It was at a tube station that he met the Angolans who would arrange his marriage, exactly two years and three days after he arrived in England; he kept count.
“We’ll talk in the car,” one of them had said earlier over the phone. Their old model black Mercedes was fussily maintained, the floor mats wavy from vacuuming, the leather seats shiny with polish. The two men looked alike, with thick eyebrows that almost touched, although they had told him they were just friends, and they were dressed alike, too, in leather jackets and long gold chains. Their tabletop haircuts that sat on their heads like tall hats surprised him, but perhaps it was part of their hip image, to have retro haircuts. They spoke to him with the authority of people who had done this before, and also with a slight condescension; his fate was, after all, in their hands.
“We decided on Newcastle because we know people there and London is too hot right now, too many marriages happening in London, yeah, so we don’t want trouble,” one of them said. “Everything is going to work out. Just make sure you keep a low profile, yeah? Don’t attract any attention to yourself until the marriage is done. Don’t fight in the pub, yeah?”
“I’ve never been a very good fighter,” Obinze said drily, but the Angolans did not smile.
“You have the money?” the other one asked.
Obinze handed over two hundred pounds, all in twenty-pound notes that he had taken out of the cash machine over two days. It was a deposit, to prove he was serious. Later, after he met the girl, he would pay two thousand pounds.
“The rest has to be up front, yeah? We’ll use some of it to do the running around and the rest goes to the girl. Man, you know we’re not making anything from this. We usually ask for much more but we’re doing this for Iloba,” the first one said.
Obinze did not believe them, even then. He met the girl, Cleotilde, a few days later, at a shopping center, in a McDonald’s whose windows looked out onto the dank entrance of a tube station across the street. He sat at a table with the Angolans, watching people hurry past, and wondering which of them was her, while the Angolans both whispered into their phones; perhaps they were arranging other marriages.
“Hello there!” she said.
She surprised him. He had expected somebody with pockmarks smothered under heavy makeup, somebody tough and knowing. But here she was, dewy and fresh, bespectacled, olive-skinned, almost childlike, smiling shyly at him and sucking a milkshake through a straw. She looked like a university freshman who was innocent or dumb, or both.
“I just want to know that you’re sure about doing this,” he told her, and then, worried that he might frighten her away, he added, “I’m very grateful, and it won’t take too much from you—in a year I’ll have my papers and we’ll do the divorce. But I just wanted to meet you first and make sure you are okay to do this.”
“Yes,” she said.
He watched her, expecting more. She played with her straw, shyly, not meeting his eyes, and it took him a while to realize that she was reacting more to him than to the situation. She was attracted to him.
“I want to help my mom out. Things are tight at home,” she said, a trace of a non-British accent underlining her words.
“She’s with us, yeah,” one of the Angolans said, impatiently, as though Obinze had dared to question what they had already told him.
“Show him your details, Cleo,” the other Angolan said.
His calling her Cleo rang false: Obinze sensed this from the way he said it, and from the way she heard it, the slight surprise on her face. It was a forced intimacy; the Angolan had never called her Cleo before. Perhaps he had never even called her anything before. Obinze wondered how the Angolans knew her. Did they have a list of young women with European Union passports who needed money? Cleotilde pushed at her hair, a mass of tight coils, and adjusted her glasses, as though first preparing herself before she presented her passport and license. Obinze examined them. He would have thought her younger than twenty-three.
“Can I have your number?” Obinze asked.
“Just call us for anything,” the Angolans said, almost at the same time. But Obinze wrote his number on a napkin and pushed it across to her. The Angolans gave him a sly look. Later, on the phone, she told him that she had been living in London for six years and was saving money to go to fashion school, even though the Angolans had told him she lived in Portugal.
“Would you like to meet?” he asked. “It will be much easier if we try to get to know each other a little.”
“Yes,” she said without hesitation.
