Closure (26 page)

He stood straight and stared out across the city. It was late morning. Wind whistled around the tower, rattling the balconies. Sunlight glittered off buildings and along the thin beaten silver of the river. Everything was so tiny, so innocent and bright, all the squalor invisible to the eye. He was not a curious person by nature, never had been. It was better that way. Better not to look too close. Trying to understand others brought you up against their stink. Trying to understand yourself was worse, but at least he now realised his mistake. He should have signed-off on Janice and the boys. Once a thing was ruined, it was the only way. He stamped his foot, testing the force he would need. Then, fumbling for his taser, he turned.

Biggs was in the main room, kneeling beside the child. He was stroking its hair. The little creature lay calmed under his hand, its breathing slowed and its eyes shut. Biggs looked up, his face luminous with pity.

“He was crawling out of there.” He indicated the bedroom. “He's hurt. What should we do?”

Follow the drill, Randall wanted to say, what else? But the words wouldn't come. He looked at Biggs and Biggs looked back at him, and he watched Biggs' face change as the lad realised what Randall planned. The shame he felt confused him; he had just got everything straight in his head. He took a conciliatory step forward. He wanted Biggs to understand.

“Vermin,” he began, then Biggs was up, red-faced, snarling. He moved between Randall and the child, fists raised. A toy warrior:
Urban Hero One
. Half laughing, half afraid, Randall backed off. His feet slipped and he reached for the balcony rail, missed, flailed, smashed against the perspex, smashed through.

Falling, he thought: Bash, Dump, Sign-off, Bash, Dump…

Eight storeys. His back ached in anticipation.

BERNARDINE EVARISTO
YORUBA MAN WALKING

When Lawani sailed up the coast of Cornwall in the
Alexandria
, a ship laden with crude rubber, cocoa beans and sheets of copper, it was the middle of August and for a country with an international reputation for damp and rain, he was surprised to see palm trees.

As soon as the iron chain of the anchor grated against the rail, he watched as revenue men in black bowlers stormed the ship, demanding to be let down into the hold. It was all show; the ship had stopped off at a Cornish cove the night before, swaying lamps on the rocks guiding it in.

He had already said a discreet farewell to the seamen who mattered: Cai Lin, Mustafa, Nicolai. Fellow nomads who spent so long away from loved ones and home that eventually no one was loved and nowhere was home.

This was the problem, along with the swollen oceans that had once lured him from his village by the lagoon. Lately he'd been having nightmares of sinking down to the seabed and being eaten by deep-sea creatures with pincers. He'd had enough, too, of the fleeting pleasures of the world's ports: Shanghai, Bombay, Marseilles, Rio de Janeiro, Antananarivo; of women who trapped a man inside the vice of their thighs and for a few moments ecstasy, and a few day's pay, left him burning with the clap.

He watched the well-dressed passengers disembark first, those whose vomit he cleared up when they got soused on highballs in the saloon and who played Speculation with the captain in his quarters, sometimes managing to lose a fortune in between countries. Captain Bartlett would be furious when he discovered that his most steadfast bosun had vanished.

Lawani walked down the gangplank that swayed and squeaked with every step.

Peddlers selling sausages, fresh fruit, bread, halfpenny ices and tin mugs of tea were hawking their wares in between the carts and carriages clogging up the dock.

He stocked up and, knapsack over his shoulder, slipped out of the port like a shadow.

He passed fishermen's cottages with nets strewn outside and an old woman bent double by a large basket of crabs strapped to her forehead. He walked uphill past Maddox & Sons Cobblers, Mrs Penberthy's Haberdashers, Killigrew Butchers, Vellanoweth & Andrewartha Undertakers.

He could read and write, of that he was proud. As a boy he'd learnt from officers who missed their sons.

Lawani was at least a head taller than the tallest of these people and as bald as a ball of pitch. He wore a blue pea jacket, thick calicos hoisted by braces and a wide, brown leather belt. On his head was a straw hat. On his feet were black, steel-toed boots. In his peripheral vision he registered people slowing down, stopping. To settle his gaze upon someone might invite confrontation. He scowled, even though no rifles were being levelled at him as had once happened in the Florida Keys for being in the wrong part of town, when he was too young to understand that he was not as free there as elsewhere.

Over the years he had learned to become metal, inside and out.

This too was the problem.

When three dainty young women appeared in his path, carrying cream parasols, he could not help but stare. They wore hats embellished with ostrich feathers and dresses of dazzling blues, greens and yellows that showed off waists the size of his thighs. A mirage of exotic Amazonian birds fluttering down the streets of this plain little town.

