Desert Flower

by Dirie, Waris

  “Tell her I’m fine, and she’ll hear from me soon.” She shook her head and got into the car. I stood on the sidewalk and waved goodbye to everyone, then walked into the street, watching the car until it was out of sight.

  I’m not going to lie I was scared. Up until that moment I hadn’t really believed that they would leave me there all alone. But as I stood in the middle of Harley Street, I was exactly that all alone. I have no hard feelings toward my aunt and uncle, though; they’re still my family. They gave me an opportunity by bringing me to London, and for that I will forever be grateful. When they left, I guess they thought, “Well you wanted to stay here’s your chance. Go ahead then do what you want. But we’re not going to make it easy for you, because we think you should come home with us.” I’m sure they felt it was a disgrace for a young woman to remain in England alone, unchaperoned. However, in the end the decision had been mine, and since I had chosen

  to remain, I would have to take charge of my own destiny now.

  Fighting an overwhelming feeling of panic, I went back inside the house. I closed the front door and walked into the kitchen to talk to the only other person left my old friend the chef. He greeted me with “Well, you know, you’ve got to go today. I’m the only one who’s staying on not you. You’ve got to leave.” He pointed toward the front door. Oh, yes, the minute my uncle was gone, he just couldn’t wait to give it to me. The smug look on his unfriendly face showed that ordering me around gave him great pleasure. I stood there leaning against the door frame, thinking how quiet the house seemed now that everybody was gone. “Waris, you’ve got to go now. I want you to get out…”

  “Oh, shut up.” The man was like an obnoxious barking dog. “I’m going, okay? I just came in to get my bag.”

  “Grab it now quickly. Quickly. Hurry up, because I have to By this time I was climbing the stairs, paying no attention to his noise. The master was gone, and in the brief interim before the new ambassador arrived, Chef would be master. I walked through the empty rooms, thinking of all the good and bad times here, wondering where my next home would be.

  I picked up my little duffel from the bed, slung it over my shoulder, walked down the four flights of stairs, and out the front door. Unlike the day I had arrived, today was a gorgeous, sunny day with a blue sky and fresh air like springtime. In the tiny garden, I used a stone to unearth my passport, slipping it out of its plastic bag and stowing it in my duffel. I brushed the soil from my hands and headed down the street. I couldn’t help smiling as I walked along the sidewalk free at last. My whole life stretched before me with nowhere to go, and no one to answer to. And somehow I knew things would work out.

  Close to my uncle’s house was my first stop: the Somalian embassy. I knocked on the door. The doorman who answered knew my family well, since sometimes he also drove for my uncle. “Hello, miss. What are you doing here? Is Mr. Farah still in town?”

  “No, he’s gone. I wanted to see Anna, to find out if I can get a job at the embassy.” He laughed, returned to his chair, and sat down. He put his hands behind his head and leaned back against the wall. As I stood there in the middle of the lobby, he made no attempt to move. His

  attitude puzzled me, as this man had always been polite to me. Then I realized that like Chef’s his attitude had changed with the departures that occurred that morning. My uncle was gone, and without my uncle, I was nobody. I was less than nobody, and these oafs were thrilled to have the upper hand.

  “Oh! Anna’s far too busy to see you.” The doorman grinned. “Look,” I said firmly, “I need to see her.” Anna had been my uncle’s secretary, and she’d always been kind to me. Luckily, she heard my voice in the lobby and walked out of her office to see what was happening.

  “Waris! What are you doing here?”

  “You know, I really didn’t want to go back to Somalia with my uncle,” I explained. “I just didn’t want to go back. So I – I’m not staying at the house anymore, you know. And I was wondering if you know anybody who maybe anybody I can work for anything I don’t care what it is. I’ll do anything.”

  “Well, my darling’ she raised her eyebrows ‘it’s a bit too short notice. Where are you staying?” “Oh, I don’t know. Don’t worry about that.”

  “Well, can you give me a number where I can find you?”

