Dottie

by Abdulrazak Gurnah

  She went for the train in the late morning, getting off at Carlisle because the guard discovered her without a ticket. He assumed she was going to Carlisle anyway because of the black soldiers. He looked sneeringly at her, and shook his head over the two little ones who would sooner or later walk down the same road. He took her to be a prostitute but Bilkisu liked to think that she had not yet sunk so low.

  Carlisle taught her otherwise. The black soldiers treated her as a whore, bargained and argued with her in public. Business was brisk. The war had freed everybody from constraint, and the soldiers behaved as if they were on holiday or on a school trip, singing joyfully the crudest songs they could manage. Hudson’s father had been one of many, black and white. Their money smelt the same, she used to say. But he came to her often and she became fond of him. It was his talk of the Hudson River, along the banks of which he had lived and played as a child, that made her call her son by that name. Long after the GI had gone, Bilkisu called him Hudson as well, and in the end pretended she could no longer remember his real name.

  In the years after the war they moved several times, rarely staying more than a few months anywhere. Bilkisu was often unwell, and found it increasingly difficult to get any kind of work. They circled south towards London, living hand to mouth while Bilkisu fought a ragged rearguard against humiliations. They always found something in the end, somewhere to stay for a few weeks, some kind of work, social security. But it was a losing battle. Bilkisu was now very ill and could do nothing to make herself better. She was too ashamed to go to a doctor. The abuse of her early years had caught up with her.

  At the age of thirty-six she was a derelict, tortured by a vile disease whose name she dared not even utter to her children. She was broken by misery, and filled with despair at her wasted life. By then they were living in South London and Bilkisu’s mind was constantly wandering back to her childhood. Often now she talked of returning to Cardiff to die, and it would fall to Dottie to comfort her. I don’t even have a name, Bilkisu would cry. How can I go back to Cardiff without a name?

  This was just at the time of Suez, when the consequences of Balfour’s policy were being enacted across the lands of the Middle East. The Israelis attacked Egypt, under the frightening leadership of their one-eyed chief. They conquered at will, humiliating the atomising nomads and their incompetent, pseudo-modern bashaws in engagement after engagement. Eden sent in the British forces to teach Nasser an unforgettable lesson, and the French joined in the fun too. Whenever anyone mentioned Eden’s name, Bilkisu exploded into curses: Laanatu-llah alaika Anthony Eden! She no longer remembered what the words meant, but that was what her father used to say about Balfour. In those times, abandoning Taimur Khan’s name for Balfour seemed even more like treachery.

  Bilkisu became too ill to do anything but sit waiting for the torment to end. Much of the time she was confused, then her mind cleared and for a while she seemed to be getting better. She would surface from the suffering with stories of Cardiff and her parents, and would wail at the fate that had befallen her. It was too late for her children to understand what she was telling them, their minds numbed by the wretchedness and squalor in which they lived. Bilkisu had become obese with age, and her illness made her retain so much fluid that she looked waterlogged. She lingered for nearly a year, trying to hide from her children the pain and degradation of her disease. They shared two rooms in Stockwell, and both were filled with the stench of her rotting body. The landlord came to demand rent but was driven away by the unspeakable vileness of their lives. He was a short, skinny Cypriot who made money out of renting dirty rooms to desperate people, but he was not without feeling. He shouted his warnings of eviction and police at the disgusting woman and her children, and fled. She would not go to the doctor, even to the bitter end.

  She lived long enough to see the hated Sir Anthony Eden removed from office, but in the late spring of that year she died. One of the neighbours called the police because the groans of the fat woman and the angry yells of her young boy were frightening. It was too late then. They did what they could for her at the hospital but her body was so full of poison that they could not save her. In her uterine canal they found a pair of nylon stockings that was green with slime.

