The Fortune Men

by Nadifa Mohamed

  ‘You should come out of that rain now, Mr Mattan.’

  Mahmood plucks the now soggy cigarette from his ear and twists it into the ground with his shoe.

  The clinic is bright and empty, the large windows bouncing light off the white tiled floor. Mahmood stands on a rubber-clad weighing scale, and pulls his spine straight so that his height can be taken at the same time.

  ‘Curious. You appear to have lost weight but there is a drop of just a couple of pounds. A hundred and twenty-three against a hundred and twenty-five, last month.’

  ‘I was fasting during Ramadan.’

  ‘I see, and eating at night?’

  ‘A little.’

  ‘You have solid muscle mass so you must have lost a little fat.’

  ‘And my height?’

  He draws the marker down to Mahmood’s hair. ‘Five foot seven and a quarter of an inch.’

  ‘Doctor,’ Mahmood steps down from the scale, ‘I want you to write my wife a letter.’

  ‘Your warders are able to help with that.’

  ‘No, I would like you to do it, so I can keep my business private from them.’

  He puts his hands in his pockets, looks ready to say no, but after stepping about a little, he nods agreement. ‘What do you want me to say to her?’ He pulls his notepad and pen from his coat pocket.

  ‘Just that I say hello, that the Court of Appeal reject my case and that I now have to wait on a pardon from the government. That she should come and see me as soon as she can, but not to panic, there ain’t no cause for her to panic, tell her that.’

  He scribbles with the paper close to his face.

  ‘Tell her that I send my love to her and the children, damn it, send my love to her mother and father too, everyone at Davis Street.’

  ‘That all?’

  ‘End with cheerio.’

  ‘Not yours lovingly or something of that order?’

  ‘No, cheerio, she like that word.’

  ‘As you wish.’ He puts the pen and notepad back in his pocket and begins to walk Mahmood to the door.

  ‘Doctor, why they care so much about my weight?’

  ‘It’s part of my duties,’ he says, striding ahead.

  ‘It got something to do with the hanging?’

  ‘We have to keep you in good health while in custody.’

  ‘But I hear when it was Ajit Singh’s time they decide how much rope to give him by his weight.’ Mahmood is almost chasing after him.

  ‘You shouldn’t listen to prison rumours.’ The doctor holds the door open, his face hard. ‘I’ll send the letter to your wife with tomorrow’s post. Good afternoon.’

  Mahmood hates this time of day, when the sun sets so slowly that blackness creeps ominously up his legs, like a plague with no cure. He sits in a chair, a half-eaten dish of mackerel and cold mashed potato in front of him. A knife and fork lie untouched on either side of the plate, he had used just the spoon and his fingers to eat, with the warders watching him in wonder. One of the reasons he gives up on his meals so quickly is the discomfort he feels eating in front of them, the forced intimacy of it and the shame of being a human animal with base needs and a wet, loud mouth. He had never really learnt how to use a knife and fork and has given up the pretence now, shovelling the tasteless fuel into his mouth the way he had thrown coal into a furnace. They watch him, blushing at his bad table manners, his fingers coated in fish oil and globules of powdered potato. He wipes his hands on his trousers and looks back at them. They had earlier refused him more regular baths. In his own life, with this heat and sticky humidity, he would bathe once in the morning and again in the evening. Just a basin of water would be enough to wash his face and under his arms but ‘against regulations’ they said. He don’t give a shit, then, if they think he eats like a savage.

  Mahmood swills water around his mouth, swallows and then rises. He paces slowly up and down, stretching his long legs, as the tiny window above their heads begins to glow orange with the final rays of the sun. ‘I’m a man who can walk non-stop,’ he announces to no one in particular.

  The Scottish warder, Macintosh, replies, ‘Is that so?’

  ‘Yeah, it is so, if you ask me to walk to Australia I could do it.’

  ‘Take you a few years, I’d guess.’ He laughs.

  ‘No, I could do it in six months.’

  ‘Six months! That’s optimistic. You know how far away it is? It takes a week by plane.’

  ‘I know it. I’ve been there, more than one time.’

  ‘I’ll be a Ten Pound Pom in a few years, if everything goes right. Me and the wife are planning on it,’ replies the other warder, Robinson, as if his already sandblasted skin could stand Australian heat.

