Текст книги "Black Mamba Boy"

Автор книги: Nadifa Mohamed

Соавторы: Nadifa Mohamed
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Текущая страница: 2 (всего у книги 17 страниц) [доступный отрывок для чтения: 7 страниц]

When Jama arrived a year later in Ambaro’s eighteenth year, she hoped it would force Guure to start providing but instead he carried on endlessly combing his hair and playing his lute, singing his favorite song to Ambaro, “Ha I gabin oo I gooyn. Don’t forsake me or cut me off.” He occasionally dangled the baby from his thin fingers before Ambaro snatched Jama away. Ambaro carried both a knife and a stick from the magic wagar tree to protect her son from dangers seen and unseen – she was a fierce, militant mother, her sweet mellow core completely melted away. Ambaro tied the baby to her back and learned from Jinnow all the things that women did to survive, how to weave straw baskets, make perfume from frankincense and myrrh, sew blankets from Ethiopian cloth, intending to barter these items in neighboring settlements for food. Whatever Ambaro did, they remained destitute, and she was reduced to foraging in the countryside for plants and roots: dabayood, likeh, tamayulaq. When Guure began to spend his days chewing qat with young men from whom he caught the Motor Madness, Ambaro was ready to tear her hair out. He bored Ambaro with obsessive talk about cars and the clansmen who had gone to Sudan and earned big money driving Ferengis around. It all seemed hopeless to Ambaro, who had never seen a car and could not believe that they were anything more than the childish sorcery of foreigners. Ambaro tried desperately to extinguish this fire that was burning in Guure, but the more she criticized and ridiculed him, the more Guure clung to his dream and convinced himself that he must leave for Sudan. His talk stole the hope from her heart, and she wondered how he could desert his family so easily. He would hold her as she wept, but she knew only heartache lay ahead.

Guure quietened down when a daughter arrived a year after Jama, a smiling golden child with big happy eyes that Ambaro named Kahawaris, after the glow of light before sunrise that heralded her birth. Kahawaris became the light of their lives, a baby whose beauty the other mothers envied and whose giggles rang through the camp. Jama had grown into a talkative little boy, always petting his little sister, accosting the adults with questions while he carried Kahawaris on his back: “Why are your toenails black?” “What made your beard orange?” With his two children pawing at him, complaining and crying with hunger each night, Guure promised that he would take any work he was given, even if it meant carrying carcasses from the slaughterhouse. He began to help Ambaro with the chores, scorning the jeers of his friends to collect water from the well and milk the goats alongside the women.

Life carried on bearably like this until, after a long, exhausting day of collecting gum for her perfumes, Ambaro unstrapped her daughter from her back and found her limp and lifeless in the cloth sling. Ambaro screamed for Guure and he took the child from her arms and ran to Jinnow, who tried to rouse the baby with drops of ZamZam water and prayers and slaps.

Ambaro’s soul emptied after her baby’s death, she wept in sunshine and moonlight, she refused to get up, to feed herself or Jama. She blamed Guure for making her carry a young baby while she bartered from settlement to settlement in the heat and dust. Ambaro had feared for Jama, as a baby she had constantly put her ear against his heart to check it was still beating, but he had thrived with her. Now she felt that she had failed Kahawaris, had been a bad mother to the beautiful child, had become arrogant and careless. Guure struggled hopelessly to look after them. He fed and bathed Jama but he could not trade and barter like Ambaro, so they often went hungry or begged. He did not know the value of anything: Was a perfume vial worth two blankets or just one? How much grain should he ask for if he gave a woman a basket full of tamarind? The wily women cheated him and sent him away with curses. Guure’s father had died before he was born, so he had no idea what a father did or didn’t do, he just floundered along guiltily, frightened that Jama would also die. Finally, when a drought devastated the clan’s camels, sheep, and goats, people began to disappear: some to find work in Hargeisa, some to live with relatives in Aden. Families dissolved as people sought survival down every dirt track.

Guure cupped Ambaro’s face in his hands and said, “Look, either I go and make a living for us or you do. What will it be?” Ambaro took his hands away and kept silent.

That very same day, Guure set off on a mapless, penniless journey to Sudan. That was the last they saw of him, though they sometimes heard tales of his wanderings: clansmen told Ambaro that he was in Djibouti singing, in Eritrea fighting, in Sudan driving. She did not tell Jama these stories, not wanting to raise his hopes with mere rumors; only news of deaths and births could be trusted along these slippery streams of walking men. Ambaro waited and waited for Guure, not knowing if he had died, gone mad, met someone else. Her family demanded that she divorce him, the wadaads told her that she had been abandoned and was free, but still she waited. She went to Aden and its factories, hoping to earn enough to track him down. She cursed her admirers and sent them away in the hope that one day Guure would appear over the horizon with his lute strapped to his back.

