Gravel Heart(30)

I started again.

Dear Mama,

Several months have passed since I have been here in Guinea Lane and I have been working in my various jobs and attending my classes and saving a little bit of money. In this way I have had glimpses of many different worlds, for which I have no immediate use but which complicate my understanding of what I thought I knew. The winter is almost over, but sometimes it drags its feet into the months of spring, as late as May and June even. Then it seems that the cold will never go away and life will never change and I will never get away from here.

It will be three years in September since I came here and it feels like a lifetime of standing still while debris builds up around me. I have worked hard and learnt a great deal, especially this year, about myself and about other people, many of whom have been kind to me. I do not know why I have been offered these kindnesses, by Mr Mgeni in particular. I have done nothing to deserve them, nor do they come to me through any virtue of mine. I had not understood how fear and trouble can co-exist with such generosity, and how complicated people are. Mr Mgeni invites me to eat with his family and he helps me with work and things like that. I wish I was more daring and could take everything on and succeed. Instead I have learnt that I am timid and cautious, afraid to cause offence.

I think of you and Baba and I try to understand. Do you think Baba likes it in Kuala Lumpur? Have you had any word? Salamu Munira.

Love,





Salim

*

In addition to telling me stories on our job outings, Mr Mgeni took to asking me a lot of questions. Sometimes they were questions about college and then he listened patiently while I held forth on the book we were studying, about the opening scene of The Rainbow or the slave-ship allusions in ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’ or something else that he had not the slightest interest in but which none the less I delivered to him without mercy. At times he asked probing questions about me. I resisted at first but he persisted and in the end I succumbed even if I told myself that I had no choice.

‘What brought you here?’ he asked me one day as we were decorating an upstairs flat in Old Kent Road. We were scraping off old wallpaper in the stairwell when he paused to ask that. I often asked myself that question when I was weary: what am I doing here? Hearing it from someone else made it sound such a pointless and obvious question that I did not answer for a moment. Because that’s how things worked out. He must have thought I had not understood because he elaborated: ‘What brought you here to London?’

‘My uncle brought me,’ I said.

Mr Mgeni waited a moment and then prompted me: ‘Yes, OK, very funny, he brought you here. To do what?’

‘He sent me to college to do Business Studies but I failed so he told me to go,’ I said.

We went back to scraping while Mr Mgeni processed this information. ‘Does your uncle live in London?’ he asked.

‘Yes,’ I said, scraping diligently and even turning slightly away from Mr Mgeni.

‘Shall we go and find him and plead with him?’ he asked, and without turning to look at him I could hear the smile in his voice. He did not mean it. ‘Is he your real uncle?’

‘My mother’s brother,’ I said.

‘And he threw you away like that,’ Mr Mgeni said, and then we did not speak for another short while. ‘You did not do anything bad that you’re not telling me?’

I shook my head. ‘I said something he did not like. He did not think I was grateful for what he had done.’

‘Is he a man full of anger?’

I thought for a moment. ‘I think he likes to be feared.’

‘It’s your luck,’ Mr Mgeni said. ‘You can’t do anything about that. What does your uncle do in London?’

‘He is a diplomat.’

‘Ah, a big man. Are your mother and father still living?’

‘Yes, but not together.’

‘They cannot help you?’ said Mr Mgeni.

It was a question so I said, ‘No.’ I did not tell him that my mother was the one who sent me here and that something broke in my father’s life a long time ago and I was the debris of their disordered lives. He asked many other questions until he knew the matter in detail though he did not ask again about my mother and father. He knew that Uncle Amir had agreed to give me a financial guarantee for the moment, but that he was angry with me and spiteful, and he was unlikely to help me in that way for long. It was more likely that in the next year or two I would have to leave or disappear. Mr Mgeni returned to the matter several times until he knew my circumstances by heart and then he came up with a plan.

‘There is someone I know,’ he said. ‘He is a Sudanese lawyer who is very good at this kind of thing.’

‘What does that mean? Is he crooked?’ I asked.

‘He has his ways,’ Mr Mgeni said and then paused to see if I wanted him to continue. Of course I wanted him to continue and nodded several times to show him my eagerness. ‘I have done business with him before. He specialises in cases of dependants who require papers to join their families. His clients are mostly Somalis and Eritreans and his fee is very big but I knew his brother many years ago when we lived in the same house in Toxteth, a whole bunch of us crowded on top of one another, understanding nothing. He will take care of this, I’m sure.’

The solicitor’s chambers were in a former Junior School in Walthamstow. I saw from the nameplates by the door that in addition to Jafar Mustafa Hilal, Solicitors, there were other respectable businesses operating out of the building: a litho and digital print service, a textile designer and an accountancy firm. A handsome young assistant showed us into the solicitor’s office and shut the door on us. There was no one else in the room or so it seemed. Mr Mgeni sat on one of the chairs facing the desk and I sat on the other. After a moment I heard the noise of running water and realised that the room was not empty after all, and that someone was washing behind the partition in the corner. In a moment a man came out from behind the screen, wiping his hands on a towel. Jafar Mustafa Hilal was somewhere in his fifties, tall and dark and heavily built. His face was round and clean-shaven and his lips were thick and bulging. His hair was close-cropped. He smiled as he walked towards Mr Mgeni with outstretched hand, but that did nothing to soften his menacing appearance.