Sipping Red Stripe
Sylvia’s Oven
By Rahad Abir
The first thing to notice in the room is the nipple lamp shade. Hanging over the bed, the amber shade has a chocolate teat bottom. It is early evening. As I enter the orange-hued room, Russell glimpses me over the book he is reading.
The room is a beautiful mess. Books and socks and hair are all over the floor. The coat rack stands like a filthy, foul lunatic. The table is jam-packed with files, papers, textbooks, and whatnot. A green passport is peeping from underneath James Joyce’s Ulysses.
This north London flat is a five-minute walk from the Tube. I am here as a new housemate.
Mr. Russell! I say.
Russell does not respond, his eyes are back in the book. New Selected Poems by Ted Hughes. Half-lying, in boxer shorts, his average-built body is bare. His twitching crossed legs are rattling the bed in a regular rhythm.
Hello! I’m the new resident. I introduce myself in Bengali.
The crossed legs cease twitching. The hands fling Ted Hughes to the bed’s end. And up he jumps.
Hey! Welcome to this wonderful hell. Russell shoots his hand at me. His other hand ploughs into his straight long hair.
We have a firm handshake. I let out a smile.
So you graduated in literature back home? he asks.
I did.
Cool. That’s why I wanted to have you here.
I tell him I had to read some Ted Hughes back in school.
Really? Who do you think is a better poet—Ted or Sylvia?
Umm… I haven’t read Sylvia that much. A lie. I had not read Sylvia Plath at all. She was not in the course. Ted was her husband, and she committed suicide sticking her head in the oven—that is all I know about her.
His tongue clucks. Forget it. Poetry isn’t your food. I can smell it from your tone. He settles back in bed and asks, Can you cook?
I nod.
Splendid. Then cook something special to celebrate your arrival.
I turn down the proposal. I need sleep.
Lazy bum. Let’s dine out then. I’ll pay.
An hour later we set off for Weatherspoon. And I learn more about him.
Eight years ago, a 19-year-old Russell came to London to study law. Just the month before he became a barrister and left his day job at a pub. Now he does court interpreting and ghost-writes college papers, charging handsome fees. Foreign students who care about earning money more than procuring a degree have the least amount of time to write their own essays. So they buy his help.
**
Before going off to bed, I find out I have forgotten to purchase pillows. And it is Sunday. The stores close early.
Can I borrow a pillow? I say, walking into Russell’s room.
He eyes me off his laptop screen, picks a pillow and throws it. I catch it and am about to exit when his voice stops me.
You better take off the cover.
There are some stains on the cover. I uncover the pillow. But the stains are still obvious.
What are these spots? I ask.
Russell gives his emphatic laugh. Are you married?
Oh, no.
Then you ought to be familiar with this. Surprise pearls. My unharvested babies.
My hand hurls the pillow across the bed. He bursts into gales of laughter. I stride out, slamming the door hard.
Within weeks it occurs to me that he is a problematic housemate. He never cooks, happily ignores the cleaning schedule and his stray hair swims across the flat. A poet—an artist, as he calls himself—should not waste time cleaning the toilet. He is smart about making excuses.
I discover my missing laundered socks in his room. He couldn’t find his, so he used mine, he explains.
Why don’t you wash yours? I demand.
I don’t wash socks. I use them until they get an odor and chuck them.
I stand there wordless.
You should look for a bar job, he tells me afterwards. Your English is perfect.
I’m trying.
I used to head home from the pub pocketing fifty quid after each night shift.
Fifty quid in tips? After every shift?
Tips and… you know. When you handle tills, it’s okay to make a little extra money. But you have to be very good at math. Very sharp. He strokes his stubble beard. Shaving at home is an unpreferable labor to him. Once a week he visits the barber.
I shoot him a jealous stare. This guy sits on his ass the greater part of the day with a laptop, listens to music, watches movies and dates a fresh girl every week. Whereas I break my back working odd hours as a security guard for no good money. And beyond question is a date.
**
I am in my room working on my MBA assignment. Russell bursts in.
Can you give me a hand? he says.
What for?
Need to tidy up the room.
You have a girl coming?
Yeah, in twenty minutes.
