“Do tell,” Hannah said.
And so Emenike did. He told the story of the taxi that he had hailed one night, on Upper Street; from afar the cab light was on but as the cab approached him, the light went off, and he assumed the driver was not on duty. After the cab passed him by, he looked back idly and saw that the cab light was back on and that, a little way up the street, it stopped for two white women.
Emenike had told Obinze this story before and he was struck now by how differently Emenike told it. He did not mention the rage he had felt standing on that street and looking at the cab. He was shaking, he had told Obinze, his hands trembling for a long time, a little frightened by his own feelings. But now, sipping the last of his red wine, flowers floating in front of him, he spoke in a tone cleansed of anger, thick only with a kind of superior amusement, while Georgina interjected to clarify: Can you believe that?
Alexa, flush with red wine, her eyes red below her scarlet hair, changed the subject. “Blunkett must be sensible and make sure this country remains a refuge. People who have survived frightful wars must absolutely be allowed in!” She turned to Obinze. “Don’t you agree?”
“Yes,” he said, and felt alienation run through him like a shiver.
Alexa, and the other guests, and perhaps even Georgina, all understood the fleeing from war, from the kind of poverty that crushed human souls, but they would not understand the need to escape from the oppressive lethargy of choicelessness. They would not understand why people like him, who were raised well fed and watered but mired in dissatisfaction, conditioned from birth to look towards somewhere else, eternally convinced that real lives happened in that somewhere else, were now resolved to do dangerous things, illegal things, so as to leave, none of them starving, or raped, or from burned villages, but merely hungry for choice and certainty.
CHAPTER 30
Nicholas gave Obinze a suit for the wedding. “It’s a good Italian suit,” he said. “It’s small for me so it should fit you.” The trousers were big and bunched up when Obinze tightened his belt, but the jacket, also big, shielded this unsightly pleat of cloth at his waist. Not that he minded. So focused was he on getting through the day, on finally beginning his life, that he would have swaddled his lower parts in a baby’s diaper if that were required. He and Iloba met Cleotilde near Civic Center. She was standing under a tree with her friends, her hair pushed back with a white band, her eyes boldly lined in black; she looked like an older, sexier person. Her ivory dress was tight at her hips. He had paid for the dress. “I haven’t got any proper going-out dress,” she had said in apology when she called to tell him that she had nothing that looked convincingly bridal. She hugged him. She looked nervous, and he tried to deflect his own nervousness by thinking about them together after this, how in less than an hour, he would be free to walk with surer steps on Britain’s streets, and free to kiss her.
“You have the rings?” Iloba asked her.
“Yes,” Cleotilde said.
She and Obinze had bought them the week before, plain matching cheap rings from a side-street shop, and she had looked so delighted, laughingly slipping different rings on and then off her finger, that he wondered if she wished it were a real wedding.
“Fifteen minutes to go,” Iloba said. He had appointed himself the organizer. He took pictures, his digital camera held away from his face, saying, “Move closer! Okay, one more!” His sprightly good spirits annoyed Obinze. On the train up to Newcastle the previous day, while Obinze had spent his time looking out of the window, unable even to read, Iloba had talked and talked, until his voice became a distant murmur, perhaps because he was trying to keep Obinze from worrying too much. Now, he talked to Cleotilde’s friends with an easy friendliness, about the new Chelsea coach, about Big Brother, as if they were all there for something ordinary and normal.
“Time to go,” Iloba said. They walked towards the civic center. The afternoon was bright with sunshine. Obinze opened the door and stood aside for the others to go ahead, into the sterile hallway, where they paused to get their bearings, to be sure which way to go towards the register office. Two policemen stood behind the door, watching them with stony eyes. Obinze quieted his panic. There was nothing to worry about, nothing at all, he told himself, the civic center probably had policemen present as a matter of routine; but he sensed in the sudden smallness of the hallway, the sudden thickening of doom in the air, that something was wrong, before he noticed another man approaching him, his shirtsleeves rolled up, his cheeks so red he looked as though he was wearing terrible makeup.
