The Fortune Men

by Nadifa Mohamed

  ‘Oh my goodness!’ Grace cries.

  ‘What a spoilt girl,’ Daniel says, shaking his head in mock envy. ‘When do I get a bicycle?’

  ‘Can I ride it now?’ Grace asks her mother.

  ‘Why not?’

  She rushes out through the kitchen and into the garden.

  Diana tops up the sherry glasses and they all sink down into their seats, the jollity suspended. Maggie looks the most deflated but, always the one to turn the conversation to safe trivialities, she sighs and says, ‘I can just feel that this year will play havoc with my hayfever. It’s come on so strong, already.’

  Diana hesitates before raising the next subject. ‘The ground is solid enough to put the headstone on.’

  ‘That’s good, that’s good,’ Daniel says, looking down at his still-full sherry.

  ‘You picked a nice stone.’

  Diana had also decided on the inscription – ‘Beloved Daughter, Beloved Sister, Beloved Aunt, May Her Soul Rest In Eternal Peace’ – but it’s such a permanent marker, one that will outlive them all, that she keeps wondering if she has chosen the right words. ‘You’re all happy with the inscription?’

  ‘Yes, there is not room enough to write what is in our hearts, is there?’ Maggie twists a napkin between her hands.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Not enough ink, not enough paper, not enough time.’

  ‘You need my help?’ Daniel asks.

  ‘No, everything is finished now.’

  ‘It was a nice little party, wasn’t it?’

  Diana and Grace are snuggled in her bed, their noses almost touching. The candle sputters and shadows wave across the fern-patterned wallpaper and matching curtains.

  ‘Lovely.’

  ‘What was your favourite gift?’

  ‘The bicycle.’

  ‘Flatterer.’

  Grace smiles and reveals her hotchpotch teeth, all different sizes and shapes.

  ‘What did you wish for?’

  ‘I can’t say.’

  ‘Sure, you can.’

  ‘No, really, I can’t.’

  ‘Because it was about Aunt Violet?’

  Grace nods.

  ‘Did you wish that she was still here?’

  ‘It’s stupid, I know.’ She holds a hand to her mouth.

  ‘No, you wouldn’t believe how many times I’ve wished the same, Gracie.’

  ‘It wasn’t right, it wasn’t fair, was it, Mammy? There was so much blood.’

  ‘She was the best. I don’t know why that was her fate. I really don’t.’

  ‘We didn’t hear anything, I mean, what if someone broke in here while we slept or while I was at school and hurt you?’ Grace trembles as the fear she has kept hidden so well tumbles out. ‘It would be better if we had a man in the house, wouldn’t it? To protect us from bad men.’

  ‘I can protect you, Gracie, I promise that. There is nothing a man could do that I wouldn’t do for you.’

  ‘But you are just a la-aa-dy,’ she sobs.

  ‘No, I am a woman, and no man would fight harder for you.’

  ‘I don’t want to go to trial with everyone there, and that … that bad man looking at me.’

  ‘It will go very quickly, Gracie, you just have to tell the truth, just say exactly what you saw and then we’ll go home and never think about it again. There is no right or wrong answer, just tell the truth.’

  ‘They will hang him, won’t they?’

  ‘If they prove he did it … maybe … I don’t know … sometimes people are reprieved. That’s not your concern, you just have to be honest, Gracie.’

  ‘I will be, I will.’

  ‘I know you will.’ Diana kisses Grace’s black hair again and again until she has quieted.

  ELEVEN

  Kow Iyo Toban

  ‘Cocksucker, fuck you!’ Mahmood presses his thumb hard against the ringer beside the door, which makes the bell in the corridor clatter.

  A warder wrenches the hatch open and bends down to meet Mahmood’s face on the other side of the door. ‘You’re asking for a hiding, aren’t you?’

  ‘I ask you to bring me water two time already, you want a man to go crazy, you bastard?’

  ‘You really don’t know what’s good for you. I had a mind to get your bloody water but now you can die of thirst for all I care.’

  Mahmood buzzes the ringer again and the warder sticks a finger in his ear. ‘I’ll report all of this to the governor, be sure of that, and he’ll order us to do whatever it takes to get some sense into your head.’

  ‘You touch me with your dirty hands and I kill you all. You think I’m your slave?’