Shortly afterward, I hear the girl’s arrival. The front door opens up, one or two words of greeting, high heels clicking against the floor—tuck, tuck, tuck—and his bedroom door shuts.
On my bed, I plant the laptop on my lap to resume working. Voices in the next room arrest my mind. He compliments her eyes. She giggles. She calls him a little bastard. He whoops. Her shoe drops. Quiet for a long moment. Giggles again. The bed squeaks...
He usually visits the girl’s place. Bright, brainy women thrill him. Last weekend he went to see an older woman because her son reads English at Cambridge. He is rather open about his dates in bed. As if they were his colossal achievements.
Tell me how to get a woman, I beg him as soon as his girl walks out.
For sex or love?
I stare and scratch the scruff of my neck.
He slaps my back hard, starts to laugh. For sex, I can take you to a whorehouse. For love, you know how it works.
He tells me to loiter on the dating site he uses.
Have you ever been in love? I ask.
Back home or here?
Here of course. You left Bangladesh pretty early.
The first girl I fell in love with was Anna. My Czech Anna Karenina. Still miss her. She had a tantalizing figure. The second was an English Yorkshire girl.
Why did you break up?
Women. They are all alike. Family, kids. But I’m not a marrying man.
I retire to my room calling him a weirdo.
On my virtual knocking, it appears the girls on the dating site are tough as the skin of rhinos, they barely respond. I check Russell’s profile. Because of his Spanish skin tone, it is hard to conclude whether he is from Bangladesh or Belgium or Belarus. Plus, he has exceptional command of English with a crisp British accent. Has the soul of a poet, knows how to seduce.
He brags one evening that the next month a German lass is landing in London to answer the call of his sultry, sensual words. She works for Rhine Air and will spend the weekend with him.
**
That winter, Russell embarks on music and emerges as a singer. At a North London music studio, he records his first song. His laptop afterwards plays his production day and night. It is not great. Not bad either. Over six months, he finishes four more songs. He releases them on YouTube. Two of them, I find out, have received appreciable views. Is he going to take music seriously? I wonder. As for his lyrics, he deserves to be a published poet. Being his flat mate, I have become the first reader of his newly birthed verses.
**
It is 2012. The Tory government has been cracking down on immigration. They have curbed student visas, all work permits, abolished post-study work visas and banned college students from working.
Russell is busy these days. He has been with a solicitor firm for a while. He tells me one afternoon that he is thinking of going independent, processing the entrepreneur visas. He asks me to spread the word to my friends and acquaintances. Sure, I will, I say.
Not long after, using his law license, Russell starts a work permit business, takes an office in Brick Lane. By and by, he lands a good number of clients, mainly Bangladeshi. Every time I find him home, he is trilling on the phone talking money. Yes, ten thousand, his voice flows. It’s the lowest. Two-year work permit…
Most days I find his leftover ordered food in the kitchen. Sometimes it is enough for me and I do not have to cook. One weekend he asks me to go clubbing with him.
What’re you doing this Friday?
I’m waiting in a wedding, I say.
Bunk off. Join me.
Sorry, I can’t.
Look, how about if I offered you compensation?
Around 8 p.m. on Friday we two set out for Fabric in Farringdon. After midnight he takes me to a strip club in Marylebone. We sit together and drink Corona and watch the table dance. If he finds the stripper desirable, he disappears with the girl into the champagne room for lap dances.
That night, four in the morning, after getting home by cab, before hitting the sack, I figure that the amount Russell has spent in a single night is tantamount to about half my monthly income.
**
One early evening as I return from work, I stumble across this girl stepping out of Russell’s room. She is in a towel heading to the bathroom. A brunette, large eyes, tantalizingly trim. Have I seen her anywhere? It’s the waitress, I remember. Russell was hitting on her last month. He and I were at Pizza Hut, and this Lebanese girl took the order. He tipped her twenty pounds. It’s for your lovely smile, he said to her. I’ll sleep with her, he told me on the way home.
Another night, I wake up for a pee and am about to touch the bathroom door handle. But the door opens itself, and a girl, stark naked, pops out. Oops, the girl says in a small voice and with her long, slender legs saunters into Russell’s room. I hold my breath and gaze at her wiggling jaunty hips as if they were two distant mountains dancing in the spring night.
