Black Mamba Boy (32 page)

Glenys’s big mistake was to show Jama the funfair as they walked home. One look and he was gone. Machines dedicated to fun and excitement had never existed in his world, and here was a whole field of delirious mayhem, lightbulbs of red-yellow-blue-green flashed and popped, burnt onions and sugar perfumed the air. Raucous songs and melodies played cacophonously over one another, interrupted by random bangs and pings. Most of the rides stood idle but the cheaper ones were flying, the screeches of girls and boys howling down. Rides to frighten, to elate, to compete in, every emotion was for sale, and when the girls saw the dark handsome sailor there was a stampede toward Jama. He was pulled from Glenys’s grip and taken away by a troop of Welsh sirens who wanted candy apples, bumper car tickets, goldfish, all the things they knew Jama could buy them.

Every evening Jama snuck out. “Where are you going now?” Glenys would ask if she caught sight of Jama skulking away.

“To buy a jumper!” he would reply before running off, but he was meeting Edna, Phyllis, Rose, or any other of the fairground girls. The girls cheered when he turned up, and he never got bored of spinning and whirling with them, but his real downfall was the bumper cars. A fix of five minutes cost sixpence, and he drove the cars from afternoon to late in the night, a pretty girl’s thighs squashed by his and another squealing
in delight when he crashed into her. He paid for all the girls and even a few boys. “What’s he about?” the boys asked.

“He’s a prince from Africa here on holiday,” the girls insisted.

Jama finally had a chance to play and live his lost childhood and his father’s motoring dream; the frustrations of a caged, demeaned, stunted life exploded out of him in that fairground. Each evening his precious pile of British money diminished until only the shiny bottom of the biscuit tin stared up at him. Now he went to the fairground or to the café with only lint in his pockets and sat watching, hoping that one of the girls would sit by him, but Edna, Rose, Phyllis, and the others coolly cast their gaze somewhere else.

“Eighty pounds! Eighty pounds! You spent all your money on those hussies!” fumed Glenys when she heard he had run out. “Well, back off to the dock with you then, there is a ship to Canada that’s looking for firemen, you better get on it, laddio.”

Abdullahi concurred with Glenys for once. “I signed for that ship today, I’ll take you to put your name down.”

The ship was taking coal to St. John, New Brunswick. Abdullahi took Jama to the British Shipping Federation office, where he gave his name and then put his fingerprint and shaky cross next to the man’s calligraphy.

“You can take your wage now if you want but you will have to wait two months for the next payment,” Abdullahi explained.

“Tell him to give it to me, I owe money to Waranle.” They walked down the street, Jama counting the money.

“Now, in Canada, you will have to wear a jumper, coat, hat, none of this nakedness you have got used to, the cold there will kill you straight, it’s happened before to foolish Somalis,” Abdullahi admonished.

“Twenty-four pounds!” Jama exclaimed.

“What did I tell you! English wages.”

“How long will the voyage take?” asked Jama.

“What’s it matter? The longer it takes the more you’ll get paid. You still want to go back to Africa?”

“I have to.”

“You don’t have to do anything. All these men are killing themselves to get here and you wanna go back to one meal a day, heat, thirst . . . You’re a strange boy to even think about it.”

As the departure date neared, Jama tried to believe that Abdullahi was right, that to return to Africa would be the worst mistake of his life, that he would never have this chance again, that he owed it to himself to go to Canada, that Bethlehem would accept or forgive anything if he came home a rich man. All of this became a kind of philosophy passed on from Abdullahi, that gray seas would be their gold mines, seagulls their pets, hairy blue-veined Britons their companions. Women and Africa were not a part of this exciting new world. Beyond the rationing, the bomb sites, the slumlike housing, the angry dungareed men, Port Talbot was still the Promised Land, with every new technology obtainable, gas cookers, vending machines, top-class radios, picture houses. Even though many white people pulled faces when they saw him, there were unexpected kindnesses, such as an old woman who invited him into her small, cozy home for a cup of tea and who stroked his hair, a photograph of her lost son shining from the mantelpiece; men who asked what Jamaica was like as they escorted him home on foggy nights. There were enough humane Ferengis to make life interesting.

_______

Life carried on peacefully until one day a stranger came to the hostel, a dapper Somali from London. He was looking for Jama.

“What do you want him for?” Abdullahi challenged.