Returning to the Islaweynes’ house was too bitter a fruit for Jama to stomach; the bloated, pompous pig of a woman treated Jama and his mother like flies hovering around her heaped dinner plate. He had grown tired of making his small body even smaller so that false queen could feel like the air in the room was her sole preserve. Even his mother did nothing but give him a headache with her cursing, shouting, and smacking, and he stayed away longer than he intended because he was afraid of the beating he would eventually receive. Living on the streets intermittently from the age of six had furnished him with a wolfish instinct for self-preservation; he could sense danger through the small hairs on his lower back and taste it in the thick, dusty air. He thought from the primitive, knotted tangle of nerves at the base of his spine – like Adam, his needs were primal, to find food, find shelter, and avoid predators. Sleeping on roofs and streets had changed his sleep from the contented slumber of an infant, safe within his mother-sentried realm, to a jerky, half-awake unconsciousness, aware of mysterious voices and startling footsteps. Weeks came and went but Jama rarely knew where he would be eating or sleeping on any given night, there was no order to his life. Jama could easily imagine growing old and weak on these cruel streets, eventually being found one day, like other market boys he had seen, cold and stiff on the curb, a donkey cart carrying him away to an unmarked pauper’s grave outside town before stray dogs made a meal of him.

His favorite place to sleep was an earth-smelling nook on the roof of a teetering apartment block. It was formed by a mud wall that curled over to make a three-sided tomb, and in it Jama felt as safe as the dead, in this world but not of it, floating high in the sky. At dawn he would wake up and watch the little insects as they carried on with their busy lives, scurrying across the wall with so much self-importance, crawling over his fingers and face as if he were just a boulder in their way. He felt as small in the world as them but more vulnerable, more alone than the ants with their armies or the cockroaches with their tough shells and hidden wings.

This night he would return to the new apartment block he had been sleeping in with Shidane and Abdi for a few weeks. Letting himself quietly into the building, he found the kind old caretaker who allowed them the use of the roof, and wished the sleepy-eyed Haji goodnight. Jama went up to the roof, feeling a hollowness in his chest from wanting to be with a mother whose company he found too difficult to bear. On reaching the roof, he saw his inner emptiness matched by complete silence. Abdi and Shidane were not there, perhaps were sleeping somewhere else. The loneliness Jama felt carved even deeper into his soul; he needed Abdi’s small warm body to huddle up with tonight, his wet nose tucked in Jama’s neck. Jama stepped onto the ledge and looked up at the stars and the indifferent moon.

He hung there, enjoying the vast drop inches away from his feet, and at the top of his lungs called out, “Guure Mohamed Naaleyeh, where are you? Come find your son!”

His voice echoed against the buildings and drifted out to sea.

Shidane led his gang through the streets of Ma’alla, the Arab section, filling in his uncle and Jama on the local goings-on, passing the information he had gleaned from his errand work. Men and women moved behind curtains like jerky Indian puppets, their lives framed by windows and backlit by lamps as the boys watched them from the twilight street.

“The woman in that house is really a eunuch, I have seen him take off his sharshuf and underneath he has a gigantic club sticking out, hair all over his arms and feet, oof! He looked like a wrestler, wallaahi, I swear.”

Jama looked incredulously at Shidane and pushed him away. Extravagantly red roses the size of Jama’s face flopped over the exterior walls of the houses, filling the air with their molasses-sweet scent. Jama picked one off its stem, stroking the petals that felt like down on a butterfly’s wing, then waved it in a circle in the dusk breeze, trailing a ballet of insects that urgently followed the arcing fragrance.

“And that man, see him up there? In the turban? He is always in and out of jail, all of his teeth are gold, he’s a diamond smuggler, he can take out his teeth and hide diamonds inside, I’ve seen him do it at night through the window.”

Abdi with a rapt expression exclaimed, “Inshallah, I will be a diamond smuggler when I’m older, that’s even better than being a pearl smuggler. I would buy sparkling black pointy shoes like rich men wear and buy my hooyo a house and more gold than she could ever wear.” Silently the three boys looked at their naked feet shod only in sand and dirt.

“Do you know what I would buy?” asked Jama.

