Authors: Peter Akinti
'I swear, Elena, you have the devil in you,' the man on the roof said.
Elena did not hear him. She moved, up and down, looking like a completely different woman, her face flushed, her arms tightened around his neck, legs clamped around his waist.
The man did not move much at first, he remained still as she shifted her weight on him, up and down, but his expression was that of a man who was trying not to show how he felt. It didn't last. In a moment he was furious, his half-closed eyes gleaming with lust and anger. He used a heavy arm to support her head as he forced her back and leaned over her, tugging at her dress. He kneaded greedily at a soft white breast and pounded her body. Each thrust buried deeper, his knees moved wider apart. She – her expression turned menacing – tossed her hair, abandoned one of her shoes and called for the devil. It was like watching a battle. He was much stronger but she was much more skilled. When she came she bit his lip so hard she drew blood. He made that unmistakable grunting sound that comes from a man who has reached his climax too soon. And in the tension that came with their unexpected stillness, they suddenly looked like a living picture of beauty.
'Now we know what it is like to see a grown woman come,' whispered James, but when he turned he saw Ashvin throwing up. Ashvin heaved violently and his puke splashed the silence when it hit the ground, spread with flecks of blood like a pink porridge. The couple heard and turned their heads.
'Tell me, Borys, why is it you can only perform in front of strangers? You fucked me good like a true Bolshevik.' She laughed as she turned to look at the boys. She wiped slime from her thighs with a handful of crumpled pocket Kleenex and laughed at their frightened, unblinking eyes.
'You have the devil inside you,' repeated Borys, buttoning his fly.
Still laughing, the woman took a pull from her cigarette, exhaled into the cold night air and then flicked it, but it didn't go as far away as she intended, so she took a step towards it and crushed the stub with the sole of her red patent shoe. She smudged mascara across her face when she wiped it.
'I'm sorry. I didn't want to call your house,' she said flatly, like she meant it. 'When you didn't show yesterday and your phone was off, I didn't know what to think.'
'I'm sorry even more, and you'll be sorry too if you ever call my house again,' he said looking steadily at her, his hands clasped behind her back. She pressed her short blonde curls into his chest. He raised his face up to heaven in triumph.
'James? James? . . . Are you still there?'
'I'm here, I'm here,' said James into his walkie-talkie but he had forgotten to press the push-to-talk button.
'I'm here, I'm here,' he said again.
'I want to tell you something.'
'Course. Go on.'
There was a long pause.
'I want to tell you about Somalia and their fucking war.'
'Right now? It's nearly time.'
'They ain't worth shit. I told you I saw what they did to my mum and dad. I told you, I told everyone that I hid. Well, they heard me. They heard me, and they did some shit to me, man. Three nasty motherfuckers took my honour. That was the last image my dad saw of me before they cut his neck. When I screamed they told me to shut up and I did. And then they cut my mum. She was still alive when one of those fuckers took me again. I'm haunted by shame.'
A loud burst of static.
'Ashvin? Is that why you raped Nalma?' asked James.
'Rape? I didn't rape him,' said Ashvin.
'I saw,' said James.
'I was getting him back for what his people did.'
'His people?'
'Ethiopians. Those evil sons of bitches.'
Static.
'Since you are coming with me,' said Ashvin, 'you should know. In case you are afraid of the repercussions, y'know, from God like, for what we're gonna do. You don't have to do this, is what I'm trying to tell you.'
'Don't do that. Don't reduce me like that. I have my own reasons for being up here.'
Another long pause.
'Do you remember Kenny Doughnut?' asked James.
'Course I remember Kenny, fattest kid in our class. Fattest kid in the school,' said Ashvin.
'Fattest kid in the wooorld.' They said it together as they had a thousand times.
'Yeah, well,' said James, 'I heard his mother got three years for repeat shoplifting. Turns out she used to sell whisky she stole from Tesco's to her local off-licence for his dinner money and stuff.'
