The Fortune Men

by Nadifa Mohamed

  Mahmood is incredulous, what kind of gabay is this? ‘They not no simple boys and I don’t need them in my life.’

  ‘I’m just saying … whatever a man done in his life der is a way of putting your best foot first.’

  ‘And that way is by telling them nothing, nothing or just lies, that is the only way to talk with police. Keep your mouth shut or lead them far away from where they want to take you. If you don’t understand that you should go back to your own country.’

  Lloyd laughs. ‘Don’t rush me, man, I know when I go back. January the first, 1960. Dat be de date I promise myself and dat de date I’ll go, not a moment ’fore, unless de Almighty got someting to say ’bout it.’

  ‘Why 1960?’

  ‘Cos dat will be ten full years of Blighty, a decade, and den I can say I saw it, lived it, and left it. You planning on going back to your piece o’ desert?’

  ‘I can’t think about it until my boys grown, there is nothing for me anywhere they don’t be.’

  ‘I bet you some kinda prince, or chieftain’s son, or second cousin to Selassie heself.’

  ‘Who me?’ Mahmood laughs a laugh that seems to catch in his throat. ‘You kidding, we had a little shop in Hargeisa, maybe ten camels grazing out in the desert with the rest of our clan’s. Nothing to rush back to … my father was short like Selassie, that the only thing same about them.’

  ‘So you come here to try your luck like de rest of us? My schoolmates dey tell me dat Old Blighty on her knees and dat I should come take her from behind,’ he cackles.

  ‘I am a gambling soul. Even as a small boy if someone say to me, “Oh, I know you won’t do that or you can’t do this,” I look them in the eye and just do it. I take everything life give me and throw it in fate’s face. My mother sent me on a lorry with traders to Dire Dawa and in the hills I fell out the back and hurt my arm. My arm look like this, you see?’ He twists his arm awkwardly at the elbow and stretches it out so Lloyd can see it from the bottom bunk. ‘The men tell me, “Go home, go see a bone-setter, you can’t carry on with us now,” but I just force my arm straight and climb back on to the lorry, go all the way to Dire Dawa. No one can tell me no. I will just tell them yes.’

  ‘Dat’s a mouth of big talk, bwoy, you expounding your philosophy?’

  ‘What that word?’

  ‘What? Philosophy?’

  ‘No, the other one.’

  ‘Expound. Dictionary word. It mean to sound off, fancy word for explain.’

  ‘Yes, I’m expounding. Listen, let me tell you the first time I was arrested. Rhodesia. 1945. I had started my journey down to South Africa to join the merchant navy. Already made it through, let me think … Kenya and then Tanganyika … when I crossed the border into Northern Rhodesia and then those uniformed dogs got me the minute I hit that red soil. Arrested me for illegal entry and threw me in jail, first time in my life, I was still a young boy, all bones and no sense. No water, nowhere to lie down, just fifty black men in a cell sleeping standing up, shitting into an empty milk powder can. Men coughing and you feel their TB on your neck, your face, enough to make you sick just thinking about it. Somehow, I still don’t know how, a Somali butcher from my clan, his name Haji Ali, heard that I was in jail in Lusaka and he put up twenty-five pounds bail, he don’t know me from Adam but he bailed me out and I was deported south, where I was heading anyway. From the first pay packet from my first ship I sent him thirty pounds. You don’t forget. Good or bad. That is also in my philosophy.’

  ‘Yes, Jehovah! Dat is de righteous way. Whatever sins we commit we leaven dem wit godly acts.’

  ‘We try, we try, we listen to the angel on our right shoulder and the devil on the left.’

  ‘Dat how you Mohammedans see it? Well, Amen, dat’s something I can live by.’

  Mahmood hadn’t really sent any money to Haji Ali, but he had intended to, still intended to, and liked the idea of being the kind of man who did things like that. A just outlaw.

  In the showers, where the water is so aggressively cold that Mahmood’s heart is thumping in his chest, and the green, medicated soap keeps slipping from his trembling hands and thudding against the cracked white tiles, something strange happens. At first, the sound merges with the splutter and shush of water through the old, cantankerous pipes, the splatter of feet through puddles, the slap of palms against wet skin, but slowly it separates and becomes distinct. The naked prisoners, head bowed and in a uniform of soapsuds, hiss, Ssssssss, first softly then rising to a barbed crescendo. The message is clear, there is an informer within their ranks, Mahmood flicks his head left to right, he catches Lloyd’s eye and he begins to hiss too. Only Mahmood is quiet, ignorant of who the target of the shaming is.