“A car?” replied Shidane.

“No, I would buy an airplane, so I could fly through the clouds and come down to earth whenever I wanted to see a new place, Mecca, China, I would travel even farther, to Damascus and Ardiwaliya, and just come and go as I wanted.”

“Allah! They are the work of the Shayddaan! You wouldn’t get me in one of those things,” Shidane harrumphed. “My mother says they’re haram, it’s only angels, insects, and birds that God intended to fly, it’s no surprise that they burst into flames. Then when you die your body is turned into ash so you can’t even have a proper burial and you go straight to hell. Serves the Ferengis right, though.”

The rose torn from its bush wilted in the stifling heat and Jama tore it apart petal by petal. “Hey, do you remember that flower merchant we worked for last Ramadan?”

“That shithead, how could we forget him? We are still waiting for our pay. We can’t all flutter our eyelashes at the women like you, Jama. ‘Good evening, aunty, any flowers for you, aunty?’” mimicked Shidane. “Sickening!”

Jama held his finger to his mouth. “Be quiet and listen, Shidane. I heard that he is now a seaman and earned enough on one voyage to take two wives and buy a large house in Sana’a.”

“Two wives!” said Shidane with a whistle. “That ugly sinner! I would be surprised if he managed to trick one blind old baboon into marrying him.”

Abdi creased up at his nephew’s cruel tongue. Abdi’s face was usually set in a grave, contemplative expression, but then with a flicker of light in his eyes, a crooked smile would crack it open, revealing teeth that tumbled over one another.

Jama had enjoyed carrying the big baskets laden with jasmine, frangipani, and hibiscus from door to door in the cool quiet twilight, smiling at the pretty wives and daughters of wealthy men in the rich neighborhoods. By nightfall his skin and sarong would be infused with an intoxicating smell of life and beauty. He returned home to decorate his mother’s black hair with the crushed pink, red, and purple flowers at the bottom of the basket that the rich women didn’t want. The bruised petals were the only gifts he had ever brought her; with the flowers he could make her beautiful, run his fingers through her hair and over the soft skin of her neck, his fingers scented with jasmine.

As the three boys padded down the street, a racket broke the silence of the neighborhood. A woman’s screams rose above the general shouts and Jama nervously looked at the others. A small middle-aged woman darted around a corner, running barefoot past them with the front of her gown ripped open revealing an old gray brassiere, her face contorted in unseeing terror.

Behind her chased a group of older men, one of them bearing a knife, another a thick cane. They hollered after her, “Ya sharmuta! Whore! Adulteress! You have brought shame on our street. By God, we will catch you.”

Behind them a ragtag bunch of children came, some crying, some cheering and laughing. This human storm engulfed Jama and then flowed away just as quickly. Jama stood still, bewildered by what he had seen, his head still turned in the direction of the lynch mob.

“Let’s chase them!” shouted Shidane, and they pelted after the crowd. “Which way did they go?” Jama asked, trying to pinpoint where all the commotion had gone.

The screams were piercing when they reached the dirty alley where the woman had been cornered. Her children clung to her, a howling, shaking little girl holding her mother around the waist, and a teenage boy desperately trying to put his slight body between his mother and the man holding the knife. Shidane pushed through the crowd to the woman, the knife frozen in the air above their heads.

“Let go of her!” he screamed. “Let go of her, you son of a bitch.”

Jama saw the man with the cane slap Shidane around the back with it, and the other thug held him back as the old man cursed and lunged at Shidane: “Get away from here! Ya abid, slave,” he raged.

The crowd of excited children shifted around Jama, their eyes wide with terror and joy at what they were seeing. One boy kept climbing Jama’s back for a better look but he threw him to the ground. Abdi was hanging from the arm of the man with the cane. Jama, worried that Abdi would be beaten, grabbed hold of the knife man’s arm and sunk his teeth in. He bit harder and harder until the knife dropped to the ground. Shidane picked it up and dragged Jama and Abdi away, into the night, the dagger tucked into Shidane’s ma’awis.

