The Fortune Men

by Nadifa Mohamed

  ‘Nothing, my mother is looking for me,’ he said, addressing the steering wheel.

  ‘They don’t know whether he is dead or alive.’

  ‘Harami!’ Bibi Zahra shouted, reaching into the car to swipe Mahmood across the face. ‘You want everyone to think that I kidnapped you? That I’m some kind of dad qalaato. I thought you were orphaned.’

  ‘I never said that, I never wished my mother dead. I said my father had died.’

  Bibi Zahra shook her head, her antimony-ringed eyes flooding dramatically. ‘Weylo o wey, just because I have not carried a child it does not mean I cannot feel what your mother must be feeling.’ She clutched her navel and then her breasts. ‘You are going to go back today. I will give you the money myself.’

  ‘No!’ Mahmood said, firing up the engine, ready to steal the car if he needed to.

  ‘Come with me,’ she ordered, beckoning with her long index finger for Mahmood to step out. ‘You will give life to your mother and speak to her.’

  ‘Hooyo?’

  ‘Who is it?’ his mother shouted down the line.

  ‘Waa aniga, Mahmood.’

  ‘Manshallah, Manshallah,’ she cried. ‘My eyes, my lastborn, my liver, my light. I thought I had lost you.’

  Mahmood bent his head low to conceal the tears coursing down his cheeks. She sounded so frightened, so old.

  ‘Hooyo,’ he croaked, he didn’t know what else to say, she loved him more than he deserved.

  ‘Are you well, my son? Has any harm come to you?’

  ‘No, I’m fat and well.’

  ‘Your brother has married and had a son, I named him Mahmood.’

  ‘I am in a town named Dar es Salaam, it is beside a big sea. I am a chauffeur now, and I can speak Swahili. Mahmood? That is an honour, hooyo.’

  They talked over each other, the line crackly and the conversation bizarre, neither of them having used a telephone before. They had had to send a messenger to fetch her from the shop and bring her to the Post Office. He could imagine her painful lopsided gait, her hand pressing down on her hip.

  She shouted a long benediction down the phone, exhorting him to say, ‘Ameen, Ameen.’

  ‘Ameen.’

  ‘May Allah let us see each other again.’

  ‘Yes, hooyo.’ He pulled the receiver away from his ear and passed it guiltily over to the operator.

  ‘Now to the train station.’ Grabbing his shoulder tenderly, Bibi Zahra led him out into the blank sunlight.

  Sitting on a wooden bench on Platform 1 of the Central Station, waiting for a train he didn’t want to ride, Mahmood picked listlessly at a packet of chaat that he had just bought from an Indian hawker. The red flash of his cart squeaking up and down the platforms, having kept Mahmood company over the past hour, now stilled.

  The trader stopped and stretched his back, complaining in Hindi as he pressed his thumbs into his spine. ‘Poor men get no rest till they die, na?’ he said to Mahmood in Swahili, shaking his head ruefully.

  Mahmood shrugged his shoulders; he’d had his fill of rest.

  ‘The Arusha train late?’ the Indian continued, eager to give his tongue some respite from the mantra of ‘one bag chaat five cents, three bags chaat ten cents’.

  ‘I don’t know, must be. It was due half an hour ago.’ Mahmood spread his hands apart and leant back, a picture of lassitude.

  ‘Where you going?’

  ‘Hargeisa.’

  The hawker lifted his eyebrows. ‘British Somaliland? Long way.’ He sprinkled chaat from his small shovel into his palm and then threw the mix of spiced rice, nuts and lentils into his mouth. ‘You should have taken a dhow.’

  ‘I will, from Mombasa.’

  ‘You have money to burn?’

  ‘I don’t, but the woman who bought me the ticket does.’

  ‘A real tajira?’

  ‘Rich dead husbands.’

  ‘Lucky woman.’

  ‘Where do the other trains go?’

  ‘Mwanza, Tabora, Kigoma, Kitadu, Tanga, Dodoma, Mpanda. I was one of the men who extended the tracks from Tabora to Mwanza a long, long time ago. There’s not much I don’t know about this railway. You could go to Tanga, get a dhow from there.’

  ‘The ticket work for all of them?’

  ‘Let me see.’

  Mahmood pulled out the flimsy yellow rectangle from his shirt pocket and unfolded it.

