Forest Gate (6 page)

When they returned to the crossroads on York Road at the back of their estates, Ashvin spoke slowly in a funny voice he thought sounded German.

'Do you have any last requests?'

'I want to have sex with a girl and I want to see something breathtaking. What about you?' asked James.

Ashvin laughed, but there was no trace of humour on his face. 'I'm going to kill that guy who hit me today. I want to take my sister to an art gallery. I want to see something breathtaking too.'

'What do you mean, kill that guy? Like murder?'

'Yes, sparky. I mean like murder.'

They both laughed.

'I know him,' said James. 'His name is Nalma Kamal. He's Ethiopian.'

'I know,' said Ashvin.

'I'll help you get him if you like.'

They shook hands and then walked their separate ways.

James wasn't at school the following day, but he turned up on Wednesday, two days after their pizza. When they saw each other in class, James asked Ashvin to sit at the desk next to his. Ashvin turned his fierce eyes on James, looked him up and down and crossed his long, skinny legs.

'What for?' he said. 'Why would I want to sit next to you?'

'They'll leave you alone,' said James.

James told me he'd always remember the way Ashvin laughed, showing all his teeth.

Weeks later, during a geography class on a day when a supply teacher was talking – to himself mainly – about sustainability and the earth's resources, Ashvin whispered, 'Thank you.'

'What for?' James asked.

'Ever since I've been sitting next to you they've stopped following me and no one laughs at my trousers. Who are you, Peter Parker?'

James turned from the window to look at Ash in that innocent way he had mastered. He didn't say anything because he didn't want to spoil such a beautiful day by talking about his brothers.

''S cool,' said James.

Ashvin and James shared the same hatred for the area we lived in. So when he found out about them, Ashvin said James was lucky to have older brothers. James didn't feel lucky.

'I'm afraid,' he said. 'Everything we own comes from evil. They sell drugs and guns. Everything always goes wrong around here. People get greedy and jealous. Failure is like the wind and it's only a matter of time before one of my brothers won't be at breakfast. Do you know what I mean?'

For a long moment they held each other's gaze.

'I know exactly what you mean, man,' said Ashvin. 'In the end death is the only winner.'

A
T THIS POINT IN
the story I had not yet met James but I'll tell you about him. He was the youngest of six boys. They all lived together on the Mandela council estate in east London, three doors down from the flat where that five-year-old girl was shot in the back with her father, in a flat where they earned their living selling crack. James did not have much of a past but he was always certain of his future. He was convinced he was going to die young.

James's mum told me once that he was shy but always imaginative. I knew different. James wasn't shy. He was solitary by nature, with an honest outlook on things. He saw that in his neighbourhood teenage boys turned into soul-shattered men who ended up in miserable jobs. Or went insane or became unwilling fathers or crack-pipe criminals. He said he was different from those boys and from his brothers. From everyone. At sixteen he decided against allowing the system to beat him. Then he and my brother just gave up.

In the beginning what I felt for James was a purely maternal sort of affection, he was a year my junior but it didn't feel that way and once we finally accepted we were in love, he told me everything. He described how once, at home, when he was dying to pee, he pushed the bathroom door open without knocking. He said he was rushed by the combined smells of burning plastic and forest-green Radox. He saw his mum in her short white nightdress (the one she always wore, smudged with age), just sitting there with her knickers on her knees, behind a veil of steam that came from the rushing tap. She was smoking crack. He waited for her to scream at him for having invaded her space, but she didn't. She just sat there with her glazed eyes barely open, looking at him with a sad smile on her face.

'Claws se hucking door,' she said.

I had never known anyone who used crack so I asked James not to spare any of the details which he didn't particularly like since it was his mother I was asking him about. But I reminded him of all the times he had pressed me about my parents, so he told me everything he could remember. He was frightened, seeing his mother reduced like that, her face blank, her far-off eyes. He looked at the bubbles formed like a pyramid beneath the tap, took slow exaggerated breaths and did as she asked: he backed up and closed the bathroom door. He told me that for a moment he felt as though he had betrayed her in some way. After that James was unsettled and felt the need to talk so he went in and sat with his brothers, Number 1 and Number 2, while they played on their PlayStation console, a racing game where two imperishable sports cars, yellow and silver, smashed through a deserted city at night. James had little time for video games; he had tried but he just didn't understand them. Neither of his brothers spoke to him until halfway through an account his brother Number 2 gave of a 'battery operation' he and his friend, Imperial Wiz, had performed on the same girl, Tameka Brown. She was a little whore who'd sleep with anyone, anywhere for twenty English pounds. Number 1 and Number 2 must have seen James's frown as he tried to imagine what a battery operation was.

