Gravel Heart(21)

‘Whenever anyone points a camera at me, I smile like that,’ I said.

‘That is not a smile, that’s a grin,’ Uncle Amir said. ‘Next time I take a photograph of you, I want you to compose yourself so that your personality comes through, not your teeth.’

Another sunny day was not long in coming and I was instructed to fetch my books and spread them out on the patio table, then seat myself there unsmiling and hard at work. That was how Uncle Amir wanted me to look. That was what he wanted my mother to see he had brought about.

After several weeks I found evening work in a supermarket and discovered unexpected satisfaction in stacking shelves and mopping floors. I did not at first understand that it was because it offered an undemanding escape from the stifling atmosphere in the house. I did not know the uses of all the products I stacked on the shelves. Everything was new and sometimes surprising, but the strangeness was also familiar in an unanticipated way. What a good idea, I would think, as I learnt the use of this or that. I had to take myself to the store and bring myself back late in the evening, working out the way, catching the bus, learning to live. When I received my first pay, I briefly forgot how tiring the work was. To have money I had worked for! It was such a delicious feeling of freedom, so ridiculous, as if I now had a life of my own. During vacations I worked in a warehouse as well and later in a launderette, turning myself into a migrant helot to show Uncle Amir and Auntie Asha that I deserved the good fortune they had granted me.

In December it snowed.

Dear Mama,

I stood on ice today. I woke up in the morning to a deep hush, and went to the window to look out at the back garden, and everything was changed. All the neighbouring roofs were covered with snow and everywhere looked so clean. It made me think of the angel on the Makkan hillside, cleansing the shepherd boy’s heart with driven snow. The pavements were covered too, which was beautiful to walk on at first, crunchy and almost silent, but the snow soon became dirty and perilous from so many feet and from the wash of cars driving by. But that first moment when I stood on ice, I will never forget that. The crisp air made breathing easier. I think today was the happiest day I have had here.

I did not send that letter because I did not know how to continue after those few lines, and when I returned to it the mood was gone. Uncle Amir took a photograph of me in the snow in the back garden, and I sent her that and wrote on the back: I stood on ice. I had bought myself a fat spiral-bound notebook with thin pages that were perforated along the margin. It was my letter-writing pad, which I kept hidden in a drawer. I abandoned several letters because I had lost the thread of my thoughts or had been too frank or homesick and unhappy. I left the unsent letters in the notebook so it also became a place where I captured solitary and gloomy reflections, sometimes deliberately. One day Uncle Amir came into my room as I was in the middle of writing, and in my surprise I was slow to close the notebook. He playfully snatched it from me and started to read aloud in a mock-confiding voice. He must have realised that he was reading something intimate because he stopped and gave the book back to me. ‘It’s not wise to write things down,’ he said, scowling disapprovingly. ‘You can never unwrite them.’

I learnt to live in London, to avoid being intimidated by crowds and by rudeness, to avoid curiosity, not to feel desolate at hostile stares and to walk purposefully wherever I went. I learnt to live with the cold and the dirt, and to evade the angry students at college with their swagger and their sense of grievance and their expectations of failure. I learnt to live with the chaotic languages of London, which did not speak to each other, and to cope with English that was broken and wrong, missing articles or in the wrong tense. I tried but could not join in the city’s human carnival. I feared the silent empty streets at night, and always hurried home when I left work, crossing the street as soon as I glimpsed a group of people on the pavement ahead. I made unexpected friends: Reshat whose parents were from Cyprus, who made me laugh with his endlessly dirty talk, and Mahmood from Sierra Leone, whom we called Mood for short, who never seemed to run out of smiles and goodwill. They were my college friends. My time after college and work belonged to Uncle Amir and Auntie Asha. My college friends teased me about that, saying that my father was an ambassador and he lived in Holland Park and would not allow me to play with the poor of the Third World. I told them Uncle Amir was not my father and he was not an ambassador, but they took no notice. Reshat clowned around as the self-important ambassador, stomping up and down, shouting obscenities about immigrant riff-raff in London slums.

‘I will report the fuckers to the Special Branch if they don’t stop trying to turn you into a drug-pusher and a pimp,’ he shouted, pushing out his belly and pouting his lips.

I laughed too but I thought there was something unhinged about Reshat. Sometimes Lizard, another of Mood’s friends, joined us. He was doing a diploma or something in Quantity Surveying. He did not seem too eager to talk about that or about anything else. His face was often dead-pan, on the brink of a sneer, but even he could not resist Reshat when he was on his manic high-horse. Mood said Lizard had been to juvenile prison for hurting someone in a fight but he was not really as scary as that sounds. I asked why he was called Lizard and Mood said he did not know, but Yorubas were big on lizards. People like Lizard made me realise how sheltered my life had been, and that made me feel as if I had been denied something rather than spared, that I was somehow inadequate.