One night a fox appeared in the garden of the house where Saeed and Nadia were staying. Saeed pointed it out to Nadia through the window of their little back bedroom, and they were both amazed to see it, and wondered how such a creature could survive in London, and where it had come from. When they asked around if anyone else had seen a fox, all said no, and some people told them it might have come through the doors, and others said it might have wandered in from the countryside, and still others claimed foxes were known to live in this part of London, and an old woman told them they had not seen a fox but rather themselves, their love. They wondered if she meant the fox was a living symbol or the fox was unreal and just a feeling and when others looked they would see no fox at all.
Mention of their love had made Saeed and Nadia a bit uncomfortable, for they had not been very romantic of late, each still perceiving the grating of their presence on the other, and they put this down to being too long in too close proximity, a state of unnatural nearness in which any relationship would suffer. They began to wander separately during the day, and this separation came as a relief to them, though Saeed worried what would happen if the fighting to clear their area began so suddenly that they would not both be able to return home in time, knowing from experience that a mobile phone could be a fickle connection, its signal thought in normal circumstances to be like the sunlight or the moonlight, but in actuality capable of an instant and endless eclipse, and Nadia worried about the promise she had made Saeed’s father, whom she too had called father, to stay with Saeed until he was safe, worried what it would make her to be proven untrue to this promise, and whether that would mean she stood for nothing whatsoever.
But liberated from claustrophobic closeness by day, exploring apart, they converged with more warmth at night, even if sometimes this warmth felt like that between relatives rather than between lovers. They began to sit on the balcony outside their bedroom and wait in the dark for the fox to appear below, in the garden. Such a noble animal, noble though it was fond of rummaging in the trash.
As they sat they would on occasion hold hands, and on occasion kiss, and once in a while feel the rekindling of an otherwise diminished fire and go to their bed and torment each other’s bodies, never having sex, but never needing to, not anymore, following a different ritual that still resulted in release. Then they would sleep, or if not sleepy go back onto the balcony and wait for the fox, and the fox was unpredictable, it might come and it might not, but often it did, and when it did they were relieved, for it meant the fox had not disappeared and had not been killed and had not found another part of town to make home. One night the fox encountered a soiled diaper, pulled it out of the trash and sniffed at it, as if wondering what it was, and then dragged it around the garden, fouling the grass, changing course again and again, like a pet dog with a toy, or a bear with an unfortunate hunter in its maw, in any case moving with both design and unpredictable wildness, and when it was done the diaper lay in shreds.
That night the electricity went out, cut off by the authorities, and Kensington and Chelsea descended into darkness. A sharp fear descended also, and the call to prayer they had often heard in the distance from the park was silenced. They supposed the karaoke player that might have been used for that task was unable to run on batteries.
EIGHT
THE COMPLEXITIES of London’s electricity network were such that a few motes of nighttime brightness remained in Saeed and Nadia’s locality, at properties on the edges, near where barricades and checkpoints were manned by armed government forces, and in scattered pockets that were for some reason difficult to disconnect, and in the odd building here and there where an enterprising migrant had rigged together a connection to a still-active high-voltage line, risking and in some cases succumbing to electrocution. Overwhelmingly, though, around Saeed and Nadia it was dark.
Mykonos had not been well lit, but electricity had reached everywhere there were wires. In their own fled city, when the electricity had gone, it had gone for all. But in London there were parts as bright as ever, brighter than anyplace Saeed or Nadia had seen before, glowing up into the sky and reflecting down again from the clouds, and in contrast the city’s dark swaths seemed darker, more significant, the way that blackness in the ocean suggests not less light from above, but a sudden drop-off in the depths below.
From dark London, Saeed and Nadia wondered what life must be like in light London, where they imagined people dined in elegant restaurants and rode in shiny black cabs, or at least went to work in offices and shops and were free to journey about as they pleased. In dark London, rubbish accrued, uncollected, and underground stations were sealed. The trains kept running, skipping stops near Saeed and Nadia but felt as a rumble beneath their feet and heard at a low, powerful frequency, almost subsonic, like thunder or the detonation of a massive, distant bomb.
At night, in the darkness, as drones and helicopters and surveillance balloons prowled intermittently overhead, fights would sometimes break out, and there were murders and rapes and assaults as well. Some in dark London blamed these incidents on nativist provocateurs. Others blamed other migrants, and began to move, in the manner of cards dealt from a shuffled deck during the course of a game, reassembling themselves in suits and runs of their own kind, like with like, or rather superficially like with superficially like, all the hearts together, all the clubs together, all the Sudanese, all the Hondurans.
Saeed and Nadia did not move, but their house began to change nonetheless. Nigerians were initially the largest among many groups of residents, but every so often a non-Nigerian family would relocate out of the house, and their place would almost always be taken by more Nigerians, and so the house began to be known as a Nigerian house, like the two on either side. The elder Nigerians of these three houses would meet in the garden of the property to the right of Saeed and Nadia’s, and this meeting they called the council. Women and men both attended, but the only obvious non-Nigerian who attended was Nadia.
The first time Nadia went the others seemed surprised to see her, not merely because of her ethnicity but because of her relatively young age. Momentarily there was a silence, but then an old woman with a turban who lived with her daughter and grandsons in the bedroom above Saeed and Nadia’s, and whom Nadia had helped on more than one occasion to ascend the stairs, the old woman being regal in posture but also quite large, this old woman motioned to Nadia, beckoned Nadia to come stand at her side, to stand beside the garden chair on which she was sitting. This seemed to settle the matter, and Nadia was not questioned or asked to leave.
Initially Nadia did not follow much of what was being said, just snippets here and there, but over time she understood more and more, and she understood also that the Nigerians were in fact not all Nigerians, some were half Nigerians, or from places that bordered Nigeria, from families that spanned both sides of a border, and further that there was perhaps no such thing as a Nigerian, or certainly no one common thing, for different Nigerians spoke different tongues among themselves, and belonged to different religions. Together in this group they conversed in a language that was built in large part from English, but not solely from English, and some of them were in any case more familiar with English than were others. Also they spoke different variations of English, different Englishes, and so when Nadia gave voice to an idea or opinion among them, she did not need to fear that her views could not be comprehended, for her English was like theirs, one among many.