Exit West(25)

All the food in the house was very quickly consumed. Some residents had money to buy more, but most had to spend their time foraging, which involved going to the depots and stalls where various groups were giving out rations or serving free soup and bread. The daily supplies at each of these were exhausted within hours, sometimes within minutes, and the only option then was to barter with one’s neighbors or kin or acquaintances, and since most people had little to barter with, they usually bartered with a promise of something to eat tomorrow or the next day in exchange for something to eat today, a bartering not so much of different goods, exactly, but of time.

? ? ?

ONE DAY Saeed and Nadia were returning home with no food but modestly full bellies, after a reasonably good evening of foraging, and she was experiencing the peculiar sweet aftertaste and acidity of mustard and ketchup, and Saeed was looking at his phone, when they heard shouting up ahead and saw people running, and they realized that their street was under attack by a nativist mob, Palace Gardens Terrace being roiled in a way that belied its name. The mob looked to Nadia like a strange and violent tribe, intent on their destruction, some armed with iron bars or knives, and she and Saeed turned and ran, but could not escape.

Nadia’s eye was bruised and would soon swell shut and Saeed’s lip was split and kept bleeding down his chin and onto his jacket, and in their terror they each gripped with all their might a hand of the other to avoid being separated, but they were merely knocked down, like many others, and on that evening of riots across their part of London only three lives were lost, not many by the recent standards of where they had come from.

In the morning they felt their bed was too tight for them both, raw as they were from their injuries, and Nadia pushed Saeed away with her hip, trying to make space, and Saeed pushed as well, trying to do the same, and for a second she was angry, and then they turned face-to-face and he touched her swollen-shut eye and she snorted and touched his swollen-up lip, and they looked at each other and silently agreed to start their day without growling.

? ? ?

AFTER THE RIOTS the talk on the television was of a major operation, one city at a time, starting in London, to reclaim Britain for Britain, and it was reported that the army was being deployed, and the police as well, and those who had once served in the army and the police, and volunteers who had received a weeklong course of training. Saeed and Nadia heard it said that nativist extremists were forming their own legions, with a wink and a nod from the authorities, and the social media chatter was of a coming night of shattered glass, but all this would probably take time to organize, and in that time Saeed and Nadia had to make a decision: whether to stay or to go.

In their small bedroom after sunset they listened to music on Nadia’s phone, using the phone’s built-in speaker. It would have been a simple matter to stream this music from various websites, but they tried to economize in all things, including the data bundles they had purchased for their phones, and so Nadia downloaded pirated versions whenever she could find them, and they listened to these. She was in any case glad to be rebuilding her music library: from past experience, she did not trust in the continued availability of anything online.

One night she played an album that she knew Saeed liked, by a local band popular in their city when they were in their teens, and he was surprised and happy to hear it, because he was well aware she was not overly fond of their country’s pop music, and so it was clear that she was playing this for him.

They sat cross-legged on their narrow bed, their backs propped up by the wall. He extended a hand, palm up on his knee. She took it.

“Let’s agree to try harder not to speak shittily to each other,” she said.

He smiled. “Let’s promise.”

“I do.”

“I do, as well.”

That night he asked her what the life of her dreams would look like, whether it would be in a metropolis or in the countryside, and she asked him whether he could see them settling in London and not leaving, and they discussed how houses such as the one they were occupying might be divided into proper apartments, and also how they might start over someplace else, elsewhere in this city, or in a city far away.

They felt closer on nights when they were making these plans, as though major events distracted them from the more mundane realities of life, and sometimes as they debated their options in their bedroom they would stop and look at each other, as if remembering, each of them, who the other was.

Returning to where they had been born was unthinkable, and they knew that in other desirable cities in other desirable countries similar scenes must be unfolding, scenes of nativist backlash, and so even though they discussed leaving London, they stayed. Rumors began to circulate of a tightening cordon being put in place, a cordon moving through those of London’s boroughs with fewer doors, and hence fewer new arrivals, sending those unable to prove their legal residence to great holding camps that had been built in the city’s greenbelt, and concentrating those who remained in pockets of shrinking size. Whether or not this was true there was no denying that an ever more dense zone of migrants was to be found in Kensington and Chelsea and in the adjacent parks, and around this zone were soldiers and armored vehicles, and above it were drones and helicopters, and inside it were Nadia and Saeed, who had run from war already, and did not know where next to run, and so were waiting, waiting, like so many others.

? ? ?

AND YET while all this occurred there were volunteers delivering food and medicine to the area, and aid agencies at work, and the government had not banned them from operating, as some of the governments the migrants were fleeing from had, and in this there was hope. Saeed in particular was touched by a native boy, just out of school, or perhaps in his final year, who came to their house and administered polio drops, to the children but also to the adults, and while many were suspicious of vaccinations, and many more, including Saeed and Nadia, had already been vaccinated, there was such earnestness in the boy, such empathy and good intent, that though some argued, none had the heart to refuse him.