  Holding the paper close to his eyes, the hawker checked all the details. ‘Second class, yes, it’ll take you anywhere in Tanganyika.’

  Mahmood refolded the ticket and placed it back in his pocket, beside the ten shillings Amira had given him for the journey.

  ‘Maybe I’ll go to Tanga, then.’

  ‘Safar salama either way.’

  ‘Asante.’

  Creaking away with his cart, the Indian had planted a seed in Mahmood’s mind. There was no compulsion to do what he had been told; he did not need to go home, or even north. What was ahead of him in Hargeisa? A tearful reunion with his mother, followed quickly by punishment, the mundane routines of the family shop, the long wait for his brothers to marry, one by one, before it was his turn. He wanted to see more beauty, more of the world’s strange places, animals and women. He wanted to see palaces, great ships, mountains, fire-worshippers and fire-headed girls. When he thought of Hargeisa it was the sandstorms that came to mind, scratching at his eyes and whipping at his clothes, the tusbah-clacking elders calling everything new the work of shaydaan, the interminable negotiations between clans over land, women and wells. It was a place for the old, not those just starting out in life.

  Hearing the hollow whistle of a train about to depart from another platform, Mahmood grabbed his small cotton bundle of clothes and ran over the bridge towards the shining black train.

  ‘Where you decide, boy?’ the hawker exclaimed in delight.

  Thick plumes of steam from the squat funnel shrouded any sign of where the locomotive might be going.

  Mahmood turned back and threw his hands in the air before clambering up the steep wooden steps into a carriage. ‘Only Allah knows!’

  The angry bull exhalations of the engine and then the zug, zug, zug of the turning wheels as the locomotive jolted the carriages away from Dar es Salaam station gave Mahmood the feeling that he was heading off to war.

  EIGHT

  Siddeed

  ‘So, what are the men saying?’

  ‘You know what they’re saying.’

  ‘That I brought this on myself?’

  Berlin throws his head back, turns away as if this is not a line of questioning worth pursuing. ‘It doesn’t matter what they think. It’s what they’ll do that counts.’

  ‘I don’t want anyone begrudging me. If they don’t want to help that’s their free choice.’

  ‘Enough, leave it alone. We can pay for the solicitor and the barrister. We spoke to three barristers and we think we’ve found the right one. He represented that son of a bitch who killed Shay last year.’

  ‘That son of a bitch was found guilty.’

  ‘He was guilty! The important question is did he hang?’ Berlin asks sharply, losing his patience.

  ‘I’ll leave it to you, there’s not much I can say from here, is there?’

  ‘No. Your case might not even go beyond the hearings, anyway.’

  ‘Inshallah, we’ll all be free of it soon. Tell the men I appreciate their help, truly.’

  Berlin waves away the sentimentality with both hands.

  ‘What is happening out there, anyway?’ Mahmood smiles, reading every part of Berlin’s face for some clue to what the other sailors think of his predicament.

  ‘I had a half-caste girl come to the café to sing, dressed like a boy in a baker’s hat, straight up and down like a boy too, but she sings like she wants to tear the walls down.’

  ‘What’s her name?’

  ‘Bassey, Shirley Bassey. She made good money that night, her hat was full to the brim. Her father was that Nigerian that got into t
rouble with the little girl, but she’s doing well enough without him. Dualleh the Communist is in London, meeting with his comrade Sylvia Pankhurst. She’s been invited by Haile Selassie to live in Addis Ababa.’

  ‘Ya salam, Dualleh is trying to persuade her to stay?’

  ‘Something like that. Crazy Tahir’s disappeared, someone said they saw him signing on to a ship at the Shipping Office.’

  ‘He must have evicted those voices out of his mind.’

  ‘Or is running away from something, someone. You can never tell with him.’

  ‘Good luck to him.’

  ‘He told me that he had been in the shop the night the woman was murdered.’

  ‘He told the police?’ Mahmood asks, dropping his hands from the back of his head.

  ‘I think so. He was terrified, but I told him he must tell them.’

  ‘Did he see anything?’

  ‘I was more interested in asking did he do anything?’

  Mahmood pushes his face closer to Berlin’s. ‘What did he say?’

  ‘He bought two bars of soap and left to meet a girl at the Arab café. He rang the bell, bought his things and hardly spent a minute there, he says. He might have a jinn in him but I’ve never known him to hurt anyone, especially for money. You see how he lives?’