**
The work-permit business visibly enables Russell to pocket ample cash. Enough cash to go beyond clubbing and calling escort services.
He starts gambling.
Months blink by.
One noon he asks me to pop in the drawing room. Why? To surreptitiously look out the street window to see if someone is watching the flat.
Yes, a bearded giant’s prowling outside. I inform him. Who’s he?
Troublemaker, he says. That man bought a work permit. We applied for it. Home Office rejected the file. I told him to wait. We’ll apply for a review. But he wants his money back.
Why don’t you negotiate?
I’m short of money. Plus, there’s nothing to negotiate with.
He tells me afterward that he has a bunch of cool work permits in his hands. He will commission me if I bring him clients.
I laugh inside. What does he think of me? A muttonhead? I recall an incident that occurred last August. Russell and I were by Whitechapel Station awaiting a friend to join us for lunch. Hands in pockets, Russell was lost in his world, eye-fucking the passing girls, his pupils twitching in his dilated eyes. I was smoking. Without warning, a voice aimed at me in Bengali.
You must be Bangladeshi, the man said. Why are you smoking during the fasting period?
Nonplussed, I looked at the man.
We are atheists, Russell shot back.
There was a rapid change in the map of the man’s face.
Hey, let’s go. I tugged at Russell’s arm and pulled him seven or eight yards away.
It’s a free country, right? He went on. These half-wit Bengali settlers are polluting the English air.
Now I have learned to read him. He is sharp, smart and all. He considers most people on earth to be idiots. And to him, it is okay to bamboozle them. Rook them. Especially the English air polluters.
**
On a weekend night, he comes home black and blue. The top button of his twill shirt is missing.
What happened?
Love bites, he fakes a smile.
Love bites?
He spits out the mystery. It is that bearded giant, and another client of his firm, who had blessed him with love beatings.
I learn that evening that Russell is neck-deep in debt. He says that for entrepreneur visas the applicant needs to show available funds of 200k pounds, transferrable to the UK as initial investment. Russell made a deal with a Bangladeshi man to take care of these bank statements. The man has good connections with moneyed people and banks back home. Only after the recent refusal of his clients, Russell discovers that the man provided him with some forged bank statements.
Also, to some acquaintances, Russell sold work permits that had come to him through other agencies. He just took his commission and handed the clients to those firms. Now, with their applications rejected, they’re making Russell accountable.
So you can imagine, Russell says, I’m in a real mess now. These people are asking for their money back.
Fair enough. What’re you going to do about it then?
Well, I’m trying hard to arrange loans, but I need some time.
His office shuts down soon after. He locks himself home playing his own music, hearing his own voice round the clock. Occasionally, in the evening, he goes out—after having checked from the drawing room to make sure no debt collectors are lurking outside. He then detours and avoids public transport. I have been instructed not to answer the front door. Not to tell any strangers in the street anything about him.
The following month he announces he is moving out.
It is a cold Sunday morning when I find his note on the kitchen table with next month’s rent paid in advance. He has left.
Shortly after, he changes his phone number. And scarcely replies to his online messages.
**
Quite often I bump into strangers as soon as I step out of the front gate. They all look alike. The typical high and dry Bangladeshi faces I see around Whitechapel and Brick Lane. More or less their issues are the same: They are looking for a better job. Their visas are expiring. They need to bring family members to Britain. And on and on and on.
I tell the strangers about Russell’s disappearance, then hurry past their expectant faces.
Today, I am heading to Tesco. This fortyish man walks beside me. Do I, by any chance, have any speck of information about Russell? I do not, I come clean. He exhales, silently keeps pace with me.
What’s your case? I ask him, looking at his brooding profile.
Through our conversation, I gather that he worked as an office attendant back home. A government job. The salary was slim, but the extra income, bribery, was fat. He came to the UK on a student visa dreaming of a rich future. But, finding no job here, he ended up being a barber.
A barber, he groans. Three hard years in London. No big savings. Lured by the work permit that Russell offered, he paid him seven thousand pounds. Now? He’s lost everything. No visa. No money. No work-permit. No future. He doesn’t want to return to Bangladesh empty-handed. The only option he can think of now is stowing away on a lorry to slip into France and seek asylum.