'So? Poor Kenny, but so what? We all got problems.'
'He hadn't been showing up for school. That welfare woman, Miss Tetherington –'
'Tetherington? I had to see her twice a week. I hate that big-nose bitch.'
'Yeah, well, anyway, Tetherington goes to Kenny Doughnut's house and finds him starved. He spent the whole of last term on his own. Nobody thought to tell him that they'd locked up his mum. They're putting him up for fostering.'
'Fat fucking chance. Who's gonna want him?'
'Why d'you have to be that way?'
'He's a lump, you know it, and his mum was on crack anyway. Everybody's got problems, some worse than his.'
'Yeah. I guess.'
There was another burst of static and then silence as James thought of his own mother and tears filled his eyes.
'It's time to set your watch and check the rope.' Ashvin's voice brought James back to his senses.
'OK, OK,' said James as he eased along the chilly bricks, holding on to two narrow shafts closer to the edge.
They had synchronised their digital watches, also bought at Currys, Stratford. They did one final check of the thirteen coils on the nylon ropes. Each boy could see the faint outline of the other. They looked across the tower blocks, trying to find some way back, but there was no hope. At 11.57 p.m. they were quiet as they emptied their minds, as they tried to forget life, to blend with their frail place in the universe.
They waited, listening to their own breathing. Three more minutes, fumbling with rope – their destiny – with hands numb from the cold. The pace of their heartbeats slowed and their breathing quickened, deepened, but brought little air because of the fear clogging their lungs. In cold sweat they squeezed shut their eyes and in silence their throats sickened. Everything went black and silent, an icy sort of truce. Then after two slow, careful steps, over the edge they went like two stone-filled sacks. They jumped.
There was a sound of a low thud and in less than a second my brother Ashvin was dead. Gone to dust. Free to begin again. His neck broken, his body swung effortlessly from side to side by force of a howling wind.
James's neck did not break. He was alive but remained neither conscious nor unconscious in a place where the pain was of such proportion as he had never felt before. The silence of the night was broken by his terrible cries; cries that saved him in the end.
James's mouth foamed while he gasped for breath, his legs kicked involuntarily, vehemently from the burning report he received from his throat. As his body swung, he thought of his father. He saw him quite clearly, smiling, rolling a joint. His heart pumped wildly. He looked down at his legs and he began to panic when he saw them thrashing wildly back and forth, kicking the wall of the great concrete monstrosity with his heels and at the air with his toes. His thoughts turned to the air being squeezed from his body and in the same instant there was another thought of a new and immense fear of death, an instant lust for life. Instinctively, he wedged the palm of his hand between his throat and the burning rope. He began to claw at his throat. This meant life. Then, under gold stars that sparkled in the sky, his thoughts became remote from his body, he stopped struggling and fell into a truly comfortable, satisfying sleep.
I
T WAS SECOND PERIOD
, during English. We were discussing 'Wine on the Desert', a short story by Frederick Faust. It was about the slow demise of a runaway murderer who plans to escape by travelling through a desert on horseback only to find wine in his flask instead of water. It showed that scheming actions lead to doom. The story was so vivid that I felt the physical detail of what it would be like to die slowly, in dire need of water. It was flawless, first the horse, then the mind and finally the body, all succumbed to thirst.
Someone interrupted our class with a message from Mrs Kelly, the head teacher. She had come to get me. It was Bertha Stewlan, a gangly girl, with braces across her teeth. She was head of student body and looked like a cross between Lauryn Hill and Angela Davis: tall, pretty and aggressive in a natural sort of way. Messages sent via the head girl meant one thing. The girls in my class immediately started speculating, excited to be part of potentially juicy gossip. The whispers about my imminent expulsion began before I left my seat, even among my 'friends'. I couldn't think what I had done.
