Poonah manoeuvred her Vauxhall Corsa into a parking bay in Area 20 reserved for airport staff. She turned off the engine and stepped out. It was 5.30 a.m. but there was no cold breeze, no wind and the sun was already comfortable in the sky. The weather was so perfectly warm you would think Britain loved tropical migrants. Perhaps the rain was taking a break.
She opened the rear door and picked up her rucksack. Armed with her customary I came to work – Britain is not my home attitude, she headed for Terminal 4 of the airport. She anticipated the usual inconveniences of a twelve-hour shift: aching feet, fatigue, clueless passengers, rude ones, ditzy ones, entitled celebrities and – courtesy of insufficient sunshine on African skin – the niggling pain in her knee. In her bag were painkillers, two cans of Red Bull and, if the worst came to the worst, Pro Plus, her turbo boost.
As she walked, a smidge of self-satisfaction fleeted across her face. Poonah was a success story. She had mastered that perfect combination of sheer hard work and stinting frugality that an immigrant with a deadline needed. Even when she visited home, Poonah dressed like she was visiting from Masaka. She did not carry gifts for relations except her children and her mother. She did not flash money helping this one, that one with their problems, reinforcing the idea that in Britain money grows on trees. She had bought two houses back home – one rented out, the other occupied by her mother and her children. She had accumulated savings in an ISA account in the region of £30,000. She had concluded that Ugandans who failed in Britain were the ones who came as an alternative. The idiots who had jobs back home but thought, Let me try Britain and see. They came expecting to get similar jobs but ended up as cleaners. Those rarely recovered. But if you had hit rock bottom and cried out to Uganda Help but it sucked its teeth, saying, You can die if you want, no matter what Britain threw at you, you thrived.
Mpona Watson was the name in her passport but she introduced herself as Poonah. Her mother had named her Mpony’obugumba. Her father, Ssenkubuge, added Nnampiima, one of the most beautiful girls’ names in Buganda. That made her name Mpony’obugumba Nnampiima. Add Ssenkubuge when the West demands a ‘family name’ and she would be Mpony’obugumba Nnampiima Ssenkubuge. Poonah clipped it. Who cared about her mother’s sentiments on barrenness or what the Ganda consider a beautiful name? She had not come to Britain to showcase Uganda’s naming creativity. And if you challenged her on altering her name or questioned her loyalty to African culture she would ask What has Africa done for me?
Poonah was not one of those middle- or upper-class Ugandans who, having grown up in the posh suburbs of Kampala and been fed on middle- or upper-class British images paraded on TV, in cinema and magazines, arrived in London’s Peckham or Manchester’s Rusholme and – because they had imagined that all of Britain was Buckingham Palace, Westminster Abbey, the Savoy and skyscrapers – whined in dismay You mean this is England? Or who on hearing the Mancunian dialect, ask But these people; what happened to grammar? Those privileged types did not realise that, despite their cushioned upbringing back home, they arrived in the roughest parts of Britain, to which Ugandans, rich or poor, tended to gravitate.
When Poonah arrived in Britain, she was in awe. Carl lived in Urmston, an upmarket area in Manchester where you asked for pumpkin and were told, ‘Pumpkin comes out once a year, mate – Halloween.’
She was suitably intimidated by the absence of people in the streets, the orderly life, the silence of the world, the obsessive timekeeping, the hyper-politeness and the fact that though she spoke English well enough, she did not understand one word that was said.
Poonah would tell you that Carl had fished her out of Nakivubo Canal dripping with need. To her, Carl was a brave Briton who came to Uganda looking for his ancestry but afterwards did charity work. Some British people start charity organisations in Uganda, some adopt children; Carl Mpiima Watson defied British immigration laws, omitted Mpiima from his name in church (he had had no idea that no church in Buganda would marry a boy called Mpiima to a girl called Nnampiima) and brought her to Britain as his wife. When she met him, Poonah still used her proper name, Mpony’obugumba Nnampiima. In fact, it was the Nnampiima that got Carl interested.
‘You mean we’re brother and sister?’
‘Same clan: we can’t fall in love.’
Unfortunately, Carl could not say Mpony’obugumba. When she said M-po, M-po Mponye, he said Pony. She said nye, nye; he said niye. Try Mpona. He said Poonah. She became Poonah.
