“Hey!” He put down the plates and squeezed opposite me, our dirty aprons between us. He was smiling and put his hands on my shoulders, which, uncharacteristically, my shoulders did not want. “OK, sorry. I didn’t mean to make nothing of what we’ve done. I love us working together. It’s just me. If I think too much about small things, I get scared that I might stop thinking about big things. I’m superstitious like that. Scared of being nothing. I just thought you needed the money.”
He dropped his arms from my shoulders just as they were about to relent their stiffness, but could not resist adding one more item of his business wisdom: “Anyway, debt doesn’t matter. It’s future income that matters. Debt just proves people trust you. Marcella, we can do anything.”
When the time came to ask Benji for his ideas now that the restaurant was at an end, his reply was both vague and specific. Our eyes at the time were not on each other but on the night-time view from our rooftop bed in Talbot Road, taking in all of London: the white terraces of Bayswater, the dark break of parkland, the lights of Kensington, the Thames, the orange glow of the southern suburbs. He said, “I might do something with Lord Cramp. I’ll introduce you. He’s a twig of the Churchill family tree.” Though he laughed, I could tell he was impressed. “He knows all the Arab royal families.”
I took this in, puzzled in the darkness, hoping the path between this and our little restaurant would become clearer. Instead, Benji moved on. He had also been approached about exporting videos to Saudi. And a Chinese Malaysian friend, Marcos, was interested in buying investment property for nervous Hong Kong millionaires and Benji, with his background in Singapore, might help out. There was a Nigerian army officer with money to spend on procurements whom Benji had met at a party. There was more.
The vagueness was in the way the people and proposals would turn themselves into the reality of money. I stayed silent, not liking to ask, not wanting to show doubt or ignorance. The reality that I could see was that Benji’s car was sometimes clean inside so that I knew he had used it as a minicab the previous night. Once I found the back seat full of beautiful men’s sweaters, which he told me would each sell in Italy for as much as a good suit sold in London. Then there were brochures for some sort of insurance policies—he called them financial instruments —that he sold on commission for an important-sounding British company in the City. He may have sold some or may not. He was vague about this too. On Sundays the reality was that he would be in Queensway, one of those men in suits offering luxury cars for sale on behalf of foreigners who had left London hurriedly. He said he only did that for fun too, for the contacts. I understood that Benji was struggling, though he never complained, never lost his style, and never lost the spendthrift ways of someone effortlessly in the money. I wanted to help him more than he would let me and more than I knew how. I looked around for an idea that I might make mine, that would set my brain cells marching around my head with dreamings, plannings and enticing calculations.
Gabrielle became my friend. It took a little time. If Monique was the lure that filled Hereford Road with visitors of every type, Gabrielle was the one who kept them there. She was quiet and cheerful, though often tired from her work at the St Mary’s hospital on Harrow Road. She monitored how everyone was doing, made them welcome and comfortable, ensured that they were fed and their problems addressed. People visited because of Monique and kept visiting because of Gabrielle. She was the one with a job that was more than for the money. Kamara told me that in her past was a love affair with an English doctor that went wrong. Now she seemed to prefer the collective affection of a group.
There were times when we were the only ones at home, when we talked, joked and watched TV. She was almost exactly my size and the flat felt spacious with just the two of us. I laughed with her while we watched a programme about Ken Livingstone, the leader of the Greater London Council. While he stood and talked, he rhythmically exercised the muscles in his buttocks, which only we seemed to notice. We giggled, decided we liked him, his ordinariness. He was cheeky to the older politicians and, against all odds, had reduced the fares of the buses and tubes. His smiling face was on hoardings all over London so that our home seemed presided over by an invincible friend.
IN COOKHAM WOOD, I SHOPPED MY FRIENDS TO THEBritish—even Gabrielle—for the sake of a degree, murdering my past for the second time. Benji was the only one I saved. It was what the academics craved, firsthand accounts of the immigrant scene by an authentic non-white participant. They loved me, and loved that I was in prison, and forgave me my lack of statistics for the sake of my empathic depth of understanding. I teased out the warmth and hospitality from the sisters’ home and made of it a machine of self-interest for my examiners’ delectation. While, in life, we had sat among cushions on the carpet, chatting, leaning against each other, watching TV, eating snacks, I perceived, in my thesis, that we were exchanging information of mutual interest: how to work the system and avoid the law. I detected