  Wednesday arrives. Magistrates. A change again into civvy clothes. Dark grey trousers, green shirt, green waistcoat, they don’t give no tie or collar, so Mahmood feels like Charlie Chaplin in a pair of oversized suede shoes. He catches sight of his hair, frizzed up in crazy waves around his head, and tries to flatten it with his hand and a bit of spit, like his mother used to irritatingly do when he was small. In the police van, his thoughts briefly settle on ‘the more serious matter’ that the inspector was trying to conjure up: whether it might be the Maltese and their fencing rings or if the shopkeeper, hoping to swindle his insurance, had said he robbed more than just the raincoat. They have nothing on him either way.

  The skin on his face and hands is taut and has turned grey and ashy from the harsh prison soap. At home – not home but the lodgings – he would put coconut oil all over his body to keep it supple and to massage away the knots on those days he worked at the quarry. He’ll do it later today, when he’s found new lodgings, he thinks.

  They arrive at the court and he lets the two older prisoners in the back leave the van first. Two policemen march them up the tall stone steps, through the arch and then they slip through a side door to wait their turn.

  Standing before the two magistrates, Mahmood’s gaze keeps going up to the gallery. Laura. Laura is there, sitting beside her mother, both of them looking smart in navy suits. Berlin, too, and Dualleh the Communist, Ismail, and so many strangers. The gallery is packed. Usually there is just one old busybody, whiling away the hours and clacking her knitting needles. There is one, of course, but she is on the edge, pushed out by the newcomers.

  ‘Please, turn this way, Mr Mattan,’ the magistrate on the right says.

  Mahmood takes a last look at Laura, her face severe under the shadow of the hat, and then turns ahead.

  ‘You are charged with murdering Miss Violet Volacki at her shop in Butetown, Cardiff on March the 6th. Do you understand, Mr Mattan?’ the clerk of the magistrates asks.

  ‘He understands perfectly, sir,’ Detective Inspector Powell says, standing up from his chair.

  Mahmood does not understand. He feels a cold sweat rush down the length of his spine.

  ‘In view of this man’s financial position, I think the question of legal aid might be considered at this stage. Do you want a solicitor to defend you?’

  ‘Defend me for what?’ Mahmood snaps, looking up towards Laura so he can confirm the lunacy of what they are saying. But their eyes don’t meet, her face is hidden in her hands.

  ‘Defend you on the two charges for which you appear at this court,’ the clerk replies, surprised at the tone as well as the question.

  ‘I don’t want anything and I don’t care anything. You people talking crazy. You can’t get me to worrying.’

  ‘We want to assist you, but it is up to you to ask for legal aid.’

  ‘It is up to you what you do. I don’t ask for anything. I have nothing to do with murder.’

  The two drab magistrates look to each other with displeasure and one of them interrupts the proceedings to say, ‘We want to help you all we can.’ He looks benevolently, expectantly at Mahmood.

  ‘I don’t want help from anybody.’

  ‘You say it is up to us. We are going to grant you legal aid and we will remand y
ou in custody until March the 25th.’

  Mahmood hears Laura’s deep cry above him, lost in the gasps, as he is led out of the court.

  It all comes together in the journey back to the prison: the strange conversation about the dead woman, the hissing, how he talks of the police as if they are old friends of his, how the warders smirk when they see him. Lloyd is a grass. He’s a snake. He talk sweet then poison you. He is the worst kinda black man or any man. Mahmood needs to get him quick before they move him to another wing or get him out of the prison. The cell empty. Mahmood rocks back and forth on the hard mattress. He waits for the bell. Scans every face in the yard. Spots him. Moves slowly. Then pounces. Shoe in his hand.

  Thwack! Once. Twice.

  ‘Nigger!’

  That foreign word coming from his mouth unbidden, projecting like venom from his lips.