  ‘It’s a nice country, looks like my homeland.’

  ‘British Somaliland? You got those red deserts? Aye, I was in Egypt during the war and they’ve got those great big yellow dunes, stacked up like castles in a child’s sand box.’

  ‘Oh, yes, I know Australia. White Australia,’ Mahmood says, tuning out their voices. The memories come as if on a track, tied together but full of variety.

  1947. The broken derrick at Darling Harbour that had delayed departure and felt, even then, a bad omen. The mouth-burning taste of Szechuan chicken from a Chinatown stall that seemed to cook with paraffin rather than oil. The smell of the freshly painted quarters he had shared with seven other Somali firemen. The black sheen of cockroaches scampering over his bunk and tired body at night, the darkness coming alive and swarming around him.

  Their vessel, the SS Glenlyon, had completely broken down a week into their journey, in the dead heart of the Indian Ocean, far from Australia, Africa or India. He hadn’t been in the engine room at the time alhamdulillah, but the explosion could be heard throughout the ship. They had passed hard through a long tropical storm, with rain and waves lashing down on to the deck, the passageways beginning to flood and the boilers going billy-o as they tried to power through it. It was only when the storm had begun to lift that the engineers went down to examine a fault the stokers had reported earlier, in furnace three. The engineers had played with it for less than an hour before a loud boom went up the funnel. The ship retreated from a galloping pace to a limp, then the propellers ceased to turn at all, far away from any assistance. You could hear the captain shouting ‘Christ!’, ‘Fuck!’ and ‘What the hell have you done?’ at the poor engineers for hours, but it was no good. There was nothing they could do without a replacement turbine. They could conjure up no temporary fix to take them to a port, only wait for the turbine to arrive on a sister ship. The captain, in a rage, set everyone, high and low, to menial tasks – sweeping, polishing, clearing out, repairing, chipping the inside of the cold boilers – but the ship had come out of dry dock and was in old but tidy shape. Their four-hour shifts of alternating work and rest came and went with little to do.

  The sea had softened but seemed to mock them, tossing the ship lightly about and tugging at their anchor. Time stopped, and at night with no lights alive on the ship and few passing vessels, a strange vertigo set in with sky and sea indistinguishable. He could have been anyone, in any time or place, even at the beginning of history. The breadth of space and depth of ocean reminding him of his own insignificance, as well as that of all mankind. Meteor showers came nearly every night, some of the falling stars so low he could hear them fizzing through the atmosphere, his neck arched back to watch them dance. The First Mate firing flares into the constellations to warn passing ships of their otherwise invisible presence.

  The sunbaked deck of the Glenlyon became like a city park, with bare-chested men reading, playing cricket and posing for Kodaks. Distinction between ranks faded, chiefs sat down to play against the best domino or card sharks, whether they were galley boys or firemen. It was the first time he had felt any kind of equality on-board a ship, and not just restricted to his bunk or the engine rooms. One night, a message was whispered around the ship that King Neptune would visit the next day, to initiat
e the Pollywogs who had crossed the Tropic of Capricorn for the first time. Mahmood realized he was a Pollywog too, a novice in contrast to the Shellbacks who had crossed the Equator, Date Line, Meridian and Tropics of Cancer and Capricorn already. The Glenlyon was sitting on the Line, drifting on it.

  It was unlike anything he had seen before. He had crossed the Equator many times without incident but now the ship appeared like a madhouse afloat. After breakfast, King Neptune appeared, winched up from a porthole below and robed in a long toga of blue netting. He had a tin-foil crown, trident and a long beard of cotton wool. Whoever it was under the get-up was unrecognizable, and the Captain saluted and transferred command of the ship to him. Buruleh, the bony, fifty-something Somali stoker, arrived after King Neptune, carried on the shoulders of a burly Latvian able seaman. Buruleh was the oldest man on-board and had been given the role of Davy Jones; he wore two steel forks as horns, his shirt stuffed with fabric to create a hunchback, his trousers decorated with fish heads and seaweed, his face powdered and his lips blackened. The third member of the strange troupe was the rotund Chief Steward, wearing a gown of tea towels pinned together and a mop head as a wig, his lips were the thin red of food dye but he had at least shaved his beard. While a sailor played an accordion, King Neptune called forth the dozen Pollywogs and then Davy Jones, to set them the tasks they would need to complete to be initiated into the fraternity.