'Is a battery operation when more than two guys take turns on one woman and it goes on and on like a Duracell?'

'You make it sound disgusting,' said Number 2.

'It kind of is disgusting,' said James.

'What do you know about it? Furthermore, get out,' said 2.

1 and 2 raised their voices together. 'Get out,' they said.

Before we met, that was the only way James learned about sexual matters – from the advice he gleaned from his brothers. He once asked his brother Number 3 how he would know when he met the right girl.

'Remember when we bought paint for the front room and you chose the colour?' 3 said. 'Remember when we got home and we all started painting and you got into a panic and made us stop because you said the colour didn't feel right? It's the same with girls. When you kiss her, somehow you'll get to know how she feels, right or wrong.'

A pillow hit James's face so hard it almost knocked him over. 'Get out.'

James didn't often cry, except when he got frustrated. He was frustrated that day when his brothers threw him out. Everything in his home felt unsafe. His eyes itched and tears blurred his vision. He felt an ache in his chest but it had faded by the time he reached the front door. He remained still, alone, and felt he wanted to die. He could hear the distant tick, tap and gush of the central heating system. He stared at their front door. He said he wanted to open it and go outside and never come back. But when he unlocked the bolts and opened the door the air outside was calm. Everything out there was unknown and that made James feel vulnerable because, he said, outside there was nowhere for him to go.

James's father died years ago. He'd had a girlfriend at the time, a white woman from Essex, called Pat, someone he'd been seeing off and on for years. James has a half-sister from that relationship. She lives in Cornwall, and sends him birthday cards occasionally. She will be seventeen on her next birthday. Sometimes, he'd try to imagine what she looked like. He planned to send her a birthday card this year. He and Ashvin planned to leave a letter to everyone they loved. In the end they didn't send anything to anyone.

James's brothers, 1, 2, 3 and 4, left school with nothing by way of formal qualification (his eldest brother 5 was the only one to complete school) and over the years he had seen their declining grades, read horrendous school reports and watched their fistfights. During his own schooldays he had a sense that he had lived it all before. Always a fast learner, James decided against going to school in the end. He and Ashvin didn't see the point. 'There isn't even one teacher in my school who could give a shit,' James said. His class teacher of the last six months was Miss Bukolov. She looked like the princess in the first
Star Wars
movie and made James blush.

'You boys need to start wearing deodorant,' she would say and James made her right. Sixteen-year-old boys had bad habits and they stank like wild goats, especially at 3.20 in the afternoon on summer months.

Brother Number 3 had picked him up from school once that summer, showing off in a stolen sports car (the type with a go-faster spoiler that you only saw in east London). James was livid when 3 and Miss Bukolov exchanged telephone numbers. Turns out Miss Bukolov had a brother, Andrius, a vet by profession, who made his living importing second-hand cars and low-powered Baikal pistols from Lithuania which he converted to discharge live ammunition and sold with Number 3, from an Internet cafe in Leyton. Once she started going out with his brother, James studied his teacher carefully during classes. He said she smiled at him in a peculiar way during lessons and she began to pin all his drawings up on the wonderful-work wall.

One Friday morning, the day the BBC reported a new study released that claimed 600,000 Iraqis had been wiped out since the invasion and the mayor was threatening Londoners with wind turbines, James sat down at the window with his back to his mother, twirling a pencil and a sketch pad while a big white man with cropped blond hair banged on the door like only men with clipboards did. He wore a dark suit and shouted through their letter box.

'Mrs Morrison, I know you're in there,' he said.

James peeked out of the window. Many of the neighbours' curtains twitched too.

'There's another man out there sitting in a white van,' said James.

'Ignore them,' his mother said as she picked at the scab on the nasty cut under her left eye. 'They'll be sorry if they wake your brother, 4.'

'Mum, I'm not going back to school.'

She watched him in silence for a moment, crossed her legs and nodded wordlessly.

'Someone bullying you?' she asked. 'Talk to one of your brothers. They can sort anything.'

James's brothers, especially Number 4, were known as psychopaths with a readiness for violence.

'No.'

'You're my youngest. You know I want the best for you, right?' She kissed him gently on his forehead. 'You have to talk to your brothers, they are . . . well,' she sighed, 'they're your brothers.'