  “No, because I don’t know where I’m staying. I’ll find some cheap hotel tonight.” I knew she would invite me to stay at her place if she hadn’t had a tiny little flat. “But I can come back and give you a number later, so you can let me know if you hear of anything.”

  “Okay, Waris. Listen, take care of yourself-are you sure you’re going to be all right?”

  “Yeah, I’ll be fine.” From the corner of my eye I saw the doorman constantly grinning like a fool. “Well, thanks look, I’ll see you later.”

  With relief I headed out into the sunlight again, and decided to go shopping. All I had to live on until I landed a job was the small sum of money I’d squirreled away from my maid’s wages. But now that I was a woman about town, I needed to buy something decent to wear, a new dress to lift my spirits. I walked from the embassy to the big department stores at Oxford Circus. I’d been there before with my cousin Basma when I’d first come to London. Aunt Maruim had sent us down to buy me a few things, since when I arrived I had no winter clothes. Actually I’d had no clothes at all, except the outfit I’d worn on the plane and one fine leather sandal.

  Strolling through the racks at Selfridges, I found the enormous variety of choices mesmerizing. The thought that I could stay here as long as I wanted and try on all these clothes all these colors, styles, sizes was intoxicating. The thought that for the first time in my history, I was in charge of my own life was intoxicating nobody yelling at me to milk the goats, feed the babies, make the tea, scrub the floors, scour the toilets.

  For the next several hours, I set to work trying on outfits in the dressing room with the help of two sales clerks. Using my limited English and sign language, I communicated that I wanted something longer, shorter, tighter, brighter. At the end of my marathon session, when dozens of discarded garments lay in stacks outside my fitting room, one of the clerks smiled at me and said, “Well, love, what did you decide to have?”

  The sheer volume of choices overwhelmed me, but by this point I was getting nervous that down the street, in the next store, there might be something even better. Before I parted with any of my precious pounds, I’d better find out. “I’m not having anything today,” I said pleasantly, ‘but thank you.” The poor clerks, standing with their arms full of dresses, looked at me in disbelief, then at each other in disgust. I sailed past them and continued on my mission: to examine every inch of Oxford Street.

  After several places, I still hadn’t bought anything; but as always, the true joy for me was simply to try on things. As I left one building and entered another, I realized the spring like day was fading, the winter evening coming on, and I still had no place to spend the night. With this thought in mind, I entered the next store and saw a tall, attractive African woman examining a sale table of sweaters. She looked like a Somalian, and I studied her, trying to decide how to talk to her. Picking up a sweater, I smiled at her and said in Somali, “I’m trying to buy something, but I can’t decide what I want. And believe me, girl, I’ve seen a lot of clothes today.”

  We began talking and the woman said her name was Halwu. She was quite friendly and laughed a lot. “Where do you live, Waris? What do you do?”

  “Oh, you’re going to laugh. I’m sure you’ll think I’m crazy, but I live nowhere. I don’t have any place to live, because my family left me today. They went back to Somalia.” I saw the look of empathy in her eyes; as I later learned this woman had been through a lot herself.

  “You didn’t want to go back to Somalia, huh?” Without saying it, we

  both knew: we missed our home and our families, but what opportunities did we have there? Being traded for camels? Becoming some
man’s property? Struggling every day just to survive?

  “No, but I have nothing here, either,” I said. “My uncle was the ambassador, but now he’s gone and the new man is coming. So this morning they kicked me out, and right this minute, I have no idea where I’m headed.” I laughed.

  She waved in the air to silence me, as if the movement of her hand could sweep away all my problems. “Look, I live around the corner at the YMCA. I don’t have a big place, but you can come and stay for the night. I just have a room, so if you want to cook, you’ll have to go to a different floor to make some food.”

  “Ooohh, that would be wonderful, but are you sure?”

  “Yes, I’m sure. I mean, come on. What are you going to do otherwise?”