They saw him, and froze. He stood aside as they passed by in a supercilious huff that could fell a man's pride. Then the youngest one, the loveliest one, the comeliest one, looked back and proffered a sneaky, moist-lipped smile. As her little booted feet proceeded down the street, he was sure he noticed a slight sashay.

He threw his hat into the air and caught it on one finger, spinning it as a fairground juggler does plates.

Yes, in this country he would find himself a wife.

He noticed a dirt slope between two houses and beyond that, woods. He followed the encrusted footprints of donkey hooves. At the top he turned back and surveyed the red-tiled roofs of the town in the valley behind him. Beyond it lay the harbour and the
Alexandria
that had become a floating prison. He waited for the pull, the drag that always made him return to whatever seafaring vessel he was manning. He waited and waited. Perhaps the cord had finally been cut. He turned his back and walked through a small woodland and eventually came upon a wide open space that did not move beneath his feet.

The more he walked, the more he felt a new weightlessness.

Alone for miles, he took off his boots and tied them to his knapsack. He stripped down to his waist and felt his feet make contact with earth, pebble, grass. He walked until the sky began to darken and then found a spot between rocks to rest for the night. He opened his knapsack and spread out his possessions: pears, apples, bread, a wheel of Port Salut cheese, strips of dried pork, salted fish, a jar of pickled onions, Garibaldi biscuits, China tea, billycan, matches, dentifrice, a leather water bottle, a shirt, a brown woollen blanket, three guineas in promissory notes, a pouch full of shillings and crowns – and the dagger he had purchased in Aden, its horn handle studded with coins.

That night, for the first time in a long time, he slept peacefully under an open sky.

In the morning he made tea in his billycan.

Sometimes he avoided people for days – no villages, no hamlets, no farms. Only when it rained did he take refuge in barns, arriving late, leaving early. When the weather began to cool, he gathered brushwood to get a fire going before dark. He began to sleep fully-clothed and awoke to powdery grey ashes and a dew-soaked blanket. His breath became visible in the damp morning air. He drank tea. Blew rings of vapour. Setting off again, he was a caped crusader as the blanket billowed behind him, drying out.

He made a staff from a fallen limb of oak tree and etched animals onto it: pangolin, bee-eater, fish eagles, queleas, bongo, aardvark. His father had been a carver of animals and gods; he had learned at his knee. His mother had died giving birth to him. His father had died of the fever. His first job was aboard the
Madeira
when he was still a boy, a reformed Portuguese slaver that used to trade with Brazil until it was arrested by a Royal Navy blockade.

With no duties to perform, no storms to handle, no people and demands to clutter up his mind and time, he came to enjoy, for the first time in his life, a solitude, a quietude.

When he came upon remote hamlets and villages, children would sometimes chase him, throw stones, call names and scamper, as if he'd bother to chase and beat the little rascals.

When he entered smoky taverns, their earthen floors congealed with mud, sawdust and ash, the room stopped mid-sentence. He bowed low and said Good Evening, smiling broadly to disarm himself.

He ordered a tankard of porter, found a stool and waited for the locals to approach, which they always did, with the caution of bear tamers.

He had long ago learnt that he could be whomsoever he wanted in strange lands.

They gathered around and he regaled them with tall tales: how he'd made a fortune smuggling whale sperm oil into Lisbon but lost it playing Chinese Checkers in San Francisco. How he'd fought for Sitting Bull against General Custer at Little Big Horn or narrowly avoided being decapitated by head hunters in Papua New Guinea. Sometimes he was the deposed King of Tonga, other times a great African chief. He
had
seen a public beheading of a pirate in Shanghai. Afterwards the executioner swung his victim's pony-tailed head around like a ball on a chain while the crowd rushed forwards to dip their hands in the blood leaking from the headless torso. He
had
witnessed a stampede of sabre-brandishing Ottomans in the town of Chania on Crete during one of their Christian uprisings.

His audience, many of whom had never ventured more than ten miles, north, west, south or east, found their world made larger, and for that they were grateful. He was rewarded with drinks paid for and a roof to sleep under for the night.

*

For three days it had been raining and he had been crossing the wide, empty countryside he now knew they called the moors without passing a single settlement or stream. His boots squelched as he walked because he had sunk knee-deep into a marsh. Eventually he came upon an orchard and farmstead just as the skies were clearing. Girls wearing wide-brimmed hats and dirty white smocks were collecting apples in baskets. Boys wearing cloth caps and knickerbockers were running around waving rattles to scare off the birds. A cry went up. A dog came barking towards him. A man appeared, a Mr Renfrey Kelynack, he quickly learned, who was surprised but not alarmed. As a young man he had been sent to work with his uncle as a hammer-man in an iron foundry in the town of Deptford in Kent. He had known men who looked like this one.

By evening Lawani was seated in a thatched longhouse so old it was sinking at one end.

