The Fortune Men

by Nadifa Mohamed

  ‘You see something of your own situation in that wild and woolly tale?’

  ‘I do, I do,’ Mahmood nods. ‘It show me how the truth kill the lie.’

  ‘How goodness conquers evil?’

  ‘That’s right, you understand me.’

  ‘Well, the Bible tells us so.’

  ‘Your book and my book they like this,’ Mahmood places his index fingers side by side. ‘We have one God, and the prophets, Moses, Ibraham, Jesus, and the Devil.’

  ‘The Abrahamic faiths can be said to be cut from one cloth, but the crucial difference is that our Lord is one of love and forgiveness. He died for all mankind’s sins, yours and mine. The God of the Jews and, correct me if I misspeak, of the Mohammedans is one of vengeance, a slave master opposed to a father.’

  ‘No, who tell you that? Your God die. It is impossible for God to die. You tell me that for one minute, five minute, an hour, your God could not see, hear or understand anything? You must have two Gods, one to die and one to bring him back to life. My God is one. He is all-powerful but he all-forgiving too. You call Allah’s name the minute you know you dead and he wash you clean, clean like a child freshborn, if you mean it in your heart, in niyaadaada, he will forgive you everything.’

  ‘That is reassuring to hear.’ The doctor smiles, trying to let the subject fall away.

  Mahmood laughs. ‘Christians funny people, if your Lord die for all our sins why you have prisons?’

  ‘That’s a question for a more philosophical soul than I.’

  The unyielding wooden cot is messing with Mahmood’s back, sometimes he’s forced to get up in the middle of the night and pace the floor, the nocturnal warders snapping open the hatch and barking, ‘Alright, mate?’ He ain’t alright. The pain moves up and down his spine, nestling between his shoulders one moment, and then nudging at his tailbone the next. Sometimes he can’t get up for hours. This morning, a medical officer gave him two paracetamol tablets to take with breakfast, but prostrating for the fajr prayer was still a struggle. He’d heard a deep, metallic thump while bending down for the second rakat, so loud it had made him jump in shock, even the cement floor had shuddered a little. He realized after the prayer that the chapel bell hadn’t rung on the hour this morning, throwing off his usual, clockwork routine.

  He changes now from his thin pyjamas into the cotton uniform and combs his hair flat. When he steps out for his morning exercise, the other hospital inmates are gathered in a huddle, all two dozen of them in white shirts that billow in the breeze. It’s a pleasant morning; the sun warms Mahmood’s face and smooths the appearance of the other men, making them look younger and softer. Archie, especially, looks like a teenager today, the fine reddish hairs along his jaw glowing copper, his big eyes darting this way and that.

  ‘They’ve had to take his body out for cremation, cos he’s a Sikh an’ all and they have to do right by him that way.’

  ‘Aye, that’s proper,’ agrees Frank, the old Scottish man with knotted, arthritic hands. ‘It made a bloody racket, didn’t it? I thought the ceiling would give way for a moment.’

  ‘The gates of hell, innit?’

  ‘You talking about Singh?’ Mahmood asks, his mind going back to the disturbed prayer.

  ‘We sure are, the late Master Singh of Bridgend has left our prison fraternity.’

  ‘They really did it,’ Mahmood says, almost to himself. Looking around him, at the waxy ivy snaking through the cracks in the brick wall, at the tall chimneys puffing out thin streams of smoke, at the prisoners on gardening detail carrying hoes and pushing wheelbarrows to the governor’s garden, everything looks benign. A man was killed here an hour ago, he thinks, a man like me, who’d worn this uniform, who probably had the same breakfast of salty porridge in his belly as they put the rope around his neck.

  ‘Who did the honours, Archie?’ a boy with a bandaged eye asks. ‘The chaplain said they would move me to another part of the prison if I wanted, but it didn’t bother me at all. He killed that girl in cold blood, I said, I’ll be applauding.’

  Samson is on the outskirts of the group, one ear turned towards Archie to better hear him.

  ‘Pierrepoint it was, it’s always that bloody bastard Pierrepoint, he’s got the hanging game sewn up. I think Allen was the assistant, but don’t hold me to that one.’

