Forest Gate by Peter Akinti Read Free Book Online Page A

have laughed. 'The night they killed my parents,' he would have said, 'while I hid under the stairs, I called to Allah and then to Muhammad and then to the God of Abraham, to Jesus Christ. I asked them to save my mother. She was old school. She'd been religious her whole life, fasting and praying, genuinely devout. She never put a foot wrong. But while she suffered, God and all His prophets remained silent.'
    'What is all the fighting about in your country?' asked James.
    'I asked my dad about this once. He said it began with the collapse of the Ottomans, the last Islamic empire. The Europeans met in Berlin in the 1800s and carved Somalia into slices like pizza. Some slices went to Italy, others to Britain and France. Menelik II, Emperor of Ethiopia, was also a Christian, and he begged his fellow Christians, saying that his country was a Christian island in an Islamic ocean. And so Ethiopia was also given a slice of Somali pizza – Ogaden. This territory has remained the cause of much of our fight with Ethiopia.'
    'I didn't understand a word of that,' said James and Ashvin would have almost spat out his pizza when he laughed.
    'My father sold drugs. He used them too,' James told him. 'In the end he was shot by men he thought were his friends. Two years ago my eldest brother returned from prison with years of his memory erased.' James held his head in his hands and his voice became tense. 'I saw my dad in hospital the night he got shot. He said he was going to be all right. He promised. I was only young. You might think he was bad because he sold drugs but he wasn't. He tried to go straight. The night before my dad died my brother made me kneel down while he prayed. I'd never prayed before, not really. I always felt stupid talking to myself in the dark but not that night. My brother said some words that I thought would make everything all right. Of course, it didn't. My father died. God didn't even answer my one simple prayer. I never pray, not now. I don't ask for anything: happiness, beauty, love, power, order, money, all the world's possibilities aren't worth the sorrow and suffering it seems you have to give in return. Things keep getting worse.'
    James told me he hadn't spoken so openly to anyone else before. Not someone who understood.
    After that they seemed to spend all their time together, sitting in Internet cafes, going to the movies, enjoying bus rides, roaming Oxford Street and sitting in the park. Yet I often think back to James and my brother together in that Pizza Hut in Forest Gate.
    James had five brothers. He said he didn't want to be like them, amoral men whose exploits normal people read about in the Evening Standard on the Tube on their way home from work.
    While they ate Ashvin remarked on the features of their waitress: she was tall with honey-brown eyes. He called her over and James asked for her phone number and email address. She laughed and gave the two boys another set of crayons and a sheet each of plain paper. 'I don't date black men,' she said.
    'But you're African, I can hear it in your voice,' said James.
    'That's why I don't date black men.'
    They didn't understand the girl but I would have given her a high-five. James took the crayons and paper and drew a picture of a satsuma with two green leaves still attached to the top and my brother wrote 'Death is Art' in red and they both laughed more than they should. The man in the London Underground uniform peeked over the booth. He kissed his teeth loudly when he saw the picture. He got to his feet cautiously and tucked his crumpled blue shirt into shabby black trousers. He smoothed the rough fabric on his coat resolutely, all the while watching them with disgust. Then he held up his newspaper and offered it to James and Ashvin.
    'Lickle shits,' he said.
    'Excuse me?' asked James.
    'You think you want to die. You aren't even ready to shave. Lickle shits, get a fucking job like everybody else,' said the old man in an incongruously pleasant