  ‘Threats of violence, too? Nice one, buddy, that will definitely catch the governor’s ear.’

  Mahmood presses the button rapidly – bell, silence, bell, silence – until the warder stops moving his lips and slams the hatch closed.

  ‘Fuck you and your religion,’ Mahmood shouts after him.

  ‘You a crazy-ass man, too wild,’ a voice chastises him from inside his skull, ‘what you get from doing that?’ He argues with it silently, ‘I get my pride, I get my revenge,’ and he then sits heavily on the bed, his head cradled in his hands. He jerks up again and stands in the direction of Mecca, bringing his feet together and placing his palms over his navel. He takes a moment before beginning the prayer to clear his mind of all the dammed-up thoughts and emotions pressing down on him and then, with a deep breath, he begins. Allahu Akbar. Closing his eyes, calming his breath, resting his forehead on the cool cement, his mind slowly lifts away from the prison.

  Mahmood feels a little lighter after the salat but there is one particular feeling that he can’t push away, an unreasonable but powerful anger towards Laura. He hasn’t bothered to wave from the window for four days now, and he watches the hour when they would normally have that brief communion come and go with a sullen desire that she feel as wretched as he does. He knows it’s wrong-headed and childish, but he can’t pretend that everything is alright and that she ain’t let him down. She’s already wasted two years of his life stringing him along like some old dog, and now he is locked up because these white shayaadiin hate that he got one of theirs. That’s what it all boils down to, right? He took one of their women, and for that they gotta punish him. ‘The blacks take our jobs and take our women.’ They talk like that in all the papers, and say it to your face if they’re feeling bold. They don’t see you having the right to earn money or marry whoever you want. The Somalis had tried to warn him, but he was too proud and stupid to listen. These girls will betray you. They take up with any fella that catches their eye. They’ll have your children calling any man Daddy, or maybe they’ll just abandon them and dump them in a home. He can’t look Laura in the eye now, she’ll see what he’s thinking, she always could see into him.

  He’d treated it all like a game, like a cat stalking mice, he’d follow girls into bars and back out again, smiling as they walked away and told him giggling that, ‘I’m not allowed to talk to black boys.’ Black stockings, red lips, eyes done up all dark, and high heels, they turned his head every damn time. Their words said no but their eyes said yes, so he’d pick up his step and keep thinking the next one, the next one. The coloured girls had stopped having the same effect, it was too easy. ‘You don’t come all this way for a skirt that looks just like your mamma back home,’ that’s what the West Indian fellas said. The black women knew they had been pushed aside and hated it.

  Once, a West Indian woman sheltering under a vast red umbrella had caught sight of him and Laura on the street, she had scanned them both from top to bottom, her nose scrunched up, and asked with a mocking laugh, ‘You see all that white and think wife, huh?’

  He had put his arm tight around Laura’s shoulder and shot back, ‘Mind your own business, gal, I ain’t one of yours.’ What a fool he had been.

  Five years. It had taken five years for him to be stripped of all of his delusions about this place. If nothing else, a cell will reveal ev
ery last mistake you made. Mahmood stands up and paces the twelve square feet of floor space. That day in Durban, when he had seen his first ship sprawled like a volcanic, steaming island across the water, that was when he was done in. He’d signed on as a pantry boy because they’d said he was too weak for the ‘Black Gang’. It makes him smile, now, to remember how annoyed he had been to work in the kitchens when all his ‘brothers’ were downstairs in the engine room. It was weeks until he realized the ‘Black Gang’ came in all colours and were so named cos they all staggered up from their watch blackened with coal dust. His work was clean, easy and humiliating: ‘Peel those spuds, Ali’, ‘You ain’t got all the grease off these pans, put some welly in it, for Chrissake!’ or ‘I don’t give a flying a fuck “you no eat pork”, get them hams scored now.’ The stewards had been rough men but not without kindness. One of them, a bald-headed thick-veined Scot, had nearly throttled an engineer for throwing a plate of slimy corned beef back in Mahmood’s face.