  We walked together to her room at the Y. The YMCA was located in a modern brick high-rise normally occupied by students. Her room was a tiny space with a twin bed, a place for books, and Halwu’s big, beautiful television. “Oh!” I threw up my hands. “Can I watch TV?”

  The woman looked at me like I was from outer space. “Oh, yeah sure. Switch it on.” I plopped down on the floor in front of it and stared greedily at her TV. After four years, I could look at it without somebody chasing me out of the room like a stray cat. “Didn’t you ever watch television at your uncle’s?” she said curiously.

  “Are you kidding? Sometimes I would sneak in, but I’d always get caught. “Watching TV again, Waris?” I mimicked my aunt’s snottiest voice and started snapping my fingers. ‘“Back to work, now, come on. We didn’t bring you here to watch television.”

  My real education on life in London began with Halwu as my professor; the two of us became close friends. I spent that first night in her room, and the next, and the next. Then she suggested, “Why don’t you get a room here?”

  “Well, first of all because I can’t afford it, and I need to go to school, which means I won’t have time to work.” I asked her shyly, “Can you read and write?” “Yeah.”

  “And speak English?”

  “Yeah.”

  “See, I can’t do any of those things and I need to learn. That’s my biggest priority. And if I start working again, I won’t have time.”

  “Well, why don’t you go to school part-time and work part-time? Don’t worry about what kind of job it is just take anything until you learn English.”

  “Will you help me’

  “Sure, I’ll help you.”

  I tried to get a room at the YMCA, but it was full with a waiting list. All the young people wanted to be there because it was cheap and very social, with an Olympic-size pool and fitness center. I added my name to the list, but in the meantime I knew I had to do something because I couldn’t keep taking up poor Halwu’s space. Right across from the YMCA, however, was the YWCA; it was full of elderly people, and fairly depressing, but I took a room there temporarily and set out to find a job. My friend suggested logically, “Why don’t you start by looking right here?”

  “What do you mean? Right where?”

  “Right here. Right here,” she said, pointing. “McDonald’s is just next door.”

  “I can’t work there there’s no way I can serve people. Don’t forget, I can’t speak English or read. Besides, I don’t have a work permit.” But Halwu knew the ropes, and following her suggestion, I went around back and applied for a job cleaning the kitchen.

  When I began working for McDonald’s, I found out how right she was. I thought that for the hard work I did the wages were poor and that perhaps the management took advantage of my illegal status. As long as you were a hard worker, the management didn’t care about your story.

  My career as kitchen help at McDonald’s put to use the skills I’d learned as a maid: I washed dishes, wiped counters, scrubbed grills, and mopped floors, in a constant effort to erase the traces of burger grease. When I went home at night I was coated with grease and stank like grease. In the kitchen we were always short staffed, but I didn’t dare complain. None of that mattered because, at least now I could support myself. I was just grateful to have the job, and besides, I knew I wouldn’t be there for long. In the meantime, I’d do whatever it took to survive.

  I began going part-time to the foreigners’ free language school, improving my English and learning how to read and write. But for the first time in years, my life wasn’t only about work. Sometimes Halwu took me to nightclubs, where the whole crowd seemed to know her. She talked, laughed, and was hysterically funny just generally so lively that everybody wanted to be around her. One night we went out and had been dancing for hours until I suddenly looked up to realize we were surrounded by men. “Damn!” I whispered to my friend. “Do these men like us?”

  She grinned. “Oh, yeah. They like us very much.” This notion astonished me. I scanned their faces and decided she was right. I had never had a boyfriend, or even the attention of any male other than some weirdo like my cousin Haji which hadn’t exactly flattered me. For the past four years I’d simply considered myself Miss Nobody the maid. Now here were these guys lining up to dance with us. I thought, Waris, girl, you have finally arrived:

  Oddly enough, even though I always liked the black men, it was the white guys who were most interested in me. Overcoming my strict African upbringing, I chatted away, forcing myself to talk with everyone black, white, male, female. If I was going to be on my own, I reasoned, I had to learn survival skills for this new world, which were different from the ones I was raised with in the desert. Here I needed to learn English, and how to communicate with all sorts of people. Knowing about camels and goats wasn’t going to keep me alive in London.