Carl brought her to Britain with the enthusiasm of a British subject giving the British establishment the middle finger. For three and a half years he looked after her like an older brother but held her like a wife in public. Three of those years, Poonah worked and saved. When she was ready to hunt for herself, Carl let her out in the British wild. By marrying her and guiding her through the maze of British systems, Carl raised Poonah, her three children and mother back at home out of necessity. That was far more than what the G20 achieved in a year.
Poonah left her children back home because British Ugandans warned that to take children to Britain was to tether yourself to the doorknob. What is the use of going to Europe if you can’t leave the house to work? And if you do, childcare wolfs down your earnings. Besides, children used to African strictness get to Britain and, because they can’t handle the kind of freedom Britain gives them, run wild. You chastise them, they call the police – parents’ hands are tied: you either dance to your children’s ntoli or Social Services takes them away.
Poonah did not need to be told twice. She told her children, ‘You know what, stay here with your grandmother. I am going with Uncle Carl to find work so we can have a good life. Be good, be grateful and study hard because this world is tough. I’ll come back as soon as I can.’
But there were people who brought kilemya, the kind of negativity designed to dishearten. We hear you’re going to Bungeleza, but do you know what they think of us over there?
Poonah asked them one question: ‘Are their thoughts bullets? As long as their thoughts don’t take food off my plate or the roof off my house, as long as when I work I get paid, I don’t care what they think.’
That attitude saw Poonah rise through the ranks. In the beginning, she sorted apples in a factory-like building – Gala from Pink Lady, russets from golden, Braeburns from Granny Smiths – on a conveyor. Soon she started to work out the British system (manager, team, team leader, minimum pay, overtime, National Insurance). Then she worked out the English language, how and where it discriminated against its own native speakers. Poonah decided to acquire the Mancunian twang. You don’t do menial jobs and speak posh English – colleagues isolate you, claiming you have airs. Poonah climbed out of the factories into care work. For two years, she looked after old people in two nursing homes. In one, she worked nights Monday to Wednesday. In another she worked daytime Friday to Sunday.
From there she joined a company providing support to people with mental health problems. She worked seventy-two hours a week until she sprouted premature grey hairs. She cut back to forty hours and offered to do bank work occasionally. By then she had so mastered the rhythms of the Mancunian dialect you would have thought she had grown up in Moss Side.
After four years of support work and a few NVQ certificates, she applied for this job at the airport and became an ASO, an Aviation Security Officer. She registered for overtime and built a reputation of reliability. She planned, between 2008 and 2010, to join university to do a BA in social work. Afterwards, she would do social work in Britain for five years to boost her CV and then return home.
It was on account of her upward mobility and job training, besides the free medical care – letters from the NHS reminding her to go to breast screening – that Poonah couldn’t stand Ugandans bad-mouthing Britain. You criticised Britain in her presence, she asked you Why don’t you go back home?
She arrived at the concourse in Terminal 4 and the buzz of passengers queuing to check in was deafening. As she reached the lifts below the escalator, a woman lamented, ‘I swear, passengers check in their brains when they check in their luggage!’
Poonah turned. A member of Monarch Airlines ground staff pointed at a family – a horrified woman and a guilt-ridden man – dashing across the concourse. Behind them, two teenagers ran after them grudgingly.
‘What happened?’
‘He left the urn with her mother’s ashes in the toilets.’
Poonah said what a Briton would say: ‘Says it all, doesn’t it?’
Father and son disappeared into the gents while mother and daughter waited outside. Poonah was about to walk away when the woman asked about her shift.
‘The big one,’ Poonah said. ‘Six to six.’
‘Ouch, it’s gonna hurt, I can tell you that, what with foreign students going home, sun-chasers on the move, stag and hen parties in bloody Benidorm, football fans travelling to Germany for the World Cup and’ – she winked – ‘that on top of the two notorious air carriers.’ The two notorious airlines were PIA (Pakistan International Airlines) and Air Jamaica. They carried some of the most airport-nervous passengers.
‘Oh, yeah,’ Poonah remembered, ‘they both fly on Wednesdays.’
‘I finish at ten and I’m out of here before hell breaks loose.’