“Family business,” replied the stranger shortly.

“I’ll go get him for you, sir,” said Glenys, dashing up the stairs. “Jama, Jama, open up,” she said, hammering on his door, “there’s a nice-looking man asking for you!”

Jama, alarmed, rushed down the stairs behind Glenys. A black-suited man sat opposite Abdullahi in the sitting room.

He stood up to greet Jama, saying, “Long time no see, cousin.”

Jama grabbed hold of Jibreel’s hand. “Man! Where has this ghost appeared from?” was all that he could say. Jibreel looked like he had stepped down from a film poster, nothing remained of the thin askari that had snored beside him in Omhajer. Shiny black hair, neat thin mustache, black hat in his hand, he was more debonair than anyone Jama had seen.

“Let’s go to your room, I have news.”

Sitting in the damp room, with wallpaper falling down around them, Jama’s heart stopped when Jibreel delivered his news. “Your wife has had a child.”

“Allah!” exclaimed Jama.

“Manshallah, Jama! Praise God, I leave you a sad little boy and now you’re a father before me.”

“Allah!” Jama said again.

Jibreel laughed. “Leave God alone!”

“How do you know?” Jama asked when he had finally composed himself.

“Your mother-in-law wants you to come home, she has been telling every Somali in a hundred-mile radius. An Eidegalle man passed through Tessenei and came by ship to East London,
where the news reached me. When I heard that you had arrived here, I couldn’t keep the good news to myself, could I?”

“I have to go to Bethlehem, what can she be living on? I didn’t leave her any money.” Jama embraced Jibreel. “But I’ve taken the Ferengis’ money, they’ll make me go to Canada,” he cried.

“You’ve signed on for another ship?”

“Yes, it’s leaving this week, they know my name, where I live, everything, they fingerprinted me!”

“Settle down, we’ll sort something out.”

Jama hid his face in his palms, imagining Bethlehem nursing his child all alone in their tukul. On the ship his love for her had been like a dove in a cage but it now stretched out its wings and soared. “Is it a girl or boy?”

“Jama, I have a letter here from your wife.”

“Read it to me outside, I can’t breathe in this room.”

They walked to the freezing docks, the sea a thrashing gray whale beside them, the wind tearing through Jama’s cotton shirt. They sat on a wall, smoking Jibreel’s cigarettes, the
Runnymede Park
bobbing gently in the distance about to depart for Egypt. Jama’s heart flipped over every second.

“Okay, I’m ready.”

Jibreel pulled out an envelope from his jacket pocket. It was covered in fingerprints and worn in places, had clearly passed through many hands to reach him. Inside was a sheet of blue paper covered in Arabic script.

Jibreel read to Jama:

My Heart,

I have been trailing your vapors since you left, I don’t know whether you are alive or dead. I even went to a fortune-teller in Tessenei and he saw you in the grains of his coffee, he told me
that you’re safe, on a sea surrounded by Ferengis and Yahudis, but I don’t believe him. My stomach has been growing ever since you left and we now have a son. I came here to the scribe because your boy is a small, sickly thing and I don’t want him to pass away without ever seeing you. Life is silent without you, the birds don’t sing anymore, even the baby is quiet, we sit together in the evening wondering where you are. Sometimes I am angry but other times I feel nothing because I doubt whether you were ever real, whether our marriage was just a dream, whether my child was put in my stomach by sorcery. Nothing grows here now that you have left, our fields and stomachs are empty. I am sending this letter out into the world in the hope that you will remember me, come home one day and tell me that you are real.

Bethlehem

Jama hid his tears from Jibreel. “What is the quickest way of getting to Eritrea?”

“You can either go to Aden and get a dhow to Massawa, or go to Egypt and travel down through Sudan.”

“Which is cheaper?”

“Through Aden.”

“Let’s go, then, I have no time to waste.”

They finished their cigarettes and walked back to Waranle’s hostel. Abdullahi looked harshly at Jibreel as they walked in. “What’s going on, Jama?”

“I have a son,” Jama replied with a weak smile.

“And what? We all have sons, daughters; doesn’t change anything.”

Jama’s face fell; hearing Abdullahi unable to even extend a kind word cut into his heart. Abdullahi was not someone to take counsel from; he was embittered, chasing money around the world without any meaning to his life.