Her mobile phone – the one no one dared touch – sounded, a Jimmy Cliff tune. She looked around trying to locate it. James closed his eyes when he heard the sound fondled leather makes as she plunged the sofa for the phone. She answered, speaking quietly.

'Skeets, give it ten minutes, then come up round the back.'

As she spoke James looked at the black-and-white poster his mum had stuck above the futon on which he'd always slept. There had been four posters once, all black men. James had pulled three of them down but he'd kept this one, not because he trusted in the words, 'by any means necessary', or the symbol of the automatic weapon the man in the poster held firmly in his hand. He told me he left that particular poster up on the wall because he recognised the way the man looked out of the window at the world, poised in anxious expectation. 'He looks truthful to me in every way. Whenever I look out of our window at home, at the mosque and the church towers that block my view of the world, whenever I look squarely at my surroundings, at my small futon sandwiched at an awkward angle between the living room door and our dining table, I know exactly how the man in the poster feels.'

I
T WAS
2.30
P.M.
The afternoon I had identified my brother. I walked along the main thoroughfare of our estate, past all the small East Asian businesses. The only shop out of the ordinary was a sauna, an odd building which had just opened. Sauna? Everybody knew it was a brothel. Cars roared by, the green on the grassy park was stirred by the wind. To the left was the road that curved passed Lea Valley all the way to Hackney. To the right the long winding street went uphill onto the new road where the houses fell away and returned with a clamber of damaged cars in the slope and rubble of Bow. A silver-coloured Jaguar pulled over close to the kerb. Mr Bloom leaned out of the open window.

'Where are you going?' he asked. His voice had an African lilt.

I shrugged my shoulders.

'Get in,' he said and he opened the passenger door.

The car shut off all the noise outside. From inside the wind sounded like a soft moan. The air in the car was slightly stale; there was a whiff of tobacco smoke and the leather seats were soft and smelled new. It took less than a second for me to recognise the slow, buttery voice of Sarah Vaughan. The half-full ashtray under the blue light of the radio reminded me that old Mr Bloom smoked Marlboro cigarettes.

'You look different.'

'It's the suit. I'm back in an office unfortunately. The flash car isn't my idea either. Nice though.' He shrugged.

An awkward silence.

'I'm sorry.'

I said nothing because if I had I would have started to cry.

'How are you doing, Meina?' he asked, squinting his wide eyes.

'I don't know,' I said finally.

The first time I met him Mr Bloom had come to our house to pick up my father. Ash and I followed them to the Alibi, an illegal bar. I must have been about ten then. I remember he wore cowboys boots. I would stare at his shoes with admiration and delight. That first night he sat in our living room and didn't smile once. After that he would visit our home and sit for hours, drinking Johnnie Walker Blue Label with my father and his friends, arguing about Thatcher and Reagan and reminiscing about the sixties. He said he worked for the UN, as an emergency aid official. But I knew better. I knew he worked for a British government intelligence agency, just like 007. Only I didn't know which one. I wondered what it would be like having a job where no one knew exactly what it was that you did. I always liked the idea of Mr Bloom constantly trying to justify his movements to girlfriends, his boss, to anyone he met.

'I don't have too long. I just need to know if you want to stay.'

'Stay where?'

He put his hand on my bare thigh but quickly removed it when he saw my frightened expression. 'Here in London,' he said.

I couldn't tell whether he touched me because he cared or because he was taking advantage of me. I wanted to be sure I could tell the difference.

'I've lost my balance. I can't think just now,' I said.

'It will take a few weeks. Try not to do anything extreme.'

'Extreme? Like what?'

'I don't know. You will feel very vulnerable. Take it from an old man. I know. I thought you might want to leave the area?'

I shook my head. 'Where would I go? Don't worry, none of this is your fault. No matter where we went we wouldn't have got away from ourselves.' I closed my eyes and listened to the calm singing voice and the slow deliberate sound of my own breathing. A truck roared by and my side of the car rattled. For a moment we did not speak.

'You didn't come in to see him.'

'I thought you'd want to be alone. You knew I was there, right?' He didn't meet my eyes.

'I guessed you were watching.'

'I was going to give you a list of options but I can't remember anything. I'm sorry. You have been through so much,' he said. His voice was uncertain.

'Did the police tell you what happened?' he asked.

'Yes.'

'Do you know the other boy?'

'What other boy?'

'Bastards,' he said. 'The other boy who jumped off the roof at the same time.'

My head felt light as though I might topple like one of those palm trees you see on television bent over backwards in the grip of a mega storm.