Poonah walked downstairs to the restrooms. She was not really worried about the busy shift ahead. At her job, busy made time fly. You didn’t want to stand there counting the minutes. She arrived at the restrooms and swiped at the door. After clocking in, she decided to eat breakfast. If it was going to be as busy as the woman had suggested, she would not get a break for four hours. She sat down to open her bag and her belly sat on her lap. The lower buttons on her blouse gasped. She sucked in her stomach but it hardly shifted. She sucked her teeth and blamed eating and sleeping at irregular hours because of shift work. It messed with her metabolism.
Just as she finished her breakfast, she heard the Nights coming down the stairs from the search area to clock out from their shift. As their voices drew near, Poonah picked up a Metro nearby and pretended to read. There was a rift between Days and Nights. One of those feuds you walk into on a new job and take sides on without realising or knowing why. All she had heard was that Nights were a nasty bunch.
They lined up outside the swipe machine and waited for 5.45 a.m. to clock out. At 5.50 Poonah grabbed her bag and started towards the search area. Members of her group, five other ASOs, walked ahead. She was not buddy-buddy with them because today they smile at you, tomorrow they pretend not to know you. You meet a colleague in a supermarket and he looks away like he’s ashamed to know you. Then there are those who are nice and expect you to suck up to them. The worst are friendly when no one is about but find them in the company of other ASOs and they look away. Soon, Poonah stopped playing along and glared everyone away Ugandan style. They declared her a nasty piece of work.
She arrived at the search area. From the sheer numbers of ASOs there, even Administration anticipated a mad day. All five X-ray machines and walk-in metal detectors were open. Each X-ray was manned by at least seven people – one on loading, helping passengers put their bags into trays before feeding them into the X-ray, one sitting down screening the bags and five stood at the back of the X-ray doing bag searches. There was a queue of passengers at each point of entry already.
The walk-in metal detectors were manned by four ASOs – two male and two female – ‘frisking’, as body searches were called. As Poonah looked for a space to insert herself, Hannah, the team leader, came up.
‘Can you do bag search on the third machine, Poonah?’
She walked across the search area and stood at the back of the third X-ray machine. Trays, loaded with passengers’ bags, slid out of the X-ray and the ASOs at the top pushed them down the rollers towards the bottom, where Poonah stood. She picked them up and arranged them on the search tables ready to be collected by passengers.
Soon, she was at the top of the queue receiving bags out of the X-ray machine and pushing them to the bottom where passengers picked them up. She searched a few random bags and it went on until she was at the top of the line for the fourth time. The ASO screening the bags stopped the X-ray to scrutinise an image.
‘Can you find out what this is, Poonah?’ He indicated an image on the screen. It was coiled, with both organic and inorganic material. He let the tray with the bag out.
Poonah picked up the tray and turned to the passengers waiting across the machine. ‘Whose items are these?’
A priest, very tall, fortyish, put his hand up.
‘Could you step over to the search tables, please?’
Poonah started with the routine questions: ‘Did you pack this bag yourself?’
The priest nodded.
‘Did anyone give you anything to carry for him or her?…Did you leave the bag unattended at any time?’
The priest shook his head at both questions.
‘This is a specific bag search; there is an object in your bag we could not identify: do you mind if I look?’
‘If you must.’
This prompted Poonah to whisper, ‘Do you by any chance have a whip in here?’, hoping to spare the priest embarrassment.
‘I beg your pardon: I am a man of the cloth!’
Poonah emptied the bag – mobile phone, wallet, shaver, car and house keys, a pair of socks rolled into a ball, a camera, a pair of sunglasses. She put each item into the tray until she got to the bottom of the bag. There, coiled like a snake, was a whip – black, leather.
Poonah retrieved it and showed it to the priest. ‘Is this yours?’
The priest’s face went scarlet. Passengers who had been sneaking peeks looked away. Poonah picked up the bag with the tray and showed the whip to the ASO screening bags.
‘Naughty, naughty.’ He twirled his chair, saw the priest and turned back, sniggering, ‘Oi oi, vicar!’
Poonah put the bag and tray with all the other items back into the machine for extra X-raying. When they came through, the screening ASO nodded his satisfaction.
Poonah walked back to the priest. ‘I’m afraid you can’t take the whip, Reverend. It’s not allowed in the cabin.’
She threw it on the heap of confiscated items. After repacking the bag, she smiled. ‘Have a nice flight, Reverend.’
As she put back the tray, one of the female ASOs on the frisk asked Poonah for a swap. She accepted reluctantly. ASOs hated the frisk. It was at the frisk that passengers staged their most devious resistance. She walked to one side of the metal detector and said hi to Alison, the other female ASO.