  A Common Failing

  1

  Hudson took it badly, despite all that Dottie could do. He was then twelve years old, and frantic with loathing for the way they lived. That was what mattered to him above all else, that he had been forced to be part of the mess. He was inconsolable, not because he grieved for his mother so much as for himself. During Bilkisu’s last months, he had avoided her. And when he could not, had sat sulking tensely while his mother tried to tempt him nearer with endearments and small bribes. If he succumbed, which he did disgustedly and with his eyes shut, he had to submit to her fumbling embraces and the vile smell she gave off. If he resisted her, she laughed at him like one of the demons in his nightmares, her face doughy and rubbery with evil. She mimicked different voices: the lost little girl, the indignant matron, the well-intentioned grown-up, and then laughed to see his agony. At least she was bed-ridden, and could not pursue him with her crazed malice. She had become a monster. Her face had swollen so that she was almost blind in one eye, and the strange lumps that had appeared made the open eye seem as if it was slit upwards. Her skin had become so diseased that Hudson sometimes imagined it giving off fumes.

  On the morning she died he had stayed behind from school because Dottie had asked him to, in case his mother needed anything. He hardly ever went to school anyway, and usually came home at about lunch-time, after wandering the streets for several hours to get away from her. It was boring, but at least he did not have to listen to teachers hectoring him, or suffer the humiliations and beatings of the playground. On the morning his mother died, he had heard his sisters getting ready to leave as usual, Dottie to go to work and Sophie to go to school. He had pulled his blanket tightly over his head, hiding from their grumbles, and grunted an answer when Dottie became persistent. Yes, he’d stay behind and keep an eye on her.

  His mother had lain in her bed, groaning with such deep anguish that Hudson had nearly gone mad with irritation and the strange pain her cries caused him. He crouched in the farthest corner of the room in which the children lived and slept. The other one was now the sick room, and he never went into that stinking pen unless it was completely unavoidable. Dottie had left the door open a crack so that Bilkisu would not need to shout to be heard, and Hudson was afraid to shut it in case she saw him and started to call to him in her demon voices. Every now and again she would catch her breath like someone sobbing, croaking her death-rattle through bubbles of phlegm, and then she would fall silent. Once the silence stretched for minutes, and Hudson stood with fists clenched, hoping that she had gone to sleep. He tiptoed gently towards the open door, allowing himself to entertain the beginnings of relief, feeling a smile spreading on his face. Suddenly, just as his suspicions were almost overcome, she started again. Stop that! he yelled, convinced that she was deliberately tormenting him. He ran to the window and pushed his head out, screaming with rage and terror. When the police came, they found him sitting under the window with his hands over his ears, yelling with pain while tears poured down his face.

  He took to sitting on the floor, rocking backward and forward and staring before him. He refused to speak and showed no sign that he had heard when anybody spoke to him. Sophie tried to cuddle him while he sat on the floor, but whenever she touched him he shut his eyes and screamed, flapping his arms in a fury. Sophie laughed at him, unable to resist his melodramatic rages, and stole swift kisses whenever he became careless. She danced round him, singing a playground song, and tried to drag him to his feet. Hudson shouted and hit out at her, making her laugh even more as she skipped away from him. When she tired of tormenting him, she prepared little trays of dainties which she slid along the floor to him, singing soft praises and sighing endearments as she did so. Hudson would ignore the gifts at first
, but when left to himself long enough he would take a piece of flapjack or jelebi, and then another piece and another because he could not resist them.

  After a few days he became less obsessed with his feelings of outrage although he was still impossible to approach. He pouted and sulked with unabated ferocity whenever he felt anyone’s eyes on him, and only listened to Dottie, only let her touch him, and then only lightly as if by accident. Dottie tearfully apologised to Hudson for leaving him alone, and begged him to stop acting so strange. They would take him away somewhere if he carried on like that, she warned, but Hudson was not to be frightened or mollified. Nothing could frighten him now after the months with the horned and claw-footed beast with whom they had been living, whose rotting smell still lingered in the air. Hudson dared not mention how he felt, so he raged and sulked, inviting his sisters to comfort and succour him. Dottie was afraid that they would be separated, fostered out to different families. She was working in Woolworth in Vauxhall at the time, and she knew that the pittance she got from there would not be enough to look after all three of them. In any case she was too young to have the legal care of her sister and her brother. The woman from the council told her that.