The next day, the boys stalked the outdoor restaurant of Cowasjee Dinshaw and Sons like a pack of stray dogs. They flanked the seated cosmopolitan diners, who had ordered heaped plates of rice with chicken, spaghetti with minced lamb, maraag with huge hunks of bread. The clinking of full glasses and chatter drifted up into the air along with faint arabesques of cigarette smoke. Jama wiped his salivating mouth and made eye contact with Shidane, who was standing behind the table of a suited Banyali merchant and his elegantly sari’d companion, her juicy flesh peeking out from underneath her fuchsia choli. The boys had barely eaten or drunk anything for days and they had to restrain their desire to knock the waiters down and snatch the steaming plates from their hands. The waiter took the white towel hanging over his forearm and flicked Abdi roughly around the back of his legs with it. “Yallah! Yallah! Leave our customers in peace,” he shouted. The boys pulled back from the restaurant and regrouped at the palm trees lining the road. Abdi gestured toward the Indian couple, who were settling their bill. Jama and Shidane sprinted to the table and in one swift movement tipped two plates of leftover spaghetti into their sarongs, which they had pulled out into makeshift bowls. Abdi collected all the bread and then ran after Jama and Shidane as they scrambled up the road. They stopped the instant they realized they were not being pursued and dropped down by the side of the road with their backs against a wall. They pulled the food to their mouths as if they would never eat again, silently and with a fixed attention to the meager meal in their laps. Abdi tried to pick spaghetti from Jama’s and Shidane’s laps but had to dodge their frenetically moving fingers. They in turn grabbed at the bread in his hands, and it was only after he shouted in despair that they slowed down and allowed him his share of the booty. Jama and Shidane wiped their greasy fingers on the sand beneath them and watched as Abdi lethargically finished off the scattered bread crumbs. Jama’s eyes scanned over the little boy’s protruding ribs and matchstick-thin ankles and wrists. “Abdi, why do you eat like a chicken? You’re always getting left with the crumbs, you have to be fast!”

“Well, I would eat more if you two pigs didn’t swallow everything before I can even sit down,” Abdi replied sullenly.

Abashed, Jama and Shidane giggled but did not meet each other’s eyes.

“I want to go see my hooyo again,” said Abdi sadly. “I think she’s ill.”

“Don’t worry, we’ll go tomorrow. We’ll all be going back to Berbera soon anyway. The dhows are already leaving for Somaliland. I can’t wait for this year’s fair: coffee from Harar, saffron, tusks, feathers from our great Isse Muuse, Garhajis with myrrh, gum, sheep, cattle, and ghee, and the Warsangeli with their bloody frankincense. And all those Arabs and Indians to pickpocket before our morning swim. Are you not going, Jama?” asked Shidane.

“No, I’m staying here, in the big city. I’ve got nothing to go back for,” lied Jama. Shidane stared at him, a smile pulling at his mouth.

“Where is your father, anyway? Why did he run off? Was it you or your mother that got on his nerves?”

“Shut up, Shidane,” Jama replied sternly. Shidane picked on people the way he picked at scabs, trying to get to the red, pulpy stuff underneath. Jama hated Shidane when he was like this. Shidane’s mother was a prostitute in a port brothel, but Jama still never dared insult Shidane back. The boys never took Jama with them when they visited Shidane’s mother but Jama had followed them once, he watched from behind a post as Shidane and Abdi embraced a small woman in a Ferengi shirt, her red hair flying in the breeze. She was surrounded by the hard-living women of the port who drank, chewed tobacco and qat, and attracted sailors by shaking tambourines and dancing. Shidane’s mother looked like a lost bride with her red lips, kohled eyes, and copper jewelry, but behind the makeup was the bloated, yellow face of a drunkard.

Shidane’s father had been killed by a British bomb left behind from their campaign years earlier against the Mad Mullah, and the rage that this had spawned in Shidane sometimes made his temper flare up as brightly as magnesium. He would seek out fights and get pulverized. Jama and Abdi would then huddle silently around him, tentative, as he wheezed and swore at them for being cowardly, stupid, pathetic, his eyes bloodshot with held-back tears. Jama and Abdi loved Shidane, so they tolerated his foul mouth, his unreasonable demands, his cruelty; he was too charming to hold a grudge against. His gigantic eyes could be so sincere and full of compassion that they could not stay angry with him.

Without Shidane and Abdi, Jama’s days would be long, lonely, and almost silent. They had insinuated themselves deep into his heart, and Jama liked to pretend that they were his brothers. The only time they were separated now was when Shidane and Abdi went to Steamer Point to dive for pennies. Cruise ships on the way to India or the Far East stopped off in Aden and idle passengers would throw coins into the water to watch the gali gali boys risk their lives to collect them. Jama occasionally watched them, Shidane dangerously sleek and elegant in the water, Abdi struggling always with a mouthful of saltwater. After hours in the sea they would come ashore with their cheeks full of coins and spit them out at Jama’s feet; it was begging, but they made it look beautiful.

