Free Mimi's Ghost by Tim Parks Page A

to chorus. That extraordinary Italian impatience! Kwame looked up to catch Morris’s eye through the now glistening windscreen. As on two previous occasions when this had happened, there was a definite hint of complicity in the polished black face, Morris was quite sure of it. He buzzed down the window and instead of offering the customary thousand lire invited Kwame to get in, then waited perhaps thirty more seconds till the light turned to amber, before releasing the clutch and accelerating away. There was simply no need for people to be so aggressive.
    Morris had learnt the black’s name, or perhaps surname, when he had helped him with his application for a permesso di soggiomo at the police station. Then there had been these meetings on the busy circular road by the cemetery, where Kwame and a dozen others apparently slept in the empty grave niches in the walls. Now, as Morris made his gesture of invitation, the black simply left his bucket on the pavement and climbed into the car with a great beaming smile on his face and no questions asked, not a word. As Peter had once dropped his nets when Jesus beckoned, Morris thought; and he was impressed and deeply touched by this demonstration of trust, intrigued too by the other man’s simple life. Because for all his love of elegance and class, if there was one thing Morris was not, it was a snob. Indeed, his genius was to recognise class in a boy like Kwame, the way he recognised culture in a penny-pinching fellow like Forbes, and had found such a potent cocktail of virtue, beauty and sensuality in a total non-entity like Massimina.
    Silent in city traffic, they inched their way to the centre. Morris found, as somehow he knew he would, the last available parking meter in the approach to Piazza Bra, and again he couldn’t help wondering whether there wasn’t some kind of destiny guiding his actions. It was the way, whenever he began something, everything seemed to conspire to make events turn out as they must. There was a Forbes to keep the hostel for you. There was a crumbling old house to be cheaply rented. There were Kwame and his boys at the cemetery. There was the mammoth order from Doorways. So often, it seemed, he was nothing more than an agent weaving together threads that had clearly been made for each other. It was a topic he might do well to explore with Massimina. Perhaps from beyond the grave the pattern would be clear to her. Perhaps she might even explain to him what seemed at the moment the rift in that pattern, his great mistake in life: his humiliating marriage to Paola. A form of penance perhaps? A constant and mocking reminder of the great wrong he had done? He took the black into a department store and bought him new shoes, new jeans, new sweater, new down jacket.
    Kwame was neither overwhelmed nor ungrateful. Tall and remarkably healthy, Morris thought, for his hours collecting small change in the freezing exhaust fumes and his nights wrapped in a blanket in a hole in the wall, he stood easily in his new clothes at the polished granite bar of one of the spiffier cafés in the piazza, and accepted a beer.
    â€˜How many of you are there?’ Morris asked, speaking English. He rather enjoyed the truculent glances of a clientele unused to having blacks in their bar.
    Ten, eleven, twelve.’ Kwame shrugged his shoulders, still smiling broadly. ‘Depends on the day, the polizia.’
    â€˜And all good boys?’
    The thick, black lower lip pouted out in an eloquent expression of ‘How should I know?’
    â€˜But reliable?’ Morris insisted, scooping up a handful of peanuts.
    Again the pouting lower lip, quickly followed by the beaming smile, the bright black eyes with their fascinating mixture of complicity and reticence. The boy must be a good twenty centimetres taller than Morris. And so very black.
    â€˜Because I want to offer you all a job,’ Morris said. ‘And a place to live.’
    It was more than