Pilgrims Way

by Abdulrazak Gurnah

  ‘Why didn’t you get help?’ she asked, her voice squealing with irritation and annoyance. Nobody could be that gormless. God, aren’t you savouring this a bit? Perhaps seasoning it as well, he could hear her say.

  ‘I didn’t know where to get help. I tried to speak to my tutor at the college. I went to see him . . . but as soon as he thought he had the drift of what I was saying he stopped me and told me to go and see somebody at the British Council or the Students’ Union. I went to the doctor,’ he said, clowning as he said this, as if he had found something at last that would make her pleased with him. She nodded, meaning to show her approval, joining in the joke.

  ‘What happened?’ she asked, smiling.

  ‘He told me to go home and eat more, and drink more milk,’ he said dejectedly.

  ‘All right, all right.’ She was suddenly unable to contain her impatience, not wanting him to continue. ‘There’s nothing you can do about it now. Why are you telling me?’

  He poured himself another glass of wine and then held the bottle inclined a little towards her. She nodded and he filled up her glass. She said Thank you quietly. He should have known better, he told himself. Should’ve kept his mouth shut.

  ‘So you think these are just excuses?’ he asked, pushing his plate away and picking up the glass of wine. He was tired of beanshoots anyway, he told himself.

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Or you think perhaps I’m enjoying myself too much and you don’t want to encourage me,’ he said. From the way she dropped her eyes he guessed that he was not far off the mark. She looked up again quickly and shrugged.

  ‘It’s just unexpected,’ she said. ‘It wasn’t what I thought . . . I don’t know what to say. Why didn’t you go to Social Security?’

  ‘I didn’t know about it,’ he said, smiling. ‘I really was pathetic, wasn’t I?’

  ‘No, you just make me feel guilty I think, like you expected me to apologise, take the blame. Anyway, I’m surprised you didn’t know about Social Security. I thought that was what you foreigners came to Britain for.’

  ‘It was easier to tell the lies, wasn’t it? Terrible tragedy! My father . . . such a charming man, a philosopher and a gentleman . . . forced to retire, I’m sorry to say. In the prime of his intellectual powers . . . a bad attack of elephantiasis of the testicles. It’s a common disease out there in the trops. Also, he isn’t quite himself, you know, in the head. There’s a history of . . . er . . . his sister had to be hospitalised. To add to all this, he never really recovered from an attack of typhoid when he was a baby. So I had to give up my studies and go to work. Who would object to that? Nobody bothered to ask how you could send money home on the wages of a theatre orderly. These people, they need much less than us. Look at the way they live sixteen to a room and survive on rice and peas. They’ve all got stacks hidden under their beds. Wasn’t it easier to tell the lies?’

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘I don’t know what hurt it’s been causing you but it would’ve been better to talk about it to somebody. Then you’d have seen that there was nothing to be ashamed of.’

  ‘Aah, thank you,’ he said. ‘I wish I’d known. I can just see myself, unburdening to some anonymous victim cornered at a party, who’d have gone home amazed at her own virtue for having spent the whole evening listening to a lonely young man’s confession.’

  The waiter walked slowly past, attracted to their table by the noise of their raised voices in the silent restaurant. He saw that they were still hesitating over authentic traditional Chinese flavour and could not blame them. It was disgusting muck and he himself would not eat it if the manager paid him to. Smile good for business, so he scraped past them with a happy grin. The more he saw people enjoying authentic Chinese flavour, the happier he became. It was almost cruel to make money this way. It was like robbing a child. The girl was pretty, but the man . . . ugh! How can she touch . . . He smiled to himself as he wandered round the empty restaurant.

  ‘You could say something encouraging,’ he suggested. ‘Instead of all this hostility.’

  ‘Like what?’ she asked, pretending to be chastened and eager to please.

  ‘You could say: You didn’t give up, though, did you? It shows a lot of strength to do things that way.’

  She did as he asked, and they smiled and drank their wine quietly under the canopy of silver stars. The waiter walked past again and this time hesitated, but Daud immediately picked up his fork and started eating, not wanting him to come yet and bustle around them. She laughingly joined in. The waiter smiled too. Smile good for business.

