Gravel Heart(28)
Mr Mgeni was a self-employed builder, who was nearly retired now. He advertised in Peter’s paper and chose what jobs he wanted to take on. When he needed an extra pair of hands, as he put it, he took me with him, to mix the mortar or to carry materials up the stairs or to hold a plank or to sweep up afterwards, or for someone to listen while he talked about his life and his travels. He loved telling stories and I loved listening to them. I had never met anyone with such openness. His wife Marjorie was Jamaican but Mr Mgeni had never been there even though they had been together for seventeen years. Whenever Marjorie felt like going home she went with their daughter, Frederica. Mr Mgeni told me this and many other things as we worked together on his jobs, dwelling on details because I was so attentive. When he got tired of talking he played tapes of Nat ‘King’ Cole on an ancient cassette player crusted with flecks of plaster and tiny lumps of concrete, and sang along with the King. Rambling rose, rambling rose, why I want you, heaven knows.
‘Nor have I gone back to Malindi for a long time, for much longer than seventeen years,’ he said. ‘Why not? That’s another story and perhaps you’ll find out the answer yourself one day. But anyway, it means that Marjorie has not seen my home either. I am tired of travelling and restlessness and now I am quite happy here in Camberwell. For many years I worked as a sailor and travelled the world. I’ve seen the estuary of the Amazon river in South America, or I should say I have been in it because you can’t see it. It’s like being at sea. I’ve watched the sun set on the Sargasso Sea in the Caribbean and seen miles and miles of the seaweed drifting on the water like an island, and I have danced in the surf on the West African coast with the youth and fishermen. Those were wonderful unforgettable experiences, worth the hardship of that work. I’ve even gone as far north as the Baltic ports and back, which I would not recommend to you. Then when I tired of sailing I became a welder, a carpenter, and finally a builder. I was injured on a job … that was how I met Marjorie, who was a nurse at St Thomas’ Hospital. I did not let her get away after that. Her fate was sealed the moment I saw her. What a magnificent hospital St Thomas’ is!’
Mr Mgeni was prone to sudden changes of direction in his stories and I nodded to see where we were now heading. ‘I haven’t noticed its magnificence before,’ I said. ‘You don’t mean the buildings?’
‘I don’t mean magnificent to look at so much as the idea behind it, a place where the sick could be cured. You’d think, isn’t that what hospitals do, cure the sick? Yes, but did you know that it was first opened a thousand years ago? I’m not joking,’ Mr Mgeni said when I laughed at this unexpected switch. ‘What would your grandfather and mine have done when they fell sick a thousand years ago? Laid on their beds and groaned, probably, and called for a sheikh to come and read prayers over them while they waited for Azraeel to come and do his work, God forgive any disrespect. These people were building hospitals for their own sick, although they probably learnt to do that from Muslims in Persia and Egypt.’
Mr Mgeni spoke to me in Kiswahili and I think that was part of the pleasure he took in telling me his stories. ‘I don’t have anyone I can speak to like this any more, not someone who will understand the language properly, without mangling it with Somali and Kikuyu, and slang and shang and who knows what words. It makes me so happy, to speak the old language and to use the big words with their flourishes and their yaanis and their graces.’
Mr Mgeni came round to our house every day to say hello and sit with us for a while. Sometimes when he came during the day and saw dirty dishes in the sink, he did the washing up. Sometimes he brought fruit or a cake Marjorie had made for the boys. In the evenings he came in for a few minutes, listened to the talk and the teasing and then went back to his house. It was as if he had come to see that we were all getting along together. No one seemed to mind his frequent presence.
Peter’s girlfriend Fran was also a regular visitor. I had become friends with Peter and sometimes the two of them included me in their plans. Fran was attractive and soft-spoken, a tall well-built woman with a bronze complexion and pulled-back dark hair. Her temperament was smiling and subdued, quite unlike the edgy frenzy of Peter’s wit and conversation. She was fussy about clothes, dressing in elegant combinations that had obviously been selected with care. The expensive clothes and her groomed appearance made her seem out of place in the cheerless décor of our house. She was in her twenties and despite her demure airs had an aura of restrained sexual energy, or so at least it seemed to me in my innocence. She worked in the finance department of a large department store in central London, from where she was able to buy clothes and accessories at a huge discount. Peter often made fun of what he called her middle-class disguise.
‘I think her mother chooses her clothes, don’t you?’ he said to me in front of Fran. ‘Her mother’s English and does not want her daughter to forget it.’ Her father was a Rwandan theology student who went home after he completed his studies and did not keep in touch. I knew this from Peter who brought up his girlfriend’s story every now and then. I sometimes thought he was ashamed of her and treated her slightingly to punish her and himself. It might start in a light-hearted way, with Fran doing something unlike her usual fastidious self, perhaps licking her knife or picking a gherkin out of the dish with her fingers.
‘Hey, what would your English mother say about that?’ Peter would pounce and then repeat the gist of the story of her mother’s abandonment. ‘And to think your father was a priest.’