Jama rushed up to his room, packing clothes into his father’s suitcase. “You know, Jibreel, that day you walked me to meet that man, the man from Gedaref, after he told me my father was dead, I sat there until nightfall unable to move, but I promised myself something. I might have been a scrawny, snot-nosed little boy but I promised myself something, that I would never abandon a child of mine, never.”

“Then you became a man that day,” soothed Jibreel.

“All that hardship my mother and I went through, the hunger, the insults, the loneliness . . . How could I do that to Bethlehem and my son?”

“You couldn’t, Jama, you don’t have the stomach for it.”

“Let’s go, I’m ready.”

Jibreel paid Jama’s bill with Waranle, and a leaving party gathered around the door. Glenys kissed Jama goodbye. “Good luck, son.” The sailors shook his hand, gave him a few coins for his child.

Jama found Abdullahi in the sitting room, sullenly drinking tea. “I’m going, Abdullahi.”

“Well, go then, fool!”

“What will happen about the wage I’ve taken?”

Abdullahi raised his eyes to Jama. “I’ll tell them you’re at death’s door, and you will have to pay them back if you ever return.”

Jama let out a long sigh. “Thanks, Abdullahi, for everything. See you in Africa maybe.”

“Not in a thousand years,” sneered Abdullahi.

The train pulled in at Paddington. “London,” crooned Jibreel. As they walked through the stony city, Jama looked up and saw
blackened buildings that looked like the nests of huge violent birds.

“London’s beauty is not in its buildings, Jama, but in its people, you go to Piccadilly Circus and it’s like walking through the crowds on Judgment Day, people come from all over the world with bits of their villages hidden in their socks and plant them anew here. Just in Leman Street we have a Somali barber, a Somali mechanic, even a Somali writer living next to the Jewish grocers, Chinese cooks, and Jamaican students.”

Jama dug out his Welsh soil from his pocket and showed it to Jibreel. He chuckled. “I’ll plant this in Eritrea.”

Jama stayed with Jibreel in his room in Leman Street, talking late into the night. “I wonder what he looks like. I hope he has his mother’s big eyes,” Jama mused.

“Imagine all the generations that have gone into making your son, marriage after marriage, the men, the women, some forgotten, some remembered, Kunama, Somali, Tigre, farmers, nomads, all to make this little worm,” Jibreel said sleepfully.

“I still can’t believe it, only when I see him will I really know what it means,” Jama replied, eyes wide awake in the dark. “But I know what I will name him.”

“Oh yeah?” slurred Jibreel.

“Yes. Shidane.”

While they waited for the ship’s departure date, Jibreel taught Jama how to Brylcreem his hair until it was just so, and then they promenaded around London. At the Serpentine, Jama told Jibreel what had happened to Shidane; at a café in Trafalgar Square he described Bethlehem’s beauty; along the South Bank he explained how he had walked from Palestine to Egypt.

Jibreel listened and smiled. “I think you are lying to me, Jama. The last I remember of you, you were always sulking, pushing your bottom lip out. You tried to turn all of us into your mother, feeding you, nursing you, giving up our mats for you.”

Jama laughed. An ocean of time separated him from that little malarial boy in Omhajer.

Finally, on a bench near Putney Bridge, Jibreel was able to tell Jama where he had been.

“After you left Omhajer, there was meant be an offensive against the Ethiopian fighters. The Italians brought out huge guns, tanks, poison gas, everything, they meant business this time. The night before we were meant to leave, I thought to myself, Do I want to die for them, is there nothing else? Before the sun came up I fled, I walked all the way to Djibouti then through both Somalilands. In Kenya I stopped, I worked as a shoe shiner at Nairobi station, without shame I polished shoes next to little boys. With a bit of money in my pocket I left again, and in Tanganyika I worked for Omani Arabs, then I got sick of that and jumped on a lorry to Rhodesia. There I worked on an Englishman’s farm, and he said to me, ‘Oh, you’re Somali, you must be trying to find work on the ships,’ and I said to him, ‘What ships?’ and he explained how so many Somalis were working for the merchant navy because it paid so well. I was off! I left that stupid farm and went to find a big port. From Rhodesia I walked to South Africa, and then I had to walk all across that damn country until I came to Durban, where the Royal Navy was. I stowed myself onto a British ship, five years to the day I had left Omhajer, I was caught and put in chains, and when we got to Liverpool I ran away and joined another ship!”