Gravel Heart(29)

Fran put up with these cruelties and did not defend herself, which seemed oddly forbearing. It was as if she knew something I did not, and knew what Peter really meant. It was difficult to be fond of him at such moments. I wondered if his mockery was to do with his own unspoken shame, and to forestall any suggestion that he had strong feelings for Fran, or that he did anything more than tolerate her. We did not talk to each other about intimate pains. We managed those kinds of things on our own. If I was the only other person in the house, Peter and Fran stayed to watch the TV for a while, and I saw them murmuring to each other on the sofa and saw the way Peter clung to her. If the others were all there, the two of them went upstairs to Peter’s room and sometimes Fran stayed the night. I thought she was uncomfortable with the others, perhaps because Peter played up the teasing and banter when they were around. Fran treated me like a younger brother although there were no more than two or three years between us and we were the same height. So many young women treated me like a younger brother. It was disheartening.

Alex and Mannie never invited their girlfriends to the house, or at least they did not come, so I never met them. Once Alex showed me a photograph of a woman looking over her shoulder at the camera in a familiar glamour pose. Her body was half turned away and her head was bent slightly forward as if she had been looking down and had just lifted her eyes at the photographer’s request. Strands of her auburn wig partly concealed her left eye. She was wearing a white running top, which was tight across her breasts, and the top six inches of her white track pants were visible in the half-body pose. Her glistening black midriff was bare. ‘Beautiful, huh? Her name is Christina and one day she’ll be my bride,’ he said before returning the photograph to his wallet.

Alex loved talking about the huge appetites of Nigerian politicians for stolen wealth. When it came to pilfering public money, they were definitely the worst in the world. He said definitely with an unusual emphasis, as if with awed respect. Nobody else came close to Nigerian corruption. Travel allowance, community allowance, hardship allowance, constituency allowance, contingency fund, seedcorn fund … you name it, they voted it for themselves. And all that besides the secret numbered accounts and the hidden commissions. He named improbable figures of stolen money, and the absurd carelessness in the handling of it. How assistants and family members travelled with thousands of dollars in their hand luggage, which they then left in a taxi or the departure lounge. He described these carryings on with a perverse pride, beaming at the audacity and the nonchalance of his country’s legislators, laughing so hard that he staggered from the force of his mirth. ‘Nobody in the world is as corrupt and greedy as us.’

Every Saturday Alex washed and shampooed and creamed and perfumed himself until he gleamed, and then he put on his multi-coloured shirt and leather jacket and headed off to Tottenham to see his girlfriend and to join the congregation of the Church of Resurrected Souls of Bethany. He did not return until Sunday evening.

Mannie’s girlfriend lived in Coventry. He said nothing about her, except that he was going away to Coventry for a few days and when he returned he was visibly happier. I learnt about her from Mood. He had never met her but he knew that she came from Martinique and was a Catholic. Mannie’s father was a Sunni imam back in Sierra Leone and would be upset to know about her and Mannie.

‘Everyone knows how tolerant Sierra Leoneans are about religion,’ Mood said.

‘Yes, everyone says that about themself,’ I said.

‘But it’s true,’ Mood said, with such anguish that I laughed and conceded. ‘But I think Mannie is afraid his family will be very angry with him, because in addition to everything else, his girlfriend is still married and has one child by her husband and another one by Mannie, and her husband refuses to divorce her. It will be too much for Mannie’s father, who is as devout an imam as you can find anywhere, a proper pious alhaji, closed off to the world. I don’t know what is going to happen to them, except maybe they will just continue like this. That’s why Mannie doesn’t talk about his girlfriend … too much guilt. He is afraid his family will find out and tell his father. I don’t know why people make such impossible choices for themselves.’

I did not have a girlfriend and the others pestered me and kept suggesting candidates. Even Fran joined in, telling me, as she would have done a younger brother, how handsome I was and how all the girls at college were probably waiting for me to ask them out. Peter frowned slightly when she said how handsome I was, but it inflamed my secret lust for her.

I could not tell them that I felt alienated by the idea of being alone with a woman – or that was what I believed, despite my physical longings. It was not that I did not have desires and cravings, and I did what was necessary to satisfy those, but when I imagined intimacies with a woman, I felt a kind of nausea and anxiety, and had to suppress memories of the defeated silence that surrounded my father, and refuse glimpses of my mother’s coercion and that man’s hard hands on her. The idea of sexual intimacy seemed to me like a submission to an ugly and shaming force and filled me with a kind of terror.

Dear Mama,

Salamu na baada ya salamu. I think of you often even though many months pass and I am silent. Even as time passes I find I cannot forget and that I miss everything so much. I miss the sight of familiar faces and old buildings and streets. I can shut my eyes and feel myself walking this or that street, leaning a little to the left as I turn into the Post Office Road or hear bicycle tyres squelching on the wet road behind me as I walk the lanes behind the market. I miss the sights and the smells that I know without knowing that I do. There are sights I don’t remember seeing which come back to me in full recall, and make me ache with their absence. I don’t know why I cannot shake off this feeling of painful longing. Why can’t one place be as good as another? I know there is a thought I have been keeping at bay, which is that you are a betrayer, that you sent me here to be with Uncle Amir to get me out of your way, that you could think of no further use for me.