  ‘But he must be the Somali they all said they saw, then.’

  ‘I don’t know, he said another Somali came in after him. A tall, dark young man that he doesn’t know. I lose track of all these new Somalis too.’

  ‘When is he back?’

  ‘How would I know?’

  ‘Fuck!’ Mahmood slams his fist into the table.

  ‘The police haven’t stopped asking questions about you, whether you carried a razor, or had ever threatened anyone. They haven’t brought up Tahir’s name once.’

  Mahmood laughs incredulously and shakes his head. ‘How can I shake these devils off my back?’

  ‘It’s bad, Mahmood. They’re showing your photo to people on the docks, asking, “Did you see this man near the Volacki shop on the night of the murder?”’

  ‘They can barely tell the difference between us in bright daylight! How they gonna say who they saw in that typhoon?’

  ‘There’s the reward to sharpen their eyesight, remember.’

  ‘Sometimes, I wake up and I don’t know where I am, which bed, which room, which country. I feel out in the deep sea, floating, between watches. It’s a strange, strange feeling. I hear the warders pacing past my cell at night, looking in on me in bed, and I think it’s my mother coming to check on me and that I must close my eyes. It’s made me wonder ’bout Tahir, you know? How sometimes he looked at his hands with such shock, as if he couldn’t believe they belonged to him. I can see how men go mad. You open a door in your mind and just step through, easy.’

  ‘You’re not crazy. Sometimes I’ve seen you fraying but you’ve always held it together. Don’t let this break you. They always come for us but you keep your waran and gaashaan up, hold them like this …’ Berlin pretends to hold a spear and shield tightly in each of his hands, ‘Vigilance, sahib, vigilance.’

  The doctor’s voice drones on, reading the instructions on the black and white form. Mahmood has listlessly completed the first two sections of the intelligence test. It is a simple assault course of numbers, shapes and word games but his mind is elsewhere. Circling what he knows must be the correct answers, he wonders how a month has passed so languidly in prison. ‘You’ll hang, whether you did it or not.’ Powell’s words come to him, clear and sharp; what he had heard then as the arrogance and frustration of a man habituated to throwing his weight around, he now understands to be a sincere threat.

  The doctor looks over his shoulder at the answers on the paper and raises his eyebrows. Mahmood had considered hobbling himself, throwing the test so that they would believe they had a simpleton on their hands, but, ultimately, his pride wouldn’t let him.

  They’d had a conversation about madness earlier; the doctor had been sniffing around, and had eventually asked Mahmood if he could define madness? Course he could. A man was mad when he didn’t know what he was doing, or couldn’t tell the difference between right and wrong. That’s how the courts saw it, and he agreed with that simple definition. He didn’t bring up jinn possession, or curses, or the madness that seemed to seep into people at sea or in deserts. The doctor wanted to know if he was fit for trial or not, that was the purpose of these chats, but if there was a chance of tricking the whitecoat into believing he was unfit, then the notion never blossomed into action. He can pretend to be stupid, he can pretend to be mad, but why go to such lengths when he knows he’s innocent? All he can do is put his faith in the All-knowing, the All-powerful. He has been praying all five daily prayers since Berlin’s visit. Trying to fire an emergency beacon out to God through the low concrete ceiling. ‘Ibad baadi, save me, anqadhani, mujhe bachao, uniokoe,’ he chants at the end of his prostrations, pleading in all the tongues he knows.

  The recreation room reminds Mahmood of the Employment Exchange, men shuffling across the bleached linoleum floor, looking for a place to sit or stand idly. The doctor has assured him that there is no risk to his children in mixing with the other inmates, so he has left the funk of his cell. His knees crack and grumble as he strides through the bright room. An awkward smile on his face as men size him up, testosterone charging their glances with electricity. There is one other coloured man in the crowd, his head bent over a complicated jigsaw, and Mahmood approaches him instinctively. The old West African has two short nicks on his forehead and high, sharp cheekbones. He doesn’t look up as Mahmood takes the empty metal chair beside him, but mumbles quietly while moving jigsaw pieces slowly around the table.

  ‘You want me to help?’ Mahmood asks, noticing the grey whorls in the man’s hair and the trembling of his hand.

  Silence.