  She had come with news of what Dottie had feared, pulling papers and files out of her case with the sudden whisper of swooping wings. Her eyes ran quickly round the room as she composed herself, taking shallow, silent breaths. Her name was Mrs Brenda Holly, she told them, making them read her name on a card that she showed them, and then smiling and waiting to see if they had an objection to this piece of news. She was a tall bony woman with short red hair and bright blue eyes. There were sharp, longitudinal creases of skin on either side of her lips, like tribal scars. When she smiled, which she did generally and not at any one of them in particular, the creases rippled tremulously, suggesting an uncertainty which her manner belied.

  She told them that Sophie was to be sent to a special girls’ school in Sussex because she was backward. Hudson was to be fostered out to a family in Dover. Dottie was to be left to fend for herself since she had a job and was nearly eighteen, but she was not to worry because Mrs Brenda Holly herself would come and check that she was all right. It was not that she meant to sound brutal, she told them, dropping her eyes and shuffling the papers in her file, but that she wanted to be honest with them and not pretend anything, because comforting lies were not what they needed. They were poor little mites who had suffered needlessly because of the ignorance of their mother. A mother should love her children without beginning or end, which was not what had happened to them. What a mess they had been left in!

  Dottie tried smiles at first but the tall woman was not to be persuaded to go away and leave them alone. Dottie could see that the woman had her papers in front of her, and in them she had written down their lives and what was to happen to them. The smile Mrs Holly gave her was intended to say that Dottie could protest if she wanted, indeed it would be better if she did since that was the decent thing to do, but it would not do much to change things. Life was not like that. Her hands were folded over the file in her lap as she listened to the young woman’s unavailing protest. When she had heard enough, Mrs Holly raised both hands suddenly, making Dottie wince with surprise.

  The school in Hastings was a reputable place, she said, and quite used to handling children like Sophie. It had made a name for itself, as a matter of fact. She had made a point of checking that they had some experience of foreign girls too, so there was nothing to worry about. She would be looked after and given the rudiments of the skills she required for survival.

  The family in Dover was reputable too, and Hudson was very lucky to have been taken by them, Mrs Holly said, raising her hands again to stop Dottie from protesting. The foster father was a headmaster at a local primary school, and the mother was a teacher too. The family had specifically asked for a foreign child. It was not easy to find good foster parents for black boys, and Hudson could not have done better than find such an eminently qualified family to look after him. She might add that Dover was a very interesting place, and so near France.

  Dottie pleaded with her, promising that they would manage somehow, asking that the judgment against them be withdrawn. Mrs Holly shook her head and looked away, shutting her eyes firmly for a moment. In the end Dottie screamed the dirtiest abuse she could think of at the social worker. She reached for the papers that the woman cradled so grotesquely in her lap, but Mrs Holly was quicker and clipped Dottie’s wrist sharply with the spine of the file. None of Dottie’s protests did any good. Mrs Brenda Holly looked hurt and her face went red at the ingratitude, but Sophie and Hudson were still taken away. Dottie thought herself lucky not to have been sent to the police by the bony, red-haired woman who had such power over their lives.

  To Dottie’s astonishment, Mrs Brenda Holly returned a few days later, accompanied by the Cypriot landlord. He had come to tell her that she would have to move, which was what she guessed as soon as she saw him. She knew her mother had owed him rent, and had heard the man ranting at her, standing at the door in his stylish clothes. She now discovered that her mother had not paid any rent at all, apart from the month in advance that the landlord had demanded at the very beginning. Nothing at all, the skinny landlord declared, clapping his hands together and then holding them out to show that they were empty. He nodded his head tragically, asking for Dottie’s understanding. Dottie smiled with pride that her mother had not paid the nasty man. The landlord mistook the smile and shrugged to acknowledge the sympathy she was offering him.