  Buruleh had an evil imagination. He made Mahmood and the others give one hundred press-ups, then made them search through troughs filled with porridge, soggy bread, half-chewed sausage and God-knows-what-else for the pennies he had hidden inside. Their shirts already wet and grimy, the novices then had to drink a brown concoction that tasted how the shower stalls smelled, and then they were dunked into barrels of seawater dyed green. Mahmood was the last to complete, as he had baulked at drinking the concoction, but Buruleh had tripped him up as he ran to the barrels, and poured a glass of it down his throat. Mahmood wrestled with him on the slippery deck, laughing and cursing in Somali, but Buruleh had been fortified by his new role and only released him when the liquid was gone.

  It was filthy and joyful at once. They were like children with no worry of rank, or colour, or pay, or jealousy. Each man was just a man with a laughing mouth, flexing muscles, eyes with stories behind them, and a heart that could love as well as hate.

  They should have stayed there for ever. Floating near the bottom of the planet. Forgotten. Beyond the reach of the real world. He had married Laura just before boarding the Glenlyon but if he had never returned maybe life would have been better for both of them.

  ‘The governor has arranged for a Mohammedan priest to visit you, he’ll be here at noon.’ Perkins counts out thirteen cards to begin a game of rummy.

  ‘Sheikh Ismail? Or Sheikh Al-Hakimi?’ Mahmood gathers his pile into one hand and knocks the cards against the table to straighten their edges.

  ‘I only caught the sheikh part, I’m afraid.’

  ‘He shouldn’t bother with either. They don’t care nothing for my hide or soul. They see me in the visiting room?’

  ‘No, in here, in case you want to pray together.’

  Mahmood looks around him, at the overflowing ashtray and his bed with the cheap grey blanket and filthy pillow. ‘It too dirty in here.’

  Perkins casts an eye over the cell. ‘I’ve seen worse, but feel free to give it a tidy if you want to keep up appearances.’ He smiles.

  Mahmood puts down the cards and does just that. He doesn’t want either Yemeni to see the level he has fallen to, he won’t let them gloat and report back about how bad the Somali thief is living. He shakes out all the bedding and straightens it over the mattress. He takes a small plate of bread crusts and an empty enamel cup to the table; Perkins hurls the contents of the ashtray over the bread and takes all of the mess to the door. He knocks and waits for it to be taken away.

  He appears in all of his entire splendour, Al-Hakimi in a globe-sized turban and sweeping embroidered cloak.

  ‘Abracadabra,’ whispers Wilkinson to Perkins, stifling a giggle.

  Perkins frowns and ushers him into the corner behind the door, to give Mahmood and the priest privacy.

  He has brought the scent of their old shared world in with him – incense, spices, oud perfume – and Mahmood has to fight the urge to bury his nose in the man’s garments.

  Al-Hakimi is three or four inches shorter than him, but has thrown his head back and peers down the length of his thin, hooked nose at him. ‘As-salaamu Alaikum, Ibn Mattan.’

  ‘Wa Alaikum Salaam, Sheikh.’ Mahmood holds out his hand.

  Al-Hakimi hesitates a moment, before extricating his small yellow hand from the heavy folds of his cloak.

  They are awkward with each other and the situation.

  ‘Sit down,’ says Mahmood in English, gesturing to the chairs.

  ‘I have been called to offer you spiritual comfort, but let me say first what an unfortunate, shameful business this is,’ he begins in Arabic, glancing over his shoulder at the warders and smiling a tight smile. ‘You must correct your condition before it is too late.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘By saying the words of the Qu’ran, “Our Lord, we have indeed believed! Forgive us our sins and save us from the agony of the Fire.”’

  ‘You think anything else passes through my mind but “Rabbi inna zalamto nafsi faghfirli”? I say that both day and night. I know I have hurt my soul.’

  ‘So, you admit it?’ he says, shaking his head.

  ‘Admit what? That I drank, gambled, stole, wasted time on women? Yes.’

