Black Mamba Boy. Nadifa Mohamed
the sea before she was brought home. Jinnow remembered them at their best, young and brave before hunger, disappointment and illness brought them low.
She recited old gabays to make him laugh: ‘Life in this world allows one man to grow prosperous, while another sinks into obscurity and is made ridiculous, a man passing through the evil influence of red Mars is feebler than a new born lamb punched on the nose.’
Jinnow told Jama one night, ‘I know you are sick of milk, you think you are a man already but don’t hurry to that, Jama, the world of men is cruel and unforgiving, don’t listen to those fools in the courtyard, you are not an orphan, you have a father, a perfectly good father who will return.’
‘Why hasn’t he come to collect me then? What’s he waiting for?’
‘Don’t be like that, Jama, we are all servants of our fate, he will come when he can. Hopefully he has made a good life for you both somewhere.’
‘What’s wrong with here? This is where we belong.’
‘Your father has too much music in his soul for this kind of life, your mother did too but she tried hard to drown it out. Life here is too hard, everyone is peering over the horizon, but one day inshallah you will also see how wide the world is.’
‘But where is my father?’
‘Far, far away, in a town called Gederaf in Sudan, beyond Ogaden, beyond Djibouti, many months’ walk, son, I heard that he was fighting in Abyssinia but now it seems he is in Sudan trying to become a driver again.’
‘Can I go to him?’
‘Allah, how could I let you do that? I owe it your mother to make sure you don’t come to any harm. She is watching me, I feel her here,’ Jinnow placed her hand on her stomach. ‘She is like a light there, you understand, son? Your mother, Kahawaris, sometimes the dead are more alive than the living, no-one really dies, not while there are people who remember and cherish them.’
Jama was ready to explode cooped up in the compound. He needed a job so that he could add to his mother’s money and find his father. He scoured the barren town for places to work, but shops and homes operated on the most basic levels of survival and there was no room for luxuries such as paid servants. The market consisted of a handful of women laying out dying fruits and withered vegetables on dusty cloths in the sand, they sat in the sun gossiping, collecting their meagre income in their laps. The eating houses were the busiest places in Hargeisa but they offered only two dishes whatever the wealth of their diners, boiled rice with boiled goat or camel. The cook would serve as waiter and dishwasher as well and would earn a pittance for all three jobs. Children and young men mobbed each other for the leftovers from the eating houses, pushing the smaller ones out of their way. Men chewed qat constantly to stave away the nagging hunger in their stomachs, so they wouldn’t succumb mentally to it, wouldn’t humiliate themselves. Late in the afternoons, the steps of the Haber Awal warehouses were clogged with men talking over each other, laughing and composing epigrams, but later as the qat left their systems they became morose, reclining like statues as the town darkened around them. Even with qat, the fear of hunger determined every decision every person made, where to go, what to do, who to be. Destitute nomads would come in from the countryside and sit under trees, too exhausted to move any further. Jama thought himself tough but the youth of Hargeisa were desert hardened, belligerent brawlers, uninterested in small talk with strangers, and the boys his age just wanted to sing and dance with the market girls. Jama, not finding any companionship inside the compound or outside, retreated deep into himself and made his mind his playground, fantasising all day about the father he had somehow lost. Conjuring his father was a pleasure, his strong muscles, gold rings and watches, nice shoes, thick hair, expensive clothes could all be refashioned on a whim, he said and did only what Jama wanted without the intrusion of reality. The fact that his father was alive made him everything Jama could want, while seeing his mother in his mind’s eye was agonising, he could recall the way she smelt before dying, the sweat running down her temples, the fear she was trying to mask from him.
Jama had seen young boys working in the slaughterhouse, ferrying the carcasses of freshly killed animals to the eating houses and market. He watched the couriers, their necks awkwardly bent forward by the weight on their shoulders, their feet frantically shuffling forward, propelling whirlwinds of sand up their legs. The work was hard and dirty, but Jama resolved to get money by whatever means necessary.
He woke up early one morning, the sky grey and the air still cool, and snuck out of the room, Jinnow’s snores chasing after him. A hyena rich darkness covered the town and Jama could feel jinns and half men at his back stalking the alleys, making the hairs on his neck stand on end. He sped to the slaughterhouse, the cries of camels and sheep growing in volume as he got closer. He summoned up an image of his father; a dreamboat of a father, tall, strong, elegant in uniform, a smile playing on his dark lips. The slaughterhouse was empty of people; only the penned-up animals, waiting since nightfall for their deaths to come, acknowledged him, fixing their pleading eyes on him, sticking their flaring nostrils into the air. Jama felt the impending bloodshed sizzle in the air and rubbed down the tiny hairs on his lower spine as they nervously stood up, as if they were frightened conscripts standing to attention before a bloodied old general. He paced up and down, avoiding the eyes of the animals, turning his back to them, counting the stars, as they one by one bowed and left the stage. As the sun rose, more tiny figures emerged from the dawn horizon, approaching Jama with hostile eyes. Jama looked around with satisfaction as he realised that he was amongst the tallest of the motley crew of boys which had formed, waiting for the butchers to come and make their selection from them. With the same swift appraisal of strength and value that they usually trained on livestock, the butchers would pick their couriers for the day. The Midgaan and Yibir boys, those too young to believe that they would never be chosen, were insulted out of the line-up, ‘Get out of here, you dirty shit, go and clean some latrines!’ They moved away, forming a separate line, silent and enraged. The oldest porters were camel herders who had been possessed by jinns in the lonely haunted desert and were now forbidden from approaching the camels. The smallest were barely five years old, bewildered little children who had been dumped in Hargeisa by nomad fathers keen to toughen them up, they had been ripped from their mother’s arms and now slept huddled in groups on the street. Hungry and lonely they followed older children wherever they went, their fathers occasionally visiting to ask, ‘So, how much have you made?’
The butchers arrived already smelling of blood, with an impatient slap on the shoulder and a grunt they pushed out of the line the boys that they would employ that day. Jama was one of the chosen few. The unlucky ones returned to their mats or patches of dirt and prepared to sleep away the day and its insidious hunger pains. Jama walked towards the killing ground but hung back, hoping to avoid seeing the actual slaughters. A man shouted ‘Hey you! Whatever your name is! Come here!’
Jama turned around and saw a broad, bare-chested man kneeling over a dead camel, still holding onto its reins as if it could make an escape. ‘Jama, my name is Jama, uncle.’
‘Whatever. Come and take this carcass over to the Berlin eating house for me. Wait here while I prepare it.’ Jama stood back and waited as the butcher cut off the neck and legs, removed the skin from the camel’s torso and emptied it of heart, stomach, intestines and other organs that only the poorest Somalis ate. The carnage shocked Jama, its efficiency and speed making it even more dreadful, he stood before the giant, naked, gleaming ribcage, frightened and awed by its desecration. The butcher got up wiping his red hands on his sarong before picking up the ribcage and balancing it on Jama’s head. Its weight made him stagger and the soft, oozing flesh pressed revoltingly onto his skin. Jama pushed himself forward, trying not to career around, but the heavy load drove him left and right. He stopped and pushed the ribcage down his neck onto his shoulders and held it wedged there as if he was Atlas holding up the world in his fragile arms. The broad bones jutted into Jama’s back and blood trickled down from his hair onto his shoulders and down his spine, making his brown back glisten with a ruby lustre. His nose was filled with the dense, iron smell of blood and he stopped against a wall to retch emptily. Blood dripped onto the sand, decorating his footprints with delicate red pools, as if he was a wounded man. He finally reached the eating house and hurriedly handed over the ribcage