The Fortune Men

by Nadifa Mohamed

  It works. The shoulders drop, fingers unclench, face lightens. ‘I’m sorry that you are in this position; it is an absolutely dreadful one. I understand that you have a wife and children that you desire to return to.’

  ‘Yes. It has been too long.’ This is how communication should be, thinks Mahmood, simple and human. He talks too much and forgets that people can’t see the fears that he has been goading in the cage of his mind. Evil thoughts that jump from his mouth as snapping, snarling things.

  ‘Your mother-in-law, Mrs Williams, has agreed to be named as a witness in your appeal, arguing that she should have been called before the jury after Mrs Gray gave her … story. She could have told the court of how Gray had offered to split the reward if they gave the same evidence.’

  ‘That is good …’ Mahmood begins to say something but then thinks better of it.

  ‘Yes, that and some technical points on the judge’s summing up will be the basis of our appeal. If you could just sign the appeal document here …’ He reaches into the yellow folder that contains this whole nightmare, and pulls out a black and white form.

  Mahmood takes the solicitor’s heavy, expensive pen and waits a moment to arrange his stiff fingers around the smooth metal. His heart begins to race as he forms the jagged peaks of the M, then the H of his signature, before falling into the rhythm of the M-a-t-t-a-n. That is it. He has either signed the last act of his life away, or pulled his fate back up from the depths.

  The cell has got so dark that the creamy white walls seem to glow. Occasional murmurs have strengthened and gathered into bad-tempered claps of summer thunder, while brisk slashes of lightning cut across Mahmood’s supine body.

  ‘How about a cheese sarnie?’ The warder leans over the bed and shakes Mahmood’s shoulder. ‘You gotta have something, otherwise we’ll have to get the doctor involved and that’s a real palaver. Get up, son, and play cards or something.’

  Mahmood is turned away, inert, only his eyes move as he follows the cracks in the wall from one brick to another.

  ‘How about a hot cuppa or bowl of soup? We don’t have to stick to the timetable in here as such.’

  ‘It’s no use, Perkins, leave him be,’ says the other warder from the table, as he counts out cards from a stack.

  ‘We’ve got to at least try.’

  ‘Is it your first time doing this?’

  The warder hesitates by Mahmood’s side, looking down with concern as his prisoner closes his eyes.

  ‘We should at least order a smaller uniform, he’s swamped in the one he’s got on.’

  ‘He’s a difficult one, Perkins, sit down and stop fussing over him like a nanny.’

  Perkins takes the rumpled blanket from the bottom of the bed and folds it into a neat rectangle before placing it over Mahmood’s feet. He sighs and takes his seat back at the table.

  ‘As I was saying, this your first time doing this?’

  ‘That’s right, no call for it at Wormwood Scrubs.’

  ‘Down your way there’s Pentonville, Wandsworth, Holloway …’

  ‘Holloway? Never. Don’t believe in capital for the ladies.’

  ‘You old romantic, if they gab on about equal rights then they can’t complain if they’re treated equally by the courts. It’s the third time I’ve volunteered and I wouldn’t hesitate if it was a bird, neither.’

  Perkins drops his voice. ‘Let’s change the subject, Wilkinson, we shouldn’t be talking about this.’

  ‘Alright. Get on and start, then. It’s your turn.’

  ‘Mahmood-o! Mahmood-o!’

  ‘Hee hooyo!’ Mahmood is startled by his mother’s voice calling him. He jumps from a light sleep and cannot fix where he is or the hour of the day.

  ‘Mahmood-o!’ He hears it again, this time quieter, but with the exact tone she had used to call him when he was little, when he would scramble to his feet and thread a needle for her or run to the shop to replenish the tea or sugar tins. ‘Mahmood-o! Mahmood-o!’ Her voice penetrates him.

  She will write soon, that’s what the voice is telling him, a blue-rimmed envelope with her fingerprints and musk on it, arriving at the bottom of a Somali seaman’s trunk. He doubts he will ever hear her words again.

  He is half fasting, half punishing himself, it’s been two days without food or water and he is so weak he barely tries to move his limbs. He doubts his fast will count if he doesn’t eat at sunset, and doesn’t even know if Ramadan has already ended, but still he persists.

