Gravel Heart(31)

‘Ahlan wa sahlan, my old friend,’ he said. He gripped Mr Mgeni’s hand briefly and then reached out for mine. ‘And this is our young man. Welcome, my son,’ he said, crushing my hand in his right while still gripping Mr Mgeni’s hand with his left. He released both of us and waved us back into our chairs. When we were all settled Mr Mgeni began to speak, to explain my situation, but I did not get the impression that Jafar Mustafa Hilal was paying careful attention. His eyes were on me, curious, smiling, and I thought predatory.

‘Yes, yes,’ he said when Mr Mgeni paused in his brief recital of my wretchedness. ‘He will do very well as your dependant, very becoming. We will see what we can do.’

He leant back, elbows on the arms of his office chair, eyes almost closed as he contemplated illegalities with what seemed like deep contentment. ‘We will have to get him a complete set of papers. It will take a while and there will be a cost, but I will do my best to make it manageable. There is no accounting between us, as you know, my brother, and the only cost will be to pay the witnesses and the providers of certificates.’

He nodded after he said this and Mr Mgeni nodded back and smiled and then leant forward slightly to express his gratitude. Mr Mgeni must have done something big for his brother. I was looking forward to the story of Toxteth. Jafar Mustafa Hilal then turned towards me. ‘This will take a little time but it is not impossible,’ he said, and I wondered if those bulging lips made it hard for him to form words, if they required greater effort to manoeuvre. ‘We will take down a few details and then you can leave this to me. You just concentrate on your studies. There is nothing more important than learning. You will be Mr Mgeni’s nephew and he will be your last remaining relative. We will also have to lower your age to strengthen your case for dependence. It will take a little time to send for the papers but once we have those we’ll get the residence issue sorted out. I will be in touch. Maasalama ya habibi,’ he said, his eyes softening with the endearment.

‘What’s the Toxteth story?’ I asked Mr Mgeni later.

‘I made a promise not to tell anyone,’ he said, but I saw the mischief in his eyes and knew that he would.

‘I’m your nephew,’ I said.

‘It is an unpleasant story,’ Mr Mgeni said, without any sign of reluctance. ‘Did I ever tell you about my brother? I had one brother and three sisters, all younger than me. My brother was the baby of the family. Then my father married a much younger woman than my mother. This new family and the way the young wife treated my mother became intolerable to me. I was sixteen then, already working at sea on the coast trade, and the insolence of this woman with whom my father spent every night was unbearable, so I signed up for a cargo ship and went sailing around the world. I moved around the earth like the sun until after a while I no longer knew the way back.

‘I wrote to my brother from Liverpool and told him I was living there. I had just learnt to write in evening classes, and that was the first letter I wrote. My brother wrote back after several weeks … I mean he got someone to write the letter for him because he still did not know how to write. He begged me to send money for him to join me, begged me, because he said life there in the old house was intolerable. I saved up enough and sent it to him and he came to live with me.

‘I lived in Toxteth as I told you, in a house I shared with other men, all of them Muslim, one of them Jafar Mustafa’s brother Sadiq, most of us hard-working and all of us poor … black men away from their homes. My brother turned out to be a violent and lazy young man. He did not stay long in any job. He just wanted jokes and dole and women and drugs, and in Sadiq he found a perfect partner. They were just the way the English want all of us to be. They roamed the streets and visited women and went to the pub. Then one day they killed a woman. Yes, they killed a prostitute in a violent sexual game of some kind. They hurried home and told me. I gave them all the money I had and they escaped. Neither of them had papers and we would all have got into trouble if they had been arrested. It was a terrible thing to do, helping those two to escape, but there is an obligation … The police came, of course, and asked a lot of questions. We said none of us knew anything. But we found out that the woman did not die after all, and she was a black woman, so the police were not interested for long. That is the story of Toxteth. That is why lawyer Jafar Mustafa Hilal is so obliging.’

‘Do you know what happened to them?’ I asked.

Mr Mgeni shrugged. ‘They’re somewhere in the world doing the same dirty business,’ he said. ‘Perhaps lawyer Jafar knows but I don’t.’

*

In the meantime I fell in love with Mr Mgeni’s daughter Frederica. She was sixteen and perfectly beautiful and I could not help myself. Whenever I went round there to have dinner with the family or to wait for Mr Mgeni before we went to do a job, or when I went to collect my pay – Mr Mgeni preferred to pay me out of sight of the others – I hoped that she would be there too. My sexual innocence was a burden to me in a country where provocation was intense and constant and I felt diminished and inadequate about it. Frederica’s manner told me that she knew more about these matters than I did, despite her parents’ watchfulness. I was sure she knew about my secret adoration and had no interest in it, but still rewarded me with smiles and occasional flattery as if she was the elder of the two of us. It must sound ridiculous, but I was profoundly in love with Frederica for several months and the anguish her lack of interest caused me is impossible to describe. If I knew how to do so I would have written a poem or a song. It was exhilarating in its way. I am sure Mr Mgeni and Marjorie knew what was going on and were amused by it. It couldn’t be helped.