Dottie

by Abdulrazak Gurnah

  ‘What has happened to you? I want you to tell me. You have to tell me the truth,’ she insisted.

  For a long moment he looked at her, his eyes still at last but fixed on her with panic. He looked as if he would get angry, his face gathering into a scowl, but then he sighed and spoke. He did not speak at once, and not fluently. Between long silences and sighs, he circled and came back to explain something, to add an important detail or offer a justification, but once he started he offered his confession willingly enough. The story he told her was worse than anything that Dottie had imagined. He had been using drugs for nearly two years, she must’ve known that, he said. He didn’t use anything too expensive and always with his friends. They paid for their pleasures by selling in the streets, and by a little petty crime.

  ‘Selling what? What do you mean a little petty crime?’ she asked, her voice low, careful not to frighten him. ‘I don’t know about these things. You have to be patient and explain.’

  His eyes looked away from her. For a moment she was afraid he would say no more but would laugh at her clumsiness and leave. They sold drugs, he told her. The suppliers sometimes gave them some to sell, and gave them a cut. They stole from shops, and sometimes from people in the streets. He looked at her to see if the answer satisfied her and quickly looked away. In the summer he had met a man who had offered him a small cut in an operation in the Midlands. Hudson travelled with this man and helped him run his business, which was selling drugs for other operators. Hudson made deliveries, acted as a messenger or a decoy as he was required. It was dangerous work, and he was learning, getting better all the time. They had some hilarious times as well, jokes and some fantastic parties. His boss told him he was tough and had a talent for the business, and promised to take him to the south of France with him during the winter if he was still around. He was also earning a lot of money, and drugs were easy, because that was their business. Inevitably, he took more and his boss did not seem to mind. It never even occurred to Hudson to resist or anything. Why should he? How could he?

  ‘You’re only sixteen,’ Dottie cried, and saw Hudson wince with panic-stricken surprise. ‘He was a wicked man to do that. Oh Hudson . . . !’

  He stood up slowly, poised to leave and looking very tired. His eyes looked smaller, she thought, as if they were already shut. The pupils were contracting and turning opaque. She called him back, tried to get nearer, but he turned away, shaking his head and waving her back. There was no need for all that fuss, he told her. He was getting himself under control, getting his head together. Getting his head together. It was just that it had been difficult, but it would turn out right. Could she keep it to herself?

  ‘Not tell Sophie?’

  Not yet, anyway, he said. He was getting himself under control, so he could go back to being himself. That was all.

  But it wasn’t. Dottie thought that she had managed the matter wrongly, had made him run away from her again, but now he began to look out for her. There you are, Sophie told her, her faith in Hudson vindicated, although he never stopped or said anything when Sophie was around. Despite his brusqueness with both of them, Sophie was happy enough with the new situation. Families were like that, she said. Always having a fight and a barney. It didn’t mean they didn’t love each other.

  In bits and pieces, Hudson’s story came out. He did not understand that his life was in danger, not until it was too late. The drugs made him reckless. He did wild things, became involved with people he should have known to avoid. Eventually he was completely in the hands of his boss. He depended on him for everything, drugs, food. He did not even know the time of day unless his boss told him. And he was too much in debt to be able to resist him. It took Hudson a long time to say so, pausing for several minutes with his head in his hands. His boss used him for sex. It was not the sex, he said, weeping with his neck bent away from her. He had already done that, and other even more terrible things. He had screwed every which way, he said, laughing with bitterness and self-pity. It was that he had no choice but to submit. And that was only the beginning. The boss permitted other people to use him as well, and made them pay. In the end he had run away from him, and sold his body in the streets to get money for drugs. He could not say all this by himself, but as the extent of the boy’s tragedy began to reveal itself Dottie lost her squeamishness in asking the questions that would let him tell his story. The more he told her, the more dejected and defeated he became. She knew there was a great deal he was keeping back, and she was overwhelmed by the thought of the unutterable squalor that her poor brother had had to live through.

  She tried to talk him into going to see a doctor, but he told her, and she knew no better to contradict him, that the doctor would call in the police. He was so distraught about his circumstances that she was persuaded when he said that if he had enough help he could overcome his addiction himself. At first, as the tale of his corruption and licence unfolded, she had felt revulsion. In her mind, she began to draw away from him. No one did that kind of thing unless something was rotten inside them, she thought. That was the smell he gave off. The more she heard, though, the more she felt his misfortune, and wanted to do everything she could to help him. Dottie insisted that they should tell Sophie, if only about his addiction to drugs. Then they would all be able to pull together . . .

  Sophie was not as surprised as Dottie had expected. She nodded, then listened silently as Dottie told her the story. ‘Where does he get money now?’ Sophie asked. Dottie did not reply, and after a few moments Sophie asked the question again.

  ‘He steals. He sells drugs,’ Dottie said. ‘Whatever he can . . . but he wants to stop. He will stop. He swears he will stop.’