All went well for the first twenty minutes – women stepped through the metal detector and she and Alison rubbed down passengers who set it off to make sure they were not carrying items of threat airside and onto aircraft.
Just then Poonah pulled a woman: ‘Could you step over to me, madam?’ Because the passenger had not set off the machine, Poonah explained, ‘This is a random search, madam,’ even though her randoms tended to be every tenth female passenger. ‘Do you mind being searched here, or would you rather go somewhere private?’
‘You’ve pulled me because I am black. You think I am carrying drugs because I am Jamaican.’
Poonah wanted to say I thought you were African, but instead smiled. ‘Really?’
‘It’s not the first time. We blacks are the worst to each other.’
Poonah ignored it. Every passenger had a reason for being pulled. Irish, Asians, blacks, Muslims, goths, people with tattoos or piercings, men with ponytails, all were persecuted by airport security.
She had done the passenger’s neck, arms, under the breasts, back and stomach. She was reaching into the back of the waistband, bringing the passenger very close to herself, when the woman exclaimed, ‘Eh, are you a lesbian?’
Poonah ignored her.
‘I can tell a lesbian when I see one.’
‘You mean you’re so irresistible all lesbians want to touch you?’
‘No, but I mean…’
Poonah started on the legs, but no matter how wide the woman stepped Poonah could not search between her thighs. She reached for the handheld metal detector and passed it around the passenger’s front and back. She had squatted to rub the ankles when the woman let loose a fart on top of Poonah’s head. Poonah stood up and stepped away.
‘Oops,’ she giggled. ‘I am so sorry: it just escaped.’
‘I am going to treat that as an attempt to obstruct me from searching you. Come’ – Poonah pulled out a chair – ‘take a seat. Take off your shoes, belt, bracelets, ring and danglers from your ears, please.’ By now ASOs stole amused glances. They loved it when black people gave Poonah grief.
The woman pulled them off and dropped them into a tray. Poonah took them back for extra X-raying. Then she told the woman to get up and walk through the metal detector again without them. There was no need, but Poonah felt like it. As she gave back her belongings she smiled. ‘Have a nice journey.’
Before she could get back to her post and whisper her outrage to Alison, a woman stepped through the detector and set it off. Poonah motioned to her. ‘Step over to me, madam.’
‘Did I set it off again?’ The passenger looked up at the machine where it flashed red. ‘I always do: too much iron in my blood.’
Alison rolled her eyes.
Luckily, the passenger knew the drill. She stood legs apart, arms stretched out to the sides without prompting. Then she sighed. ‘I’m glad I changed my knickers.’
Poonah had long decided that body searches were so intrusive that some passengers said to themselves If you’re going to touch me everywhere you might as well hear my life’s story.
As soon as Poonah started rubbing her arms, the passenger went frolicsome: ‘Uhhhh, I haven’t been touched in years.’
Poonah kept a straight face.
She found a mobile phone in the passenger’s trousers and told her, ‘This is what set the machine off.’ She put the phone in the machine to be X-rayed. After the search, she handed the phone back to the passenger and wished her a good flight. The woman leant in and whispered, ‘I’ve heard that you blacks are good at this sort of thing, but I had no idea!’
By the time Poonah recovered, the passenger had gone.
Alison was seething. She whispered, ‘I bet she left that phone in her pockets on purpose, I bet she wanted to be frisked, perv! You get all sorts in this place. We call them lesbos in this country. They disgust me. You Africans are right; don’t let them destroy your culture.’
To Poonah, the passenger was not necessarily gay. Desperate, maybe. On the frisk, passengers said all sorts just to rattle you. One time after being frisked, this woman smiled at an ASO and said, ‘I hope you enjoyed that more than I did!’ The ASO was having none of it. She whispered back, ‘Trust me: you’re not all that!’ Another time, a camp Somali lad walked through and set off the metal detector. Being Somali and camp was one thing; being terribly ticklish was another. He was so unprepared for being frisked that, as he was rubbed down, he yelped, hopping from one leg to the other as if walking barefoot on hot embers. Afterwards, as he picked up his tray, tears running down his face, an ASO turned to another and whispered, ‘You mean they can be gay too?’
