“Of course,” he said, and shifted his pile of books and magazines, even though it had not been on the side of the table that they would use. The boy looked eight or nine years old, wearing a Mickey Mouse sweater and clutching a blue Game Boy. The woman was wearing a nose ring, a tiny glasslike thing that glittered as she moved her head this way and that. She asked if he had enough room for his magazines, if he wanted her to move her chair a little. Then she told her son, in a laughing tone that was clearly intended for Obinze, that she had never been very sure if those narrow wooden sticks next to the packets of sugar were for stirring.
“I’m not a baby!” her son said when she wanted to cut his muffin.
“I just thought it would be easier for you.”
Obinze looked up and saw that she was talking to her son but she was watching him, with something wistful in her eyes. It filled him with possibility, this chance meeting with a stranger, and the thought of the paths on which it might lead him.
The little boy had a delightful curious face. “Do you live in London?” he asked Obinze.
“Yes,” Obinze said, but that yes did not tell his story, that he lived in London indeed but invisibly, his existence like an erased pencil sketch; each time he saw a policeman, or anyone in a uniform, anyone with the faintest scent of authority, he would fight the urge to run.
“His father passed away last year,” the woman said, in a lower voice. “This is our first vacation in London without him. We used to do it every year before Christmas.” The woman nodded continuously as she spoke and the boy looked annoyed, as if he had not wanted Obinze to know that.
“I’m sorry,” Obinze said.
“We went to the Tate,” the boy said.
“Did you like it?” Obinze asked.
He scowled. “It was boring.”
His mother stood up. “We should go. We’re going to see a play.”
She turned to her son and added, “You’re not taking that Game Boy in, you know that.”
The boy ignored her, said “Bye” to Obinze, and turned towards the door. The mother gave Obinze a long look, even more wistful than before. Perhaps she had deeply loved her husband and this, her first awareness of feeling attraction again, was a startling revelation. He watched them leave, wondering whether to get up and ask for her contact information and yet knowing he would not. There was something about the woman that made him think of love, and, as always, Ifemelu came to his mind when he thought of love. Then, quite suddenly, a sexual urge overcame him. A tide of lust. He wanted to fuck somebody. He would text Tendai. They had met at a party Nosa took him to, and he ended up, that night, in her bed. Wise and large-hipped and Zimbabwean Tendai who had a habit of soaking in baths for too long. She stared at him in shock the first time he cleaned her flat and cooked jollof rice for her. She was so unused to being treated well by a man that she watched him endlessly, anxiously, her eyes veiled, as though holding her breath and waiting for the abuse to emerge. She knew he didn’t have his papers. “Or you would be the kind of Nigerian working in IT and driving a BMW,” she said. She had a British stay, and would have a passport in a year, and she hinted that she might be willing to help him. But he did not want the complication of marrying her for his papers; one day she would wake up and convince herself that it had never been merely for papers.
Before he left the bookshop, he sent Tendai a text: Are you home? Was thinking of stopping by. A freezing drizzle was falling as he walked to the tube station, tiny raindrops spattering his coat, and when he got there, he was absorbed by how many blobs of saliva were on the stairs. Why did people not wait until they left the station to spit? He sat on the stained seat of the noisy train, opposite a woman reading the evening paper. Speak English at home, Blunkett tells immigrants. He imagined the article she was reading. There were so many of them now published in the newspapers, and they echoed the radio and television, even the chatter of some of the men in the warehouse. The wind blowing across the British Isles was odorous with fear of asylum seekers, infecting everybody with the panic of impending doom, and so articles were written and read, simply and stridently, as though the writers lived in a world in which the present was unconnected to the past, and they had never considered this to be the normal course of history: the influx into Britain of black and brown people from countries created by Britain. Yet he understood. It had to be comforting, this denial of history. The woman closed the newspaper and looked at him. She had stringy brown hair and hard, suspicious eyes. He wondered what she was thinking. Was she wondering whether he was one of those illegal immigrants who were overcrowding an already crowded island? Later, on the train to Essex, he noticed that all the people around him were Nigerians, loud conversations in Yoruba and Pidgin filled the carriage, and for a moment he saw the unfettered non-white foreignness of this scene through the suspicious eyes of the white woman on the tube. He thought again of the Sri Lankan or Bangladeshi woman and the shadow of grief from which she was only just emerging, and he thought of his mother and of Ifemelu, and the life he had imagined for himself, and the life he now had, lacquered as it was by work and reading, by panic and hope. He had never felt so lonely.