  The sisters did what they could, but with each week they realised the ferocity of the adversary they had undertaken to defeat. Hudson lied to them, stole their savings. He wiped them out. Everything of value that they possessed he took from them. When they remonstrated with him, and he was feeling low, he wept with remorse. When he was high, he threatened to leave and go to New York to find his father. Sophie brought stories home from Jimmy, warning the two sisters that Hudson was capable of anything, would do any evil when the need was on him. He warned them to get rid of him . . . How could they ask Hudson to go? He was their brother. Sophie threatened to move out herself, but was restrained by the thought of leaving Dottie alone.

  In the spring, Hudson was arrested. He was charged with robbery with violence. Three of them had burgled a house in Clapham, and found themselves confronted by an old man with a horn-handled carving knife. They dispossessed him of the blunt, old weapon and beat him to a pulp. The sergeant at Clapham Police Station told Dottie that a neighbour identified one of the boys, and he had confessed and implicated the other two. All three, the sergeant said, were addicts and street-boys. Male prostitutes, he said, making sure that his euphemism was not misunderstood. They always go vicious with that combination, and certainly deserve a lot worse than the few months in the nick that they’ll get, he said.

  To the bitter end, Hudson swore that he was wrongly accused, and the boy on whose confession the charges were based claimed he had been beaten. They had tortured him in the station, he said in court, saying the word with all appearance of aggrieved pride, showing off wounds acquired in the gallant defence of his self-hood. Neither the bench nor the counsels seemed at all impressed or disturbed, and seemed quite uninterested when the third boy brought a factory manager to speak for him as a character witness. The old man identified the three black boys as his assailants, and that was more than half-way there. Hudson was sent to reform school for fourteen months. Dottie stood up in court and yelled at the magistrate, outraged by the cruelty of the smug man sitting on the bench and despatching Hudson to a life of misery. When the magistrate became angry and instructed for her to be removed, she fell down on her knees and begged him to show mercy to the poor confused boy. None of it made any difference, and she was driven from the court-room with a cuff round the ear.

  Alth
ough neither sister would have liked to say it, it was a relief to be without him. Perhaps it would do him good, in some way, they consoled each other. If nothing else it would remove him from the corrupt ways that had almost destroyed his life, and give him the chance to redeem something from it. God willing, Amen! Sophie cried in a fervent whisper, then shut her eyes for a long minute of silent prayer. She had secretly taken to going to church again on Sundays, with some of the friends she had made through Jimmy. She spent almost every Saturday with him, and could conveniently slip to church the following morning without Dottie knowing. Dottie would not have cared, so long as she was not expected to turn up every week to listen to the harangues of a loud-mouthed preacher, but Sophie did not know that. When she sensed Dottie’s disapproval of her church-going, she did not bother to enquire for the reasons, but quietly went underground.

  She was still with Jimmy, much to Dottie’s surprise. Dottie was forced to concede that she had misjudged the man. As soon as she felt less pressed by recent events, she promised herself, she would encourage him to come round more. She wrote to Hudson when she was sent an address. She told him about Jimmy and Sophie, and how happy they seemed to be. Then she wrote an enthusiastic paragraph about Yuri Gagarin going into orbit around the planet Earth. You must have seen a picture of him in the newspaper. He has such a round cheerful face that you have no choice but to believe he is real. Not even the Russians could’ve made him up. The space suit he wears looks too big for him, I think. It looks like they’ll soon have a man on the moon. Who would have thought that that would really happen one day.

  Hudson was sent to Dover Borstal, and she appreciated the irony at the same time as she felt a familiar twinge of guilt. Perhaps none of this would have happened if she had left him alone in Dover in the first place. During the year that he spent there, Dottie visited him four times, although it was four months before they let her go there for the first time. They told her Hudson was in hospital, and was best left without visitors for the time being. When she saw him he was gaunt and vacant, as if the stuffing had been taken out of him. As he got better, he was more animated, but in a furtive way, watching her movements and smiling without explanations. His manner made her think of someone who was scheming something. He talked about becoming a sailor, travelling the world and visiting America. I’ll go and see my dad, he said, with a self-mocking smile.

  3

  ‘Have you ever stopped to think how pointless we are in this place?’ he asked her on one of her visits. He did not bother to explain what he meant by we. She had been telling him about the Christmas festivities, although she did not tell him that she had been forced to spend the holiday on her own. Sophie and Jimmy had invited her to join them, but she could not bear to contemplate the revelry that they so keenly anticipated, and she had refused. Despite being alone, she had had a pleasant enough time, reading a very funny book and going for long, long walks. She told Hudson the story of a Jamaican man who had been murdered on his way home from a New Year’s party in Brixton, and it was that that had provoked his question. ‘They don’t want us in their country. They don’t need us for anything apart from dirty jobs that no one else will do. And look at all these thousands of people, these immigrants, pouring in before the law changes and denies them entry to this paradise. What use can people like us have here?’