  Mahmood elbows Archie to get his attention. ‘What they do with him now?’

  ‘Bring the ashes back and bury him with the rest. I ain’t supposed to tell you,’ he gestures for the circle to tighten around him, ‘but they’re all under the vegetable patch. We’re eating convict-composted spuds and greens, fellas.’ He bursts out laughing.

  ‘You lie.’ Mahmood frowns.

  ‘Do I heck! The nightshift warders are my pals, I keep ’em chatting so they won’t fall asleep on the job. There’s nothing they won’t tell me … like about Lester the Ghost.’

  The men groan and fall back from the tight circle.

  ‘Hear me out, hear me out, you know I never sleep, don’t ya? Well, take it from me that when you’re all snoring like brutes I can hear him, an old stoker he was, a black fella,’ he nods to Mahmood, ‘I can hear him shovelling, the pipes knocking as if they’re warming up, but touch ’em and they’re as cold as a witch’s tit.’

  ‘You and your cockney yarns.’ Frank wheezes, his eyes crinkled in merriment.

  ‘Find me a Bible and I’ll swear on it, ask any of the old-timers, or the chief warder, Richardson, his dad was the one on duty in the condemned cell when they came for him. Nineteen twenty-something. He had to be carried to the noose in a chair because the silly bugger was paralytic down his left side, had blown the skull off his gal but then turned cack-handed when pulling the trigger on himself. A Jamaican sailor, old Lester was, only young when he died, but getting into his dotage as a ghost, steps through the walls like they’re just cobwebs. Listen out at night and you’ll hear him, I promise it.’

  The bandaged boy looks pale now. The others enjoy his discomfort, exchanging mischievous glances as they roll cigarettes and pass around a box of matches.

  ‘You’re looking a bit green there, Dickie, your pink-eye bothering you?’

  ‘No, I’m alright, just need to ask someone about something.’ He slopes back inside, his head downcast.

  ‘Yeah, go to nanny,’ sneers Archie.

  ‘A stoker?’ Mahmood repeats.

  ‘So I’ve heard.’ Archie’s eyes cross as he concentrates on forming smoke rings with his thick, wet lips.

  ‘They carried him in a chair?’

  ‘You got to admire the diligence of screws, no job too dirty for them. I hope he at least put their backs out, or pissed down their legs, you’d want some sorta revenge, right?’

  NINE

  Sagaal

  ‘That disgraceful old bag!’

  ‘She really followed your mother out?’ Mahmood blows a sharp arrow of smoke over Omar’s head, his hand on his son’s round belly, as the boy manipulates the arms of a cheap wooden robot in his lap.

  ‘You bet she did, came chasing after us as we left the Magistrates. We hadn’t gone ten yards before she was grabbing Mam’s elbow and pulling her aside.’

  ‘Tell me again what she said.’

  ‘She said, “If you tell the court that you saw him with a bundle of cash too, we can go halves on the reward money.” Bold as brass.’

  ‘What did your mam say?’

  ‘What do you think? She told her to go jump! Then the nasty piece of work starts on with, “What kind of mother lets her daughter marry a darkie in the first place?” and says that the two of us had gone into her shop ages ago … to threaten her! Mam was having none of it, we were in bloody Hull at the time. She gave her a shove, and an earful to go with it.’

  Mahmood can’t help smiling. ‘They had a fight?’

  ‘Almost, they were separated by one of the ushers, but Mam has reported her and her lies to the police. I don’t know what will happen if they see each other again, or if I clap
eyes on her, for that matter.’

  ‘Keep your hands to yourself, Williams, we can’t both end up in this box.’

  ‘I can’t promise anything, I swear she had my blood seething.’ Even now, Laura’s face has reddened just telling the story, her neck blotchy and streaked where her nails have dragged the skin.

  ‘I saw her at the hearing, a Davis Street special, alright, looks like the marrow suck straight outta her bones.’

  ‘A vampire, a real vampire.’

  Mahmood looks down at Omar, wipes biscuit crumbs from his face, and then reaches for Laura’s hand on the table and holds it softly. ‘I spoke to the solicitor before you came.’

  ‘What did he say?’