Poonah paused to catch her breath, and froze. Across from her at the back of the main machine stood Nnamuli. Poonah lost her rhythm and stood for too long. In the background, she felt a current of excitement run through the search area. She glanced towards where the commotion came from, but only to make sure that Nnamuli standing in the search area was not a dream. Wrestlers had arrived, but Poonah looked back to Nnamuli. Nnamuli still stood in the search area, not as a passenger but as a new ASO. Poonah called the next female passenger through.
As far as Poonah’s shifts in Security at the airport went, this one had been so far unremarkable – until Nnamuli arrived. Nnamuli was not just another Ugandan; her family had once employed Poonah when she first arrived in Kampala, an A-level dropout from Buwama looking for a bright future. At the time, Nnamuli’s dad had been an MP, not yet a cabinet minister. They had had a supermarket along Jinja Road. They had employed Poonah as one of the three shop attendants. Because the shop closed late, Poonah, the youngest of the shop attendants, slept in a room above. Sometimes, after closing, Nnamuli’s father would come to the shop to balance the books. After letting him in, Poonah would go to her room. He would call as he left and Poonah would lock the door.
One day, Nnamuli, who was the same age as Poonah, had come to get something from the shop and was shocked to find her father there balancing the books. Soon after she had gone home, Nnamuli’s mother had arrived angrier than a cobra at midday.
‘Pack your bags and get out.’
Poonah asked why.
‘I said, get your stuff and get out.’
Poonah remembered that her husband was downstairs and understood. This was a world where women suspected that men were so blind with desire they would cheat with anything. Denying it was a waste of time. It was a wife saying to her husband Watch me throw the object of your desire out of this place. And the husband’s silent contemptuous silence of Go on: see if I care.
When Poonah stepped outside, Nnamuli’s mother waited for her husband to finish and locked up. She took the keys. Husband and wife got into separate cars and drove off, leaving Poonah spluttering into her hands outside the door. They hadn’t even paid her.
That was the Nnamuli standing in the search area.
Luckily that night, Mutaayi, a special hire driver, had still been on the taxi rank next to the Diamond Trust bank. He was the only person Poonah knew in the city. The other person was her aunt who lived in Matugga, twenty miles away. Too late to find taxis going there at 11 p.m. Mutaayi had once taken Poonah out for a meal but all he had talked about was my goats, my pigs, my chickens, my land back upcountry. Poonah had left the rural specifically to escape goats, pigs, chickens and digging. Then he had taken her to the Pride Theatre, where he had kept up a running commentary on the performance. At the end of the evening, he had looked at Poonah like I’ve spent all this money on you, what do I get in return? When he had realised she was not sleeping with him, Mutaayi had sulked. Poonah had avoided him since.
Now she walked to him the picture of a rural damsel in distress – a makyala dress, plastic shoes, luggage in plastic bags and a teary story. He did not pretend to believe her. To him she was one of those girls who only dated a man if he spent money on them, who at the point when the relationship should transition to the next level, fled after ‘eating’ your money. He told Poonah to go back and wait for him outside the shop while he finished working.
Mutaayi knew how to break a girl. He finished work two hours later. By then Poonah was so desperate she was ready to pay for the meal, Pride Theatre and for much more if Mutaayi got her off the dark street.
The following morning, he asked: ‘You’re going to your aunt for what? How is a woman twenty miles away going to help you find a job in the city? Stay here, where I can help you.’
At first, he took her for job interviews and waited to drop her home afterwards. He gave her money for everything she needed while she job-hunted and Poonah got comfortable. But before she got a job, she got pregnant and Mutaayi told her to forget working.
Pregnancy broke the remnants of her spirit and she became dependent on him. She received his money gratefully and accepted his rules. She had three children, cooked and maintained a stress-free home environment for him. Their ten-year relationship ended when Mutaayi found her stash of birth control pills and punished her so severely she could not go to the police to say it was not him. It was back in 1992, when those feminist lawyers, FIDA, were scary to a certain kind of man. By the time she came out of hospital, they were all over the case, brandishing words like battered woman, domestic violence, internalisation. Poonah told them, ‘You put him away, my children will suffer,’ but they were not moved. That was how she ended up peddling tea and chapati along Channel Street, where Carl Mpiima Watson found her.