'She's going back to Africa,' said somebody really smart. I turned to see who it was, ready to throw my ocean-freeze stare. I think it was Shirley Farquhar, a bizarre-looking girl the colour of blended Scotch whisky who seemed to be growing inwards from the hunched way she walked. Practically the first thing she told anyone about herself was that she was a third Indian. She was funny, odd. I had never met a black person like her before. She said weird things to me like: 'Why don't you eat bacon?' On my first day of school she asked me what it was like to be starving because whenever she didn't finish her meals, her mum always said, 'Think of all the starving kids in Africa.' During Ramadan it would be her who'd talk about how stuffed she was after lunch. The day before she had asked Fuzia why the Indians in the Forest Gate post office didn't ever employ black people.
'I dunno, Shirley. I'm from Morocco,' said Fuzia, bewildered.
Once, Anastasia, a Turkish girl from Tottenham went for Shirley's throat when Shirley asked her how come her dad didn't own a kebab shop instead of a fruit shop.
'There are at least ten fruit shops on the same stretch of road,' she said. 'My brother says you're all selling hash and that the police know it and that they wouldn't allow that shit if it was blacks. I mean, come on, how many kilos of seedless grapes do you think a person can eat at two in the morning?'
That was Shirley. She had a boyfriend, an older boy who called her 'Sweet Mama' when he picked her up from school in his flashy red sports car. I tell you, she was just stupid. Always talking about how some rapper was marrying a girl from her island and she had the most annoying ringtones (always, always Soca tunes). And God alone help you if you were near her in the corridor when her phone rang, she'd be all hips and arms and winding waist.
As I passed her desk I wanted to say something unforgettable about her peanut-head brother who kept sending me gifts and emails without capital letters but I couldn't focus my mind.
'Shhhh,' said Miss Diaz to the class, looking over the rim of her specs as she pressed her index finger against her thin lips.
My mind froze, overloaded with half-thoughts and fears. I followed Bertha's immaculate back, looking at her big arse that made me feel good about my own and her God-awful weave, gathered in a ponytail. I looked at the rubber heel of her shoes and then at the hem of her skirt, way above her knees, and I suddenly thought of home. In my country a girl would do anything to avoid being exposed to the gaze of men. Bertha would not make it home if she ever wore a skirt like that. In Somalia gunmen ruled the cities and they would rape girls like Bertha and they would say she asked for it because of the length of her skirt. I remembered the stories. They would use long, sharp knives to slice open the walls of the tin-shack homes and snatch daughters away. Girls would return, sometimes, in the morning, cast off from a traditional society that demanded virginity at marriage. At home in Somalia I always wore a hijab or headscarf outside the house and I used to wear long, dark dresses,
direh
and colourful cloth over my shoulders and around my waist, they followed behind me everywhere like a shadow. I don't cover my head in London but I always wear trousers. I looked down and tried to remember the last time I had seen my own naked legs.
I tried my best to match Bertha's brisk stride. I liked the funny sound her steps made on varnished wood. She turned her freshly made-up face on mine just once at the mouth of the long entrance that led to Mrs Kelly's office, the only carpeted corridor in our college. Bertha fixed my tie and turned the collar on my shirt so it didn't show at the back. Then she put her hands on my shoulders and gave me a long, searching stare.
'Do you want to tell me anything before you go in?'
'Huh? No.'
'Well, in that case,' she said, 'the police are in there waiting. If you have any shit on you get rid of it now.' Her cloying smile was like a gulp of chocolate mousse and then she swivelled and bounced off. I had heard she could be a real bitch at times, Bertha Stewlan, a real snob, but I'll always be grateful to her for that moment.
I walked through a heavy wooden door into the calm office. There were piles of thick books on a solid oak rack and a moon-shaped teakwood desk littered with papers. Mrs Kelly was dressed in a pleated blue suit and watched me steadily as I entered the room. I couldn't stop her favourite phrase from entering my mind: 'Newham girls are always mindful of their diction.' First-term girls would be given to repeating her phrase along the corridors after assembly. It got on everyone's nerves, like tourists saying 'Mind the gap' on the Central Line at Bank.