  SIX

  Lix

  The room is grey, filled with gloomy morning light and faded chintz. Diana, propped up on two frilly pillows, reaches for the lamp switch and turns the stained-glass shade red. Her hair is in her eyes but she doesn’t bother adjusting it, just rests a saucer on the pink counterpane and lights a Player. She savours these moments first thing, before the past, present and future have solidified, when time feels timeless and screeching seagulls have safely navigated her from dreams of soundless wailing. She smokes the cigarette with her arms flat on the bed, inhaling and exhaling from the side of her mouth, ash falling square into the saucer. She can feel a wave of ‘things to do’ building up in her mind but she holds it back, back, back; trying to allow herself these five minutes of nothingness. No thought is free now or unfreighted, they each come with entangling duties, fears and sorrows, so she sucks the tobacco deep, keeps everything still and listens to the swoop and shriek of innocent birds.

  After washing her face and brushing her teeth at the basin, she strips off her nightie and stands for a moment before the mirror, taking inventory: white strands in her black hair, black moles on her white skin, black eyes surrounded by blue skin, silvery tendrils across her stomach and hips, only the pale pink of her lips and nipples lifts the monochrome. This thirty-six-year-old body of hers is still strong, still shapely, but she has mothballed it, for her daughter’s sake, for sanity’s sake. Her thoughts drift to those lines from ‘To His Coy Mistress’ that she had once recited in Mrs Benson’s English class.

  Thy beauty shall no more be found;

  Nor, in thy marble vault, shall sound

  My echoing song; then worms shall try

  That long-preserved virginity,

  And your quaint honour turn to dust

  And into ashes all my lust …

  ‘My quaint honour indeed,’ thinks Diana, wondering how Marvell could see a dead woman as just a lost opportunity to get his end away. But there’s some truth there: when was the last time a man had touched her? Beyond a handshake or brief consoling embrace? She was once passionate, free. Now what? Fearful? Frigid? Past it? None of those words feel right. Her soul still desires human touch, warmth and envelopment, but there is no time for it now, no place even. ‘Had we but world enough, and time’, she wouldn’t be the woman looking back at her from the mirror; a woman who had thought she could refashion the world and her place in it but had been left with chastened, darkened eyes. The world is finite and unyielding, as is time, those eyes say.

  Mrs Pritchard, the landlady, is in the dining room fussing with her rabbit-themed crockery: bunny mugs and coasters, little silver teaspoons with rabbit ears, Peter Rabbit egg cups, embroidered hares skipping across napkins, a ceramic doe nursing her litter on the lid of a tureen. Her whole unappetizing warren strewn across the table.

  ‘Good morning, dear.’

  ‘Good morning.’

  ‘I have my son stopping by so I thought I would put some welly into it.’

  The table heaves every morning; Diana and the other woman, the secretary, are barely able to make a dent in it. Today, she manages a cup of tea from the winter bunny teapot and a bite of toast.

  ‘Lift up the lid there, cariad, and you’ll find a nice bit of smoked mackerel. You can’t go wrong with Tenby mackerel.’

  Diana slides a greasy little fish on to her plate without any intention of eating it.

  Detective Inspector Powell had accompanied her to the court yesterday. He’d told her that this man had been at the top of their list from the very beginning, that one constable who’d had previous dealings with him shouted out his name the minute he’d heard about the murder. Everything would move quickly now, the Department of Public Prosecutions would sew together the numerous pieces of evidence against the Somali, and a capable barrister present it all at trial. Powell has a bad habit of talking both down to her and over her, his tall dominating frame and handsome gargoyle face an inch too close, but he also appears genuinely moved by Violet’s death, and keeps telling Diana that ‘if there is anything at all you need, don’t hesitate to call at the station’ until it almost sounds true.

  She had gone to the court against her better judgement. She feared the effect it would have on her to see that man again, whether she might even faint or do something else ridiculous. Sitting up in the gallery, in the back row, she had waited and waited until she felt strong enough to peer down and take a glimpse at him: a thin, harmless-looking young man with a growing bald spot on the crown of his head, nothing more than that. He kept looking up, searching out a face in the crowd, and Diana looked in the same direction at a pale girl in a blue suit, sitting straight-backed in the front row of the gallery. An older woman, presumably her mother, whispered regularly in her ear and patted her narrow back a few times. None of them looked familiar; if they had ever been on Bute Street or in the shop she couldn’t say, theirs were just the anonymous faces found amidst the unfortunate, distant-eyed flotsam of Cardiff, their quiet lives sustained by day wages and borrowed rations. Berlin, the milk bar owner, had raised his hat to Diana but she had looked away, blushing, unable to acknowledge anyone in that setting. When the man, Mattan, had been given a chance to speak to the magistrate, his flintiness had surprised her, as did the aggrieved pride in his voice; his English boomed loud and clear, unlike some of the sailors who mumbled and spoke in two-word phrases. She didn’t like the pantomime gasps and hubbub as he was led out, but it felt too as if a page had started to turn, that this part of her own ordeal had a foreseeable end.