  In his hours off he’d walked every corner of every deck, his legs still used to tramping miles of earth each day, and it amazed him that this beast, this steel whale crashing through the waves, had electricity, telephones, lifts, smokeless cookers, flushing toilets, and levers and dials everywhere that did mysterious things. White man magic. It was as if Europeans had remade the world, and they only had to stretch out their hands to bring before them all the wonders of the world. The ship revealed to him the gulf between the life he had been living in Africa and the world beyond. That ship, the SS Fort Ellice, might as well have been a rocket ship, taking him to a planet of green gabbling aliens and ice-sheet seas, and the closer they got to their destination, Cardiff, the more Mahmood knew that Africa had become too small for him.

  It wasn’t until his third voyage, when his muscles were little hillocks atop his fine bones, that he made his way into the bowels of the ship where the real men worked. Still not furnace material, he’d been put to work in the coal bunkers as a trimmer, shuttling coal to the boilers, where stokers, almost limp with exhaustion, threw it into the flames. The coal bunkers were pitch black and illuminated with just a single movable lamp. The floor roiled and pitched with the Atlantic waves, and the trimmers staggered about as the coal slipped beneath their feet. On that ship there had been a fire in the bunker, but not any normal blaze – there were no flames to see or smoke to smell – just a heat so intense, from deep within the black heap, that it forced a bulge in the steel bulkhead. The old Yemeni trimmer, Nasir, who could taste the quality of coal by biting into it, said it happened sometimes when too much new coal was piled on top of old, or when the bunker was sitting idle too long. He spoke of coal as if it was a fond but volatile friend, his bow legs blackened up to his baggy shorts. ‘Yallah! Yallah! No way to put out the fire but to burn it!’ he shouted, shoving Mahmood out of the way to rush through with his sharp-lipped wheelbarrow.

  They were joined on some watches by a Welshman who sang so deeply Mahmood felt his voice in his ribs; at other times a pair of identical Somali twins from Berbera, Raage and Roble swung their shovels beside him. Those days when the three Somalis were entombed and fell into the same hypnotic rhythm, the bunker felt almost like a mystical space. Their shovels plunging and flying up to the same beat, old work songs from the desert pulling their hoarse voices together in low, monotonous tones, the sweat, the pain, the heat exorcizing every last thought from their minds, a makeshift zaar at the bottom of the sea. He would clamber into his bunk, in a ten-man cabin choked with cigarette smoke and stale sweat, feeling as if he had been battered with hammers, his eyes wincing from the brightness of the light. But he fell asleep still elated, his pulse in tune with the thump of the motors. ‘Yallah! Yallah! No way to put out the fire but to burn it!’ Those were words to live by.

  Boy, had he burned! There were few sins he hadn’t committed. He’d had his first taste of liquor in a small bar on the dockside of Porto do Rio de Janeiro, in a palm-thatched dive where coloured sailors from all over the world gambled and danced with fleet-footed, blank-faced bar girls. The little glass of brown liquid was tea, he told himself, as he took it from the caramel-skinned Brazilian waitress. This had been while he still preferred women who reminded him of home. She was dressed up in a tight black halter-neck top with a red scarf tied around her neck and had twisted her black curls into a pompadour near the front of her head. She watched him as he took his first gulp of rum and giggled as his eyes widened in alarm. He looked around the bar for the other Somali sailors but they were not there, there was no one to judge or restrain him in that dim neon-illuminated space. She said something encouraging in Portuguese and refilled the glass from a heavy bottle. Rain poured down in heavy sheets from the rim of the thatch, cooling the heat of bodies pressed too close together, she took his hand and led him away from the loud jukebox ringing with frenetic samba music. The sky was darkening but the somnolent haunches of the mountains were still visible over the funnels and smoke columns of the port. She pointed each mountain out to him, speaking slowly as if to a child, her feline face silhouetted against a yellow bulb, her tongue making strange, sibilant sounds. He leant over and kissed her powdered cheek, emboldened by the rum, and waited for a slap that didn’t come, instead she turned and kissed him unabashedly on the lips. He reached out gingerly for her waist, his mind racing from his mother to the smell of the girl’s perfume to a memory of the macalim’s cane. Instinct and upbringing clashing just enough that his hands quivered a millimetre above her round hips. What kind of woman does this? his mind said. Who cares? his body replied.

