Dada 111

‘Everything’ I said.

Excellent, he said. We fell silent and Mo kept on smiling. He would look down and then up at me and our eyes would briefly meet and he would look down again. The fat women was shouting at the man next to me, her husband was a big, light skinned man with an honest face  who could have worked down there on the ships if they  let him on the dock. She was continuing a conversation that they had already started.

‘Saba didn’t want to take him’ she shouted at the top of her lungs. ‘Right the man said, right’

‘I told her you’d have him back when you got out but she said you wouldn’t want to take him’ The man looked as if he wished he was sitting on the floor and just making light easy stuff with his hands, like the others, maybe Dada had felt the same way.

Mo shouted that Iskra said hello and I replied ‘thanks’ but my voice was blocked out by the man next to me who was asking ‘Is the kid all right.’

His wife laughed and shouted back and said, ‘never better, he has a job with the runners, the only ‘Manta they’d let near the water ‘

Something inside me shuddered and I felt a wild pain of longing for this boy I had never seen. Go swimming where I had swum or paint the side of ships or decks like Dada who said he grew up in the sea and that each time there came the sound of a distant siren from a tug, it would always remind him of home bound ships and the longing to be away. The noise of the water was to him like the Silk Road to the Europeans. He said it reminded him of Liverpool or San Francisco and the decent drink and nights he had spent dancing there.

The prisoner on my left was a small young man with delicate hands who never spoke. I noticed he was sitting opposite the little old woman in black clothes and that the two of them were staring at each other intently but I did not have time to watch them anymore because Mo shouted that I shouldn’t give up hope. I said yes. I looked at him and wanted to touch the  hair that had streamed out behind him but it was all tucked away now .He started to list the contents of food prices and how dear and expensive everything was now and the price of vegetables.

He did not mention Dade’s apartment nor how beautiful everything was in the water under the sun or on his shoulder when we were on the beach, or nights under the window in the rain and the feel his soft clothes that he wasn’t wearing now. I didn’t know exactly what more I could say to take him away from his vegetable list. Surely there must be a code to all this but maybe people don’t speak of the thing in question before them; maybe it was always about something else. Maybe that was what Mo meant because he kept smiling and all I could see were his bright teeth and the little wrinkles around his eyes and think of our time together.

‘You’ll get out and we’ll go to the market again’ he shouted again.