'No. They didn't tell me anything about that. But I can guess who he was.'

'His name is James Morrison. Some old biddy heard him on the roof and called the police. He's in intensive care.'

'James is my brother's best friend.'

We remained in silence for a moment and I smiled when I glimpsed Mr Bloom's suede boots. Seeing them reminded me of my father.

'Does Google sell our search history?' I asked.

He didn't look at me as he replied, his eyes focused on some far-off thing. 'I rarely touch the Internet. I read somewhere that in one month alone the five leading sites recorded nine billion searches. Some smug little bastard somewhere knows what the whole world is thinking, all our intentions, everything. None of those technological giants have morals. These people are dangerous. I've been saying it for a long time,' he said.

'Do you use the Internet to look at porn? I mean, do all men do that?'

He looked at me and shifted uneasily in his seat. 'Did you hear anything I just said?'

'Yes, but don't most men look at porn on the Internet?'

'I don't use the Internet,' he said. 'If I did use it for porn I wouldn't tell you. Why do you ask?'

I shrugged.

His eyes were on me as if he knew what I was thinking. He puckered his mouth and inhaled deeply.

'You're not thinking of doing anything stupid?' he said.

I knew he would ask me that. I thought for a second. Would I commit suicide? I didn't really have any ideas of my own, none strong enough to want to die over. He began to talk about how important life was. 'It'll turn out all right,' he said, his voice heavy with worry. 'I know that sounds ridiculous after all you've been through, but it will be OK, I promise you.'

His words barely registered.

The sun filtered through the leaves of a nearby tree and I passed my eyes over rows of cinnamon-brown rooftops. Suddenly the pavements were filled with freed children in scruffy uniforms, mothers with prams and sprightly grandfathers in flat caps. None of them seemed real. I remembered how excited I would get the few times my father picked me up from school. Some of the children could not help staring inside the car as they passed, as if expecting to see someone important. I loved the innocence of the children, their lack of preconceptions, the way they interacted with each other and exaggerated all their facial expressions. It made me think about how much we learned to keep tucked away as adults.

'Is there anything I can do?' Bloom asked. 'I owed your father a considerable amount of money. If you need anything just say.'

'What did you owe him money for?' I asked. I knew he wouldn't answer.

He let go of the steering wheel and handed me a credit card – green with white dots – with my name on it.

'I've written the pin number down. Can you read my writing? Four, three, two, two.'

He put his hand on my thigh again. It felt warm. I looked directly in his eyes. I tried to use my eyes to show anger but I knew they betrayed me so I shut them tightly. I was confused because I always had a great respect for Mr Bloom. When my father was murdered his friends all disappeared, out of fear I guess. Mr Bloom was the only one who seemed to care. He didn't remove his hand. Instead he began to rub inside my thigh gently. I thought I would melt with the tingling sensation that spread along my spine. I breathed deeply and closed my eyes as Mr Bloom used his other hand to touch my neck.

For a moment I wanted to cry because I remembered being dressed up by my aunt, Shifa. I wouldn't dare use her name, not even in my thoughts – in Somalia all elders are called 'uncle' or 'auntie', even strangers. It is a mark of respect. She was wildly spiritual, my aunt, but not godly. She took an immediate dislike to me right after I told her the things her husband tried to do to me whenever we were alone. I don't know what I expected.

My aunt dressed me for the men she would bring home to come and look at me. She would put yellow beads around my neck, a middle parting in my hair and dress me in a slinky white
diriic
like my mother's, which hung low on my shoulders and revealed the top of my back. The men always came in the afternoons. We would assume our positions in the centre of her living room like stage actors, while my aunt's husband lay flat on the folding table in the kitchen – the worse for drink – with his mouth open wide, dribble coursing through his stubble.

Their house was an unfinished two-storey building of brick. One of those houses somebody started building but then ran out of money or was killed. My aunt and her husband took possession in 2002. It was a common thing to do. She wasn't poor, my aunt, but she wasn't rich either. She scraped by. When my parents were alive I remember she often came over to our house to ask for help. When they died she thought about moving into our house – I heard her discussing it with her husband. They decided it was too dangerous, they were afraid of being so closely associated with my father. Our house was lovely, especially at night under the glow of moonlight. It was surrounded by grass that felt like carpet to walk on, even barefoot – when I close my eyes I can remember the feeling of warm soil pressing against my toes. It was always cool and when there was no gunfire you could hear the sound of flowing water.

