A Life Elsewhere Read online

  SEGUN AFOLABI

  A Life Elsewhere

  VINTAGE BOOKS

  London

  This eBook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

  Version 1.0

  Epub ISBN 9781407091167

  www.randomhouse.co.uk

  Published by Vintage 2007

  2 4 6 8 10 9 7 5 3 1

  Copyright © Segun Afolabi 2006

  Segun Afolabi has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988 to be identified as the author of this work

  This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

  First published in Great Britain in 2006 by Jonathan Cape

  Random House, 20 Vauxhall Bridge Road, London SW1V 2SA

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  Addresses for companies within The Random House Group Limited can be found at: www.randomhouse.co.uk/offices.htm

  The Random House Group Limited Reg. No. 954009

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

  ISBN 9780099485186

  Printed and bound in Great Britain by Bookmarque Ltd, Croydon, Surrey

  CONTENTS

  Cover Page

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  About the Author

  Monday Morning

  People You Don’t Know

  The Wine Guitar

  Arithmetic

  The Visitor

  Two Sisters

  The Husband of Your Wife’s Best Friend

  Moses

  Now that I’m Back

  The Long Way Home

  Something in the Water

  Mrs Minter

  Another Woman

  Mrs Mahmood

  Gifted

  In the Garden

  Jumbo and Jacinta

  for my parents, James and Christine, and for Saraya

  A LIFE ELSEWHERE

  Segun Afolabi was born in Kaduna, Nigeria, in 1966 and grew up in various countries including the Congo, Canada, East Germany and Indonesia. His stories have been published in literary journals including the London Magazine, Wasifiri and Granta. His short story ‘Monday Morning’ was awarded the 2005 Caine Prize for African Writing. He lives and works in London.

  But Ruth replied, ‘Do not urge me to leave you or to turn back from you. Where you go I will go, and where you stay I will stay. Your people will be my people and your God my God. Where you die I will die, and there I will be buried.’

  – Ruth 1: 16–17

  MONDAY MORNING

  ‘I WANT TO piss,’ the boy said in their language. He held his mother’s hand as they walked, but his feet skipped to and fro.

  The mother scanned the area, but she could not find a place for her son; there were too many people beside the trees, talking, laughing. ‘Take the boy to the edge of the water so he can piss,’ she said to her husband.

  The boy and his father hurried towards the lake. The father was glad to see that his son could find relief. They did not notice how people looked at them with their mouths turned down. Sour. The eyes narrowed to slits.

  The breeze blew and the ducks and swans floated past. The boy was afraid of them, but his need to evacuate was urgent. Steam rose from the stream that emerged from him as it fell into the water and he marvelled at this. There was so much that was new to understand here. He had seen on the television at the hostel how water could become hard like glass, but the lake was not like that. The swans pushed their powerful legs and the ducks dipped their heads beneath the surface. The father held onto his son’s jacket so he would not fall in. There were bits of flotsam at the bank where the water rippled. The boy looked away, a little disgusted, and gazed into the clean centre of the lake.

  They came away from the water’s edge and joined the mother and the boy’s brother, and the boy from the hostel whose name was Emmanuel. The father looked at his wife and the children. He wondered at how beautiful everything was in this place with the whispering leaves and the green grass like a perfect carpet and the people so fine in their Sunday clothes. He thought, With God’s help it can surely happen. You are distraught, time passes and you are away from it. You can begin to reflect and observe. It was difficult now, to think of artillery and soldiers and flies feeding on abandoned corpses.

  The little one laughed and said, ‘My piss made fire in the water,’ but the mother slapped his shoulder. ‘It’s enough,’ she said.

  They joined the people on the path as they strolled through Regent’s Park. Only Emmanuel wanted to walk on the grass, but he did not dare because the father had forbidden it. He was a feeble man, Emmanuel thought, so timid in this new place, but his sons were different. Bolder. They had already grasped some of the new language.

  A breeze gathered up leaves and pushed the crowds along. A clump of clouds dragged across the sun. People pulled their clothes tight around themselves. The mother adjusted her scarf so there were no spaces for the wind to enter. She reached across with her good hand to secure her husband’s baseball cap. The area in the centre of his scalp was smooth as marble and he felt the cold easily. She shoved her mittened hand back into her coat pocket and watched the children as they drifted further away. After a moment she called, ‘Ernesto, come away from there,’ to her eldest boy. They had wandered towards an area where people were playing a game with a ball and a piece of wood, and she did not want there to be any trouble. Not today, not on Sunday. She knew his friend was leading him to places he would not have ventured on his own and she feared there would be difficulties ahead. The youngest boy skipped between them: the mother and father, his brother, the brother’s best friend. He was her little one and she would hold on to him for as long as she was able.