Now, Poonah rolled her eyes skywards. Tears are a jerk. Sometimes they don’t warn you before they spoil your cheery facade. She sucked her teeth and blamed Britain for making her soft. She looked across at Nnamuli and wondered, What are the odds? Here was Nnamuli – expensive education, sheltered life, daughter of a cabinet minister – doing the same job. Hadn’t she become a lawyer or doctor or an engineer like her kind were supposed to? Then it dawned on her that perhaps Nnamuli was at university doing a second or third degree. She had that aura of this situation is temporary that you saw on middle-class Ugandan students doing menial jobs in Britain.
Poonah looked down. Let Nnamuli see her in her own time.
The wrestlers were mountains. They were in character – bouncing, flexing, rasping and huffing – to the kids’ delight. They signed autographs. Passengers jumped out of queues to take pictures, which they were forced to erase, and the kids cried at the meanness of it.
When Poonah turned to call in another passenger, Nnamuli was staring: This can’t be true. Poonah smiled: Yes, it’s me, Mpony’obugumba Nnampiima, the real one! Nnamuli’s face was so sickened with shock, she looked ready to throw up right there in the search area. Poonah’s eyes said Isn’t Britain quite the leveller?
Poonah went back to frisking.
Most PIA passengers travelled in large family groups, with lots of bags, excited kids and grown-ups wearing the beleaguered look of a people under suspicion. The men and women so looked you in the eyes to see your prejudice that you had to smile to reassure them that you were more intelligent than that. Unfortunately, most women passengers were pulled because bangles set off the detectors. It was impossible to convince them that they were not targeted. When metal detectors went off, they pointed to the bangles: ‘Mine’re pure gold. They don’t go off.’ And when you insisted, they became suspicious: ‘You’ve set the machine off remotely to search us.’
Poonah, aware that Nnamuli was watching, explained patiently that gold was still a metal: it sets the machine off, that there was no way of setting the machine off remotely. But they were not having it. No gold-wearing passenger ever wanted to hear that gold was not above metal detection.
When she looked up again, Nnamuli had pulled a bag. It belonged to a family of three generations – grandkids, parents and grandparents. Unfortunately, all the women had set off the machine. The grandfather and his sons stood away from the body search area, watching livid but helpless, as Poonah and Alison frisked the women all over. The women, especially the grandmother, were scandalised. She gave Poonah the sour Even you, joining them in humiliating us! look that minorities gave each other.
Poonah had had enough of the frisk. As the family walked towards Nnamuli on bag search, she swapped and went to load bags into the X-ray. She kept an eye on Nnamuli to see how she handled the irate family.
The grandfather asked his family to pick up the rest of the bags and step back while he dealt with the bag search. After the preliminary questions, Nnamuli pulled a two-litre bottle of semi-skimmed milk from the bag.
‘It’s for drinking on the flight,’ the old man said.
‘You can’t take liquids into the cabin.’
‘Why not?’
‘It could be a liquid bomb disguised as milk.’
Poonah smiled. You don’t say bomb to a Muslim passenger in an airport. You stick to It’s not allowed.
The man opened the lid, drank some milk. ‘Would I drink it if it was dangerous?’
‘I’m afraid that’s the rule.’
The man opened the lid again, but this time lifted the bottle up and slowly poured the milk over his head. It flowed down his face, his white tunic and onto the floor. His family stared. Passengers stared. Airport staff glanced at each other and carried on unfazed. Nnamuli shrank. Poonah did not hide her satisfaction.
As soon as he put the empty bottle down, the cleaners kicked into full gear. Yellow wet floor signs were put in place. Mops danced: We’re on top of this.
Someone whispered, ‘Imagine sitting next to him all the way to Karachi.’
When the family left, Hannah, the team leader, came to Nnamuli and commended her: ‘I was watching; you did everything by the rules.’
Poonah looked away.
It was ten in the morning when Poonah went to the restroom as part of her hour’s break. When she returned, she was sent to patrol duty-free shops, boarding gates, air bridges and the ramp. She did not come back to the search area until one o’clock. By then, the Air Jamaica passengers had been cleared and tucked away at their boarding gate. The area was quiet. Only a third of the ASOs remained. Nnamuli was chatting to other new ASOs. Her body language said I’m going to be just fine.
As Poonah settled on bag search, Liam from her group popped up behind her and asked, ‘Do you know the new girl?’
Poonah looked at Nnamuli and shook her head.
‘Apparently she’s Ugandan: her name’s Dr Mrs Jingle.’