  ‘Take this piece, it goes there …’ Mahmood tries to place the wood in a space between tree and sky.

  ‘Fuck off, man! Just fuck off!’ He thumps his palm on to the table and pummels the scene until the small pieces pile up like rubble.

  ‘You’ve gone and done it now, ain’t ya?’ chuckles a small blond man, sitting behind them. ‘You can’t interfere with Uncle Samson and his jigsaw, it’s his life’s work, you see.’

  Mahmood is up on his feet, embarrassed at having gone straight to the madman.

  ‘Pull up a chair here, mate. He likes to be left alone.’

  He accepts the invitation and moves to the Englishman’s table. A draughts board and counters spread out on it.

  ‘Archie Lawson, Esquire,’ he says, offering a thin, pale hand.

  ‘Mattan, Mahmood,’ he replies, shaking it firmly.

  ‘You a local boy, then?’

  ‘No. Yes. I live in Adamsdown.’

  ‘A veritable hop and a skip. Me, I’m from a land far, far away. My birth heralded by Bow Bells.’

  ‘London boy?’

  ‘You got it in one. A cockney by birth and sentiment.’

  ‘I stay in London last year, in the East End. Trafalgar Square, Piccadilly Circus, all that too busy for me.’

  ‘Old boy, I’ve had my fill of the Big Smoke too, it was Samuel Johnson who said, “When you’re tired of London, you’re tired of life,” but I’ve had it right up to here.’ He chops at his neck while arranging the discs in neat rows on either side of the board. ‘I’m on my regal tour of Her Majesty’s Prisons, I could write a guide book on ’em, if asked. Pentonville grub leaves a lot to be desired, you’d taste better licking the floors, and the sporting facilities? An absolute outrage, an outrage, I say.’

  Mahmood smirks, but the man speaks so fast and in so many voices he struggles to follow. ‘Prison food is no food,’ he concurs, finally.

  ‘What’s wrong with ya, then?’

  ‘Nothing. They keep me here for nothing.’

  ‘Don’t complain, least you get your tea and cake in the afternoon.’

  Under the slee
ve of his white shirt, Mahmood sees a coarse bandage wrapped around Archie’s arm.

  ‘You know how to play?’ Archie asks, gesturing with his chin to the board.

  ‘Sure, every man plays draughts at sea.’

  ‘Well, let’s not dilly-dally, then.’

  ‘How much was in my hands?’

  ‘Two and six.’

  ‘Correct, and now?’ The doctor turns his closed fists up and quickly flashes them open to reveal a scattering of gold, silver and copper coins.

  ‘One florin, thruppence and two farthings.’

  ‘Your memory really is remarkable, Mr Mattan.’

  ‘All my people the same, I told you we keep shop in my country, I learn to count money before anything else.’

  They have been playing the memory game for the last ten minutes; it’s an amusing pastime but only adds to his sense that he is regressing. The jigsaws, picture books, board games and doctor’s tests make him feel as though he is in a nursery, the highlight of his day coming at 4 p.m. when the kitchen crew come round with a trolley of perfectly uniform cake slices. Jam sponge, fruit cake, nut spice loaf, oatmeal slice, he is indifferent to what they bring, it’s just the melt of sugar on his tongue that he craves, something to remove the lardy, meaty taste of the prison lunches.

  ‘How are you feeling in regards to the progress of your case?’ the doctor asks, arranging his coins into columns on the bed.

  ‘I still ain’t seen my barrister,’ Mahmood sits further back on the bed, leaning against the cold brick wall, ‘and the hearing coming up. My countrymen paying for him, I don’t need no legal aid shitty lawyer. The hearing come and then this story come to an end, I walk in the street a free man.’

  ‘You sound optimistic.’

  ‘Optimistic? You mean cheerful? I be cheerful, I put my faith in God and he don’t let no innocent man suffer. You know, I watch a picture once, a cowboy film. I watch every Western they put on at the bug house. I like how in them films every man is his own master, and the deserts and mountains make me remember my old country. Anyway, this film, I forget the name, it have a man new to the town who is accused of killing an old woman and the Marshal, a real nasty man, hate him and want him dead. The saloon man say he saw it, the boy in the stables say he saw the stranger with blood all over him, the whores say he come to them with money, but one by one they kill each other and the stranger prove they lying and he go free, and then the Marshal is taken away for punishment.’