  Mahmood’s body won the argument that night, and the next and the next, until the coal was replenished and the cargo loaded and he had to wave goodbye one final morning to his bold Brasiliana. The gambling came later, when with beginner’s luck he’d put in £10 and won £100 at a poker table in Singapore. It was a bigger thrill than even the alcohol and women had been, and he knew he’d found his poison. He’d stayed to watch the other games, promising himself he was done, but then he’d sat down again, placed a tenner on the narrow wooden table, then a twenty and eventually the whole lot. The Chinese cooks he’d tagged along with stayed up all night, fighting sleep with more plates of fried food and thimbles of whisky. The yellow strip lights buzzed, his brain hummed with exhaustion, but he watched intently as one old chef – with an opium-drowsy jinu perched on his knee, rubbing his mottled bald head encouragingly with her long black talons – pulled in a messy heap of cash and jewellery. It was enough to retire on but the old man didn’t crack a smile. Shaking the girl off his knee, he passed a bill to each man around the table and then walked stiffly back to the ship along the wide, bare, day-broken streets, his winnings concealed in a brown paper bag. The back room where they had spent the night turned rapidly into a doss house, as the first hawkers cried out their wares outside. He was the only black man there but no one cared or told him to leave. The gamblers flopped on the floor or slept at the tables, ducking their faces into their shirts or crossed arms, like crows nestling under their wings. Mahmood staggered behind the fortune-taker and arrived back at their ship, bloodshot-eyed and empty-pocketed, feeling as if a miracle had been worked.

  The need to work for a living was suddenly not an inescapable fact of life. You could earn, or not really earn but pocket enough in one night to put a stop to all the donkeywork, the sour bosses, the four-hour watches, the strikes, sinkings, long workless spells. You could become the master of your own life, go anywhere and do what you liked each day. He had found his new dream but it was one he could do nothing to fulfil, fortune couldn’t be nudged or shaken awake, she had to be given her liberty to act when and where she wanted. But damn, the bitch took her time and let a man down too hard. What sense it make for him to be here on a murder charge for something that have fuck all to do with him? What kinda fate is that? When some other bastard can get away with murder and probably win a big race on top of it too. Where is he now? That piece-of-shit killer? Tucked up in his woman’s arms, prob
ably, not a care in the world. No chance he’s gonna come running, confessing guilt, no, man, no way. Mahmood ain’t got no hope of that. He can’t rely on no witnesses, no lawyers, no judge, no fate. Just Allah. He has rinsed his soul and can beg God with a clean, true heart for justice. Just justice. He doesn’t expect his own sins to be overlooked, only that he shouldn’t pay for another man’s too.

  Even some of his sins feel forced on him by this damn country. He had never taken anything in his life until these bastards made him feel like the shit they’d stepped on in the grass. Old bitches holding their handbags to their chests cos they catch sight of him, or looking ready to cross themselves if his shadow fall on them. ‘What make you so scared?’ he’d wanted to shout many times. ‘It’s your people who easily kill us for sport.’ You could be the angel Jibreel but if your face dark it don’t matter how honest, kind or soft you are, you still the Devil. He’d started walking with crossed arms, as if lashed down, to let them know he wasn’t gonna hurt them. His mind was full of shaki, he kept asking himself did that woman look at her bag cos she see me coming, or she just needs something from it? Is that man following me around, or just wandering around his shop? Until, one day, he just had enough. A woman had given him a real stinker of a look, a real ‘get back to your mother’s hole’ look. At him! With his three-piece suit and silk scarf, while the old bat had on a rain jacket that hadn’t seen a laundry since the war. It was too much. When he caught up with her, haggling over a cheap fillet with Tommy the Fish, and saw that she had dumped her plastic handbag at the end of the cart, he hooked the strap with a finger and carried it away. It was an act of mischief, of tiny revenge. He had no need of her pennies, but the thrill, the build-up and pleasure of getting away with it, was the same as putting on an outside bet and getting lucky. It happened again and again, when he felt his dignity had been taken too lightly. He would become the devil that they always took him for. Then he got clever and saved his talent for times when he needed easy cash: sneaking a watch here, a coat or wallet there. He watched the experts at work in the pubs, slicing unseen through the crowds, or backslapping and tickling boozers. They each had their own style but it was always like a dance, down to good footwork and knowing how their mark would move, and Mahmood had always liked to dance.