  Trying to carve out his solitude in that crowded room, he won’t turn in the bed unless he is hidden under the blanket; he never looks at the warders or talks to them, it’s bad enough that he has to overhear their dumb chatter. English is like barbed wire to him now, a lethal language that he needs to keep outta his mouth.

  The trial is still ongoing in his dreams and waking thoughts. He plays judge, prosecution, defence all at once, ripping himself to shreds then calling order before arguing his innocence again and again and again. In court he had been copying the barristers’ words – their ‘it may be’, ‘I know not’ and ‘it is not for me to explain’ – when he had kept saying ‘I am not going to imagine’ the truth of the statements against him, but from his own mouth it had sounded so different. He should have wept, cried, pleaded, shredded his clothes, told them he was only a savage who had been outwitted by clever Welsh policemen. A sad savage with smiling eyes. A smiling savage with sad eyes.

  ‘You have a visitor, Mattan.’

  Mahmood opens his eyes, squints at the warder’s face … yet another new one.

  ‘You should take a look in the mirror and sort yourself out,’ the man says, pushing the blanket away.

  Mahmood unfurls his legs and places his feet on the cold floor. He tries to stand but feels woozy and drops heavily back on to the bed.

  ‘Watch yourself there,’ the warder says in an accent that sounds almost foreign to Mahmood.

  ‘Where you from?’

  ‘Newcastle.’

  ‘Oh, hallelujah! He speaks,’ exclaims a Welsh warder standing by the door, and that is enough to shut Mahmood’s mouth again.

  They walk him to an adjacent bathroom with a bathtub, sink and toilet. Mahmood looks at himself in the small mirror above the sink and runs his hands through his linty hair. ‘Dibjir. Homeless man,’ he says to his unrecognizable reflection, the Newcastle warder visible over his shoulder.

  Shuffling along, his grey uniform trousers billowing around his legs, his hair flattened down with cold water, his regulation shoes held together with a tiny suicide-proof length of shoelace, Mahmood follows the whistling warder into the visiting room. He prays it’s not Laura; he’s not ready to face her yet.

  Berlin stands there. Tall, beautiful, leaning on a black umbrella as if about to break into a song-and-dance number. His pale eyes widen on seeing Mahmood enter the room and he straightens up.

  Mahmood takes a long look at Berlin before sitting down: at his gleaming black lace-ups, his grey tweed suit, the fat silver tie, at the jacquard pocket square, at the medals crowding his lapel.

  A glass panel separates them. ‘Eid greetings, old friend,’ Berlin says, smiling. His face is clean-shaven and glossy, his dark oily skin contrasting with the white hairs running through his black sideburns.

  ‘Eid?’

  ‘Yes, they called it in Cairo two nights ago.’

  ‘You had a party at the milk bar?’

  ‘Nothing I would call a party, more a way of passing the time, just Ismail and a few of the other old fellas.’

  ‘Big parade to the mosque?’

  ‘Of course, and the sheikh called the mayor and mayoress to eat with him at the zawiya, he’s big pals with them now. Playing the Welshman.’

  ‘That’s why they don’t give a damn about me. You should start up a Somali mosque, what do you get from them but fighting and politics?’

  Berlin looks over his shoulder and eyes the guard, before switching to Somali. The language sounds conspiratorial and intim
ate to Mahmood’s unaccustomed ears.

  ‘We’ll get one, inshallah. Now, Mahmood …’ he hesitates, searches for the right words, exhales, ‘this … has gone too far.’

  Mahmood shrugs despondently.

  ‘We will see you through it, you know that, the money we raised has gone already, we didn’t think ahead to appeals or anything like that, but we talked to the Somalis in Newport, South Shields, Hull, Sheffield and East London, and they all say they will contribute. What? Two, three pounds a man? It’s nothing. They don’t have to reach too far into their pockets.’

  ‘I appreciate it, man, I really do. I never had to ask these people for their charity and that is one good thing.’

  ‘I saw it all. I was there at the trial.’