  Up the steps to the flat above the shop, knees creaking as much as the old wood, already a different smell to the abandoned place – damp, mice, stale five-spice from the Chinese restaurant. Daniel has sold all the wardrobes, dressers, chests of drawers and cabinets, and emptied their contents into cardboard boxes and suitcases for her to look through. Violet’s possessions spill out of six large boxes in her room, while Diana had managed to keep a tight rein on her and Grace’s clutter to the point that their memories can now be carried away in two large armfuls. She kneels on the rug and starts with Violet’s clothes: dark, collared frocks, corsets, knitted cardies, girdles, her ‘fancy’ twinsets, rayon slips, an expensive-looking tweed pencil skirt Diana had never seen her wear, the familiar High Holiday wool suits and silk blouses. The shoes: two pairs of black lace-ups for the shop, patent court shoes, a pair of knitted slippers with the backs pressed flat.

  It can all go.

  Then it’s on to her toilette: hair rollers clogged with her fine brown hair, paddle brushes, an untouched tin of pressed powder, talc, Yardley soaps sealed with the golden royal warrant, a large bottle of Revlon perfume, the subdued red lipstick she wore a handful of times a year.

  Her books and magazines: piles and piles of Picture Post, Good Housekeeping and the Jewish Chronicle, the collected works of Dickens and Shakespeare, Jane Eyre, Rebecca, Pride and Prejudice, schlocky paperbacks with lurid covers and titles, Teach Yourself guides for bridge, their father’s Russian poetry collection, and dictionaries. Diana puts aside one roller, the pressed powder and red lipstick and seals the rest up in their boxes with tape. In
large chalk letters she writes ‘Sally Army’ and moves on to the archival collection: birth, marriage, divorce and death certificates in a muddled pile on top of each other, their father’s naturalization papers and property deeds, insurance and investment certificates, school awards from the 1920s for each of the three daughters, letters between Violet and Diana while she was in London with the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force. She unfolds one letter, written on a blue page torn from a military-issue exercise book, and reads.

  21st October 1940

  Dear Darling Violet,

  Beep, beep, beep, this is London calling, here is the news: I’m terribly sad to have missed your birthday again, but this year I can promise to make it up to you with wonderful news. I’m not going to let Jerry’s silly little bombing campaign stop me from returning to Cardiff next month. I’ve applied for leave already and expect it to be granted, but I won’t tell you why just yet. Don’t worry about me, Vi, the barrage balloons and fighter pilots are doing sterling work above our heads. I’m sleeping in a bunker deep underground and wouldn’t exchange it for a penthouse at the Savoy.

  Kisses,

  Diana

  How many weeks pregnant must she have been then? Eight? Ten? It was still early but getting to the point where people had to be told and decisions made. Ben hadn’t heard yet, the letter stuck somewhere between London and Egypt. She knew he would reply with an excited telegram as soon as he received it. What a time that was, a quarter-century of life behind her and seemingly centuries still to go, Grace a minuscule tadpole within her, the story of the Volackis and Tanays commingled and thrown forward into the future. Ben a machine-gunner and sergeant in the Royal Air Force, looking tanned and handsome in his flight overalls and bomber jacket, the effort it took not to boast when girls asked what her husband did.

  Diana opens another box and finds the gramophone records she’d wished she had taken to the lodging house with her. The Andrews Sisters, Cab Calloway, Eddie Cantor, Artie Shaw, The Ink Spots, Ella Fitzgerald, Louis Armstrong, Billie Holiday. She pulls The Ink Spots record out of its sleeve and places it on the turntable of the portable gramophone she had bought Violet for her fortieth birthday. First, that beautiful sound of white noise, of captured time, of anticipation and held breaths, then the plodding guitar chords of ‘It’s All Over But The Crying’. The early verses so melancholy and sentimental that her eyes begin to well until the song turns around on itself: tempo rising, beat deepening, harmonies quavering, the same despondent lyrics sung over the ebullient tune of a toothpaste advert jingle. Next, the full-hearted sorrow of ‘We Three’. She leans back, spreads her fingers on the dusty floor and closes her eyes.