  It had been an unsatisfactory meeting; Mahmood had been waiting weeks to work out a strategy with him on how to get out of this mess, but the solicitor seemed to have already given up. He read out the list of prosecution witnesses, more than thirty of them. Mahmood recognized only four names. Doc and Monday, of course, were singing to the police’s tune, but so were Billa Khan and the racetrack man. The rest were either chancers – like the old bigot shopkeeper – informers, or must have been hassled into saying something, anything, by the police because they had dirt on them. The solicitor also reported that the police whitecoats had found specks of blood on his boots; spots so small you’d need a microscope to find them. Human blood, they said. He had bought the boots as a favour from Laura’s mother. Her brother had found them on a rubbish tip, and as they didn’t fit her husband or sons, she had wanted to offload them and get a bit of money in exchange. God knows where they had come from and how many men had worn them before him, ma’alesh, never mind, nothing to be done about it now.

  Mahmood had said again and again that he wanted to give evidence at the hearing but the solicitor wasn’t having it, said it would give away their defence to the Prosecution. Better to hold their cards close to their chest, like in poker? Mahmood had asked, thinking it over. ‘That’s right,’ the solicitor had replied, but it didn’t feel right. If they heard him, heard the truthfulness in his voice, they would let him go. He had a low opinion of the police but the courts had been fair to him. That time when he had been wrongly accused of stealing clothes and money from a docked ship in the Bay, the court had thrown out the charges. That time in London, when he’d had an argument with that Warsengali over money, and had been charged with demanding money with menaces and sent to the Old Bailey, they’d taken his word over that thief’s and let him go. That was the famous British justice. You had to have proper evidence, or the game was all over: not ‘I think’, or ‘I heard’, or ‘I guess’, none of that shit.

  ‘What did he say?’ Laura repeats, squeezing his index finger.

  ‘He said they don’t have real evidence against me but it’s better I wait for the trial to give my story.’

  Her shoulders drop. ‘Wait till trial? But that could be ages. I’m getting tired of this place, Moody, I …’ Her voice cracks before she can get the words out.

  Mahmood raises her hand and kisses it. ‘I know, my woman, I know. I’m tired too. I am stuck in this cage when I want to be home with you. When I come out we’ll live together, yes?’

  She wipes a cotton hankie roughly over her eyelids and nods without looking at him.

  ‘From my cell I can see the backyards on your side of the street. How about Friday, you and the boys stand in the yard and I look for you?’

  ‘That’s daft.’ She laughs, her tears not yet dispelled.

  ‘Let it be, I want to see you.’

  ‘What time?’

  ‘Noon sharp.’

  ‘I’ll be out there. Don’t stand me up.’

  ‘Never.’ Mahmood laughs, wrapping both of her hands in his and then stroking her forearm as far as her shirtsleeves will allow.

  Right on the first day of the hearing they had asked Mahmood what he had to say to the charge of murder. He had put his palms up, and replied calmly, ‘All I got to say is, I’m not guilty.’

  Regardless, the witnesses keep coming, as if they have been dredged up from the bottom of the Glamorganshire Canal and flopped on to the floor of the Law Courts: fat, thin; black, white, brown; swanks and vagabonds; strangers and acquaintances. All coming to drive a knife through his shoulder blades.

  ‘I saw him with a razor, sure I did,’ says one Nigerian. ‘He threatened my neighbour with a knife,’ goes a housewife. The police still haven’t found the murder weapon, or any money, so they use these narks to demolish his reputation, make him sound like a man capable of anything. ‘A desperate criminal,’ as they call it in the newsreels. So many of them say they saw him walk out of the shop the night of March sixth that he almost begins to believe that he did. They have a West Indian, a Welshman, an Arab, a Maltese, an Indian, a Jew, almost the League of Nations accusing him. He can only stand there in the dock, his lips sealed shut as they drag his name through mud and broken glass. Whose bed did he shit in for them to do this to him? None of the Somalis have given evidence yet, neither for the Prosecution nor the Defence, and he’s grateful for that; it would make this circus too fucking real.