At Shidane’s instigation the gang would sometimes go looking for trouble. Indian kids, Jewish kids, and Yemeni kids all lived with their parents, however poor they might be. It was only the Somali children who ran around feral, sleeping everywhere and anywhere. Many of the Somali boys were the children of single mothers working in the coffee factories, too tired after twelve hours of work to chase around after boisterous, hungry boys. Their fathers came and went regularly, making money and losing it, with the monsoon trade. With no parental beatings to fear, the Somali boys saw the other children as well fed and soft enough to harass safely.

Jama, Shidane, and Abdi liked to prowl around Suq al-Yahud, and the Banyali area as well as old Aden. Today, they penetrated the Jewish quarter, walking under the flapping laundry crisscrossing the alleys, looking for boys their age to fight. The Jewish boys looked so prim and proper in comparison with them, overdressed with little skullcaps balanced on their heads, books tucked under their arms as they returned from yeshiva.

Shidane picked up a stone and lobbed it at one. “Hey, Yahudi, do they teach you this at your school?” he said with the secret envy of the illiterate. Abdi and Jama, although hesitant, picked up smaller stones and threw them as well.

The Jewish schoolboys piled up their books in a heap. “Somali punkah-wallahs, your fathers are dirty Somali punkah-wallahs!” they shouted and started bombarding the Somali boys.

Soon vile insults in Arabic against one another’s mothers were exchanged along with the stones. Jama chipped in with a few Hebrew insults he had learned from Abraham, a boy he used to sell flowers with: “Ben Zona! Ben Kelev! Son of a whore! Son of a dog!”

The Jewish boys had sweat dripping down their temples into their ringlets, and their tunics were damp with it. Jama and Shidane cackled as they avoided the sharp stones, pushing Abdi out of the way whenever one was aimed at him. Hearing the commotion and obscenities, mothers came out onto their balconies to hector the little brats. They went unheard until one no-nonsense woman went indoors and returned with a large basin, tipping half of the dirty water on the Somali intruders and splattering the rest on the Sabbath-disrespecting sons of Israel. All of the boys ran away, Jama, Shidane, and Abdi fleeing together, passing fabric shops as their shutters closed for the holy day.

Abdi pinched a black waistcoat that was hanging from a nail and they ran even faster, their booty held aloft while a burly, bearded man chased them. “It’s the Sabbath, you shouldn’t be running!” shouted Jama over his shoulder, and Shidane and Abdi roared at his wit.

The man huffed and puffed behind them but eventually gave up, cursing them in Hebrew. “You should have had a shit. You’re too heavy to catch us!” shouted Jama in a parting shot, as they bolted from the neighborhood.

The Camel mukhbazar was a small, whitewashed greasy spoon with a few round tables inside and Somali baskets hung from the wall in an attempt at decoration. Most of its customers preferred to stand or sit outside in loud groups, metal plates of overcooked pasta or spiced iskukaris rice balanced in their hands. The Camel had become a meeting place for all the Somalis who washed up on the Yemeni coast looking for work. Merchants, criminals, coolies, boatmen, shoemakers, policemen all went there for their evening meal. Jama often hovered around its entrance, hoping to see his father or at least someone who had word of him. Jama did not know what his father looked like; his mother rarely talked about him. Jama always felt, however, that if he ever had the chance to catch his father’s eye, or watch him move or talk, he would instantly recognize him from among the untidy men with shaved heads and claim him as his own.

One windy day, as Jama’s legs and feet were being buffeted by flying refuse, he joined a group of men gathered around Ismail, the owner of the mukhbazar. The Somalis were flowing out into the road to the consternation of Arab donkey drivers and coolies, who struggled past with their heavy loads. Jama heard them cursing the Somalis under their breath. “Sons of bitches should go back to the land-of-give-me-something,” one hammal said. Jama fought the temptation to tell the men what the Arab had dared say. He eased his way into the crowd until he was at Ismail’s shoulder. Ismail was reading from an Arabic newspaper. “Italy declares war on Abyssinia, Haile Selassie appeals to the League of Nations,” he translated.

“To hell with that devilish imp!” shouted out a bystander.

“Colored Americans raise money in churches but the rest of the world turns its gaze,” Ismail carried on.

“Good! They turned their gaze too when the Abyssinians stole our land in Ogaden, handed over to them by the stinking English. If the Habashis can take our ancestral land then let the Ferengis take theirs,” shouted another.