  Halwu supplemented these nocturnal nightclub lessons with further instruction the next day. She went through the entire roster of characters we’d met the night before, explaining their motives, their personalities basically giving me a crash course in human nature. She talked about sex, what these guys were up to, what to watch out for, and the special problems in store for African women like us. Nobody had ever discussed this topic with me in my life. “Have a good time talking, laughing, and dancing with these guys, Waris, then go home. Don’t let them talk you into having sex. They don’t know that you’re different from an English woman; they don’t understand that you’ve been circumcised.”

  After several months of waiting to get a room at the YMCA, I learned of a woman who wanted to share a room there. She was a student and couldn’t afford the room by herself. This was perfect for me, because I couldn’t either, and the room was large enough for the two of us. Halwu was a great friend, and I made others at the Y, because the whole place was swarming with young people. I was still going to school, gradually learning English, and working at my McDonald’s job. My life

  was moving along, smooth and steady, but I had no idea how dramatically it was about to change.

  One afternoon, I got off work at McDonald’s and, still covered with grease, decided to leave through the front, passing by the counter where the customers ordered their food. And there, waiting for a Big Mac, was the man from All Souls Church School and his little girl. “Hello,” I said, gliding by.

  “Hey, it’s you!” Clearly I was the last person he was expecting to see at McDonald’s. “How are you?” he said eagerly.

  “Fine, fine.” To Sophie’s friend I said, “And how are you?” I enjoyed showing off my English. “She’s fine,” her father replied.

  “She’s growing quickly, isn’t she? Well, I’ve got to dash. Byebye.”

  “Wait where do you live?”

  “Bye-bye,” I said with a smile. I didn’t want to talk to him anymore, because I still didn’t trust this guy. The next thing I knew, he’d show up outside my door.

  When I got back to the Y, I decided to consult the all-knowing Halwu about this mystery man. I grabbed my passport from the drawer, flipped through its pages, and pulled out Malcolm Fairchild’s card from the spot where I’d stuck it the day I buried the little plastic bag in Uncle’s garden.

&nb
sp; Marching downstairs to Halwu’s room, I said, “Tell me something. I have this card, and I’ve had it a long time. What is this man? I know it says fashion photographer, but what does that mean?”

  My friend took the card from my hand. “It means somebody wants to put clothes on you and take your picture.”

  “You know, I’d really like to do that.”

  “Who is this man? Where’d you get this card?” “Oh, he’s this guy I met, but I don’t really trust him. He gave me his card, then followed me home one day and started saying something to my aunt. She just got pissed off and started yelling at him.

  But I never really understood what he wanted.” “Well, why don’t you call and ask him?”

  “You sure?” I said, making a face. “Should I? Hey, why don’t you come with me and you can talk to him find out what’s the story. My English is still not very good.”

  “Yeah, go call him.”

  It took me until the next day before I worked up the courage. As Halwu

  and I walked down to the pay phone together, my heart pounded drumbeat in my ears. She put a coin in the slot, and I listened to it click. She held his card in one hand, squinting at it in the dim light of the dark hallway as she dialed. Then a pause. “Yes, may I speak to Malcolm Fairchild?” After exchanging a few opening comments, she got right to the heart of the matter: “You’re not some kind of pervert or something, are you? You’re not trying to kill my friend? .. . Yeah, but I mean we don’t know anything about you where you live or nothing… uh-huh, uh-huh… yeah.” Halwu was scribbling something on a scrap of paper, and I strained to see over her shoulder.

  “What’s he saying?” I hissed. She waved at me to be quiet.

  “Okay, then. Fair enough… we’ll do that.” Halwu hung up the phone and took a big breath. “Well, he said, “Why don’t you both come by my studio, and see where I work, if you don’t trust me? If you don’t want to well, that’s okay,

  too” ‘