Mrs Kelynack had washed his boots and stuffed them with oats to dry out. She looked young enough to be her whiskery husband's daughter.

A long oak table with grooves. Flagstone floor with a layer of grit brought in from outside. Lime-washed walls perspiring with condensation. Heavy iron pans hanging from metal hooks. The granite hearth was the stove.

Mr Kelynack said prayers and Lawani dropped his head out of politeness.

Potato and rabbit stew, barley bread, baked figgy plum pudding on a pewter platter sprinkled with white sugar. All washed down with ginger beer. No ship's weevils. No mould. No grey rubbery mash to digest or disgusting watery gruel. It was the finest meal he had ever eaten but when he thanked the cook her eyes slid away from his.

The children sat there mesmerised and barely spoke. The youngest, Tamsin, sat at his side and began crawling her fingers slowly towards him like a spider. He pretended not to notice. Emboldened, she stroked his hand.

Stop it, Tamsin, said her father.

Mr Kelynack told his guest that his farm was called Bos Eldon and when his father and older brothers died one harsh winter, he had been urged to come home from London.

The farm consisted of Little Lower, Middle Lower and Great Lower Fields. They kept sheep, grew corn, barley and red wheat. A tin seam in the valley was useless, its yield negligible, unlike the mines further north that were big business in these parts. See here, an acre can produce six Cornish bushels of wheat in a good year, that being equivalent to three English bushels. Red wheat weighs more than white so it makes sense to grow that. Oxen are cheaper than mules, which is why I plough with one. Mr Kelynack inhaled on his pipe when he spoke and wheezed like rusty bellows when he did not.

I could do with some help here.

His guest nodded.

And where in the Americas are you from?

His guest laughed. I come from a village called Lagos.

I see, and where is that?

Yorubaland.

Where be Yoboyobolanda? Tamsin piped up. Can we go there?

It is far, far away.

He did not want to speak of the place of his birth. As a boy at sea, it was too painful to remember his home and the father he had lost.

Instead, he described the Victoria Falls in Matabeleland. How it dropped over three hundred feet into the great Zambezi River so that when he peered over the edge he saw only hissing froth that nonetheless left him drenched.

The local people call the Falls
Mosi-oa-tunya
: Smoke that Thunders.

Mossy tinna, Tamsin repeated.

He told them about the sadhus, holy men of India – their hair and faces white with chalk. How some of them walked for so many years with an arm raised in the air that it eventually shrivelled and hung limp. How some of them lay on a bed of nails.

S'dangris, Tamsin said.

It is indeed.

Her hand was a little ball in his so long he ceased to notice it. When he finally opened his palm to release her she jumped onto his lap and squeezed her arms around his neck, almost choking him. Everyone laughed. He carefully unclasped her limbs with fingers that individually were almost as big. She looked up at him and he took in her broad forehead, freckles, stubby nose, hair tangled as a bird's nest. He put a hand on her shoulder but felt awkward. He had never held a child before. She smelt so different, fresh; this was a child's smell. She was so tiny, so light, so warm in his lap that he realised in that moment, that if anyone had dared hurt her he would have laid him out flat and stamped on his skull until he heard it crack.

Later, when he was scrubbing himself down by the well with a bucket of water, and the children were in bed and Mr Kelynack had taken the dog off to rally the sheep, he glanced up to see Mrs Kelynack had come around the side of the house.

She was devouring him.

When he hid his shame, she did not look away.

He slept in the eaves, on a boarded platform above the larder, and was, thankfully, untroubled.

He liked his host. Mr Kelynack was a kind man.

Before dawn, Lawani was crossing Middle Lower Field, his staff pounding the ground. Three days later he had climbed to the brow of a hill and saw a strange squatter encampment below. Calwatha Mine. Chimneys blackened the sky, there was a steam-driven pump, shaft openings, pulleys, awnings, giant wheels, timber scaffolding, shuttle tracks, mountains of sludge, granite slopes and a patchwork of cabins and long huts.

The manager, a Mr Yelland, looked grateful to see him enter the camp looking for work. His men had been migrating in droves to the silver mines of Mexico and the copper mines of Tasmania. He told Lawani he'd been a supervisor at a diamond mine in Kimberly in the Cape Colony until his wife insisted they raise their children in God's Own Country, not some hellhole a million miles from civilisation.

You'll start at seven and finish at seven with half an hour for lunch, Monday to Saturday. Payday is Friday. You can park yourself in the dorm for now. No point shilly-shallying, we'll get you down below tomorrow.

A jacket, a bowler hat with a clay candle holder attached, a pot of resin to harden the hat, candles, a pick, shovel, wedges, hammers – all signed for and to be deducted. These people made sure a man spent his wages before he'd even earned it.