“Runta! Ain’t that the truth! Look at this small boy.” Ismail suddenly lifted his head from the paper and pointed an angry finger at Jama. “Selassie is no bigger than him yet he has the nerve to call himself a king, an emperor, no less! I knew him in Harar, when he was always running to the moneylenders to pay for some work of the devil he had seen the Ferengis with. I bet he needs his servants to pick him up before he can relieve himself in his new French piss pot.”

Jama inched back, the finger still pointed at him as Ismail returned to reading. “The Italians have amassed an army of more than one million soldiers, and are stockpiling weapons of lethal capability. Somali and Eritrean colonial troops are already massed at the borders.”

Ismail stopped and screwed up his face. “One million? Who needs a million of anything to get a job done? This war sounds like the beginning of something very stupid.” He impatiently scrunched up the newspaper, wiping the ink from his fingers with a handkerchief, and padded back inside his mukhbazar.

Jama was eavesdropping on the men’s war talk; the names of strategic towns, disloyal nobles, Somali clans that had decided to fight with Selassie were thrown about over his head. Ismail leaned out the kitchen window and whistled at Jama. “Come in and make yourself useful, boy!”

Two cooks were working in the kitchen. A bald-headed, yellow-toned Somali man cooked the rice and pasta and another, taller man made vats of the all-purpose sauce of onion, tomato, and garlic.

Ismail fluttered around, moving dirty dishes to the basin on the floor. “Get here, boy, and wash these dishes. Do them well and you’ve got yourself a job.”

Jama’s eyes widened with happiness at the prospect of regular money and he rushed toward the pyramid of dishes. The hot water scalded his arms but he scoured and rinsed the heavy pots and pans without complaint. His nimble, strong hands reached the dirty corners that the adults missed, and he imagined he was scrubbing the roof like he used to for his mother. Ismail stood behind him, scrutinizing his work, but soon left to talk with new customers. Within a few minutes the dirty pyramid had been transformed into a sparkling display of almost-new-looking dishes. Jama turned around with a jubilant look but the two cooks were uninterested in his achievement. Ismail came back into the kitchen and, after casting an eye over his rejuvenated dishes, said, “Come back tomorrow, Jama, you can start at seven in the morning. There’s a plate of rice waiting for you outside.”

Jama skipped past as Ismail slapped the back of his neck. A large white plate of steaming rice and stew was placed on a table, and he stopped to smell the delicious aroma and wonder at all this food that was entirely his own. Eating slowly was a luxury he rarely allowed himself but he chewed the lamb meditatively, removing all the meat from the bone and sucking out the marrow. He licked the plate clean, then sat back as his stomach strained against his knotted sarong. As soon as he felt able, he waddled out toward the beach, eager to boast to Shidane and Abdi about this unexpected good luck at a place they were used to stealing from. Shidane’s idea had been to tie a fresh date to a stick, and use the contraption to pick up paisas left on tables for the waiters. Jama was the best at casually, innocently walking past and stabbing the coin with the stick. When they had finally been caught by a waiter who knew Shidane’s reputation, they had moved on to the Banyali quarter. Shidane would throw a bone into the shops of the vegetarian Hindus and Jama would offer to remove it for a price.

Shidane and Abdi were kicking at the surf. The waistcoat Abdi had stolen looked ridiculous hanging from his bony shoulders, and Jama burst into laughter at the sight of Abdi in a fat Jewish man’s clothing. Jama skipped up and jumped onto Shidane’s shoulders. Shidane shook him off in irritation, and said, “Leave me alone, you donkey.” Abdi looked gloomily at them both, rubbing his red, teary eyes with the back of his hand, silently gathering the waistcoat around his ribs to stop the sea breeze blowing it away. Shidane was in one of his moods. He kept staring at Jama, his nostrils round and flared, his face set in a hostile grimace. “Something has happened to Shidane’s mother,” Abdi tried to explain, but Shidane hushed Abdi with a stern finger against his lips.

“What’s the problem, walaalo? You need money? I’ve just had some good luck.”

“What?” asked Shidane defensively.

“I’ve got a job starting tomorrow at the Camel mukhbazar, Ismail wants me to do the dishwashing from now on.”

“Ya salam! You Eidegalle really know how to look out for each other, don’t you?” interrupted Shidane.

“What do you mean by that?” asked Jama in shock.

“Well, it just seems strange that you’re always getting work and you never think to ask for us as well, all you care about is yourself.”