  The father sighed and called out to his children. The cold was setting in again and their walk was too leisurely. They would have to return to the hostel before the sun disappeared. He called to Ernesto, ‘Come, it is time for us to go. Tell your brother.’ It would take at least half an hour for them to walk back.

  Ernesto turned to Alfredo, the little one, who giggled as they played a game among themselves – Kill the Baron. The friend, Emmanuel, ran about them, laughing, until the father called again. ‘We are going back, you hear me? Ernesto, hold your brother! We go!’

  Emmanuel looked at him. He did not speak their language, but, regardless, he thought the father was a stupid man – too fat, too quiet. The boy had lost his own father in his own country in his own village home. Now he could only see the faults in them, the other fathers, their weaknesses, what they did not understand. He had thought his father remarkable at one time, but with his own eyes he had seen him cut down, destroyed. They were all foolish and clumsy, despite their arrogance. He would never become such a man himself.

  The children trailed behind the mother and father as they navigated paths that took them to the edge of the park. As they came to the road, Alfredo raced to walk beside his mother, and a passing car screeched to a halt.

  ‘Keep ’em off the road, for fuck’s sake!’ the driver sho
uted.

  The mother held her son, and the father looked at the driver without expression. The boy had not run across the road, but the driver had made an assumption, and now he did not want to lose face.

  ‘Keep the buggers off the road!’ he shouted again and shook his head when there was no response.

  The father glanced at the mother who only shrugged and held her boy. Emmanuel turned to the driver and waved an apology on behalf of the father, grinning to indicate he under-stood. But he did not know the appropriate words, and the driver failed to notice or did not care for the gesture. He sped away, complaining bitterly to his passenger. There were people on the pavement who had seen the incident, who now stood watching. The mother and father did not understand the signs and gestures the people used. They did not feel the indignation. They knew only that they were scrutinized and they were sometimes puzzled by this, but they were not over-whelmed.

  They trudged along the main road near the building where the books lived. The huge railway stations teemed with people. In the mornings sometimes, the father walked in the vicinity of the stations. At night the area was forsaken, but during the day workers emerged in their thousands. Often he looked at them and it seemed impossible that he could ever be a part of this. The people moved as if they were all one river, and they flowed and they did not stop.

  ‘Here’s the one!’ Alfredo squealed to Emmanuel when they came to the glass hotel. ‘I will live here!’

  ‘You’re crazy,’ Emmanuel said to the boy. But he could not fail to notice the guests in the lobby, the people sipping tea in the café, the lights warm, the atmosphere congenial.

  The sign at the building read Hotel Excelsior, but this was not a hotel. The orange carpet was threadbare, the linen was stained with the memory of previous guests, the rooms sang with the clamour of too many people. When they had arrived, the mother knew it was not a place to become used to. They had their room, the four of them, and it was enough: the bed, the two narrow cots. There was warmth even though the smell of the damp walls never left them. They could not block out the chatter and groans of other occupants. In the mornings the boys feasted on hot breakfasts in the basement dining room where there was a strange hum of silence as people ate. They were gathering strength after years of turmoil in other places. This was the best part of the day.

  As they approached the hostel the sky was already turning even though it was still afternoon. Men and women walked up and down the road, but they did not have a destination. They glanced at the family with eyes like angry wounds. A woman knelt on the pavement with her head upturned, swaying, and when the family passed, Alfredo could see that she was dazed. The mother cupped her hand against his face so he could no longer look at her. Another man guided a woman in a miniskirt hurriedly by the elbow. He was shouting at her. He crossed the road so he would not have to meet the family and then re-crossed it after they had passed. Every day they saw these people, the lost ones, who seemed to hurt for the things they were looking for but could not find. The mother wondered sometimes, Have they never been young like my boys? Where does innocence flee? She wanted to be away from this place, away from the Excelsior. She wanted her family’s new life to begin.

  The father had begun to work. He could not wait for any bureaucratic decision when there were people who relied on him for food and shelter, for simple things: his mother, his sister and her family, his wife’s people. It had begun easily enough. A man at the hostel told him there was work on a construction site in the south of the city. They did not ask for your papers there, he said. It was a way to help yourself, and if it ended, well, there were other places to work. It was important not to be defeated, he warned, even though you were disregarding the rules. The man had been an architect in his own country, but now he did the slightest thing in order to help himself. He was ebullient, and when the father looked at him and listened, he was filled with hope.

  Four of them journeyed from the Excelsior to the building site in the south. Every day they took their breakfast early and joined the people who became a river on their way to work. The job was not complex, but one could easily become disheartened by the cold and the routine. The father dreamed of the day when he could return to his own occupation, to the kitchen where he handled meat and vegetables and the spices he loved so much. He had not touched any ingredients for many months now and sometimes he was afraid he would forget what he had learned. Already it was ingrained in him and he could not lose it, this knowledge, but he did not realise this yet.

