming from the kitchen. A day in prison rushes by so fast, as if the warders are eager to put the prisoners to bed and then have the run of the halls and yards themselves, sliding down the bannisters and doing trapeze walks along the railings.

  ‘You coming?’ Lloyd nudges him and leads the way to the exercise yard.

  The yard is not for exercise as much as it’s for standing up, taking in fresh air and looking at the sky without a smudge of soot and bird shit fouling the view. The men circle each other in concentric rings, the eldest in the middle, their shoulders knocking each other, tobacco the main topic of whispered conversation, crimes unspoken and backgrounds unknown.

  ‘Get a load o’ him!’ says a man, and suddenly the yard is a-shiver.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘What you on about?’

  ‘Where am I supposed to look?’

  ‘Singh!’ hisses the first man, his flat bald head now visible as he points up to an external staircase leading to one of the far wings.

  Mahmood cranes his head over the others, resting a hand on Lloyd’s shoulder so that he can gain some height.

  An Indian man in a pale blue turban appears between the black spears bristling along the top of the yard’s brick walls. He’s broad, as long-bearded as a prophet, and moves with the lumbering gait of a dancing bear, his hands cuffed as he trots, up-down, up-down, behind a warder, until they disappear through an arch and out of sight.

  ‘Fat fucker, isn’t he?’ someone shouts and then after a second’s delay, the prisoners in the yard laugh all at once.

  ‘It’ll take more than a rope for ’im! Chain more like, greedy bastard.’

  ‘It’s worth gettin’ a capital if they feed you so well.’

  ‘Oi, Judge, I’ll put the black cap on myself, but just remember I like my steak well done.’

  ‘He won’t be having a steak, boyo, he’s a Hindu! They’ll just have to pay out on rice and spices.’

  ‘He’s a Muslim, you fool!’

  ‘You’re all imbeciles, the man’s a Sikh! You can tell it by the name! Ain’t none of you served with them?’

  ‘I have. Who wants to know what you call a Hindu that’s done everything? Bindair Dundat … you don’t have to pay me for that one, chaps.’

  Some men groan, some chortle, but the mood, the strange chill that Mahmood had felt on seeing the condemned Ajit Singh, is gone, evaporated by the prisoners’ refusal to feel
it.

  ‘How de English put it?’ Lloyd nudges.

  ‘What?’ Mahmood asks, scrunching up his eyebrows.

  ‘Dat man, he look like … his goose well and truly cooked.’

  ‘His fate bring him all the way here from India, imagine.’

  ‘How long you think you stay here?’

  ‘Man, I’ll be out ’fore de week pass.’

  ‘Me too.’

  ‘You say so?’

  ‘By God, man, I finished with this place.’

  ‘You certain dey ain’t got nuttin’ else on you?’

  Mahmood stops pulling at the loose skin around his thumbnails and lies back on the bed. He thinks back over the last few weeks and, apart from one time when he pickpocketed an old fella at the Newport races, he’s clean. ‘Nothing.’

  ‘You ’ear about de Jew woman who got rob an’ kill in her shop in ol’ Bute Street?’

  ‘Who hasn’t?’

  ‘She had a nice big safe in der. Big prize.’

  ‘You think so? Look to me she sold only small pieces.’

  ‘You step inside her place?’

  ‘Many times. Got some shirts, dresses for the wife.’

  ‘I hear she a nasty woman, a real Jew, de kind dat hear pennies jingling in your pocket as you pass de street.’

  ‘Once she tried to sell me a bundle of shirts with a couple missing.’

  ‘Oh, you see what I’m saying, den? She probably messed with de wrong person. Dey tussle, she die, and den he think why should I leave de place empty-handed? Manslaughter dey call it.’

  ‘Who tussles with a woman and pulls out a knife?’

  ‘It was a knife? I didn’t read dat.’

  ‘Or a razor, whatever it was, you can’t find no justification.’

  ‘If a man give a good case to de police, I bet dey would go easy on ’im.’

  ‘Where you been where they go easy on any man unless he got money or know the right people? I seen them wake their own white beggars with a kick to the head.’

  ‘Nah, man, you gotta learn how to sweet-talk dem, dey simple boys in uniform, cops and robbers need each other, you give meaning to der life and dey to yours.’