Poonah doubled over. Delicious. It was so typically Ugandan middle-class to roll out all the pre-nominal letters to establish rank.
Poonah said, ‘Yes, Jjingo is a Ugandan name.’
Gossip was rife in the search area about Dr Mrs Jingle. Of course, no one believed Nnamuli was a doctor. She had not realised that in Britain marriage was not an honour but a lifestyle choice. Poonah was tempted to mention that Nnamuli’s father was a cabinet minister, then the ASOs would treat her to the full combo of contempt, disdain and disgust: Her father is one of those greedy politicians who engorge themselves on public funds while their own people suffer. But Poonah held back; it would not ring true with Nnamuli doing this kind of job.
By 3.30, passenger flow had dwindled to a trickle. Three of the five X-ray machines were shut down. The remaining ASOs spread out on the two machines around the main entrance. Nnamuli and Poonah ended up on the same machine. Poonah bristled.
At half past four, a woman, twenty-something, hair dyed green, large floral cloth bag, slender, smiley, airport-savvy, walked in. After being frisked, she thanked the ASO. As she got into her shoes, Nnamuli asked for a random bag search. The passenger smiled: ‘Knock yourself out.’
As she emptied the bag, Nnamuli pulled out a gadget. From where Poonah stood, it looked like hair tongs in a sheath. But as Nnamuli put it down, she flicked a switch and the gadget bobbed.
Someone elbowed Poonah. ‘Go help your friend.’
Poonah ignored the presumptuous your friend and looked again. She realised what the gadget was and giggled but did nothing. Luckily, the passenger deftly switched the gadget off without revealing it. Nnamuli was blissfully oblivious.
When she was done with the other contents, Nnamuli lifted the gadget (all gadgets had to be swabbed for traces of drugs and explosives) and asked the passenger: ‘What is this?’
At first the woman looked at her like Are you taking the piss? But then she shrugged. ‘You’re the one searching my bag: open it and see.’
Nnamuli unzipped the sheath as if peeling a banana, then she shrieked and threw the vibrator into the tray. A female ASO stepped in and took the tray to the farthest search table. She beckoned the passenger and went through the bag again, toy covered from public view. The ASO swabbed the bag and tested it for narcotics and explosives. Satisfied, she passed it to the passenger with effusive apologies.
When she was gone, the stunned air turned to anger. First, Nnamuli’s indiscretion – she shouldn’t have exposed the toy. Part of their training dealt with how to handle sex toys discreetly. Secondly, Nnamuli’s reaction – unprofessional. Hannah arrived and pulled Nnamuli out of the search area and into the manager’s office.
The air took a turn for the worse.
A sense that Nnamuli had exposed the whole British culture to ridicule crept over the search area. Now the other ASOs avoided looking at Poonah, like she had conspired with Nnamuli to embarrass everyone. Normally, they would say You’d think she’d have the common sense to check in her toys, but this time it was: ‘People are entitled to carry whatever they want.’
Poonah had to make a decision. Either she condemned Nnamuli and joined the outraged brigade and muted the African/British binary, or she kept quiet and appeared complicit. She could not fake outrage, and kept quiet.
When Nnamuli returned, she walked across the search area and joined the machine opposite. The ASOs standing closest to her walked off and joined Poonah’s machine. The others turned their backs to her. ASOs arriving for evening shifts were told about the incident and they stared at Nnamuli. There were whispers of ‘Apparently, her name is Dr Mrs Jingle…don’t like the look of her.’
It was like watching a plant being sprayed with weedkiller. Poonah started to get agitated. You know when you’ve fought with your sibling and a friend takes your side but hurts your sibling more than necessary? Poonah wanted to say, Back off!
Finally, Poonah caught Nnamuli’s eye and flicked a sympathetic hand. Perhaps it was the unexpectedness of it, maybe Nnamuli realised that she had dragged Poonah’s arse into it, but her head dropped and she cracked.
Poonah rushed over and grabbed her – ‘You can’t cry in the search area’ – and steered her towards the toilets.
Hannah saw them and hurried over. She took Nnamuli and said, ‘Leave her to me, Poonah. Go back to your post.’
‘She genuinely didn’t know what it was.’
‘I know.’
Hannah led Nnamuli to the manager’s office.
The air in the search area turned again. Now the ASOs were uncertain. Would their reaction be seen as racist? They asked Poonah, ‘She’ll be alright, won’t she…It’s a tough job, this one…We come from different cultures…to be fair, who wants to touch her bits, I mean!’