  ‘I know you don’t have anything to give me,’ he said, glancing at Dottie’s skinny and undeveloped form. ‘But you got to get out of my house. Your family has cost me a thousand pounds already. A mother’s memory is sacred so I won’t say anything about her. It’s a sin against God to abuse the memory of a mother. I know that, you don’t have to tell me about that. She carries us for nine months and suffers so we can be born. Then day after day she washes and she cooks, and she cleans and she sews so we can grow up. I know the sacrifice a mother makes, I can tell you that. Whatever a mother does she can never do wrong in the eyes of her child. But I’m a businessman, and if I run my business with my heart I will always be a poor man. So I want you to get out of my house!’ The landlord was almost pleading by this stage, and Dottie suspected that the performance was not intended for her but for the social worker. The cringing man disgusted Dottie, but with a victim’s intuition she delayed making a reply, driving the landlord into a frenzy of frustrated impatience.

  ‘All right, all right,’ he said at last, dropping his voice and straightening himself to his full height. ‘Your mother never paid me any rent. When I came here she abused me. The house is like a pig sty. All right, but I’m not without feeling. One day my heart will ruin my business. You can have a room in another house of mine in Balham for a reasonable rent. You can afford it easily if the council gives you a rebate. That’s the best I can do. But I want you out of here!’

  Dottie nodded at last, and earned an approving little smile from the social worker. That’s the way to treat the cringing knave, her smile seemed to say. The landlord raised his eyes to heaven and muttered under his breath.

  ‘There’ll be no problem with the rebate,’ Mrs Holly beamed at her.

  The two sisters and their brother wept bitterly as they were separated. Dottie vowed that she would get them together again soon. But on a Sunday morning in late August, Dottie found herself on her own. With her few belongings tied in bundles like a beggar, she walked from Stockwell to her new room in Balham. The room was in the back of a large terraced house in Segovia Street, gloomy and overshadowed by a huge elm tree. The wallpaper had been stripped, as if in preparation for decorating, but nothing further had been done. There were damp marks on the outside wall and one of the window-panes was broken. The hand basin was cracked, and crusted with green sediment round the base of the taps. A powerful smell of drains filled the room and made her nauseous. Pushed against the inner
wall was a metal bed, and hard up against the foot of it was a table and chair. It was like many other rooms they had lived in, bare and damp, with a layer of grime and grease over everything. From the bits of furniture and the walls themselves came soft gasps of despair. Dottie felt their hot breath on her and felt her heart sink with resignation. At least it was big enough, she thought, to have Sophie and Hudson come to stay now and then.

  On her first night there, late at night, she heard laughter coming from one of the downstairs rooms. She wedged the door-handle with the chair and pushed the table up against that, barricading herself in. The laughter frightened her, for it reminded her of the drunken revelry that used to take place in their rooms when she was small, the noise of drinking men and the abandoned yells of paid women. That was the music that accompanied them when Sharon was alive, she thought. She always called her Sharon, to her face, when neither Sophie nor Hudson were allowed to. It was a privilege that her mother had foisted on her as an admission of her dependence. She realised as thoughts of her mother started to come back to her that she had not thought very much about her since her death. At first she felt guilt for her neglect, but as the memories came back she knew that she had been expecting her mother’s death for months, had been waiting for it, desiring it. Although it was a shock when it came at last, as death always is, and the news filled her with sudden anguish, the need to assuage Hudson’s terror had saved her from further thought about her mother.

  Now, as she lay listening to the cruel rumbles of men’s voices and the infrequent raucous hoots of the woman’s laughter, she knew that she had resisted her mother in those last months, had fought off the burden of guilt and shame that Sharon seemed to be wanting to pass on to her. All that talk of Cardiff! All those names that she was to remember! She had paid no attention, remembering instead the countless times her mother had told her, when she was less feeble and crushed, that she should never allow past things to tyrannise her, that religion and culture were stuff and mumbo-jumbo for old people to force those who come after them to toe the line. Yet even as she thought this, she could not prevent herself feeling some blame for the misery of those last years, could not help feeling that there was more she could have done. Perhaps if she had tried harder she could have persuaded her to a hospital. It was wrong of her to feel revulsion, to wish her dead. Dottie’s first night in her new room turned out a long and sleepless one. She rose every little while to check that the chair was firm under the handle, and in the end moved her bed up against the table. Also, once she started thinking of her mother she could not stop. Whenever she lay down, after another small adjustment to her barricade, her feelings of guilt instantly returned.