  He moved building materials from one place to another, and when they needed a group of men to complete a task, he became essential. But he did not know the English words. Most of the others did, but there was no one from his country here. Sometimes they would slowly explain to him the more difficult tasks, and every day, it seemed, the work became more intricate. The father moved his head so they would think he had understood, but he did not understand one word. He began to sense that words were not necessary; he could learn by observation and then repeat what he saw. In his own country he had not been an expressive man. Even as a child he had only used words when absolutely necessary. People often thought he was mute or he was from another country or his mind was dull. But all of that did not matter; he had learned to cook and he had discovered the love of a woman who did not need him to be someone he was not.

  The woman touched the man at the meat of his shoulder and when he felt her, his body relaxed. It was not like coming home when they returned to the Excelsior; the strangeness of the place and the noise of the people there discomfited them. A woman was crying behind the door of the room opposite theirs and they wondered, Has she received some terrible news? Will she be returned to the place she has run away from? The hostel was a sanctuary, but it was also a place of sadness for many, and often it was only the children who gave it life.

  ‘Tomorrow,’ Emmanuel said to Ernesto, and he touched him lightly on the back and then ran to another floor of the building where he and his mother lived. He did not acknowledge the father and the mother. Alfredo turned so he could say goodbye to his brother’s friend, but the boy was already gone. He could not understand how Emmanuel had spent the day with them and could then disappear without a word to him. He too wanted a friend, like the children he had played with in his own country.

  ‘Why does he go so fast?’ he asked. He felt the smart of Emmanuel’s abruptness in his chest.

  ‘He has his own mother,’ the woman replied. ‘Maybe he feels bad for leaving her all day.’

  Alfredo thought about this, about how he would feel if he had left his mother alone in the hostel, and he under-stood her words. He said, ‘We will . . . When . . . When will we go to the glass hotel?’ The words emerged so quickly from him in his agitation they fell over one another.

  ‘We will go one day,’ the father said as they entered the room. ‘You will see.’ It was his secret plan to take his family to the hotel one weekend, when a person could eat a two-course meal at a special rate. He would work on the construction site until he was able to pay for the things they needed, for the money he would send back home. Then they would all spend the day at the glass hotel. Perhaps there would be a swimming pool for his sons. He touched the boy on his head so he would not feel bad about the place they were in, the erratic Emmanuel, the people they had left behind.

  At night the father dreamed he was in his old kitchen, with the heat and flies and the squawks of chickens outside. The mother flew to the beach on their coast and noticed how the moonlight glinted off the waves. Ernesto dreamed of his school friends before they had been forced to scatter, before the fighting had begun. Only Alfredo remained in the new country in his sleep; he was in the glass hotel, in his own room.

  The night moved on and then other dreams began, the ones of violence, of rebels and rape and cutlasses arcing through the air. The father began to shudder in his sleep, and then his wife woke. When she realised it was happening again, she reached out and petted him with her club, her smooth
paw. She did not know she was doing so; it was instinctive. Ordinarily she concealed the damaged limb. They had severed her hand in the conflict, but she could still feel the life of her fingers as she comforted her man. In the new country, they had offered her a place to go, for the trauma, but she did not want that; she had her boys, her quiet husband. There was a way to function in the world when the world was devastating, everyone careless of each other and of themselves. She knew that now. She had been forced to learn. In a moment her husband was still again and she lay back with her eyes closed, but she did not sleep.

  It was a simple thing, a misunderstanding, that caused the confusion the next day. The father travelled to the south to the construction site. By the end of the week he was certain he would have earned enough to send several packages home. But mid-morning the inspectors arrived.

  A foreman took him aside. ‘You have the correct papers?’ he asked.

  The father looked at him and nodded. He did not understand what was happening. He continued to work as the inspectors spread out. He could not see the other men from the hostel, but he would look for them soon so they could take their lunch break. It was colder today, but he had been working so hard he had been forced to remove his sweater.

  They came up the scaffolding, two men with their brief-cases and the foreman beside them. From the corner of his eye the father could see the men from the hostel across the road. They were waving to him frantically. The inspectors approached another man and talked quietly with him. They stood next to the ladder. The father could not see another way down. He thought, I am in a place I do not understand. The ground is vanishing beneath me. He pictured the boy, his youngest, and he pushed away the fear. He ran to the edge of the platform and grasped the metal pole. He did not look down in case he faltered. He held the pole and allowed gravity to carry him, not knowing how it would end. His hands were cut and then his torso rubbed hard against the brackets. He remembered his sweater lying on the platform. He did not have the strength to manage a smooth descent and his shirt and trousers were torn, but he did not notice these things. His mind was on his folly. If he were caught he would jeopardise everything for his family and he did not know if he could live with himself after that.