| Out
of the Night
by Barbara Inglis
You will not see me. I work in one of the best restaurants in London,
but you will not see me. I am in the kitchen and I wash the dishes and
I clean up after the chefs. The boss he says they should clean up after
themselves, it is part of their training, but they don’t do it,
and it must be done. So this is what I am doing these days.
People might say, if they know me, this is not what I have always done,
but here in this city not so many people know me. Most of the time it
is better that way.
I have been here a long time. Sometimes it seems to me I have been here
all of my life, but in my heart I know that it is not so.
The kitchen, the dishes, everything must be clean and tidy by the end
of the day. Rather it’s the start of the next day more than the
end of this day. Our last patrons seem to wait for the dawn. It is a good
thing that we open only in the evening.
‘All done, Thomas?’ the boss asks, as I go to put on my coat.
I nod. As if I should leave, and all the work not done.
‘Safe journey, then. See you tomorrow.’
I trust in safe journeys. What else can I do? Once, when I was at home,
no journey was safe. No one knew where the militia would be waiting, no
one knew which militia. No car would travel through that night. One had
only to trust.
Here there is no militia, and there should be no fear.
As I open the door to leave, the boss he says what he says every night.
‘It’s dark out there, Thomas. No need to be scared of spooks.
They won’t see you if you don’t smile and you don’t
show them the whites of your eyes.’
I used to ask myself, is that racist what the boss says to me every night?
He will make no jokes with the Poles or the Slovaks or the other people
from the east of Europe, he says this only to me. But I do not think that
is the way he means it. So I smile and I nod and I say ‘Right, boss.’
And here I am in the dark streets of the city. The newspapers say these
days that London is so much more dangerous than it was. They talk of gun
crime and knife crime. Lily she says to me I should always go home by
the night bus, but I have read too of bad things that happen on the night
buses, and I have not far to go.
The night in London has no stars. When I first came here, that was the
biggest surprise. No stars. In the township there are always stars. You
look up and they shine down, as they always have. Only on nights of storms
are there no stars. Here there are only street lights, and the shadows
they cast.
The shadows mostly do not move. In a doorway a man stirs, but he is in
the darkness and he casts no shadow. He is one of the homeless. I have
much to be thankful for. I have a home.
I walk at the side of the street. I know from back in my homeland it is
better to stay on the edge, where there is shelter. Unless of course someone
is waiting there, someone who is not homeless, someone who is not dispossessed,
someone who holds a sharp knife or a machete and who believes only in
the world of evil.
You read it in the newspapers, you read it all the time, the world is
evil now. You read also that the country is full of foreigners, of criminals,
of illegal people. But when you read the names of the ones in court, they
do not have names like my name. They have the names that have been here
for centuries. And I am not illegal here.
I think I hear someone behind me, walking steadily. There is nothing wrong
with that. I walk at night, this person also walks at night. Perhaps he
is also going home from some job that pays not so good but where he can
hide in the background and try to forget where he came from, why he is
here and what he has had to leave behind. Or perhaps he is not.
If I walk faster, this man behind me will not catch up. If I hear him
walk faster, too, then I know he has no good purpose in mind. So I should
walk faster.
Or I could walk more slowly and let this man go past me. Then I can see,
too, who he is, how he looks, maybe what his purpose is.
When I look back, I see no one, but I know there is someone there. I quicken
my steps.
Out of the darkness there steps a woman. Here, not so far from the West
End, there is one sort of woman who walks here in the darkness and one
sort only.
‘Hey, are you in a hurry?’ she asks.
I have learned always to be polite, no matter how much I distrust those
who speak to me. There are few times this path has not seen me to safety.
I nod my head, say I am going home, and the woman looks at me and laughs.
Laughter is not something that hurts. I smile.
‘What are you grinning at, you black bastard?’ she asks. Her
voice slurs with alcohol.
Laughter doesn’t hurt, but I have heard the words before; they did
not call me ‘black bastard’ then; we were all black back in
the homeland. Instead they used the name of my people, and I tried still
to be polite.
It is hard to be polite when they beat you with sticks, and you wonder
do they have machetes or knives. The scar on my neck starts to throb;
I do not touch it; if I touch it, it will hurt.
‘Won’t you even share a word with me?’ the woman asks,
in her slurred voice. ‘All the same. You’re all the same.’
She tries to put her hand on me, but I push past her and walk on.
Behind me I hear the sounds of a scuffle. The man who has been following
me has met with the drunk woman in the street. She has accosted him as
she accosted me, and he is no more happy than Iwas. The words I cannot
hear, but I hear their tone. She has stopped him on his mission and his
mission is – to catch up with me. To pick some kind of quarrel with
me. To make trouble for me.
I quicken my steps and slip again into the shadows by the side of the
buildings. My pursuer has been held back. It should mean I am safe, but
in this dark night I do not feel safe. It is not a truly dark night, I
remind myself. There are lights from the streetlamps, the light I am trying
to avoid, so that the man who is following me cannot see me. Whatever
danger lurks here, it cannot be as bad as the dangers I have come through.
The city becomes poorer as I walk; the restaurants have faded into blocks
of offices, some of them with signs that say ‘to let’ and
now those fade into houses, the houses of the poor. I am nearly home.
Do I still hear footsteps behind me? I am not sure. There seems to be
a distant noise, it gains speed, someone running. My pursuer has shaken
off the woman who spoke to him and he is getting closer. There is an alley
here, where the bins sit and where sometimes the homeless ones sleep.
In there it is very dark. I slip into the darkness, the true darkness,
and the steps come close, run past me.
I dare to look out, and it is a man in shorts and a vest. The night is
cold but he runs fast and he will not feel the chill. My breath comes
back to me, but I do not step out to follow him. I would not like to put
fear into the heart of a stranger. As I look up from the darkness of the
alley, where no streetlights shine, above me I can see the stars. Their
names I do not know, as they are not the same stars as I would see in
my own country, but they seem friendly stars, lucky stars, and I carry
their memory with me as I walk on through the poor streets to my own apartment
block.
I turn my key in the outside door, and then I climb the stairs. As I open
the door to my home, Lily speaks from the living room.
‘Thomas,’ she says, ‘you did come home on the bus, didn’t
you?’
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