The female police officers sat facing Mrs Kelly on two stiff high-backed chairs, with a third vacant chair to their right. When I was called in they looked at me with the same hard expressions, like two white masks. I stood still for a moment, my knees weakening and then, without being asked, I sat in the empty seat, hoping Mrs Kelly wouldn't notice my blue for black trousers.
Mrs Kelly was a redhead with a pale freckled face. She rolled her syllables around her tongue. I liked her – she had given me a chocolate bar once for winning a short-story competition. The other girls said I only won because I was from Africa.
As I sat down she uncrossed her long, thick fingers, rapped them on her desk and said, 'I'll spare you any more suspense and get straight to the point. There has been an accident. Your brother may have been involved. You live with your brother, correct?'
'Yes, Mrs Kelly.'
'Speak up.'
'Yes, Mrs Kelly!'
'When was the last time you saw him?' asked a policewoman with an arched left foot for a jaw.
I shrugged. I thought of the last time I had seen Ashvin, at breakfast the day before last.
'Google keeps eighteen months' worth of search history and sells it to the highest bidder behind our backs. When we search the Internet we leave a trail of all our needs, all our desires,' he had said.
'You'd better lay off "YouPorn" then,' I'd said without looking up from my bran.
'Just don't Google, smart mouth,' he said.
Don't Google? . . .
'Was he at home last night?' The policewoman had to repeat herself, but her tough voice did not go with her softening face.
'No,' I said.
The three women looked at each other and each gave a tiny nod.
What? I thought and Mrs Kelly must have read my mind.
'These police officers would like you to identify a body,' said Mrs Kelly gently.
She paused for my reaction. I gave none. Instead, I feigned a cough and made a weak show of covering the expelled air from my mouth with both hands.
'The welfare officer, Miss D'Suza, is off sick. I'm not sure I approve of you going alone. You're not under arrest or anything like that, so you don't have to go, you understand? You have a choice,' she said. 'But it may be for the best if you do.'
'Yes, Mrs Kelly!'
Green. Amber. Red. We left my school at eleven in the morning as it started to rain. I was feeling dazed in the back seat of the Ford Fiesta police car with a bright orange stripe driving through the world to Whipps Cross hospital. All the houses we passed were two-storey terraces with nothing really to set them apart. The streets were teeming with people weaving, playing chase, crisscrossing paths. I opened the window but the drone of car engines was overwhelming. I looked up at the sky. It was rat grey. I tried to ignore people peering in at me but there was this one old couple – they looked like Mr and Mrs Bennet from that Jane Austen book – who pulled up in a new Volvo the colour of an avocado and they were looking at me, talking about me in my face like I was a monkey or like they'd already made up their minds. I stared them down. The way they looked at me was so English, so imperial. I wanted to stick my middle finger up at them and poke out my tongue but the light changed and vroom, they were gone, back to their universe, back to Longbourn House.
It was at the third set of traffic lights when I noticed him. Old Larry Bloom, my guardian. He pulled up on my side in a very businesslike silver Jaguar. He kept his eyes facing forward so that I could see most of his grey ponytail and not much of his face. But I knew it was Bloom as soon as I saw the red of his florid skin against his silver hair. For a second my mind eased. He wore his grey suit well with a thin club tie on a wide-collar blue shirt. Mr Bloom had known my father. I was eight when I first met him. He looked like the typical white man in Africa from the American movies: red-faced, flash jeep, reeking of built-in authority.