They ate fish and chips in a pub, a thin crust of grime on the sides of the wood table, while she talked about her love of fashion and asked him about Nigerian traditional dress. She seemed a little more mature; he noticed the shimmer on her cheeks, the more defined curl of her hair, and knew she had made an effort with her appearance.
“What will you do after you get your papers?” she asked him. “Will you bring your girlfriend from Nigeria?”
He was touched by her obviousness. “I don’t have a girlfriend.”
“I’ve never been to Africa. I’d love to go.” She said “Africa” wistfully, like an admiring foreigner, loading the word with exotic excitement. Her black Angolan father had left her white Portuguese mother when she was only three years old, she told him, and she had not seen him since, nor had she ever been to Angola. She said this with a shrug and a cynical raise of her eyebrows, as though it had not bothered her, an effort so out of character, so jarring, that it showed him just how deeply it did bother her. There were difficulties in her life that he wanted to know more about, parts of her thick shapely body that he longed to touch, but he was wary of complicating things. He would wait until after the marriage, until the business side of their relationship was finished. She seemed to understand this without their talking about it. And so as they met and talked in the following weeks, sometimes practicing how they would answer questions during their immigration interview and other times just talking about football, there was, between them, the growing urgency of restrained desire. It was there in their standing close to each other, not touching, as they waited at the tube station, in their teasing each other about his support of Arsenal and her support of Manchester United, in their lingering gazes. After he had paid the Angolans two thousand pounds in cash, she told him that they had given her only five hundred pounds.
“I’m just telling you. I know you don’t have any more money. I want to do this for you,” she said.
She was looking at him, her eyes liquid with things unsaid, and she made him feel whole again, made him remember how starved he was for something simple and pure. He wanted to kiss her, her upper lip pinker and shinier with lip gloss than the lower, to hold her, to tell her how deeply, irrepressibly grateful he was. She would never stir his cauldron of worries, never wave her power in his face. One Eastern European woman, Iloba had told him, had asked the Nigerian man, an hour before their court wedding, to give her a thousand pounds extra or she would walk away. In panic, the man had begun to call all his friends, to raise the money.
“Man, we gave you a good deal” was all one of the Angolans said when Obinze asked how much they had given Cleotilde, in that tone of theirs, the tone of people who knew how much they were needed. It was they, after all, who took him to a lawyer’s office, a low-voiced Nigerian in a swivel chair, sliding backwards to reach a file cabinet as he said, “You can still get married even though your visa is expired. In fact, getting married is now your only choice.” It was they who provided water and gas bills, going back six months, with his name and a Newcastle address, they who found a man who would “sort out” his driving license, a man cryptically called Brown. Obinze met Brown at the train station in Barking; he stood near the gate as agreed, amid the bustle of people, looking around and waiting for his phone to ring because Brown had refused to give him a phone number.
“Are you waiting for somebody?” Brown stood there, a slight man, his winter hat pulled down to his eyebrows.
“Yes. I’m Obinze,” he said, feeling like a character in a spy novel who had to speak in silly code. Brown led him to a quiet corner, handed over an envelope, and there it was, his license, with his photo and the genuine, slightly worn look of something owned for a year. A slight plastic card, but it weighed down his pocket. A few days later, he walked with it into a London building which, from the outside, looked like a church, steepled and grave, but inside was shabby, harried, knotted with people. Signs were scrawled on whiteboards: BIRTHS AND DEATHS THIS WAY. MARRIAGE REGISTRATION THIS WAY. Obinze, his expression carefully frozen in neutrality, handed the license over to the registrar behind the desk.
A woman was walking towards the door, talking loudly to her companion. “Look how crowded this place is. It’s all sham marriages, all of them, now that Blunkett is after them.”
Perhaps she had come to register a death, and her words merely the lonely lashings-out of grief, but he felt the familiar tightening of panic in his chest. The registrar was examining his license, taking too long. The seconds lengthened and curdled. All sham marriages, all of them rang in Obinze’s head. Finally the registrar looked up and pushed across a form.