Nnamuli did not come back to the search area. Rumour had it that she was given the rest of the day off.
Hannah let Poonah and her group off the search area at 5.00 p.m. for their third and final break. Since their shift ended an hour after that, she told them not to come back. Nnamuli was in the restroom when Poonah arrived. ‘Are you into cigs?’ she asked. ‘This is the smokers’ room.’
Nnamuli began crying afresh. Poonah sat down beside her and dropped the Mancunian twang.
‘Don’t worry: it’s just herd mentality. ASOs can be childish.’
‘I’m not coming back.’
‘Why? Because you made a mistake and they overreacted?’
Nnamuli sobbed.
‘Are you a part-timer or a full-timer?’
‘Part-time – twenty hours a week.’
‘Tsk’ – Poonah dropped English altogether – ‘that’s nothing. Stop acting spoilt. Do you need the money or not?’
Nnamuli sighed.
‘Then quit playing. Let me tell you about this place. You come, you do your job, you keep your head down. Carry a lot of thank yous, I am sorrys and excuse mes. The way they make mistakes is not the way we make the same mistakes. Be careful: you fall out with one of them, they all turn against you – it’s called closing ranks. Graduates don’t do these kinds of jobs; don’t tell people about your degrees. Play dumb; dumb protects you. They’re gossipy; don’t tell them things about yourself. They turn just like that – they turn on each other too. Don’t tell them how rich you are back home: they won’t believe you. When they ask Do you like this country? say It’s fantastic. When they ask Do you plan to stay?, say Of course not! They ask Would you like to become British? say I am proud to be Ugandan. Finally, they have this thing of being nasty very politely: learn the skill.’
Nnamuli sighed. ‘Is it as mad every day in the search area?’
‘Mad? Apart from the milk incident and your reaction to the…whatever, that’s every day. You’ll get used. It’s busy up to the end of September. Then it gets quiet until two weeks before Christmas, when things get manic. It gets a little busy in January with skiers and winter sports, but dies down again. Listen, you need to keep busy in this place: busy keeps your mind off things, busy is overtime.’
‘Are you working tomorrow?’
‘Four to ten in the morning.’
Nnamuli checked her roster. ‘Same.’
‘That’s good. If you want, I can talk to Hannah so you’re moved into my group. Then we’ll be on at the same time.’
‘Can you do that?’
‘Sure. Hannah is nice.’
Nnamuli sniffed. ‘After this kind of pain, earning just £6.10 an hour, someone back home rings and says Can you send me £100?’
Poonah laughed. She wanted to say Your family is wealthy; who would send such a message? but there were more important things to tell Nnamuli. She asked, ‘Do you drive?…I can drop you…Are you at Manchester Met or Manchester Uni? I can’t make up my mind where to do my BA.’
At 5.50 p.m., they swiped out from their shift and made their way to the car park. As they got to her car, Poonah clicked the doors open. ‘It’s a mess,’ she apologised as she threw her rucksack into the back seat. When she turned the key in the ignition, ‘Something Inside So Strong’ by Labi Siffre burst out.
‘Ooops,’ Poonah said casually as she turned the volume down, ‘I didn’t realise how loud I had it,’ but inside she was remembering how Nnamuli’s parents had got in their cars that night.
‘This version sounds African,’ Nnamuli mused.
‘It was written by a Nigerian.’ Poonah reversed out of the space and drove to the barrier. She removed her pass from the lanyard and swiped it. ‘Son of an immigrant.’ The barrier opened.
‘It doesn’t mean the same when Kenny Rogers sings it.’
Poonah kept quiet for the rest of the journey and the air became bloated.
When Poonah dropped her outside her door, Nnamuli thanked and thanked her.
‘I’ll pick you up at three in the morning,’ Poonah said. ‘I prefer to get to the airport at least half an hour before my shift starts.’
‘Isn’t that too early?’
‘Eyajj’okola teyebakka,’ she snapped. ‘Being in Britain is the proverbial prostituting: you know you came to work, so why get in bed with knickers on?’
‘Absolutely,’ Nnamuli agreed, too quickly.
When Nnamuli stepped inside her house, Poonah waved and drove away. She had decided to wait until Nnamuli trusted her entirely and then to ask Do you know what happened to me that night?