  ‘You went to Swansea? I thought you hate to leave the Bay.’

  ‘I do, but I got on that damn, stinking train. Thought we needed a man there, an observer.’

  ‘And what did you think? Better than the pictures, huh?’

  ‘Wahollah! It was a circus, it just needed acrobats and fire-breathers.’

  Mahmood lets his tense shoulders drop and laughs a loud bark.

  ‘And the lions and women who contort their bodies instead of the truth.’

  ‘But she was the lion, wasn’t she? Didn’t you see the grey mane and sharp claws? She did not like you. What did you do to wrong her, take her handbag?’

  Mahmood puts his hand over his heart, smiling in a slightly manic way. ‘Wallahi billahi tillahi, I wish I knew. She told Laura’s mother, to her face, that I stole from her but I was living in Hull at that time. She’s that hateful type who just hates a dark face. Now, the Nigerian, the watchmaker, I did wrong him and I can admit that. I took a watch from him, but does that mean I should hang?’

  ‘Of course not, I pray that won’t happen.’ Berlin leans back in his chair, looks around the windowless visiting room. ‘These people are crazy. It’s got even worse in town now, they slam all sorts of doors in a coloured’s face. Never mind the usual public houses, poor Lou was even told to get out by the dentist. The papers have riled them up over your case and now they think we’re all carrying a switchblade ready for a shopkeeper’s neck. How you cope in this place? I swear my blood turns to ice the minute I step through the gate.’

  Mahmood lifts his palms. ‘I just live, I wake up each morning and can’t believe this is my story, I don’t know how it could come to this. Berlin, let me ask you now … if they do this … you know … finish me, I want you to write to my mother and tell her I died at sea, that I went back to the navy and my ship went down somewhere far away. That’s all. Don’t tell her nothing about all of this.’

  Berlin nods. ‘Painful either way but I understand you.’ He nudges his head towards the warder, ‘They treat you alright?’

  ‘They follow me to the bath, to the toilet, and stand watching the whole time in case I find a way to kill myself. I don’t even think about them any more. I can see through them like they’re not there, had to learn fast before I go completely crazy. I sit here, thinking about what’s happening outside the prison walls. What my boys are doing each day, what Laura is dealing with, what fun you men are having.’

  ‘The men are doing what they have always done: bickering, fighting over money, going to sea. One fella, Awaleh, was sent back as a distressed seaman from Brazil. He’s a strange one.’

  ‘The same one who was taken sick in Japan? He’s just got bad luck like me.’

  ‘That sailor gives me a bad feeling.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I don’t want to put thoughts in your head, but you know when you hear whispers and the end of sentences and it leaves you feeling … in the dark.’

  ‘Yes …’

  ‘Well, people …’

  ‘People?’

  ‘Ismail. Ismail says the only man who fits the description of the six-foot Somali the police were talking about is Awaleh, the only one in the Bay that night, anyway.’

  ‘You believe the police?’ Mahmood snorts. ‘You think they would say it’s a six-foot Welshman when they could pin it on a man with black skin?’

  Berlin tips his head in agreement. ‘But, but that’s all I can say, something doesn’t feel right. I know these Somalis, have lived too long with them, and there is something they are keeping quiet. I’ve never felt it so strongly before.’

  ‘Why? Why would they do that?’ Mahmood puts his face closer to the glass, his eyes watching Berlin closely.

  ‘I don’t know, man, that’s why I can’t say anything concrete. If I had real evidence I would take it to your damned overpriced lawyer. Awaleh was definitely here the night of the murder, I saw him in the milk bar that afternoon, but the next day I heard he had gone to Manchester.’

  Mahmood sinks back into his chair. ‘So, why didn’t someone say something before?’

  ‘Because who wants to be an informer? The Somalis didn’t say anything about you, and I guess they chose not to say anything about him neither.’

  They have let Mahmood out into a private yard for his daily exercise hour and he feels brought back to life. The day is warm, almost hot for the first time in a long while, but with the fresh green scent of drying rain still in the air. The light is harsh and washes over the damp brick walls and ironmongery of the prison like varnish. Everything feels new and clean; even the barbed wire above his head glitters with raindrops hanging from the twisted points. Mahmood closes his eyes and lets the sunshine pour over his face like holy oil.