  ‘Can I tell you about the Test Match score now?’ he asked. ‘England were all out for 71 in their first innings. 71! You’ll never guess who did all the damage!’

  ‘I don’t want to hear about the Test Match, please,’ she pleaded through gritted teeth.

  ‘That’s a very selfish thing to say, so for your own good I’ll ignore it. There they were, poor old England, with the chance of behaving honourably for a change. They were given a reasonable start by Mike Selvey who took four whole wickets on his own. Ha ha ha, grovel grovel grovel, Tony Greig was saying. Then Michael Holding started on that long run-up of his that the commentators love to make fun of. Crack! Smash! Ooops! 71 all out.’

  ‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘Now can you stop?’

  He looked at her for a long moment, then sucked his teeth with powerful disdain. ‘Explain this incredible prejudice that you have against the great game. On second thoughts, don’t bother. Tell me something interesting instead. How long do you have to wait before you are awarded your cap, earn your wings, finish your training or whatever you call it?’

  ‘No,’ she said, glaring at him.

  ‘All right then, tell me about your brothers or sisters, or maiden aunts or your local vicar. Or how you lost your virginity,’ he persisted, thinking this was the wrong way to go about winning hearts and minds in the jungles of Kent. It was the thought of the Yacht Club beau that was irritating him. No doubt he was always going on about cricket, without really appreciating the finer points of the game the way Daud did. And because of some pampered, plump Englishman, he was not to be allowed to gloat and crow over England’s disastrous display.

  When the bill came, his consternation was real. The waiter smiled and smiled while Daud peeled off note after note from his small wad, wondering if anything would be left after he had finished, or if he would have to put up with Karta’s nagging about the job. He did not want to explain to Karta that another job like the one he was doing would be no improvement. If that was how things were, then he might as well stay where he was. He suspected there was something illogical in his explanation and so was reticent with it. She watched him pay the bill and pursed her lips with incredulity.

  ‘Those were very expensive beanshoots,’ she said.

  ‘There’s no problem,’ he said, adding another note as a tip. Catherine gave it her serious consideration and then wrenched her eyes away. Daud took the note back with a smile.

  They walked around the quiet streets afterwards. She asked him again about his first years in England, made him talk about the events he had described at dinner. He was not so tense now, and told her different stories of the clever things he had got up to, or how awkward he had felt in his home-cut clothes, how difficult it had been to understand what people were saying to him. They caught glimpses of the cathedral in their wanderings, its formal, lit-up splendour crossing the lowering, medieval alleys down which they strolled. He tried to persuade her into the County Hotel for a drink. The barman there was a Venezuelan he knew, a man called Ricardo who claimed that his father was the Chief Justice of Venezuela and directly descended from Francisco Pizarro, the butcher of the Incas. Ricardo was patently a self-invention, another stranger passing himself off as an-exotic-in-exile, and more grist to the Englishman’s self-esteem. He wanted to take Catherine in there to show off to her. I know some very weird people. But she refused, with an instinct that he had not ye
t grasped. She was put off by the hotel’s appearance of burgher stuffiness, the kind of place where the Rotary Club would hold its dinners, she said.

  They met other couples strolling in the long summer evening. He took her down a dark street which suddenly opened out into a small clearing. They were on the edges of Westgate Park. The houses were run-down here, and some of them looked dark and empty. There were skips full of rubbish on the road. The area made him feel vaguely anxious, and he laughed off his nervousness by making fun of the names people had given their houses. They went down another dark street. He heard her sigh wearily.

  ‘Are you all right?’ he asked, although he guessed that what she was trying to tell him was that she was getting bored. They walked down a gloomy, leafy lane which smelled of mould and damp, and passed a dark, shadowy lump in the evening murk. ‘That’s the oldest church in the city,’ he told her. She agreed very readily when he suggested that they go for a drink. She would even have agreed to the County Hotel and Ricardo to escape the gloomy streets.