The men my aunt brought to look at me were all old. Cattle herders mostly, covered in sweat, with naked arms protruding from voluminous cloth. We Somalis called it
aroos fahdi
, arranged marriage. My mother did not agree with
aroos fahdi
. 'It could make you think you were indifferent to the power of true love.' When I think back on those men in that living room with its makeshift bamboo shades on the heavily framed windows, its empty-beer-bottle smell and its ugly walls, it all seems very sad to me. In my memory the men all look the same – wide lips, dead eyes. Up close they smelled of cattle or desert sand or fresh khat, a mild stimulant they liked to use to speed up time.

My aunt would burn incense in my hair and use
khidaab
, a plant-based dye to decorate my left foot up to my ankle. I hated that incense smell in my hair. It was too old for me.

'Wirgin?' the men would ask candidly. They often spoke English to feel like the wealthy men of the West but they could never pronounce the English letter 'V'.

'Straight from heaven, not even circumcised,' my aunt would say.

My mother was circumcised. My great-grandmother held her down and cut her when she was nine. Strangely, she was not bitter like most of the girls at my old school. She put it down to culture rather than male domination. Ashvin was circumcised when he was three years old. My mother made a big deal about being progressive. She waited until I was thirteen and she gave me the choice. She sat me down with a human biology picture book.

'What is it?' I asked.

'It is a Muslim ritual.'

'I know that. But no one ever says
what
it is.'

My mother put the book on my lap. 'In Sudan they remove the clitoris,' (point) 'the labia minora,' (point) 'and the labia majora,' (point) 'and then they stitch the sides together.' (Point, point, point, point.) 'In Somalia we only remove the clitoris.' (Point.) 'It takes forty days to heal. It's part of your ancestry. Would you like to have it done?' She smiled because she already knew the answer.

I was in shock. I can't remember my exact words but it was Somali for 'Hell, no'.

We laughed. But I was frightened because I thought I would be forced. When I started to cry, she hugged me. 'Armeina,' she said, 'you will never be forced to do anything.'

I miss her.

'Enough touching. You want more? You have to marry.' My aunt was the colour of coffee without milk, all bosom and no heart. She was fat, old and wasted like a big slice of stale fruit cake. She wore colourful headscarves and liked to pencil her eyebrows into a perpetual enquiry. On the few occasions she smiled, usually when my prospective husbands were in tow, her big upper lip would fold over itself.

Sometimes the men would show off their guns to prove that they could protect their land and their livestock and, by association, their women. They would stand in front of me salivating and my aunt would slowly spin me round in the middle of the living room. I remember there was an overriding smell of goat's pee in the room, mingled with the fearful smell of male desire.

The room was painted a smoky blue and the ceiling was covered with fake wood. One dust-encrusted window looked down onto the gravel street. Up and down the street on a steep hill was a mass of modest houses with sun-faded bricks and rows of breeze-swept trees with reddish-brown leaves. There were noisy children playing and a barefoot old woman in a faded blue apron displaying wares nobody was willing to pay for: miscellaneous kitchen implements, empty jars, pot holders and rubber bands. She had eyes dimmed by cataracts and hairs on her chin, that old woman. My aunt thought she was a spy for the government-sponsored militia because somehow she always had money.

Everything seemed to freeze as I was twirled in my white robe like a figure from an old English fairy tale. I'd ask myself, 'Is this who I really am?' I would be touched intimately over my dress, between my legs, on my breasts and my backside. It was some time before I realised it wasn't the flimsiness of the material of my dress that gave me goosebumps. Every nook of the room filled with my fear and my heart charged with sorrow – my father would be so ashamed.

I would remain rigid, sometimes searching the faces of the men but usually I would close my eyes, my heart racing. My belly would tense involuntarily like it often did when I lowered myself into a hot bath. With my eyes closed I could see the blood in my eyelids on account of the sun. I would count the slowly passing seconds in my mind. I was a butterfly free to flutter away in search of a new home.

All eighteen of my suitors said yes after seeing me and touching me. But only six came up with the dowry. Those men would say yes to any woman because of their interpretation of marriage. Or perhaps they all mistook my childish bafflement for modesty. I don't suppose you can call it rape if you are married, but for what it is worth I never once gave my consent to any of my six husbands. But with the formality of daylight over, and without prompting, each of them would begin pushing and pulling my body into peculiar angles. I always fought them off until I had no strength left, and after disentangling myself I would weep because I would be left with a strange stillness and the sense of having failed my father.