  A guard watches him idly from the entrance but Mahmood has space all around him; space to think, to feel, to remember who he really is beyond his prison number. The walls reach just over his head and if he had the courage he would lift himself over and run through the many quadrants, green spaces and gates of the jail and the short distance to Laura and the children. He hasn’t seen her for more than a week but knows that she’ll be in a worse state than him, full of guilt and fear. On paper he has two more weeks to live but in his gut he doesn’t believe it, he feels in his veins and sinews that they have more time, that Laura has time to settle her nerves before facing him. He doesn’t grasp where this confidence comes from but it is there, solid and elemental.

  It’s not that Mahmood believes himself important, the past few months have torn away that illusion, but he is extraordinary, his life has been extraordinary. The things he has got away with, the things he has been punished for, the things he has seen, the way that it had once seemed possible for him to bend, with great force, everything to his will. His life was, is, one long film with mobs of extras and exotic, expensive sets. Long reams of film and miles of dialogue extending back as he struts from one scene to another. He can imagine how his movie looks even now: the camera zooming in from above on to the cobblestone prison yard and then merging into a close-up of his thoughtful, upturned face, smoke billowing out from the corner of his dark lips. A colour film, it must be that. It has everything: comedy, music, dance, travel, murder, the wrong man caught, a crooked trial, a race against time and then the happy ending, the wife swept up in the hero’s arms as he walks out, one sun-filled day, to freedom. The image stretches Mahmood’s mouth into a smile.

  Up above, a seagull careens through the midday sky, and from somewhere unseen a crow repeatedly caw-caws, seeming to enjoy the vibration in its throat. Life. Life. It is so simple and beautiful. The waxy leaves of an ivy vine snaking up from the sterile ground, a spider twitching on its bejewelled web, the flow of air in Mahmood’s lungs and the rush of blood through his heart – all of it beyond his control, all of it somehow both fleeting and eternal. He, himself, could disappear from the world just as easily as the seagull winding an aimless path in the air, its bones falling apart one day somewhere hidden and mysterious, no one thinking to ask after it. He is a man, and there are other men, just as there are other seagulls, but what he can’t shake is the idea that the world will end in a tiny way without him. Everything will appear exactly the same but with a permanent shade where he should b
e. Laura, alive but widowed, his sons, alive but fatherless, his mother, alive but grieving a child, his technicolour talkie snapping back to be replaced by a black and white, silent film. ‘We close our eyes and ears to death,’ the macalim used to say, ‘but it is all around us, it is in the air we breathe.’ While he stands there smoking, a few yards away in one of the streets nearby someone will be drawing their last breath, from disease or a petty little accident. Their possessions piled up around them like wreckage. Like the murdered woman, Violet, and her shop that looked like it held all the world’s shoes and dresses and wool blankets.

  If, and it’s an ‘if’ that he chooses to reject, they go through with the execution, he has so little to pass on to his children. There is his toothbrush, his Qur’an, a few photos at Laura’s place, but the rest is with the police, tagged and contaminated by their injustice to him. They will not even have his body, which the courts want to keep here, as some kind of punishment or prize. The only substantial inheritance they will have are his stories, parcelled out by Laura or Berlin and covered in their own fingerprints. They will hear that he was a nomad, a chancer, a fighter, a rebel, but not from him, and therefore they will know the price of being all that, the potion and the poison taken together.

  Back in the cell, he agrees to sit with the warder from London, Perkins, and the other from Newcastle, Wilkinson. The time in the yard has made him realize that for the survival of his soul he must sit up, eat, occupy his time and talk to human beings, whoever they may be. Otherwise, he is only cheating himself of the seconds, minutes and hours that are leased, not given, to any living thing. By nature, he is not a melancholy man, he is someone who has always woken up with a desire to extract as much pleasure from the day as possible, and he can’t let the prison change that.

  Mahmood sits between them, with the draughts board directly in front of him. Perkins will play against him first and then Wilkinson. He feels like a child between these two large, grey-whiskered men.