Gravel Heart(39)

Over the years I had become a secret miser. I pretended not to be one but I counted every penny and put away what I could. I bought cheap clothes and wore them until they were threadbare. I denied myself whatever I could resist and saved what I earnt with stubborn determination. There was pleasure in the self-denial. Moving into the one-bedroomed flat on my own was a struggle but I could no longer bear the dirt and the tumult of the shared house in Fiveways. At the beginning it had been my idea that I must save enough for a ticket home, in case my life here became intolerable. It was part of the panic I felt when I first arrived to live in London under the protection of Uncle Amir and Auntie Asha. I did not feel safe once I began to understand the wilfulness of my guardians. The price of a ticket home was a sum that seemed beyond possibility at first, but I added pound after pound over the years, watching the numbers grow in my bank statement with a secret gloating, so that by the time I graduated I had saved more than the price of a ticket home.

I wrote to my mother: Dear Mama, It’s time for a little relief and celebration. It’s seven years now that I’ve been here. Or have you stopped counting? I hope you are enjoying your luxury flat and you find it amusing to mingle with those plunderers of the human spirit. Well, I am learning to stop counting too and will soon become naturalised. That is what happens to people like me in this country. If we are lucky we stop being foreigners and we become naturalised. Everything has changed so much, I feel I have been bleached or emptied of something vital but at last I have managed to complete my degree. What a long time that took, and I am not sure the thing I’ve now got in my hands was worth the anguish. If I had listened to Uncle Amir I would have been an accountant or something useful like that by now, instead of which I am working in a café and I don’t know what else I can do. Do you have any news of Baba? I imagine him living peacefully in Kuala Lumpur, walking in the Botanical Gardens (there are always Botanical Gardens in places the British have colonised) or lying in the shade of the veranda of his father’s house, reciting verses he remembered from his childhood.

I started again: Dear Mama, Salamu na baada ya salamu. I hope you are well and that Munira is well. It must be beautiful there now the rains are over and everything is cool and green. I received my results today, and I am writing to tell you the good news that I have passed quite well. I wish I was with you in person to celebrate this news with you, but I think of you whenever anything good befalls me. I am sorry to hear the tests have been inconclusive but that could be good news.

Love,





Salim

After graduating I continued working for Mark full-time while I applied for other jobs. He told me I could stay as long as I wanted but he could not give me a raise. Business is business, my sainted friend, he said, looking shifty and fat. I applied for work everywhere: to the British Airports Authority (Gatwick was only twenty minutes away on the train), local newspapers, estate agents, banks, American Express (their main UK offices were in town), the University of Sussex, the University of Brighton, solicitors, and was tempted by an advertisement recruiting trainee train drivers. Why not? But it all came to nothing.

*

I went to visit Mr Mgeni in the New Year. ‘We thought we had lost you,’ he said. He had sold the OAU house to a businessman from Zaire, who was now converting it back to a family home for sale. House prices were soaring in their street. Mannie had moved to Coventry but did not leave an address. Amos had taken a job in Libya and had a bad accident there. A piece of grit entered his eye, which became infected. Mr Mgeni heard that from someone who was a carpenter and who went to Libya with Amos on the same job. ‘Someone came to ask for you,’ Mr Mgeni said, ‘that friend of yours, Mannie’s young relative, Mood. I asked him what kind of name Mood was, and he said it was short for Mahmood. Why do you shorten a nice name like that? I didn’t say so to him because he did not look well: trembling, sniffing, dirty clothes. He’s taking something. He asked me for a pound but I said no, because if you give money to someone doing that kind of thing, he will come back. He wanted to know how he could reach you, but I said I didn’t know any more.’

‘But I sent you the address,’ I said.

‘You want him to come all the way to Brighton to find you? Why don’t you get a phone?’

I had not seen Mr Mgeni for a few months. His breathing was laboured and his eyes lacked their usual spark. I did not want to interrogate him about his health at our first meeting after so long. Marjorie prepared a small feast and Frederica came to lunch, looking outrageously beautiful in a thin red cotton dress. Mr Mgeni laughed with delight when she arrived, holding her at arm’s length to have a good look at her before pulling her briefly into an embrace.

‘My child, you look stunning. You have come to woo him, haven’t you?’ he said, nodding towards me. ‘You’ve decided to give that other one up and come back for your childhood sweetheart.’

Frederica slapped her father on the hand, the playful slap that young women give to an elderly flirt, or that a daughter might teasingly deliver to an ailing father. Marjorie explained that Frederica was now living in Streatham with her partner, Chris, and they planned on getting married soon. I did not know what it meant that Frederica looked so exceptionally beautiful. She was like a miracle. It seemed to me that her beauty must have meaning. if I could grasp what that was, it would be a way of understanding something important.

‘You look more beautiful every day,’ I said. ‘What a lucky man your Chris is.’