  He took her to the Black Dog. He explained to her that this was a kind of pilgrimage. ‘When I first came,’ he said, ‘the biggest surprise was the constant mockery . . . Racial taunting seemed so much part of English life that I began to take names like the Black Dog as an intended insult. Even now, when I go into a place called the Black Dog or something like that, I have to nerve myself to it.’

  ‘Let’s go somewhere else,’ she said.

  ‘No. I’ve been in there before. I was just explaining. Because we were talking about those days . . .’ The pub was surprisingly plush and quiet, an atmosphere that seemed to mock his pretensions. He felt he did not have a right to be there. They stayed until closing time. Could they meet again tomorrow, he asked, walking her slowly home? She was working the next day but she was free on Sunday. That suited him better, although he did not say so. It would give him time to wash the sheets on the bed.

  When they reached her flat, he stood awkwardly in front of her for a moment and then leaned forward to kiss her lightly on the lips. He kissed her again, but made no further effort to detain her. On his way home he thought of all those years. He had kept that to himself for too long, and he was glad that he had spoken to her about some of it. It felt like he imagined confession would feel. He wished he could treat it all casually, but he knew he would never be able to do that. It was nothing very much really. He had been too young and feeble to grit his teeth and keep his head down. He had allowed himself to be overcome, had spent his evenings huddled over a tiny gas fire, wondering for how long he could keep going.

  He reached home with a sense of relief. He had given the racist monkeys the slip for another night. He did not linger. In his bedroom he began a letter to his father which he knew he would never finish, or if he did, would never send. What could he say to him? And he had to go to work the next day.

  9

  Lloyd arrived with his bag of shopping late on Saturday afternoon. Daud was watching the final session of play in the Third Test. He had gloated over every run and grinned at Tony Greig whenever his baffled face appeared on the screen. Grovel, you Boer! Lloyd’s arrival was unwelcome on several counts, Clive Lloyd had just declared the West Indies’ second innings closed at 411, a lead of 551. Daud wanted to give his whole attention to the impending destruction of the flower of England, and not have it distracted by one of its idiot sons. Also, Lloyd’s presence meant that he could no longer make faces at the screen and give free vent to his derision of the England Captain. He did not want to look childish and vindictive. He did not want a heathen to lecture him on fair play and how to be a good sport.

  ‘They’re useless, aren’t they?’ Lloyd said, putting his shopping bag down and inviting himself to a chair. The bag meant that he would be staying for the evening. ‘They’re getting thrashed.’

  ‘Don’t write them off yet,’ Daud said, reluctant to have the matter dismissed in this blasé style and wanting the agony prolonged, and properly analysed and relished. Couldn’t Lloyd at least show some patriotism? Stand up for his brothers? And allow Daud the pleasure of telling him what a bad leader Tony Greig was?

  Daud wondered what the bag contained. He was ashamed of himself and vowed to resent afterwards the bucketful of trinkets, or the plump joint of something juicy, with which Lloyd was buying him. It was no more than tokenism, condescension and bad conscience, and Daud would be as humiliated and angry as decency required later on. For the time being it was necessary to be thick-skinned. His romantic excesses with the beanshoots had left him with the prospect of bangers and mash for the rest of the week. And although the butcher round the corner prepared fine sausages, it was not a prospect Daud relished. Sausages gave him indigestion. It was such things that convinced him that he was not intended to live rough, or to turn ascetic. Spinach gave him diarrhoea, cheese blocked him up for sure. Yoghurt made him nauseous. Breakfast cereals made his stomach bleed and biscuits made him sneeze. This was not the result of a congenitally weak gut, but the insistence of a stubborn one. It thrived best on subtly spiced curries and rich casseroles served with mounds of rice. Or fat, bulging meat pies, on their own or with a bit of salad. Or fried red mullet, prepared to a recipe that was a family secret, and served with flat bread and green chillies.

  Daud cheered, unable to control his joy as he watched Holding running in to bowl to Brian Close. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Lloyd watching him with a smile. When he glanced at him, Lloyd bent down to unload the shopping and lay it out on the table. He did this one item at a time, putting it down and then glancing at Daud with a smile, waiting for him to look and respond. He was like a child, asking and inviting approbation for some good deed. Good boy, now just leave the stuff there and piss off. Daud saw a chicken and some cans of beer, along with a pile of vegetables and fruit.