  His titanic barrister, tall and red-faced, watches the proceedings with unreadable grey eyes. They are yet to exchange a word, but that man holds his life in his hands; Mahmood is beginning to understand that now. As each witness takes the stand, his previous estimation of his own power diminishes. His barrister, Rhys Roberts, looks like a boulder made of the same pale rock as the magistrate and prosecutor; granite hewn somewhere foreign to him, in public school dormitories or army barracks, perhaps. They are gentlemen with signet rings and inherited watches, who speak in a language far removed from his English of engine rooms, factories, quarries, street fights and pillow talk. They mumble and race through the hearing, the routines of it familiar to them but not to him. Questions about him, the defendant, asked and answered before he’s even understood them.

  When Mahmood had interpreted in court, two years previously, for one of the Abdis who had beaten Shay for stealing their savings, it had seemed easy. Converting convoluted English into straightforward Somali and then forcing the reply back into simple English. He could afford to take the kernel of what was meant and throw away the rest, but now? Now that his own freedom is at risk he needs every distinction. When the pathologist said ‘contusion’ did he mean bruise? When he said ‘haemorrhage’ did he mean some special kind of bleeding or just normal bleeding? The woman was killed from behind, he understood that, and died from one deep cut to her throat, with three other small cuts surrounding it. One second he can understand everything, then they change frequency, like a fuzzy wireless, and go into their university talk, leaving him with only isolated words to hold on to. They think a man stupid because he talks with an accent, but he wants to shout, ‘I teach myself five languages, I know how to say “fuck you!” in Hindi and “love me” in Swahili, give me a chance and speak plain.’

  Sometimes, he finds himself smiling, overwhelmed by and incredulous at the fictions told about him: the strange costumes the witnesses put him in. What man would ever wear white cook’s trousers with a blue Air Force dress jacket? The non-existent moustache and gold teeth they place on his face. The desirable inches they add to his height. They have created a man – no, a Frankenstein’s monster – and branded it with his name before setting it loose. Standing there, shoulders sagging, in the Law Courts, in Cardiff, in Bilad al-Welsh, he feels the blows of their lies like a man shot with arrows. They are blind to Mahmood Hussein Mattan and all his real manifestations: the tireless stoker, the poker shark, the elegant wanderer, the love-starved husband, the soft-hearted father.

  It’s going to trial. It’s going to trial. It’s. Going. To. Trial. That’s the end of it; the hearing has passed, with all the lies in place. The police have done a good job of fixing him. He needs to save his strength now for the assizes, when he will give evidence, whatever the damn lawyer says. The fact is, he is innocent. ‘The truth will set you free.’ He’s heard the
locals say that many a time, like something they learn in their church.

  Standing on his bed, the loose woollen socks on his feet sliding as he tiptoes off the side of the mattress, Mahmood angles his head over the dusty windowsill until he can see more of the Davis Street backyards. He counts down the odd-number side until he picks out the familiar junk abandoned by the Williams family in their weed-strewn garden. A rusty tricycle lying upside down, an old-fashioned pram with large silver wheels and sun-bleached hood, a broken sink, the detritus of a home where nothing with even a notional value can be easily parted with. ‘I’ll fix ’em, I’ll fix ’em,’ promised Laura’s father, Evan, chewing his plastic pipe. ‘I’ll buy you a new one,’ Mahmood had assured her, but everything remained unrepaired and unreplaced. Money coming in and going out like the tide for all of them. His hands grip the windowsill until he’s steady, an ache growing in his neck as his crooked body hangs in the air like a question mark, the question being, ‘Has she forgotten?’

  Mahmood waits, a minute passes and then another, he wriggles and adjusts his footing, glad that the miserable cell is out of his sight and that there is still a world out there. The four metal bars on the window throw simple details of life into focus and make them more beautiful. Cars, vans and lorries honk and skid irritably past milk carts and horse-drawn carriages on Adam Street. Black and white specks, crows and seagulls, wheel through the sky, searching for a stray chip or breadcrumb. A ginger tomcat pads along a garden wall, his attention fixed on some unseen target. A stout-armed, hair-netted woman shakes out a wet sheet with a sharp snap and then pins it along the washing line with wooden pegs from her wide apron pocket.