Yet over the years things changed. Apart from my father, Mr Bloom was the only man I trusted. It was Mr Bloom I had called the morning after my parents were killed. He had picked us up, Ashvin and me, and after everything, arranged our flights. I remember him seeing us after we had washed the blood from our parents' bodies, the way he lowered his gun and then began to curse, unable to stem his anger, the way he walked around my parents' bodies carefully and quietly as though the realisation broke slowly within him like the cold, the loving way he embraced my father. Mr Bloom remained speechless. He just stared at the two of us for some time – I was slumped in a corner not having seen, until then, the amount of blood I had on my dress. Ashvin sat in an old plastic chair by the window. Mr Bloom was the reason we were fast-tracked into Great Britain. Red. Amber. Green. It was only as I watched the plume of smoke and the drips of fuel that fell onto the asphalt from the corroded exhaust of Mr Bloom's car that I knew Ashvin was really dead.
There were police outside the mortuary. Death stained the walls of the building like rust clutching at iron. They led me down a narrow flight of stairs to a drab, tile-clad room that felt like it was directly underneath the entrance. The small, grey room was a place outside the rush of time. The two long windows had been darkened and gave me the uncomfortable feeling that I was being watched. There was a strong smell of sulphur. I turned and noticed a third basement window with a roller blind that was half closed so it looked like a giant eyelid. There was a crisp white sheet half covering a body on a metal slab. All the majesty of life gone.
'Take your time,' said one of the policewomen.
I felt a dull thud in my head as I searched for the desert orange of my brother's eyes but the eyes of the corpse were closed. It looked as though his upper lip had been bitten off. The neck was ravaged pulp. I looked at the face and I thought if I looked for too long anything could become familiar. I froze when I saw his navel. His had not been cut right, my brother's, it had swelled to the size of a tangerine, tumour-like. It was him.
His forehead was lined with creases. He had large bags under his eyes. It was hard to believe he was still just a boy. My sixteen-year-old brother.
His skin was pallid, his face swollen. It carried no expression save for a quiet snarl that did not belong to him; his arms looked flabby. There was a track of outraged flesh and coagulated blood around his throat and lacerations on his face where he must have scratched himself involuntarily. I felt my insides coil and reverse on themselves. I looked from the body to the police out of the corner of my eye and I thought of our father. I had asked him once why he didn't call his friend Mr Bloom by his first name. He looked at me as though I should have known. 'Because he is a white man, and despite what they say, they like us to remember our difference. You will do well to remember this, daughter,' my father said.
'Well, miss?' asked the officer with the boyish haircut who hadn't spoken to me up until then.
'Well what?' I said without removing my eyes from Ashvin. I wondered why it was that in Somalia people did not have surnames in the Western sense. To identify a Somali, three names must be used: a given name followed by the father's given name and the grandfather's. Women don't change their names at marriage. Nearly all men and some women in Somalia are identified by a public name,
naanays
. There are two kinds of
naanays
: overt nicknames, similar to Western nicknames, and covert nicknames, which are used to talk about a person but rarely used to address that person. I remembered my father called us fireflies on account of our eyes. And then I heard my father telling us that he loved us more than his own life. And then I wondered if coming to London had been worthwhile, if there was ever such a thing as escape. Since life is ultimately what you carry around in your heart.
'Well, is it him or not?' She pointed her chin at me.
I could do that.
I had first noticed something strange happening to my brother a few months earlier. He would get very happy and then, mid-sentence, become irritable and start talking too fast, too much. He began coming home to our flat to shower and change clothes only when he knew I would be at school. He hardly ever slept. Some nights I would listen outside his bedroom. He would be having conversations with himself, as though he were two people. At first I would knock and go in but then he stopped letting me. When he wasn't around I would sneak in and try to work out what he saw in all the newspaper clippings he kept. He would circle words like 'Pope', 'UN', 'asylum', 'oil' and 'Ethiopia' always, always in red. And he kept a list under his bed with all the names of leaders of African countries and he put numbers next to them, numbers that made no sense, like Y2B8 or Zd29. We didn't speak about what he did in his room or about the bits and pieces of conversation I heard him having alone. But his gloom had come between us; it settled in our flat uninvited like a squatter. There were many things I had no idea about. At first I asked him questions but finally I gave up. I missed the days when Ashvin thought he was my protector, when he talked to me about everything as though he understood.