**
For half a year I have been unaware of Russell’s whereabouts. Then in the beginning of summer, I receive his email, asking me to meet him around 7 p.m. at a Caribbean restaurant in Lewisham.
He comes late. We sit at a quiet corner table, overlooking the street.
Where have you been hiding? I say. You’ve lost weight.
He grins. His face is bearded, long hair tied back, exposing his thinning hairline. He is wearing black khaki pants with an off-white shirt. In his hand, he is holding The Making of a Poem—a book that he carries whenever he commutes. He’d borrowed the book from the school library but never bothered to return it.
Know what, I say. Stop hiding. Face reality.
Reality? Reality is they’re still looking for me. He says he grabbed about 200k from clients and not a penny is left with him.
You gambled it all away?
Pretty much.
Holy shit! Why the hell did you get into this dirty business?
Easy money, he says. Each application takes over a year to resolve. So before an applicant knows he’s screwed, you are safe to use the money.
But too much cash dragged you into gambling. Destroyed you. And you’re a sex addict. You have no morals.
Stop shitting nonsense. Morality is a moronic idea. Eat, drink and be merry—that’s my moral, that’s my motto. Moral life bores me.
I heard about the loans you took from your acquaintances to return your clients’ money. And you gambled that away too.
Look, he says, a drowning man will hang on to even grass. I thought gambling was the only way to cover up my losses, to turn the table like a magic wand. I’m good at gambling, believe me. But the problem is, when I play under pressure, I lose. If you give me a thousand pounds and say you don’t mind losing it, I can make it back five, six or ten times.
I sneer and shake my head. Tell me, do you have any regrets? I ask afterward.
Of course not, he says. I made mistakes. Yes, like all humans. But I enjoyed my time. Been happy. I enjoyed gambling more than anything. More than sex. More than food. The first night I played online I won seventy-seven thousand pounds. Can you imagine? Seventy-seven thousand pounds in one night. Just in a few hours. I began to live life as if there were no tomorrow. I couldn’t see tomorrow. I never had a long-time plan in fact.
Why is that?
Well, to have a long-time plan I need to have a long life. I’ve always thought I’ll die soon.
That doesn’t seem like it’s going to happen very soon.
I know. But I just can’t feel it. Although waking up every day, I look about, I look out the window. I watch people walking by, I see the sunlight. I breathe in and smell the world around me. I savor these small things and moments. He pauses. A slice of a smile in the corner of his lips.
His smile withers. The only regret is, he adds, I’ve played with the lives of some poor chaps. But the thing is there are scores of scam immigration firms out there. If those chaps hadn’t lost their money to me, they’d have lost it to some other firms anyway.
We both sip from Red Stripe. I ask him where he lives and how he supports himself at present.
He tells me he works for an immigration law firm near London Bridge, mostly from home, and lives in an attic room in Croydon.
Over dinner, he passes me a large envelope. My poems, he says. Will email you a digital copy as well.
What business do I have with this?
Keep it. If you ever find a publisher, submit it.
You’re not writing?
I can’t write anymore. Gone bankrupt of creative juices. All my life savings are about two hundred poems and five songs. If they’re worth something, they’re worth something. If not, they ain’t.
Listen, I say. My visa expires in two months. Why not go back together? You can make a fresh start.
Back to Bangladesh? Nah, that country’s drowning. He suppresses a sigh. Then he stares at his tumbler and talks about him and his family back home. His father died of cancer in his mid-forties, leaving the family in financial straits. Russell was a bright student. He had a cousin—his aunt’s daughter—who had a thing for him. When he decided to pursue a law degree, her aunt stepped up with financial support. It was suggested that having completed his degree in the UK, he would go back and marry her. He never returned and happily broke the promise. But he paid back the money in full.
We finish the meal in silence and drink coffee afterward. At our parting, I ask him about his plan for the coming days.
My plan? He laughs. I’ll be baking in Sylvia’s oven.
Rahad Abir is a writer from Bangladesh. His work has appeared in The Los Angeles Review, The Bombay Literary Magazine, Himal Southasian, Courrier International, The Wire, BRICK LANE TALES anthology, and elsewhere. He has an MFA in fiction from Boston University. He received the 2017-18 Charles Pick Fellowship at the University of East Anglia. Currently he is working on his novel and a short-story collection.
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