“Are you Obinze Maduewesi?” the red-cheeked man asked. In his hands was a sheaf of papers and Obinze could see a photocopy of his passport page.
“Yes,” Obinze said quietly, and that word, yes, was an acknowledgment to the red-cheeked immigration officer, to Iloba and to Cleotilde, and to himself that it was over.
“Your visa is expired and you are not allowed to be present in the UK,” the red-cheeked man said.
A policeman clamped handcuffs around his wrists. He felt himself watching the scene from far away, watching himself walk to the police car outside, and sink into the too-soft seat in the back. There had been so many times in the past when he had feared that this would happen, so many moments that had become one single blur of panic, and now it felt like the dull echo of an aftermath. Cleotilde had flung herself on the ground and begun to cry. She might never have visited her father’s country, but he was convinced at that moment of her Africanness; how else would she be able to fling herself to the ground with that perfect dramatic flourish? He wondered if her tears were for him or for herself or for what might have been between them. She had no need to worry, though, since she was a European citizen; the policemen barely glanced at her. It was he who felt the heaviness of the handcuffs during the drive to the police station, who silently handed over his watch and his belt and his wallet, and watched the policeman take his phone and switch it off. Nicholas’s large trousers were slipping down his hips.
“Your shoes too. Take off your shoes,” the policeman said.
He took off his shoes. He was led to a cell. It was small, with brown walls, and the metal bars, so thick his hand could not go around one, reminded him of the chimpanzee’s cage at Nsukka’s dismal, forgotten zoo. From the very high ceilings, a single bulb burned. There was an emptying, echoing vastness in that tiny cell.
“Were you aware that your visa had expired?”
“Yes,” Obinze said.
“Were you about to have a sham marriage?”
“No. Cleotilde and I have been dating for a while.”
“I can arrange for a lawyer for you, but it’s obvious you’ll be deported,” the immigration officer said evenly.
When the lawyer came, puffy-faced, darkened arcs under his eyes, Obinze remembered all the films in which the state lawyer is distracted and exhausted. He came with a bag but did not open it, and he sat across from Obinze, holding nothing, no file, no paper, no pen. His demeanor was pleasant and sympathetic.
“The government has a strong case and we can appeal but to be honest it will only delay the case and you will eventually be removed from the UK,” he said, with the air of a man who had said those same words, in that same tone, more times than he wished to, or could, remember.
“I’m willing to go back to Nigeria,” Obinze said. The last shard of his dignity was like a wrapper slipping off that he was desperate to retie.
The lawyer looked surprised. “Okay, then,” he said, and got up a little too hastily, as though grateful that his job had been made easier. Obinze watched him leave. He was going to tick on a form that his client was willing to be removed. “Removed.” That word made Obinze feel inanimate. A thing to be removed. A thing without breath and mind. A thing.
HE HATED the cold heaviness of the handcuffs, the mark he imagined they left on his wrists, the glint of the interlinking circles of metal that robbed him of movement. There he was, in handcuffs, being led through the hall of Manchester Airport, and in the coolness and din of that airport, men and women and children, travelers and cleaners and security guards, watched him, wondering what evil he had done. He kept his gaze on a tall white woman hurrying ahead, hair flying behind her, knapsack hunched on her back. She would not understand his story, why he was now walking through the airport with metal clamped around his wrists, because people like her did not approach travel with anxiety about visas. She might worry about money, about a place to stay, about safety, perhaps even about visas, but never with an anxiety that wrenched at her spine.
He was led into a room, bunk beds pushed forlornly against the walls. Three men were already there. One, from Djibouti, said little, lying and staring at the ceiling as though retracing the journey of how he had ended up at a holding facility in Manchester Airport. Two were Nigerian. The younger sat up on his bed eternally cracking his fingers. The older paced the small room and would not stop talking.
“Bros, how did they get you?” he asked Obinze, with an instant familiarity that Obinze resented. Something about him reminded Obinze of Vincent. Obinze shrugged and said nothing to him; there was no need for courtesies simply because they shared a cell.