The bird wailed, ‘Povee! Vee!’ Then she hopped about on her perch and reverted to her usual repertoire. ‘Say hello, Flinna! First of March, 1932!’
We both laughed again. This arrangement isn’t going to be so bad, I thought. It’s nice to have someone cheerful in the flat. It’ll stop me getting on to that downhill spiral. At least until I get through this gloomy phase and square things with Mrs Penny. After that, Inna could go home — wherever that was. I realised how little I knew about her and her life before I met her in the hospital, but I guessed we would have time enough to find out.
The hospital had phoned to apologise for the delay in the autopsy, which was due to staff shortages, they said. I felt that until the funeral and mourning period were over I couldn’t really move on in my life. But the parrot lesson had given me an idea: before I could let Inna loose in the neighbourhood I must teach her to play the part of my mother. This would be a challenge. I poured us both some coffee. She drank hers black with four heaped spoons of sugar.
‘Inna, sit down. There’s something we have to discuss.’
‘You want to make sex wit me, Mister Bertie?’ Her eyes twinkled behind her cat’s-eye glasses.
I wondered for a moment whether she was having me on. ‘No, I want you to play the part of my mother. When you go out. When you meet people. Remember we discussed it in the hospital?’
‘Aha! You want I mekkit golabki kobaski slatki? I mekkit delicious wit yushka.’
‘Yes, that too. But the main thing is, you have to say you’re my mother. You have to say your name is Mrs Lily Lukashenko, and your date of birth is the first of March, 1932. Can you remember all that?’
‘First of March, 1932!’ squawked Flossie. ‘Shut up Flinna!’
‘Inna!’ said Inna.
‘Shut up, Inna!’
‘But my birthday is the twentieth of April.’
‘Shut up, Inna!’
‘I know, but you have to pretend, remember?’
‘Oy! Pretend remember not my birthday?’
‘Shut up, Inna!’
‘Shut up, Flossie! Yes, that’s it. Don’t worry, Flossie will remind you.’
‘Who is Flossie?’
‘Flossie the parrot.’
‘No, parrot name Mister Indunky Smeet. Your mother has told me.’
‘Listen. Listen carefully. The parrot is Flossie and you are Mrs Lily Lukashenko.’
‘Oy! Why for such ridiculous name? Alfandari is better.’
‘I know, but it’s my mother’s name.’
Inna sighed deeply. ‘If you say so.’
Inna went out that afternoon to Hampstead, saying she needed to retrieve some of her belongings and to pick up her mail. I gave her a key, and pointed out the bus stop, but five minutes later she was back, saying, ‘I forgot papers.’ She tucked a large brown envelope into her handbag. Why does she need papers to go back to her old flat? I wondered. But it wasn’t until later that I became suspicious of her comings and goings.
Around five o’clock, I spotted her walking back through the cherry grove with a couple of carrier bags. I could see from my window that her bearing already seemed sprightlier, more optimistic, as if buoyed up by my small act of kindness that nature’s fragile vessel doth sustain in life’s uncertain voyage. The thought made me feel rather pleased with myself. She paused to rest near the playground, where the boy who had nearly been hit by the van was idling on the swings, toying with his phone. I wondered who he was. Suddenly Mrs Crazy appeared, heading towards the community garden. She and Inna greeted each other, then to my alarm they began to chat, leaning together as if exchanging confidences. This could be dangerous. If Inna tried to pass herself off as Lily Lukashenko, Mrs Crazy would smell a rat. She knew Mother well, and I had told her she had twisted her ankle.
A few minutes later Inna’s key turned in the lock.
‘Hello, Mister Bertie. Look! I got cabbage for mekkit dish from my country, best in world.’
That evening, we dined on mashed potatoes with yuksha, a type of gravy, and globokli. These turned out to be boiled cabbage leaves stuffed with a mixture of minced meat and rice. Inna had picked up the ingredients in the market at Hoxton and spent an hour in the kitchen preparing them. It would be an exaggeration to say they were delicious, but they were more edible than the fluorescent styrofoam chunks from Shazaad that had become my staple diet. This arrangement was working out just as I’d hoped.
‘Lovely, Inna,’ I said. ‘You’re an excellent cook.’ Which was perhaps a slight overstatement, but I thought she’d be pleased.
Instead she burst into tears and buried her face in her apron. ‘Oy! Oy! My good husband, he was saying same exactly thing!’
I laid a hand on her wrist. ‘Hush. I’m sure he is in heaven looking down on you.’
Sometimes a white lie can mend matters, but this one clearly opened up a wound.
‘Not in heaven! Dovik is Jew of Sephardim, I am Christian of True Believer! Oy! We will never be together in heaven wit Lily and Lenin and Khrushchev!’
‘I don’t think Lenin and Khrushchev will make it to heaven, Inna. Religion and politics have slightly different rules.’
‘Not so different. In my country first we have religion, everybody dead, then we get communism, everybody dead, then we get religion again, still everybody dead. Always everybody dead!’
She crossed herself in a display of fervour which culminated in a violent coughing fit. Not wanting to risk another green phlegm eruption, I quickly changed the subject.
‘Never mind, Inna. What’s past is prologue. I saw you met one of the neighbours today — the lady in the purple coat. Her name is Mrs Cracey, but we call her Mrs Crazy.’
‘Aha. Yes, very nice lady, she told me husband was bishop. But dead. I say why for bishop living in council flat?’ Her nose wrinkled up. ‘She said he come from East London lost all money at poking. I said my husband come from East Ukraina lost all money at smoking. Ha ha. Men always good for losing money.’
So Mrs Crazy was now claiming her late husband had been a bishop, was she? The old fibber. Hence the jewellery and showy headgear, no doubt.
‘So what else did you tell her, Inna, about … you know … about us?’
‘Don’t worry, Bertie, I tell her I am your mother.’
Violet: Risk
Risk. Violet has never thought about it much before, except when it affects her directly. But now the world seems to be full of it. The CIA World Factbook, for example, paints a frightening picture of corruption and terrorism in Kenya which is at odds with her own idyllic memories.
The Nairobi shopping mall project is turning out to be more challenging than she imagined. The land the mall will be built on is to the east of the city, not a part she is familiar with, uncomfortably close to the Nairobi River where flooding or landslip could be a hazard, not far from Eastleigh with its Al Shabaab influences, and the Gikomba Market, a vast emporium of clothing from UK charity shops where fires are a regular occurrence. So many risks. If she had been setting up a major development, she would not have chosen this place. She wonders who owns the development company HN Holdings. Buried in the paperwork she finds the name Horace Nzangu. It rings a bell. Where has she heard it before? Has there been a proper survey or planning permission granted for this development, or did money change hands to get it approved?
Out of curiosity, she finds the Nairobi City Planning Department online, and telephones with her questions, slipping in a few friendly words of Swahili that she remembers, but after an hour of being transferred from one department to another, asked for details, and kept on hold, she finds she has gone around in a full circle and learned absolutely nothing — except that there is no apparent record of a planning application, nor anyone available to talk to her who is responsible for planning in that area. She’s fizzing with frustration when Gillian Chalmers emerges from her office with a pile of slip cases, clack-clacking on her high heels as she heads towards the lifts.