  ‘Use? Do you mean a purpose for living? You have to make a purpose,’ Dottie said, dropping her voice and glancing around her, afraid of being overheard. ‘This is where we live. We belong here. Where else are you going to go? A place doesn’t give you the reasons for living, you have to find them in yourself.’

  Hudson threw his eyes to heaven, baring his teeth with derision. He’s so young, she thought, and he can dismiss everything that is said to him with such disdain. Perhaps because he’s so young . . .

  ‘Oh very brave! Don’t give me that holy roller stuff, that slave talk,’ he said. ‘How can you find any reason for living in a place where they treat you like an animal? All the time they show you that you are something they hate. Something below them . . . inferior to them. All the time! If you object, if you fight, they tell you you’re obsessed with the colour of your skin. You become a dangerous man, a trouble-maker, and they beat you to bring you in line. If I could, I would destroy this place, wipe it off the face of the earth. Start again somewhere else.’

  ‘Where? Where is it going to be any different?’ she asked, not because she wanted to fight him, or because she did not believe that life could be better than the version of it they were saddled with, but because she sensed that such schemes of escape were beyond them. And she disliked the intensity with which he expressed his anger. She thought she understood what he was saying. The prison made it possible, made it necessary, maybe, but she did not want to hear him talking with such bitterness. No, the prison made it unavoidable, but anger of that kind could only destroy a person’s mind, and eat away at the parts of it that made people understand what was around them. They did not even know who they were, she and Sophie and Hudson, or what people they belonged to. They knew this place, and this was all they had. There was no choice but to hang on here, and make room for themselves. What choice did they have?

  After she left him, and returned to the mind-numbing drudgery of her work at the factory, and the squalor and loneliness of her room in Balham, she thought that perhaps she had been too hasty. It was she who felt overwhelmed by her circumstances, who felt that there was no escape. Hudson had miraculously survived the wretchedness of those months on the streets, and now wanted to make a fresh start with his life. She should encourage the talk of becoming a sailor, instead of telling him how they were saddled with the lives they had. A sailor! It made her think of Ken and the life he had led. Hudson would be a better person for doing all that too, no doubt. He would be able to get out from under the burdens that were crushing him here. Becoming a sailor was better than becoming nothing, and would get him to America, at the very least.

  A man could think like that, she thought. He could get up and leave with a sense of doing something noble, preferable to conceding to superior events. She could not see herself doing that. She would worry about Sophie, about Hudson, about keeping all of them together. Or was that a lie? Maybe she was simply afraid, or did not have the strength to take the risks. What would the big wide world make of a woman travelling alone, poor little Dottie trying to make a new life for herself? Look what happened to Sharon. They turned her into something they could use, and after they had finished with her they left her to die a death of unbelievable meanness. Let Hudson be as selfish as he liked, she thought. That was his chance. One day, she too would see the places she hankered for, although first she would have to do something about the small, mean burdens that constantly seemed on the point of crushing her.

  She started saving again, thinking that when Hudson came out the money would be useful to help fit him out as a sailor. She had no idea what he would have to do to become one, but she imagined it would cost money. Sophie was enthusiastic, and lapped up Dottie’s account of Hudson’s recovery. She could not bring herself to make the trip to Dover, she said. It would make her too miserable. But Dottie guessed that she was really too embroiled in her own affairs to be able to leave them unattended for a whole afternoon. She had her own life to secure too. She had more or less moved out again, coming back for the odd evening to talk and help out. She was putting on weight again, and sometimes she was too easily out of breath. Sophie laughed and shrugged. She would cut down, but otherwise life was good for her and Jimmy was fine. Twice he came with her to say hello and pay his respects, but he never stayed for long. It was obvious that he was uncomfortable with Dottie. His jokes did not quite come off, and his merry manner seemed forced and insincere. Perhaps he was also slightly resentful that a younger woman should make him feel like that. That was Dottie’s guess, in any case, from the number of comments he made about her age. Jimmy thought a sailor’s life would do Hudson good, and he whistled with appreciati
on when he heard about the little fund they had started in preparation for Hudson’s new career. He’s a lucky boy, he said.

  The two sisters saved their pennies. In that same long year, the post-war boom in Britain was beginning to fizzle out, and the migrant workers from the old Empire who had come in their thousands in the good years were now no longer required. No one could persuade these pesky creatures that they were not welcome any more, and that the natives were beginning to get restless and irate. No more work, kapish, basi, imshi, but they still came. So, for the sake of civil peace, the British government under Macmillan passed the first of its anti-immigration laws, panicked into pusillanimous retreat by the presence of a few thousand of the silent sullen peoples over whom it had been lording it for centuries. The new law immediately fuelled a frantic attempt by migrants from South Asia and the West Indies to bring their families in before the shutters came down, turning migrant workers into settlers.