  He hated his vulnerability to such largesse. He had tried to persuade himself to laugh at Lloyd, to see him as egotistical and ignorant. He took these offerings to be Lloyd’s way of pre-empting rejection. Look what I’ve brought you. Does it please you? A gift as well as a means of pacifying his own fears about scrounging off other people. He did not want to believe that Lloyd could be bringing the food out of the selfless kindness between friends. He could not believe that Lloyd was naive enough to think him that kind of a friend. Live off the Englishman, my bro, Karta advised him. They stole all this money from us anyway. Suck his blood! Make him pay for his wicked history.

  ‘I thought I could persuade you to turn out one of those interesting chicken casseroles of yours,’ Lloyd said, cringing with exaggerated anxiety. ‘I hope you don’t mind. It’s a bit of a liberty, I know. But you make them so magnificently . . .’

  ‘It’s a diabolical liberty,’ Daud said, unable to resist such an opening.

  Lloyd grinned with relief, assuming that Daud did not really mind. ‘It’s sheer desperation,’ Lloyd said, laughing now. ‘It makes me reckless. And you’d understand why if you took up the invitation I’m always extending to you. Come and try one of my mother’s dinners. Dad is really keen to meet you as well. He says you must be the only intellectual left in England.’ Daud understood, from the way that Lloyd chuckled as he said this, that the intellectual was not to be taken as either true or as a compliment. What it was meant to say, he assumed, was that he must be one of these Babus. A monkey see monkey do type of swot, affected and clownish like a Benson-Hylen strutting his Englishness across the world stage.

  ‘Well played,’ Lloyd applauded ironically as Edrich ducked under another bouncer.

  He came round two, maybe three, evenings a week and Daud was tired of it. Daud sometimes heard him walking up and down on the pavement outside the house at night. He knew it was Lloyd because the first time it had happened it had terrified him. He assumed it was a racist freak that he had dodged at one time or another who had recognised him and followed him home, and had now come to post a Molotov cocktail or a carrier bag full of shit through his letter box. He had peeped out carefully from
an upstairs window, debating the range of weapons available to him, only to discover Lloyd strutting up and down on the pavement outside his front door. He had ignored him then, and ignored his other late night visits. Lloyd never knocked on these occasions, waiting to be discovered there. Fancy seeing you here! Come in, have a nip of brandy before you continue on your inspired stroll round the deserted streets of the town. Tell me, since you’re stopping for a few minutes, what are you working on? An ode or a canto this time? Or is it an entirely new form that you have invented? He sometimes brought a bundle of papers that he left casually on the table, as he would a pound of apples or a bottle of milk, saying nothing until Daud asked him. It would turn out that they were poems or a story. There was nothing else to be done then but to ask if he could read them. Lloyd protested that he carried them around because they comforted him. He did not intend to impose . . .

  Once he left three pages of a story on the table, and Daud left them alone. He did not ask anything about them and casually moved them aside when the food was ready. Lloyd forgot the papers when he left, and Daud heard him tramping the pavement the following night. When he turned up on the third evening, his eyes went directly to the table and to his pages, spotted with splashes of grease now and filmed with a fine dust. That was at a time when Daud was trying to chase Lloyd away with cruelty. He failed in the end, unable to sustain the necessary callousness.

  Lloyd liked to read the poems aloud, speaking them gently and never looking up while he read. He had seen Pablo Neruda do that on television and had admired his dignity and modesty. Lloyd’s attempt at the pose was a much cruder affair, the cringing poet making an offering of his labours and his craft while all the time suspecting that he was much better than his listeners were likely to give him credit for. Daud found the poems dull and rarely said anything to Lloyd’s requests for a comment. That was not the end of his misery, though, for Lloyd would launch himself on an interminable monologue about the shifts of style and imagery, the pun here and the primordial there, archetypals jostling with mnemonics enough to do justice to his education at the renowned public school in the town.