Excerpt from The Fortune Men by Nadifa Mohamed, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

Kow

[ One ]

Tiger Bay, February 1952

The King is dead. Long live the Queen." The announcer's voice crackles from the wireless and winds around the rapt patrons of Berlin's Milk Bar as sinuously as the fog curls around the mournful street lamps, their wan glow barely illuminating the cobblestones.

The noise settles as milkshakes and colas clink against Irish coffees, and chairs scrape against the black-and-white tiled floor.

Berlin hammers a spoon against the bar and calls out with his lion tamer's bark, "Raise your glasses, ladies and gentlemen, and send off our old King to Davy Jones's Locker."

"He'll meet many of our men down there," replies Old Ismail, "he better write his apologies on the way down."

"I b-b-b-et he wr-wr-wr-ote them on his d-d-d-eathbed," a punter cackles.

Through the rock 'n' roll and spitting espresso machine Berlin hears someone calling his name. "Maxa tiri  ? " he asks as Mahmood Mattan pushes through the crowd at the bar.

"I said, get me another coffee."

Berlin catches his Trinidadian wife's waist and steers her towards Mahmood. "Lou, sort this troublemaker another coffee."

Ranged along the bar are many of Tiger Bay's Somali sailors; they look somewhere between gangsters and dandies in their cravats, pocket chains and trilby hats. Only Mahmood wears a homburg pulled down low over his gaunt face and sad eyes. He is a quiet man, always appearing and disappearing silently, at the fringes of the sailors or the gamblers or the thieves. Men pull their possessions closer when he is around and keep their eyes on his long, elegant fingers, but Tahir Gass—who was only recently released from Whit church asylum—leans close to him, looking for friendship that Mahmood won't give. Tahir is on a road no one can or will walk down with him, his limbs spasming from invisible electric shocks, his face a cinema screen of wild expressions.

"Independence any day now." Ismail gulps from his mug and smiles. "India is gone, what can they say to the rest?"

Berlin makes his eyes bold. "They say we got you by the balls, darkie! We own your land, your trains, your rivers, your schools, the coffee grains at the bottom of your cup. You see what they do to the Mau Mau and all the Kikuyu in Kenya? Lock them up, man and child."

Mahmood takes his espresso from Lou and smirks at the exchange; he cares nothing for politics. While trying to straighten his cufflinks a drop of coffee runs over the rim and falls on to his brightly polished shoes. Grabbing a handkerchief from his trouser pocket, he wipes it off and buffs the stain away. The brogues are new and as black and sharp as Newfoundland coal, better shoes than any other fella here has on his feet. Three £1 notes burn away in his pocket, ready for a poker game; saved through missed lunches and nights spent without the fire, mummified in his blankets. Leaning over the bar, he nudges Ismail. "Billa Khan coming tonight?"

"Me come from the jungle? I wish I come from the jungle! I said to him, look around you, this is the jungle, you got bushes and trees everywhere, in my country nothing grows." Ismail finishes his joke and then turns to Mahmood. "How would I know? Ask one of your crooks."

Kissing his teeth, Mahmood throws the espresso down his throat and grabs his fawn mackintosh before stalking through the crowd and out of the door.

The cold air hits his face like a spade, and despite urgently forcing the jacket around his body the bitter February night takes hold of him and makes his teeth chatter. A grey smudge hovers over everything he sees, the result of a hot chink of coal flying from a furnace and into his right eye. A pain so pure that it had hoisted him up and backwards on to the cooling clinkers behind his feet. The clatter of shovels and devil's picks as the other stokers came to his aid, their hands tearing his fingers from his face. His tears had distorted their familiar faces, their eyes the only bright spots in the gloomy engine room, the emergency alarm clattering as the chief engineer's boots marched down the steel staircase. Afterwards, two weeks in a hospital in Hamburg with a fat bandage wrapped around his head.

Excerpted from The Fortune Men by Nadifa Mohamed. Copyright © 2021 by Nadifa Mohamed. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.