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hears him shout, the young one in the cellar. They call him Allsorts, and it makes him angry, but they all have sweetie names. This makes Rita laugh, when he tells her their sweet names, as if they were not the bastard, nasty fellows he knows them to be. She says, “Sweet names, as if they were sweet on each other!” He loves Rita, loves her joy, the way she has taken him on, the way she wipes her hand across his forehead when he’s angry. The way she loves his boy, his grown-up son, Ali: taking him to work at the hotel, getting him a job so he’s safe away from the men
he
works with.
    It’s not real work, not the way Basit worked in Sri Lanka. Over there, he pushed along in his father’s tailoring business, machine-sewing sarongs with a pedal Singer. He drank and gambled. The black sheep. They sent him to England as soon as he had earned the fare. Off the boat he looked like everybody else, but now he catches a glimpse of himself in the mirror of the club: grey shiny suit, sharp as broken glass; hair slicked back in a quiff; white shirt, thin black tie, jacket buttons done up; a cigarette dangling from his lips; and even though they’re inside, the thin sunglasses.
    “Allsorts!” the man calls from the cellar.
    “Yes, yes,” he says obsequiously, as if startled to hear it.
    “Come here, you wog,” the man says. It’s just what they say. “Wily oriental gentleman,” the boss said it meant.But to Basit, wogs are the black guys. It is short for “golliwog,” and though the black clubs are where he goes when he’s world-sore, unhappy, seeking out the friendships of his first days off the boat, he doesn’t want them confusing him with blacks. He’s not black. He’s a Sri Lankan, a Muslim, from Colombo, not the sticks, his parents from a good family … he said it at the tables once, and one of the big bosses said, “You’re nothing here, mate. You’re what
we
say, all right?” And the other one started laughing and said, “Here, your name’s Basit, right? What about we call him Allsorts?” And they all laughed, and he laughed with them, because he was grateful for the job.
    The man is stuck in the cellar. He’s trying to lift a box, looks like a tea chest.
    “What you want me to do?” he says. The man looks up; he’s no more than a boy, really. They call him Bullseye because he has a glass eye, an accident when he was doing his national service.
    “We’ve got to leg it. They’ll be coming soon,” Bullseye says, and he looks pale.
    “Who?” He doesn’t understand why they are here. It’s a small club, all locked up, but Bullseye has a key.
    “Look, boss said come over, get this box, and leg it, so that’s what we’re going to do, but you got to give me a hand, all right?”
    He can’t help himself, he nods his head from left to right, that up-and-down sideways agreement that was silent acquiescence at home. Bullseye starts to laugh, a little snot shooting from his nose. “You look like a fucking coolie when you do that,” he says, but he means it kindly. Basit moves in to help him, looks at the situation. The stairs down to the cellar are rickety, riddled with worm and shreddingoff in pl aces. The ch est is too big for two people to negotiate up the steps.
    “Let us empty it?” he says.
    “No, mate, boss says we leave it. Nothing to be disturbed. Secret stuff in there.”
    When he got off the boat, he had one suitcase, brown leather, which his father gave him. A khaki shirt, brown trousers, and one brown cotton jacket, all of which his father had made on the Singer machine. He headed the way others headed, on the train from Tilbury and then toward the East End. London yielded little. He followed a Muslim once but lost him in the narrow alleyways. His very first night he spent by the river on a bench. He had never felt so cold. But the sun coming up over the Thames was the shivering sunshine of his future: a paradox, the chilly sun, the whiteness, the clear air of it all. This was