CHAPTER 28
One morning in early summer, a renewing warmth in the air, Obinze arrived at the warehouse and knew right away that something was amiss. The men avoided his eyes, an unnatural stiffness in their movements, and Nigel turned swiftly, too swiftly, towards the toilet when he saw Obinze. They knew. It had to be that they had somehow found out. They saw the headlines about asylum seekers draining the National Health Service, they knew of the hordes further crowding a crowded island, and now they knew that he was one of the damned, working with a name that was not his. Where was Roy Snell? Had he gone to call the police? Was it the police that one called? Obinze tried to remember details from the stories of people who had been caught and deported but his mind was numb. He felt naked. He wanted to turn and run but his body kept moving, against his will, toward the loading area. Then he sensed a movement behind him, quick and violent and too close, and before he could turn around, a paper hat had been pushed onto his head. It was Nigel, and with him a gathering of grinning men.
“Happy birthday, Vinny Boy!” they all said.
Obinze froze, frightened by the complete blankness of his mind. Then he realized what it was. Vincent’s birthday. Roy must have told the men. Even he had not remembered to remember Vincent’s date of birth.
“Oh!” was all he said, nauseous from relief.
Nigel asked him to come into the coffee room, where all the men were trooping in, and as Obinze sat with them, all of them white except for Patrick from Jamaica, passing around the muffins and Coke they had bought with their own money in honor of a birthday they believed was his, a realization brought tears to his eyes: he felt safe.
Vincent called him that evening, and Obinze was mildly surprised, because Vincent had called him only once, months ago, when he changed his bank and wanted to give him the new account number. He wondered whether to say “Happy birthday” to Vincent, whether indeed the call was somehow related to the occasion of the birthday.
“Vincent, kedu?” he said.
“I want a raise.”
Had Vincent learned that from a film? Those words “I want a raise” sounded contrived and comical. “I want forty-five percent. I know you are working more now.”
“Vincent, ahn-ahn. How much am I making? You know I am saving money to do this marriage thing.”
“Forty-five percent,” Vincent said, and hung up.
Obinze decided to ignore him. He knew Vincent’s type; they would push to see how far they could go and then they would step back. If he called and tried to negotiate, it might embolden Vincent to make more demands. That he walked in every week to Vincent’s bank to deposit money into his account was something Vincent would not risk losing entirely. And so when, a week later, in the morning bustle of drivers and trucks, Roy said, “Vinny Boy, step into my office for a minute,” Obinze thought nothing of it. On Roy’s desk was a newspaper, folded at the page with the photo of the big-breasted woman. Roy slowly put his cup of coffee on top of the newspaper. He seemed uncomfortable, not looking directly at Obinze.
“Somebody called yesterday. Said you’re not who you say you are, that you’re illegal and working with a Brit’s name.” There was a pause. Obinze was stung with surprise. Roy picked up the coffee cup again. “Why don’t you just bring in your passport tomorrow and we’ll clear it up, all right?”
Obinze mumbled the first words that came to him. “Okay. I’ll bring my passport tomorrow.” He walked out of the office knowing that he would never remember what he had felt moments ago. Was Roy merely asking him to bring his passport to make the dismissal easier for him, to give him an exit, or did Roy really believe that the caller had been wrong? Why would anybody call about such a thing unless it was true? Obinze had never made as much of an effort as he did the rest of the day to seem normal, to tame the rage that was engulfing him. It was not the thought of the power that Vincent had over him that infuriated him, but the recklessness with which Vincent had exercised it. He left the warehouse that evening, for the final time, wishing more than anything that he had told Nigel and Roy his real name.