  ‘No, the crime that keeps you here?’

  ‘No, I cannot admit what I have not done.’

  ‘You cannot ask forgiveness for what you have not confessed to, either.’

  Mahmood places his left hand over his heart and holds his right hand up, the index finger pointing to heaven. ‘As Allah is my witness, I did not kill that woman, my blood and her blood are both spilt in innocence. You tell that to everyone. I don’t die a blameless man but I die a shaheed.’

  ‘A martyr?’ Al-Hakimi repeats, raising an eyebrow.

  ‘It’s the truth.’ Mahmood keeps his hands in their oath-swearing posture. ‘I remember hadith after hadith that my macalim taught me as a child. There are many types of martyr: a woman who dies in childbirth is one and her child will drag her into paradise with its umbilical cord – that is from Musnad Ahmed. Another one: “A Muslim who dies a stranger or in a strange land is a shaheed,” as narrated by Ibn Majah. Am I not a stranger in a strange land?’

  Al-Hakimi nods.

  ‘And what does a martyr receive?’ Mahmood asks, playing teacher.

  ‘Jannat ul-Firdaws.’

  ‘Yes. The highest paradise. I have learnt much in here, Sheikh. I have learnt the fear it takes to truly beg God for forgiveness, from the pit of the stomach. I have learnt how lonely a soul can be when all amusement and kindness and family are taken away. I have learnt how small and fragile this life is, and how everything in this world, this duniya, is a mirage that evaporates before the eyes. I have tasted the bitterness of injustice. Have you, Sheikh?’

  Al-Hakimi shakes his head, his pale brown eyes fixed on Mahmood’s mouth.

  ‘It’s like swallowing poison.’

  ‘If …’

  ‘There is no if, Sheikh, laa, do not say that word to me.’

  ‘Whatever the case, all we can do is pray for Allah’s mercy on you, both for this life and the next life. You have impressed me, Mattan.’

  Mahmood smiles his indeterminate, mysterious smile. ‘Do that, and I will return the favour. May Allah forgive you and the other Muslims for abandoning me.’

  The sheikh leans back in his seat, not breaking eye contact.

  ‘Look at my bones, see how they show through my skin,’ he lifts his sleeves to reveal his forearms, ‘know that they will bury me here, keep these bones like loot. No Muslim to wash me, no prayers, no one to rest my left cheek to the
soil. Know that, Sheikh.’

  ‘We will pray for you. Do not despair, repeat after me: “Our Lord, in You we have placed our trust, and to You do we turn in repentance, for unto You is the end of all journeys.” Repeat it.’

  Mahmood repeats the du’a.

  ‘Ameen.’ Al-Hakimi takes one of the long black prayer beads from his richly embroidered chest and lifts it over his head. ‘Take this, and count the names of Allah day and night, put your trust in the Almighty because the world of men is an unjust one.’

  Mahmood wraps the tusbah around his knuckles.

  Days after the sheikh’s visit, there is still a kind of glow around Mahmood, an inner spiritual illumination. Everything is as Allah willed it to be. The warders mean no harm, he realizes, they are only men placed in their stations by divine providence, just like he is. All of them gathered together by a fate that was written before any of them drew their first breaths. This feeling is like being doped, or what he imagines dope achieves; a soft, warm numbness that makes any painful thought or feeling unreachable. He wakes up and sleeps with the sensation of real submission, not having to search anywhere for it, but the feeling lasting and lasting as the days turn over. That train that took him south from Dar es Salaam, that first ship in South Africa, that meeting with Laura in the café, that jury man turning to him and reading ‘guilty’ – all rungs of an invisible ladder that he was climbing up and up towards heaven. The exact date and time of his death already fixed, these ignorant white men manipulated like puppets. There is no one to rage at, or to even blame. He just wishes that he had paid more notice to Violet Volacki, that small, stout, dark-haired woman whose death was inextricably tied to his own. He had never cared to think of her as more than a talking, hard-haggling version of one of her shop dummies. He should have held her hand when she passed back his change, or put a gentle palm on that twisted back of hers. Looked deep into the flecks inside her brown eyes and said, ‘You and I are joined for eternity. The thread of my life will be cut the moment you die.’