Gravel Heart(41)

It did not seem likely to me that Mr Mgeni would get fat. If anything, he was losing weight and at the same time swelling around his wrists and his face and perhaps other parts of his body not visible to me. He did not look as if he had the strength to do very much anyway. His hand trembled when he picked up a cup, and he was no longer capable of the unstinting benevolence of years before. He was now more easily irritated, although his tetchiness was often directed at himself and sometimes at Marjorie. He cried very easily. When I saw those tears in his eyes I had to look away for fear they would bring on my own. He looked exhausted and conversation with him was becoming difficult because he was not able to keep his mind from wandering. He said that sometimes he woke up in the morning and did not know where he was. He returned again and again to the hardships of the early years of his life at sea, and then to the decades of his time in England, working in all weathers and living in hostels and cramped lodgings – the life of a beast, he said – until God showered him with blessings and sent him Marjorie. He wandered from story to story, sometimes becoming exasperated with himself because he could not remember a name or a place or a date, or because he tangled up one outcome with another. He spoke about old wrongs that he should have put right while he had the strength. He said nothing when I asked him what those were.

‘Are you thinking about your home?’ I asked him.

He did not reply for a while and I did not ask again. Then he said, ‘This is my home.’

I went round there a few days after I received a letter from my mother telling me that she had to go back to Dar for more tests. He was his old self on this occasion, laughing and telling stories and giving advice. I mentioned my mother’s letter to Mr Mgeni because he asked after her.

‘Tests for what?’ he asked.

‘I don’t know, she doesn’t say,’ I said. I had told him that she was having tests but he did not always remember. ‘You know how it is, people are discreet about their illnesses.’

‘Not with her own son. Call her. You have a telephone in your flat now. Call her like she wants you to,’ Mr Mgeni said, bristling uncharacteristically at me, like a proper uncle.

When I lived with Uncle Amir and Auntie Asha they called home regularly, and at some point I was always summoned to exchange a few words with my mother. She hated the phone, I knew that of old, and I hated it too and hated hearing her voice on it. But after I was expelled from that Eden I did not call because the man himself might answer and I had no wish to speak to him.

Yes, I did have a telephone in the flat and I had her number beside it but I still had not been able to bring myself to make the call. It was another one of my anxieties but I did not know what I would say to her. I thought of the phone as an instrument to be used when there was something urgent to say and I had nothing like that to tell her. I had not spoken to her for years and I did not know where I would begin. And then he might answer the call. But that weekend evening, stung by guilt and Mr Mgeni’s rebuke, I did call home. I dialled the number and after a few rings I was about to put the receiver down with relief when someone picked up. I heard a voice I could not mistake.

‘Hello,’ he said. It was him. When I did not answer he said, ‘Nani huyu? Who is calling? Hello, is this an international call? Can you hear me?’

I put the phone down. His voice was strong and firm as I had imagined from a man with a thick neck and hard hands. I should have spoken and asked for her. I should have spoken like a grown-up person who had learnt to cope with the world and not fled like a child. I tried to put the encounter behind me but could not get over the shame. I could not stop thinking about it for days.

A couple of Sundays later I went round to Mr Mgeni’s for lunch and he asked after my mother and if I had spoken to her about the tests. I lied and said that I had called but there was no reply.

‘You tried once?’ he asked. I did not answer. ‘Do you have her number with you? Don’t be so stubborn. Go and call her now. Use our phone.’

‘I’ll call her later,’ I said.

‘Give me the number,’ he said. ‘I’ll call her and tell her that you are an ungrateful son as well as a worthless nephew.’

‘I don’t have her number with me. I’ll call her later,’ I said. He must have believed me because he forgot himself enough to pat my knee some time during the afternoon.

He was almost his old self at Frederica’s wedding, beaming at everyone and even stepping out on to the floor for a couple of turns when they put Nat ‘King’ Cole on for him. I saw Frederica at work sometimes and she always had news of them, speaking to me in a way that had come to her with marriage, a way which was flirtatious but had in it an unguarded confidence, as if she was a grown woman teasing a child. I remembered Peter’s girlfriend Fran used to treat me like that years ago. What had happened to Fran? Did she go with Peter? What had happened to him back in the new South Africa?

Mr Mgeni died during my second year in Putney, and I went to the funeral held in the crematorium chapel in Streatham. Marjorie asked me to read something that would remind us of Mr Mgeni’s home and the way he grew up, and I read the fatiha followed by al Ikhlas because I did not know any funeral prayers and I did not think Mr Mgeni did either. I wrote to my mother to tell her about Mr Mgeni’s death. I had told her about him several times, about how we spoke Kiswahili together and how I used to go on jobs with him and how I was always welcome in his house. After his death, it felt to me as if my mother was someone who knew him and would like to be informed about his departure. I wrote: It might not seem right that there was no one there to say a prayer for him but me, and that all I could manage was the fatiha and the shortest sura in the good book, but I don’t think it would have troubled him very much. There was his family there, who were, as he said, the blessing that God had showered on him. That would have mattered more to him than if I had read Yasin for him. He had resigned himself to many losses. As I was writing the letter I thought of what Mr Mgeni would have said to me if he were here. Call her. The thought thrilled me and without further reflection I did so.